Michael Tomasky's Blog, page 49
October 13, 2010
Think Progress v. Chamber of Commerce | Michael Tomasky
Some of you, especially the Yanks, may have been following the allegation that the US Chamber of Commerce, which has launched a massive, $75 million campaign to unseat Democrats this November, is commingling foreign money into that pool of expenditures, which would be potentially illegal. The allegations first surfaced last week at Think Progress, the web site affiliated with the Center for American Progress.
Last week, TP's reporting was a bit speculative. I won't bog you down with all the details, but TP basically made a reasonable surmise based on the known fund-raising practices of the Chamber's overseas branches. They asked the CoC, which stonewalled.
Mainstream media pick-up quoted CoC representatives, but never anyone from the web site. Those representatives have in essence maintained that the chamber does indeed have foreign or multinational members, but they tend to be companies that have extensive operations and/or have long done business in the US - BP, say, or Shell.
Today, TP's Lee Fang has put new flesh on the bones of the charge. In a new investigation, Fang has identified 84 more foreign companies that donate to the CoC's 501c6 arm that is used, he writes, for attack ads. Dues contributions from these companies to the c6 total $885,000 - still not a large percentage of $75 million, but a pretty penny indeed, and far, far more than the $100,000 the chamber earlier acknowledged came from foreign companies.
I thought it was a little tawdry, frankly, for Obama and Axelrod to start road-testing this one in the past few days, before there was good documentation on it. I mean, as allegations go, it's not up there with saying Bill Clinton helped kill Vince Foster, or outing Valerie Plame; but a sitting president should not make statements he can't back up factually.
Now, however, this story takes on a new aspect. Here's nearly a million foreign dollars, and Fang notes it could be more, that's apparently going directly into a group running attack ads. Speaking of allegations against Bill Clinton, the charge that he was injecting foreign money into US political campaigns was, in the 1990s, deemed by Republicans to be worthy of congressional hearings.
It will be very interesting now to see how the rest of the media follow this. They will be cautious about (that could be read: snooty about) following the lead of small and partisan web site. But certainly the chamber has more questions to answer.
Chamber representatives do have the benefit of appearing on Fox "News" to give their side of the story, as they have been doing. Fox is owned of course by the News Corporation. What is the News Corporation? A $1 million donor to that same Chamber of Commerce attack campaign.
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The most dangerous jobs | Michael Tomasky
I see that some of you have launched into a conversation about the most dangerous jobs, with some saying that being a cop or fire fighter is comparatively not all that dangerous. It's true, really. I once spoke with an NYPD guy who told me the percentage of cops who retired from the force without ever once unholstering their service revolvers.
I don't remember the number, but it was stunningly high. Maybe 80-something percent? Don't hold me to that, but it was shocking. And that's New York City. Forget all these small towns where they don't even really have crime in the sense we normally speak of it (although they do have meth labs).
Anyway, here's a rule to live by: Whatever the topic, there's probably a report on it. And sure enough, I have cunningly located for your reading pleasure this US government report (pdf) on workplace fatalities in America in 2009. The chart on page four tells the sad tale.
Most dangerous job in America: fishing. By a country mile, in fact, with 200 fatal injuries per 100,000 full-time equivalent workers. Next: loggers, at 62. The bronze goes to, and this I find more than mildly disconcerting, aircraft pilots and flight engineers, at 57. Then come farmers and ranchers (9mile, watch those limbs and digits!), roofers, structural iron and steel workers, etc. Mining, which one thought might have been higher, sees just 13 deaths per 100,000 (see p. 3 chart). Cops and fire fighters don't even make the charts.
The table on p. 9 tells us more. It seems 243 deaths befell the combined "protective service occupations," divvied up into "law enforcement workers" (108), "fire fighting and prevention workers" (29), and "other protective service workers" (81). I don't know what these others are. By contrast, "grounds maintenance workers" lost 147 of their brethren and sistren last year.
Of course, workplace fatalities are only one way to measure danger. You have only to watch a little Law & Order to see that banging down a drug dealer's door is high-risk work, even if you don't get killed. I support the idea that cops, and fire fighters to a lesser extent but them too, should be able to retire earlier than other categories of public employees with a decent pension.
For my money, the worst job in the world is cane-cutting. I read a book about it. Unspeakable work. They wear these thick and heavy metal shin-and-ankle guards because the possibility of hacking off one's own foot is so high. Made worse, of course, by the speed at which their masters see to it that they have to do their work. And they live, many of them, in conditions of virtual peonage.
