Something To Think About While Iowa Caucuses-- The Establishment Is Our Enemy

Hillary has tried to say she isn't part of the Establishment. That's insane and if you believe it, you should do the country a favor and not vote at all. This should be the year that voters from both parties are disgusted enough with that corrupt, self-serving Establishment to turn it out. Republican voters seem to understand the dynamic better than Democratic voters, even if their fake anti-Establishment candidate is a a degenerate and parasitic New York City billionaire.

Over the weekend, the NY Times published OpEds by Frank Bruni and Ross Douthat examining the spirituality behind the campaigns leading up to today's caucuses in Iowa. Douthat framed it as a revolt against decadence by the supporters of Herr Trumpf and Bernie. He finds voters angry, exhausted, disgusted and cynical with the Bushes and the Clintons and the rest of the blood-sucking establishment. Since most everything is pretty good-- employment, peace, Obamacare, the deficit, inflation, immigration, abortion-- he wonders aloud what's propelling the rise of the two outsider candidacies.

One answer might be that they’re fed up with exactly this-- the politics of “it could be worse,” of stagnation and muddling through. They aren’t revolting against abject failure, or deep and swift decline. They’re rebelling against decadence... [D]on’t just think about the word in moral or aesthetic terms. Think of it as a useful way of describing a society that’s wealthy, powerful, technologically proficient-- and yet seemingly unable to advance in the way that its citizens once took for granted. A society where people have fewer children and hold diminished expectations for the future, where institutions don’t work particularly well but can’t seem to be effectively reformed, where growth is slow and technological progress disappoints. A society that fights to a stalemate in its foreign wars, even as domestic debates repeat themselves without any resolution. A society disillusioned with existing religions and ideologies, but lacking new sources of meaning to take their place.

This is how many Americans, many Westerners, experience their civilization in the early years of the 21st century. And both Trump and Bernie Sanders, in their very different ways, are telling us that we don’t have to settle for it anymore.

With Trump, the message is crude, explicit, deliberately over the top. Make America Great Again. “We will have so much winning if I get elected that you may get bored with the winning.”

But it resonates because the diagnosis resonates-- especially with older Americans, who grew up amid the post-World War II boom, the vaulting optimism of the space age, the years when big government and big business were seen as effective and patriotic rather than sclerotic and corrupt. Trump is offering nostalgia, but it’s not a true reactionary’s lament. He wants to take us back to a time when the future seemed great, amazing, fantastic.

Likewise Sanders... [who] is telling liberals, younger liberals especially, that the heroic age of liberalism isn’t over yet, that they can have a welfare state that’s far more amazing and fantastic than the one their forefathers constructed...

[B]oth men are promising the implausible or the impossible-- and the fact that Trump is openly contemptuous of our ragged republican norms-- is a reminder that there are worse things than decadence, grimmer possibilities for the future than drift and repetition.

The disappointment and impatience that people feel in a decadent era is legitimate, even admirable. But the envy of more heroic moments, the desire to just do something to prove your society’s vitality-- Invade Iraq to remake the Middle East! Open Germany’s borders! Elect Trump or Sanders president!-- can be a very dangerous sensibility.

There are pathways up from decadence. But there are more roads leading down.

Douthat, of course, is a ridiculous reactionary blockhead, clinging to the fringes of the media establishment himself, and incapable of the imagination it takes to break through the scenario he somehow managed to outline. Bruni, at least has an IQ capable of grappling with abstract and complex ideas as he examined the role of religion in the Iowa GOP campaign, what he painted as "an unsettling holy war," something many observers have been aghast to view in recent weeks. But "righteousness," he points out in regard to Cruz's pandering, "is a tricky business. It has a way of coming back to bite you."

Religion routinely plays a prominent part in political campaigns, especially on the Republican side, and always has an outsize role in Iowa, where evangelical Christians make up an especially large fraction of the Republican electorate.

But there was a particular edge to the discussion this time around. It reflected Trump’s surprising strength among evangelicals and his adversaries’ obvious befuddlement and consternation about that.

Cruz’s whole strategy for capturing the presidency hinges on evangelicals’ support, as Robert Draper details in the Times Magazine.

He rails against abortion rights and same-sex marriage in speeches that sound like sermons, with references to Scripture and invocations of God.

He ended a question-and-answer session with Iowans that I attended in a typical fashion, asking them to use the waning hours until the caucuses to pray.

...A super PAC supporting Mike Huckabee produced an ad for both radio and TV in which two women express doubts about Cruz’s commitment to Christian causes, saying that he speaks in one way to Iowans and in another to New Yorkers whose campaign donations he needs.



... It’s impossible to know the genuineness of someone’s faith. That’s among the reasons we shouldn’t grant it center stage.

Religion was integral to our country’s founding. It’s central to our understanding of the liberty that each of us deserves. But so are the principles that we don’t enshrine any one creed or submit anyone-- including those running for office-- to religious litmus tests.

So why does a Republican race frequently resemble such an exam?

The winner of the Iowa caucuses in 2012 was Rick Santorum, who put his Catholicism at the forefront of his campaign. The winner in 2008 was Mike Huckabee, a former evangelical pastor who never let you forget that.

To emerge victorious in 2016, several candidates are leaning hard on religion, hoping it’s an advantage over Trump.

But just as God is said to work in mysterious ways, religion is working in unexpected ways in this campaign. According to some national polls, more evangelicals back Trump than they do any other candidate.

That’s true although he’s on his third marriage; although he’s boasted of sexual conquests; although he went to the evangelical stronghold of Liberty University in 2012 and, in a rambling speech, mentioned the importance of prenuptial agreements; although he returned to Liberty University just weeks ago and revealed his inexperience in talking about the Bible by citing “two Corinthians” when anyone with any biblical fluency would have pronounced it “Second Corinthians.”

Liberty’s president, Jerry Falwell Jr., went so far as to endorse Trump, a development that clearly galled Trump’s rivals and bolstered their resolve to prove that they’re the better Christians.

Jeb Bush questioned Trump’s faith. Marco Rubio kept going out of his way to extol his own.

...[A]t a rally, Rubio visibly brightened when a voter brought up faith and gave him an opportunity to expound on it.

“I pray for wisdom,” he said. “The presidency of the United States is an extraordinary burden and you look at some of the greatest presidents in American history. They were very clear. They were on their knees all the time asking for God, asking God for the wisdom to solve, for the strength to persevere incredible tests.”

That same image came up at the Cruz event during which Perry denigrated Trump. One of the speakers expressed joy at the thought of “a president who’s willing to kneel down and ask God for guidance as he’s leading our country.”

Cruz had declared such willingness in Iowa in November at an evangelical conference where a right-wing pastor talked about the death penalty for gay people and the need for candidates to accept Jesus as the “king of the president of the United States.”

“Any president who doesn’t begin every day on his knees isn’t fit to be commander in chief of this country,” Cruz said then.

I’m less interested in whether a president kneels down than in whether he or she stands up for the important values that many religions teach-- altruism, mercy, sacrifice-- along with the religious pluralism that this country rightly cherishes. And while I agree that Trump is unfit for the Oval Office, Corinthians has nothing to do with it.

John Judis wrote at Vox over the weekend that Beltway elites better wake up and figure out what's motivating the Trumpf and Bernie voters. After pointing out that the 2 candidates differ dramatically on issue after issue, he writes that "both are critical of how wealthy donors and lobbyists dominate the political process, and both favor some form of campaign finance reform. Both decry corporations moving overseas for cheap wages and to avoid American taxes. Both reject trade treaties that favor multinational corporations over workers. And both want government more, rather than less, involved in the economy."

Sanders is a left-wing populist. He wants to defend the "collapsing middle class" against the "billionaire class" that controls the economy and politics. He is not a liberal who wants to reconcile Wall Street and Main Street, or a socialist who wants the working class to abolish capitalism.

Trump is a right-wing populist who wants to defend the American people from rapacious CEOs and from Hispanic illegal immigrants. He is not a conventional business conservative who thinks government is the problem and who blames America’s ills on unions and Social Security.

