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FOCUS | Newt's Shop of Horrors |
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Saturday, 07 January 2012 12:28 |
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Egan begins: "There must be a Greek tragedy, a Shakespeare play or a 'Daily Show' parody to explain the exquisite irony of Newt Gingrich being destroyed by the very forces he unleashed - a smack-down that sets up 2012 as the year the moneyed elite learn to use the limitless power granted them by the Supreme Court."
Ironically, Gingrich's candidacy fell victim to the monstrous power of 'Super-PAC' money which he actually helped to unleash. (photo: Dennis Van Tine/ABACAUSA.COM)
Newt's Shop of Horrors
By Timothy Egan, The New York Times
07 January 12
 here must be a Greek tragedy, a Shakespeare play or a "Daily Show" parody to explain the exquisite irony of Newt Gingrich being destroyed by the very forces he unleashed - a smack-down that sets up 2012 as the year the moneyed elite learn to use the limitless power granted them by the Supreme Court.
The deflated Newt balloon is pathetic, to use one of his favorite words. There he was, tired and bitter on election night, after getting carpet-bombed by advertisements painting him as a soulless hack tied to Washington like sea rust on the underside of a listing ship.
He complained about "millionaire consultants" buying every television outlet to "lie" about him. He whined about getting buried under "an avalanche of negative ads" that left him "drowning in negativity." You get the picture: ugly, sudden death, the very life snuffed out of him by things he could not control.
And yet, of course, what killed Gingrich was in part his own creation, and not just because he himself is a millionaire consultant paid to destroy or inflate on demand. The Frankenstein's monster emerged from his own shop of horrors.
Gingrich, for the last few years, has been partners in self-promotion with Citizens United, the group that prompted the worst Supreme Court decision of the nascent 21st century, the one that granted "personhood" rights to corporations and green-lighted them to dominate American elections. More to the point, that 2010 case gave birth to shadowy super PACs that can annihilate a candidate, no holds barred, no responsibility to those pulling the strings.
If you live in Cedar Falls, and didn't like seeing Iowa nice turned into the scene from "Fargo" when a victim is ground up in the wood chipper, blame Citizens United, and the Supreme Court majority that Republicans can't praise enough. Unlimited political filth by anonymous rich groups - this is John Roberts's America.
It was a hit piece, after all, a film on Hillary Clinton produced by Citizens United, that led to the Supreme Court case. Gingrich and Citizens United have worked closely together on several other films. Gingrich loved the court decision. And on the one-year anniversary of the case, Gingrich was still effusive.
"I actually think that the Citizens United case is one of the best examples of a genuine strategy that I've seen in the years I've been in Washington," he said.
Earlier, he'd sent out a video plea, saying, "Please join Citizens United and me in our fight for the First Amendment rights of every American."
Yes, because every lone citizen's voice is roughly equal to, say, the $3 million or so in negative advertising spent in Iowa to crush Gingrich. Those citizens who worked at corporations, or founded super PACs, were somehow denied their First Amendment rights, in the reasoning of the court and Gingrich. Money is speech, one and the same, in their world.
If Gingrich had any guts, or lasting principles, he would now sound alarms about the absurdity of a court decision equating the Norman Rockwell citizen standing at town hall to the anonymous millions that can kill a candidate in less than month. In Gingrich's case, he fell 20 points in 20 days.
This is your democracy on meth - the post-Citizens United world. I saw it in Colorado in the 2010 election, a close senate race, where retail campaigning was overshadowed by more than $30 million spent by outside groups answering to no one. In the last month of that election, negative television ads ran nearly every minute of every day.
But Colorado was training wheels for the current presidential race, the first since the court unleashed the worst demons of American political life. Gingrich himself has a super PAC, Winning Our Future, and he's now prepared to use it like a political suicide bomb as his campaign comes to its brutal end. That group, by the way, is not to be confused with Restore Our Future, the super PAC linked to Mitt Romney that took down Gingrich in Iowa.
By law, the super PACs are not supposed to coordinate with the candidates. Oh, heavens to Betsy, no! "My goodness," said Romney, when asked about the wealthy PAC that does his bidding, "if we coordinated in any way whatsoever we'd go to the big house."
So, who are the people behind Restore Our Future? They're former associates of Romney's at Bain Capital, business friends of his in Utah and some of the same donors who Swift-boated John Kerry in 2004.
