The WAWG Blog

Rick Perry Starts Drawing $90,000 Annual Retirement while Teachers and Other State Workers Suffer – Rick Perry — who isn’t stepping down as governor — nevertheless was able to officially “retire” this year for benefits purposes, a move that gives him about $90,000 more in annual retirement compensation on top of his $150,000 salary as governor.

The move may open him up to criticism from rivals, who can point to Mr. Perry’s recent suggestions that the retirement age for Social Security and the age eligibility for Medicare be raised — two government programs that many older Americans depend on to make ends meet.

The Perry campaign disclosed the information in Mr. Perry’s newest filing with federal election regulators.

The governor defended his pension decision at a campaign stop Friday in Cherokee, Iowa.

“That’s a program that’s been in place for decades as far as I know,” he said at a coffee shop. “I would be surprised why someone would not take a retirement they were eligible for. That’s just kind of good estate planning in my opinion.”

The Texas Democratic Party blasted Mr. Perry’s move as nothing more than an on-the-job pay raise while state workers were being fired for budget reasons.

“When you start getting more money from your employer while also continuing to receive your salary, that’s called a raise,” a Democratic Party spokesman, Anthony Gutierrez, said. “Somehow this Republican budget doesn’t have room to pay teachers but they can give Rick Perry a $100k pay raise. If Perry wants retirement benefits he should do us all a favor and actually retire. Giving himself a raise while thousands of teachers are losing their jobs is unconscionable.”

NO TEXAS OFFICIAL HAS EVER DONE THIS. “Regular employees who retire and return to work get their pension frozen and don’t accrue additional years of service — and those people are strongly criticized as being double-dippers and trying to exploit a unique situation, ” said Mike Gross, head of the Texas State Employees Union.

Republicans Causing Backlogs in Courts by Holding Up Judicial Nominees – With just days left in the Senate’s 2011 calendar, there are still 21 judicial nominees waiting for their final floor votes.
Here are the shocking figures on nominations and confirmations over the last month:

• 21 pending nominees
• 19 with very strong bipartisan support
• 16 unopposed in committee
• 9 to fill judicial emergencies
• 1 confirmed this week

All Americans rely on the courts to protect our rights. Now it’s time for the Senate to simply do its job and hold votes on all pending nominees.

Click here to send a message to your Senators and the Senate leaders. Tell them that the obstruction and partisan games must end.

Republican Party is Extreme and Uncompromising According to Poll of American People – According to the latest Pew Research polling, the Republican leaders are being more and more seen as the root of government’s failure to accomplish anything, and the party is almost twice as often viewed as “extreme and uncompromising” in compared to the Democrats.

“The Republican Party is taking more of the blame than the Democrats for a do-nothing Congress. A record-high 50% say that the current Congress has accomplished less than other recent Congresses, and by nearly two-to-one more blame Republican leaders than Democratic leaders for this. By wide margins, the GOP is seen as the party that is more extreme in its positions, less willing to work with the other side to get things done, and less honest and ethical in the way it governs. And for the first time in over two years, the Democratic Party has gained the edge as the party better able to manage the federal government,” according to the poll.

Why Do Our Laws Favor the Ultra-Rich? –

42% of our U.S. Representatives and 43% of U.S. Senators are in the top 1% of wealth.

63% of our U.S. Representatives and 83% of U.S. Senators are in the top 10% of wealth.

Republican Mythical Billionaire Job-Creators Just Can’t Be Found – The Republicans have substituted “job creator” for the word “rich” in discussions of tax policy. It is absolute standard practice for them to object to taxing people who have money by saying that this will reduce job creation.

Since this claim has become so central in policy debates, Morning Edition decided to do what any reasonable news organization might do: see if it is true. Morning Edition called the Republican party and asked to be put in contact with some tax burdened job creators. They were unable to provide anyone for NPR to interview. NPR then contacted several of the business lobbies who have been complaining that higher taxes would impede job growth. These organizations were also unable to find any job creators who would speak to NPR.

NPR then put in a request to talk to job creators on Facebook. It got several responses from small business owners. The ones featured on its segment said that the personal tax rate would affect their disposable income but would have no effect on their hiring. This is pretty much what economic theory would predict.

Palin Guilty of Major Ethics Act Violation: Must Return $386,000 in Contributions – “Nearly a year after she quit her governorship of Alaska, Sarah Palin was found guilty today of another breach of the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act involving her so-called Alaska Fund Trust (AFT), which she established as a private ‘legal defense fund’ while governor.

Regards,

Jim

A Newt 2012 Position Paper – Compiled from previous writings of and paid for by Newt Gingrich:

Looks like what Newt is proposing is to reduce the power and protections of the judicial branch of our government in favor of the other two. Remember, the Executive and Legislative are elected by a minority of the voting age public, a public who are becoming less and less educated as our public education system is de-funded to pay for tax cuts for the mega and ultra rich.

