The Democratic Cult of Saint Maggie?

I've written before about the strange and vexing Reagan hagiography in which American liberals and Democratic partisans regularly engage.  It is a tactic--an often misguided one, if you ask me--to paint today's Republican Party as "extremist" by claiming the mantle of Reaganism for a Democratic Party centrism.  We see this most frequently on issues of tax increases and gun control--although it is not limited to these.  Today, the cult of Saint Ronnie swam across the Atlantic and gained a Saint Maggie, too.

ThinkProgress produced an article entitled "Why the Modern Republican Party Would Reject Margaret Thatcher" that defies belief in its desire to rewrite history.  Their praise for Maggie's tax increases ignores her love of regressive taxation such as the poll tax she tried to introduce and the sales tax that she increased. Raising sales taxes to fund income tax reductions is so regressive that Bobby Jindal had to pull his proposal to do so.  TP's claim that Maggie supported "socialized medicine" is not borne out by the facts, considering the "Iron Lady" tried to dismantle the widely popular NHS---and failed.

Self-described 1980s conservative Barack Obama, a proud member of the strange and awkward cult of Saint Ronnie in the Democratic party, also extended some glowing praise to Maggie in his statement upon her death:

"Michelle and I send our thoughts to the Thatcher family and all the British people as we carry on the work to which she dedicated her life—free peoples standing together, determined to write our own destiny."

"...we carry on the work to which she dedicated her life..."  He said that with an utter lack of irony.

Free peoples, eh? Tell that the people of Chile who endured a military dictatorship run by Maggie's good friend Augusto Pinochet.  Also, ask the people of South Africa; Maggie referred to Nelson Mandela as a "terrorist" and opposed economic sanctions on the apartheid regime.  She--of course with the help of the U.S.--supported the military government of General Mohammed Zia ul-Haq in Pakistan, who helped fuel the radicalization of the country.  Ask the people of Northern Ireland about peaceful, freedom-loving coexistence while you're at it. What a champion of freedom she was!

We also saw the Democratic cult of Saint Ronnie in action on MSNBC last night on Lawrence O'Donnell's show.    MSNBC has a mix of Beltway whisperers (Morning Joe), unabashed party hacks (Bashir, Matthews, O'Donnell), and principled, intellectual liberals (most notably, Maddow and Hayes).  O'Donnell, whose show and style I can't stand and who is apparently a member of the cult of Saint Maggie, un-ironically praised Thatcher for being a "good socialist."  The ignorance manifest is stunning.

You would have, thankfully, heard a concise but effective rebuke in the prior hour on The Rachel Maddow Show.  Thank you, Rachel, for delivering an eloquent attack on the whitewashing of Ronnie and Maggie's legacies.  

Although Democratic partisans love to blather about how much to the right the modern day Republican Party is from their professed conservative heroes of yore like Maggie and Ronnie, I'd much prefer to see a piece called "Why George McGovern Would be on the Left Fringe of Today's Neoliberal Democratic Party."  If Ronnie and Maggie could find home in the modern Democratic Party, then it's the Democratic Party's lurch rightward that's most manifest and most troubling.

"Non-Ideological Problem Solvers"

If I wanted to vote for a "non-ideological problem solver," I'd vote for a computer.

You Can't Call It a Concession if No One Asked For It

So, as we saw in Obama's weekly address yesterday, he's trying to deny ownership of his cuts to Social Security even though he's certainly expressed interest in doing so for quite some years now.  Painting himself as a "post-partisan" self-negotiator rather than a resolute neoliberal (Is either that laudable?), he spoke of his budget as a "compromise" position, again painting the chained CPI as though it were a "concession" he'd be willing to make as long as Republicans agreed to close tax loopholes.
The problem with such a frame is that you can only call it a concession if the other side asked for it.
If you read the House budget (i.e. the Paul Ryan budget), you'll notice the dance Ryan does around the topic of Social Security.  There is language hinting at means testing and raising the eligibility age combined with the usual Peterson-esque fear-mongering about debt and future bankruptcy of the program, but there is no direct recommendation.  As far as direct recommendations go, all that we get is this:

Social Security in brief
• Require the President to submit a plan to shore up the Social Security Trust Fund.
• Require Congress to submit a plan of its own.

