Sarah Palin Takes A Bite Out Of Willard's Pious Bologna

Even Sarah Palin has stumbled into attacking the presumptive Republican candidate for the presidency. This is the man who the one percent will use to try to turn back the modest, vaguely pro-middle-class policies of Barack Obama, and yet many professional right-wingers can't pull themselves to get behind him-- at least not yet. They'll take their castor oil, hold their noses and feign enthusiasm... soon. Palin, whose husband Todd elicited laughter when he endorsed Gingrich last week, considers herself a power in the faux-populist wing of the Republican Party. She wasn't born rich and doesn't have patrician upbringing but has clawed her way into their world. She's asking Romney to release his tax reports like everyone else does and to show some proof for his bogus claims about having created 100,000 jobs at Bain Capital. She was on Hannity's show Wednesday night-- Hannity who's already put himself in the tank for Romney-- and she defended Gingrich's and Perry's slams against Romney for his hideous record at Bain. Here's Palin helping make sure Obama gets a second term:

PALIN: I think what Governor Perry is getting at is that Governor Romney has claimed to have created 100,000 jobs at Bain and people are wanting to know, is there proof of that claim? And was it U.S. jobs created for United States citizens? … You know, own up to the claims that are being made. And that’s fair. That’s not negative campaigning. That’s fair to get a candidate to be held accountable to what’s being claimed. [...]

Nobody should be surprised that things about Bain Capital and maybe tax returns not being released yet and records not being as transparently provided to the public as voters deserve to see right now-- don’t be surprised that that’s all coming out today, 'cause it would come out as an October surprise [by Democrats] had these GOP candidates not brought them out today.

It's certainly beyond Palin's ability to comprehend-- and nothing that is getting answered (or even asked) when it comes to the silly Republican "debates"-- but Romney is the candidate of Austerity, and Austerity, as Jeff Madrick at the New York Review of Books pointed out, is killing Europe. It will also kill America, or at least what's left of the middle class. Which is exactly what Romney's class wants. I wish the middle class had a more determined and forceful champion than Obama, but you go to war with the army you have, not the one you wish you had. Romney is clearly the enemy.

On the last day of 2011, a headline in the Wall Street Journal read: “Spain Misses Deficit Target, Sets Cuts.” The cruel forces of poor economic logic were at work to welcome in the new year. The European Union has become a vicious circle of burgeoning debt leading to radical austerity measures, which in turn further weaken economic conditions and result in calls for still more damaging cuts in government spending and higher taxes. The European debt crisis began with Greece, and that nation remains the European Union’s most stricken economy. But it has spread inexorably to Ireland, Portugal, Italy, and Spain, and even threatens France and possibly the UK. It need not have done so. Rarely do we get so stark an example of bad-- arguably even perverse-- economic thinking in action.

Over the past two years, the severe 2009 recession, which started in the US but spread across Europe, have imperiled the finances of one European country after another. As a result, Portugal, Ireland, Spain and Italy are coming under pressure from the EU to cut government spending and raise taxes to reduce their deficits if they wanted to qualify for a bailout. All have done so. Ireland and Portugal sharply cut spending and still had to take tens of billions of euros to help meet financial obligations as of course did Greece. The European Central Bank bought the bonds of Italy and Spain. Britain’s Conservative government led the way in ruthless government cutbacks in 2010. France has adopted its own austerity package, and even Germany, the supposed economic leader of Europe, has planned to cut its deficit by a record 80 billion euros in 2014.

Proponents of austerity claim that as nations take control of their finances businesses become more convinced that interest rates will not rise and that growth will resume. Their reasoning has been abetted by the financial markets, which drove up rates on Greek debt and soon enough on the debt of nations like Portugal, Spain and Italy. Should these nations not be able to pay their debts, bond buyers wanted a high enough interest rate to compensate for the risk.

But this is pre-Great Depression economics. How could the EU so misread history and treat with contempt the teachings of John Maynard Keynes, who argued that during recessions governments must expand economies through spending and tax cuts, not the opposite? In practice, making large-scale budget cuts or raising taxes, as Keynes showed, will reduce demand for goods and services just when an increase is needed. Faltering sales will undermine the confidence of businesses far more than fiscal consolidation will embolden them. By ignoring this, European policy makers will deepen, not solve, the financial crisis and millions of people will suffer needlessly.

Indeed, austerity economics has not worked in one single case in Europe in the last two years. When David Cameron’s government imposed a first round of harsh spending cuts in 2010, it utterly failed to revive the British economy as promised. To the contrary, it probably cut a budding recovery short. Unemployment and the deficit as a percent of GDP remained high. Some pro-Conservative observers I met at the time assured me that the Cameron team, led by George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was pragmatic and would reverse course on austerity if it wasn’t working. Yet when growth basically ground to a halt in late 2011, the Cameron team only doubled down, making further cuts. We need more of the same medicine, they told their citizens, a record number of whom are unemployed. Britian is a hair’s breadth away from outright recession only two years after its last one.

