“An Echo, Not A Choice”: How The Right Wing Lost In 2012
The right wing has lost the election of 2012.
The evidence for this is overwhelming, yet it is the year’s best-kept secret. Mitt Romney would not be throwing virtually all of his past positions overboard if he thought the nation were ready to endorse the full-throated conservatism he embraced to win the Republican nomination.
If conservatism were winning, does anyone doubt that Romney would be running as a conservative? Yet unlike Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater, Romney is offering an echo, not a choice. His strategy at the end is to try to sneak into the White House on a chorus of me-too’s.
The right is going along because its partisans know Romney has no other option. This, too, is an acknowledgment of defeat, a recognition that the grand ideological experiment heralded by the rise of the tea party has gained no traction. It also means that conservatives don’t believe that Romney really believes the moderate mush he’s putting forward now. Not to put too fine a point on it, but if the conservatives are forgiving Romney because they think he is lying, what should the rest of us think?
Almost all of the analysis of Romney’s highly public burning of the right’s catechism focuses on such tactical issues as whether his betrayal of principle will help him win over middle-of-the-road women and carry Ohio. What should engage us more is that a movement that won the 2010 elections with a bang is trying to triumph just two years later on the basis of a whimper.
It turns out that there was no profound ideological conversion of the country two years ago. We remain the same moderate and practical country we have long been. In 2010, voters were upset about the economy, Democrats were demobilized, and President Obama wasn’t yet ready to fight. All the conservatives have left now is economic unease. So they don’t care what Romney says. They are happy to march under a false flag if that is the price of capturing power.
The total rout of the right’s ideology, particularly its neoconservative brand, was visible in Monday’s debate, in which Romney praised one Obama foreign policy initiative after another. He calmly abandoned much of what he had said during the previous 18 months. Gone were the hawkish assaults on Obama’s approach to Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Israel, China and nearly everywhere else. Romney was all about “peace.”
Romney’s most revealing line: “We don’t want another Iraq.” Thus did he bury without ceremony the great Bush-Cheney project. He renounced a war he had once supported with vehemence and enthusiasm.
Then there’s budget policy. If the Romney/Paul Ryan budget and tax ideas were so popular, why would the candidate and his sidekick, the one-time devotee of Ayn Rand, be investing so much energy in hiding the most important details of their plans? For that matter, why would Ryan feel obligated to forsake his love for Rand, the proud philosopher of “the virtue of selfishness” and the thinker he once said had inspired his public service?
Romney knows that, by substantial margins, the country favors raising taxes on the rich and opposes slashing many government programs, including Medicare and Social Security. Since Romney’s actual plan calls for cutting taxes on the rich, he has to disguise the fact. Where is the conviction?
The biggest sign that tea party thinking is dead is Romney’s straight-out deception about his past position on the rescue of the auto industry.
The bailout was the least popular policy Obama pursued — and, I’d argue, one of the most successful. It was Exhibit A for tea partyers who accused our moderately progressive president of being a socialist. In late 2008, one prominent Republican claimed that if the bailout the Detroit-based automakers sought went through, “you can kiss the American automotive industry good-bye.” The car companies, he said, would “seal their fate with a bailout check.” This would be the same Mitt Romney who tried to pretend on Monday that he never said what he said or thought what he thought. If the bailout is now good politics, and it is, then free-market fundamentalism has collapsed in a heap.
“Ideas have consequences” is one of the conservative movement’s most honored slogans. That the conservatives’ standard-bearer is now trying to escape the consequences of their ideas tells us all we need to know about who is winning the philosophical battle — and, because ideas do matter, who will win the election.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, October 24, 2012
“The Romney-Ryan Budget”: A Sketchy Plan That Makes Social Security Less Secure
With Election Day two weeks away, my series of posts on the Romney-Ryan budget plan is drawing to a close. Today I’m writing about the changes GOP candidates Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have in store for Social Security, and in my final post I’ll cover other social programs on the chopping block and call attention to who stands to profit should Romney’s sketchy deal become reality.
First, any meaningful discussion of Social Security calls for the airing of three simple truths:
Truth #1 – Social Security has played a major role in reducing poverty in the United States for 75 years. Today, one in every six U.S. residents collects Social Security benefits. Included in this group are retirees, people with disabilities and young survivors of deceased parents. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the program keeps 21.4 million women, men and children from living in poverty. People like Social Security because it works and it’s reliable. Wall Street is risky. But Social Security hasn’t missed a payment since the first benefit was issued in 1937.
Truth #2 – Social Security is even more important to women because we live longer than men and typically retire with less savings than men. When you think about it, it’s not hard to see why that is so. On average, women are paid less than men, either due to outright wage discrimination or because women are clustered into low-paying fields. Over a lifetime, this disparity really adds up. Additionally, women are less likely than men to work for employers that provide pensions, and we often take time out of the paid workforce to care for children or other family members. Women of color retire at an even greater economic disadvantage than white women.