Basically, the House Republicans simply punt, demanding that Obama be the one who owns the cuts to Social Security, and Obama seems perfectly willing to oblige. And what makes his willingness to cut Social Security even more galling is the fact that he used retirement insecurity as a reason to delay environmental/climate action earlier this week.  At his fundraiser in San Francisco, he spoke of the difficulties of pushing environmental legislation in the following way:

But — and I mentioned this to Tom and Kat and a few folks right before I came out here — the politics of this are tough. Because if you haven’t seen a raise in a decade; if your house is still $25,000, $30,000 underwater; if you’re just happy that you’ve still got that factor job that is powered by cheap energy; if every time you go to fill up your old car because you can’t afford to buy a new one, and you certainly can’t afford to buy a Prius, you’re spending 40 bucks that you don’t have, which means that you may not be able to save for retirement — you may be concerned about the temperature of the planet, but it’s probably not rising to your number-one concern. And if people think, well, that’s shortsighted, that’s what happens when you’re struggling to get by. You’re thinking about what’s right in front of you, which is how do I fill up my gas tank and how do I feed my family.

If he believed that retirement insecurity, housing insecurity, job insecurity were making people less able to view climate change as the major threat that it is, then he wouldn't be so willing to cut Social Security and would have a more robust housing policy amidst the foreclosure crisis.  

False Equivalence Alert: Obama on Gun Control

Yesterday, Obama went to Aurora, Colorado, to speak about gun control, an attempt to use the bully pulpit to goad Congress into action.  Unfortunately, he had done no such thing after the shooting in Aurora last summer.  He also danced around the issue during the town hall debate last fall, in which Obama spoke about education and Romney complained about single mothers while neither answered the question that had been asked.  Obama's conversion into a gun control advocate (or perhaps reversion, he may have devolved and then evolved as he did with marriage equality) post-Newtown is welcome.  However, watching him speak in Colorado reminded me of one of my biggest gripes with his rhetorical and governing style.

I watched a clip of his speech during All in with Chris Hayes last night, and as soon as I started to hear the glimmer of vague, feel-good "post-partisan" language, all I could think was "Wait for it, Wait for it.  He's going to say that both sides are equally to blame."  And, lo and behold, he did.

“Part of the reason it’s so hard to get this done is because both sides of the debate sometimes don’t listen to each other.   The people who take absolute positions on these issues on both sides sometimes aren’t willing to concede even an inch of ground.”

I am very intrigued to know of whom he is thinking when he refers to absolutists on the side of gun safety.  No elected official--or even activist group--is broaching even the idea of the very strict gun policies that the United Kingdom has, where even the police don't have guns.  The left-bound of the debate is the assault weapons ban and the magazine restriction, both of which garner majority support from voters.  Universal background checks garner even higher support.  Obama claims to support all three proposals. 

Gun control advocates are not the ones with the anti-government, doomsday fantasies or twisted machismo.  Gun control advocates are not the ones brandishing weapons outside of state capitols with more faith in intimidation than democratic deliberation.  Gun control advocates are not the ones promising to filibuster of any gun control package.  Gun control advocates, ignored entirely by the president and the Congress (save for a few lone representatives), will likely accept whatever they can get, and I don't see liberal Democrats threatening to filibuster a bill that is too watered down.  So, please, Mr. President, save me your hollow centrist rhetoric.

The Strange and Substanceless Dem Embrace of Chris Christie

Why Do Democrats, Especially Jersey Democrats, Like Chris Christie So Much?

