Tag Archives: GOP

Donald Trump, Staying Puft

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Fun’s fun. Admittedly, it has been fun to watch Donald Trump ruining the field for sixteen or more other Republican candidates for the White House. He’s like a human-shaped cue ball. Knocked into the rack, he has sent minor and major candidates careening in all directions, colliding with each other and banging up against sides of the green baize table. All their careful game plans gone awry. Their carefully tailored appeals overwhelmed. Their thoughtfully crafted pathways to attention in a crowded field, demolished by the Trump campaign, if you call it that. More oafish and media-baiting than Chris Christie, more openly immigrant-baiting than Scott Walker, more plugged in than Jeb Bush, more ‘centrist’ or unpredictable on some individual issues than any governor, more woman-baiting than any other candidate–Trump has exploded the usual paths to celebrity for other Republicans. He’s stomping on their dog whistles. Red meat? Next to Trump, they look more like pink SweeTARTS®.

Here they are

Couldn’t have happened to a nicer bunch of people. As said, the spectacle is fun to watch. Serves them right.

Still, given that some GOP voters out there clearly hope that Trump will swing down in a golden chariot from his Tower, and scoop them up from whatever financial doldrums they’re in, it is only fair to point out that deep questions about Trump’s own finances remain open.

Is Trump distracting attention from something?

A few facts are clear from Donald Trump’s 92-page financial disclosure filing to the Federal Election Commission (FEC). One is that Trump is carrying a heavy debt load. He owes four creditors “Over $50,000,000” apiece; his loans total $215 million-plus to $400 million-plus; and at least $25 million to $125 million in loans come due in the next four years. Trump, who has declared bankruptcy four times, has taken on more than $130 million of the current debt since 2012. Trump has claimed a huge income on air, and also claims to be willing to spend $1 billion on the 2016 election, if that’s what it takes to win, but the debt load is still sizeable from any perspective.

The FEC filing also shows that few people who are not Trump himself employ Trump, or pay him for work. His occupational income seems to be largely speaker fees or fees for managing properties now partly owned by others; his pay for managing his own companies is not shown. The financial disclosure form also shows that Trump has sold or liquidated substantial assets in value stocks and in bank funds from the beginning of 2014 to now, the period covered by the filing.

It is not clear whether the assets were sold to finance Trump’s White House bid or for other reasons. The asset sales generated handsome capital gains; his own more volatile companies and properties–the corporations and LLCs with Trump as officer or member, and the famous hotels and resorts, etc., bearing the Trump name–were not sold. The FEC filing also does not clarify Trump’s net worth. Not a balance sheet or a budget, it does not clarify the proportion of income to outlay. Trump’s campaign and press office, contacted by phone and email on August 13, have not responded to questions.

Trump floated one of his preliminary statements about running for president back in 2011, with sources quoted by Politico putting out word that he was worth $7 billion. The net worth figure was disputed even at the time: “The eye-popping figure is far higher than the $2.7 billion that Forbes Magazine valued his net worth to be last month.” Estimates of Mr. Trump’s net worth have fluctuated, with Bloomberg News and the New York Times among others expressing skepticism when Trump upped his claim to $10 billion. Trump’s own estimates have also fluctuated, although Trump’s much-quoted emphasis on his wealth–“I’m really rich“–remains a constant. Since launching his campaign on June 16, Trump has reiterated the brash statements about his wealth, seemingly at every opportunity.

One statement not being recycled, however, is the unnamed 2011 sources’ claim that Trump’s financial disclosures would indicate “more than $250 million of cash, and very little debt. He is very, very liquid.”

The man at the moment

As of 2015, in actuality, Trump’s financial disclosure filing shows massive debt and undefined liquidity. “Part 8: Liabilities” (page 47) lists fifteen debts. Two are Merrill Lynch mortgages totaling less than $1 million. The remaining thirteen are gargantuan. Trump’s filing shows “Over $50,000,000” owed to Ladder Capital Finance LLC; Deutsche Bank Trust Company Americas; Chicago Unit Acquisition LLC; and Capital One, although the Capital One deal has an asterisk showing it refinanced with Ladder Capital. Trump also owes another $25 million to $50 million to Deutsche Bank, due in 2024, and $5 million to $25 million to Deutsche Bank due in 2015. He also owes $5 million to $25 million apiece to seven other creditors including Bank of New York Mellon, Ladder Capital, Royal Bank America, and Amboy Bank. Two of the loans come due in 2015, one in 2016, two in 2017, and three in 2019. Setting up a blind trust for a Trump term in the White House would be a challenge.

One question put to the Trump campaign is whether the debts are in any way problematic. Does Trump expect to pay them all? If so, will he resolve them before entering the White House, should he win? If not, how would they be handled?

Meanwhile, one of Trump’s “Over $50,000,000” notes comes from an entity owned 100% by Trump himself (page A3), called Chicago Unit Acquisition LLC. Chicago Unit Acquisition generates income (page 13)  listed as “None (or less than $201).” This Trump-to-Trump loan is Trump’s highest-interest big loan, at Prime + 5%. No deadline year is given; the “Term” column is filled in with the phrase “Springing loan.”

Other questions put to Trump concern this springing loan. Not an MBA myself, and not being Barry Ritholtz, I had to look up the phrase. A “springing guaranty” is a guarantee that takes effect when something bad happens, like bankruptcy. (This arrangement is also called a “bad-boy guarantee.”) According to the asset wizards at Andrews Kurth, in a springing guarantee, “the borrower is required to fund an escrow account serving as additional security for the loan.” This way, if something bad happens–“say a key tenant decides not to renew its lease”–“when funded, the borrower has more skin in the game to offset drops in value.”

One way to keep the feds off your back? Run for the White House. What better position could there be, from which to argue that an investigation is ‘politically motivated’? Ask Hillary Clinton.

On page 13, Trump lists the value of “Chicago Unit Acquisition LLC” at $1,001 to $15,000 (thousands, not millions). So he owes the LLC at least 3,333 times its value, or he owes it to himself, or to a tiny LLC owned wholly by himself, to fund an escrow account, in case things go wrong? If he owes it to himself, is this enforceable? Will the loan be paid off? Does it have to be? If listed as a “springing loan,” is the escrow requirement enforceable, when the creditor is owned by the debtor? Whatever this dizzying arrangement means, the FEC filing makes clear that Trump owes somewhere in the neighborhood of half a billion dollars. Depending on how much over $50 million the phrase “Over $50,000,000” means, he could owe much more. Trump himself has spoken on the campaign trail in favor of transparency. It would be nice to have the debts elucidated. Trump has repeatedly said that candidate Jeb Bush is a “puppet” for donors who give him millions. Point taken, but what about a candidate who has been lent millions, or hundreds of millions?

As listed in “Part 6: Other Assets and Income,” substantial assets have been liquidated or sold since the beginning of 2014, in stocks and funds. These sales did not include the 501 corporations or LLCs for which Trump lists himself as director, president or member. The sales were of Baron funds, Paulson funds, and DJIA major companies. Recently, Trump has sold assets held in twelve of eighteen bank funds (page 35). Amounts are given in ranges, and some capital gains are combined with interest and dividends, but the sales total falls somewhere between $2 million and $15 million. The filing does not make clear how much of the fund assets remain.

