Curt Schilling’s Still a Teabagger

I’m not a big baseball fan, but I did develop an interest in Red Sox pitcher, and outspoken anti-government bootstrapper, Curt Schilling. Back in November, a lawsuit was filed against Schilling by the state of Rhode Island for bilking the taxpayers for millions of dollars. It’s been a while since I heard about any updates, aside from this somewhat recent report about Schilling politely asking a judge to simply forget about this whole bamboozling business and call it squaresies. Seems like he isn’t having fun anymore.

 

I was curious to see if Schilling learned anything – anything at all – from this catastrophe, so I went to check out his blog, which sadly wasn’t updated very often. So then I decided to scout his twitter feed, which fortunately, proved to be more useful. Sadly, however, it seemed Schilling was just as teabagger-y as ever:

 

Yes, if anyone has a right to speak out against crushing debt, it’s Curt Schilling.

 

For we all know, you would never do such a thing, right, Curt?

 

Indeed. And the $75 million government loan you took didn’t include a single penny from the tax payers of Rhode Island either.

 

I don’t think I’m being unfair with my criticism. Here’s a guy who constantly spewed Randian garbage like this and this, only to turn around and not only seek out evil socialist assistance, but actively encourage states to listen to that advice, as well!

 

Granted, I suppose it’s too much to expect that such an experience would cause Schilling to reevaluate his economic beliefs. But at the very least, you would think Schilling would have enough sense to keep his politics to himself. But as I’ve said many a time, self awareness and shame are commodities that were always in short supply among teabaggers.

Republicans Say the Darndest Things

Ever since I started following politics, I found that one of the most shocking things when it came to this subject was how politicians (oh hell, why sugar coat it? Republicans) consistently, and more importantly, openly say absurd and idiotic things. Things that even someone who doesn’t follow politics would say “Wait, WHAT?” Examples include one of my personal favorites, Senator Jon Kyl’s famous “Not intended to be a factual statement” comments, and Rep. Steve King’s absolutely glorious and breathtaking defense of dog fighting (easily the greatest thing I’ve seen in all of 2012).

And here’s the thing. Even in a world of chock full of moronic statements, the aforementioned examples stand out because they were prepared beforehand. These comments would still be awful and worthy of ridicule even if they were off the cuff, but one could at least grant some leeway. But no, Kyl and King came up with those remarks, presumably proofread them, and thought they appeared more than appropriate to go public.

Brother Benen provides us with yet another example of this phenomenon:

“Because of the president’s reluctance to cut spending, we’ve been caught in this battle of having cliffs and having these deadlines. This is no way to run a government. But until the president gets serious about the serious structural spending problem that we have, we’re going to have to deal with it. I suggested to the president the other day, the best thing we can do is find some way to get the Senate to finally do their work, have a large agreement that begins to address the spending problem, puts us on a path to balance the budget over the next 10 years, and get out of this cliff business. It’s not good for the country for us to continue to go through this.”

Let the bolded simmer in your brains for a bit. Here you have the (nominal) head of the Republican Party in the House saying that these consistent, manufactured crises are indeed a bad way to run a government, but he and his party will continue to govern in that fashion because Obama doesn’t want to give them what they want. This is Boehner’s defense! As Steve points out:

The fact that the House Speaker doesn’t see the flaws in saying this out loud is disconcerting.

Seriously.

Conservative Radio Host: “Yes, I’m Going To Make This Argument With A Straight Face”

On Friday, Fox News host, Megan Kelly held a panel to discuss the President’s remarks in a recent interview he did with Al Sharpton:

“Nothing is important enough to raise taxes on wealthy individuals or corporations,” Obama told Sharpton of the GOP’s motivations. He said that world-view “binds” the party together.

Now I may be biased, but I don’t see much wrong with the President’s comments. But apparently, conservative radio host, Ben Ferguson disagreed. His arguments were something I found quite stunning to say the least:

“Yes, seven out of the top ten richest people in congress happen to be Democrats. President Barack Obama is the one who got us into this crisis that we’re in right now with these budget cuts as you just mentioned statistically and he’s sitting there playing this rich vs. poor man card when he’s the one that allowed the payroll tax to go up that takes away sixteen bags of groceries for an average working family right now in this country. 