In other words, let’s constrain the power of the one branch that can still protect the 99% while the other two branches do the bidding of the ONE%.

Here are some excerpts from the referenced document above:

Judicial Supremacy and The Power Grab of the Lawyer Class

Judicial Supremacy’s Assault on National Security, Religious Liberty, and National Sovereignty

Rejecting Judicial Supremacy: History of Executive and Legislative Actions to Check and Balance the Judicial Branch

Reestablishing a Balance of Power Today: Reasserting Executive and Legislative Branch Powers to Check and Balance the Judiciary

Appendix A – Catalog of Warnings About the Dangers of Judicial Supremacy and the Judicial Branch Exceeding its Authority

Appendix B – Federal District Court Judge Orders the Censoring of High School Graduation Speech

Appendix C – Historical Grounds for Impeachment of Judges

Appendix D – Relevant Source Materials on the topic of Judicial Supremacy and Executive and Legislative Powers to Check and Balance the Judicial Branch

Republican Operative Guilty of Voter Suppression – A jury has found a former aide to Gov. Bob Ehrlich guilty of conspiring to suppress the black vote by using robocalls during last year’s gubernatorial election. The robocalls went out to about 112,000 Democratic voters in Prince George’s County and Baltimore City — largely black jurisdictions — on Election Day 2010, suggesting that the election was over before the polls closed and that Gov. Martin O’Malley had already won.

Mitt Romney Says He Doesn’t Need to Know Anything to Make a Decision – When asked about his views on climate change at a campaign event, Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney replied that although he did not know enough, he had already made up his mind about what his policy would be.

“I’m not a scientist, so I don’t know the answer to these things,” he told the questioner. “I think the earth is getting warmer. May be wrong. I think we probably contribute something to it, but I don’t know if we contribute a little or a lot. And therefore, when I come to the policies I’d put in place, I do not support cap and trade policies, which raise the cost of energy.”

“Scientists will figure that out ten, twenty, fifty years from now,” he concluded.

In sharp contrast with Romney’s suggestion that the question of climate change can be deferred for another fifty years, however, the majority of scientists have already concluded that man-made global warming is real, has already contributed to an unprecedented number of climate disasters, and will be irreversible unless significant changes are made within the next decade.

Wall Street Received Loans at as Low as 0.01 Percent… Could You? – The GAO’s main report on its audit of the Federal Reserve exposed who received the trillions and trillions of dollars in Fed bailouts. But the GAO report wasn’t very specific about the terms of those bailouts. For that, we have the Freedom of Information Act records obtained by Bloomberg News, which Bloomberg wrote about last week. Among other things, Bloomberg reported that the Fed lent out this cash to Wall Street at rates “as low as 0.01 percent” t

o such worthy recipients as Bear Stearns, AIG, the Royal Bank of Scotland, etc., etc.
If you do that math, you’ll see that when the Fed gave Citigroup the money for a $200,000 mortgage, at 0.01 percent, Citigroup had to pay less than $2 each month for that money. Citigroup then lent that money to you – if it deigned to lend you anything – for maybe $1,000 a month, maybe more.

And that $40,000 credit card balance? Citigroup paid the Fed less than a dollar a month for that money. And you pay $1,000.

Citigroup pays $1. You pay $1,000.
Citigroup fell into such a deep hole that it had to borrow a “term-adjusted” $58,000,000,000 from the Fed, according to Page 132 of the GAO’s audit report.

And what would you get from the Fed, if you fell into a deep hole? Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Zip. Diddly-squat. Zero.

You wouldn’t get jack. If you lose your home, you can sleep in your car. If you lose your car, you can sleep under a bridge. Unless, of course, you’re a Wall Street banker.

Tea Party Insults the President – Patriot Freedom Alliance, the Tea Party of Hutchinson, Kansas, carries a picture of a skunk on its website and explains the skunk has replaced the eagle as the symbol for the president. “It is half black, half white, and almost everything it does, stinks,” it states.

Bill O’Reilly Lies About Man Who Asked Him Questions – Fox News host Bill O’Reilly claims he was accosted by a “screaming” man “armed with a cell phone camera” on December 7 while walking to a media party at the White House in Washington, D.C. On his show the next night (O’Reilly Factor, 12/8/11), O’Reilly explained, I told the guy to get lost, but he came closer and closer, armed with a cell phone camera. When he was about a foot away, I turned to shield myself and my assistant with an umbrella. At this point, we were just a few feet away from the White House gate.