In November, meanwhile, Spaniards voted out of office a once-popular Socialist government, in part for its failed austerity program of the past year. The Socialists had earlier presided over a boom and even built a budget surplus. But then the housing and banking crises struck and private Spanish banks ran amok. In response, in 2010 the Socialists sharply reversed an earlier stimulus policy, cut spending, and raised taxes to the tune of about 5 percent of GDP. Government debt is still not high in Spain, and interest rates have not risen the way they have in Italy. But economic growth stalled after these measures were implemented, because reduced public spending weakened the demand for goods and services, pure and simple. With Spain’s official unemployment rate now 21.5 percent, the Socialists lost the election badly-- paradoxically pushing voters to elect a conservative leadership that is calling for more austerity. In Spain, recession is now inevitable.

...The EU leaders must get over their obsession with eliminating deficits. They now want to reduce every country’s deficit to less than 0.5 percent. This is disaster. It will lead to very slow growth for a long time. Instead, they must use temporary deficits to restart growth. Rarely has policymaking been this poor. Sooner than later, the citizens of these nations will say, No more!, and political instability will result.

The U.S. is far better equipped to fight this battle against inequality, which is, in effect, what the movement against Austerity is. In short, the increase in inequality over the last 30 years is the equivalent to a $1.1 trillion transfer from the 99% to the 1% every year. Our ability to take that on presupposes defeating Romney next November and giving Obama a more progressive Congress. Obama will have to fight his own battle against Romney, but Blue America has every intention of helping him with a more progressive Congress. Bill McKibben got to the heart of the problem in an OpEd for The Nation this week. His specific subject is the conservative-controlled Congress' attempt to go around President Obama on the Keystone XL pipeline decision. The House voted 234-194 to force Obama's hand.

As important as the vote total in the House, however, was another number: within minutes of the vote, Oil Change International had calculated that the 234 Congressional representatives who voted aye had received $42 million in campaign contributions from the fossil-fuel industry; the 193 nays, $8 million.

I know that cynics-- call them realists, if you prefer-- will be completely unsurprised by that. Which is precisely the problem.

We’ve reached the point where we’re unfazed by things that should shake us to the core. So, just for a moment, be naïve and consider what really happened in that vote: the people’s representatives who happen to have taken the bulk of the money from those energy companies promptly voted on behalf of their interests.

They weren’t weighing science or the national interest; they weren’t balancing present benefits against future costs. Instead of doing the work of legislators, that is, they were acting like employees. Forget the idea that they’re public servants; the truth is that, in every way that matters, they work for Exxon and its kin. They should, by rights, wear logos on their lapels like NASCAR drivers.

...Far from showing any shame, the big players boast about it: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, front outfit for a consortium of corporations, has bragged on its website about outspending everyone in Washington, which is easy to do when Chevron, Goldman Sachs, and News Corp are writing you seven-figure checks. This really matters. The Chamber of Commerce spent more money on the 2010 elections than the Republican and Democratic National Committees combined, and 94% of those dollars went to climate-change deniers. That helps explain why the House voted last year to say that global warming isn’t real.

It also explains why “our” representatives vote, year in and year out, for billions of dollars worth of subsidies for fossil-fuel companies. If there was ever an industry that didn’t need subsidies, it would be this one: they make more money each year than any enterprise in the history of money. Not only that, but we’ve known how to burn coal for 300 years and oil for 200.

Those subsidies are simply payoffs. Companies give small gifts to legislators, and in return get large ones back, and we’re the ones who are actually paying.

I don’t want to be hopelessly naïve. I want to be hopefully naïve. It would be relatively easy to change this: you could provide public financing for campaigns instead of letting corporations pay. It’s the equivalent of having the National Football League hire referees instead of asking the teams to provide them.

Public financing of campaigns would cost a little money, but endlessly less than paying for the presents these guys give their masters. And it would let you watch what was happening in Washington without feeling as disgusted. Even legislators, once they got the hang of it, might enjoy neither raising money nor having to pretend it doesn’t affect them.

To make this happen, however, we may have to change the Constitution, as we’ve done 27 times before. This time, we’d need to specify that corporations aren’t people, that money isn’t speech, and that it doesn’t abridge the First Amendment to tell people they can’t spend whatever they want getting elected. Winning a change like that would require hard political organizing, since big banks and big oil companies and big drug-makers will surely rally to protect their privilege.

Still, there’s a chance. The Occupy movement opened the door to this sort of change by reminding us all that the system is rigged, that its outcomes are unfair, that there’s reason to think people from across the political spectrum are tired of what we’ve got, and that getting angry and acting on that anger in the political arena is what being a citizen is all about.

It’s fertile ground for action. After all, Congress’s approval rating is now at 9%, which is another way of saying that everyone who’s not a lobbyist hates them and what they’re doing. The big boys are, of course, counting on us simmering down; they’re counting on us being cynical, on figuring there’s no hope or benefit in fighting city hall. But if we’re naïve enough to demand a country more like the one we were promised in high school civics class, then we have a shot.

If you'd like to help, you can do so here, replacing Austerity freaks and congressmen determined to hold onto the corrupt status quo like Fred Upton, Charlie Bass, Steve Womack and Bob Dold with progressives like John Waltz, Annie Kuster, Ken Aden and Ilya Sheyman who have pledged to change it.

Watched this yet? It's the whole 28 minute analysis of Mitt Romney's repulsive career as a vulture capitalist: