“Babyface Scores A Takedown”: Glenn “The Heel” Beck Does The Impossible
Remember the good old days when professional wrestlers “injured” in the ring would pretend to be injured in public just in case a fan saw them?
No? Ok. Well, take my word for it. The term of art is “kayfabe.” It’s the wrestling equivalent of a blue wall of silence. Omerta. That wall is very thin these days, and WWE proudly calls itself an entertainment company. No one is fooled, but the wrestlers try to keep in character most of the time, and the fans generally pretend to accept the real fakeness of wrestling. It is a confusing mental feat, but WWE makes a lot of money every year, so they’re doing something right.
In the past, when WWE wrestlers have formally broken character during a show, it’s because something bad happened; the real world intruded unexpectedly in a way that kayfabe couldn’t cover. The death of wrestler Owen Hart in the ring 14 years ago. Commentator Jerry the “King” Lawler suffers a heart attack on air a few months back.
Now, it’s something more… jovial. It’s Glenn Beck.
It started on Beck’s Mercury Radio Network program. WWE has a new character that Beck believes is “stupid.” The character is a Tea Party take-off who taunts the current WWE world champion, Alberto Del Rio, for allegedly being an illegal immigrant. Lest you find offense at this in any way, note that in this storyline, Del Rio is the good guy, and gets cheers from the fans, and the Tea Party wrestler, Zeb Colter, is the bad guy. (Colter’s bud is a veteran wrestler named Jack Swagger, another villain.)
Beck said this of the storyline:
So may I ask: Did George Soros buy the WWE? Is this a Cass Sunstein presentation? And maybe it’s just us. Maybe — you know what? Maybe we’re wrong. Maybe that’s the way WWE people view the TEA Party. And maybe they love to hate the TEA Party. But I have to tell you, I expect that from Hollywood, but I don’t expect — if I’m getting my entertainment from somebody that I think is on my side — and I’m sorry. I just don’t see a bunch of progressives going and buying their tickets to the WWE. Do you? I mean, and maybe there are. I tend to notice that the progressives are not as popular in the South unless they’ve moved from the North. So I’m just trying to figure out exactly who they’re trying to appeal here, who they’re appealing to.
He actually referred to George Soros and Cass Sunstein. Beck goes on to speculate that the WWE is alienating 80 percent of his audience, which he thinks “skews” conservative.
WWE responded by first inviting Beck to appear on their program. (It’s the biz!)
But then they released a video, where the wrestlers in question break character and bash Beck.
WWE’s reps concede that they’re promoting a storyline that makes anti-immigrant politics look bad because a significant and growing portion of their audience domestically and in Latin America is Hispanic.
And here is where Glenn Beck gets his sense of WWE wrong: wrestling might not seem “progressive” to him, but wrestling fans are young. They’re of the Obama generation. They like to be on the right side of history. Actually, if you look at wrestling storylines years back, you’ll see how the script matches or tries to catch up with the political zeitgeist.
Beck will get some PR out of this, but WWE has Wrestlemania on April 7.
Win!
By: Marc Ambinder, The Week, February 24, 2013
“The First Progressive Revolution”: It Did Happen And It Will Happen Again
Exactly a century ago, on February 3, 1913, the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, authorizing a federal income tax. Congress turned it into a graduated tax, based on “capacity to pay.”
It was among the signal victories of the progressive movement—the first constitutional amendment in 40 years (the first 10 had been included in the Bill of Rights, the 11th and 12th in 1789 and 1804, and three others in consequence of the Civil War), reflecting a great political transformation in America.
The 1880s and 1890s had been the Gilded Age, the time of robber barons, when a small number controlled almost all the nation’s wealth as well as our democracy, when poverty had risen to record levels, and when it looked as though the country was destined to become a moneyed aristocracy.
But almost without warning, progressives reversed the tide. Teddy Roosevelt became president in 1901, pledging to break up the giant trusts and end the reign of the “malefactors of great wealth.” Laws were enacted protecting the public from impure foods and drugs, and from corrupt legislators.
By 1909 Democrats and progressive Republicans had swept many state elections, subsequently establishing the 40-hour work week and other reforms that would later be the foundation stones for the New Deal. Woodrow Wilson won the 1912 presidential election.
A progressive backlash against concentrated wealth and power occurred a century ago in America. In the 1880s and 1890s such a movement seemed improbable, if not impossible. Only idealists and dreamers thought the nation had the political will to reform itself, let alone enact a constitutional amendment of such importance—analogous, today, to an amendment reversing Citizens United v. FEC and limiting the flow of big money into politics.
But it did happen. And it will happen again.