New Jersey is a fairly blue state.  In the past election, NJ voted to re-elect Obama by a comfortable margin (58.3 % - 40.6%).  However, according to all early polls, Chris Christie, the Republican governor of New Jersey, is expected to win by a landslide against Democratic challenger Barbara Buono.   National polls, also, indicate that Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents have taken a liking to Christie.  A PPP poll from yesterday found that Obama voters (42/24) like him better than Romney voters (36/31) do.  He gets praise lavished upon him in the media, both by news hosts and talk show hosts.  However, the praise rarely addresses his actual record as governor, which offers little to embrace with such open arms. Let's take a look at his record so far.

Chris Christie has repeatedly vetoed funding for Planned Parenthood.

Chris Christie has vetoed marriage equality legislation.

Chris Christie pulled Jersey out of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.

Chris Christie killed the Tunnel Project, which would have created two new rail passages between New York and New Jersey, bringing both economic and environmental benefits to the region, and lied about the cost to justify his decision.

He is a strong proponent of voucherizing the school system to siphon away money from public schools and slashing funding for public schools, and he regularly vilifies teacher' unions.   He also gets his education ideas from ALEC.

Chris Christie is a strong advocate of corporate welfare, who doles out subsidies even when the companies fail to create the jobs they promised.  Of his Urban Transit Hub Tax Program, the New York Times noted,

"Under the program, the Christie administration has granted more than $900 million in state tax credits over 10 years to 15 companies, including Panasonic, Goya, Prudential and Campbell’s Soup. The companies have promised to add 2,364 jobs, or $387,537 in tax credits per job, over the next decade. "

What efficiency!  As the article further elaborates, NJ has only recovered 20% of the jobs lost in the Great Recession--compared to 80% in its neighbor to the north, New York.  New Jersey currently has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country.

Even though Jersey can dole out this cash in corporate subsidies, Christie still claims not to have enough money to provide public workers with the pensions and health care benefits they've earned.
We also know that Christie and the Koch brothers are good friends.

Chris Christie is a strong supporter for NJ's deeply corrupt privatized halfway house system, and he's lobbied for the company that runs them.

I vaguely remember a video of Chris Christie yelling at someone going viral among conservatives a few years ago because Christie purportedly battered his opponent with a summary of the Republican ethic of "personal responsibility" in a way that made right-wingers giddy.  (He has many videos of himself yelling at people, so this would likely prove difficult to find.)

Despite all that, he remains popular among Democrats.  Some probably like him because of his 'bromance' with Obama after Hurricane Sandy or the fact that he criticized Republicans for blocking Sandy relief funds.  Working with the federal government on disaster relief should be neither liberal nor conservative: it is simply doing your job as governor.  When Chris Christie criticized House Republicans, he made sure to highlight that Jersey gives more to the federal government than it gets back.  One wonders how much Governor Chris Christie would have supported federal relief funds from one of the less affluent states.

Maybe his support stems from people's tendency to equate brash and obnoxious with "relatable" although that would be rather depressing.

In some ways, the Democratic fondness of Chris Christie reminds me of the embrace of Jon Huntsman, whose campaign platform was actually very conservative.  They both have managed--in large part because of media fawning--to cultivate an image of moderation while largely belying that in practice.  Chris Christie and Jon Huntsman may count as "moderates" in a Republican Party that has drifted as far to the right as it had, but that hardly makes them "moderates" overall.

I Wrote to My Senator about His Vote for Keystone XL. Here is the Response I Got (Annotated)

Last week, Senator Bob Casey (D-PA) heard several times from an unhappy constituent (i.e. me) about his vote for the Keystone XL pipeline during the Senate's budget amendment vote-a-rama. I have included the email response that I got from Sen. Casey's office last Friday, which I've decided to annotate to highlight its factual inaccuracies and platitudes.  