Trump has also sold company stocks from several brokerage accounts, although he still owns stock in at least 190 companies. Oppenheimer and one Deutsche Asset brokerage account seem to be the fullest; a different Deutsche Asset account and a JP Morgan account seem to be the emptiest. Many remaining company stocks are listed as producing no income, “or less than $201.” Meanwhile, the JP Morgan brokerage account (pages 44-45) shows stock in forty companies from Amazon to Yahoo effectively cleaned out, their remaining value listed as “None (or less than $1,001).” Stocks sold include several on the current Dow Jones Industrial Average–Apple, Boeing, Caterpillar, Exxon Mobil, Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble. The “Over $5,000,000” realized from Bank of America stock appears to be Trump’s best sale or liquidation. Nobody’s wrong all the time. B of A is also one of the largest donors to Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush.

If these sales were connected to the White House campaign, there may be more sales, depending on how much the campaign costs in coming months. (“$1 billion”?) Again, the ranges given on the standardized form do not show much remains viable for further sales and assets liquidation.

Pageant winners

In the past, Trump’s flamboyant business career involved buying the Miss USA and Miss Universe beauty pageants, which deflected media attention from his real estate troubles. He is now putting himself on a pageant stage. How serious the run is remains to be seen, but the effectiveness of the deflection is undeniable. Trump has brashly and repeatedly emphasized how much he has given to politicians–“almost everybody on this stage,” he said famously (and falsely) in the August 6 GOP debate. The emphasis on his giving deflects attention from how little he has received, usually a benchmark of candidate success. (“I don’t care”; “I don’t want their money.”) The campaign website has a button for donating, of course. Data from the Center for Responsive Politics show donors to Donald Trump to be few and far between. Similarly, Trump’s brash emphasis on his own companies deflects attention from the fact that he is not hired as CEO and chair of other people’s large companies. His brash emphasis on his wealth–in general terms–deflects attention from his bankruptcies, his volatility, and the lack of specific disclosures on income and net worth.

Ironically, this is the one GOP campaign getting high marks for truthfulness. Donald Trump, who with one of his lawyers concocted the line that a woman attorney wanted to breast-pump in front of him, is the only Republican getting credit for telling it like it is. Media commentators are paralleling Trump to Bernie Sanders–both ‘outsiders’. Actually, Trump is an insider, as his financial disclosures make clear.

The man himself

A better parallel would be to the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man (with thanks, or apologies, to the late Harold Ramis et al. at Ghostbusters). So long as he can stay on his feet and bully, he can roll through the avenues of New York. Impervious to loss, shame, or bankruptcy, buoyed up (in GOP opinion polls) by pestilential behavior, he stays afloat.

 

Next up:   Hillary Clinton’s emails

Hillary Clinton Would Be Awful for the Democratic Party in 2016

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Clinton as Secretary of State

 

And the Republicans know it.

This post will be short.*

Clinton would be the worst possible choice for Democratic nominee in 2016. Every flaw revealed in the 2008 campaign is still there, not to be ignored in a presidential campaign. Clinton’s one plus is that much of her work as Secretary of State was good; she was part of a good governmental team. But even that work has been compromised. With moral idiocy, Clinton set up a private server for emails. While working for the United States, she used her own email account. So much for benefiting from, and reinforcing, the teamwork of respected professionals. A life in public, and she still does not understand that governmental work belongs to the people of this nation?

Keeping her emails private enabled Clinton to stockpile her writing and correspondence as SecState for future books, of course. Anything to make another few million bucks. (This point has not been made in media commentary about the emails.)

Speaking of money, one strength the Clintons undeniably have is the ability to raise millions. (The fact that I do not understand why people throw money at this unsavory pair is beside the point; they do throw money.) So the Clintons could make partial amends for their thirty years of hysterical selfishness in Arkansas, by continuing to raise money for charity. Instead, as ever with this pair, it is self uber alles. 2000 redux.

And the GOP knows it. Notice how every ‘establishment’ pundit and every GOP public figure has treated Clinton as an inevitability. The tactic kills several American birds with one stone. 1) It denies media attention to every better Democratic candidate. 2) It puts the worst possible face on the Democratic Party. 3) It ensures that most money goes to Clinton, slowing down other potential candidates. 4) It diminishes the gulf between the two major parties, foregrounding the creepy, self-engrossed Clintons and cementing the Dems more firmly to the worst of Wall Street.

The upside for Dems is that the idea of running against ‘Hillary’ has encouraged a multitude of demented candidacies for the GOP nomination. But meanwhile, the GOP has a vested interest in undoing the Obama administration as much as possible, as their only shot at position and money. Promoting ‘Hillary’ is the easiest and cheapest way to do that.

Simple point: the Clintons had thirty years in Arkansas. If they had done a good job, Hillary Clinton would have run for the Senate from Arkansas. If Bill Clinton had been the person he could have been, he would have retired to Arkansas, and been content, like Cincinnatus. But during their THIRTY YEARS in Arkansas, they did as little for working families as they could get away with doing. Their energies were focused elsewhere. And when Democratic voters wanted something better for working families, the Clintons were always there, to throw other figures under the bus, as ‘liberal’.

The ticket our establishment pundits envision in store for us is appalling. I read, but I am one voter among many who will never vote for either a Bush or a Clinton.

 

* I am working on a book that takes most of my writing time.

Elections 2014, and New York District 21 Is Looking Weird

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Elections 2014, and New York District 21 Is Looking Weird

Candidates Stefanik, Woolf, and former candidate Funiciello

Okay, this is just strange. A former GWBush official is running for Congress in an upstate New York district, and polls show the race as close. Admittedly, the official in question–Elise Stefanik–was only a minor official under Bush, and New York’s 21st District does not number among those suffering worst from the invasion of Iraq. Stefanik was still in prep school at the Albany Academy for Girls when George W. Bush got the White House after the non-vote count of 2001. She was barely out of college–a Harvard grad–when she went to the Bush White House, where she worked for the Domestic Policy Council under Karl Zinsmeister and for Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten.

But the struggle continues. More recent items on the plummy resume include this kudo from her alma mater, “Elise Stefanik (SAC 2006) has joined the Foreign Policy Initiative as director of communications and external affairs.”

FPI: The new PNAC

The Foreign Policy Initiative, for those of you keeping tabs at home, is the newest avatar of the former Project for the New American Century (PNAC), long since designated as a cyberspace ghost town but in its heyday the think tank that brought us the Iraq invasion with its consequent ills. Founders and directors include Bill Kristol and the other head cases who worked feverishly, for years, to make terrorism the new communism; committed to revisiting their palmy days in the Cold War, they went the old military-industrial complex one better, by working ceaselessly to make a cold war hot. This is the leading edge young, up-and-coming GOPers want to associate themselves with?

To coin a phrase, have these people no shame?

Other items on the resume include work for 2012 presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty, where Stefanik was titled Director of New Media and Deputy Policy Director. Stefanik also founded an entity called “American Maggie,” now defunct.

But be it noted that the valid criticism here is not of small-time efforts or even of failed efforts. The criticism is of awful efforts.

The late great poet Adrienne Rich was right: amnesia in the public discourse is a continuing problem.