By: Robert Reich, The American Prospect, February 3, 2013
“The Big Freaking Deal”: Progressives Might Want To Take A Brief Break From Anxiety And Savor Their Real Victories
On the day President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law, an exuberant Vice President Biden famously pronounced the reform a “big something deal” — except that he didn’t use the word “something.” And he was right.
In fact, I’d suggest using this phrase to describe the Obama administration as a whole. F.D.R. had his New Deal; well, Mr. Obama has his Big Deal. He hasn’t delivered everything his supporters wanted, and at times the survival of his achievements seemed very much in doubt. But if progressives look at where we are as the second term begins, they’ll find grounds for a lot of (qualified) satisfaction.
Consider, in particular, three areas: health care, inequality and financial reform.
Health reform is, as Mr. Biden suggested, the centerpiece of the Big Deal. Progressives have been trying to get some form of universal health insurance since the days of Harry Truman; they’ve finally succeeded.
True, this wasn’t the health reform many were looking for. Rather than simply providing health insurance to everyone by extending Medicare to cover the whole population, we’ve constructed a Rube Goldberg device of regulations and subsidies that will cost more than single-payer and have many more cracks for people to fall through.
But this was what was possible given the political reality — the power of the insurance industry, the general reluctance of voters with good insurance to accept change. And experience with Romneycare in Massachusetts — hey, this is a great age for irony — shows that such a system is indeed workable, and it can provide Americans with a huge improvement in medical and financial security.
What about inequality? On that front, sad to say, the Big Deal falls very far short of the New Deal. Like F.D.R., Mr. Obama took office in a nation marked by huge disparities in income and wealth. But where the New Deal had a revolutionary impact, empowering workers and creating a middle-class society that lasted for 40 years, the Big Deal has been limited to equalizing policies at the margin.
That said, health reform will provide substantial aid to the bottom half of the income distribution, paid for largely through new taxes targeted on the top 1 percent, and the “fiscal cliff” deal further raises taxes on the affluent. Over all, 1-percenters will see their after-tax income fall around 6 percent; for the top tenth of a percent, the hit rises to around 9 percent. This will reverse only a fraction of the huge upward redistribution that has taken place since 1980, but it’s not trivial.
Finally, there’s financial reform. The Dodd-Frank reform bill is often disparaged as toothless, and it’s certainly not the kind of dramatic regime change one might have hoped for after runaway bankers brought the world economy to its knees.
Still, if plutocratic rage is any indication, the reform isn’t as toothless as all that. And Wall Street put its money where its mouth is. For example, hedge funds strongly favored Mr. Obama in 2008 — but in 2012 they gave three-quarters of their money to Republicans (and lost).
All in all, then, the Big Deal has been, well, a pretty big deal. But will its achievements last?
Mr. Obama overcame the biggest threat to his legacy simply by winning re-election. But George W. Bush also won re-election, a victory widely heralded as signaling the coming of a permanent conservative majority. So will Mr. Obama’s moment of glory prove equally fleeting? I don’t think so.
For one thing, the Big Deal’s main policy initiatives are already law. This is a contrast with Mr. Bush, who didn’t try to privatize Social Security until his second term — and it turned out that a “khaki” election won by posing as the nation’s defender against terrorists didn’t give him a mandate to dismantle a highly popular program.
And there’s another contrast: the Big Deal agenda is, in fact, fairly popular — and will become more popular once Obamacare goes into effect and people see both its real benefits and the fact that it won’t send Grandma to the death panels.
Finally, progressives have the demographic and cultural wind at their backs. Right-wingers flourished for decades by exploiting racial and social divisions — but that strategy has now turned against them as we become an increasingly diverse, socially liberal nation.
Now, none of what I’ve just said should be taken as grounds for progressive complacency. The plutocrats may have lost a round, but their wealth and the influence it gives them in a money-driven political system remain. Meanwhile, the deficit scolds (largely financed by those same plutocrats) are still trying to bully Mr. Obama into slashing social programs.
So the story is far from over. Still, maybe progressives — an ever-worried group — might want to take a brief break from anxiety and savor their real, if limited, victories.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columist, The New York Times, January 20, 2013
“Laying Out The Best Options”: The Progressive Case For The Chained Consumer Price Index
Liberals are going to have to decide if they’ll stick with the president if the plan he floated this week to cut Social Security benefits by switching to the so-called chained CPI becomes a reality, and it’s not an easy choice. Progressive pressure groups and lawmakers are furious with Obama for proposing the cuts, as I noted yesterday, but House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi said she’s confident that her caucus would ultimately support the plan if the president asks them too.