According to O’Reilly, at the White House gate he tried to get the Secret Service and the D.C. police to arrest the man, but was told by a police officer that according to the law, no assault had occurred. Claiming the police had also told him that his tormenter was a member of the Occupy Wall Street movement, the Fox News host concluded his commentary with an attack on OWS.

The problem with O’Reilly’s account is…just about everything. As the videotape posted by interviewer Branden Lane shows, he was not screaming, he was much more than a foot away when O’Reilly opened his umbrella at him (apparently hitting his camera in the process), and did not appear threatening as he straightforwardly asked O’Reilly if he was returning from a fundraiser for Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich.

One could argue that the man was less threatening and intrusive, and more professional, than the video teams O’Reilly sends to ambush subjects while they are at their homes or on vacation or when they are with their young children. In fact, O’Reilly’s producers have actually physically interfered with subjects on some of their ambush stakeouts.

Fox New Trying to Send a Message to Their Radical Base?
Does Fox News think that Mitt Romney is not radical enough and is too much like President Obama? Look at this screen shot:

Regards,

Jim

Right-wing States Rights – Conservatives talk a lot about how states should retain their individual control over how they handle issues. But at the same time, they are attempting to secretly impose one-size-fits-all legislation at the state level through a corporate and billionaire-controlled organization called the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

Founded in 1973 by Paul Weyrich and other conservative activists, ALEC is a critical arm of the right-wing network of policy shops that, with infusions of corporate cash, has evolved to shape American politics. ALEC’s model legislation reflects long-term goals: downsizing government, removing regulations on corporations and making it harder to hold the economically and politically powerful to account. Corporate donors retain veto power over the language, which is developed by the secretive task forces. ALEC’s priorities for the 2011 session included bills to privatize education, break unions, deregulate major industries, pass voter ID laws and more. In states across the country they succeeded, with stacks of new laws signed by Republican governors like Ohio’s John Kasich and Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, both ALEC alumni.

The details of ALEC’s model bills have been available only to the group’s 2,000 legislative and 300 corporate members. But thanks to a leak to Aliya Rahman, an Ohio-based activist who helped organize protests at ALEC’s Spring Task Force meeting in Cincinnati, more than 800 documents representing decades of model legislation have come to light.

ALEC’s billionaire benefactors include Tea Party funders Charles and David Koch. “Dozens of corporations are investing millions of dollars a year to write business-friendly legislation that is being made into law in statehouses coast to coast, with no regard for the public interest,” says Bob Edgar of Common Cause. “This is proof positive of the depth and scope of the corporate reach into our democratic processes.” The full archive of ALEC documents is available at a new website, alecexposed.org, thanks to the Center for Media and Democracy, which has provided powerful tools for progressives to turn this knowledge into power.

Below are links to further reading about ALEC:

The Koch Connection

Rigging Elections

The Hidden History of ALEC and Prison Labor

Regards,

Jim

New Bill Allows Military To Detain You Indefinitely – It’s a bad sign when George W. Bush’s defense team thinks that a military bill goes too far in violating your rights. But we’ve got just that with the passing of the National Defense Authorization Act. This bill authorizes the military to detain American citizens indefinitely without giving them their Constitutional rights. Basically, if the military suspects that an American citizen has terrorist ties it can just throw them in military jail without the rights to habeas corpus, an attorney or just about anything.

It’s being called the “America the Battlefield” bill, because it treats your front yard like a battlefield — and every citizen like a potential enemy. It basically puts a giant asterisk next to the Bill of Rights saying, “unless we don’t feel like it.”

It’s no wonder that former a Bush State Department adviser said that this bill “would likely have been as strongly opposed by the Bush administration as by the Obama administration.” The same people who brought us waterboarding and the PATRIOT Act think that this is a step too far.

The Obama administration has signaled that it might veto this egregious attack on Americans’ rights, but his decision is still up in the air. To let him know how important constitutional liberties are to them, thousands of people are petitioning the President to veto the bill. If he fails to veto, it will likely go to the Supreme Court.

Maybe it’s not so bad — since corporations are people, the government could just indefinitely detain Goldman Sachs.

Norquist Tells GOP That Raising Taxes On The Middle Class Doesn’t Count As A Tax Increase – Anti-tax zealot Grover Norquist, the president of Americans For Tax Reform and author of the radical anti-tax pledge that has played a significant role in hamstringing budget and deficit-reduction negotiations, has said that it is unacceptable for those who have signed his pledge to vote in favor of any tax increase. But now that President Obama and congressional Democrats are backing a tax cut aimed at stimulating economic growth, Norquist has changed his tune.

Norquist met with Republican members Wednesday to let them know that opposing the extension of the payroll tax cut — which would provide many families an extra $1,000 a year — would not amount to supporting a tax increase.