This legalism of "no coordination" is a filament-thin G-string. Everyone coordinates. President Obama's allies may spend up to $1 billion through their own super PAC, Priorities USA Action, and other groups. Karl Rove has promised to pollute the air waves with tens of millions of dollars in attack ads from his organization, American Crossroads.
All of this is the spawn of the Citizens United case - free speech dominated by the few, the powerful, the wealthy. It can be stalled only by forceful appeals from the leading candidates, a multi-lateral disarmament that is highly unlikely.
Among the losers, Gingrich has the least credibility complaining of the effects. What happened to him in Iowa is not what he wished for, but it is certainly what he asked for.
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Ron Paul's Useful Idiots on the Left |
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Saturday, 07 January 2012 11:08 |
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Carpentier begins: "If you told a liberal in 2008 that progressives ought to give Republican Texas Congressman Ron Paul a chance because he was the most anti-war candidate on the ballot, you would have been laughed out of the room - or, more likely, the bar."
Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul, 01/06/12. (photo: Jamie Turner/Guardian UK)
Ron Paul's Useful Idiots on the Left
By Megan Carpentier, Guardian UK
07 January 12
 f you told a liberal in 2008 that progressives ought to give Republican Texas Congressman Ron Paul a chance because he was the most anti-war candidate on the ballot, you would have been laughed out of the room – or, more likely, the bar. But in 2012, some prominent (and white, male) progressives are arguing exactly that. What's changed? Not Ron Paul, that's for certain.
He's still the same guy who thinks the US should withdraw from the WTO and the United Nations, and who wants to eliminate foreign aid and the Department of Commerce and all its trade regulation and promotion activities. But, we are told, since he advocates for a complete, immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan (which military intervention, notably, he voted for), he's a better foreign policy candidate than President Obama.
And, if his newest converts are to be believed, his support for the withdrawal from Afghanistan, his impassioned pleas for a return of Americans' civil liberties from an overreaching government and his opposition to the drug war are reason enough to give the man a chance. After all, they say, President Obama has not delivered on his promises and supporters' expectations in those areas, either. But to the women, minorities and LGBT people (and their supporters) who have paid attention to Paul's record, it comes as little surprise that his most vociferous supporters on the left are pale and male … and their arguments stale.
This is the man who, to trumpet his pro-life agenda in Iowa to social conservatives, released an ad that questions whether repealing Roe v Wade would eliminate women's abortion rights in enough states, since it would create "abortion tourism" (a situation with which the Irish and the British are already familiar). He opposed the Obama administration's decision to declare birth control a preventative medicine, which pressures insurance companies to cover it without co-pays. He has said he would allow states to decide same-sex marriage rights for their citizens but keep the Defense of Marriage Act intact – which restricts federal rights, including immigration and social security survivor benefits (among others) to opposite-sex married couples.
He also opposes the US supreme court decision in Lawrence v Texas that decriminalised consensual sodomy in the United States. He opposes the 1964 Civil Rights Act. He wants to restrict birthright citizenship, denying the children of immigrants legal status in the United States if they are born here, voted to force doctors and hospitals to report undocumented immigrants who seek medical treatment, and sponsored bills to declare English the official language of the United States and restrict government communications to English. And that's just for starters.
Nonetheless, there have been calls by progressives, most notably Glenn Greenwald, to ignore all of that and more, and focus instead on Obama's policy failings to have "an actual debate on issues of America's imperialism". He went on to argue that there are no policy priorities more imperative than those – certainly not abortion, immigration rights, LGBT equality, racial justice or any other aspect of the US's extensive foreign policy. (Greenwald, who is gay, was in the relatively privileged position of being able to travel to Brazil to circumvent Doma.) And so people whose lives, safety, livelihoods and health depend on them should accept that they are trading their concerns for, say, the lives of Muslim children killed by bombs in Afghanistan.
In fact, many of Ron Paul's newest supporters on the left look strikingly like the majority of the ones on the right who have been following him for years: the kinds of people whose lives won't be directly affected by all those pesky social conservative policies Paul would seek to enact as president, either due to their race, class, gender or sexual orientation.
