Rick Santorum’s Cynicism: A Fine Day To Discuss The Value Of The Affordable Care Act
This morning brings some sad news, that Rick Santorum’s daughter, Bella, has been hospitalized in Philadelphia. The child has Trisomy 18, a particularly heartbreaking genetic condition.
I do not share the opinion that it is distasteful to discuss the political issues surrounding a tragedy, that there should be some kind of grace period. If you want to argue for or against gun control in the wake of a school shooting, have at it. Why should the very day an issue gets maximum media saturation be the one day we can’t discuss its political contours?
Point being, I think it’s okay to point out that under the Affordable Care Act, insurers can’t deny coverage to children with a preexisting condition or disability.
[T]he law actually prevents insurance carriers from denying coverage to individuals with pre-existing conditions (and disabilities), prohibits health plans from putting a lifetime dollar limit on benefits and offers new options for long-term care. This is why groups like the American Association of People with Disabilities, National Organization For Rare Disorders, and The Arc of the United States not only support the law, but have filed an amicus brief in its defense.
And it’s equally okay to remind voters that Santorum, in an act of startling cynicism, continues to equate the ACA with socialism, even suggesting that it would lead to the death of his daughter. His claim that he’s “fighting for Bella and other children like her” — and, by extension, proponents of the ACA are not — is spurious.
By all accounts, Santorum’s daughter has beaten the odds. She’s gotten marvelous healthcare. I have yet to encounter a decent justification from either Santorum or his fellow candidates for denying the nation’s children the same opportunity.
By: Elon Green, Washington Monthly Political Animal, January 29, 2012
The Primary Primer: “Why Won’t These People Leave”?
I am feeling totally cheated. The New Hampshire primary is over, and none of the Republicans went away.
This is not how things are supposed to work in America. Every week, one contestant is supposed to be eliminated. That’s the way it is in politics — one day you’re in, the next day you’re out. Why won’t these people leave?
Well, here we are. All six alleged Republican presidential contenders are still with us and getting ready for the next primary in South Carolina, the Palmetto State.
You probably have some serious policy-based questions.
What is a palmetto?
Not really a good question, but it’s a tree. A palmetto bug is a large, flying cockroach, but that is definitely not on the state flag.
South Carolina is also known as “The Iodine State,” but that absolutely never comes up in political commentary.
What will the big issues be in the South Carolina primary?
When five of your six candidates could not be elected president if they were running against Millard Fillmore, I think you can presume there will not be much serious issue discussion.
However, there will undoubtedly be a great deal of talk about the threat of European socialism and whether or not Mitt Romney is a vulture. One of those venture capital vultures that, in the inimitable words of Rick Perry, are “sitting out there on a tree limb, waiting for the company to get sick, and then they sweep in, they eat the carcass, they leave with that, and they leave the skeleton.”
Also, whether Mitt Romney is an Obamacare-passing European socialist.
Has Romney figured out how to explain the nearly identical-to-Obama’s health care law that Massachusetts passed when he was governor?
Yes! This is all about each state finding its own, unique answer to its own special health care issue. Romneycare, Mitt explains, was right for Massachusetts because the state was faced with the choice of requiring everyone to have health insurance or continuing “to allow people without insurance to go to the hospital and get free care, paid for by the government, paid for by the taxpayers.”
This shows you how different the situation in each state is, since it is well known that in other parts of the country, sick and uninsured people do not go to hospitals but instead are encouraged to present themselves to the nearest local nail salon.
What do the Republicans have against Europe?
All the candidates in the Republican primaries seem obsessed with the idea that the United States is in danger of becoming like Europe, which would be the worst thing imaginable. (Rick Santorum: “They have nothing to fight for. They have nothing to live for.”) The Gingrich camp claimed that Mitt Romney was a fan of “European socialism” when he said something nice about the value-added tax.
However, it’s been Mitt that’s been sounding the most Europhobic. He’s been warning that the president “takes his inspiration from the capitals of Europe” and is attempting to turn the country into a “European-style social welfare state.” (Do you think he really means: Takes his orders from the capitals of Europe? Next stop: “Barack Obama, Brussels Puppet.”)