The case against moving to the chained CPI is easy to make: It represents a real cut to seniors’ Social Security benefits, which has so far been a non-starter. Even advocates of the switch acknowledge this. But since we may have to swallow it, it’s worth laying out the best progressive argument possible in favor of the chained CPI. We’re not saying it’s right, but it’s a case that should be made.
And the argument does exist. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, one of the most well-respected liberal think tanks on policy analysis, has endorsed the change. As has the Center for American Progress, Washington’s most powerful liberal think tank, which recommended the chained CPI in its comprehensive Social Security reform plan.
The key question is this: Do you believe Obama can get a deal without cutting anything from social safety entitlement programs, or is he going to have to do something? If you fall in the former camp, then the chained CPI is dead on arrival. But, if you think we’re going to have to cut entitlements at some point, then the chained CPI is probably the least bad option of a menu of bad possibilities, including raising the Medicare retirement age, which is the most likely alternative and would be far more harmful.
On its own, the chained CPI is unquestionably bad, but as part of a deal to raise taxes, extend unemployment benefits and do the other good things Obama wants to do, and if it includes major mitigating tweaks, it can be made almost palatable.
First of all, it’s important to note that the CPI formula doesn’t affect just Social Security. Rather, it appears in hundreds of different places on both the revenue and spending side of government. Almost every government retirement, disability and income-support program pays annual cost of living adjustments that are linked to the CPI. On the tax side, dozens of elements, from the standard deduction to limits on contributions to 401K plans to the earned income and child tax credits, are adjusted every year based on the CPI.
The whole point of the CPI is make sure benefits keep pace with inflation on the one hand, and to ensure that people are paying enough taxes as inflation changes on the other hand. So while the chained CPI cuts benefits, it also raises revenues in a way that’s palatable to Republicans. The change is estimated to save about $220 billion over 10 years, $72 billion of which would come from increased tax revenue.
Moreover, both CBPP and CAP, along with many independent economists, believe the chained CPI is a more accurate measure of inflation than the current index, called the CPI-W. The CPI is calculated by measuring price changes in a basket of 250 common consumer goods, but only the chained CPI takes into account that people shift their buying habits in response to price changes. Adjusting for that, the chained CPI grows about .3 percent slower than the current rate.
Liberals rightly note that this substitution effect isn’t really true for the very poor and very old, who spend a disproportionate amount of their income on non-substitutable goods like healthcare and housing. That’s why the only acceptable way to shift to the chained CPI is to include exemptions for some of the most vulnerable groups.
There are two major changes necessary. First, add a bump in benefits to the very old, who are more likely to have high healthcare bills and to have exhausted their savings that supplemented their Social Security income. Second, exempt Supplemental Security Income, which serves the poorest, disabled and blind but still often leaves people below the poverty line. SSI benefits should actually be increased, but that would require a different effort, so it should at the minimum be exempted from the CPI change.
Obama has indicated that he will demand these changes. The Simpson-Bowles and Rivlin-Domenici deficit reduction plans, which both included a move to the chained CPI, also included similar caveats. Nancy Pelosi said the changes would be included in a final deal: “The details of this are not all ironed out, but they all mitigate for helping the poorest and neediest in our society, whether they’re Supplemental Security Income recipients, whether they’re 80 and older or whether they’re truly needy in-between.”
With the changes, CBPP says, “we believe that the chained CPI is a reasonable component of a comprehensive package to put the budget on a sustainable course.”
But wait, aren’t there more progressive ways to change Social Security? Yes, but.
Dylan Matthews yesterday laid out three alternative ways to cut the plan that is far progressive in the economic sense and appealing to progressives in the political sense. Two of the plans are different ways to reduce benefits for the wealthy, while the third option would be to raise or eliminate the tax cap, which prevents any income over about $110,000 from being taxed. These plans would all save far more money than the chained CPI, and do it all by hurting only the rich, unlike the CPI change. Great, right?
There are two major political problems with either approach. The first is in the short term: Republicans will never support raising or eliminating the tax cap as it would be a huge tax increase. Even Democrats would have trouble embracing it, since it would mean raising taxes on people who make under $250,000 a year, whose taxes they’ve promised not to hike.
The second problem is in the long term. Social Security was designed to be not a welfare program but a social insurance program. You get out what you paid into it over many years of working, with only marginal changes to redistribute income downward. Making it a welfare program would undermine the programs long-term political strength.
This was a cornerstone of FDR’s vision for the plan. He had to defend the plan from attacks from the populist left, which called for more aggressive redistribution from general taxation. Some means testing may be possible without transforming the perception of the program into a welfare plan, but it’s a potentially dangerous precedent.
