If I were running the Iowa Republican Party, I would be seeking to vastly increase the turnout at the Jan. 3 caucuses. After all, those who turn out can be recruited to help in future Iowa Republican campaigns. I would be especially interested in attracting new young voters; the median age of 2008 caucusgoers was nudging up toward 60.
Yet despite polls showing that Republicans are enthusiastic about the coming campaign and determined to defeat Barack Obama, Iowa Republican insiders are predicting that turnout will not exceed and may not even reach the 119,000 of 2008, when Republicans were dispirited about their party's chances. Puzzling.
Low turnout is indicative of an enthusiasm gap and also coincides with what recent polls have shown us - a Republican base that isn't that excited about the election. Sure Republicans want to see President Obama voted out of office, but the problem is who they are going to replace him with?
Can they stomach 4 or even 8 years of Newt Gingrich or Mitt Romney?
Would it be better to suffer through another 4 years of President Obama, at least knowing what they got, then spend that 4 years regrouping to find a better candidate?
If I were a betting man I would place my money on the second option. 2016 doesn't seem that far off, but 2020 does. If the GOP ends up putting a Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich in the White House that means the Democrats could come out with Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden in 2016, then the Republicans may likely be screwed until 2024.
The GOP is facing a real dilemma right now and that dilemma could end up really helping President Obama. The key take away from all of this is to not watch who wins the upcoming primaries, but rather check out the key turnout number. That will be the best indicator of what will happen in the fall.
Members of various working groups of Occupy Wall Street gathered together to bring a simple message to the holiday shoppers and tourists around town. We met with some disapproval and reprisals by law enforcement - but were encouraged by the cheers and support of the public.
At our final stop in Grand Central Station where we were interrupted by the police at the end of our second action there - a number of of the public engaged the police demanding to know why we were being prohibited from doing something so brief and in no way disruptive. They were told no signs were permitted in the terminal.
Ironically we were also told that no advertising was permitted in Times Square. Rather than fight the fight making the obvious points about freedom of expression - we simply thanked all officers and moved to our next location.
Needless to say - they will see us again - and most likely they will again be too late.
Thanks to Erik Mc Gregor for his excellent camerawork and editing - and to our Occupy the Message team
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Music by Battles - the song is Snare Hangar. Used with gratitude.
Next fall, thousands of students on college campuses will attempt to register to vote and be turned away. Sorry, they will hear, you have an out-of-state driver’s license. Sorry, your college ID is not valid here. Sorry, we found out that you paid out-of-state tuition, so even though you do have a state driver’s license, you still can’t vote.
Political leaders should be encouraging young adults to participate in civic life, but many Republican state lawmakers are doing everything they can instead to prevent students from voting in the 2012 presidential election. Some have openly acknowledged doing so because students tend to be liberal.
Seven states have already passed strict laws requiring a government-issued ID (like a driver’s license or a passport) to vote, which many students don’t have, and 27 others are considering such measures. Many of those laws have been interpreted as prohibiting out-of-state driver’s licenses from being used for voting.
It’s all part of a widespread Republican effort to restrict the voting rights of demographic groups that tend to vote Democratic. Blacks, Hispanics, the poor and the young, who are more likely to support President Obama, are disproportionately represented in the 21 million people without government IDs. On Friday, the Justice Department, finally taking action against these abuses, blocked the new voter ID law in South Carolina.
Creating an explanation for the new ID laws, as Republicans don't generally want to actually say the purpose is to turn away voters, they've claimed the stricter laws are "to prevent voter fraud." However, this explanation falls flat since there is almost no voter fraud in the nation to prevent.
The stricter voter ID laws aren't just having a negative impact on the rights of students to vote: Think Progressreports that "A 93-year-old Tennessee woman who cleaned the state Capitol for 30 years, including the governor’s office, says she won’t be able to vote for the first time in decades after being told this week that her old state ID failed to meet new voter ID regulations."
"Thelma Mitchell was even accused of being an undocumented immigrant because she couldn’t produce a birth certificate."
Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann has found a loophole in her pledge not to use teleprompters.
At a campaign stop in Creston, Iowa Wednesday, the candidate read her campaign speech directly from an iPad tablet computer.
"I have a statement I would like to read before I open up and take a few of your questions," the candidate told the crowd, only pausing from her prepared remarks to yell "Good morning!" at a passing train.
The Minnesota Republican slid her finger across the iPad screen as she opined for over five minutes about a recent attack ad by GOP hopeful Rick Perry, President Barack Obama's signature health care legislation, and the dangers of North Korea and Iran.