Truth #3 – Wealthy conservatives have been after Social Security since its inception. This is not a delusion — it’s a fact. For decades, right-wing think tanks have hatched several key myths and sound bites that politicians have repeated over and over again: The program is going bankrupt; the money’s gone; it’s a Ponzi scheme. These messages have sunk so deeply into the consciousness of this nation that you often hear people under 40 or even 50 state that “Social Security won’t be there for me when I retire.” Encouraged financial moguls and their congressional water-carriers have made numerous moves toward privatizing Social Security, including a big push in the 1980s and again under the presidency of George W. Bush.
Here’s a compelling way of looking at the situation: Truth #1 — the success of Social Security and its corresponding support from voters — has prevented Truth #3 from producing any concrete progress. But Truth #2 keeps the efforts of Truth #3 alive — meaning, conservative elites are much more likely to continue trying to dismantle a social insurance system that disproportionately benefits women and particularly women of color. It’s so much easier to funnel other people’s money into the risky stock market when you truly do see them as different, undeserving, not peers — literally as “the Other.”
It should come as no surprise, then, that Romney and Ryan share the right-wing thirst for converting Social Security to a private program under which billions of previously safeguarded dollars would flow into Wall Street traders’ hands. But these guys know their agenda is so deeply unpopular with the vast majority of voters that they have to tread very carefully, blurring their ultimate goal.
So, the Romney-Ryan budget plan is fairly cryptic on the subject. Here’s what it has to say: “[T]his budget calls for action on Social Security by requiring both the President and the Congress to put forward specific ideas and legislation to ensure the sustainable solvency of this critical program.” The budget raises suggestions such as “reforms that take into account increases in longevity, to arrest the demographic problems that are undermining Social Security’s finances.” In other words, raise the retirement age. The Romney-Ryan plan claims that “[t]he solutions are clear,” but it doesn’t really commit to anything specific.
The Oct. 11 vice presidential debate did offer a glimpse at the contrasting philosophies held by those who want to quell the panic and take responsible steps toward protecting and improving Social Security versus those who want to stir up enough public distrust in the system that gambling on Wall Street will seem like a viable alternative.
When asked about the program, Rep. Paul Ryan pulled out a string of classic right-wing scare tactics: “If we don’t shore up Social Security, when we run out of the IOUs, when the program goes bankrupt, a 25 percent across-the-board benefit cut kicks in on current seniors in the middle of their retirement.”
Vice President Joe Biden replied: “If we had listened to Romney, Governor Romney, and the congressman during the Bush years, imagine where all those seniors would be now if their money had been in the market.”
Ryan pulled out the standard caveat that he’s not talking about changing the system for people who have already retired or are about to retire: “[W]hat I’ve always agreed is let younger Americans have a voluntary choice of making their money work faster for them within the Social Security system.”
But what about the single mom — one of Ryan’s “younger Americans” — who’s working two jobs trying to support her family when suddenly all the money in her private retirement account is gone because Wall Street had another collapse? Now she has to start all over again. Is that fair? Is it even remotely wise to put the people of our nation, the people who drive our economy, at such risk?
Romney and Ryan know that there is no compelling reason to turn Social Security over to the private market. Those with enough money to invest in the market can already do so. But most people need the economic security that comes from a stable system of retirement insurance that isn’t out to make its shareholders rich.
You may be asking yourself at this point: But isn’t Social Security in danger of falling behind, now that the Baby Boomers are starting to retire? Don’t we need to do something?
Yes, we do. But we don’t have to settle for what the privatizers are selling us. After all, they’re working for the one-hundredth of one percent, not us. In fact, the elites’ lobbyists have produced policies that are draining money from the Social Security trust fund. According to the Economic Policy Institute, “Low- and middle-income workers and their families would have had far better income growth over the past 30 years if economic policies had not directed the fruits of economic growth to the highest-income Americans.” In effect, fairer wages would have resulted in more payroll taxes going into the system for the last three decades.
Elites, meanwhile, have enjoyed drastically lower payroll tax rates than the rest of us. Currently, there is a cap on the amount of a worker’s wages that are subject to Social Security deductions: If you make less than $110,100, all of your salary is in play; if you are paid more than that, everything over $110,100 is in the clear. For most of us, the payroll tax is about six percent. But for someone earning $1 million per year, it’s 0.6 percent! You see, as income in this country increasingly shifts to higher earners, less and less money flows into the Social Security pool.
This May, the National Organization for Women Foundation put out a report along with the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare Foundation and the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. Unlike the Social Security raiders, we see the good in the system — its strengths and potential. Breaking the Social Security Glass Ceiling: A Proposal to Modernize Women’s Benefits presents 10 improvements, such as providing credits for caregivers, that would make Social Security more equitable while safeguarding benefits for women. Simply eliminating the cap on payroll contributions would pay for the vast majority of these improvements and ensure the system’s solvency for at least 75 years. A higher minimum wage and a lower unemployment rate would pay for the rest by creating higher payrolls, thus more contributions into the system. Small tweaks in the payroll tax rate are also both feasible and promising.