Both men are foes of what they describe as their party’s establishment. And both campaigns are also fundamentally about rejecting the way economic policy has been talked about in American presidential politics for decades.

...Businesses initially found useful allies in a Republican party that was bringing together local business, rural voters, and white working-class voters disillusioned with the Democrats. But as labor lost members and money, businesses also assumed a larger role in funding Democratic candidates.

In 1992, Bill Clinton’s single biggest bloc of contributions came from the employees of Goldman Sachs. And Clinton didn’t disappoint his funders when he named Goldman Sachs president Robert Rubin as the head of his new National Economic Council and later as Treasury secretary, where he championed bringing China into the World Trade Organization (even as it continued to manipulate its currency and saving rates to achieve trade surpluses) and the deregulation of the financial industry.

Business’s influence was magnified by a series of Supreme Court rulings-- handed down by a court whose members had been nominated by Republican presidents. It began in 1976, when the court’s decision in Buckley v. Valeo threw out the campaign finance reforms of 1971 and 1974, which had established limits on both total contributions and total spending, and has continued through Citizens United and McCutcheon, which repealed, in effect, a century-old restriction on corporate contributions. As a result, businesses and the very wealthy are able to use their financial advantage to sway both Republicans and Democrats on economic legislation that is important to them.



...Sanders, with his New Left pedigree, is a much more predictable foe of market liberalism among Democrats as well as Republicans. Until he ran for president, Sanders was an independent, not a Democrat. He has no endorsements from current senators or governors (even in his home state) and only two endorsements from House members. Some Democrats share some of his political ideas, but as a whole, what Sanders thinks runs counter to the prevailing ideology of the past three Democratic administrations.

Sanders still calls himself a socialist, although he has abandoned the Marxist conception of socialism as public ownership and control of the means of production. He also calls himself a progressive and was a founder of the House Progressive Caucus, but he is not exactly in the tradition of progressives or liberals. Progressives and liberals want to reconcile the competing demands of capital and labor.

Sanders is much more of a left-wing populist who sees a virtuous people arrayed against an establishment. Asked by NBC’s Chuck Todd why he thought he had no Senate endorsements, Sanders replied: "It tells me that we are taking on the political establishment, we're taking on the economic establishment, the financial interest in this country, and we're taking on the corporate establishment."

...Sanders, like Trump, takes positions on specific issues that put him at odds with market liberalism. His proposals, whether or not they are immediately feasible, challenge an approach that prioritizes the private market. He unblushingly favors huge government spending-- $1 trillion worth-- on infrastructure and would pay for that and for free public college tuition by tax hikes on speculation and the wealthy that Clinton, for one, opposes. He wants Medicare for all, which would mean eliminating private health insurers except as they might supplement government programs.

Sanders opposes trade agreements that he believes encourage American companies to invest overseas rather than at home, and wants to close tax loopholes that would allow "corporate deserters" to avoid American taxes. Like Trump, he promises to be tough on China. He wants to break up the biggest banks by reinstating the Glass-Steagall Act that the Clinton administration and Congress repealed. And while he favors comprehensive immigration reform, he joins Trump in charging that the H-1B program, cherished by Silicon Valley Democrats, deprives Americans of jobs.

While Trump has financed his own campaign, Sanders, unlike Clinton, has relied on small donors and avoided PACs or Super PACs. He wants public funding of campaigns and promises to make overturning Citizens United a litmus test in a Supreme Court nomination. But the heart of his case against the current political arrangement comes in his call for "political revolution," which he regularly defines as "involving millions and millions of people in the political process today in a way that has never been the case before." Sanders is referring not simply to election turnout, but to the kind of popular presence between elections that could counter the power of the "billionaire class." Sanders’s view, however vague, is a call to reverse the oligarchic tendencies of the past decades. Only an organized movement from below could conceivably do that.

Sanders and Trump appeal to very different constituencies.

According to a January Pew poll, Trump’s voters tend on average (but not exclusively) to be white, male, older, without a college degree, and in the middle or lower-middle income quintile. They are the descendants of the white working-class Reagan Democrats who made possible-- but didn’t constitute the bulk of-- the Republican majorities of the past 35 years. As a new RAND survey has shown, Trump’s supporters are more likely to express resentments toward racial minorities and undocumented immigrants and to favor "progressive economic policies."

Sanders’s voters, on the other hand, tend to be younger, are attending or have graduated from college, and are in the upper-middle income quintile. There are signs of some blue-collar support, but for the most part Sanders’s supporters are more likely to be potential or existing professionals that as a group have played a similar role in Democratic majorities as the white working class in Republican majorities. In surveys, they currently tend to be white and male, but that is largely out of comparison with Hillary Clinton, who enjoys widespread support among women and minorities.

In New Hampshire, I found some voters who said they would support either Trump or Sanders, and some other reporters have come up with additional examples of potential crossover voters, but I don’t think at present the bulk of either candidate's voters would favor the other. The gulf on minorities, immigrants, climate change, and the general attitude toward women is too great. The Sanders and Trump constituencies are parts of a whole that doesn’t yet exist, but if it were to come into being it could potentially shake the foundations of present market liberal politics.

...What is happening to the United States and Western Europe now can be compared to what happened from the 1870s to the beginning of World War II. During this earlier period, capital and a laissez faire view of the economy initially reigned supreme, and, as Thomas Piketty has demonstrated, economic inequality grew apace, as it has over the past 40 years.

There were initial outbursts similar to those that the United States and Western Europe are experiencing now-- the populists and socialists in the United States, the socialist and Labour parties in Europe-- but they didn’t cohere into a powerful challenge until the decades after World War I and the onset of the Great Depression.

When they did come together, however, the challenge took two very different forms. In the United States, the breakdown of the old order led to the triumph of the New Deal on the left. In Europe, it resulted in the rise of fascism.

A Post About Why Democrats Got Trounced-- Without Once Mentioning Steve Israel

With a very few exceptions, it was congressmen from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party-- the Wall Street whores who fight alongside the Republicans against working families-- who got the short end of the stick Tuesday. Strong progressives in both Houses tended to win. The very well financed candidate the Koch brothers ran against Jeff Merkley in Oregon only won 37.63% of the vote Tuesday. When Merkley was first elected in 2008, he beat his GOP opponent 49-46%. Why did he do so much better? He summed up how Oregonians saw his record in the Senate like this: "When you fight for a fair shot for everyone-- a chance to work a good job at a living wage and go to college and retire with dignity-- working Americans stand up for you!"

Democratic turnout was pitiful in Florida last week. The top of the Democratic ticket was a conservative Republican who morphed into a moderate Republican, then an independent, then a conservative Democrat. The Party tried selling Democratic voters the most inauthentic political Svengali the state had ever seen. So tens of thousands stayed home. But not in FL-09, Alan Grayson's district. Early vote and vote by mail turnout was massive-- and Grayson won by over 10 points. "When Democrats stand for something," he reminded fellow Democrats Wednesday, "Democrats win."

This morning, the Washington Post's Greg Sargent, who has one of the sharper minds among Beltway pundits, reported that top Democratic operatives say their party's real problem, not just Tuesday but going forward, is with older and blue collar voters. Ironic, huh? The party of the working class and the party that passed Social Security and Medicare and defends both has a problem with what should be its core constituency? Tuesday 22% of voters were 65 years or older. 57% of them voted for Republicans, only 41% for Democrats.

The most common explanation we’re hearing for the GOP sweep of a dozen Senate races last night is that an already-treacherous map for Democrats was made a lot worse by the failure of core Dem voter groups to show up.

But multiple Democratic pollsters involved in these races identify another problem: The failure of the Democrats’ economic message to win over persuadable voters, ones outside the ascendant Democratic coalition, in the numbers needed to offset the structural disadvantages Democratic incumbents and candidates faced. These pollsters describe this as a serious problem afflicting the Democratic Party that must be addressed heading into 2016.

No question, the map/turnout problem was daunting. But some evidence suggests that in some places, Democrats actually did push up turnout among core groups from 2010 levels. Democrats appear to have performed pretty well among these voters. But this wasn’t a 2012 electorate, and there just weren’t enough of them. Which leads to the related problem that John Judis points out: Democrats underperformed so badly among older voters and blue collar whites that it became impossible to make up that lost ground. This wasn’t just a turnout problem; it was a persuasion problem, too.