Perhaps the best argument against the chained CPI is that even if it is a more accurate measure of inflation, Congress should not cut benefits because it would be almost impossible to restore or raise them (which is probably what actually needs to happen) through a change in the benefit structure. This would require an enormous congressional fight and Republicans would almost surely kill it, so the current CPI should be preserved, the thinking goes. This is convincing. The only plausible response is a good government argument that the CPI should be used to calculate inflation, not monkey with benefits in a backdoor way.
To Paul Krugman, the plan put forward by Obama is barely acceptable, and anything more would be unacceptable, but he’s not convinced the chained CPI is an outright deal killer.
Since the chained CPI may become a reality, liberals should at least begin thinking critically about it, even if just to decide once again that it is unacceptable.
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, December 19, 2012
“An Effective Ad Man”: Democrats Could Use Their Own Grover Norquist
Here’s the first lesson from the early skirmishing over ways to avoid the fiscal cliff: Democrats and liberals have to stop elevating Grover Norquist, the anti-government crusader who wields his no-tax pledge as a nuclear weapon, into the role of a political Superman.
Pretending that Norquist is more powerful than he is allows Republicans to win acclaim they haven’t earned yet. Without making a single substantive concession, they get loads of praise just for saying they are willing to ignore those old pledges to Grover. You can give him props as a public relations genius. Like Ke$ha or Beyonce, he is widely known in Washington by only one name. But kudos for an openness to compromise should be reserved for Republicans who put forward concrete proposals to raise taxes.
The corollary is that progressives should be unafraid to draw their own red lines. If you doubt that this is a good idea, just look at how effective Norquist has been. Outside pressure from both sides is essential for a balanced deal.
Start by insisting that Social Security and any increase in the retirement age be kept off the table. President Obama’s bargaining hand will be strengthened further if he can tell Republicans that there just aren’t Democratic votes for steep cuts in Medicaid and Medicare. The president’s room for maneuver expands still more if liberals refuse to look at cuts in programs unless Republicans are prepared to raise tax rates on the wealthy.
Already, there are signs that Republicans realize how much leverage the president has. If Congress doesn’t act, all the Bush tax cuts expire at the end of the year. At that point, the Senate’s Democratic majority has the power to block (or Obama can veto) any restoration of the upper-end Bush tax rates.
One indication that Republicans are aware they’re boxed in came from Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), one of his party’s shrewdest political minds. He suggested that Republicans should take up the president’s invitation to extend the Bush tax cuts for the 98 percent of Americans who earn less than $250,000 a year. Yes, this would amount to throwing in the towel on those upper-bracket levies. But Cole knows that it won’t help the Republican brand if voters come to see the GOP’s one and only objective as protecting wealthier Americans from tax increases.
The next lesson is not about politics or PR. It’s about substance, and this is where the Washington establishment has to get serious. The simple fact is that it’s bunk to claim that “tax reform” alone can produce the revenue we need.
One of the great disservices of the Bowles-Simpson commission was that it fed the impression that tax reform could generate so much cash that it would permit a cut in tax rates.
Grant Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson credit for good intentions — they were desperate to find a way to get Republicans on their commission to acknowledge the need for new revenue. It’s also worth remembering that their proposal assumed the expiration of the Bush tax cuts for those earning more than $250,000 a year. Nonetheless, their stress on tax reform with lower rates was more a political deal than wise policy. They sent us down the wrong path.
The only way tax reform might raise enough money to prevent a rate increase, let alone create an opportunity for rate cuts, is to reduce popular deductions (like the one on mortgage interest) so deeply that middle-class Americans would get a tax increase, too. And eliminating or sharply undercutting the deduction for state and local taxes is a bad idea. This only penalizes higher-tax states that try to solve their own social problems — for example, by providing health insurance to their low-income residents.
And all the schemes to eliminate tax expenditures to avoid rate increases have the effect of protecting just one group: Americans with very high incomes. That’s how the math works.
The right thing is to bring back Bill Clinton’s tax rates on the well-off and then have a broad tax reform discussion next year. A similar logic applies to health-care programs, as Jonathan Cohn suggested in the New Republic. Before making big cuts in Medicaid and Medicare, we need to see whether the reforms in the Affordable Care Act can contain medical inflation.
The fiscal cliff creates an enormous opportunity to end an era in which it was never, ever permissible to raise taxes. In the pre-Grover days, conservatives believed passionately in pay-as-you-go government. A tough stand by progressives will make it easier for conservatives to return to the path of fiscal responsibility.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, November 28, 2012
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