DemocratsForProgress

DemocratsForProgress's Journal

June 12, 2014

Lessons Celebrating Eric Cantor’s Primary Loss

Walter Rhett: Lessons Celebrating Eric Cantor’s Primary Loss

Who speaks today of Jim Wright or Dennis Hastert?

Eric Cantor is a name that will slip easily into the past, having achieved little on his watch expect his own ambitions, which now will remain forever incomplete. The ladder of success is a two-way passage, and Cantor obviously forgot the Old Testament teachings that, among the many meanings of Jacob’s ladder, is the changing affairs of human community. Tuesday, Cantor’s fates changed; his Congressional career and ambitions perished in a hell of his own making. He wakes up today to find the gates slammed shut on his dreams.

He earned his current infamy. Yet by all accounts, he never saw it coming. That he missed what should have been in plain sight is explained in the text of an old southern African proverb: A blind mule is never afraid of the dark.

Cantor’s blindness begins when he miscalculated the dynamics of his gerrymandered district, which runs from Richmond to the Washington suburbs. His briar patch of safety was filled with thorns and he got stuck, having created many reasons for personal grudges in a district both conservative, educated and middle class–“rich and stupid” is the shorthand I have used to describe it. Conservative, yes. Loyal, no. Reactionary, yes. Racist, yes. Invested in a Koch brothers-writ future? No. Despite Cantor’s loss...

More at: http://www.democratsforprogress.com/2014/06/11/lessons-celebrating-eric-cantors-primary-loss/

June 9, 2014

Stormy Monday, 6/9/14

Jeff Rosenzweig: Stormy Monday, 6/9/14

With every lurid allegation and wheezing harrumph over Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl and the circumstances of his captivity and release being debunked, Republicans are left to stand around looking not just damn foolish, but hypocritical and heartless. That’s not a novelty, of course; they’ve been doing it pretty much forever. Sgt. Berhdahl is simply the latest excuse for GOP poutrage spun out of whole cloth. On the brighter side, at least Republicans are spending so much time hyperventilating about him that they’ve hardly had time to keep grinding the stubs of their ax handles over Benghazi, the IRS, Syria, and whatever other pseudo-scandals have slipped my mind at the moment. Small mercies. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel testifies on the Bergdahl release before the House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday.

Any remaining unexploded Republican heads will probably explode today as direct talks begin in Geneva between officials of the US and Iran, as efforts continue to reach a final deal on Iran’s nuclear program by July. Deputy Secretary of State William Burns leads the US delegation.

The results of an internal audit on the VA’s hospital scheduling issues were released this morning. The details were heartbreaking and infuriating. Over 57,000 vets have been awaiting initial appointments for more than 90 days, and 64,000 enrollees over the past decade have never got an appointment. Also today, the House Veterans Affairs Committee hears testimony from the office of the VA’s Inspector General and representatives from the GAO. Acting Veterans Affairs Secretary Sloan Gibson has vowed swift reform.

Hillary Clinton, who says in an interview with Diane Sawyer airing tonight that she won’t announce her presidential plans until 2015, is kicking off a national book tour this week, during which she’ll be asked by every local media figure and every autograph-seeking fan at every stop in every city whether she intends to run in ’16. She’ll also be campaigning for a variety of Democrats, each of whom will ask her whether she intends to run in ’16...

More at: http://www.democratsforprogress.com/2014/06/09/stormy-monday-6914/

June 4, 2014

The Five

Walter Rhett: The Five

I usually write analysis. I identify important points left out of the conversation (Ukrainian gas pipelines; the Koch brothers’ shadow governments in the states, race in the halls of power). I explain how these ideas and forces play out and their potential for unexpected turns. I keep open a global eye, especially in finance (recently, Argentina) and military force multipliers (the Navy’s AEGIS destroyer fleet). My slant is more German, the idea that the world has organic, multi-leveled interconnections, rather than English with its view of the sanctity of contracts or the French faith in rationalism.

I think the South wrote the book on how to leverage denial. And that Americans for Prosperity (AFP) has turned denial and fear into a major capital industry to direct politics without creating jobs. AFP just defeated a zoo levy in Columbus, Ohio by calling a slight increase in the zoo levy a “105 percent property tax hike,” calling their effort “education.”