Thank you for taking the time to contact me regarding the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. I appreciate hearing from you about this issue. The TransCanada Corporation, a Canadian company, has proposed a plan to build a 1,900-mile pipeline to carry crude oil extracted from tar sands in Alberta, Canada, to refineries in Texas. If approved, the Keystone XL pipeline would double the capacity of an existing pipeline and would transport more than 500,000 barrels per day of crude oil. On February 4, 2011, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper met with President Obama to discuss the proposal. Afterward, Prime Minister Harper urged U.S. officials to approve the pipeline, calling his country a secure, stable and friendly neighbor that poses no threat to Americans. The State Department has said seeking energy from stable trading partners is in our national interest. According to a report commissioned by the Obama Administration, the Keystone XL pipeline would cost $7 billion and could substantially reduce U.S. dependence on oil from the Middle East and other regions.

Sen. Casey has gotten his data from the TransCanada-commissioned Perryman Group study; however, the Cornell University Institute for Global Labor, which has provided one of the most prominent independent analyses of the pipeline, has argued that their numbers are exaggerated and misleading. The $7 billion claim is particularly egregious, and the Cornell study estimates that the total expenditure into the U.S. economy would be closer to $3 or $4 billion. First, the $7 billion refers to the whole pipeline, including the parts in Canada; the expenditure for the U.S. portion would only be $5.4 billion. Second, roughly $1.8 billion has already been spent on design, permitting, and material inputs--sunk costs. The Cornell study further estimated that up to $1.3 billion of that total may have already been committed; in other words, whether or not the pipeline is built, that money will be spent. TransCanada has also contracted with steel manufacturers both at home in Canada and abroad in India, meaning that the pipeline will not be a boon to domestic manufacturing. The claim to energy security has a similarly weak foundation. The Keystone XL pipeline will end in the Texas refineries in the Gulf Coast, ready for export. There is no reason to believe that the oil refined there will stay in the U.S. rather than being sold to the highest bidder in the global market. The only way that the U.S. could guarantee that the oil produced/extracted/refined domestically is sold and used domestically would be to nationalize the industry, and we all know how much the U.S. likes the nationalization of oil companies.

 The report also suggests that the pipeline could create as many as 20,000 high-paying jobs for American families and inject a possible $20 billion into the U.S. economy.

The Cornell study addresses these claims as well. The Perryman study does not actually include the full expenditure data provided by TransCanada, so its calculations about multipliers cannot be independently reviewed as thoroughly as necessary. However, if the $7 billion number does not hold, neither can any of the subsequent job predictions, which would have to be revised downwards. Many of the jobs created by Keystone would be temporary jobs, and after the pipeline is built in about two years, only about 50 permanent jobs would remain. The jobs predictions also do not take into account potential job-killers that could result from the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. In addition to the cost of potential oil spills, air pollution, and increased greenhouse gas emissions, the Keystone XL pipeline would actually increase fuel prices in the Midwest by diverting major volumes of tar sands oil now supplying Midwest refineries to the Gulf Coast and export markets. Consumers in the Midwest could end up paying 10 to 20 cents extra per gallon per gasoline.

The possible environmental impacts caused by the construction of the pipeline and the refinement of tar sands oil have caused some to oppose the approval of this plan. The international scientific community has concluded that human activities that add a large amount of heat-trapping greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, to the atmosphere are a leading cause of global warming. I understand that some Pennsylvanians are concerned about how the proposed Keystone XL pipeline will contribute to global warming.

From this language, Sen. Casey himself does not seem concerned about the effects of global warming. His language about "some Pennsylvanians" reminds me of the language Candy Crowley used when she spoke about why she chose not to include a question about climate change during the second debate.