“We have a problem,” Democratic pollster Mark Mellman, who polled on the Kentucky Senate race, told me. “If we’re really going to expand our chances in the Senate and House, we have to appeal to a wider group than we are now.”

The exit polls show that candidates like Mark Pryor, Kay Hagan, Bruce Braley and Mark Udall lost by anywhere from large to truly massive margins among non-college whites and older voters. That’s also true of the overall national electorate. You should treat these exit polls with a grain of salt, but the pollsters I spoke to agree that this gets at a fundamental problem Democrats face.

These pollsters argued that this was above all the result of a failure to connect with these voters’ economic concerns. At the root of these concerns, Mellman says, are stagnating wages and the failure of the recovery’s gains to achieve wider, more equitable distribution. Democrats campaigned on a range of economic issues--— the minimum wage, pay equity, student loan affordability, expanded pre-kindergarten education-- but these didn’t cut through people’s economic anxieties, because they didn’t believe government can successfully address them.

“People are deeply suspicious that government can deliver on these problems,” Mellman says, in a reference to the voter groups that continue to elude Democrats. “And they are not wrong. We’ve been promising that government can be a tool to improve people’s economic situation for decades, and by and large, it hasn’t happened.”

Obamacare was a halfway measure that gave the Republicans plenty of ammunition to attack it for good reasons (rather than for the reasons they really oppose it). Democrats who really wanted to stand up for working families wanted to expand Medicare-- pure and simple... and popular (although not among big campaign donors and lobbyists).

Same situation with Wall Street reform. Too many New Dems and other Wall Street whores in the Democratic Party worked with lobbyists and Republicans to weaken Dodd Frank and make it less effective-- and at a time when the Obama Administration decided to not hold the banksters accountable for their criminal behavior. Democrats who stand with working families knew that the reform measures didn't go far enough and, like Obamacare, Dodd Frank gave the GOP plenty of ammo to use against the Democrats and against reform without them having to expose the real reasons they oppose reform. In her NY Times column this morning, Margot Sanger-Katz pointed out that voters in states where Obamacare has been most effective-- where uninsured rates have plummeted most-- Republicans ran extremely well. "Arkansas, Kentucky and West Virginia," she wrote, "states that saw substantial drops in the proportion of their residents without insurance-- all elected Republican Senate candidates who oppose the Affordable Care Act. Control of the West Virginia state House of Delegates flipped from Democrats to Republicans. And Arkansas elected Republican supermajorities to both houses of its legislature along with a Republican governor, a situation that could imperil the Medicaid expansion that helped more than 200,000 of its poorest residents get health insurance."

LOLGOP had a perceptive look at the challenge for Democrats this morning at EclectaBlog:

Democrats also need to get Republicans back on the side of defending tax breaks for the rich and the big banks. This is easy-- at least for someone like me who doesn’t need to court millionaire donors. Democrats should back a new Glass-Steagall bill that restores the protections that kept us out of a crisis for 60 years. Also, Democrats need to demand a real end to trickle-down economics by demanding the end of tax breaks on investment income for the wealthy. Billionaires shouldn’t pay lower and lower tax rate for opening a mailbox than a nurse does for working 60 hours a week. While tax increases on the rich led to the best job growth of the last two centuries, cutting the capital gains tax preceded the Dot Com bust and then the greatest housing crisis in our history.

And with the money we’d save by taxing the rich like normal human beings, Democrats need to start fighting for universal free higher education. The richest country in the world can afford to give everyone a college or vocational education.

Bingo! In his review, Why The Democratic Party Acts The Way It Does, of professional centrist Al From's new book, The New Democrats and the Return to Power, Matt Stoller makes the crucial point that it's all about policy, not personalities.

Everything is put on the table, except the main course-- policy. Did the Democrats run the government well? Are the lives of voters better? Are you as a political party credible when you say you’ll do something?

This question is never asked, because Democratic elites--  ensconced in the law firms, foundations, banks, and media executive suites where the real decisions are made-- basically agree with each other about organizing governance around the needs of high technology and high finance. The only time the question even comes up now is in an inverted corroded form, when a liberal activist gnashes his or her teeth and wonders-- why can’t Democrats run elections around populist themes and policies? This is still the wrong question, because it assumes the wrong causality. Parties don’t poll for good ideas, run races on them, and then govern. They have ideas, poll to find out how to sell those ideas, and run races and recruit candidates based on the polling. It’s ideas first, then the sales pitch. If the sales pitch is bad, it’s often the best of what can be made of an unpopular stew of ideas.

Still, you’d think that someone somewhere would have populist ideas. And a few-- like Zephyr Teachout and Elizabeth Warren-- do. But why does every other candidate not? I don’t actually know, but a book just came out that might answer this question. The theory in this book is simple. The current generation of Democratic policymakers were organized and put in power by people that don’t think that a renewed populist agenda centered on antagonism towards centralized economic power is a good idea.

This election night survey from Hart Research for the AFL-CIO of 11 Senate battle ground states indicates that even if elites and DC pundits aren't concerned about issues, voters were:

• This election was about the economy: Asked to choose one or two priorities from a broad list, economic issues such as “the economy and jobs (42),” “Healthcare” (29), “Social Security” (18), and “Government spending and the deficit” trumped “Terrorism and national security” (17) and Taxes (11).

• Raising wages is good for workers and the economy:  68% of voters said that “raising wages and salaries is good because it improves people's standard of living and boosts the economy by putting money in people's pockets.” Voters supported “raising the federal minimum wage to ten dollars and ten cents per hour” by 62-34%.

• Congress and the president must invest in key economic priorities: The electorate’s economic focus is underscored by the answer to this question: “Which one of the following do you think should be the higher priority for the president and Congress right now–(A) reducing taxes on businesses and individuals or (B) investing in key priorities like education, healthcare, and job creation?” “Investing in key priorities” (67%) dominated “Reducing taxes.” (29%)

• The 2014 electorate remains deeply pessimistic about Republicans in Congress and whether they can fix the economy: Asked “Do you think that Republicans in Congress have a clear plan for strengthening the economy and creating jobs?,” only 29% of the electorate said yes, while 62% said no.

• The electorate is struggling economically: 54% say their income is falling behind the cost of living while only 8% say that there income is going up faster than cost of living.  33% say their income is staying about even with the cost of living.

• Voters “feel that corporations had too much influence over this year’s elections” (62%): whereas only 5% said corporate influence was “too little.”

Along the same lines, 55% strongly agree with the statement that “politicians from both the Democratic and Republican parties do too much to support Wall Street financial interests and not enough to help average Americans, while 25% somewhat agree, and only 13% disagree (only 4% strongly).

• Empowered union members supported working family candidates: While the non-union electorate voted 6% more for Republicans than Democrats, union voters preferred Democrats by 26%. That difference continued over key demographic groups: while non-union seniors (65+) voted 21% more for Republicans than Democrats, union seniors voted Democratic by a margin of 35%. Similarly, Republicans won non-union white women's votes by 25%, and union member white women voted for Democrats by that same margin-- 25%. Non-union voters who make less than $50,000 per year voted for Democrats 1% more than Republicans, while their union counterparts voted for Democrats 35% more than Republicans.


• Corporations should pay their fair share of taxes: 66% supported using tax revenue from closing corporate loopholes to reduce the budget deficit and make public investments while only 22% were in favor of reducing tax rates on corporations.

That’s consistent with the finding that 73% of voters support “increasing taxes on the profits that American corporations make overseas, to ensure they pay as much on foreign profits as they do on profits made in the United States,” while only 21% oppose such a plan.

• More funding is needed for public schools and higher education: “Increasing funding for public schools from preschool through college was supported 75-21%,” while “raising taxes on the wealthy and large corporations to fund priorities like education, job training, and deficit reduction” was ahead 62-32%.

• No fast-track authority for NAFTA style trade agreements: By 49% to 36% voters oppose having Congress give the president fast-track authority for a new Pacific trade agreement.

