First Secession, Now Contempt: An Ugly Start To Rick Perry’s Campaign
“If This guy prints more money between now and the election, I dunno what y’all would do to him in Iowa, but we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas.”
Thus spoke Republican Gov. Rick Perry on Monday, referring to Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. You might chalk the remark up to a weak attempt at humor —if you watch the video, you’ll hear a few nervous laughs from the small crowd — but then Mr. Perry went on in an even less appropriate vein.
“Printing more money to play politics at this particular time in American history is almost treacherous, or treasonous, in my opinion,” Mr. Perry said.
“To play politics”? Mr. Bernanke was appointed chairman of the Fed by a Republican president, George W. Bush. He was reappointed by a Democratic president, Barack Obama, in an acknowledgment of how indispensable he had become in a time of crisis. In fall 2008, when global finances threatened to spin out of control, Mr. Bernanke responded with a steeliness that may have saved the country from disaster far worse than the severe downturn it has experienced.
That’s our view; it’s the view, we’d wager, of most economists. Mr. Bernanke’s actions had the support of both Mr. Bush and then-candidate Obama, of Republican Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and future Democratic Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner. And in the years since, Mr. Bernanke and his team have done as much as the Fed should do to get the economy moving again.
Now, if Mr. Perry disagrees, that’s fine. The actions of the Fed leading up to, during and after the crisis will be studied and critiqued for decades. Maybe Mr. Perry could have done better; we’ll be interested to hear about his economic program in the days to come.
But there has never been a whisper, let alone any evidence, that Mr. Bernanke’s actions have been motivated by anything but patriotism and determination to see the U.S. economy regain its footing. There was never a whisper, let alone any evidence, that the Republican-appointed Fed chairman sought to help Republican candidate John McCain in 2008, and there is no reason to believe he is playing politics now.
If Mr. Perry has evidence to the contrary, he should present it. If not, he should apologize.
But questioning his opponents’ good faith seems to be part of Mr. Perry’s early playbook. He already has disparaged Mr. Obama for not serving in the military, something that Mr. McCain — with far greater claim on the nation’s gratitude for his military service than Mr. Perry has — never stooped to. And when asked whether Mr. Obama loves his country, Mr. Perry responded, “I dunno, you need to ask him. . . . You’re a good reporter, go ask him.”
When we asked the campaign about these remarks, a spokesman e-mailed, “The Governor never said the President does not love his country.” As to his remarks concerning Mr. Bernanke, “The Governor was expressing his frustration with the current economic situation and the out of control spending that persists in Washington.” But frustration does not excuse accusing people of treason if you don’t like their policies.
In the days after the Jan. 8 shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) and 18 others just outside Tucson, there was widespread revulsion at the nastiness of much political rhetoric and widespread commitment to argue about issues without questioning opponents’ motivations or character. Mr. Perry’s presidential campaign, not yet a week old, suggests he didn’t get the message. We hope he begins to make his case in a way that will reflect better on his own character.
By: Editorial Board Opinion, The Washington Post, August 16, 2011
CEO’s And Teapartiers, Shut Up And Pay Your Taxes: Starving The Government Is Not Patriotic
As I sit here in Germany’s financial capital, a few hours by train from where my forbearers set out for the United States a century ago, I’m remembering what antitax Americans are forgetting: Living in a stable and free society that supports economic initiative isn’t a given.
Those who think that U.S. corporations and wealthy individuals already pay too much in taxes and get too little in return are taking for granted social order and economic opportunity. Keeping the peace costs money, and paying police, fire and other emergency personnel requires tax revenue. Just ask U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron, whose plan to make substantial cuts in London’s Metropolitan Police budget now looks ill-timed, amid pictures of looters making off with stolen goods.
U.S. corporations benefit every day from operating in an environment where bricks aren’t flying through windows and gunshots aren’t going off in parking lots. Civil unrest can be expensive, as executives at Sony Corp learned this week after its London warehouse went up in flames.
It also costs money to educate a workforce, something that also seems glossed over by those who want to slash money for federal education grants.
When I first arrived in Germany, people asked me whether the news they saw on TV is true, that “everyone in the United States is lining up for food stamps,” as one Frankfurter put it. Their questions were a reminder that even though Germany’s tax burden is higher than that in the United States, its economy weathered the global recession of 2008-09 better than America’s did, and its unemployment rate today, at 7%, is significantly lower than ours at 9.1%.