 On December 23, 2011, President Obama signed into law H.R. 3765, the Temporary Payroll Tax Cut Continuation Act of 2011. H.R. 3765 required President Obama, acting through the Secretary of State, to grant a permit for the Keystone XL pipeline project not later than 60 days after the enactment of this legislation, so long as it is not determined it would not serve the national interest. On January 18, 2012, Deputy Secretary of State William Burns formally announced the rejection of the permit, but also stated that TransCanada is allowed to work on an alternative route through Nebraska. The decision was predicated on the fact that the Department did not have sufficient time to obtain the information necessary to assess whether the project was in the national interest. Some Pennsylvanians strongly favor the construction of the proposed pipeline; other Pennsylvanians strongly oppose the proposed route.(emphasis added)

Well, duh...

 Last Congress, Senator Hoeven of North Dakota introduced an amendment to the Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act to authorize TransCanada to build and operate the Keystone XL pipeline. I supported this amendment, which would have protected American jobs and manufacturing. However, the amendment failed to receive the votes necessary to pass. As the Senate discusses other legislative proposals relating to the Keystone XL pipeline, I will evaluate each of these proposals very seriously. As your U.S. Senator, I will continue to monitor this issue closely and will keep your thoughts in mind.

 Notice how he did not mention at all that he JUST VOTED FOR THE PIPELINE AGAIN LAST WEEK. I already knew that he voted for it last Congress, but I had a glimmer of hope when he didn't sign on to the Baucus-Hoeven letter to Obama earlier this year. So much for that...

  As always, I appreciate your views, thoughts and concerns as they assist me in understanding what is important to the people of Pennsylvania. Please do not hesitate to contact me in the future about this or any other matter of importance to you. For more information on this or other issues, I encourage you to visit my website, http://casey.senate.gov. I hope you will find this online office a comprehensive resource to stay up-to-date on my work in Washington, request assistance from my office or share with me your thoughts on the issues that matter most to you and to Pennsylvania. 

Sincerely, 
Bob Casey United States Senator

What particularly fascinates me in Sen. Casey's response is the fact that he never acknowledged how the Keystone XL pipeline would benefit the people of Pennsylvania, whom he is supposed to represent. He makes no argument of such a sort (except, loosely perhaps, in terms of the bipartisan chimera of energy independence), and the increased greenhouse gas emissions from the pipeline would certainly affect other states--and other countries--far outside of the region through which the pipeline would run.

The Counter-Intuitive Debate around the Health Care Mandate

I was reading an interesting article about the Affordable Care Act from the Roosevelt Institute's Next New Deal blog earlier today.  The author was looking at how low-wage workers, such as fast food workers, may fare poorly under the ACA's provisions because the deductibles of their new employer-provided health care will be more expensive than the penalty for no coverage.  As the byzantine nature of the Affordable Care Act unfurls over the next few years, we'll get to see more about how well it accomplishes the goals implicit in its name.

This reminded me of the strange and often counter-intuitive contours of the debate around the individual mandate.  The individual mandate is a conservative policy that can only be championed through conservative rhetoric.  Befitting a conservative policy--especially one originating at the Heritage Foundation--it penalizes the poor for being poor.  No one actively does not want to have health insurance; the uninsured are, for the most part, those whose job will not cover their insurance or who simply cannot afford to purchase insurance on their own.  Likewise, arguing for the individual mandate requires a rhetoric of "individual responsibility," a frame that presents the image of "freeloaders" who take advantage of mandatory hospital care (a policy from Reagan).  These "freeloaders" who are "shirking" their personal responsibility sound a lot like the "moochers" of the right-wing imagination.  The language that supports the individual mandate counters the idea that health care is a fundamental human right. 

To understand this, let's look at a parallel in education.  The individual mandate would be the equivalent of requiring compulsory school attendance while not having public schools (or perhaps only public schools for kindergarten).

The conservatives who decry the individual mandate--a conservative policy--speak in language of "freedom," which is often ironic because they probably have health insurance themselves and will not be affected.  Their image of the government "taking away their freedoms" likely does not extend to the plight of the fast food workers described earlier, but rather remains in the realm of right-wing anti-government paranoia that fuels anti-gun control advocacy.