• Social Security benefits should be increased rather than cut: Increasing Social Security benefits, paid for by having high-income people pay Social Security taxes on all of their wages was supported 61-30%, whereas raising the Social Security retirement age won only 27% support, with 66% opposed.

• Along similar lines, voters are opposed 76-18% to the idea of raising the age at which seniors are eligible for Medicare and oppose “Cutting the Medicaid health program” by a similarly overwhelming margin of 76-17.

Hillary Clinton is not the answer and not part of the solution. But Democratic politicians (and partisans) look to her as the only personality who can save them from the big bad Republicans, many of whose economic "solutions" aren't much different from her DLC perspective. Is there a solution? Yes, right here; it's up to us.

The Worst Republican? Yes, There's A Worst

This morning I saw a tweet by Noam Scheiber that got my attention: "The worst Republican in America may be about to lose office." The worst? Forget for a minute that whoever it is may lose, how does anyone sort out the racists, fascists, corporate whores and psychopaths who are the core of GOP officialdom to come up with just one "worst Republican?" Ted Cruz isn't up for reelection. That rapist doctor is Tennessee, Scott DesJarlais already won his seat. Deranged sociopath Paul Broun isn't running again and his off-the-shelf replacement, Hate Talk radio host Jody Hice hasn't been elected yet-- neither has similar crackpot Mark Walker in North Carolina. I had no choice but to click the link-- which led to a an excellent article by John Judis in the New Republic, crowning Kansas Secretary of State, Kris Kobach, Miss America's Evil Twin.

In the video up top, Rachel Maddow summarized the latest events in the unlikely horserace the Kansas Senate race has turned into. That's the background to Judis' story on Kobach's inept, hyper-partisan handling of his job as Secretary of State. But the big story isn't just about Pat Roberts losing his Senate seat to Independent Greg Orman. Kobach himself, a notorious racist and Know Nothing zealot, is also on the ballot.

Kobach is running for re-election against Republican-turned-Democrat Jean Schodorf. Ordinarily, a race like this would be irrelevant in national politics, but Kobach is a crusader against illegal immigrants—and, by extension, most immigrants not of European extraction—and has used a minor state office to rewrite Kansas’s voting laws. He has long been associated with the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), an organization founded by a proponent of eugenics and population control and funded in part by the Pioneer Fund, an organization founded to promote “race betterment.” He is also quite effective, and even brilliant, at what he does.

Kobach, who is now 48, grew up in Topeka. He went to Harvard, where he studied under Samuel Huntington, who at the end of a long and glorious career, had become obsessed himself with the threat that immigrants from the south posed to American civilization. Kobach wrote a prize-winning senior thesis on the efforts during the apartheid era of South African business to evade the effects of sanctions. He got a law degree from Yale and returned to Kansas where he practiced law in Kansas City and taught law at the University of Missouri in Kansas City.

In 2001, he joined the Bush administration, first as a White House fellow and then as an aide to Attorney General John Ashcroft, where he helped devise the national security visa system that required Muslims and Middle Easterners to register and be finger-printed. (It was suspended in 2011 because it had proved both ineffective and discriminatory.) In 2003, he returned to Kansas City, where he ran for Congress against Democratic incumbent Dennis Moore. He called for keeping out illegal immigrants and making English America’s official language. He lost, but six years later ran for secretary of state on a platform of preventing immigrant voter fraud.

In the meantime, Kobach had become the senior counsel for FAIR’s legal arm, the Immigration Reform Law Institute. He remains today their senior counsel. With FAIR, Kobach helped write Arizona’s highly discriminatory immigration law, which required police to demand proof of citizenship from anyone they suspected of being in the country illegally and advised other states, including Alabama, that have passed similar legislation. He also filed suit to prevent Kansas, Nebraska, and California from offering in-state college tuition to the children of undocumented immigrants, and he has defended laws in Nebraska, Texas, and Pennsylvania that would make it illegal to rent to undocumented immigrants.

In his 2010 campaign for secretary of state, he promised to stamp out voter fraud. (Kobach has been able to come up with one case-- from 1997-- that involved fraud by an undocumented immigrant.) After Kobach was elected, he got the Kansas legislature to pass and Governor Sam Brownback to sign a law that allowed him to rewrite the state’s election registration laws. Kobach adopted rules requiring all new registrants to show documented proof of citizenship to obtain Kansas registration. At the polls, all registered voters had to show photo identification.

In the run-up to this year’s election, Kobach was able to disqualify almost 20,000 new registrants because they hadn’t proven their citizenship. These had to include many people (including a 92-year-old woman who appealed her denial) who for one reason or another didn’t have passports or birth certificates on hand. Kobach’s ruling created a weird two-tier system, where Kansans who had national voter registration, which only requires a registrant to swear that he or she is a citizen, could vote in congressional or senate selections, but unless they had a Kansas voter registration, which requires proof of citizenship, could not vote in a state or local race.

There are, of course, anti-immigration nuts who don’t care about any other issues or about politics in general, but Kobach is also an avid partisan who was chairman of the Kansas Republican Party. His rulings on voter registration appear equally designed to help Republicans and to eliminate an alien presence in American life. His attempt to keep Taylor on the ballot-- and his subsequent threat to force the Democrats to replace him on the ballot-- reflects a diehard partisanship that shows little concern for legal niceties. In 2012, he even justified an attempt to keep Obama off the Kansas ballot on the grounds he had not proved his citizenship. And he is also a hardline rightwinger on the welfare state (he wants to remove Kansas entirely from the purview of the Affordable Care Act) and on guns, championing a law that has made guns produced in Kansas not subject to federal regulation. (He is a shareholder in a new Kansas gun firm aptly called Minuteman Defense.)

Kobach is running again on his attempt to stamp out voter fraud, and enjoys the enthusiastic support of anti-Obama stalwart Ted Nugent. “The Leftists and commies are working overtime to defeat him in this year’s election,” Nugent warned. Kobach’s opponent, Schodorf, is a former Republican state senator who was ousted in the 2010 primary by a more conservative challenger backed by Brownback and the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity and Kansas Chamber of Commerce. She switched parties to run against Kobach.  Schodorf has never run statewide before, and faces a two-to-one Republican edge in registration in a race that voters don't normally pay attention to, but she has been running even in the polls and could benefit from the snafu over keeping Taylor on the ballot.

If Schodorf does win, it will be a victory for American democracy and not simply the Democratic Party. Kobach is that bad. To be sure, there has always been a case to be made for better controlling American borders and for discouraging entry by undocumented workers, but Kobach’s position, like that of FAIR, edges into the dark corners of nativism. And his attempt to manipulate state election laws is quite simply an attempt to subvert the democratic process. Here’s to his defeat and banishment from elected office.

And… Maddow's weird Kobach update from last night (in which, among other things, she compared Kobach to a "Family Values" GOP hypocrite who gets caught in bed with a  goat-- "a boy goat":

If Only Every Voter Could Read This One... Gadarene Swine And All

Who'da thunk! An Ohio Republican governor!

You would certainly not know it from the laughable Sunday Inside-the-Beltway corporate media gabfests, but this weekend's most talked about political story was a piece Saturday by former Republican Party operative and congressional staffer, Mike Lofgren, Goodbye To All That: Reflections Of A GOP Operative Who Left The Cult. You know how we're all always saying how the two corporate Beltway parties absolutely suck but the other guys are even worse than ours. Lofgren's broken free from that perspective. I gather he feels that though they both suck, his is now far, far worse-- beyond the pale. "Both parties," he avows, "are rotten-- how could they not be, given the complete infestation of the political system by corporate money on a scale that now requires a presidential candidate to raise upwards of a billion dollars to be competitive in the general election? Both parties are captives to corporate loot. The main reason the Democrats' health care bill will be a budget buster once it fully phases in is the Democrats' rank capitulation to corporate interests-- no single-payer system, in order to mollify the insurers; and no negotiation of drug prices, a craven surrender to Big Pharma." But, he doesn't leave it there-- not at all. In all those years working for the Republicans he;s noticed something-- a big, big change that's come lately. "Both parties," he explains, "are not rotten in quite the same way. The Democrats have their share of machine politicians, careerists, corporate bagmen, egomaniacs and kooks. Nothing, however, quite matches the modern GOP." The party, he writes is now full of lunatics, lunatics way beyond even the California crackpots of yore like B-1 Bob Dornan and Bill Dannemeyer (best known for this speech he insisted be part of the Congressional Record: "activities peculiar to homosexuality include: rimming, or one man using his tongue to lick the rectum of another man; golden showers, having one man or men urinate on another man or men; fisting or handballing, which has one man insert his hand and/or part of his arm into another man's rectum; and using what are euphemistically termed 'toys' such as one man inserting dildoes, certain vegetables, or lightbulbs up another man's rectum"). Crazier than that? Maybe not crazier than John Schmitz, who Lofgren never got around to. He just says that "the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital center today: Steve King, Michele Bachman (now a leading presidential candidate as well), Paul Broun, Patrick McHenry, Virginia Foxx, Louie Gohmert, Allen West. The Congressional directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy." He knows his Members!