By no means am I an Austrian, the counter flag for conservative ideology about government and markets whose views Paul Krugman describes as cockroach ideas—no matter how many times the ideas are defeated, proven wrong by experience, meticulously deconstructed by theory, they keep crawling back...

More at: http://www.democratsforprogress.com/2014/06/04/the-five/

June 2, 2014

Stormy Monday, 6/2/14

Jeff Rosenzweig: Stormy Monday, 6/2/14

Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl begins the week at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany after nearly five years as a prisoner of the Taliban. He was released Saturday after the conclusion of negotiations which included the release of five Afghani detainees from Guantanamo. Sgt. Bergdahl’s next stop is expected to be San Antonio Military Medical Center. And if his newfound freedom isn’t heartwarming enough, there’s this: Republicans are pissed off about it. So, apparently, is Hamid Karzai.

Thursday, the incomparable Bernie Sanders will chair a Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee hearing on his proposed Restoring Veterans’ Trust Act, which, among other important and overdue measures to enhance veterans’ benefits, would go a very long way toward straightening out the unconscionable VA healthcare mess that cost Eric Shinseki his job last week.

The President heads to Europe today for a five-day junket that will include stops in Poland (to honor the 25th anniversary of democratic elections there), France (to honor the 70th anniversary of D-Day), and Belgium (to honor whatever it is that gets honored at G7 meetings).

Today, the EPA proposed a 30-percent reduction in power plant carbon emissions over the next 15 years. The plan gives states considerable flexibility in achieving targeted reductions. Even Republicans have found something to like about the proposal: an opportunity to score cheap political points. Tomorrow, the National Republican Senatorial Committee begins a series of predictably dishonest robocalls in four states, portraying incumbent Democratic senators as radical tree-huggers determined to bankrupt their constituents with out-of-control electric bills...

More at: http://www.democratsforprogress.com/2014/06/02/stormy-monday-6214/

May 28, 2014

When Reason Stops Short

Walter Rhett: When Reason Stops Short

Unlike bullets and political rhetoric, reason often stops short. Like bullets and rhetoric, reason often puts forth a single-sided, unchallenged view. Thinking is no longer a safe zone: it is used for deadly purposes. Political leaders and armies have conscripted reason into their arsenals. Insurgents and students deploy it in the service of their cause. As we review the cases, we see reason how reason stops short and trends farther and farther from the truth. It does its most damage when it stops short. Here’s proof.

Russia’s Vladimir Putin says he still recognizes Viktor F. Yanukovych as Ukraine’s president. Nobody has heard from Yanukovych since February, when he gave a press conference after he had disappeared and turned up in Russia near Ukraine’s border. It is a globally accepted practice that when a head of state flees a country voluntarily, has no popular or party support, no longer controls the military, can no longer appoint ministers or cabinet members, and no longer has signatory authority, that person is considered to have been stripped of the power of office. But in Russia, in the logic and reason of Putin, such a person still holds high authority. Reason stopped short.

The recent Ukrainian national election won by a billionaire chocolate maker, Petro Poroshenko, a former Ukrainian foreign minster and trade minister who knows Putin well, was not enough to convince Putin otherwise. Putin’s reasoning not only falls short but steps into a big hole—it ignores the overwhelming presence of a connected series of irrefutable facts. Putin is the communist president who would be the Russian empress Catherine. His subjects silent, fearful of laughing, afraid he or his agents will hear snickering, he declares he is sartorially arrayed in the regalia of power, when his closet (and coffers!) are empty and his tenuous rewriting of history is in free fall.

Putin positions his army on the edge of his reason. Looking down the barrels of very large guns spread across their borders, local populations and even nations rarely object to his fallacies and delusions. Armed threats are persuasive; his words make no case...

More at: http://www.democratsforprogress.com/2014/05/28/when-reason-stops-short/

May 26, 2014

Stormy Monday, 5/26/14

Jeff Rosenzweig: Stormy Monday, 5/26/14

After his invigorating Memorial Day weekend trip to Afghanistan, the President leaves the storied delights of Bagram Airfield behind for the shilling fields of DC. No wonder he’s planning to get out of town again by midweek, when he’ll head to West Point to deliver a commencement address focused on foreign policy, advocating what one Administration official calls “interventionism but not overreach.”