What do you think’s up with Mitt? Perhaps he’s afraid we’ll all start demanding free child care and fresh-baked bread. He did live in France for more than two years as a Mormon missionary and he didn’t make many converts. Also, he had harsh things to say about the toilets.
Why is Newt Gingrich still running for president? Aren’t voters fleeing from him as if he were a rabid palmetto bug?
To understand Newt Gingrich, you have to envision a mixture of “Kill Bill” and “Carrie,” after Sissy Spacek gets hit with the bucket of blood. His only mission in life is getting even with Mitt Romney and the rich minions who paid for all those anti-Newt ads in Iowa. He is exactly like Sweeney Todd mixed with Charles Bronson in “Death Wish.” And maybe a smidge of “Shogun Assassin.”
Now Gingrich has roped in a few rich minions of his own, and you should watch the video they’ve just put out. Romney looks worse than the evil banker in “It’s a Wonderful Life.” It’s full of heart-tugging former factory workers who used to have happy homes and wonderful Christmases until … Mitt Romney Came to Town. By the time it’s over, you will want to gather up the peasants and march on one of Romney’s mansions with flaming torches.
There is nothing Gingrich won’t do to get Mitt. At the end of the video, there’s a clip of Romney speaking French! And now Newt’s Web site has a video that basically asks whether America will elect a president who once drove to Canada with the family dog strapped to the roof of the car. Which is, of course, an excellent question.
By: Gail Collins, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, January 11, 2012
So, Should We Start Calling Gingrich A Socialist?
You mean the wealthy on Wall Street aren’t benevolent “job creators” after all and that one of the pirate captains flying the Jolly Roger of buccaneer capitalism is a “predatory corporate raider” who goes by the name of Mitt Romney? Who knew?
In boardrooms across America, the plutocrats are freaking out. Their carefully plotted strategy of making the 2012 election a referendum between economic “freedom” and suffocating “big government” is being blown to smithereens by that infamous bomb-thrower, Newt Gingrich, who is detonating the idea that unsupervised laissez faire capitalism is the unmitigated blessing its cheerleaders at the Wall Street Journal have always claimed it to be.
I guess I spoke too soon when I wrote the other day that an entire philosophical tradition of conservative anti-capitalism had been lost now that the Republican Party has made itself into the wholly-owned subsidiary of Wall Street. But how was I to know Newt Gingrich was about to launch a jihad against the black magic of compound interest?
Gingrich is the guy, remember, who closed down the government in order to stick it to President Clinton for a perceived slight he suffered on Air Force One. So, why should we be surprised that Gingrich would lay waste to 30 years of supply-side mythology if doing so let him get back at that spoiled rich kid who used daddy’s money to torment him in Iowa?
This is what everyone in the Republican Party was afraid from the start Gingrich would do to them given his well-known MO, says Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum: “Destroy them utterly if they declined to nominate him.”
And with a $5 million in the bank thanks to right-wing casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, Gingrich now has lots of money to put to use the Karl Rove strategy of inflicting maximum pain by hitting an opponent right where he’s strongest. And in South Carolina Gingrich intends to hit Mitt Romney where he is strongest, specifically by pulling down all those statues erected to “The Job Creator from Bain Capital.”
The political effect of these attack ads, says New York magazine’s Jon Chait, is to tear down Romney’s carefully-crafted image in such a way that “his private-sector experience becomes an indicator — not that he will fix the economy — but that he will help the already-rich. It’s a smash-you-over-the-head blunt message, with ominous music and storybook dialogue.”
And according to the transcript of the ad Gingrich plans to run: “Mitt Romney was not a capitalist during his reign at Bain. He was a predatory corporate raider. His firm didn’t seek to create value. Instead, like a scavenger, Romney looked for businesses he could pick apart. Indeed, he represented the worst possible kind of predator, operating within the law but well outside the bounds of what most real capitalists consider ethical…..He and his friends at Bain were bad guys. Any real capitalists should disavow Romney’s ‘creative destruction’ model that made him wealthy at the expense of thousands of American jobs.”