People like Grover Norquist, who claim that high taxes are the root of all our economic problems, have no answer for facts like these.
Those who want to lower business taxes often say that the U.S. corporate tax rate of 35% is higher than the 25% average of the world’s developing economies. But that argument ignores the long list of tax loopholes that allow U.S. companies to pay much lower rates in actuality.
Go down the list of second-quarter earnings reports for companies in the S&P 500 Index and stop when you get to one that paid 35% of earnings. That might take a while.
What the United States needs isn’t more tax cuts, but tax reform to eliminate the many loopholes that create an uneven playing field.
Tax corporate cash
Given the sluggish pace of U.S. economic growth, perhaps such reform could include a tax on the enormous amounts of cash that American companies now have sitting on their balance sheets.
Non-financial companies in the S&P 500 are sitting on more than $1 trillion in cash right now — an absurd amount given that many of those same companies are laying off workers. Some estimates put the total closer to $2 trillion.
Forcing corporations to spend that money, either by hiring workers or paying investor dividends, would go a long way toward spurring growth.
When I hear Norquist — along with the candidates active in the tea-party movement that are too weak to resist signing his so-called loyalty oath — complain about actually having to pay for government services, I think we’ve come to take those services for granted.
I also think such whining is the exact opposite of the can-do attitude of the waves of immigrants who helped build the U.S. economy and continue to do so today. I’d like to introduce them to some of the start-up CEOs that I interview every week in Silicon Valley.
During the past few months, I’ve been writing a series of profiles on tech entrepreneurs for the site Entrepreneur.com. Neither I nor my editors planned it this way, but given that recent immigrants tend to be among the hardest-working Americans, perhaps it’s no surprise that none of the first four that I’ve written about are native to the United States.
These executives are people who, like generations of immigrants before them, came to the States and put their energy into building companies, rather than sitting around complaining how terrible a place this is to do business. They also, by the way, create jobs.
They come from across the globe: Victoria Ransom and Alain Chuard of Wildfire Interactive grew up in New Zealand and Switzerland, respectively; Mikkel Svane and his Zendesk co-founders hail from Denmark; Rahim Fazal of Involver is from Vancouver, B.C.
Yet all of them came to the United States to build their businesses. Why would they do that if it’s so hostile to their efforts, as the antitax extremists claim the country to be?
The answer is it’s not. On the contrary, America’s still the most attractive country for entrepreneurs. Keeping it that way costs money — something that tax haters seem to forget.
By: John Shinal, MarketWatch, August 12, 2011
Is Obama “American” Enough For The Far Right Now?
Now that President Obama and his national security team have proven their mettle in pursuing and finally eliminating the supreme Islamic terrorist, a question arises: Will the not-insignificant chunk of voters who have rejected the president’s basic legitimacy — expressing skepticism about the circumstances of his birth in the face of conclusive proof that he was born here — be more likely to view Obama as “American” now?
On CNN’s “Reliable Sources” over the weekend, Washington Post reporter Nia-Malika Henderson suggested that the birther movement may not be about race. She compared the buzz around the issue to those conspiracy-minded individuals who tied Bill Clinton to the “murder” of Vince Foster in 1993 — an observation that other have made as well. It just seems too easy to describe the ruling passion of those who label President Obama a secret Muslim (or, to recall Mike Huckabee’s infamous slur, a Kenyan revolutionary), as strictly racist. History, though, yields enough clues to suggest that journalists who look for alternative explanations are wrong.
Birtherism has a distinctive history. If you go to the birther.org website, you will find a history lesson along with their creed: “The Birthers: Dedicated to the Rebirth of the Constitutional Republic.” Much like the Tea Partiers, birthers have linked themselves to America’s founding fathers. Their fealty to the Constitution is centered on a single phrase in Article II that requires the president to be a “natural born citizen.”
What does the all-important phrase mean? Birthers interpreting Article II say that “the president must above all else be loyal to this nation.” It is a “self-evident” truth that such loyalty is drawn from nature–and they are quite explicit about what that means: “kinship, our most primitive and natural form of citizenship, from blood”; a nativity which comes “from the soil,” or “place of birth.” It is an ideal of kinship that energizes the birther movement—the transmission of civic identity by descent, through bloodlines, from parents to children.