It was this cast of characters and the pernicious ideas they represent that impelled me to end a nearly 30-year career as a professional staff member on Capitol Hill. A couple of months ago, I retired; but I could see as early as last November that the Republican Party would use the debt limit vote, an otherwise routine legislative procedure that has been used 87 times since the end of World War II, in order to concoct an entirely artificial fiscal crisis. Then, they would use that fiscal crisis to get what they wanted, by literally holding the US and global economies as hostages.

The debt ceiling extension is not the only example of this sort of political terrorism. Republicans were willing to lay off 4,000 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) employees, 70,000 private construction workers and let FAA safety inspectors work without pay, in fact, forcing them to pay for their own work-related travel-- how prudent is that?-- in order to strong arm some union-busting provisions into the FAA reauthorization.

Everyone knows that in a hostage situation, the reckless and amoral actor has the negotiating upper hand over the cautious and responsible actor because the latter is actually concerned about the life of the hostage, while the former does not care. This fact, which ought to be obvious, has nevertheless caused confusion among the professional pundit class, which is mostly still stuck in the Bob Dole era in terms of its orientation. For instance, Ezra Klein wrote of his puzzlement over the fact that while House Republicans essentially won the debt ceiling fight, enough of them were sufficiently dissatisfied that they might still scuttle the deal. Of course they might-- the attitude of many freshman Republicans to national default was "bring it on!"

It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe. This trend has several implications, none of them pleasant.

...[V]irtually every bill, every nominee for Senate confirmation and every routine procedural motion is now subject to a Republican filibuster. Under the circumstances, it is no wonder that Washington is gridlocked: legislating has now become war minus the shooting, something one could have observed 80 years ago in the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic. As Hannah Arendt observed, a disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of democratic government to undermine democracy itself.

John P. Judis sums up the modern GOP this way:

"Over the last four decades, the Republican Party has transformed from a loyal opposition into an insurrectionary party that flouts the law when it is in the majority and threatens disorder when it is the minority. It is the party of Watergate and Iran-Contra, but also of the government shutdown in 1995 and the impeachment trial of 1999. If there is an earlier American precedent for today's Republican Party, it is the antebellum Southern Democrats of John Calhoun who threatened to nullify, or disregard, federal legislation they objected to and who later led the fight to secede from the union over slavery."

A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress's generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.

A deeply cynical tactic, to be sure, but a psychologically insightful one that plays on the weaknesses both of the voting public and the news media. There are tens of millions of low-information voters who hardly know which party controls which branch of government, let alone which party is pursuing a particular legislative tactic. These voters' confusion over who did what allows them to form the conclusion that "they are all crooks," and that "government is no good," further leading them to think, "a plague on both your houses" and "the parties are like two kids in a school yard." This ill-informed public cynicism, in its turn, further intensifies the long-term decline in public trust in government that has been taking place since the early 1960s - a distrust that has been stoked by Republican rhetoric at every turn ("Government is the problem," declared Ronald Reagan in 1980).

...[The] constant drizzle of "there the two parties go again!" stories out of the news bureaus, combined with the hazy confusion of low-information voters, means that the long-term Republican strategy of undermining confidence in our democratic institutions has reaped electoral dividends. The United States has nearly the lowest voter participation among Western democracies; this, again, is a consequence of the decline of trust in government institutions - if government is a racket and both parties are the same, why vote? And if the uninvolved middle declines to vote, it increases the electoral clout of a minority that is constantly being whipped into a lather by three hours daily of Rush Limbaugh or Fox News. There were only 44 million Republican voters in the 2010 mid-term elections, but they effectively canceled the political results of the election of President Obama by 69 million voters.

This tactic of inducing public distrust of government is not only cynical, it is schizophrenic. For people who profess to revere the Constitution, it is strange that they so caustically denigrate the very federal government that is the material expression of the principles embodied in that document. This is not to say that there is not some theoretical limit to the size or intrusiveness of government; I would be the first to say there are such limits, both fiscal and Constitutional. But most Republican officeholders seem strangely uninterested in the effective repeal of Fourth Amendment protections by the Patriot Act, the weakening of habeas corpus and self-incrimination protections in the public hysteria following 9/11 or the unpalatable fact that the United States has the largest incarcerated population of any country on earth. If anything, they would probably opt for more incarcerated persons, as imprisonment is a profit center for the prison privatization industry, which is itself a growth center for political contributions to these same politicians. Instead, they prefer to rail against those government programs that actually help people. And when a program is too popular to attack directly, like Medicare or Social Security, they prefer to undermine it by feigning an agonized concern about the deficit. That concern, as we shall see, is largely fictitious.

Undermining Americans' belief in their own institutions of self-government remains a prime GOP electoral strategy. But if this technique falls short of producing Karl Rove's dream of 30 years of unchallengeable one-party rule (as all such techniques always fall short of achieving the angry and embittered true believer's New Jerusalem), there are other even less savory techniques upon which to fall back. Ever since Republicans captured the majority in a number of state legislatures last November, they have systematically attempted to make it more difficult to vote: by onerous voter ID requirements (in Wisconsin, Republicans have legislated photo IDs while simultaneously shutting Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) offices in Democratic constituencies while at the same time lengthening the hours of operation of DMV offices in GOP constituencies); by narrowing registration periods; and by residency requirements that may disenfranchise university students.

This legislative assault is moving in a diametrically opposed direction to 200 years of American history, when the arrow of progress pointed toward more political participation by more citizens. Republicans are among the most shrill in self-righteously lecturing other countries about the wonders of democracy; exporting democracy (albeit at the barrel of a gun) to the Middle East was a signature policy of the Bush administration. But domestically, they don't want those people voting.

You can probably guess who those people are. Above all, anyone not likely to vote Republican. As Sarah Palin would imply, the people who are not Real Americans. Racial minorities. Immigrants. Muslims. Gays. Intellectuals. Basically, anyone who doesn't look, think, or talk like the GOP base. This must account, at least to some degree, for their extraordinarily vitriolic hatred of President Obama. I have joked in the past that the main administration policy that Republicans object to is Obama's policy of being black. Among the GOP base, there is constant harping about somebody else, some "other," who is deliberately, assiduously and with malice aforethought subverting the Good, the True and the Beautiful: Subversives. Commies. Socialists. Ragheads. Secular humanists. Blacks. Fags. Feminazis. The list may change with the political needs of the moment, but they always seem to need a scapegoat to hate and fear.

It is not clear to me how many GOP officeholders believe this reactionary and paranoid claptrap. I would bet that most do not. But they cynically feed the worst instincts of their fearful and angry low-information political base with a nod and a wink.

...The reader may think that I am attributing Svengali-like powers to GOP operatives able to manipulate a zombie base to do their bidding. It is more complicated than that. Historical circumstances produced the raw material: the deindustrialization and financialization of America since about 1970 has spawned an increasingly downscale white middle class-- without job security (or even without jobs), with pensions and health benefits evaporating and with their principal asset deflating in the collapse of the housing bubble. Their fears are not imaginary; their standard of living is shrinking.

