“Benghazi, The Cost Of An Obsession”: A Farcical Waste Of Time And Money
The furious, year-and-a-half-old effort to turn the deadly Benghazi attack into a Watergate-level scandal has so far failed. Naturally that hasn’t stopped Republicans from howling at hearings and turning over seat cushions in search of evidence. “Naturally,” because the Republican base has so far embraced these tactics.
But the Democrats, who for the most part have responded to the hysteria with loud sighs, are increasing their efforts to change the politics of the endless investigation by showing that it’s a farcical waste of time and money.
So it was that on Monday Nancy Pelosi provided journalists with a document revealing this year’s anticipated operating costs for the 12-member select committee on the Benghazi attacks. House Republicans have apparently requested $3.3 million for the panel, which will be composed of seven Republican lawmakers, five Democrats and an expected staff of 30.
USA Today put that figure in perspective:
Since the Benghazi committee was created in May, its full-year equivalent budget would be more than $5 million. This is more than the House Intelligence Committee, which has a $4.4 million budget this year and spent $4.1 million last year. The largest House committees — Energy and Commerce; Oversight and Government Reform; Transportation and Infrastructure — have budgets between $8 million and $9.5 million for the year.
A special committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming created by Democrats in 2007 spent about $2 million a year until it was shut down by the new Republican majority in January 2011.
The $3.3 million doesn’t count as a new expenditure since it will come from legislative branch funds that have already been appropriated. But this kind of profligacy won’t help the Republicans sell themselves as fiscal conservatives.
By: Juliet Lapados, Taking Note, Editor’s Blog, The New York Times, July 8, 2014
“It’s Time For Progressives To Reclaim The Constitution”: Challenging Conservative Claims About What The Constitution Really Demands
You cannot talk for very long to a conservative these days without hearing the words “constitutional” and “constitutionalist.”
Formulations such as “I am a constitutional conservative” or “I am a constitutionalist” are tea party habits, but they are not confined to its ranks. Many kinds of conservatives contend that everything they believe is thoroughly consistent with the views and intentions of our 18th-century Founders.
Wielding pocket-sized copies of the Constitution, they like to cite it to settle political disputes. Writing in the YG Network’s recently issued conservative manifesto, “Room to Grow,” Ramesh Ponnuru argues that there is a new and salutary “popular interest in constitutionalism.”
“Instead of treating the Constitution as the property of lawyers and judges,” he notes, “it proposes that legislators, and even citizen-activists, have an independent duty to evaluate the constitutionality of legislation.”
One plausible progressive response is to see Ponnuru’s exercise as doomed from the start. The framers could not possibly have foreseen what the world would look like in 2014. In any event, they got some important things wrong, most glaringly their document’s acceptance of slavery.
Moreover, because the Constitution was written primarily as a foundation for government, it can answer only so many questions. David Strauss of the University of Chicago Law School authored a book called “The Living Constitution” to make plain that there is a lot more to this concept than its detractors suggest. He notes that “a great part of the framers’ genius lay exactly in their ability to leave provisions general when they should be left general, so as not to undermine the document’s ability to serve as common ground.”
The problem with “originalists,” Strauss says, is that they “take general provisions and make them specific,” even when they’re not. One might add that the originalists’ versions of specificity often seem to overlap with their political preferences.
Nonetheless, progressives should take Ponnuru’s proposal seriously and think constitutionally themselves. In doing so, they would challenge conservative claims about what the Constitution really demands.
In the May issue of the Boston University Law Review, Joseph R. Fishkin and William E. Forbath of the University of Texas School of Law show that at key turning points in our history (the Jacksonian era, the Populist and Progressive moments and the New Deal), opponents of rising inequality made strong arguments “that we cannot keep our constitutional democracy — our republican form of government — without constitutional restraints against oligarchy and a political economy that maintains a broad middle class, accessible to everyone.”
Their article is called “The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution,” though Forbath told me that he and Fishkin may give the book they’re writing on the topic the more upbeat title “The Constitution of Opportunity.” Their view is that by empowering the wealthy in our political system, Supreme Court decisions such as Citizens United directly contradict the Constitution’s central commitment to shared self-rule.
“Extreme concentrations of economic and political power undermine equal opportunity and equal citizenship,” they write. “In this way, oligarchy is incompatible with, and a threat to, the American constitutional scheme.”
While their overarching vision contrasts sharply with Ponnuru’s, they make a similar critique of what they call an excessively “court-centered” approach to constitutionalism. “Constitutional politics during the 19th and early 20th centuries” was very different and the subject of democratic deliberation. In earlier eras, they say, the Constitution was seen as not simply permitting but actually requiring “affirmative legislation . . . to ensure a wide distribution of opportunity” and to address “the problem of oligarchy in a modern capitalist society.”
The authors remind us of Franklin Roosevelt’s warning that “the inevitable consequence” of placing “economic and financial control in the hands of the few” would be “the destruction of the base of our form of government.” And writing during the Gilded Age, a time like ours in many ways, the journalist James F. Hudson argued that “imbedded” in the Constitution is “the principle” mandating “the widest distribution among the people, not only of political power, but of the advantages of wealth, education and social influence.”
The idea of a Constitution of Opportunity is both refreshing and relevant. For too long, progressives have allowed conservatives to monopolize claims of fealty to our unifying national document. In fact, those who would battle rising economic inequalities to create a robust middle class should insist that it’s they who are most loyal to the Constitution’s core purpose. Broadly shared well-being is essential to the framers’ promise that “We the people” will be the stewards of our government.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, July 6, 2014
“The Limits Of Corporate Citizenship”: Why Walgreen Shouldn’t Be Allowed To Influence U.S. Politics If It Becomes Swiss
Dozens of big U.S. corporations are considering leaving the United States in order to reduce their tax bills.
But they’ll be leaving the country only on paper. They’ll still do as much business in the U.S. as they were doing before.
The only difference is they’ll no longer be “American,” and won’t have to pay U.S. taxes on the profits they make.
Okay. But if they’re no longer American citizens, they should no longer be able to spend a penny influencing American politics.
Some background: We’ve been hearing for years from CEOs that American corporations are suffering under a larger tax burden than their foreign competitors. This is mostly rubbish.
It’s true that the official corporate tax rate of 39.1 percent, including state and local taxes, is the highest among members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
But the effective rate – what corporations actually pay after all deductions, tax credits, and other maneuvers – is far lower.
Last year, the Government Accountability Office, examined corporate tax returns in detail and found that in 2010, profitable corporations headquartered in the United States paid an effective federal tax rate of 13 percent on their worldwide income, 17 percent including state and local taxes. Some pay no taxes at all.
One tax dodge often used by multi-national companies is to squirrel their earnings abroad in foreign subsidiaries located in countries where taxes are lower. The subsidiary merely charges the U.S. parent inflated costs, and gets repaid in extra-fat profits.
Becoming a foreign company is the extreme form of this dodge. It’s a bigger accounting gimmick. The American company merges with a foreign competitor headquartered in another nation where taxes are lower, and reincorporates there.
This “expatriate” tax dodge (its official name is a “tax inversion”) is now at the early stages but is likely to spread rapidly because it pushes every American competitor to make the same move or suffer a competitive disadvantage.
For example, Walgreen, the largest drugstore chain in the United States with more than 8,700 drugstores spread across the nation, is on the verge of moving its corporate headquarters to Switzerland as part of a merger with Alliance Boots, the European drugstore chain.
Founded in Chicago in 1901, with current headquarters in the nearby suburb of Deerfield, Walgreen is about as American as apple pie — or your Main Street druggist.
Even if it becomes a Swiss corporation, Walgreen will remain your Main Street druggist. It just won’t pay nearly as much in U.S. taxes.
Which means the rest of us will have to make up the difference. Walgreen’s morph into a Swiss corporation will cost you and me and every other American taxpayer about $4 billion over five years, according to an analysis by Americans for Tax Fairness.
The tax dodge likewise means more money for Walgreen’s investors and top executives. Which is why its large investors – including Goldman Sachs — have been pushing for it.