The website also makes it clear that, for birthers, a natural-born president must have natural-born parents, and that civic identity only exists in a homogeneous population. “If the parents were split in their loyalties,” the website declares, “the child would be split in loyalty to America.” Mixed heritage is thus a liability, for it undermines proper patriotic breeding. Indeed, for the birthers, the breeding question is inextricably linked to a person’s genetic vulnerability.
President Obama was raised by his white, midwestern mother, and her parents. But his actual upbringing matters not a bit to birthers. For most of them, Obama is his father’s son, because kinship is measured though the traditional order of the father’s line. To make their claims stick, birthers have had to erase President Obama’s mother from the fanciful narrative of his African birth. Just as Glenn Beck indelicately declared that Obama had an instinctive hatred of white people, birthers divorced him from his mother’s family. The father he hardly knew remains the dominant force in his life; the president cannot be an American because he is loyal to his patriarchal line, that is, to his father’s race.
Not surprisingly, the birthers have the Constitution all wrong. The delegates who attended the convention in Philadelphia in 1787 were not much concerned with the president’s nativity. In establishing the chief executive’s qualifications, the initial proposal focused on age and duration of residency, and said nothing about his being a “natural born citizen.” The founders made no mention of any requirement that the parents of the president be natural born citizens either. Nor, for that matter, did they require the president to be a Christian. Abigail Adams, the wife of the second president, referred to her daughter-in-law, Louisa Catherine, who married John Quincy Adams, as a “half blood”; by this cultural (though not legalistic) designation she meant that one parent was American, the other English. In sum, the founders could easily have specified that the president have “natural born” parents. But they did not. The reason is obvious. Any talk about kinship and bloodlines bore the taint of aristocracy and royalty, a caste system the founders had rejected during the Revolution.
The convention delegates did, however, vigorously debate the requirements for senators and representatives. Some delegates expressed fears of “foreign attachments”; future vice president Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts indulged in some wild conspiracy mongering when he proposed longer residency requirements for House members to prevent the possibility that foreign governments (he meant the British) might send spies to infiltrate the federal government. He hoped that, in the future, only the native-born would be eligible to serve in the House.
Yet even Gerry could never have imagined the 21st-century birther conspiracy, the most extreme versions of which evoked the “Manchurian Candidate,” a plot so cleverly devised that the institution of the presidency could be subverted by placing a secret Muslim in the White House. In fact, the deepest fear the founders expressed had nothing to do with the president’s qualifications. Instead, it was the military powers with which the Constitution endows him. They worried that as commander-in-chief, he might be bought off by a foreign government and drawn into unnecessary wars at the behest of an ally to whom he felt personally indebted. To counteract their fear, the framers insisted that Congress alone be authorized to declare war.
Despite all their efforts, the birther movement cannot look to the founders for its inspiration. Their ideas grow out of a traditional obsession with the legal status of free blacks and mulattos in the decades before the Civil War. When a firestorm of debate flared over Missouri’s admission to the Union in 1819-1820, northern and southern congressmen tangled and principles yielded to racial prejudices. Missouri’s proposed constitution barred blacks from entering the state who were not the legal property of white men. While northerners argued that free blacks were not “aliens or slaves,” but “free citizens,” opposing politicians and jurists twisted the law to justify the argument that native born free black Americans could be denied the same constitutional protections that native-born white Americans claimed. In the years before the South finally seceded, judges issued decisions in which free blacks were described as “our wards” or “strangers to our Constitutions.” Mississippi’s highest court categorized free U.S. residents of African descent as “alien strangers.”
The question of how to define a natural-born citizen reached the Supreme Court in the notorious Dred Scott case of 1857. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney (appointed by unapologetic slave-owner Andrew Jackson) argued that free blacks were never contemplated by the founders as part of the national community. Insisting that African Americans were not recognized as citizens in any state, before or after the Revolution, he dismissed all contrary evidence. To Taney, as with the birthers, facts were irrelevant.
Taney’s goal was to restrict citizenship to one of two processes: naturalization or biological inheritance. Blacks had been explicitly excluded from citizenship in the federal Naturalization Act of 1790, he noted. Even more telling, according to constitutional historian James Kettner, Taney wished to ignore “volumes of judicial precedents emphasizing place of birth without regard to ancestry.” Taney thus transformed “natural born citizen” into a racial category.
The birthers have the same idea in mind. Ultimately, they don’t really care what it says on President Obama’s birth certificate, short or long form. For these modern-day Taneyites, Obama’s citizenship is questionable because his civic identity is tainted by descent — he is, unmistakably, the son of an African man. The birthers, like Taney, believe that a natural-born citizen must be possess the right pedigree: he must descend from the same race as the founders, or be born on U.S. soil in the image of the founders. For Taney, the national community was a closed community. Even if they haven’t gone so far as to say so explicitly, for today’s birthers the presidency is an exclusive club.
Their obsession with placing Obama in Africa at the moment of his birth was a means to diminish the influence of his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham. Republican hopefuls Newt Gingrich and Mike Huckabee deliberately circulated the strange story that Obama’s politics can be traced, genetically, to the anti-colonial revolutionary rhetoric that once existed in his father’s homeland.
But what about the equally ridiculous claim that Obama’s paternal grandmother testified to her grandson’s birth in Kenya? Why did that idea capture birthers’ imaginations? Here, historical precedent may again shed light. In 1907, a law was passed in the United States stating that any natural-born female who married an alien automatically lost her citizenship. She was expatriated without her consent. Compare that to the law that prevailed from 1855 to 1922, by which any alien woman who married an American citizen immediately became a citizen, bypassing the normal naturalization process.
It was a longstanding tradition in American history that a wife’s civil and political rights came through her husband. Under the law, marriage made husband and wife “one person.” The argument that citizens cannot have two allegiances was applied to wives: her first allegiance was to her husband. She could not vote or exercise political rights, because she had no independent civic identity. Her husband acted as her political proxy, voting in her stead. Recall that women did to receive the right to vote until 1920.
The birthers, too, in recurring to antiquated racist assumptions, assume that President Obama cannot have dual allegiances. Either he is all-American or else his true loyalty resides elsewhere. Birthers have made Obama’s mother a cipher all over again. Her political identity was subsumed into her African husband’s. In effect, he “voted” for her. Because she is deceased, it has been easy for birthers (not to mention the hubristic Donald Trump) to erase the president’s mother from the picture. She was never able to testify. And her World War II hero father presumably had no need to; his service to his country should have spoken volumes.
At the time of the 1907 law, women who married aliens were considered unpatriotic. Until 1967, interracial marriages could still be considered illegal in most southern states. What matters to birthers, subconsciously or otherwise, is the taint of foreign blood, the taint of African blood, Obama, Sr.’s alien status. Stanley Ann Dunham had made an unnatural and unpatriotic choice of a husband.
The racism of the birther movement, then, is not just a wacko conspiracy. Adherents of this new old cause have a large following because of our country’s troubled history. Of course, Americans are by no means the only culture to rationalize discrimination on racial and gender grounds. It happens on every continent, constantly. In the modern age, anxiety over what makes a “real” American is most often tied to wartime, or “Cold War time”; but in this case, it was the “national emergency” of a person becoming president whose physiognomy tapped into vestigial fears.
Finally, there is the newly hatched probe (thank you, once again, Donald) into the president’s educational pedigree. For hardcore birthers, President Obama cannot possibly deserve his office. There must be a catch somewhere. How, akin to “uppity” free blacks past, did he move into elite circles from which black aspirants were traditionally barred? The world has been turned upside down for birthers.
The term “birther” has always sounded idiotic. If they want a more legitimate-sounding name, they should call themselves “descenters.” For what they really seem to be defending is that every child inherits his nationality from his father, just as he inherits his surname: Barack Hussein Obama II instead of Barry Dunham.
In their campaign to unearth the secret life of President Obama, birthers make descent more important than consent — the republican principle that Americans choose their officeholders by popular election. For them, nature trumps consent. According to their logic, natural-born presidents have natural-born American parents. And by nature, they mean the traits passed down from one’s ancestors to his rightful heirs. We’ve seen this logical construction before: it worked for something known as the “divine right of kings.” Loyalty to the sovereign? Didn’t we, at some point, declare national independence in order to move beyond that sort of thinking?
So maybe those who suggest that it’s not just racism that motivates the birthers really are on to something. Maybe it’s something that really is un-American..
By: Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg, Salon War Room, May 4, 2011
Behind the Abortion War: Sen Jon Kyl And Other Things “Not Intended To Be Factual”
Part of the price of keeping the government operating this week is another debate over the financing of Planned Parenthood. Whoopee.
At least it’ll give us a chance to reminisce about Senator Jon Kyl, who gave that speech against federal support for Planned Parenthood last week that was noted for: A) its wild inaccuracy; and B) his staff’s explanation that the remarks were “not intended to be a factual statement.”
This is the most memorable statement to come out of politics since Newt Gingrich told the world that he was driven to commit serial adultery by excessive patriotism.
The speech in question was Kyl’s rejoinder to the argument that Planned Parenthood provides a critically important national network of women’s health services.
“You don’t have to go to Planned Parenthood to get your cholesterol or your blood pressure checked. If you want an abortion, you go to Planned Parenthood, and that’s well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does,” Kyl declared.
Planned Parenthood says that abortions, which are not paid for with federal money, constitute 3 percent of the services they provide. That’s quite a gap. But only if you’re planning on going factual.
Anyhow, that was definitely a high point. Next year, Kyl is retiring from the Senate and returning to the private sector, where he will have leisure to contemplate that this was the single moment of his public career for which he became nationally famous.
But there’s another part of Kyl’s speech that’s more significant. Take a look at the “good” nonabortion services he does mention. They don’t include contraception, which seems strange since Planned Parenthood has definitely gone public with its association with family planning.
And he’s not alone. Senator Patty Murray, one of the leaders of the defense of Planned Parenthood in the Senate, says that she doesn’t remember any of the lawmakers who wanted to strip Planned Parenthood’s funds mentioning that they supported contraception services. “They just lump everything into one big basket with the word ‘abortion,’ ” she said.
This is important because it speaks to a disconnect in the entire debate we’ve been having about women and reproduction. For eons now, people have been wondering why the two sides can’t just join hands and agree to work together to reduce the number of abortions by expanding the availability of family-planning services and contraception.
The answer is that a large part of the anti-abortion community is also anti-contraception.
“The fact is that 95 percent of the contraceptives on the market kill the baby in the womb,” said Jim Sedlak of the American Life League.
“Fertility and babies are not diseases,” said Jeanne Monahan of the Family Research Council’s Center for Human Dignity, which has been fighting against requiring insurance plans to cover contraceptives under the new health care law.
Many anti-abortion activists believe that human life and, therefore, pregnancy begin when the human egg is fertilized and that standard birth control pills cause abortions by keeping the fertilized egg from implanting in the womb. This isn’t the general theory on either count. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists defines pregnancy as beginning with the fertilized egg’s implantation. Dr. Vanessa Cullins of Planned Parenthood says that the pills inhibit the production of eggs or stop the sperm before they reach their destination. “There is absolutely no direct evidence that there is interference with implantation,” she said.
Beyond the science, there’s the fact that many social conservatives are simply opposed to giving women the ability to have sex without the possibility of procreation.
“Contraception helps reduce one’s sexual partner to just a sexual object since it renders sexual intercourse to be without any real commitments,” says Janet Smith, the author of “Contraception: Why Not.”
The reason this never comes up in the debates about reproductive rights in Washington is that it has no popular appeal. Abortion is controversial. Contraception isn’t. A new report by the Guttmacher Institute found that even women who are faithful Catholics or evangelicals are likely to rely on the pill, I.U.D.’s or sterilization to avoid pregnancy. Rachel Jones, a lead author of the report, said the researchers found “no indication whatsoever” that religious affiliation has any serious effect on contraception use.
What we have here is a wide-ranging attack on women’s right to control their reproductive lives that the women themselves would strongly object to if it was stated clearly. So the attempt to end federal financing for Planned Parenthood, which uses the money for contraceptive services but not abortion, is portrayed as an anti-abortion crusade. It makes sense, as long as you lay off the factual statements.
By: Gail Collins, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, April 13, 2011
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