This is brutal stuff that plays right into President Obama’s hands as he portrays the GOP as the Party of the One Percent unconcerned with the fate of the other 99%, says Drum. It also undermines the whole trickle-down rationale underpinning finance capitalism.
The supply-side oligarchs who rule the Republican Establishment are beside themselves as they circle the wagons against this madman from Georgia, who not only says Wall Street plutocrats who preach the virtues of capitalism have no clothes but that the clothes they do have on order are being imported from Chinese sweat shops which pay slave wages to child coolie labor.
The day before voters went to the polls in New Hampshire’s primary, the Wall Street Journal reported that the right wing Club for Growth reflected the shock among conservatives when it went after Gingrich for his “disgusting” attacks against Romney and his record at Bain Capital.
The group’s president, former Rep. Chris Chocola (R-Ind), said in a written statement: “Attacking Governor Romney for participating in free-market capitalism is just beyond the pale for any purported ‘Reagan conservative.'”
Like smart traders who buy low and sell high, America’s plutocracy has profited spectacularly from the yawning gap which exists between the values used by the public to judge and reward economic behavior and the public’s understanding of the revolutionary changes in the economy over the past 30 years that have made those values obsolete.
When conservatives talk about the virtue of competition and “entrepreneurship,” for example, they are exploiting the ignorance of a public that still believes America’s economy is dominated by people who make things and so thinks rewards should naturally go to those who can make things faster, better, cheaper.
As a reader on Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Beast site put it: “Most Americans appreciate a free market system in which those that produce the best goods and services at the best value should be successful and become wealthy. However, when people become fabulously wealthy at the expense of others while producing nothing but investment gain for the investors, I think most Americans take pause.”
Yet, as economic historian Kevin Phillips notes, Wall Street is no longer the servant of Main Street where profits are confined to the earnings it can make by providing capital to entrepreneurs and businesses to invest in real things and good ideas. Today, financial firms earn more than 40% of all corporate profits and command a quarter of stock market capitalization — up from just 6% when Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980 – largely because of the powers Wall Street’s been given from deregulation to create debt and to earn fees from the distribution of that debt.
Historically, says Phillips, this transformation from a making to a papering economy “is as momentous as the emergence of railroads, iron and steel and the displacement of agriculture during the decades after the Civil War.”
And the problem for Mitt Romney is that he embodies these fundamental if poorly understood changes, which is why Republicans are so furious with Newt Gingrich for putting this all up in lights.
All Republicans talk about free markets, says Kevin Drum, but Mitt Romney has actually lived it. “That makes him a more concrete messenger, someone who can credibly say that he not only believes in free markets, but has lots of experience in making them work.”
Chances are that when Americans hear about free enterprise from conservatives “it’s usually accompanied by images of sunrises over wheat fields, hardworking farmers, and small-town construction workers heading home after a day of honest labor,” says Drum. “It is very definitely not accompanied by images of well-coiffed guys in suits and green eyeshades, making millions by sitting in boardrooms and approving mass layoffs by adding a quick line to a spreadsheet before they head out to lunch.”
Someone like Newt Gingrich can get up on his soapbox and keep things “fuzzy” by delivering a stem-winder about free markets, the glories of competition and keeping government off our backs “and then just walk off the stage — mission accomplished,” says Drum.
Not so Mitt Romney. When Romney talks about free markets the stakes are much higher, says Drum.
“He can’t get away with platitudes,” says Drum. “His experience at Bain Capital will inevitably be Exhibit 1 in just what he means when he talks about free markets.”
Short of being the CEO of Goldman Sachs, “this is quite possibly the worst possible face you can imagine for a conservative message about the glories of free enterprise and wealth creation,” adds Drum. “Romney, whether he likes it or not, won’t be able to talk about those glories without also facing up to the human destruction that often follows in its wake.”
Americans may say they are for free markets. But at the end of the day they are just regular folks who believe in a regular day’s pay for a regular day’s work. So, “if you rub their noses in the true face of modern capitalism, they aren’t going to like what they see,” Drum insists.
And that is what Gingrich is threatening to do. So, you can understand why Republicans and their wealthy benefactors are so uneasy — and incensed — by what Gingrich is about to do.