What do the Democrats offer these people? Essentially nothing. Democratic Leadership Council-style "centrist" Democrats were among the biggest promoters of disastrous trade deals in the 1990s that outsourced jobs abroad: NAFTA, World Trade Organization, permanent most-favored-nation status for China. At the same time, the identity politics/lifestyle wing of the Democratic Party was seen as a too illegal immigrant-friendly by downscaled and outsourced whites.

While Democrats temporized, or even dismissed the fears of the white working class as racist or nativist, Republicans went to work. To be sure, the business wing of the Republican Party consists of the most energetic outsourcers, wage cutters and hirers of sub-minimum wage immigrant labor to be found anywhere on the globe. But the faux-populist wing of the party, knowing the mental compartmentalization that occurs in most low-information voters, played on the fears of that same white working class to focus their anger on scapegoats that do no damage to corporations' bottom lines: instead of raising the minimum wage, let's build a wall on the Southern border (then hire a defense contractor to incompetently manage it). Instead of predatory bankers, it's evil Muslims. Or evil gays. Or evil abortionists.

How do they manage to do this? Because Democrats ceded the field. Above all, they do not understand language. Their initiatives are posed in impenetrable policy-speak: the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The what?-- can anyone even remember it? No wonder the pejorative "Obamacare" won out. Contrast that with the Republicans' Patriot Act. You're a patriot, aren't you? Does anyone at the GED level have a clue what a Stimulus Bill is supposed to be? Why didn't the White House call it the Jobs Bill and keep pounding on that theme?

You know that Social Security and Medicare are in jeopardy when even Democrats refer to them as entitlements. "Entitlement" has a negative sound in colloquial English: somebody who is "entitled" selfishly claims something he doesn't really deserve. Why not call them "earned benefits," which is what they are because we all contribute payroll taxes to fund them? That would never occur to the Democrats. Republicans don't make that mistake; they are relentlessly on message: it is never the "estate tax," it is the "death tax." Heaven forbid that the Walton family should give up one penny of its $86-billion fortune. All of that lucre is necessary to ensure that unions be kept out of Wal-Mart, that women employees not be promoted and that politicians be kept on a short leash.

It was not always thus. It would have been hard to find an uneducated farmer during the depression of the 1890s who did not have a very accurate idea about exactly which economic interests were shafting him. An unemployed worker in a breadline in 1932 would have felt little gratitude to the Rockefellers or the Mellons. But that is not the case in the present economic crisis. After a riot of unbridled greed such as the world has not seen since the conquistadors' looting expeditions and after an unprecedented broad and rapid transfer of wealth upward by Wall Street and its corporate satellites, where is the popular anger directed, at least as depicted in the media? At "Washington spending"-- which has increased primarily to provide unemployment compensation, food stamps and Medicaid to those economically damaged by the previous decade's corporate saturnalia. Or the popular rage is harmlessly diverted against pseudo-issues: death panels, birtherism, gay marriage, abortion, and so on, none of which stands to dent the corporate bottom line in the slightest.

...[T]he Republican Party of 2011 believes in three principal tenets I have laid out below. The rest of their platform one may safely dismiss as window dressing:

1. The GOP cares solely and exclusively about its rich contributors. The party has built a whole catechism on the protection and further enrichment of America's plutocracy. Their caterwauling about deficit and debt is so much eyewash to con the public. Whatever else President Obama has accomplished (and many of his purported accomplishments are highly suspect), his $4-trillion deficit reduction package did perform the useful service of smoking out Republican hypocrisy. The GOP refused, because it could not abide so much as a one-tenth of one percent increase on the tax rates of the Walton family or the Koch brothers, much less a repeal of the carried interest rule that permits billionaire hedge fund managers to pay income tax at a lower effective rate than cops or nurses. Republicans finally settled on a deal that had far less deficit reduction-- and even less spending reduction!-- than Obama's offer, because of their iron resolution to protect at all costs our society's overclass.

...2. They worship at the altar of Mars.  While the me-too Democrats have set a horrible example of keeping up with the Joneses with respect to waging wars, they can never match GOP stalwarts such as John McCain or Lindsey Graham in their sheer, libidinous enthusiasm for invading other countries. McCain wanted to mix it up with Russia-- a nuclear-armed state-- during the latter's conflict with Georgia in 2008 (remember?-- "we are all Georgians now," a slogan that did not, fortunately, catch on), while Graham has been persistently agitating for attacks on Iran and intervention in Syria. And these are not fringe elements of the party; they are the leading "defense experts," who always get tapped for the Sunday talk shows. About a month before Republicans began holding a gun to the head of the credit markets to get trillions of dollars of cuts, these same Republicans passed a defense appropriations bill that increased spending by $17 billion over the prior year's defense appropriation. To borrow Chris Hedges' formulation, war is the force that gives meaning to their lives.

...3. Give me that old time religion. Pandering to fundamentalism is a full-time vocation in the GOP. Beginning in the 1970s, religious cranks ceased simply to be a minor public nuisance in this country and grew into the major element of the Republican rank and file. Pat Robertson's strong showing in the 1988 Iowa Caucus signaled the gradual merger of politics and religion in the party. The results are all around us: if the American people poll more like Iranians or Nigerians than Europeans or Canadians on questions of evolution versus creationism, scriptural inerrancy, the existence of angels and demons, and so forth, that result is due to the rise of the religious right, its insertion into the public sphere by the Republican Party and the consequent normalizing of formerly reactionary or quaint beliefs. Also around us is a prevailing anti-intellectualism and hostility to science; it is this group that defines "low-information voter" - or, perhaps, "misinformation voter."

...Televangelists have long espoused the health-and-wealth/name-it-and-claim it gospel. If you are wealthy, it is a sign of God's favor. If not, too bad! But don't forget to tithe in any case. This rationale may explain why some economically downscale whites defend the prerogatives of billionaires.

The GOP's fascination with war is also connected with the fundamentalist mindset. The Old Testament abounds in tales of slaughter-- God ordering the killing of the Midianite male infants and enslavement of the balance of the population, the divinely-inspired genocide of the Canaanites, the slaying of various miscreants with the jawbone of an ass-- and since American religious fundamentalist seem to prefer the Old Testament to the New (particularly that portion of the New Testament known as the Sermon on the Mount), it is but a short step to approving war as a divinely inspired mission. This sort of thinking has led, inexorably, to such phenomena as Jerry Falwell once writing that God is Pro-War.

It is the apocalyptic frame of reference of fundamentalists, their belief in an imminent Armageddon, that psychologically conditions them to steer this country into conflict, not only on foreign fields (some evangelicals thought Saddam was the Antichrist and therefore a suitable target for cruise missiles), but also in the realm of domestic political controversy. It is hardly surprising that the most adamant proponent of the view that there was no debt ceiling problem was Michele Bachmann, the darling of the fundamentalist right. What does it matter, anyway, if the country defaults? - we shall presently abide in the bosom of the Lord.

Some liberal writers have opined that the different socio-economic perspectives separating the "business" wing of the GOP and the religious right make it an unstable coalition that could crack. I am not so sure. There is no fundamental disagreement on which direction the two factions want to take the country, merely how far in that direction they want to take it. The plutocrats would drag us back to the Gilded Age, the theocrats to the Salem witch trials. In any case, those consummate plutocrats, the Koch brothers, are pumping large sums of money into Michele Bachman's presidential campaign, so one ought not make too much of a potential plutocrat-theocrat split.

Thus, the modern GOP; it hardly seems conceivable that a Republican could have written the following:

"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid." (That was President Eisenhower, writing to his brother Edgar in 1954.)

It is this broad and ever-widening gulf between the traditional Republicanism of an Eisenhower and the quasi-totalitarian cult of a Michele Bachmann that impelled my departure from Capitol Hill. It is not in my pragmatic nature to make a heroic gesture of self-immolation, or to make lurid revelations of personal martyrdom in the manner of David Brock. And I will leave a more detailed dissection of failed Republican economic policies to my fellow apostate Bruce Bartlett.