The sugar industry has been one of America's most powerful for 150 years or more. In the 19th century, the US Senate, for example, was pretty much owned lock, stock and barrel by the railroads, oil and gas, steel, and sugar. The conditions in which many cane-cutters work today is something that I think most Americans simply wouldn't believe; they would not accept that it could happen in the US.
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On the subject of a grand left-right bargain | Michael Tomasky
CautiousOptimist wrote on the last thread at 1:07 pm:
MT talks a lot about bipartisanship, but that typically means he wants the Republicans to agree with the Democrats. But I hear very little about the Democrats agreeing with Republicans. And I think there are areas where the Republicans have valuable views.
Naturally, I don't think this is entirely fair to moi. I feel like I said several times during the healthcare debate that I would vastly prefer bipartisan outcomes even if it meant (and in practice it would always mean) that the legislation in question was less quote-unquote liberal. If both Democrats and Republicans participate in crafting legislation, then both Democrats and Republicans down the road will have an interest in preserving it and correcting it. This is an unremarkable position. It's the way the legislative process works...in countries where it works, a list that doesn't include my country, and while the D's are a long way from perfect, the R's are clearly more to blame than the D's.
The funny thing is, and the thing most people forget, that the Democrats have compromised. The default Democratic position on healthcare (most Democrats, if someone died and made them emperor) is a single-payer British or Canadian-style system. But that's socialism. So a compromise was crafted called the public option. But that was socialism, too. So what the Democrats ended up passing was modeled largely on...Republican Mitt Romney's Massachusetts plan, and Republican John Chafee's 1993 alternative to Hillarycare.
But guess what? That's socialism too. Did I say this was a "funny" thing? It's really not so funny.
Same thing with cap-and-trade. The default Democratic position is a carbon tax. Cap-and-trade is a free-market alternative to a tax. But suddenly it too is...guess what? Most of the Democratic platform is compromise.
But okay: here's one issue on which I do fault Democrats, and it's one many of you conservative commentators complain about bitterly - public employee unions, and especially the pension obligations.
David Brooks addressed this yesterday in an interesting column about New Jersey's effort to build a rail tunnel. I thought his premise was a little cockeyed. Capital financing of big infrastructure projects is typically a different pot of money than operating budgets. But point taken. Public pension obligations are onerous.
But, they're not as onerous as Brooks makes them sound, wrote Ezra Klein in a very fact-based riposte yesterday. For starters, Klein notes that New Jersey governor Chris Christie didn't fund his state's $3.1 billion pension obligation this year, so that could hardly be the reason New Jersey can't come up with the tunnel money.
But the real point is this:
Brooks's column doesn't do much to put the pension obligations of the states in context, so we'll do it here. Just today, Alicia H. Munnell, Jean-Pierre Aubry and Laura Quinby released a paper (pdf) tallying up the pension problem. "Public plans are substantially underfunded," they conclude, but "in the aggregate, they currently account for only 3.8 percent of state and local spending." Roll that around for a minute. Pension obligations currently account for 3.8 percent of the average state's spending. That's not where the current crisis is coming from...
..."The problem in this moment," says Betsy Zeidman, director of the Center for Emerging Domestic Markets at the Milken Institute, "is revenue." The word "revenue," incidentally, doesn't appear in Brooks's column.
The revenue problem is a result of the bad economy, of course, but also a function of the fact that we are forbidden to discuss taxes at the national level. I urge to you click through to Ezra's post because he makes two or three other highly salient points on this, all backed up empirically.
All that said: I can understand why some people on the right get frosted at the idea that someone can retire at age 52 or 53, or younger in the case of cops and fire fighters, and get a handsome pension and health plan for possibly 30 years or more and go pursue a new career too. It's a basic fairness issue.
And I will acknowledge quite plainly that Democrats will probably never do anything about this, at the national level. AFSCME is too powerful in Democratic politics. Some Democrats at the state and local level will inevitably make public pension cuts - they'll have to. And they'll probably be lionized by the media for having kicked the unions. That's how it works in this country.
If someday the political atmosphere in this country becomes less toxic, a scene I'd like to see is Democrats and Republicans actually being leaders and announcing a grand bargain whereby reasonable cuts are made to public-employee pension and health plans, and reasonable tax increases (a higher marginal rate for really high-end earners, a carbon tax, a gas tax) are agreed to. But it's an impossibility in this country now and for the foreseeable future. Both sides are to blame, but I say and will always say that the R's are more to blame on all of these questions because one can't even talk about taxes with them.