"And we should always use the full resources of our military when we go to achieve a victory," Bachmann said, again raising her voice to compete with another train.
"That's the Reagan doctrine. That will also be the Bachmann doctrine," she added.
Throughout her presidential campaign, Bachmann has attacked Obama for his use of teleprompters, and promised they would not be part of her White House.
"I know you’re not used to seeing a president without teleprompters," the candidate said in July. "But I’m just here to tell you President O’Bach — President Bachmann will not have teleprompters in the White House."
"Smokestack Lightnin'," with Hubert Sumlin backing Howlin' Wolf in 1964
This is the time of year when we're reminded of all the famous people who died over the last twelve months, a list which includes two of my favorite guitar players (Hubert Sumlin and Cornell Dupree). But there were also some notable non-human deaths in 2011, especially in the world of economic policy.
One of those deaths should have completely altered the political debate in Washington. The name of the deceased was "Austerity Economics," and it was first glimpsed in a 1921 paper by conservative economist Frank Wright. Austerity died of natural causes brought on by prolonged exposure to reality.
But the debate in Washington didn't change nearly enough after its passing. In the nation's capital, dead things still rule the night.
Why Austerity?
"Austerity economics" backers claim that today's economic woes can only be fixed by dramatic reductions in government spending, which will lead to increased private-sector confidence and therefore to greater investment and growth.
But it's never worked. And if investors have lost confidence in the U.S. government's fiscal stability, they're sure not acting that way. There hasn't been this much demand for Treasury bonds since the government began tracking it twenty years ago, and they haven't performed as well since the go-go 1990s.
It's easy to understand austerity's attraction for power elites inside and outside of government. The people who suffer from austerity budgets aren't the kinds of people they know personally, since they're typically public employees like teachers, police, firefighters and the administrators of social programs; people who need government assistance, like the poor; and middle-class people with the temerity to either grow old or become disabled.
Austerity's attraction became even greater in the U.S. because once it became conventional wisdom that tax increases on the wealthy was "politically infeasible." That made it a program whose sole purpose was to cut government spending, lowering the pressure to increase taxes on the wealthy from today's historically low levels.
For a one-percenter, what's not to love?
Austerity Comes of Age
The idea's been around in one form or another since that 1921 paper, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) had been imposing it on Third World nations for decades.
But 2009 was the year that austerity really came of age. That was the year that a wealthy stockbroker's son named David Cameron began campaigning for Prime Minister of Great Britain on an explicitly pro-austerity platform.
It was also the year that Cameron helped to form a group named European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) dedicated to electing like-minded politicians across Europe and helping them collaborate on ways to slash government spending. It was also the year that right-leaning Angela Merkel won reelection as the Chancellor of Germany with a stronger mandate than she'd been given in her first term.
With Nicolas Sarkozy as President of France, Great Britain was the only major European power not yet in the hands of the corporate-backed austerity crowd.
The Global Sado-Erotic Thrill Machine
That changed with Cameron's election as Prime Minister in May 2010, an event that threw pro-austerity Americans into throes of near-erotic ecstasy. And if that sounds like hyperbole, consider conservative Anne Appelbaum's reaction to Cameron's budget in September of 2010:
Vicious cuts." "Savage cuts." "Swingeing (sic) cuts." The language that the British use to describe their new government's spending-reduction policy is apocalyptic in the extreme. The ministers in charge of the country's finances are known as "axe-wielders" who will be "hacking" away at the budget. Articles about the nation's finances are filled with talk of blood, knives, and amputation.
And the British love it.
What can I say? There are people who collect serial-killer memorabilia, too. But Appelbaum wasn't just speaking for herself. It became unacceptable for any politician in Washington, Democrat or Republican, to advocate anything other than an austerity budget for the United States.
And it was more than an economic strategy to its backers. Austerity became a way to demonize those who had suffered most from the banking abuses and self-indulgences of the wealthy, a totemic "blame the victim" response that turned the political debate into a grotesque inversion of morality. Again, Appelbaum:
"Not only is austerity being touted as the solution to Britain's economic woes; it is also being described as the answer to the country's moral failings."
Bad Metaphors vs. Good Economists
The Democratic President of the United States, Barack Obama, jumped onto the bandwagon with both feet by repeatedly lecturing Americans on the need for government to stop "spending beyond its means." Obama recycled the popular conservative metaphor of a family that has to sit around the kitchen table and decide how much money it has to spend.