I left because I was appalled at the headlong rush of Republicans, like Gadarene swine, to embrace policies that are deeply damaging to this country's future; and contemptuous of the feckless, craven incompetence of Democrats in their half-hearted attempts to stop them. And, in truth, I left as an act of rational self-interest. Having gutted private-sector pensions and health benefits as a result of their embrace of outsourcing, union busting and "shareholder value," the GOP now thinks it is only fair that public-sector workers give up their pensions and benefits, too. Hence the intensification of the GOP's decades-long campaign of scorn against government workers. Under the circumstances, it is simply safer to be a current retiree rather than a prospective one.

If you think Paul Ryan and his Ayn Rand-worshipping colleagues aren't after your Social Security and Medicare, I am here to disabuse you of your naiveté. They will move heaven and earth to force through tax cuts that will so starve the government of revenue that they will be "forced" to make "hard choices"-- and that doesn't mean repealing those very same tax cuts, it means cutting the benefits for which you worked.

During the week that this piece was written, the debt ceiling fiasco reached its conclusion. The economy was already weak, but the GOP's disgraceful game of chicken roiled the markets even further. Foreigners could hardly believe it: Americans' own crazy political actions were destabilizing the safe-haven status of the dollar. Accordingly, during that same week, over one trillion dollars worth of assets evaporated on financial markets. Russia and China have stepped up their advocating that the dollar be replaced as the global reserve currency-- a move as consequential and disastrous for US interests as any that can be imagined.

If Republicans have perfected a new form of politics that is successful electorally at the same time that it unleashes major policy disasters, it means twilight both for the democratic process and America's status as the world's leading power.

Maybe Obama Will Actually Bring Some Change... More Than Anyone Bargained For

Nice target... I mean house

From today's Frank Rich column, Still The Best Congress Money Can Buy: Wall Street is already celebrating the approach of bonus season by partying like it’s 2007. In The Times’s account of this return to conspicuous consumption, we learned of a Morgan Stanley trader, since fired for unspecified reasons, who went to costly ends to try to hire a dwarf for a Miami bachelor party prank that would require the dwarf to be handcuffed to the bachelor. If this were a metaphor-- if only!-- Wall Street would be the bachelor, and America the dwarf, involuntarily chained to its master’s hedonistic revels and fiscal recklessness with no prospect for escape.

John Judis, author and senior editor at TNR, argues persuasively that despite the fact that "the percentage of conservatives in the actual electorate this November-- and their proportional support for Republicans-- increased dramatically by ten percentage points from 2006," conservatism among registered voters hasn't gone up much since 2006. There was an increase of 3 percentage points from 2006 to 2010 but-- and this is key-- "the conservative tilt was much stronger in the electorate that actually voted than among registered voters." Just as our own research has shown, "conservatives were more energized than their liberal or moderate counterparts. And intensity has much more to do with political outcomes than the sheer numbers that opinion polling registers... [T]he liberal electorate that took to the streets in 2006 and 2008 was demoralized and demobilized."

And the results showed not just in the election, but in the political questions that are currently being debated in the press and in Congress. It’s not whether to have a single-payer health care system, but whether to have a national system at all. It’s not whether social spending should be increased, but whether it should be frozen or cut.

The "better" news is that "the conservative trend after 2008 was not the result of the gradual erosion of the liberal-moderate majority, but of the failure of the Obama administration to stem the [economic] downturn that began in 2008... [T]he Obama administration’s failure to seize the political opportunity afforded by the Great Recession has not necessarily opened the way to a new Republican majority. More likely, it will lead to a period where the two parties exchange power, and where neither can establish a long-lasting majority."

But Obama could easy make it much worse-- and many observers think he's, in fact, determined to. About a week ago Dave Johnson of Campaign for America's Future applied the theory of "The Shock Doctrine" to the push to gut Social Security. He decries the move towards proposals meant to cut middle class tax breaks and programs so that the richest Americans can continue to concentrate the nation's wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer families. "This is full-on Shock Doctrine, wait for an emergency like the terrible recession so people are in shock and want solutions, and then change everything so fast they can’t respond while telling them how this is good for them." And on Friday Johnson followed up with a proposal of his own that is meant to cut the deficit without hurting the people who Obama and the American government are supposed to represent-- the 99% of us who are not fabulously wealthy and who we don't expect to see ignored, especially not by a Democratic administration. Johnson's 8-point proposal seems like a lot more serious and effective-- not to mention fair-- than the toxic nonsense coming out of the Catfood Commission or the Rivlin Commission.

1) Restore pre-Reagan top tax rates. We didn't have massive deficits until we reduced the top tax rates.

2) Income is income. No more reduced capital gains tax rate. The incentive to invest should be to make a bunch of money from a good investment. The reason there is a low capital gains tax rate is that the wealthy get most of their income from capital gains. And the reason they get most of their income from capital gains is there is a low capital gains rate. The resulting income shifting schemes are a drag on the rest of us. (Also applies to dividends.)

3) Income is income. Inheritance income should be taxed as income, except there should be a "democracy cap" on how much someone can inherit. We decided not to have an aristocracy when we founded this country so we shouldn't have one.

4) Businesses should be taxed or not taxed, but not taxed AND not taxed. They shouldn't be able to use "double Irish" or "Dutch sandwich" or operate out of PO boxes in Bermuda or the Cayman Islands. (Bonus, this also helps reduce incentives to send our jobs and factories out of the country.)

5) If you don't pay your taxes We, the People won't pay to provide you with services. We can start by not allowing you to have a driveway that connects to public streets, or water/sewer hookups or mail. Also we won't enforce any contracts for you, including the one that says you "own" your house(s). And no government-developed Internet for you.

If companies like Google want to "double Irish" and "Dutch Sandwich" us or operate out of PO boxes in tax havens, we shouldn't let them use government services like courts, or the government-developed Internet. See how well they operate without access to roads (that includes for employees to get to go to work.) How about withdrawing the limited liability protection that investors in corporations receive? And of course no protection for "intellectual property" or trademarks. Oh, yeah, no access to anyone who went to a school that used tax dollars. And no government services means no sea-lane protection for your products shipping from Chinese factories, by the way.

6) Speaking of sea-lane protection, why do we have a military budget comparable to when we faced nuclear annihilation by the Soviet empire? Bases in Germany and Japan? And why can I go to this website, pick a DC-area zip code, say 22314, and learn that "Dollar Amount of Defense Contracts Awarded to Contractors in this Zip Code from 2000 to 2009: $7,086,397,848." Seriously, scroll down the page and look at some of the contracts and amounts awarded. I suspect there's some serious deficit reduction to be found in the military budget. A comprehensive and very public audit of where all that money has been going since, say, 1981 might take a chunk out of the debt problem all by itself

7) I could start listing all the corporate subsidies, tax breaks, monopoly grants, schemes, contracts, etc. that we pay for, but I think you get the idea. How about calling bribery by its name: bribery, and doing something about it?

8) To the extent that implementing this plan does not clear up the deficit and start paying off the debt, how about a yearly national property tax on all individual holdings above, say, $5 million, with the tax rate progressively increasing as total wealth increases, and keep doing this each year until the debt is paid off. Perhaps start at 1% on $5 million, 2.5% at $10 million, 5% at $50 million, etc. (Hedge fund managers and investment bankers start at 50% and go up, just for the heck of it. We can call this the "get the money from where the money went tax.")

Or maybe Obama wants to just continue to preside over a situation that's starting to smell a lot more like pre-Revolutionary France. And all it took to trigger the decapitations of the aristocracy was... some climate change. Of course, the ruinous climate change alone wouldn't have done it. Does this wikipedia description of the causes of the French Revolution sound vaguely familiar?

Although France in 1789 faced economic difficulties, mostly concerning the equitability of taxation, it was one of the richest and most powerful nations of Europe. The French people also enjoyed more political freedom and a lower incidence of arbitrary punishment than any of their fellow Europeans. However, Louis XVI, his ministers, and the widespread French nobility had become immensely unpopular. This was a consequence of the fact that peasants and, to a lesser extent, the bourgeoisie, were burdened with ruinously-high taxes levied to support wealthy aristocrats and their sumptuous, often gluttonous, lifestyles.