Budgets are about spending and revenue. We talk all the time about spending. We don't talk about taxes, except to lower them more and more from what are already 80-year lows.
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Video | Tomasky Talk: US midterms 2010: Ohio
Michael Tomasky rounds up all the midterm contests in this bellweather state, featuring tight races for governor and senate
Michael TomaskyUntempered adversity | Michael Tomasky
Sorry about yesterday, gang. I had to go to New York, and I was planning on blogging on the train. The Acela has wifi now. Well, they have wifi in theory. In practice things are somewhat more complicated.
On the way up, it took about (not exaggerating) four to five minutes to load a page. I finally got this page I'm looking at right now loaded (i.e., the page in the Guardian remote tools system on which I actually type these posts) after considerable waiting. I wrote about 200 words of a post, pressed save: and the screen went dead.
On the way home, I got online quickly, but it refused to let me visit any site except the Amtrak welcome page, which sort of put a damper on my researches. Every site I tried to visit, it looked for about one second as if it was going there, and then zoom, back to the Amtrak "Let's get started!" page. And I don't think it was just me. The two people I was riding up with had problems similar to mine, one of them able to fight through the cyber-molasses, the other not. IE, Firefox, didn't matter. They have a few kinks to work out. But they do offer far more leg room than the Eurostar, as previously discussed.
Anyway, reduced as I was to old media, I actually read a physical copy of The New Yorker, which contained this fine essay by the historian Sean Wilentz on the Tea Party movement and the historical transformation of right-wing extremism over the last 50 years from something shunned by "respectable" conservatism to something embraced and encouraged and applauded by it.
Read it. You will see where these "ideas" of people like Glenn Beck come from, and how truly crackpot they are. Crackpot. And made up, either out of whole cloth or out of a paranoid reordering and reinterpretation of a few loose facts. It's really pretty sobering. Wilentz:
[Glenn] Beck's version of American history relies on lessons from his own acknowledged inspiration, the late right-wing writer W. Cleon Skousen, and also restates charges made by the Birch Society's founder, Robert Welch. The political universe is, of course, very different today from what it was during the Cold War. Yet the Birchers' politics and their view of American history—which focussed more on totalitarian threats at home than on those posed by the Soviet Union and Communist China—has proved remarkably persistent. The pressing historical question is how extremist ideas held at bay for decades inside the Republican Party have exploded anew—and why, this time, Party leaders have done virtually nothing to challenge those ideas, and a great deal to abet them.
Sean's answer to this question, bruited further down in the piece, is this:
Whatever misgivings may have arisen about him on the right, Reagan achieved a dramatic conservative overhaul of the federal tax code, a profound reconfiguring of the judiciary, and a near-victory for the West in the Cold War. From the standpoint of the mainstream right, the only problem with his legacy was that no other Republican could come close to matching his public appeal and political savvy. For the party of Reagan, his departure was the beginning of a long decline, and it is the absence of a similarly totemic figure, during the past twenty years, that has allowed the current resurgence of extremism.
I'm not sure I entirely agree with that. It's a factor. As I've written, George W. Bush was no Reagan, but his presence in the White House and certain things he did, like saying that we were not at war with Islam, kept the lid on some of the venomous craziness we've seen in the past few months.
But I say follow the money. Many prominent corporate titans in America since the 1920s have inveighed against the state and equated liberalism with socialism and then communism and sought (for their own comfort and bottom line, of course) to have the state stripped out of their lives like the bark off a tree. They've never been able to do it, for various reasons. Now they smell blood. This is not to say that the Tea Party is entirely orchestrated by corporate interests: merely that it is extremely convenient to them.
Anyway, we are in a truly crazy period, which we know, but I recommend this essay because it puts some meat on the bones of the general argument about why and how the modern right and GOP have become so extreme - what the sources are, and how those sources have been permitted to go mainstream.
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October 11, 2010
Sleeper issue: Colas | Michael Tomasky
Looking for a sleeper issue this election? We may see one stir and wake up on Friday, when the Social Security Administration is expected to announce that senior citizens won't get Colas for the second straight year. I don't mean Pepsis. I mean cost of living increases.
This is not a political decision of any sort but a straightforward actuarial one. If the consumer price index for wage earners doesn't go up from September of the previous year to September of the current one, there's no Cola in the current fiscal year (which really tracks more closely to calendar year 2011 than 2010, since the fiscal year starts October 1). The September 2010 numbers will come in Friday, and it is universally expected that they will not justify an increase under law.
There wasn't one last year either. But last year wasn't an election year. This is. And an off-year election, in which seniors make up a higher-than-typical proportion of the vote.
You'd think most senior citizens would understand how this works, and it's the law and all that. Still, that seems unlikely to prevent Republicans from saying "Barack Obama is denying you your cost-of-living increase." In fairness, Democrats would probably do much the same thing if the situation were reversed, but Republicans are just more ferocious about this sort of thing in general, as we know, and some of them will undoubtedly find a way to imply that Obama doesn't want them to get their benefits because they aren't Muslim or something.
It is possible for Congress to vote for a lump-sum increase anyway - say, $250, which would in many cases be not too much less than the total annual benefit increase (typically in the area of $300 or $350 most years, as I recall) but would not, if voted as a lump-sum, count in the ongoing Social Security benefit increase calculation. North Dakota House Democrat Earl Pomeroy, fighting for his political life up there on the lone prairie and likely to lose, wants to do just that.
Well, a, Congress is adjourned until after the election. It would seem to me that Democrats could still campaign on the promise that they will do this, but that's not the same as doing it before an election.
So, two and half weeks before voting day, the largest bloc of voters in the country is going to be told that the government is not increasing their benefit. I wonder how Bush and Rove would've handled this...
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Back when there were compromisers| Michael Tomasky
Reading something like this from last Friday's Times is just a sick joke. Republicans expressing nostalgia for the moderate, reasonable Bill Clinton? Please. They set out to destroy Bill Clinton, and at the time they called him most of the things they're now calling Obama, except for Muslim, a term that didn't have a very high Q-rating then.
I also note that Trent Lott, now a millionaire lobbyists, is still wearing just about the same stripes he donned when he was waxing nostalgic about Strom Thurmond's America, with the difference that he's learned how to put things more decorously:
"You know with Clinton the chemistry was right," said Trent Lott, the former Senate majority leader. "He was a good old boy from Arkansas, I was a good old boy from Mississippi, and Newt, he was from Georgia. So he knew what I was about, and I knew where he was coming from."
I would translate that for you, but I don't think it needs it.
Another bleak irony of this, as Ezra Klein pointed out, is that Obama's socialistic big-government healthcare plan bears a funny resemblance to...the 1993 Republican plan that was offered by then-senator John Chafee as a responsible, free-market-friendly alternative to Bill and Hillary Clinton's socialistic big-government plan. See this chart and this article for more on that.
Of course today's conservatives will say, Chafee was a sell-out, which is why we drummed him and his no-good son out of the party. To which the planet earth response is, well, yes, they were moderate Republicans who believed in certain principles but also believed in the legislative process and didn't think that Bill Clinton was illegitimate because he got only 43% of the vote and didn't think liberals were evil and thought, quite unlike Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, that governing had a substantive element to it, beyond cutting taxes and regulation.
Nearly every word out of these people's mouths is spoken for the purpose of immediate political advantage. They tried to kick Bill Clinton out of office. High-ranking people, like a sitting federal judge and a man who went on to become solicitor general, participated in schemes to spring an impeachment trap on him, and Republican lawmakers winked and went along and thundered about Clinton's morality. They made the Washington air thick with hatred.
But today, because it's to their advantage in this political moment to speak well of him...and part of the problem here, by the way, is journalism. The Times piece does not quote one single person calling out the bulls--- here. This kind of moral neutrality about matters with moral elements is a big, not-often discussed part of mainstream journalism's problem.
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October 8, 2010
Naturally, it's more sinister than that | Michael Tomasky
In my last post, I mentioned how Murdoch "gives every right-wing reject who develops a following a Fox welfare check."
It was a throwaway line, and I didn't think much of the practice. Just the usual degree of cynicism. But after posting I read this column by Eric Alterman that put the pieces together in a rather brilliant way that I have to confess hadn't occurred to me. He is referring here to Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee, all of whom have Fox contracts:
In the first place, one must note the oddity of this situation. After all, what are political candidates doing working for a "news" station? Isn't that inconsistent with very idea of journalism? Can these candidates be trusted to tell the truth about themselves, their supporters, and their opponents? What's more, what is it about Fox that would entice these candidates to give the station exclusive access to their appearances?