But before he gets that far, on Tuesday the President plays host to the fifth annual White House Science Fair. This year’s edition celebrates the achievements of women and girls in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) competitions nationwide.

Speaking of the President, Senator Ted Cruz, intrepid Texan-Canadian-Cuban defender of all things he considers Constitutional, warned last Thursday that the wily Kenyan Usurper and his Senate henchmen are goiing to repeal the First Amendment. Will it happen this week? You never know. Stay vigilant, and keep a bag packed in case you have to flee the house ahead of the secret police coming to haul you off to that FEMA camp you heard tell was being built out there in the woods past Transit Road.

Tuesday, voters will decide whether veteran Congressman Ralph Hall – 91 years old and a lurid example of that weirdest of political creatures, a Democrat turned Republican – should get another kick at the can, or whether he has already done sufficient damage to the Republic and should be replaced by the even more odious John Ratcliffe. If you’re a voter in the Texas 4th, well, to paraphrase Simon and Garfunkel, “any way you look at it, you lose.”

More at: http://www.democratsforprogress.com/2014/05/26/stormy-monday-52614/

May 21, 2014

The Insanity of Capital

Walter Rhett: The Insanity of Capital

The art of politics is lost. Money is the main candidate. The largest amount wins. You no longer need a record of civil involvement, just the right connections. Its a bidder’s war. The price of the 2016 elections will be insane.

But cash can get you in trouble. The US Attorney General, Eric Holder, announced a guilty plea to criminal charges yesterday by the international bank Credit Suisse that included fines totaling $2.6 billion. In the plea, Credit Suisse admitted actively helping its account holders to evade US taxes.

On the heels of the Attorney General’s announcement, the New York Times reported the German bank, Commerzbank, suspended two employees for manipulated the $5 trillion daily currency market. The bank called their conduct “inappropriate.” Commerzbank issued a statement citing their “zero tolerance for non-compliance with rules and regulations.” A Swiss commission is also investigating eight institutions for colluding to manipulate global benchmark currencies, and one of those institutions is Credit Suisse.

More: A German authority also reported finding evidence of attempted currency manipulations but has decided not to pursue its findings...

More at: http://www.democratsforprogress.com/2014/05/21/the-insanity-of-capital/

May 14, 2014

A Template for Greed

Walter Rhett: A Template for Greed

I.

In a statement for a case the Supreme Court declined last year, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, “prejudice should not be substituted for reason.” That’s a tall order, from the streets or the bench.

Having institutionalized its attitudes of bias into law, and into employment patterns, housing, education, wages, voting and social behavior for more than a century, the US is still struggling to dismantle racism, despite loud proclamations that it is gone, and blaming its victims for recognizing its problems.

Racism is in slow retreat, but its legacy remains; intact. Not always as a barrier, as limits on opportunity or as carrier of stereotypes and hate—racism’s legacy is a template of action, tied to wealth. An empty jar is a template. It can hold water or nitroglycerin. A basket can hold fruit or be filled with vipers. Racism’s biggest impact on America’s political economy is its template, an interconnected, elaborate methodology of laws, beliefs, behaviors and networks, a series of conjectures and omens that can be abstracted and applied to issues far outside race. Surprisingly, its manifest destiny has attached to international finance.

Substitute wealth into the language of race, and you can see the labels, the special privileges, the denials, the demagoguery, the legal justifications for its concentration and expansion of power that once accompanied race. America’s political economy is in a battle royal for wealth and power, seeking their absolute convergence...