 

One in a series of short posts on especially soul-destroying 2014 races.

Blacks helped Thad Cochran win? –Not so fast.

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Blacks helped Thad Cochran win? –Not so fast.

A seductive meme: ‘Black voters in Mississippi helped Thad Cochran win’. But it sounds too good to be true.

One day after the primary, the story makes the rounds like Paul Revere, except faster and in a warmer climate–black voters held their noses, or better, and put Sen. Thad Cochran over the top in a perilously close runoff, after he was being written off for dead by the national political press. Examples abound, like here and here and here and here. A related meme and a more refined way of saying the same thing runs that ‘Democrats helped Cochran pull off the win’; a by-product of Mississippi’s ‘open primary’ system, Cochran’s win is attributed to crossover voting by Democrats who did not vote in the June 3rd Mississippi primary, as in this article. There are less polite ways of putting the same thing; setting aside most of the predictable non-news-media examples from wingers, a typical partisan example runs here, with an interesting thread. ‘Cochran won with the help of Democrats’ is all over cyberspace, not entirely with a view to praising Cochran.

Challenger Chris McDaniel himself is taking a version of the same line, expressing public doubt about whether the GOP senate primary in Mississippi was won by Republican voters.

From the top–it is entirely possible that a few African-Americans voted for Cochran, and in an extremely close county, even a few votes would influence the win, at least for that county. For my money, though, it is highly unlikely that the outcome in Hinds County will turn out to have been brought about by African-American votes.

Maybe not all white

If I turn out to be wrong, so be it; I’ll believe it when I see it. Further evidence will be interesting. Meanwhile–

This is a juicy story, and I am all for juicy stories. In a payback’s-a-bitch kind of way, it is almost irresistible: McDaniel supporters who did everything but show up in white sheets to vote, stymied by some of the overlooked figures disenfranchised for so long, like a scene from Blazing Saddles. In somewhat more elevated perspective, the story is appealing as another chapter of forgiveness in a very long book. It is also refreshing in showing at least some acquaintance with history; recognizing, for example, that the flatland (alluvial plain) areas of Mississippi are the areas with the largest majorities of African Americans, for reasons briefly explained below.

 

But at this point, whatever truth there may be in this story is getting way too big a megaphone. It seems almost ungracious to raise questions, but questions remain.

 

Two sides of GOP coin

For a start, we do not know how many African Americans turned out to vote in the June 24 runoff. A few media interviews do not make a trend; more importantly, they do not provide exact and accurate numbers. Since Mississippi does not register voters by party, we do not know how many registered Democrats voted in the runoff; we do not know how many of the June 24 voters were Republican and how many were Democratic. In fact, party registration in the Magnolia State has to be inferred from votes, after an election, as in this 2012 article. (Note that the piece quotes then-State Sen. Chris McDaniel on a GOP ‘enthusiasm gap’.) Or, of course, one can try to infer it from ethnicity, since the Mississippi GOP has been the de facto White People’s Party ever since the Dixiecrats ran out of sand.

Logo but no Raymond Loewy

Mississippi has 82 counties. Cochran carried some 52 of them in the June 3rd primary–a better outcome than hinted by most of the media coverage. In the June 24th runoff, he lost two counties that he had won before, while increasing his totals and of course improving the outcome.  As widely reported, both Cochran and McDaniel upped their totals and the turnout on June 24. The over-all vote from unofficial results was Cochran 185,104 to McDaniel 179,263 or a statewide margin of 5,841 for Cochran.

The scenario making the rounds is that Cochran won by drawing more votes in majority-black counties, especially in the Mississippi Delta. This synopsis is the one that needs demurral. There is a difference between saying that Cochran won in black-majority counties, which is accurate–though not the whole picture–and saying that Cochran won because blacks voted for him. The latter statement needs careful checking.

(For convenience, I am using this map.)

Landscape

Start by taking a look at the Delta region, actually not deltoid but a rather broad swath of flat land–alluvial plain–running north and south up and down the Mississippi River, in Mississippi and Arkansas. This land was farmed as ‘plantations’ in Mississippi in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, importing large numbers of slave laborers, because its immense tracts of fertile soil were ripe for the early versions of agribusiness, making cash crops like cotton and rice profitable where they were less feasible in the wooded hill country elsewhere in the state. The descendants of slaves outnumber the descendants of slaveholders in Delta counties–a fact not lost on the state’s white power structure.

 

Unsolicited book plug

True enough, Cochran won in every Delta county up and down the Mississippi River, except for Wilkinson County down at the bottom of this stretch (but north of the Gulf Coast), and DeSoto County at the very top of the stretch (but south of Memphis). However, look at Cochran’s margins of victory in these lands of former grandees.

Vote margins, heading south down the Mississippi River from Tunica County:

  • 149
  • 313
  • 689 (Bolivar)
  • 849 (Washington)
  • 55
  • 424 (Warren)
  • 49
  • 26
  • 273

Remember, these are actual votes cast, not percentages. Of these Delta counties, Cochran won three by fewer than 100 votes. He won another three by fewer than 500 votes. This is nine out of 82 counties, all majority African-American, giving Thad Cochran a total vote margin (in unofficial returns) of 2,827 votes. A win is a win, of course, and some of the percentages are impressive–Washington County went for Cochran by 70 percent, Tunica County by 72 percent–but those percentages mask some very micro numbers. Issaquena County gave Cochran the win by a whopping 71 percent–which translates into 92 votes (to 37 for McDaniel). It is entirely possible that this turnout, which will surely earn Mr. Cochran the nickname of ‘Landslide Thad’ for the next several years, was 100 percent white.

For good or ill, this is not a black avalanche. In fact, Cochran’s wins all along the river gave him a total margin of victory less than the margin for McDaniel in DeSoto County alone; DeSoto, also touching the river but majority white, went for McDaniel by a margin of 3,904.

The Delta being a fairly wide expanse in some places, let’s move over one row of counties eastward, to be thorough, and tally the next north-to-south row of counties. This series of 13 counties begins just south of DeSoto County, which as mentioned went almost two-to-one for McDaniel. Though not touching the Big Muddy, these counties are contiguous to those next to the Mississippi and share some features. Tate County at the north end of this row of counties, and majority white, went for McDaniel, as did Franklin and Amite at the south end of this stretch. The counties that Cochran won gave him the following margins, north to south:

  • 79
  • 86
  • 154
  • 413 (Sunflower)
  • 210
  • 234 (Sharkey)
  • 235 (Yazoo)
  •  5,301 (Hinds)
  •  86
  • 432 (Lincoln)

Again, these are the margins by numerical vote. (In my county, they would look more like precinct totals, not county totals, except for the Jackson tally.) Cochran won three of these counties by fewer than 100 votes, six by fewer than 500 votes, and only one–Hinds County, with the city of Jackson–by a substantial margin.

Margins for McDaniel in Tate, Franklin, and Amite:

  • 596
  • 166
  • 380

Compare these margins. Leaving Hinds County aside, Cochran’s total margin for this row of counties one over from the Mississippi was 1,929. McDaniel’s total margin for his wins in three counties in this row was 1,142. Counting Hinds County, Cochran’s total vote margin from his wins in these 24 counties was 10,057. McDaniel’s total vote margin, in the same area of the state, in counties where he won, was 5,046. The difference even including Jackson is 5,011 votes.