...These problems were all compounded by a great scarcity of food in the 1780s. A series of crop failures caused a shortage of grain, consequently raising the price of bread. Because bread was the main source of nutrition for poor peasants, this led to starvation. The two years previous to the revolution (1788–89) saw meager harvests and harsh winters, possibly because of a strong El Niño cycle caused by the 1783 Laki eruption in Iceland.

Sure, a little excessive... but a bat mitzvah no one will ever forget, even if daddy's a criminal

Yesterday was the anniversary of a big party in New York. Could it really only have been just 5 years ago when notorious war profiteer David H. Brooks was celebrating his daughter's bat mitzvah at the Rainbow Room. The event cost upwards of $10 million and featured Aerosmith, Nelly, Tom Petty, the Eagles, Kenny G. and 50 Cent. Aerosmith was paid $2 million and there's no way on earth Tom Petty or the Eagles would have played for less; they share the same manager. Brooks was a big macher; he had just donated $25,000 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee a couple of months earlier.

There's a lot in this post that tangentially touches on Iceland. Loki, the volcano that errupted and caused the wealther patterns that triggered the French Revolution, for example, is on Iceland. And these days, whenever I think about Iceland, I think about Charles Ferguson's brilliant documentary about the most recent financial meltdown, Inside Job since it too is tangentially about Iceland. I posted about the film when I first saw it in September. And a month ago Ferguson posted over at Salon about the question that probably anyone who's sitting and watching it for a few minutes will ask himself-- how will he deal wth Obama?

It was before the election and he wasn't as harsh as he could have been. But he did struggle with the question about how to tackle Obama.

When Barack Obama was elected, he had an unprecedented opportunity to shape American history by bringing the country's new financial oligarchy under control. Elected on a platform of change and renewal by a nation in crisis and with strong majorities in both houses of Congress, his election celebrated throughout the world, Obama could have done great things. Instead, he gave us more of the same. America will be paying for his decision for a very long time.

The first troubling sign was his personnel appointments: Larry Summers, the man behind nearly every disastrous policy that created the crisis, fresh from making $20 million from hedge funds and investment banks while at Harvard, to become the director of the National Economic Council; Tim Geithner, plucked from the New York Federal Reserve Bank and put in charge at Treasury; as Geithner's chief of staff, Mark Patterson, a former Goldman Sachs lobbyist; to succeed Geithner at the New York Fed, William C. Dudley, who was chief economist of Goldman Sachs during the housing bubble years; Michael Froman, straight from Citigroup Alternative Investments, which lost billions while its executives became rich, to coordinate economic policy for the National Security Council; Jacob Lew, who was the CFO of Citigroup Alternative Investments, as deputy secretary of state (and now, Obama's nominee to run the Office of Management and Budget); Gary Gensler, a former Goldman executive who helped ban the regulation of over-the-counter derivatives, to lead the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which regulates derivatives; Mary Shapiro, former head of the Financial Industry Regulatory Agency, the investment banking industry’s self-policing body, to run the Securities and Exchange Commission; reappointing Ben Bernanke. And on and on.

These moves were excused as the understandable actions of a president-elect without a background in finance turning to the most experienced people in a time of crisis. But even then, it was clear that these people had been part of the problem, not the solution, and that other highly competent but untainted candidates were available.

And now, nearly two years later, the Obama administration has established a clear record. Beginning almost immediately, the president consistently opposed any effort to control financial industry compensation-- even for firms receiving federal aid, as most were in 2009. Then came a long period of total inaction, followed by the toothless Wall Street reform bill passed this summer and the appointment of a former Fannie Mae lobbyist, Tom Donilon, as the new national security advisor. There was no action on the foreclosure crisis and no serious attempt to investigate the causes of the crisis. The SEC has brought only a handful of civil cases ending in trivial fines, with neither firms nor individuals required to admit any wrongdoing.

Most tellingly, there has not been a single criminal prosecution of any firm or any individual senior financial executive-- literally zero-- and, of course, no appointment of a special prosecutor. While we can debate the extent to which fraud caused the crisis, and precisely how much fraud was committed, the answer is clearly not zero. We already know that Lehman and other firms used fake accounting to hide liabilities and inflate assets; that lenders and securitizers frequently knew that the loans they sold and packaged were fraudulent or defective; and, of course, we also now know that Goldman Sachs and other investment banks sold securities they knew to be defective (they were often sold to pension funds for low-paid government employees, by the way)-- and that they designed many of these securities so that they could profit by betting against them after they were sold. Stunningly, this last practice was not ipso facto illegal; but as a practical matter, it’s pretty hard to do if you’re telling the truth. Yet nobody has been prosecuted, and only a very few individuals have even been sued in civil cases.

It is, in short, overwhelmingly clear that President Obama and his administration decided to side with the oligarchs-- or at least not to challenge them. This raises the question of why they have made this choice, and whether it is a correct (in the sense of rationally self-interested) calculation on their part.

As to the "why," several explanations have been proposed. One is that the president, as a matter of individual psychology, is extremely conflict-averse, preferring to avoid fights no matter how important. A second hypothesis is that the president is simply doing the most he can, given the political climate and the furious lobbying effort with which he is confronted. This explanation, however, is belied by the personnel appointments, among other evidence.

A more disturbing possibility is that the Obama administration has simply codified a new strategic equilibrium in American politics, one first devised by the Clinton administration, in which both parties are supine with regard to the financial sector and the wealthy.

The objection to this view is that there is some evidence, in conventional political terms, that the Obama strategy of giving in to Wall Street might be a mistake. The economy remains in bad shape, bad enough to be a major political handicap, and will likely stay that way for several years. Democrats are having trouble fundraising (from individuals, at least; interest group donors remain plentiful), union voters may desert them, and it looks like Republicans and the Tea Party will make substantial inroads in the midterm elections. The liberal media, most prominently the Huffington Post but many other outlets as well, have turned sharply critical of administration policy. And my own conversations with friends and colleagues have revealed a deep, angry disillusionment with Obama.

But consider the situation more broadly. If the two parties both lie down for Wall Street in roughly equal measure, but fight viciously over other issues, it is possible to construct a stable strategic equilibrium. At the margin, the Democrats are slightly less favorable to business, at least for unionized industries, but nobody upsets the financial sector apple cart.

This angers much of the Democratic base. But the Democrats avoid the epic confrontation that would surely ensue if they were to take on the financial sector, which would retaliate with a massively funded effort. Instead, the two parties fight furiously, or at least pretend to fight furiously, about a wide range of other social issues that affect many voters deeply-- abortion, gay rights, gun control, stem cell research, creationism, global warming, health insurance and so on. Each side can credibly warn its base that if it deserts the party, apocalypse may follow. So, while some citizens may register as independents, or stop voting, or stop donating to the system, the entrenched establishments of both parties will remain safe.

Of course, the sustainability of this strategic duopoly depends on the absence of truly independent challenges, such as third parties. Third parties can and do arise in America-- George Wallace, Ross Perot, Ralph Nader and, now (sort of), the Tea Party-- but they tend to be short-lived, in part because they face enormous structural obstacles in becoming a sustainable political force. For one, America doesn't have a parliamentary system, and most localities don’t use ranked-choice or "instant-runoff" voting. Plus, given the structure of American elections, the Obama administration can credibly warn, pointing to the example of Ralph Nader, that any splinter effort would hand the White House to the Republicans. And, given the enormous role now played by money in American elections, the logistical and financial efforts required to create a grass-roots third party would be huge. In contrast, the financial sector possesses the twin advantages of concentration and cohesion on the one hand, and of enormous financial resources on the other.

So, then, the Obama administration’s choices may be depressingly rational, given the "quiet coup," to use Simon Johnson’s term, constituted by the spectacular rise of the financial industry and the wealthy over the last quarter-century. This does not mean we should all despair; there have been times before in American history when the American people had to force their leaders to follow them. A century ago, the progressive movement achieved major reforms in the face of an economy even more concentrated than today. But it won’t be easy. To reverse the hegemony of the financial sector, and the danger it poses both to economic stability and to real democracy, will require an enormous outpouring of popular anger and organizational energy, probably a considerable period of time, and perhaps could be generated only by... another, even worse, financial crisis, such as might well occur a decade hence, given the absence of real reform after this one…