“So I look at the stats and say, look at Nancy Pelosi, she didn’t want to get a pay cut. In fact, she wanted a pay increase, even talking about lowering her salary right now is beneath the dignity of her job. So you tell me who actually is a rich person looking out for rich people. Republicans are looking out for average Americans.”

This is utterly remarkable. Sure, we just went through an election cycle where Obama and the Democrats were consistently criticized for allegedly vilifying the wealthiest and most hard working among us, and where the Republican presidential candidate offered an economic plan that would provide a massive blowjob to the top income brackets, but apparently, it turns out that it was the Democrats who were the ones in the tank for the rich all along!

Now, the Right does this sort of thing every so often. It’s that really annoying, Karl Rovian tactic of projecting your own weaknesses onto your opponent. While most conservatives, including Ferguson, are more than happy to carry water for the wealthy, many of them also realize it’s a very unpopular position to hold. So what they do is attack the Left for supposedly coddling the rich, while simultaneously continuing to fight for policies that do just that. If you’ll recall, Presidential silver medalist, Mitt Romney tried to pull the same shit during the first presidential debate.

Just to drive the point home, Republicans in congress currently want to cut programs that benefit pretty much all Americans, while also easing the burden on the wealthiest among us. In fact, if you can believe it, they’ve offered a new plan that’s even worse than stuff they’ve previously proposed. Not to mention you also have several Republican-led states who seem to think that the non-rich have it way too easy and are currently seeking legislation aiming to correct that.

Taken together, it’s really hard to make the argument that the Republican party is in fact the party of Robin Hood.

The Right Doesn’t Understand Economics, and They Hope You Don’t Either

I just saw Ann Wagner, U.S. representative for Missouri’s 2nd congressional district on TV. First, she correctly pointed out “We can get more revenue is by growing the economy.” This isn’t a rare thing for a Republican to say, but it is correct. If you grow the economy, then more people will pay in taxes, and less will be unemployed and/or using government spending programs. That’s simply what happens when an economy grows (the opposite is also what happens when an economy shrinks). What she said next, though, is where a lot of Republicans get things wrong. Sometimes they get it wrong because they simply do not understand economics, but I think most of them just hope you don’t understand economics either. She continued with, “and the only way to do that is by reining in our spending.” I wanted to slam my head into the table when she said it. It’s utterly idiotic, and completely counter productive.

As I pointed out in my last post, which mainly dealt with government jobs, when you cut spending you cut someone else’s income. When the government cuts, they’re cutting directly into the profits of the private sector. The right does a lot of talk about how we should not become Greece, or not become Europe, but whenever they trot out this little line like Ann did, they are effectively telling us that we should in fact become Greece or Europe. Our media is not doing a good enough job at all in pointing out this hypocrisy. You see, when the recession hit, Europe did precisely what the Republicans are calling for. They enacted spending cuts, while the US as of now largely did not. While we didn’t spend enough to get us out of the recession quickly, we haven’t fallen into the same trap that Europe has. In 2011 alone, “Greece’s austerity package amounted to 11.1 percent of GDP. Spain’s was 3.1 percent. Great Britain’s was 2 percent. Italy’s was 1.8 percent.”

So what happened in Europe? For one, the recession deepened. “The euro zone’s fourth-largest economy, [Spain] which is grappling with the collapse of a decadelong housing boom, fell into its second recession in three years toward the end of 2011.” Spanish unemployment is 26%, and reaches as high as 55% for those under 25 years old. Greece is also struggling with 26% unemployment. The Eurozone as a whole has a 11.8% unemployment rate as of November 2012. Things have become so bad, some in Europe are being forced to pick through the garbages in order to eat.

The IMF also “found that budget cutbacks are much more damaging to economies recovering from recession than has been previously believed. The reason is that with interest rates stuck near zero, there is no room to lower them when fiscal policy is tightened, and thus no way to offset the pain of budget cutbacks.” It also said that these sorts of spending cuts in depressed economies act to deflate confidence, and that’s precisely because they can quickly decelerate economic growth or even at times turn it into an economic decline.