Yes, McDaniel lost the state by only 5,841 votes.

But he won Jones County (alone) by 9,209 votes.

Taking a look at the statewide picture from a different angle, let’s start with majority-white areas that went for Cochran. Take the Gulf Coast.

Majority white Harrison County gave Cochran a solid win. Hancock County, 90 percent white, gave Cochran a solid win. Of the three Mississippi counties on the coast, all three with very sizable white majorities, only Jackson County went for McDaniel, by 296 votes.

Cochran’s total vote margin in the largely-white Gulf Coast of Mississippi:  410 + 3,633 – 296 = 3,747.

The Gulf Coast vote for Cochran is being written about–or written off–as the result of military contracts, and it may indeed be related to business and contracts. That still leaves the rest of the state. Cochran won almost two-thirds of the 82 Mississippi counties, spread over the state from Alcorn in the north to Harrison in the south, and from Bolivar in the west to Lowndes on the eastern border with Alabama. Two additional small majority-black counties that went for Cochran include Noxubee, with a margin of 64 votes, on the eastern border of the state, and Kemper just south of Noxubee, with a margin of 80 votes. Majority-white counties that went for Cochran include Tippah, Alcorn, Prentiss, Lauderdale, Lowndes, Monroe, Smith, Simpson, Scott, Newton, and Neshoba. This list is not exhaustive, and more detailed analysis of the runoff election will have to wait for official vote tallies. Meanwhile, however, it will be wise to remember that while McDaniel did better than Cochran in some rural thicketed counties, Cochran still won quite a few of them. And while McDaniel indeed seems not to have won any counties that were not majority-white, Cochran won a sizable number of both majority-white and majority-black counties.

Furthermore, the small vote totals leave an outcome easily conceivable in a universe of white, Republican Mississippi voters. If Cochran’s vote totals and margins had been in the tens of thousands, the picture would be different. But neither the votes themselves nor the increase in Cochran’s turnout over the June 3 is evidence of African-American ballots. Cochran may have grown his vote “in the Mississippi Delta, the largely black and strongly Democratic northwest of the state,” as in this roundup in Slate, but neither the increase nor the margin of victory nor the number of votes cast shows an incursion of cross-party voting; the numbers fall easily inside the range of possibility for–frankly–exclusively white voters. In any case, the brief scenario linked here omits the fact that Cochran also grew his vote in other terrains and in numerous other counties around the state, as above.

Time will tell more about such evidence as there is. The weird case of the McDaniel supporters has yet to unfold. Meanwhile, the outside-agitators meme is better confined to the extreme amounts of money actually, provably, demonstrably spent on this statewide runoff, rather than extended to fantasies of voter sabotage of an ‘open primary’.

 

Next: This Is an “Open” Primary?

The returning issue of Romney’s tax returns

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The returning issue of Romney’s tax returns

Tax returns are not trivial

In the land of abundance, the legal obligations of citizenship rest lightly for most Americans. With no military draft or compulsory youth service, the United States actually requires little in the way of civic obligation–that is, obligation imposed by law and justice. Jury duty, maybe. Community service, maybe, depending on your school district, but only for students in school at the time (and their parents, dragooned indirectly to chauffeur them). Showing up to vote? If you don’t want to, no one can make you. Military service, maybe, but only if you sign up, and aside from the occasional court-mediated pre-sentencing agreement for young people, there is no one in officialdom to make you sign up. We may not always find feasible transportation to work, we may not find good jobs, we may not always be able to get needed medical attention. And of course we are supposed to eschew crime. But our system of government imposes few affirmative obligations on us individually as we go about our day. That leaves taxes as one of the few government-imposed legal obligations for the overwhelming majority of U.S. citizens and legal residents.

 

Whack-job signs

Thus it is either funny how much fuss the right-wing noise machine makes about government, when you think about it, or no wonder GOPers make such a fuss about taxes. If media personalities in the foaming-lips crowd want to represent the president as some kind of tyrant, they have little work with.

All this means that discussion about Mitt Romney’s tax returns, and questions about why Romney has not released them, are not trivial, silly or superficial. I respectfully disagree that the presidential candidate’s refusal to disclose his own IRS returns is a side issue.

 

Front page

Furthermore, Romney’s refusal to release his individual tax returns magnifies his inability to disclose his tax plans–tax policy–for other Americans.

 

Rep. Paul Ryan was repeatedly recommended as a vice-presidential pick before appearing in reports on Romney’s short list, before Romney took him on board Aug. 11–and not always by conservatives. In the context of taxes, former automobile ‘czar’ Steven Rattner on ABC’s This Week had this to say:

“I personally would love to see [Romney] pick Paul Ryan, because then we could actually have a decision about Romney’s economic plan, which he is not discussing, because I think when people actually understand his plan, they’ll understand all the tax things that we talked about. They’ll understand the spending implications of the Ryan budget plan in terms of what it does to Medicare, privatizing it, what it does to Medicaid, turning it into a block grant program, and then 33 percent cuts that are going to occur in a whole series of programs, including things like food stamps. Just to make his numbers work. So I would welcome Ryan and the discussion we have about it.”

The next speaker, former White House environmental advisor Van Jones, brought the Aug. 5 discussion closer to tax returns as well as to taxes:

“We’re talking about two different things here. We have a problem with Mitt Romney, because it seems that Mitt Romney doesn’t understand what ordinary people are going through. He’s talking—he’s had these magical mystery numbers about, oh, we’re going to close loopholes. When you dig down into it, the levels, what he’s calling loopholes as you are saying, are what ordinary people rely on to keep moving forward in the economy. So I think what you got here is do you want to elect somebody who won’t tell you how much money he’s making and won’t give you his tax returns, but with all he’s put on paper, will cut his taxes and raise yours. That’s the real question.”

One of Ryan’s biggest boosters, George H. W. Bush speechwriter Mary Kate Cary, pushed for Ryan in hopes that he would distract attention from Romney’s tax returns:

“This is an election about “big ideas,” and the longer it stays on small issues like Bain Capital and Romney’s tax returns, the worse Romney will do. Ryan is the intellectual leader of the party—who better to take the Republican case to voters in common sense language about how high the stakes are? Time to move from defense to offense.”

Ryan holding up budget

Moving back a little earlier in time than the presidential-campaign year, if we remember, Romney declined to weigh in on any congressional disputes over the payroll tax. Thus when congressional Republicans argued–in effect–that payroll taxes don’t count, compared to income tax, Romney offered no reasoned correction. (He has, after all, said in private that “47 percent” of Americans pay no income tax without mentioning that those people do pay payroll taxes.) Romney, the man running as CEO who can fix things, has taken little to no part in any of the fiscal policy disputes embroiling Congress. When he did take part–belatedly and reluctantly–he blew hot and cold, first over Ryan’s budget, then over the debt-ceiling deal. (Right now it looks as though Ryan is returning the favor by positioning himself for 2016, as much as working to benefit Romney.)