The revolutionary bomb-thrower who once brought down a House Speaker and ended 40 years of consecutive Democratic rule is now poised to blow up the Republican Party’s designated heir apparent and with him the Republican Party’s name-brand issue.
Wouldn’t it be ironic, then, if Newt Gingrich’s final act as America’s most famous radical was to squander the profits Republicans have so regularly earned — both economically and politically – through the arbitrage which exploits the gap between fact and fiction, reality and myth, in America’s system of free market capitalism?
By: Ted Frier, Open Salon, January 11, 2012
Why Romney Decided to Go Glenn Beck
A few weeks ago, Mitt Romney abruptly changed his main campaign message. Before that point, he had been lambasting President Obama as a likable failure, well intentioned but sadly unable to revive the economy. When asked if Obama was a socialist, Romney would deny it outright, insisting he was merely in “over his head.” But starting December 7, Romney began to paint Obama as a sinister radical who had not failed, but had succeeded all too well, in transforming the basic nature of America.
At the time, I thought Romney’s sudden switch was a response to Newt Gingrich’s sudden (and apparently short-lived) challenge from the right, positioning himself to speak more directly to the fears of a freaked-out Republican electorate. But I now think Romney’s campaign has concluded that his old campaign message wasn’t strong enough for the general election. Conservative columnist Kimberly Strassel has a column passing on research findings from American Crossroads, a Republican independent expenditure group. Crossroads surveyed a large number of swing voters and concluded that they couldn’t beat Obama merely by portraying him as having failed:
“To lock down voters in the middle, Republicans are going to have to convince them that Obama isn’t just a flawed and ineffective leader, but that he has an agenda and motivations that they don’t share,” says Steven Law, president and CEO of Crossroads
Strassel presents these findings as advice that Romney needs to take. But I think it’s pretty obvious that Romney has already taken it. His tone toward Obama has grown harsher, and he is now openly (and falsely) calling Obama a socialist who is promoting total economic equality. I’m actually pretty skeptical of this research – the political middle clearly seems to be voters who like Obama but blame him for the poor economy without having a strong ideological understanding of why the economy has failed. But, whatever its merits, this seems to be the strategy Romney has embraced.
The tension between the previous version of Romney and the newest model sprang to the fore when he visited the Wall Street Journal editorial board for a weekend interview. In it, Romney carefully presented himself as an ideologue rather than a technocrat:
[Romney] concludes with even more force, “America doesn’t need a manager. America needs a leader. The president is failing not just because he’s a poor manager. It’s because he doesn’t know where to lead.”
Voters will have to judge the quality of that vision, and how it compares with President Obama’s. But there’s no doubt it’s a contrast with Mr. Romney’s visit to our offices in 2007, which became legendary for its appeal to technocratic virtue.
In that meeting the candidate began by declaring “I love data” and kept on extolling data, even “wallowing in data,” as a way to reform both business and government. He said he’d bring in management consultants to turn around the government, mentioning McKinsey, Bain and the Boston Consulting Group. Mr. Romney seemed to elevate the power of positive technocratic thinking to a governing philosophy.
So it is also notable that now Mr. Romney describes the core failure of Mr. Obama’s economic agenda as faith in “a wise group of governmental bureaucrats” rather than political and economic freedom.
Romney’s problem is that he is, as Jodi Kantor’s New York Times profile shows, a technocrat at heart. He approaches public policy from a data-driven standpoint, searching for solutions that do the most to increase human welfare. This inevitably estranges him from the conservative tradition, which in its essence is a philosophical belief in limited government that holds firm regardless of empirical effects.
It was Romney’s technocratic inclinations that caused him to look at a problem like health care and wind up embracing essentially the same solution that the Obama administration did, which is why conservatives distrust him. The irony is that Romney approaches campaigning the way he approaches governing, obeying the data above all else. If the data tell him to start wildly accusing Obama of abolishing all economic inequality, then that is what he will do.