Politico quotes C-SPAN Political Editor Steve Scully explaining that when C-SPAN tried to interview Sarah Palin, "he was told he had to first get Fox's permission—which the network, citing her contract, ultimately denied. Producers at NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, and MSNBC all report similar experiences." "We have tried to book many of them, but they have always refused, saying they are exclusive to Fox," explained another rival network staffer.
The Politico reporters note that when these candidates appear on the network, like most Republicans, they simply "offer their views on issues of the day." Rarely if ever are they expected to defend their views or answer to any potential inconsistencies.
Think about it. Fox is paying the people they are alleging to cover, and this makes them off limits to any actual coverage save straightforward propaganda. "We're acutely aware of this" explained a "Fox insider" in the Politico story. And yet, "The cold reality is, nobody at the reporter level has any say on this," added someone Politico described as "another source familiar with the inner workings of Fox." Nobody will talk about it on the record, outside of C-SPAN, apparently for fear of retribution.
That is really quite astonishing. These people are all potential future presidential candidates. But because Roger Ailes gave them a press card and made them sign exclusivity agreements, they cannot go on other news air and submit to questions. The Orwellian beauty part is that such agreements are of course standard for high-profile television personalities - Tom Brokaw could not have appeared on a CBS News show back in his day, for example - so on one level Fox isn't doing anything unusual!
So these people get to be members of the media for as long as that's convenient for them. What if one of them were caught up in a genuine scandal? They wouldn't talk to 60 Minutes or The New York Times? They'd only go on Fox and give prepared statements and be asked softball questions? That's kinda how it looks.
This really is Big Brother time. Does Sky do this sort of thing? I guess it's different because the Tories are now in power, but I wouldn't think he could get away with it there. I also think this is arguably more Ailes than Murdoch. Murdoch covers bases; remember, he semi-wanted to endorse Obama. Ailes is hard-hard-core.
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Video | Tomasky Talk | US mid-terms 2010: West Virginia
Michael Tomasky discusses the senate race in his home state, where the popular Democratic governor Joe Manchin is struggling to beat Republican challenger John Raese, who has been very successful running an 'anti-Obama, anti-Washington' campaign
Michael TomaskyShe's not me, by a longshot | Michael Tomasky
After declaring myself uninterested in Christine O'Donnell, I must confess that she does keep delivering surprises. Here is the second ad in her already-famous "I'm You" series, in which she avows that she didn't go to Yale or inherit a million bucks like her opponent.
In the first one, which I didn't discuss on this blog but which you probably saw, she started out by affirming that she was not, in fact, a witch. She speaks in front of a plain black background in both messages, and says "I'm You" at least twice in each.
Dave Weigel thinks these are terrible ads, and I suppose that by conventional measures they are. But they're terrible only if you think she's running for Senate. I think she's running for The View (note to Brits: our most popular daytime women's talk show, featuring Barbara Walters, Whoopi Goldberg and Elisabeth Hasselbeck).
It's long been the case in America that people move from other realms into politics: Ronald Reagan and George Murphy from acting, Jim Bunning and many others from sports, et cetera. It's lately also been the case more lately that some who try for public office, or even serve in it briefly but are retired by the voters, move into other public forums, mostly media. This has been accelerated by Rupert, who gives every right-wing reject who develops a following a Fox welfare check.
But O'Donnell may be the first person who (to my eye) really is not deep down interested in winning office but in losing in just the right way - establishing a public profile that is endearing and enraging, that traduces bien-pensant liberalism but does so without all those Palinesque hard edges - that will permit her to launch a media career. So I have come around to the view that she is sort of a postmodern genius and an emblem of a future America in which technology finally erases all distinctions between politics and entertainment and enables all of us to become cross-platform performers, if we have the cunning.
She is very much Not Me, by a long shot. But a part of me appreciates her savvy. Whereas someone like Sharron Angle is just a batty loon, who either gets to the Senate or goes off to the desert to suck on cacti. Politico has a big story today about how Harry Reid's people are nervous. It's a story that is Drudge-ified in that way that Politico political stories often are, based mostly around a Rasmussen poll and a Fox poll. But it does make a fair point: Reid had months, and millions, to define her, and she's still close or sometimes ahead, and that's with a third tea-party candidate in the race stealing 5-7% of the vote, surely all from her. There are lots of wacos running for Senate, but I think I find her the wackiest.
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