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Billionaires Crap Out in 2012 Elections |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=6907"><span class="small">Jim Hightower, Creators Syndicate</span></a>
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Wednesday, 14 November 2012 14:53 |
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Hightower writes: "They came. They spent! Then, they limped home, tails between their legs. (OK, they didn't limp; they were flown home on their private Gulfstream jets. But still, their tails were tucked down in the defeat mode.)"
Texas' progressive political curmudgeon, Jim Hightower. (photo: JimHightower.com)
Billionaires Crap Out in 2012 Elections
By Jim Hightower, Creators Syndicate
14 November 12
 hey came. They spent! Then, they limped home, tails between their legs. (OK, they didn't limp; they were flown home on their private Gulfstream jets. But still, their tails were tucked down in the defeat mode.)
"They" are the far-right corporate billionaire extremists who tried to become America's presidential kingmakers this year. Unleashed by the Supreme Court's Citizens United edict allowing unlimited sums of cash in our elections, they spewed an ocean of money into efforts to enthrone Mitt Romney in the White House and turn the Senate into a GOP rubber stamp for totally corporatizing government.
On election night, they gathered at exclusive Romney victory parties, but the celebratory mood quickly soured, for key states were choosing Democrats. The people were speaking, and (damn them) they seemed to be deliberately voting against the barons.
Take casino baron Sheldon Adelson, for example. He became the 2012 caricature of an obscene billionaire trying to buy democracy. Adelson rolled the political dice on eight candidates, betting more than $60 million - and crapped out on all of them.
Also, the uber-arrogant Koch boys, Charles and David, amassed some $200 million from their corporate vault and from other billionaires to knock out President Obama. But at evening's end, there the president stood, re-elected by a majority of voters and winning with more than 56 percent of the electoral votes.
And Bob Perry, another self-serving, ultra-rightist billionaire dumped $21 million into GOP Super PACs trying to win senate races in Florida and Virginia, as well as the presidency. All for naught.
Democrats not only gained two seats in the Senate, but new senators such as Elizabeth Warren, Tammy Baldwin and Mazie Hirono are expected to make the Senate more populist and much feistier. Heidi Heitkamp, Joe Donnelly, Chris Murphy and Martin Heinrich are expected to make the Senate more progressive than it has been (admittedly a low standard) and less likely to support the kleptocracy the barons so dearly hoped to establish.
Of course, the billionaires aren't through. They reckon that the roughly one billion bucks they put up this year just wasn't enough firepower. So look for even more obscene spending in 2014 and 2016.
Meanwhile, let's check in on the premier political bagman for moneyed corporations: Karl Rove. You know it's been a good election night when he has a hissy fit on national television.
It came at just past 11p.m., after he heard a TV network declare Obama the winner in Ohio.
This was not just any network; it was Fox, the Republican Party's official propaganda machine! Rove, who is a rabidly partisan GOP politico and fundraiser, also doubles as an expert "analyst" for Fox. (Proof again that this network has amputated the word "conflict" from the ethical concept of "conflict of interest." But I digress.)
Rove was sitting just off-camera on the Fox set when the on-air anchor team made the call on Ohio. In fact, he was on his cellphone at the time with a top Romney staffer who was wailing that Fox was wrong, that Romney was winning Ohio. With his right knee jerking furiously, Rove demanded to be put on the air to rebut the network's own professional vote counters. He got what he wanted, publicly chiding his Fox colleagues for being "premature." This prompted an unusual moment of dead air, after which anchor Megyn Kelly said, "Well, that's awkward." Since every news outlet and even Republican Party officials were by then conceding Ohio (and the presidency) to Obama, Kelly asked whether Rove was using his own math just to "make himself feel better."
Bingo! Karl the Kingmaker was having a really bad night. In the past year, he had talked assorted corporations and fat cats into putting some $256 million into his attack ads against Democrats, assuring the donors that their money and his political genius would put the White House and the Senate in GOP hands. He came up a bit short. For example, American Crossroads, one of Rove's two political funds, spent $103 million to defeat Democratic Senate candidates, but the return on that investment was a pathetic 1 percent. Billionaires expect quite a bit better, so Rove had some explaining to do and some crow to eat.
By the way, in response to this brouhaha, Jon Stewart of Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" said, "'Math You Do As a Republican To Make Yourself Feel Better' is a much better slogan than the one Fox has now." But again, I digress.
To be fair to the Karlmeister, his 1 percent return on the money he handled is not atypical of the secretive Republican political funds in this election. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce laid out $31 million in dark money and got a 5 percent return on their funders' investment. Worse, the National Rifle Association surreptitiously invested $11 million in several Republicans - and got zero return.
As a researcher for the Sunlight Foundation, an independent watchdog group, put it: "It may mean people really don't like big money in politics."
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FOCUS | Go Ahead and Secede, Texas. We Dare You |
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Wednesday, 14 November 2012 13:15 |
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Thompson writes: "Let's back away from the secession ledge for a moment, see if we can’t find a compromise."
'More than 80,000 people have signed an online White House petition asking permission for Texas to leave the Union.'(photo: Getty Images)
Go Ahead and Secede, Texas. We Dare You
By Chuck Thompson, The New Republic
13 November 12
 n the wake of news that more than 80,000 people have signed an online White House petition asking permission for Texas to leave the Union, a single grave concern has united the minds of Americans of all political colors: If the state secedes, where are we going to get our NFL-caliber wide receivers?
As a recent student not just of secession, but the traditionally Southern mindset that drives it in this country (similar petitions for Louisiana, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, and North Carolina have all topped 20,000 signatures), let me be the first to say to the aggrieved liberal community: relax. No one is talking about building a Berlin Wall around the upside-down pistol grip part of Texas.
Texans may be stubborn, but they ain't stupid. In the event of secession, mutually beneficial treaties would be drawn up between the United States and newly formed Texas Republic, ensuring both sides get what they need.
The U.S.A. would be guaranteed access to Texas's critical military bases, and to necessities such as refined oil, natural gas, cattle, cotton and cheerleaders. (By the way, anytime someone mentions jazz as America's singular gift to world culture, I hasten to remind them of the cheerleader outfit.) In return, Texas would receive from the rest of the nation such life-sustaining provisions as …
Come to think of it, what does Texas actually need from the rest of us?
It's not just that the state leads the nation in production of most of those aforementioned resources. With a rock-solid infrastructure (Texas is the only state in the continental U.S. with its own independent power grid) and stable political tradition, it's also a self-sustaining player in agriculture, aeronautics, computers, energy, high-tech research and manufacturing, telecommunications, transportation and just about any other economic category to which you care to attach a dollar value. It's home to six of the top 50 Fortune 500 companies, including ExxonMobil, ConocoPhilips and AT&T, not to mention Southwest Airlines, American Airlines and Dr Pepper. According to a 2011 Economist ranking, Texas's $1.224 trillion GDP makes it the economic equivalent of Russia - and the fourteenth-largest economy in the world, second among U.S. states only to California.
Even during the recent economic downturn, commerce in Texas has remained robust. Employment is growing at 3.1 percent annually; its manufacturing and export figures are trending up; its unemployment rate currently stands at 6.8 percent, a full point below the national average; and housing starts are up 17.2 percent over the past year.
Texan Bob Smiley, author of the witty Texas secession novel Don't Mess With Travis (Travis being the surname of a fictional Texas governor who calls for secession), is even more emphatic on the point. "In the last decade of the Great Recession, Texas has expanded by more than one million jobs, more than all other states combined," Smiley told me in an email. "And fully 95 percent of the country receives its oil and gas courtesy of pipelines that originate within Texas. That is what one might call leverage."
Texas isn't entirely without need - consider the recent drought there, and accompanying federal aid - but then again, no major player in the global economy is entirely self-sufficient. Point being, instead of freaking out about angry Texans and other Southerners wanting to control their own destiny, we'd do better to consider their position and complaints, and ask ourselves: Shouldn't shared values, cultural norms and manageable geography - not the chance tentacles of history and insatiable federal bureaucracy - ultimately be the things that unite a given population?
For two years, I traveled throughout Texas and the South researching these very questions for a book. I concluded that while on its surface secession is an admittedly absurd proposition, there's a certain logic, even a sense of humanity, in its essence. Sure, splitting the country apart feels unnatural - a crime against manifest destiny, at the very least. Americans have become so accustomed to their hard divisions - conservative-liberal, black-white, Roe-Wade, red-blue, Tea Party-sane - that the chasm separating us feels almost ordained, an organic and even integral part of the national tradition. But just because spiritual, political, racial and commercial divides have always been with us doesn't mean they must continue to define us.
So let's back away from the secession ledge for a moment, see if we can't find a compromise. Maybe the solution for dissatisfied Texans and other wannabe secessionist states that can't tolerate the oppressive yoke of the federal government is to grant them some measure of quasi-autonomy. There's plenty of international precedent. Maybe deal with Texas the way that the Philippines deals with its restive state in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, or the way China manages economically independent Hong Kong as a Special Administrative Region, even issuing its citizens their own passports. Hell, Scotland already has a semiautonomous parliament and in 2014 it's going to vote on an independence referendum that could abolish its 300-year tie to the UK. Turn Texas into Puerto Rico or Guam; give them some form of political and social expression in exchange for diminished power in federal government.
Or maybe the solution is simply to give Texas and other secessionist-conservatives what they really want: free passage to the land of all their conservative fantasies. Send them all off with gratis one-way tickets (I'm happy to earmark some of my socialist tax dollars for the effort) to a country with: a small federal government with limited power and meager influence over the private lives of its citizens; extremely weak trade unions routinely sabotaged by the federal government (i.e., a "pro-business environment"); negligible income tax; few immigrants, legal or otherwise; a dominant Christian population, accounting for some 70 percent of the people; no mandatory health insurance or concept of universal health care; a strong social taboo surrounding homosexuality and a constitution that already states, "All individuals have the right to marry a person of their choice of the opposite sex"; and a gun culture so ubiquitous that you can find automatic weaponry displayed openly on the streets of its capital city and in many households.
Sound like a Texan secessionist's dream? Well, it's no dream. This country already exists. It's called the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Don't mess with us, Texas. You just might get what you want.
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FOCUS | Why Obama is More than Bush With a Human Face |
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Wednesday, 14 November 2012 11:40 |
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Žižek writes: "So should we write Obama off? Is he nothing more than Bush with a human face?"
President Barack Obama speaks at a campaign rally in Fayetteville, North Carolina 10/19/08. (photo: Jim Young/Reuters)
Why Obama is More than Bush With a Human Face
By Slavoj Žižek, Guardian UK
14 November 12
Ground-floor thinking can give Obama lift-off. His reforms have already touched a nerve at the core of the US ideological edifice
 ow did Barack Obama win re-election? The philosopher Jean-Claude Milner recently proposed the notion of the "stabilising class": not the old ruling class, but all who are committed to the stability and continuity of the existing social, economic and political order - the class of those who, even when they call for a change, do so to ensure that nothing really will change. The key to electoral success in today's developed states is winning over this class. Far from being perceived as a radical transformer, Obama won them over, and that's why he was re-elected. The majority who voted for him were put off by the radical changes advocated by the Republican market and religious fundamentalists.
But long term, is this enough? In his Notes Towards a Definition of Culture, the great British conservative TS Eliot remarked that there are moments when the only choice is between heresy and non-belief, when the only way to keep a religion alive is to perform a sectarian split from its corpse. Something like this is needed to break out of the debilitating crisis of western societies - here Obama clearly did not deliver. Many disappointed by his presidency held against him precisely the fact that the core of his much-publicised "hope" proved to be that the system can survive with modest changes.
So should we write Obama off? Is he nothing more than Bush with a human face? There are signs which point beyond this pessimistic vision. Although his healthcare reforms were mired in so many compromises they amounted to almost nothing, the debate triggered was of huge importance. A great art of politics is to insist on a particular demand that, while thoroughly realist, feasible and legitimate, disturbs the core of the hegemonic ideology. The healthcare reforms were a step in this direction - how else to explain the panic and fury they triggered in the Republican camp? They touched a nerve at the core of America's ideological edifice: freedom of choice.
Obama's healthcare reforms effectively deliver a large part of the population from the dubious "freedom" to worry about who will cover their illnesses. Being able to take basic healthcare for granted, to count on it like one counts on water or electricity without worrying about choosing the supplier, means people simply gain more time and energy to dedicate their lives to other things. The lesson to be learned is that freedom of choice only functions if a complex network of legal, educational, ethical, economic and other conditions is present as the invisible background to the exercise of our freedom. This is why, as a counter to the ideology of choice, countries like Norway should be held up as models: although all the main agents respect a basic social agreement and large social projects are enacted in a spirit of solidarity, social productivity and dynamism are at extraordinary levels, contradicting the common wisdom that such a society should be stagnating.