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The Chilean Miracle

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Herman Cain is fucking crackpot. Well thats at least how he had been marketing himself for some time. From his online TV channel, CainTV, which seemed like if the Adult Swim creators suddenly became deep in Austrian economics to his appearances on the Colbert Report, it seems that Cain had been cashing in on his fame when it lasted. Even when he was running for president he had his share fair of cooky moments. His 9-9-9 tax plan caught the attention of the media as Cain’s solution to our mess of a tax code was literally nothing more than a magic bullet. And who can forget Cain quoting Poke’mon during one of the debates. Yet there was one more crackpot thing that Cain tried to suggest that the less political savvy didn’t realize. During one of the debates Herman Cain proposed his plan for social security. The Chilean model. Herman Cain cited that this is a model that quite simply works. But as you can assume that much like everything else from Herman Cain its just a load of crap.

Chile’s pension system differs from the United States and other first world nations in which that pensions aren’t financed through a system where workers, employers and the government all contribute to the pension, but instead where workers are forced to pay 10 percent of their salaries to private investment accounts. There are some positives to this model. The most notable is that social security costs significantly less than it does in other nations. About one third less than the United States and half of Australia. In a nation obsessed with debt it seems like an obvious path to take. There is just one problem, when Cain said this nearly half of the Chilean population wasn’t covered by Chile’s system… Its pretty easy to have half the amount spent on social security compared to the beacon light of the traditional model when you only cover half the amount of people. Nor does this go into the detail that in the United States the social security system it uses the people pay nearly fifty percent less into it than Chile’s system. And it doesn’t go into the fact that the minimum amount of social security given in Chile’s system, which isn’t always given, is hysterical. Now I’m not trying to say that the American form of social security is perfect, far from it. And I am ignoring the fact that Chile has recently revised its social security, like it has many times before, to try and cover more people. I just find it odd that such a system is held up as the pinnacle of social security. Even prior to the reforms many on the right, including the then president George W. Bush, stated that the Chilean model is what the nation should strive for social security to be. Continue reading →

Of Crabs and Men – How Economic Spite and Fear Gets Us Nowhere

“If I have it this bad, why shouldn’t they?” You’d think words like this only came from annoying toddlers, but I hear it all the time here, usually speaking about teachers, but more broadly it’s about all government employees. I had a discussion the other day with someone that claimed government employees never got hit by the recession. Not only that, but he argued that it’d be good if they did get hit even more. This isn’t the first person I’ve met with that sort of mindset, nor will it be the last.

First, this factually wrong, because pay raises were stopped and harsh budget cuts were enacted in state and local governments throughout the US. Many workers were laid off, and hiring was frozen, leaving  those lucky enough to have a job to pull things together and perhaps do the work of more than one person. The LA Times points to a report by the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government, “which calculates that while private-sector employment is down 3.1% from its peak in January 2008 and on the rebound, state and local government employment is down 3.4% from its peak in August 2008 and continuing to slide.” In addition to this, because of the commitment the public sector has to equal opportunity and affirmative action, the recession in the public sector is hitting women and African Americans the hardest.

It’s not only wrong, though. It’s dangerous, and there’s a great phrase for it. That phrase is crab mentality, and it refers to a scenario of crabs in a bucket. Individually they could escape, but they end up pulling each other back down. In the end none of them escape. This collective antagonism kills any chance that any will survive. It’s a very similar thing here, especially when you’re talking about a recession. Conventional wisdom is that during a recession the government will need to spend a bit more in order to jump start things and get the economy back on its feet. Conventional wisdom also says during this time, through no real fault of their own, many more people will need government programs. That’s just factually what a recession does, and that’s just factually how one gets out of a recession. Like the crabs, stuck in their bucket, though, we end up either not helping each other upward or even not letting our fellow humans climb. Like the crabs we end up pulling others downward.