Hopeful Ryan with Bush Sec of State Condoleezza Rice

The refusal to release his own tax returns is one of few issues on which the GOP nominee for the White House has been consistent, and Romney has held to this one position even under heavy fire. Even in the Republican primary season, with Newt Gingrich among others calling for Romney to release his tax returns, no dice. He held to the position even when several right-wing commentators weighed in, in concert, with the same advice.

Romney himself recognizes that his unearned income, his inherited wealth and connections, and his immense fortune acquired through finance are less than political assets. He has played down the amount of money he  inherited outright–though the amount would be substantial for almost anyone else. He modestly deprecated $374,000 in speaking fees as “not very much.” He told at least one audience that he, too, feared being fired, feared getting a pink slip. The partial tax returns released do everything possible to minimize his assets abroad in the Caymans and elsewhere. And in the Oct. 18 town-hall debate, Romney even made the remarkable claim that “I came through small business.”

These are not the actions of a candidate oblivious to the impact of tax discussion.

 

Side note:

Taking a leaf from Rupert Murdoch’s book, Bain Capital over the years has invested heavily in media companies in the U.S. and abroad, one example being Clear Channel–a conduit for Bush administration communiques. Other media acquisitions and investments include Warner Music, The Weather Channel and AMC Entertainment, but completed media deals are only part of the picture; the Bain Capital track record also includes several foiled attempts (including in China). No one writes about Bain and media companies, but Bain Capital has a pattern of acquiring or trying to acquire a number of large media companies, in the U.S. and abroad. Thus, just as GOP federal-state links cemented under the GWBush administration have continued to solidify and expand–reinforced by superPACs, well-funded lobbying and party ties–so have GOP government-corporate links, including politics-media links. All signs point to a party (GOP)-government-media nexus on steroids under a Romney White House. It’s the right-wing noise machine grown more elegant, so to speak, because quieter and subtler. Gives a whole new meaning to the old term “fourth estate.”

Republican Party’s legitimate difficulty over Todd Akin

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Republican Party’s legitimate difficulty over Todd Akin: Re-cap and overview, part 1

 

Returning to the topic of Rep. Todd Akin’s senate race in Missouri, the real sticking point for Republican Party movers and shakers is not Akin’s mistaken science, his comforting notion that a woman’s body will ward off pregnancy in a sexual assault. The real sticking point, for top Republicans including presidential nominee Mitt Romney, is Akin’s genuine belief that abortion is wrong in all cases.

Todd Akin

(Certainly, Akin’s belief appears to be genuine, and short of proclaiming self a mind reader, it can be taken to be sincere.)

The fact that I do not agree with this view is beside the point. The point is that many voters and contributors on whom the upper levels of the GOP depend to keep office do agree with it. The official Republican Party platform adopted at the 2012 Republican National Convention–along with threatening to cut the mortgage interest deduction–holds with this view.

Those religiously conservative voters who hold this view are the people being stiffed by the national GOP, up to and including Romney.

So much for lip service. The Republican candidate for office who most strongly comes out with the anti-abortion party line in 2012–openly, candidly, unequivocally–happens, by some fluke, to be exactly the candidate that almost every well-placed Republican operative tries to exile beyond the pale. Akin’s remarks highlighted a view that many Republicans–especially those in Washington–do not hold. Worse yet, Akin’s remarks interfered with top Republicans’ ongoing strategy of keeping that view quiet.

Akin, Ryan

The adverse reaction to Akin’s remarks by wounded important people in the wounded top echelons of the GOP was swift, widespread and unequivocal.

Let no one be accused of exaggerating the reaction. Quick recap:

The day of Akin’s interview, then-presumptive nominee Mitt Romney promptly, if tersely, distanced himself from Akin’s comments.

The similarity between Akin’s no-exceptions position and that of Romney’s running mate, Paul Ryan, coming swiftly to light, the Romney campaign seems to have decided that just rejecting Akin’s views was not going to be enough. The next day, Romney came out to condemn Akin’s words as “inexcusable.”

The next day, he went farther yet, expressing a public hope that the Missouri congressman would leave the race.

Mitt Romney

Romney, be it noted, was not exactly going out on a limb here, separated from the rest of the party establishment. Other nominees suggesting that Akin should drop out include Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts, strongly challenged by Elizabeth Warren. (Brown faces the key difficulty that Warren would make a better senator.)

Elizabeth Warren

 

Reportedly joining in against Akin was incomprehensibly well-paid radio host Rush Limbaugh, though Limbaugh back-pedaled afterward. As the deadline for Akin to drop out without penalty approached its last hours, establishment pressure on Akin mounted.

The August 21 deadline, as we know, came and went with Akin remaining in the race on the eve of the RNC. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) joined the throng asking him not to. There aren’t many occasions when  Issa can chastise someone for ill-considered speech, but he stepped up to the plate this time. Must have been something of a shock to some of Issa’s supporters back home.

Coming to the convention, Romney seized air time in interviews to reiterate his opposition to Akin.

 

Matalin on air

Top GOP operative Mary Matalin went even farther. As previously written, Matalin said emphatically on air that the Republican Party will fund a write-in candidate against Akin in Missouri, if Akin stays in the race. As of last writing, Akin has not dropped out, though Matalin has not yet retracted her statement.

 

Rove at Republican National Convention 2012

Matalin’s king-of-the-hill moment didn’t last long. Funding a candidate to run against Akin was tumbled off by Karl Rove’s expressed desire to murder him. In a gathering for wealthy supporters and party strategists, Rove’s fancy turned to homicide. He later apologized to Akin. Rove was at the convention. Akin was not.

 

So much for pro-life.

It is fair to take Akin’s remarks to be sincere. It would be fair to accept Rove’s remarks as sincere.

And this, gentlemen and ladies, is what the Christian right gets from the national Republican party: It is okay for rightwing pro-lifers to show up and vote; it is okay for them to contribute money in small amounts; it is okay for them to keep Wall Streeters in power. Position to get money, money to get position, all fueled by some vague notion of status.

But when one politician gets so out of line as to state openly the party’s no-exceptions position on abortion–makes clear that yes, that’s what the party stands for–the full weight of the party comes down on him.

Mary Matalin says GOP will fund a write-in against Todd Akin in Missouri

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Election 2012: Mary Matalin says GOP will fund a write-in against Todd Akin in Missouri

Admittedly this is the kind of thing that could change in another hour. As of now, however, GOP top strategist Mary Matalin is saying something pretty crisp about Rep. Todd Akin’s senate race. After dismissing Akin’s chances of getting funding from the Republican party, Matalin went on to say, flatly, “Wagner’s going to be our candidate.”

 

Matalin and Carville

The reference is to Ann Wagner, the Missouri GOP chair now running for Akin’s House seat.

Wagner

 

Speaking in ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos panel discussion, Matalin went on to say “We have the money to do it”–i.e. fund a statewide write-in campaign for the U.S. Senate–and added that they’ve done it before. Presumably that last refers to Sen. Lisa Murkowski in Alaska. Matalin–New Orleans resident, wife of Dem strategist James Carville, and former diehard George W. Bush operative–is one of the nation’s most prominent pro-right discoursers on party politics and party policy.

The odds on a win for the hypothetical Wagner write-in in Missouri would be hard to calculate; in all likelihood the party would be counting on Akin to drop out, maybe at the last minute, in the face of a well-funded and serious write-in campaign from his own party.