That stands in contrast, however, to Norquist’s position on tax cuts for the wealthy. Norquist has repeatedly warned GOP members about voting in favor of repealing the Bush tax cuts for the rich or tax hikes on millionaires, even verbally sparring with a member of a group of millionaires advocating for higher taxes on themselves last month in Washington, D.C. And yet, when it comes to tax cuts for the middle class meant to drive economic recovery, Norquist clearly takes a different stance.

Senate Republicans Block Confirmation of Richard Cordray to Head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau – After a long-awaited vote, Senate Republicans blocked the confirmation of Richard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).

The mission of the CFPB is to make markets for consumer financial products and services works for Americans! It is there to protect us, but Republicans would rather make a political statement than to help working America!

Rick Perry Launches Homophobic, Divisive Campaign Ad – The Dislike to Like ratio of this hateful Rick Perry ad is 47 to 1. 187,422 people have disliked this ad.

Republicans Want to be Able to Endlessly Call Your Cell Phone and Charge It to You – Republicans are pushing new legislation that would end the 20-year ban on telemarketers calling cell phones. This would be an extremely annoying invasion of privacy. It would also be another congressional giveaway to big corporations, since robocalls from telemarketers would count against your monthly minutes.

Our best chance to stop the bill is in the House Energy and Commerce Committee. If we can prevent the bill from coming to a full House vote, we can effectively kill it and preserve the traditional protections consumers enjoy from intrusive and unwanted robocalls to their cell phone.

Click on the link above to tell the members of the Energy and Commerce Committee: Oppose any bill that would give corporations virtually free rein to call cell phones.

The Man Who Wants to Loot Social Security – Pete Peterson, co-founder of the Blackstone Group, who has pledged to spend $1 billion to privatize Social Security and cut Medicare and Medicaid.

To vote for Mr. Peterson, click on the the link above.

Regards,

Jim

Romney Spent Nearly $100,000 to Hide His Records – Mitt Romney spent nearly $100,000 in state funds to replace computers in his office at the end of his term as governor of Massachusetts in 2007 as part of an unprecedented effort to keep his records secret. When Romney left the governorship of Massachusetts, 11 of his aides bought the hard drives of their state-issued computers to keep for themselves. Also before he left office, the governor’s staff had emails and other electronic communications by Romney’s administration wiped from state servers, state officials say.

Those actions erased much of the internal documentation of Romney’s four-year tenure as governor, which ended in January 2007. Precisely what information was erased is unclear.

Republicans Vote to Kill the Federal Agency Charged With Preventing Tampering of Voting Machines – Republicans in state legislatures across the country have spent the past year mounting an all-out assault on voting rights, pushing a slew of voter ID and redistricting measures that are widely expected to dilute the power of minority and low-income voters in next November’s elections. Now that effort has come to Capitol Hill, where the U.S. House voted Thursday to pass a GOP-backed bill to end the Election Assistance Commission (EAC)—the last line of defense against fraud and tampering in electronic voting systems around the country. The bill is now in the Senate, referred to the Committee on Rules and Administration.

Good-government groups, including the Campaign Legal Center, the League of Women Voters, and People for the American Way, have leaped to the commission’s defense, arguing that eliminating it poses a “threat to the health of our democracy and yet another distraction from the vital and unfinished business before the House.”

“There is no doubt that a voter suppression effort is underway in this nation,” Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio) charged on the House floor. “Abolishing the Election Assistance Commission, an agency charged with ensuring that the vote of each American counts, is just another step in the voter suppression effort and would completely remove oversight of the most important process in our democracy.”

House Republicans Pushing Bill To Shift Regulation Authority To Congress – Congress would gain major new power over government regulations under legislation set for approval by the Republican-run House. The Office of Management and Budget said the bill “would throw all major regulations into a months-long limbo.” While Republicans insist the bill would help businesses by giving them cost savings to create jobs, the White House said the legislation would be “impeding business investment that is vital to economic growth.”

Besides the $100 million economic impact figure, the bill would apply to proposals that could lead to a major increase in costs or prices; or those that potentially would have a significant adverse effect on competition, employment, investment, productivity, innovation or competitiveness.

The Coalition for Sensible Safeguards, an alliance of consumer, small business, labor, environmental and other groups, said the bill would:

_Undermine the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act.

_Delay consumer product safety rules affecting toys, cribs and thousands of other consumer products.

_Make it more difficult for the Food and Drug Administration to ensure the safety of food and prescription drugs.

_Delay rules for Americans with disabilities.

_Endanger workers employed in mines, factories and other workplaces where on-the-job hazards exist.