Big business and the wealthy, who have an outsized influence on our discourse, will fight tooth and nail against common-sense options like these. They will generously fund the campaigns of their wealthy friends, like Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, and do all they can to control the media outlets from which the voters get their information.
Women like Linda, who would be completely dependent on her daughter if it weren’t for her monthly Social Security check, rarely have a voice in this process. But they do have a voice at the polls on Election Day. The people’s greatest defense against attacks on Social Security is our voting power. And politicians know it.
That is why Romney and Ryan are working so hard to downplay their Social Security plans. But we need to send them the message that women are not fooled. We may not have access to their billions of dollars, but we can and must use our votes to let them know: Social Security is ours, and we will continue to protect it for generations to come.
By: Terry O’Neil, President, National Organization for Women; The Huffington Post, October 22, 2012
“Skewed Equilibrium”: Mitt Romney Is Wrong About The Wage Gap
Asked about the gender wage gap last night, Mitt Romney changed the subject. “What we can do to help young women and women of all ages is to have a strong economy, so strong that employers are looking to find good employees and bringing them into their workforce and adapting to a — a flexible work schedule that gives women the opportunities that — that they would otherwise not be able to — to afford,” he said. Sensing that he was going to be forced to actually answer the question, Romney added, “I’m going to help women in America get — get good work by getting a stronger economy and by supporting women in the workforce.”
There are so many half-formed assumptions and pseudo-promises here that it’s hard to know where to start, but let’s go to the basic premise: That the wage gap narrows when the economy is strong. That premise, so far as we can see from the data, is wrong.
“In good economic times, bonus payments, overtime hours and merit pay increase,” says Ariane Hegewisch, a study director at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. “Women are under-represented in the top echelons,” where compensation has soared in good times. “Women are less likely to work overtime,” she adds, and “research suggests that merit and performance-related pay still is a key area for gender discrimination.” There’s also research suggesting that “salary increases related to promotions might differ by gender.”
In fact, the recent economic woes actually narrowed the wage gap, because while both men and women suffered, men lost more ground, according to a 2011 IWPR analysis: “Real earnings for both men and women have fallen since 2010, by 0.9 percent for women and 2.1 percent for men.” That’s likely because male-dominated sectors like construction were hard hit in the recession. Since then, the majority of job gains in the recovery have gone to men, suggesting that (skewed) equilibrium will likely be restored.
By: Irin Carmon, Salon, October 17, 2012
“Whispering Sweet Nothings”: On Women’s Issues, Mitt Romney Has Binders Full of Nonsense
In the summer of 1960 the Republican Party passed a platform at their convention calling for an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution. They also approved a strong civil rights plank. My, how times change.
Now, we are faced with a political party and a nominee that seem to want to whisper sweet nothings in the ears of women while taking us back not 50 years but closer to 100. They seem to think they can talk their way out of their policy positions. Dream on.
In the debate, Mitt Romney took a detour from the question about equal pay for equal work to talk about “binders full of women.” The new Facebook page with that name had over 300,000 followers in a matter of hours, clearly indicating voters were not happy with his claims about appointing women.
Let’s deal with these issues one at a time. First, Mitt Romney did not ask his aides to put together these “binders.” A bipartisan group of women began to work in the summer before the election to assemble women who could serve in the next gubernatorial administration. These names were to be given to whoever won the election in November. Second, Romney’s number of women appointed decreased in every year of his administration and it was Gov. Deval Patrick who upped the number of women appointees. Third, the women got the lower level appointments not the plum jobs under Mitt Romney. So enough long stories about “binders.”
Next, Romney wanted to leave the impression that “I support contraceptives” when, in fact, he won’t support health coverage for them. Viagra, no problem, but gee whiz we shouldn’t require companies and organizations to have health insurance that covers contraceptives if they have a “religious objection.” His lieutenant governor, Kerry Healey, told Andrea Mitchell this was a “peripheral issue”—but it’s not peripheral to those who have to pay for it.
But, of course, the crowning glory for Romney in the debate and afterwards was his effort to duck the equal pay for equal work legislation, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. Ed Gillespie, his senior adviser, stated that Romney opposed this bill but that, as the governor has said, he would not try and repeal it as president. Oops, then slippery Ed tried to walk it back saying Romney did not take a position on it. Hooey.
This bill passed in January 2009 in the House of Representatives with only three Republicans supporting it. It passed the Senate with only five Republican Senators in favor. It was signed into law by President Barack Obama on January 29, 2009. It is now a very popular piece of legislation.
Of course, Romney didn’t support it then; the question to ask is whether he supports it now. He will not answer that question. Mitt Romney should stop his dance with women voters and be honest, truthful, up-front. Mitt Romney might want to take a page from the 1960 party platform but then he would have to disavow this year’s platform which does not even have an exception for rape, incest, and life of the mother when it comes to a woman’s right to choose.
Mitt Romney’s record for women is disgraceful, despite his rhetoric.
Even the 1950s look good compared to Mitt Romney.
By: Peter Fenn, U. S. News and World Report, October 18, 2012
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