In Europe, the ground floor of a building is counted as zero, so the floor above it is the first floor, while in the US, the first floor is on street level. This trivial difference indicates a profound ideological gap: Europeans are aware that, before counting starts - before decisions or choices are made - there has to be a ground of tradition, a zero level that is always already given and, as such, cannot be counted. While the US, a land with no proper historical tradition, presumes that one can begin directly with self-legislated freedom - the past is erased. What the US has to learn to take into account is the foundation of the "freedom to choose".
Obama is often accused of dividing the American people instead of bringing them together to find bipartisan solutions - but what if this is what is good about him? In situations of crisis, a division is urgently needed between those who want to drag on within old parameters and those who are aware of necessary change. Such a division, not opportunistic compromises, is the only path to true unity. When Margaret Thatcher was asked about her greatest achievement, she promptly answered: "New Labour." And she was right: her triumph was that even her political enemies adopted her basic economic policies. True victory over your enemy occurs when they start to use your language, so that your ideas form the foundation of the entire field. Today, when neoliberal hegemony is clearly falling apart, the only solution is to repeat Thatcher's gesture in the opposite direction.
Yurodivy is the Russian Orthodox version of the holy fool who feigns insanity so he can deliver a message so dangerous for those in power that, if stated directly, it would cause a brutal reaction. Do Donald Trump's post-election tweets not sound precisely like a holy fool's ramblings? "Let's fight like hell and stop this great and disgusting injustice! This election is a total sham and a travesty. We are not a democracy! We can't let this happen. We should march on Washington and stop this travesty. We should have a revolution in this country!"
Although Trump is in no way a radical leftist, it is easy to discern in his tweets the doubt about "bourgeois formal democracy" usually attributed to the radical left: superficial freedoms mask the power of elites that enforce their will through media control and manipulations. There is a grain of truth in this - our democracy effectively has to be reinvented. Every opening should be exploited to bring us closer to this goal, even the tiny cracks through which some light shone in Obama's first term. Our task in his second term is to maintain constant pressure to widen these cracks.
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The President's Opening Bid on a Grand Bargain |
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Wednesday, 14 November 2012 08:45 |
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Reich writes: "The President should make crystal clear that America faces two big economic challenges ahead: getting the economy back on track, and getting the budget deficit under control."
Portrait, Robert Reich, 08/16/09. (photo: Perian Flaherty)
The President's Opening Bid on a Grand Bargain
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog
14 November 12
 hen he meets with Congressional leaders this Friday to begin discussions about avoiding the upcoming "fiscal cliff," the President should make crystal clear that America faces two big economic challenges ahead: getting the economy back on track, and getting the budget deficit under control. But the two require opposite strategies. We get the economy back on track by boosting demand through low taxes on the middle class and more government spending. We get the budget deficit under control by raising taxes and reducing government spending. (Taxes can be raised on the wealthy in the short term without harming the economy because the wealthy already spend as much as they want - that's what it means to be rich.)
It all boils down to timing and sequencing: First, get the economy back on track. Then tackle the budget deficit.
If we do too much deficit reduction too soon, we're in trouble. That's why the fiscal cliff is so dangerous. The Congressional Budget Office and most independent economists say it will suck so much demand out of the economy that it will push us back into recession. That's the austerity trap of low growth, high unemployment, and falling government revenues Europe finds itself in. We don't want to go there.
Although the U.S. economy is picking up and unemployment trending downward, we're still not out of the woods. So in the foreseeable future - the next six months to a year, at least -the government has to continue to spend, and the vast middle class has to keep spending as well, unimpeded by any tax increase.
But waiting too long to reduce the deficit will also harm the economy – spooking creditors and causing interest rates to rise.
This is why any "grand bargain" to avert the fiscal cliff should contain a starting trigger that begins spending cuts and any middle-class tax increases only when the economy is strong enough. I'd make that trigger two consecutive quarters of 6 percent unemployment and 3 percent economic growth.
To make sure this doesn't become a means of avoiding deficit reduction altogether, that trigger should be built right into any "grand bargain" legislation - irrevocable unless two-thirds of the House and Senate agree, and the President signs on.
The trigger would reassure creditors we're serious about getting our fiscal house in order. And it would allow us to achieve our two goals in the right sequence - getting the economy back on track, and then getting the budget deficit under control. It's sensible and do-able. But will Congress and the President do it?
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o you like word games? Here's one: in the next paragraph, replace the word "Greek" with "American."