When people are frustrated with their own lives they have a tendency to lash out at others. This translates to a feeling that government employees should be cut down even more. Let’s go over exactly why such a reaction would be terrible. Right now we’re not in the midst of a recession, but our unemployment still sits at 7.9%, and a lot of people are wondering exactly why we can’t lower that. Well, if you look at this chart you can see at least one reason:

publicjobchange

And here’s what the Economic Policy Institute says about that graphic:

How many more jobs would we have if the public sector hadn’t been shedding jobs for the last three years? The simplest answer is that the public sector has shed 627,000 jobs since June 2009. However, this raw job-loss figure understates the drag of public-sector employment relative to how the economy functions normally.

Over this same period, the overall population grew by 6.9 million. In June 2009 there were 7.3 public-sector workers for every 100 people in the U.S.; to keep that ratio constant given population growth, the public sector should have added roughly 505,000 jobs in the last three years. This means that, relative to a much more economically relevant trend, the public sector is now down more than 1.1 million jobs. And even against this more-realistic trend, these public-sector losses are dominated by austerity at the state and local level, with federal employment contributing only around 6 percent of this entire gap.

Paul Krugman points out a very similar thing here:
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His assessment is that if public employment mirrored the growth under Bush that by the time he wrote this (April 25, 2012) we’d have 1.3 million more government workers, and our unemployment rate would be less than 7 percent. That’s a almost a full point lower than it is now, and he wrote this a year ago!

In Wisconsin this fight against public workers came down to a fight about collective bargaining. Despite the fact that there’s really no correlation between collective bargaining and state budget deficits, that right just had to go.

Here’s what The New Republic says about the rollback in rights:

What proponents of the rollback in public-sector bargaining rights are unable to explain is how taking rights away from some American workers will improve the lot of others. How will denying collective bargaining rights for teachers, social workers, or parks employees in Wisconsin create good jobs in the private sector? How will taking away the rights of prison guards to bargain collectively in Ohio keep manufacturing jobs in the United States? How will reducing the pensions promised to government workers (often in return for their agreement to forego salary increases) create retirement security for private sector workers whose paltry 401Ks are unable to support them? How will holding down public-sector pay stop the erosion of the American middle-class—of which public-sector workers constitute a significant proportion?

What proponents of cutting government employment are unable to explain is how taking away jobs and cutting pay will help improve the lot of others. How will it helps a small business owner to have one more potential customer lose his job? How will it help him to have another potential customer get a cut in pay? What needs to be explained to everyone who proposes something like this is the interconnectedness of our entire economy. We are not islands with no relation to each other. Your spending is my potential profit. A cut in your pay is a cut in my potential profit. If that teacher you’re so jealous of gets her job cut, then that means every business she shops at gets their business cut. It’s all connected.

A solid example of this is found in the numbers released last week that show the US economy shrunk by .1 percent late last year. The reason for this? Government spending cuts. A lot cheered because those are spending cuts in our bloated defense budget, and I’d likely agree, but we shouldn’t cheer about an all around cut at this point. Cuts should still be made up elsewhere with spending, so that someone can at least chase that profit and we can all experience more hiring and more growth. Every cut we make at this point represents a cut to someone’s income or job somewhere.

Krugman goes further in blaming that shrinkage on the shrinking government sector. He says that “transfer payments like Medicare and Social Security are rising (although unemployment benefits are falling), but government purchases of stuff — mostly at the state and local level, where the stuff in question includes hiring schoolteachers — has been in fairly rapid decline.”

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What this shrinkage translates to is, according to him, a possible 1.5 percentage point higher unemployment than what we should have right now.

The result of his absolutely historic spite and fear throughout our state, local, and federal governments is seen here:
government

We’ve hit a historic decline in our government at one of the absolute worst times to do it.

John T. Harvey does a good job of pointing out exactly why the private sector needs the government to spend. He points out that the real drivers of economic growth are in Investment and Government Spending. Since WWII, government spending has been an affective counterbalance to business cycle falls in investment. When a recession hits, government spending, without any sort of legislation attached, goes up simply because of less tax receipts and more people qualifying for things like unemployment. It’s this spending that makes these recessions less severe and damaging to the country overall, and it’s at least partially why we didn’t experience another Great Depression.