Mitt Romney’s Pork Barrel Past – Far from decrying Washington’s spendthrift ways, Romney, as governor of Massachusetts, sought to position his state to hoover up every federal dollar it could. According to memos, emails, and other records now housed in the state archives, the Romney administration made the pursuit of federal funding a top priority, establishing a federal grants office to scour for opportunities and bolstering its presence in DC by retaining a powerful lobbying shop for help. Internal documents show the administration bemoaning its low ranking in an annual “pork list” detailing which states brought home the most federal bacon, and aggressively planning to boost that ranking. Which they did: Between 2003, when Romney took office, and 2006, Massachusetts climbed as high as nine spots in the pork rankings.

That Romney once coveted the spending he now denounces reinforces his image as a politician whose positions change with the political headwinds.

The Republican Effort to Restrict Voting Rights – Republican legislatures and governors across the country have launched an unprecedented effort to restrict voting rights among traditionally Democratic voting blocs. Learn more, and find out what Democrats are doing to fight back.

Regards,

Jim

Galveston County Judge Presides Over Legal Cases With No Law Experience and Only 46 Hours of Training – In Texas, county judges are primarily administrators who sit on County Commissioners Court. They are not expected to handle criminal matters. However, Galveston County Judge Mark Henry (Republican) regularly presides over judicial proceedings even though he isn’t a lawyer, a practice that worries some attorneys and judges.

Henry, a pilot by training, gets himself an extra $15,000 a year by presiding over court proceedings. He is the first Galveston County judge since at least 1967 to assume the judicial duties that provide the supplement to his $133,600 annual salary.

Henry has only completed 46 hours of judicial training. Several attorneys and former county judges questioned the practicality of a county judge in such a large county taking time away from demanding administrative duties. They also questioned the propriety of a non-lawyer acting as a judge in an urban county.

“No competent defense attorney would agree to have an inexperienced amateur on the bench,” attorney Winston Cochran said.

Henry has presided over misdemeanor plea bargains, which worries state District Judge Susan Criss.

“There are certain things in my job that I do that I have to have legal training to do,” she said. “I am not comfortable with someone who is not a lawyer taking pleas.”

Karl Rove Attempting to Weaken Rules to Allow His Super PAC to Coordinate With Republican Candidates – Karl Rove and his Super PAC American Crossroads want to tear down the thin wall that prevents Super PACs — which can accept unlimited, easily hidden contributions — from running ads coordinated directly with candidates and their campaigns — which have strict contribution limits.

The prohibition on coordination is one of the few remaining rules separating our so-called democratic elections from becoming a no-holds-barred, corporate cash free-for-all. So it’s no surprise that Rove has asked the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) if he can get around it, by running coordinated political advertisements, featuring candidates the PAC is supporting.

The FEC has already issued four draft opinions. It is supposed to issue a final ruling within days and is accepting public comments on Rove’s request.

The deeply damaging Citizens United decision opened the floodgates to unlimited corporate donations and spending by Political Action Committees, so long as they were independent of the campaign.

But Rove’s FEC request flouts even that. Rove literally states that what is coordinated, shouldn’t be considered coordinated:

“While these advertisements would be fully coordinated with incumbent Members of Congress facing re-election in 2012, they would presumably not qualify as ‘coordinated communications,’.”
And yet, three of the four draft responses posted by the FEC would allow Rove’s American Crossroads Super PAC, to air these coordinated-yet-not-coordinated ads featuring, and approved by, political candidates.1

The limits that exist to prevent coordination between Super PACs, officially known as “independent-expenditure only committees,” and political candidates are already astonishingly weak — allowing discussion of strategy, and even for candidates to fundraise directly for a Super PAC.2

Now Rove wants to use these unlimited pots of Super PAC money to essentially fund candidate’s official advertising campaigns. That’s going way, way too far. And we need to tell the FEC to stop it.

Tell the FEC: Reject Karl Rove’s Super PAC power grab. Submit a comment now.

1. “Four Ways The FEC Could Rule On Uncoordinated Coordination By American Crossroads,” Talking Points Memo, November 28, 2011
2. “Uncoordinated Coordination: Six Reasons Limits on Super PACs Are Barely Limits at All,” Talking Points Memo, November 21, 2011

The Next Republican Joke: Donald Trump to Host Republican Presidential Debate – Yes, folks, Donald Trump is going to moderate a Republican presidential debate. Sponsored by Newsmax, one of the internet’s most conservative websites, the newly arranged event will be held in Des Moines on December 27th — just one week before the Iowa caucus. Grandmaster of the 1% presiding!

I can’t wait for Trump to tell one of the candidates, “You’re fired!”

Regards,

Jim

Mitt Romney Puts “Political Implications” Ahead of the Lives of 11 Million People – At a debate last week Mitt Romney placed himself further to the right on immigration than any presidential candidate in recent history.