 

Akin

The clear take-away from this Sunday morning’s talk shows confirms that the GOP establishment is indeed against Akin, as he says. Mitt Romney spent a few minutes of his lengthy one-on-one with Chris Wallace at Fox distancing himself from Akin, again, and calling attention to the fact that he is doing so. Former Florida Gov. Charlie Crist came out in favor of President Obama. Even Gov. Bob ‘vaginal probe’ McDonnell of Virginia mealy-mouthed around the rape-exception issue, saying, “The [national GOP] party didn’t make any judgment on that.”

With even fellow frothers like McDonnell bailing on him, Akin does indeed seem to face a tough rowing job. He is not completely alone, of course. Mike Huckabee is supporting him, front-pew, as are a number of Christian right organizations.

Outgoing Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, on CNN with Candy Crowley, broadened the discussion a bit. Hutchison said firmly–speaking about abortion–that “We shouldn’t put a party around an issue that’s so personal, and also religion-based.”

Hutchison, like all the GOP and pro-GOP voices on the air waves, went on to use the line that ‘the economy’–‘jobs’–should be the issue in the election.

Mitt Romney

You know the GOP is hurting in an election when it starts talking about jobs, the domestic economy, or hardships faced by ordinary people. It’s really hurting when it tries to switch the discussion to those topics, in preference to others.

 

To be continued

Those pesky regulations and the empty threat of filibuster

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Regulation, public policy and the hollow threat of filibuster

Family responsibilities and work have taken me in recent months to Louisville, Ky., Shreveport, La., and Houston, Texas. The changes of place did not change the big picture. In every place, local news stories and larger news stories–this is something one can count on–reconfirmed the need for what the GOP calls ‘job-killing regulations’. This phrase is quite the talking point, by the way, notwithstanding its lack of validity. The nonprofit web site Think Progress reported in April that use of “job-killing regulation” increased 17750 percent in U.S. newspapers between 2007 and 2011.

Orwell lives, and this is one of the big Orwellianisms. Repeat it often enough, and it starts to seem plausible? –Let’s hope not. There is no evidence that regulation kills jobs.

On the contrary, there is every indication that unregulated outsourcing, off-shoring, merger and consolidation do kill jobs, or at least U.S. jobs. This is one of the big reasons why the rightwing noise machine is so against what it characterizes as regulation: protection of jobs, like protection of public health and public safety, works to the advantage of the many, rather than just of the few.

There is also every indication that lack of regulation–genuine regulation, backed up by oversight and enforcement–kills people. Does any responsible person really want an Alzheimer’s facility, or any long-term care facility, to be unregulated and unmonitored? Unlikely, and the same goes for day care centers, private schools, and children’s camps. For that matter, the same goes for the athletic program at Penn State (State Penn).

Travel is a continuing reminder of the need to protect public safety and public health. From the interior space on an airplane–if any–to getting from airport to final destination, from questions like whether your luggage arrives to more essential questions like whether you do, our predominant business model tends to create a continuing tug-of-war between efforts to cut corners at the top (corporate management) and efforts to survive at the bottom (customers). The same goes for every other industry. There are some honorable exceptions, such as CREDO, and they deserve kudos. But exceptions do not disprove the general rule.

Among the local news stories in Kentucky:

  • Neighbors in one community gathered at an elementary school to hear about ground contamination from lead, arsenic and DDT from a 29-acre industrial site near their property.
  • Three day care centers in Louisville recently closed, after the driver of a van crashed, killing a woman passenger and sending 14 children to the hospital, three in intensive care. The company operating the centers had previously been cited by state agencies for dozens of safety violations; this is a perfect example of the kind of ‘small business’ where ‘job-killing regulations’ are bemoaned by Mitt Romney and his spokespersons including Ed Gillespie.
  • In other local news, an abandoned theme park has been getting only minimal maintenance, meaning that its structures will at some point just fall down. The company that owns it, Six Flags, was in bankruptcy reorganization, and the Kentucky State Fair Board faces its own budget constraints–like virtually all state and local agencies.

When we lose ‘government jobs’–another favorite Orwellianism–we lose independent oversight for dangerous occupations and sites.

Speaking of oversight and dangerous sites, word of fraud in the investment world also continually seeps out. A few familiar examples suffice:

  • Bernard Madoff’s brother Peter has pleaded guilty to fabricating compliance reports and deceiving the SEC. This case–the record-breaking Madoff Ponzi scheme–is another reminder of the need for good, honest record-keeping, and for someone to watch the custodians.
  • Houston can do you an Allen Stanford, investment scheme $8 billion.
  • An investment advisor in Glasgow, Ky., is indicted for allegedly defrauding investors in Kentucky and Indiana of $2.4 million. Having promised to invest customers’ money, the so-called advisor allegedly spent it on a shooting range he set up in an old rock quarry, and on himself.
  • Closer to home (D.C. region), the former CEO of Virginia’s Bank of the Commonwealth has been indicted for alleged fraud conspiracy in covering up the bank’s financial condition since 2008.
  • On a grander scale, we have august Barclays bank allegedly depressing its interest rate on lending–and thereby short-changing institutional investors including Baltimore City on returns they could have gotten. The city of Baltimore is suing. Time will tell whether Virginia Attorney General Ken (“Kooky”) Cuccinelli elects to do the same.

All of these problems are a function of privatizing gain, socializing risk; reserving gains for the few and shifting the burdens of compliance, taxation and monitoring to the general public, to the individual, and to state and local government. The pattern fits into a larger one: Over-all family wealth in the U.S. declined 39 percent from 2007 to 2010, while the wealthiest gained 2 percent.

No one talks about it this way, but the NRA and nut-right mantra that what everybody needs are bigger guns and more guns also fits into the same pattern. Why, when you think about it, should a private citizen be expected to go out and purchase ludicrously expensive semi-automatic weapons for protection? Why should the onus of acquiring combat gear and combat training be on private citizens in the first place? Socializing risk, privatizing gain–the big-time weapons commerce fills the bill, and our docile GOP lawmakers relentlessly forward this agenda by talking about it as a “right.” Funnily enough, they do not talk about purchasing health insurance the same way.

For self-defence, there is actually no evidence that bigger magazines and more clips mean more protection. Even at worst–firing a gun at someone–you need one good shot, not a spray of careless rounds. That’s if you really care about self-defense rather than aggression.

But our NRA, and the politicians hired by the NRA, have been intent for decades now on blurring the line between self-defense and aggression.

Again when you think about it, the sole use for automatic and semi-automatic multiple-shot firearms, as for big magazines that hold hundreds of rounds of ammo, would be to kill off a whole crowd or army of attackers. It happens in movies. In real life, armed attacks are generally perpetrated by–what’s that word again?–oh, yes!–loners. In reality, unlike in film, attacks with big-time weapons are more liable to come from one gunman or two, shooting into a crowd or a classroom, than from a crowd shooting at the one lone individual (you, in this paranoid view).