Some Walgreen customers have complained. A few activists have rallied outside the firm’s Chicago headquarters.
But hey, this is the way the global capitalist game played. Anything to boost the bottom line.
Yet it doesn’t have to be the way American democracy is played.
Even if there’s no way to stop U.S. corporations from shedding their U.S. identities and becoming foreign corporations, there’s no reason they should retain the privileges of U.S. citizenship.
By treaty, the U.S. government can’t (and shouldn’t) discriminate against foreign corporations offering as good if not better deals than American companies offer. So if Walgreen as a Swiss company continues to fill Medicaid and Medicare payments as well as, say, CVS, it’s likely that Walgreen will continue to earn almost a quarter of its $72 billion annual revenues directly from the U.S. government.
But as a foreign corporation, Walgreen should no longer have any say over the size of those payments, what drugs they cover, or how they’re administered.
In fact, Walgreen should no longer have any say about how the U.S. government does anything.
In 2010 it lobbied for and got a special provision in the Dodd-Frank Act, limiting the fees banks are allowed to charge merchants for credit-card transactions — resulting in a huge saving for Walgreen. If it becomes a Swiss citizen, the days of special provisions should be over.
The Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” decision may have opened the floodgates to American corporate money in U.S. politics, but not to foreign corporate money in U.S. politics.
The Court didn’t turn foreign corporations into American citizens, entitled to seek to influence U.S. law and regulations.
Since the 2010 election cycle, Walgreen’s Political Action Committee has spent $991,030 on federal elections. If it becomes a Swiss corporation, it shouldn’t be able to spend a penny more.
Walgreen is free to become Swiss but it should no longer be free to influence U.S. politics.
It may still be the Main Street druggist, but if it’s no longer American it shouldn’t be considered a citizen on Main Street.
By: Robert Reich, The Robert Reich Blog, July 6, 2014
“Supreme Anointment Court”: Sheltered From Sun And Light In Our Nation’s Holiest Building
True Blood, the magic, devilish, vampire TV world of shape-shifters where blood is a bottled commodity to drink in a bar and extreme graphic violence and sex is recklessly paired will finally have the stake driven into its heart and exit at the conclusion of this seventh season.
I remember the show’s big surprise lesson from season one that no matter how scary and powerful, vampires cannot enter your home without being invited. However, there is no end in site of the bad true bloody struggles between the five conservative and four liberal justices of our Supreme Court, and no matter how societal changing a Court decision is, the public mostly never gets invited in, never gets to be witness to these omnipotent secret cultish figures dressed in robes sitting elevated and fortressed behind sacred wood protected in their house from uninvited intruders while drinking their own ideological dogmatic “blood.” We never get to see their clever shape-shifting after taking up the bar forever in residence chambered and sheltered from sun and light in our nation’s holiest building. We never get to experience these high priests of the constitution experiencing the life we live that they interpret for us. We never get to see whose influential blood and money they drink that becomes the magic elixir of their last words that toss the ingredients of our melting pot. We never get to see their expressions as indicators of how bad the blood between them might really be as they depart company after each session to take solace and recharge in their secluded coffined off chamber.
Throughout much of our history, we have mostly accepted, obeyed, revered and patiently waited with undying respect for the Court’s directives. We knew they knew better what was better for our society. For Americans, this was the place where evil, malice, patronage, cronyism, politics, and the compromising inducements of avarice and greed humans are so easily soiled by held to a higher standard that truly defined how great a system ours was. We hardly ever get to see this side of the court any more. Just as divided and unpredictable as the world depicted in True Blood, the Supremes on the Court dominated by extremist conservatives are driving the stake into the disunited states of America.
Recent polling supports the perception of a society absolutely at odds with all forms of government. The Supreme Court has lost the confidence of Americans. We are now adrift without a moral compass, without checks and balances, without a credible mandate voice in any of our three plus media equals four branches of government. A majority of voters elected President Obama twice with such a mandate. But increasingly, we are witnessing a court that has anointed itself as representative to its secreted world to drive The Stake to drain the blood of Obama-ism. What after-world can and will emerge in such a divided state and in what state of health and personhood will each of us be in at that time? As we do get to witness many hot spots around the globe descend into horror, can we save America and ourselves?
By: Allen Schmertzler, The Huffington Post Blog, July 3, 2014
“The Incompetence Dogma”: So Much For Obamacare Not Working
Have you been following the news about Obamacare? The Affordable Care Act has receded from the front page, but information about how it’s going keeps coming in — and almost all the news is good. Indeed, health reform has been on a roll ever since March, when it became clear that enrollment would surpass expectations despite the teething problems of the federal website.
What’s interesting about this success story is that it has been accompanied at every step by cries of impending disaster. At this point, by my reckoning, the enemies of health reform are 0 for 6. That is, they made at least six distinct predictions about how Obamacare would fail — every one of which turned out to be wrong.
“To err is human,” wrote Seneca. “To persist is diabolical.” Everyone makes incorrect predictions. But to be that consistently, grossly wrong takes special effort. So what’s this all about?
Many readers won’t be surprised by the answer: It’s about politics and ideology, not analysis. But while this observation isn’t particularly startling, it’s worth pointing out just how completely ideology has trumped evidence in the health policy debate.
And I’m not just talking about the politicians; I’m talking about the wonks. It’s remarkable how many supposed experts on health care made claims about Obamacare that were clearly unsupportable. For example, remember “rate shock”? Last fall, when we got our first information about insurance premiums, conservative health care analysts raced to claim that consumers were facing a huge increase in their expenses. It was obvious, even at the time, that these claims were misleading; we now know that the great majority of Americans buying insurance through the new exchanges are getting coverage quite cheaply.
Or remember claims that young people wouldn’t sign up, so that Obamacare would experience a “death spiral” of surging costs and shrinking enrollment? It’s not happening: a new survey by Gallup finds both that a lot of people have gained insurance through the program and that the age mix of the new enrollees looks pretty good.
What was especially odd about the incessant predictions of health-reform disaster was that we already knew, or should have known, that a program along the lines of the Affordable Care Act was likely to work. Obamacare was closely modeled on Romneycare, which has been working in Massachusetts since 2006, and it bears a strong family resemblance to successful systems abroad, for example in Switzerland. Why should the system have been unworkable for America?
But a firm conviction that the government can’t do anything useful — a dogmatic belief in public-sector incompetence — is now a central part of American conservatism, and the incompetence dogma has evidently made rational analysis of policy issues impossible.
It wasn’t always thus. If you go back two decades, to the last great fight over health reform, conservatives seem to have been relatively clearheaded about the policy prospects, albeit deeply cynical. For example, William Kristol’s famous 1993 memo urging Republicans to kill the Clinton health plan warned explicitly that Clintoncare, if implemented, might well be perceived as successful, which would, in turn, “strike a punishing blow against Republican claims to defend the middle class by restraining government.” So it was crucial to make sure that reform never happened. In effect, Mr. Kristol was telling insiders that tales of government incompetence are something you peddle to voters to get them to support tax cuts and deregulation, not something you necessarily believe yourself.
But that was before conservatives had fully retreated into their own intellectual universe. Fox News didn’t exist yet; policy analysts at right-wing think tanks had often begun their careers in relatively nonpolitical jobs. It was still possible to entertain the notion that reality wasn’t what you wanted it to be.
It’s different now. It’s hard to think of anyone on the American right who even considered the possibility that Obamacare might work, or at any rate who was willing to admit that possibility in public. Instead, even the supposed experts kept peddling improbable tales of looming disaster long after their chance of actually stopping health reform was past, and they peddled these tales not just to the rubes but to each other.
And let’s be clear: While it has been funny watching the right-wing cling to its delusions about health reform, it’s also scary. After all, these people retain considerable ability to engage in policy mischief, and one of these days they may regain the White House. And you really, really don’t want people who reject facts they don’t like in that position. I mean, they might do unthinkable things, like starting a war for no good reason. Oh, wait.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, June 26, 2014
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