He said he would deport all undocumented immigrants — including grandparents and families who have been in the United States for over 25 years, belong to local churches, pay their taxes, and in some cases have even defended our country in the military.

The thing that makes Mitt’s statement even more troubling is that a mere five years ago — when the politics of immigration among GOP voters were quite different from today — he was singing a different tune, saying that the nearly 11 million undocumented immigrants in our country “are not going to be rounded up and box-carred out.”

In an interview yesterday he was reminded of his old talking points, but rather than attempting to moderate his stance, he actually doubled down on his current position.

So why the change of heart? It’s simple, according to Mitt’s 2008 Iowa State Director, Doug Gross. Gross said that while campaigning in Iowa before the caucuses, Mitt began to realize the so-called “political implications” of his stance and switched his position as a result.

“Political implications” shouldn’t be the determining factor in the lives of 11 million people.

Stand up for Hispanic families in this election and fight for sensible immigration reform.

Five Mitt Bits:

1. As head of the investment company Bain Capital, Mitt Romney laid off thousands of workers.
[CBS News, 01/28/2008]

2. Mitt Romney’s advice on the foreclosure crisis: “Don’t try and stop the foreclosure process.”
[Mother Jones, 10/18/2011]

3. The former Bain Capital managing director said of Mitt Romney’s tenure: “We had a scheme where the rich got richer.”
[Los Angeles Times, 12/16/2007]

4. Mitt Romney set up shell companies in the Cayman Islands and Bermuda to avoid U.S. taxes.
[Los Angeles Times, 12/19/2007]

5. Mitt Romney’s first budget as governor included $240 million in fee increases. [Meet the Press, 12/16/2007]

The Republican Consensus on the Economy is Wrong, Wrong, Wrong – Former economic speechwriter for President George W. Bush, David Frum, lists 13 ways in which the new radical Republican consensus on the economy is wrong, wrong, wrong:

• It is wrong in its call for monetary tightening.
• It is wrong to demand immediate debt reduction rather than wait until after the economy recovers.
• It is wrong to deny that “we have a revenue problem.”
• It is wrong in worrying too much about (non-existent) inflation and disregarding the (very real) threat of a second slump into recession and deflation.
• It is wrong to blame government regulation and (as yet unimposed) tax increases for the severity of the recession.
• It is wrong to oppose job-creating infrastructure programs.
• It is wrong to hesitate to provide unemployment insurance, food stamps, and other forms of income maintenance to the unemployed.
• It is wrong to fetishize the exchange value of the dollar against other currencies.
• It is wrong to believe that cuts in marginal tax rates will suffice to generate job growth in today’s circumstance.
• It is wrong to blame minor and marginal government policies like the Community Reinvestment Act for the financial crisis while ignoring the much more important role of government inaction to police overall levels of leverage within the financial system.
• It is wrong to dismiss the Euro crisis as something remote from American concerns.
• It is wrong to resist US cooperation with European authorities in organizing a work-out of the debt problems of the Eurozone countries.
• It is wrong above all in its dangerous combination of apocalyptic pessimism about the long-term future of the country with aloof indifference to unemployment.

Regards,

Jim

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”
– Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The 99% are suffering from the Great Recession and it will be years before we recover. At least one conservative economist is willing to admit the free enterprise system is flawed.

Alan Greenspan admitted this failure while testifying to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform:

… almost three years after stepping down as chairman of the Federal Reserve, a humbled Mr. Greenspan admitted that he had put too much faith in the self-correcting power of free markets and had failed to anticipate the self-destructive power of wanton mortgage lending.

“Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief,” …

We are in this recession because of the foolish belief in the invisible hand of the free market to self-regulate. The reality is that any system or institution created by ‘man’ is only as perfect as the least perfect human controlling or using that system. Only systems driven by nature’s laws, like the entire universe, are truly self-regulating and man is the only animal on earth that can, and has, altered that self-regulation in innumerable ways.

Why do we have this belief in the invisible hand of self-interest? As explained below, it has to do with our belief in the Cold War Rational Actor. However, research since the 90’s on brain function has shown reasoning is much more than self-interest.

Maybe Greenspan’s “shocked disbelief” and the Great Recession could have been avoided if he and others were aware of the current research on how decisions are really made.

At the beginning of The Political Mind, George Lakoff, one of the researchers on the workings of the brain, stated,

We will need to embrace a deep rationality that can take account of, and advantage of, a mind that is largely unconscious, embodied, emotional, empathetic, metaphorical, and only partly universal. A New Enlightenment would not abandon reason, but rather understand that we are using real reason — embodied reason, reason shaped by our bodies and brains and interactions in the real world, reason incorporating emotion, structured by frames and metaphors and images and symbols, with conscious thought shaped by the vast and invisible realm of neural circuitry not accessible to consciousness.