This fact could represent something of a hurdle for the guns-and-ammo industry, the NRA, and the GOP officeholders who support them, if they were to permit its transmission. So they prevent its getting out, as much as possible–no small feat, given that it surfaces again every time some disturbed young guy, heavily armed, commits a mass shooting. So what’s a guns-and-ammo industry to do? –Why, market to the paranoid and unstable, of course. What are the cartel-supporting NRA and the NRA-supporting GOP to do? –Why, vent as much hyperbolic us-and-them rhetoric into the air as possible (Michelle Bachmann’s nonsense about Huma Abedin is only the most recent example).

Anything to obfuscate the fact that mass shootings are committed by the lone off-base guy, against the masses, not the other way around.

James Holmes

This point should not be oversimplified, but it also should not be lost sight of. Back to ‘regulation’ again–that being the GOP word for providing for public safety and public health: Public safety and public health require decent regulation of indecent commerce. Multiple clips and magazines, body armor, automatic or so-called semi-automatic rifles, assault weapons, military-grade- and SWAT-team gear–there is no reason why unauthorized civilians should be allowed to buy them. We need regulation of the online commerce that gets around state and local attempts to protect public safety. We need for private gun sales, second-hand gun sales, straw purchases, auctions, and gun shows to operate under the same law as storefront owners who sell guns do.

The laws, furthermore,  need to be good.

Contrary to the thrust of some media representations, the situation is not hopeless. There is no such thing as perfect safety or perfected public safety, as there is no other perfection on earth. But the fact that we cannot do everything is not an argument for doing nothing. In public policy, some specific remedies are clear.

And in the politics that lead to policy changes, some highly specific small steps are also clear, and timely. There is no reason, for example, why strong public support for reasonable public safety measures should be contravened by a minority in the senate–by the mere threat of filibuster.

Calls to abolish the filibuster by amending the constitution are about as good an idea as most proposed constitutional amendments, which means not very. There is a simpler, cleaner and more legitimate means to address this ridiculous problem that never should have been allowed to arise in the first place: When our GOP minority in the U.S. Senate threatens to filibuster, make them actually filibuster. Let Mitch McConnell and Jim Inhofe and Dan Coats and the rest get up there and do like Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, albeit with less idealism. Let them read aloud from the Bible they profess to love so much, read Shakespeare, read Little Women or Anne of Green Gables for that matter.

Mitch McConnell

Having the mere threat of filibuster substitute for putting in the time on the floor, preventing needed legislation, is unconstitutional.

 

 

Imaginary flap over Marco Rubio

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Imaginary flap over Marco Rubio

The VP flap yesterday over Marco Rubio’s not being ‘vetted’ as Mitt Romney’s pick for the second spot on the Republican ticket was pretty weird, even for television. I’m all for imagination, the play of color and the zodiac of human wit and all that, but there’s supposed to be a limit. Lo-mein-for-brains took over the airwaves yesterday, at least in politics.

Rubio

Seriously: Not that this writer bears any brief for Romney, but to call him out for not vetting Rubio for the GOP nomination for Vice President of the United States is just baseless.  This is what passes for political analysis nowadays–a flap because Marco Rubio is reportedly not being considered for the VP spot?

Why should he be considered? Why in the world should the Romney campaign, or any presidential campaign, spend time and resources vetting Marco Rubio?

Let’s run down a quick list of the premises of this remarkable criticism of Romney. For perspective, it might be remembered that Romney is the man who, as they say in convention nominating speeches, recommended letting Detroit go bankrupt; who has never met a war he didn’t like except the one in which he could have served; who gives every sign of wanting another trillion-dollar tax cut for the rich and another trillion-dollar war if he can get it.

So what are they talking about, chez Romney? –Rubio. Marco Rubio?!?

Let’s have a little correction here, or at least a rethinking of some of those glib assertions all over the place yesterday.

No, passing over Rubio is not somehow an ‘insult to Hispanics’. There is less than no evidence that Rubio would draw Latino voters to the GOP or to the Romney ticket. Rubio is Cuban-American, not from Mexico or points south–and not even a refugee from Castro at that. His parents fled Cuba, as we know from the reporting of the WashPost’s Manuel Roig-Franzia, under the Batista regime. More importantly, every typical GOP policy Rubio supports is antithetical to the preferences of most Latino voters as expressed in recent elections. Immigration is only a partial exception–and Rubio’s comparative mildness or non-xenophobic position on immigration runs counter to that GOP ‘base’ we hear so much about. Back to Latinos, it would be more insulting to assume that Latinos are going to vote in a bloc for a man just because his last name ends in a vowel.

No, Rubio is not overwhelmingly ‘popular’ nationwide. He did well for himself in Florida, where the civic infrastructure has been laid waste by GOP state administrations and legs. The general public knows little about him except that he is young and Republican and male and married. There is no indication that he would help carry any other state. In fact, there is no hard evidence that he would help Romney carry Florida. If placed under nationwide scrutiny, his policies, his finances–that misuse of official credit cards, for example–and his misstatements about family history might well catch up with him. Then there’s the nature of his donors. He is no shoo-in, not somebody to be considered automatically a plus.

No, Rubio would not necessarily carry Florida. If Florida voters get a clear choice and a clear look at GOP policy–another trillion-dollar war, another trillion-dollar drain of public resources set up by tax policy for the wealthy and for corporations–there is no reason to think Rubio would somehow outweigh that in the balance. Self-adoration is not the same as the adoration of a multitude.

No, Rubio is not qualified to be Vice President. Cast of thousands, admittedly. Virginia’s Gov. McDonnell Douglas is also not qualified to be VP–unless VP stands for vaginal probe–but gets talked about that way anyway, as does Rubio.

No, Rubio is not such a significant political figure that he automatically gets entered in the veepstakes. What, exactly, has Marco Rubio done as a senator? What if anything did he accomplish in Florida, aside from some credit-card shopping?

No, Rubio would not necessarily be an overwhelmingly popular choice for the Republican ‘base’. The first choice of the GOP ‘base’ is not black; not female; not Latino. Never. They don’t say it, they are chagrined at being considered prejudiced, they tend to be defensive about it–except in private conversations–and they put up with tokens, exceptions and the Herman Cains of the world cheerfully. They don’t have a high opinion of politics, of candidates for office, for public office or for civic engagement in the first place, after all. But they still have their preferences, their base attitude so to speak. The national political press has spent a good fifty years ignoring this attitude and thus covering up for it. Meanwhile, the politicians the  insiders have protected have spent decades ignoring the racial disparity in applying the death penalty, just to take one example.

It’s still remarkable that they can get away with it, after all these years.

That said, from a certain perspective it might be beneficial if Rubio did actually end up getting put through what former Vice President Dick Cheney called the meat grinder.

In narrowly political terms, however, that’s another good reason for the Romney campaign not to subject him to it. All these commentators speaking, ostensibly, from the perspective of Romney’s political advantage–suppose the Romney team found out something about Rubio? What then?

BizarroWorld veepstakes.

Indirectly the flap yesterday may have been of benefit to the public, at that. If Romney can be pushed around this easily–doing an apparent 180 on a potential VP choice, just because some television commentators discussed Rubio’s not being on the list–then it’s good for American voters to know it.

Funny how you never hear the blowhards on air talking about a ‘Sistah Souljah moment’ when a Republican candidate is involved.