That's one of the worst metaphors in modern politics. Does a family establish its own currency -- especially one that has the unique position of the dollar? Can a family borrow money at rates so low they're effectively less than zero? Would a family let Grandma go hungry because Junior bought too many Porsches out of the family kitty and then gambled it away on lousy mortgage investments?
The world's top economists, those who had successfully predicted the crisis of 2008, tried telling the rest of the world what was wrong with the idea: Joblessness and consumer fears were killing any chance of real recovery. More short-term spending was needed to get the economy moving again. Austerity would make things worse, not better.
But nobody listened. Austerity's S&M-like attraction had the world's elites in its grip.
Death of a Delusion
And then something else came into the picture: Reality.
Cameron's austerity budget had a shattering effect on the already-struggling British economy. His government's financial stability was downgraded five times during his first year in power and retail sales had fallen 2.5 percent. Household income was projected to fall an additional 2 percent if his austerity plans were carried forward. Britain's modest employment gains were reversed, youth unemployment reached record levels, and income inequality was the worst it had been in more than half a century.
Anne Appelbaum's erotic dreams had become Great Britain's nightmare.
As Europe's ruling austerity class pushed forward with their plans, even the IMF tried to dissuade them. It was clear to anyone who wasn't blinded by ideology or political cynicism that austerity economics was a failed program. Even in countries like Greece, where government was far graver than elsewhere, the austerity programs imposed from outside threatened to destabilize society while other reasonable measures like improved tax collection were still not taken seriously enough.
And now the entire Eurozone hangs in the balance. Bankers became wealthy by treating governments as if they were mortgages, lending recklessly and pocketing their fees without considering the long-term reliability of their loans. European leaders insisted for months they were take the kind of sensible steps that should've been taken in the United States by requiring bankers to accept at least part of the losses for the bad loans they had issed.
That plan was quietly dropped last month. "Austerity economics" never calls for austerity from those who have gotten rich by being irresponsible, only from those who didn't benefit from it at all.
The Afterlife
President Obama has dropped his austerity rhetoric, at least for the time being, but the Republicans have not. Listening to Mitt Romney discuss economics is like having a doctor wave a dead chicken over your head and saying he's decided to cast a spell on you rather than operate on that thing they found in your X-rays.
Aside from the bill introduced this month by the House Progressive Caucus to almost no media attention, there's no comprehensive plan for dropping this country's ineffective austerity strategy and replacing it with an agenda that works.
Rational solutions to our economic problems are being ignored. There won't be a real debate about alternatives to austerity until an entire political party, not just part of it, adopts this kind of program. Until then there will be chaos. And where there is chaos, austerity's powerful advocates can step in and take charge.
Austerity economics died in 2011 and is survived by the British, German, and French governments as well as the GOP and large portions of the Democratic Party. Instead of sending flowers, the family has asked the public to abandon all hopes of future economic growth.
The days of Sen. Jefferson Smith are sadly over. Congress is no longer the vehicle for idealistic young politicians eager to make a meaningful change. It's now designed to protect the status quo: districts are drawn to protect parties; campaigns require a ridiculous amount of money so that it becomes impossible for anyone without a whole lot of cash to even launch a credible campaign.
It wasn't always that way. We've had politicians from modest circumstances. They understood the concerns of every day Americans. But while we've seen the wealth of most Americans go down in the last twenty five years, the wealth of members of Congress has gone way, way up:
Between 1984 and 2009, the median net worth of a member of the House more than doubled, according to the analysis of financial disclosures, from $280,000 to $725,000 in inflation-adjusted 2009 dollars, excluding home equity.
Over the same period, the wealth of an American family has declined slightly, with the comparable median figure sliding from $20,600 to $20,500, according to the Panel Study of Income Dynamics from the University of Michigan.
The comparisons exclude home equity because it is not included in congressional reporting, and 1984 was chosen because it is the earliest year for which consistent wealth statistics are available.
The growing disparity between the representatives and the represented means that there is a greater distance between the economic experience of Americans and those of lawmakers.
Unsurprisingly, this income disparity has resulted in greater and greater polarization in voting as well:
Thus, we're looking at a congress that are less our elected representatives and more representative of the one percent. This is why cutting social safety programs make sense...they can't imagine anyone like them actually needing them.
Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum is advising Iowans that by giving him their vote, they can "stick it" to the man.
Speaking to a crowd of supporters in Iowa Tuesday, the former Pennsylvania senator accused President Barack Obama of "nasty, personal, divisive, unfair accusations."