In other words, our decisions are not just based on self-interest. So, where did the Rational Actor making logical decisions based on self-interest come from? It is a twentieth century Cold War myth.

Joe Brewer summarized it this way in an article at Cognitive Policy Works:

Back in the 1940′s and 50′s, a research center was created to explore fundamental issues of concern to the Air Force. This Research ANd Development institute was aptly named the RAND Corporation. Within the high-security walls of this military think tank, mathematicians developed abstract principles for nuclear strategy during the Cold War. In the midst of this particular, historically contingent environment – and motivated by concerns of defense contractors in the air combat arena – the notion[/myth] of self-interested rational action was born.

Joe Brewer then discusses some of the recent research into the working of the brain that’s disproving the decision process of the self-interested Rational Actor.

In a related article, Lawrence DiStasi states that he supports Joe Brewer’s attempts to “dismantle the conservative corporate juggernaut that has so dominated our political/economic life for the past 40 years.”

DiStasi continues with this:

An essential component [dismantling this juggernaut] involves deconstructing the now widely-accepted notion[/myth] that capitalism works because it is natural, the natural child of human nature pursuing democracy and freedom. And at the heart of this free capitalism idea is the notion[/myth] of the “rational actor” pursuing his own “self-interest.” This notion — not as old nor as self-evident as one might think — argues that capitalism’s “invisible hand,” which runs a free-market economy without interference, is really embedded by nature in us all, millions of us who as “free” individuals make rational decisions in pursuit of our own self-interest.

DiStasi goes on to discuss the RAND Corporation and their development of the “rational choice theory” and their “self-interested strategic rational actor,” and the use of these notions/myths by other disciplines.

He summarizes, although not as thoroughly as Professor Lakoff above, the recent research that debunks the self-interested strategic rational actor:

The full story is complex and still being formed. But the basics are quite simple. Humans do not make key decisions based on the rational part of the brain. Their decisions, rather, come about either before rational consciousness has a chance to even think, or from deeper areas of the brain that govern the emotions. Rational consciousness — the ego in Freudian parlance — is too often a ‘rationalizer.’ …

DiStasi concludes with:

To sum up: the market fundamentalists who have nearly destroyed the American economy have done so under the banner of the so-called free market, raised to the level of an almighty controller of all things, including democracy. They have essentially said that with rational actors making economic (consumer) decisions, not just the market but politics itself, the welfare of the entire nation itself, is automatically and invisibly regulated. There is no need for government to regulate anything. There is no need for compassionate politicians to look out for the welfare of the people. There is need only for “rational” consumers making “rational” decisions. But what their beloved science — now in the form of behavioral psychology, behavioral economics, neuroscience, and linguistics — has begun to tell them is that the whole structure is based on a lie. …

This belief in a debunked twentieth century idea allowed the Great Recession and is killing American. Henry Giroux put the impending death of America this way in a recent article:

In the age of Reagan and Thatcher, neoliberalism [(liberalism tending to favor free-market capitalism)] was becoming normalized all over the globe. This was particularly evident to me by the early 1990s as neoliberal capitalism became more ruthless, consolidated and poisonous in its ever expanding support for a culture of cruelty and a survival-of-the-fittest ethic in which market-driven values and relations acted as the template for judging all aspects of social life. By transforming society into the image of the market, the space and conditions for thinking outside of market values and relations became more difficult, and one particularly grim consequence was the demolition of non-market values, public spheres, and forms of community. As democratic social forms diminished, so did social values, the public good, social responsibility and the very nature of politics. This was a very destructive moment for both the U.S. and the rest of the world. Just as corporate sovereignty replaced or weakened political sovereignty, the attack on the social state intensified, the power of capital became detached from the traditional politics of the nation state, the punishing state was on the rise and there emerged a new set of economic and social formations in which social protections were weakened, social problems were increasingly criminalized and all public spheres were subjected to the forces of privatization and commodification, especially public and higher education.

Under neoliberalism, we have witnessed the rise of an unfettered free-market ideology and economic Darwinism in which market values supplant civic values. Everything is for sale. A hyper-individualism is celebrated. Profit-making is seen as the essence of democracy, and the obligations of citizenship are reduced to the practice of consuming. This is a system in which a dehumanizing mode of consumerism and the unencumbered concentration of capital are matched by the endless disposing of goods, rendering even people now redundant and extraneous. This is also a system in which everything is privatized, with one grave consequence being that the public collapses into the private. It becomes increasingly difficult to translate private concerns into public issues.