Policy matters

But then it is seldom suggested that a Republican candidate is actually trying to help a disadvantaged person or group, so there’s no bar to raise for hypocrisy in that regard.

 

Déjà vu all over again: Rightwing attacks on presidents

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Déjà vu all over again: Rightwing attacks on Franklin Roosevelt

 

There are few better ways to get a handle on the current political scene than to re-read The Age of Roosevelt, the historical trilogy on the New Deal by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Volume 3 is titled The Politics of Upheaval. During the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, and the struggles of American labor to survive, the United States had to try to conserve fiscal and social health in the face of continuing assaults from nut-right politicians and media figures. Then as now, there was an unholy alliance between the distorted faux-populists doing the vocalizing and their funders; to some extent the self-described representatives of the people—or of religion, or of morality—represented the limited short-term interests of the very wealthy and of Wall Street.

Side note: Admittedly, the term ‘nut right’ is anachronism. Back in the 1930s the destructors were called other names, often more elegant though equally negative. There is little use in trying to quantify the ugliness of the personal attacks, to compare then and now. Obviously the anti-Rooseveltians did not have race to use against their president. But they did make fun of–for example–his being disabled and in a wheelchair. A political-social occasion described by Schlesinger gets the idea across: Republican business chiefs, gathered for a dinner meeting, all rose for a ‘toast’ to the absent president, laughing as a group at the fact that he would not be able to do the same.

 

FDR

A rose by any other name . . .

The thumbnails below should seem familiar. Let’s take, for example, the unholy alliance between the rightwing super-rich and racist-demagogue politicians not typically featured in Town and Country magazine:

“ . . . the du Ponts in particular were prepared to support almost anyone who promised to stir the masses—even, it developed, Governor Eugene Talmadge of Georgia.

Nothing better demonstrated the naivete—or the desperation—of the American right than this decision. Since his election as governor in 1933, Talmadge had become a strident figure on the national scene. He seemed a character out of Erskine Caldwell, with black rumpled hair, suspicious eyes glaring behind thick horn-rimmed glasses, a black cigar jutting out of his wide fleshy mouth, and a collection of poor-white prejudices ejaculated with restless and rabid intensity. Talmadge, who held a law degree from the University of Georgia, was actually much less the uncouth backwoodsman from Sugar Creek than he pretended.” (520)

 

Eugene Talmadge

But Talmadge had his uses. As Georgia’s governor,

 

“Talmadge spat at the New Deal with contempt. Little riled him more than [National Recovery Act] standards of wages and hours, unless possibly it was the [Works Progress Administration] standards of relief. When Ben Stolberg asked him what  he would do for the unemployed, Talmadge roared back, “Let ‘em starve.” The Governor then added, “What you need in New York is not La Guardia but Mussolini. A little castor oil would go a long ways toward starting the wheels of industry goin’ again.” (Stolberg concluded he was talking to Buzz Windrip.)” (521)

Note: The topical allusion to Mussolini here refers to one of Mussolini’s milder forms of torture, forcing political prisoners to drink the strong laxative castor oil. The offense was memorialized in Sinclair Lewis’s darkly sardonic novel It Can’t Happen Here. Buzz Windrip is a character in the novel. The Sinclair Lewis Society, of which I am a member, can and does find Lewis all over the map. Nowadays it is hard not to see him everywhere.

 

Sinclair Lewis, avatar Steve Buschemi

Back to then Gov. Talmadge,

“A Texas lumberman named John Henry Kirby presently waited on [Talmadge] as chairman of the Southern Committee to Uphold the Constitution. Kirby and Talmadge soon conceived the idea of a convention of grass-roots Democrats to denounce the New Deal and (though this was less advertised0 to launch the Talmadge presidential boom.

Talmadge’s retrenchment policies—especially the across-the-board reduction of the property tax, which gave immense benefits to the Georgia Power Company while saving the average Georgia farmer 53 cents a year—had won him a good name among businessmen.”

 

How time doesn’t change things:

“Late in January 1936 the forces gathered at Macon, Georgia, to save the republic—Thomas L. Dixon, the author of The Klansman, Gerald L. K. Smith, an assortment of other politicians, and Talmadge himself . . . Above the platform hung the Stars and Bars of the Confederacy. On every seat lay a copy of the Georgia Woman’s World with a two-column photograph splashed across the page [showing Eleanor Roosevelt in the company of African-Americans; offensive description].” (522)

Shades of Citizens for a Working America PAC. Grass roots? Not so much:

“Even in Georgia the grass-roots convention played only to a half-filled auditorium . . . What gave the episode significance was the readiness of northern businessmen—who presumably knew by 1936 all that it was necessary to know about Gene Talmadge—to give him money to advance his ideas and ambitions. Some of them—Sloan and Henry du Pont, for example—actually sent along their contributions after the [racist] revelations of Macon. Arthur Krock ascribed it not to malice but to gullibility, and he was doubtless right. The frightened rich were evidently at the mercy of every fast-talking political adventurer who came down the street.”

But fancily named organizations, like hope, spring eternal:

“Other attempts on the part of the Liberty Leaguers, du Pont section, to break through to the masses were even more ludicrous. One shrewd promoter sold them the idea of establishing something called the Farmers’ Independence Council. The only known address of the organization was the Liberty League office in Washington. “The biggest contributor,” remarked the Philadelphia Record, “was that old hayseed, Lammot du Pont, who kicked in $5000. (Crops pretty good this year, ain’t they Lammot!)” Other interested agriculturists were Sloan, Ogden Mills, Winthrop Aldrich, and Pew of Sun Oil. Relentless congressional investigation failed to disclose a single working farmer in the membership.”

On the other hand–here is a congressional committee whose time has come again:

“In the spring of 1936 Hugo Black’s Special Committee to Investigate Lobbying Activities got around to looking at the du Pont political subsidiaries—the Southern Committee to Uphold the Constitution, the Farmers’ Independence Council, the Crusaders, the Sentinels of the Republic. The result of the unfeeling exposure of rich men as political suckers was merriment in the press and a permanent conviction that the American Liberty League was a political bust. By midsummer, in the cruelest blow of all, the Republican party begged the Liberty League to stay away from its presidential ticket.” (523)

By the way, this chapter from Schlesinger’s book is titled “Dissidence among the Democrats.” This week, the major media outlets gave big play to theories that President Obama’s support of marriage equality would generate dissidence among minorities, and thus loss of votes for the Democrats. The Washington Post, a newspaper with a contingent actively campaigning against President Obama, has run this kind of line at frequent intervals since November 2008, although more feebly and dispiritedly lately. As regards the 2012 election, opinion polls indicate the same-sex-marriage issue less than a game changer. Meanwhile, now as ever some of the largest media outlets continue hand-wringing over the loss of ‘moderates’ in both parties blahblahblah.

 

Once again, a question for those still literate, factual, and practical: What is the ‘moderate’ number of exotic failures on Wall Street? What is the ‘moderate’ number of oil spills? What is the ‘moderate’ amount of mortgage fraud?

The methods, like the aims—money to get position, position to get money and status—are perennial. The power and will in some sectors of corporate America to push back against the interests of the general public should not be under-estimated.

 

Note: The above is re-posted, with revisions, from an earlier piece, regrettably still relevant.