By: Published in New York Magazine, Daily Intel, December 27, 2011
Soaring Inequality: “It’s Time To Take The Crony Out Of Capitalism”
Whenever I write about Occupy Wall Street, some readers ask me if the protesters really are half-naked Communists aiming to bring down the American economic system when they’re not doing drugs or having sex in public.
The answer is no. That alarmist view of the movement is a credit to the (prurient) imagination of its critics, and voyeurs of Occupy Wall Street will be disappointed. More important, while alarmists seem to think that the movement is a “mob” trying to overthrow capitalism, one can make a case that, on the contrary, it highlights the need to restore basic capitalist principles like accountability.
To put it another way, this is a chance to save capitalism from crony capitalists.
I’m as passionate a believer in capitalism as anyone. My Krzysztofowicz cousins (who didn’t shorten the family name) lived in Poland, and their experience with Communism taught me that the way to raise living standards is capitalism.
But, in recent years, some financiers have chosen to live in a government-backed featherbed. Their platform seems to be socialism for tycoons and capitalism for the rest of us. They’re not evil at all. But when the system allows you more than your fair share, it’s human to grab. That’s what explains featherbedding by both unions and tycoons, and both are impediments to a well-functioning market economy.
When I lived in Asia and covered the financial crisis there in the late 1990s, American government officials spoke scathingly about “crony capitalism” in the region. As Lawrence Summers, then a deputy Treasury secretary, put it in a speech in August 1998: “In Asia, the problems related to ‘crony capitalism’ are at the heart of this crisis, and that is why structural reforms must be a major part” of the International Monetary Fund’s solution.
The American critique of the Asian crisis was correct. The countries involved were nominally capitalist but needed major reforms to create accountability and competitive markets.
Something similar is true today of the United States.
So I’d like to invite the finance ministers of Thailand, South Korea and Indonesia — whom I and other Americans deemed emblems of crony capitalism in the 1990s — to stand up and denounce American crony capitalism today.
Capitalism is so successful an economic system partly because of an internal discipline that allows for loss and even bankruptcy. It’s the possibility of failure that creates the opportunity for triumph. Yet many of America’s major banks are too big to fail, so they can privatize profits while socializing risk.
The upshot is that financial institutions boost leverage in search of supersize profits and bonuses. Banks pretend that risk is eliminated because it’s securitized. Rating agencies accept money to issue an imprimatur that turns out to be meaningless. The system teeters, and then the taxpayer rushes in to bail bankers out. Where’s the accountability?
It’s not just rabble-rousers at Occupy Wall Street who are seeking to put America’s capitalists on a more capitalist footing. “Structural change is necessary,” Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, said in an important speech last month that discussed many of these themes. He called for more curbs on big banks, possibly including trimming their size, and he warned that otherwise we’re on a path of “increasingly frequent, complex and dangerous financial breakdowns.”
Likewise, Mohamed El-Erian, another pillar of the financial world who is the chief executive of Pimco, one of the world’s largest money managers, is sympathetic to aspects of the Occupy movement. He told me that the economic system needs to move toward “inclusive capitalism” and embrace broad-based job creation while curbing excessive inequality.
“You cannot be a good house in a rapidly deteriorating neighborhood,” he told me. “The credibility and the fair functioning of the neighborhood matter a great deal. Without that, the integrity of the capitalist system will weaken further.”
Lawrence Katz, a Harvard economist, adds that some inequality is necessary to create incentives in a capitalist economy but that “too much inequality can harm the efficient operation of the economy.” In particular, he says, excessive inequality can have two perverse consequences: first, the very wealthy lobby for favors, contracts and bailouts that distort markets; and, second, growing inequality undermines the ability of the poorest to invest in their own education.
“These factors mean that high inequality can generate further high inequality and eventually poor economic growth,” Professor Katz said.
Does that ring a bell?
So, yes, we face a threat to our capitalist system. But it’s not coming from half-naked anarchists manning the barricades at Occupy Wall Street protests. Rather, it comes from pinstriped apologists for a financial system that glides along without enough of the discipline of failure and that produces soaring inequality, socialist bank bailouts and unaccountable executives.
It’s time to take the crony out of capitalism, right here at home.
By: Nicholas D. Kristof, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, October 26, 2011
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