Joe Brewer concluded his article on The Death of Self-Interest Fundamentalism with the following:

Yes, it is time to let self-interest fundamentalism go the way of monarchy and feudalism. It may not go silently into the night, but the end is nigh. Pretty soon we will have laid the foundation for a sustainable future – both ecologically and financially. In order to do so, we’ll have to acknowledge how human beings actually are instead of how theorists engaged in military strategy presumed us to be 60 years ago.

The longer we refuse to recognize the imperfections of man made economic systems, the longer it will take to recover from the Great Recession. The demise of self-interest fundamentalism is long overdue and the Occupy effort will hopefully hasten it’s end.

In three previous articles, I have discussed the growing American police state. This police state is supported by an authoritarian worldview and is promoted by the “bad barrel” structure of today’s police departments.

In a recent article by former Police Chief Norm Stamper of Seattle, Mr. Stamper made the following statements concerning our “increasingly militarized” peace keepers.

… The “Battle in Seattle,” as the WTO protests and their aftermath came to be known, was a huge setback—for the protesters, my cops, the community.

More than a decade later, the police response to the Occupy movement, most disturbingly visible in Oakland—where scenes resembled a war zone and where a marine remains in serious condition from a police projectile—brings into sharp relief the acute and chronic problems of American law enforcement. Seattle might have served as a cautionary tale, but instead, US police forces have become increasingly militarized, and it’s showing in cities everywhere: the NYPD “white shirt” coating innocent people with pepper spray, the arrests of two student journalists at Occupy Atlanta, the declaration of public property as off-limits and the arrests of protesters for “trespassing.”

The paramilitary bureaucracy and the culture it engenders—a black-and-white world in which police unions serve above all to protect the brotherhood—is worse today than it was in the 1990s. Such agencies inevitably view protesters as the enemy. And young people, poor people and people of color will forever experience the institution as an abusive, militaristic force—not just during demonstrations but every day, in neighborhoods across the country.

Much of the problem is rooted in a rigid command-and-control hierarchy based on the military model. American police forces are beholden to archaic internal systems of authority whose rules emphasize bureaucratic regulations over conduct on the streets. An officer’s hair length, the shine on his shoes and the condition of his car are more important than whether he treats a burglary victim or a sex worker with dignity and respect. In the interest of “discipline,” too many police bosses treat their frontline officers as dependent children, which helps explain why many of them behave more like juvenile delinquents than mature, competent professionals. It also helps to explain why persistent, patterned misconduct, including racism, sexism, homophobia, brutality, perjury and corruption, do not go away, no matter how many blue-ribbon panels are commissioned or how much training is provided.

External political factors are also to blame, such as the continuing madness of the drug war. Last year police arrested 1.6 million nonviolent drug offenders. In New York City alone almost 50,000 people (overwhelmingly black, Latino or poor) were busted for possession of small amounts of marijuana—some of it, we have recently learned, planted by narcotics officers. The counterproductive response to 9/11, in which the federal government began providing military equipment and training even to some of the smallest rural departments, has fueled the militarization of police forces. Everyday policing is characterized by a SWAT mentality, every other 911 call a military mission. What emerges is a picture of a vital public-safety institution perpetually at war with its own people. …

It is ironic that those police officers who are busting up the Occupy protesters are themselves victims of the same social ills the demonstrators are combating: corporate greed; the slackening of essential regulatory systems; and the abject failure of all three branches of government to safeguard civil liberties and to protect, if not provide, basic human needs like health, housing, education and more. With cities and states struggling to balance the budget while continuing to deliver public safety, many cops are finding themselves out of work. And, as many Occupy protesters have pointed out, even as police officers help to safeguard the power and profits of the 1 percent, police officers are part of the 99 percent.

There will always be situations—an armed and barricaded suspect, a man with a knife to his wife’s throat, a school-shooting rampage—that require disciplined, military-like operations. But most of what police are called upon to do, day in and day out, requires patience, diplomacy and interpersonal skills. I’m convinced it is possible to create a smart organizational alternative to the paramilitary bureaucracy that is American policing. But that will not happen unless, even as we cull “bad apples” from our police forces, we recognize that the barrel itself is rotten.

And so, our police state grows.

Police Chief Norm Stamper, suggests the following remedy:

Assuming the necessity of radical structural reform, how do we proceed? By building a progressive police organization, created by rank-and-file officers, “civilian” employees and community representatives. Such an effort would include plans to flatten hierarchies; create a true citizen review board with investigative and subpoena powers; and ensure community participation in all operations, including policy-making, program development, priority-setting and crisis management. In short, cops and citizens would forge an authentic partnership in policing the city. And because partners do not act unilaterally, they would be compelled to keep each other informed, and to build trust and mutual respect—qualities sorely missing from the current equation.

Maybe the Occupy protesters will help implement this solution and reduce the fear citizens have towards peaceful rallying.