"That's why I'm asking for your help and support," Santorum explained. "Obviously you've got a big decision to make in a week's time, a week from today. And I would very much like your support. If you want to send a message to the man, those are the folks that are the experts, the folks that are trying to shape this race."
"If you want to stick it to the folks who want to shape the debate and think they can tell you who you should pay attention to, as opposed to you who have been on the ground listening to all the candidates, this is where you step up and say, 'No, you don't get to decide. You in Washington and New York, you don't decide this race by who you have shined your light on and said who the American public should pay attention to,'" he added.
The days of Sen. Jefferson Smith are sadly over. Congress is no longer the vehicle for idealistic young politicians eager to make a meaningful change. It's now designed to protect the status quo: districts are drawn to protect parties; campaigns require a ridiculous amount of money so that it becomes impossible for anyone without a whole lot of cash to even launch a credible campaign.
It wasn't always that way. We've had politicians from modest circumstances. They understood the concerns of every day Americans. But while we've seen the wealth of most Americans go down in the last twenty five years, the wealth of members of Congress has gone way, way up:
Between 1984 and 2009, the median net worth of a member of the House more than doubled, according to the analysis of financial disclosures, from $280,000 to $725,000 in inflation-adjusted 2009 dollars, excluding home equity.
Over the same period, the wealth of an American family has declined slightly, with the comparable median figure sliding from $20,600 to $20,500, according to the Panel Study of Income Dynamics from the University of Michigan.
The comparisons exclude home equity because it is not included in congressional reporting, and 1984 was chosen because it is the earliest year for which consistent wealth statistics are available.
The growing disparity between the representatives and the represented means that there is a greater distance between the economic experience of Americans and those of lawmakers.
Unsurprisingly, this income disparity has resulted in greater and greater polarization in voting as well:
Thus, we're looking at a congress that are less our elected representatives and more representative of the one percent. This is why cutting social safety programs make sense...they can't imagine anyone like them actually needing them.
Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry on Tuesday declared that had undergone a "transformation" and no longer supported abortion in cases of rape or incest.
During a campaign event in Iowa, Full Faith Christian Center pastor Joshua Verwers noted that Perry used to believe that abortion was acceptable for victims of rape and incest, but the Texas governor had recently signed a Personhood USA pledge that says abortion should be illegal in all cases.
"To me it seems kind of like a contradiction where you were a month ago," Verwers said.
"You're seeing a transformation," Perry explained. "That transformation was after watching the DVD Gift of Life. And I really started giving some thought about the issue of rape and incest."
Earlier this month, Perry and several other GOP candidates attended a screening of The Gift of Life, which was produced by Citizens United and narrated by former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R).
"All I can tell you was God was working on my heart," Perry remarked.
It wasn't clear from his answer if the candidate still supports abortion when it is necessary to save the life of the mother.
A recent Public Policy Polling survey found that in Iowa, Perry is trailing Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R), former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) and Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-MN) ahead of the Jan. 3 caucuses.
Newt has constantly denied that he once supported Mitt Romney's health insurance mandate in Massachusetts, but the wayback machine has something else to say about that. Here's a letter written by Newt in April of 2006:
The most exciting development of the past few weeks is what has been happening up in Massachusetts. The health bill that Governor Romney signed into law this month has tremendous potential to effect major change in the American health system.
We agree entirely with Governor Romney and Massachusetts legislators that our goal should be 100% insurance coverage for all Americans. Individuals without coverage often do not receive quality medical attention on par with those who do have insurance. We also believe strongly that personal responsibility is vital to creating a 21st Century Intelligent Health System. Individuals who can afford to purchase health insurance and simply choose not to place an unnecessary burden on a system that is on the verge of collapse; these free-riders undermine the entire health system by placing the onus of responsibility on taxpayers.
The Romney plan attempts to bring everyone into the system. The individual mandate requires those who earn enough to afford insurance to purchase coverage, and subsidies will be made available to those individuals who cannot afford insurance on their own. We agree strongly with this principle, but the details are crucial when it comes to the structure of this plan. Under the new bill, Massachusetts residents earning more than 300% of the federal poverty level (approximately $30,000 for an individual) will not be eligible for any subsidies. State House officials had originally promised that there would be new plans available at about $200 a month, but industry experts are now predicting that the cheapest plan will likely cost at least $325 a month. This estimate totals about $4000 per year, or about 1/5 of a $30,000 annual take-home income.