So, we really should not give in to fear and spite. I realize that a lot of people now are working themselves to the bones, perhaps with two or three jobs, and not seeing much in the way of raises. Seeing someone else doing ok can be hard, but we must not let that mean we should take it from them. That hurts us all in the long run. It’s like cutting off your nose to spite your face. Pulling down your fellow humans as they try and escape from the bucket into the middle class during this recession does nothing but doom us all to continuing stagnation. Instead of looking to one another to see what we should cut down at this time, we in the private sector should really be looking to one another and seeing how we can come together to demand better. After all, the “U.S. corporations’ after-tax profits have grown by 171 percent under Obama, more than under any president since World War II.” The money is there. We just have to demand it. And then things will grow, because we all have more to spend.

Immigration and the Republican Divide

Image Source: Reuters

Image Source: Reuters

This past Monday, a group of eight senators, four Democrat and four Republican, announced a legislative plan to address the eleven million illegal immigrants who currently reside within the United States. Not only is the makeup of those making the announcement bipartisan, but the ideas within the proposal are as well. The legislation would create a path to citizenship for those who are already within the United States while making significant increases to border security. The following day, President Obama essentially endorsed the Senate proposal. Achieving true immigration reform is something that is politically beneficial to both parties, as it’s an issue that Democrats have sought to address for some time and it’s becoming increasingly obvious that the GOP’s disastrous support among Latinos is a recipe for defeat on a national level, something Senator John McCain admitted.

Senator McCain’s public admission of their dire electoral situation highlights the feeling among establishment Republicans who see the writing on the wall that says that unless they do something to address the 3-to-1 advantage Democrats have with Latinos, they are going to be in trouble in future elections. Despite this reality, the base and the non-elected, de-facto representatives of the Republican base are not so pleased with this idea.

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Senator Ron Johnson Fails Again

It should surprise no one that tea bagger senator, Ron Johnson, is a fan of Ayn Rand. He recently gave an interview with the Rand-inspired, Atlas Society, where he made, as you would expect from someone like Johnson, a lot of stupid comments. However, one particular thing he said hasn’t achieved as much attention as it probably should have (skip to 6:37):

For those of you who can’t watch clips at work:

“It’s a real concern,” Johnson said, when asked if he saw examples of the private sector “shrugging”—that is, wilting under the pressure of government regulations. “As I talk to business owners that maybe started their businesses in the ’70s and ’80s, they tell me, with today’s level of taxation and regulation, there’s no way I can start my business today.”

Sigh.

See, this is why it’s difficult to have a grown up conversation with these folk. This is yet another example of a far right douchebag trying to argue his case by once again rewriting history.

So taxes in the 70s and 80s were much more business friendly than under Chairman ObaMAO’s regime? Let’s take a look, shall we? Here’s a list of the historical corporate tax rates from the non partisan Tax Policy Center. A quick glance shows that the top rates ranged from 49.2% in 1970 to 40% through 1987, with the last few years of that decade going at 34%. How does that compare to the anti freedom environment we have today? Currently, the rate is a whopping 35%!

Well, that appears to somewhat undermine Johnson’s complaint. But Let’s continue. What about the capital gains tax rate? The rate seemed to range from 20% on the low end, to as high as nearly 40% in those two decades. Up until the the beginning of this year, the rate under the entire first term for Obama was a crushing….15%?

Hmm.

So how do you suppose Johnson squares this circle? I would imagine that he rationalizes in by one of two ways. One theory is that Johnson may belong to that group of people who subscribe to the belief that numbers worked differently back in the old days before the stupid liberals recruited the homosexuals to write our arithmetic textbooks.

Alternatively, as Johnson has demonstrated quite recently, it could be that he simply just doesn’t care about getting his facts in order.

Unusual New Arguments Against Same-Sex Marriage

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Gay Marriage has come a long way over the past years. It seemed the 2012 election especially spelled the turning of the tide toward equality for same-sex couples. The past had been shaky for voting in gay marriage, but finally it won in 3 states, Maine, Maryland and Washington state. Minnesota voters also weighed in by defeating a possible “traditional” marriage amendment. In addition to all that, we elected our first openly gay U.S. senator, Tammy Baldwin.