More at: http://www.democratsforprogress.com/2014/05/14/a-template-for-greed/

May 12, 2014

Stormy Monday, 5/12/14

Stormy Monday, 5/12/14

With the Benghazi pseudo-scandal momentarily on hold as John Boehner’s Republican-dominated kangaroo court – uh, I mean select committee, is assembled, the Secret Service has set tongues wagging with the revelation by the agency’s former director, Mark Sullivan, that agents were routinely pulled from White House perimeter duty to protect Sullivan’s assistant at her Maryland home. Expect calls this week for House and Senate investigations. And don’t be surprised if Louie Gohmert, Michele Bachmann or one of their GOP colleagues gets the bright idea to have Sullivan reappointed to his old position so that they can then demand his resignation again. Hell, one or more conservative pundits clamoring for the President’s impeachment on the grounds that he failed to micromanage his own security detail wouldn’t shock me either.

In other Secret Service news, Thomas Lemuel “Lem” Johns, who was assistant to the special agent in charge of LBJ’s security detail in Dallas on November 22, 1963, died Saturday, aged 88. The Alabama native was present at Johnson’s ad hoc inaugural aboard Air Force One, and would later head the agency’s Birmingham field office. His son and grandson also went on to serve on presidential security details. Lem Johns will be interred at Birmingham’s Elmwood Cemetery on Wednesday.

Also on Wednesday, Senator Patty Murray of Washington will introduce the Social Security and Marriage Equality (SAME) Act of 2014, which would “amend the Social Security Act to grant survivor benefits to any individual legally married anywhere in the United States, regardless of whether he or she lives in a state that recognizes same-sex marriage.” The bill is co-sponsored by another Democrat, Colorado’s Mark Udall. Yep. Not a dime’s worth of difference between the parties. Yep.

With a ton of testosterone-tinged rancor left over from his aggression in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin could be poised to invade the Eurovision Song Contest following Friday’s victory in Copenhagen by Austrian drag queen Conchita Wurst’s impassioned “Rise Like a Phoenix.” Russia was unsuccessful in its efforts to strong-arm the contest into banning Wurst’s performance. Following the result, Russian Vice Premier Dmitry Rogozin noisily tweeted about Europe’s future being “a bearded girl,” while numbskull MP Vladimir Zhirinovsky described the win as “the end of Europe.” Wurst’s performance is a marvel, no question, and certainly anything that ticks off Pootie is a good thing, but to a codger like me it’ll never top Eurovision winner “Waterloo,” which poured non-stop out of every transistor radio in Europe during my summer there in 1974. Yes, it was a simpler, more innocent era: the Paris Peace Accord had crumbled, resulting in renewed hostilities in Vietnam, civil war raged and Haile Selassie was dethroned in Ethiopia, Turkey invaded Cyprus (twice), the Red Brigades were bombing seemingly every passenger train I wanted to take, and Richard Milhous Nixon resigned in disgrace...

More at: http://www.democratsforprogress.com/2014/05/11/stormy-monday-51214/

May 7, 2014

The Fifth Wheel: America’s Political Economy

Walter Rhett: The Fifth Wheel: America’s Political Economy

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor presented her first oral dissent from the high bench last week. The New York Times coverage also reported a written statement she released the previous year on a case the Court declined to hear. The statement makes plain a profound truth overlooked. A federal prosecutor’s statement* about a group of African-Americans and Hispanics and a drug deal, she noted, was “pernicious in its attempt to substitute racial stereotype for evidence, and racial prejudice for reason.”

Have we become a government by stereotype and blame? Yes. But more importantly, how did it happen? What were the economic and politic elements that created a such a dramatic shift? The answers lie within our political economy, one of five models active as global templates.

The most traditional of the five is the European template. In Europe, government is actively engaged in providing public service; it offers benefits to its citizens and is concerned with the public good and common resources, from roads to energy consumption, from employment to schools, from the internet to the arts. No European government would declare the death of Big Bird, the most successful teacher of early childhood language skills, as Mitt Romney did in a presidential debate (overlooking the fact that “Bird” is a part of a private non-profit group that is self-sustained by license fees). By all measures except for taxation, the European model works well, and citizen groups are not in open revolt about its goals, even as the countries of Europe debate its priorities.

European conservatives argue for austerity, but few go so far as calling for the dismantling of national social nets, the transfer of government assets to the private sector, or bizarre gun rights such as “stand your ground.”

More at: http://www.democratsforprogress.com/2014/05/07/the-fifth-wheel-americas-political-economy/

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