Factually, the best is yet to come. History seems to be on the side of same-sex marriage. It’s just a matter of time. Advocates have been wondering, though, whether that time would come much sooner than anyone had predicted. Back in December the Supreme Court decided it would take up two separate cases on the matter. One is on California’s Prop 8, which could either accept or reject a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. The other is on the Defense of Marriage Act, the law signed by Bill Clinton that says no state is required to recognize a same-sex marriage from another state, and for federal benefit purposes same-sex marriage is not recognized.

People are wondering whether Chief Justice Roberts will be primarily concerned with his legacy or what one normally thinks of as conservative principles. What makes speculation on this so interesting is that he actually did pro bono work on a landmark gay rights case. That might not mean anything, though. He could have just been representing his clients to the best of his ability. We don’t really know. There’s also a lot of wiggle room to decide. It could push same-sex marriage as a right throughout the country, or rule much more narrowly for California.

The arguments the lawyers defending DOMA and Prop 8 came out last week, and the justification feels especially bizarre. Here’s what Paul D. Clement, lawyer for the House Republicans wrote:

“[Traditional Marriage Laws] reflect a unique social difficulty with opposite-sex couples that is not present with same-sex couples — namely, the undeniable and distinct tendency of opposite-sex relationships to produce unplanned and unintended pregnancies. Unintended children produced by opposite-sex relationships and raised out-of-wedlock would pose a burden on society.”

That’s right, the argument is no longer that same-sex marriage is immoral. It’s not that same-sex marriage would be a menace on our society or a slippery slope to “man on dog,” or marrying a table or a clock. No, now it has nothing to do with the apparent ridiculousness to conservatives of same-sex people being able to fall in love. It doesn’t even have anything to do with the myth that children are better with opposite-sex couples than same-sex ones, something which has been disproven. Now the argument is that opposite-sex coupling is actually inherently so dangerous to society as a whole that we need to incentivize them to bond more permanently. We can’t trust them to figure things out themselves. The idea is, apparently, that same-sex couples have to plan to have a child, and thus they don’t need marriage. Shall we call this the shotgun traditional marriage defense?

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The Changing World and the Rise of Drones

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Before we begin, you might be wondering where I stand on the issue. I understand the need for it, but I also understand its concerns. To say it is right or it is wrong will mean that I have the answers. I do not. I neither promote nor condemn it, because it is not a black and white issue with clear cut answers. I could think of ways to reduce its usage and make everyone happy in the process, but it’s not that easy. Every one of us should deeply think about its place in today’s warfare and come up with at least a little bit of understanding on its usage. My article seeks to do that by expounding on its use in today’s global political climate.

In the light UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights’ review of American Military’s usage of Drone strikes, I think it’s apt to understand why modern warfare has changed. The inquiry was sponsored by Russia, China and Pakistan.

In my opinion, the 2003 invasion of Iraq will be the last time we will see a “traditional war”. Even though Russia, Pakistan and China have launched the anti-American policy inquiry, we will never go to war with them. Iran and North Korea are the only two countries on earth that are still remaining in our “Axis of Evil” list created by President George W. Bush. Despite the war cries from the likes of Sen. John McCain, there won’t be an Iran invasion partly due to the realization of drain on the economic health of a country, but mostly due to globalization. In the past 30 years, the world has become more open due to commerce, diplomatic efforts and citizen journalism. The last bastion of dictators has been wiped from South America, Eastern Europe and now Middle East, which always hosted some of the most ruthless rulers in modern history. Apartheid has failed. The walls have been shattered, revolutions have sprung, democracies incubated and voices heard. This era of transformations will continue our Global Village Project forward.

Moving forward, the greatest challenge the west faces is not sovereign countries, but non-state actors. Though there is always the possibility that a fringe group could successfully attempt a coup d’etat on a country like Russia or Pakistan and start a traditional war, the likelihood of that happening has been shrinking due to shared intel and joint operations between countries. Now I’m not saying that we will never ever see a large-scale war. We will, at some point in time. But it will be something like Operation Allied Force or more recently, Operation Unified Protector.

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