And so, to the women who worry they'd be left without access to reproductive healthcare, immigrants who need to see a doctor or understand a government form (like an immigration form), African Americans who rightly wonder what this country would look like in the absence of a civil rights act, and LGBT people who would like to get married and get access to the rights straight Americans take for granted on a daily basis, all are told, again, to wait: there are more important issues to talk about, more important problems to be solved, more life-or-death situations that we're simply ignoring out of selfishness.
Seems like there's a lot of that going around.
• Guardian UK Editor's Note: Glenn Greenwald has responded in this discussion thread to the specific criticism directed at him in this article
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FOCUS | Mitt, Son of "Citizen's United" |
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Friday, 06 January 2012 11:44 |
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Intro: "First, a confession. If Mitt Romney becomes president I'm partly to blame."
Portrait, Robert Reich, 08/16/09. (photo: Perian Flaherty)
Mitt, Son of "Citizen's United"
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog
06 January 12
 irst, a confession. If Mitt Romney becomes president I'm partly to blame.
Ten years ago I ran for the Democratic nomination for governor of Massachusetts - which would have given me the opportunity to whip Mitt Romney's ass in the general election,
I blew it. In the final week of the primary I was neck and neck with the state treasurer, but then my money ran out, which meant my TV ads stopped. Declining the suggestion of my campaign manager to take out a second mortgage on my home, I frantically phoned anyone I could find who hadn't yet contributed $500, the maximum state law allowed. I didn't raise beans. In the end, the treasurer won the primary, Romney won the general election and became governor, and I went back to being a professor.
But my fantasy of beating Romney may be nothing more than a fantasy because Romney had - and still has - something I never did (and I'm not referring to his gleaming white teeth, carefully-coiffed hairline, or height). He has money, and he has connections to much more money.
Mitt Romney was then and still is the candidate of big money.
In the last weeks before the just-completed Iowa caucuses, Romney spent over $3 million relentlessly torpedoing Newt Gingrich with negative ads - cutting Gingrich's support by half and hurtling him from first place to fourth. But Romney kept his fingerprints off the torpedo. Technically the money didn't even come from his campaign.
It came from a Super PAC called "Restore Our Future," which can sop up unlimited amounts from a few hugely wealthy donors without even disclosing their names. That's because "Restore Our Future" is officially independent of the Romney campaign - although its chief fundraiser comes out of Romney's finance team, its key political strategist was political director of Romney's 2008 presidential campaign, its treasurer is Romney's former chief counsel, and its media whiz had been part of Romney's media team.
"Restore Our Future" is to Mitt Romney's campaign as the dark side of the moon is to the moon. And it reveals the grotesque result of the Supreme Court's decision a year ago in Citizen United vs the Federal Election Commission, which reversed more than a century of efforts to curb the influence of big money on politics.
If income and wealth in America were as widely shared as in the first three decades after World War II, we'd have less reason to worry. But now, with an almost unprecedented concentration of money at the very top, Citizens United invites the worst corruption our democracy has witnessed since the Gilded Age.
And Romney and Citizens United were made for each other. Other candidates have quietly set up Super PACs of their own, and President Obama has his Super PAC already busily tapping into whatever reservoirs of big money it can find. But Mitt's unique ties to the biggest money pits enable him to take unique advantage of the Court's scurrilous invitation.
The New York Times reports that New York hedge-fund managers and Boston financiers contributed almost $30 million to "Restore Our Future" before the Iowa caucuses. And "Restore Our Future"'s faux independence has allowed Romney to publicly distance himself from them, their money, and the dirty work that their money has bought.
More than anyone else running for president, Mitt Romney personifies the top 1 percent in America - actually, the top one-tenth of one percent. It's not just his four homes and estimated $200 million fortune, not just his wheeling and dealing in leveraged-buyouts and private equity, not even the jobless refugees of his financial maneuvers that makes him the Gordon Gekko of presidential aspirants.
It's his connections to the epicenters of big money in America - especially to top executives and financiers in the habit of investing for handsome returns. And there are almost no better returns than those found in tax benefits, government subsidies, loan guarantees, bailouts, regulatory exemptions, federal contracts, and trade deals generating hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars a year.
Romney, in other words, is the candidate Citizens United created, the creature given life by Scalia, Roberts, Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito all playing Dr. Frankenstein.
Given what the Court has wrought, my conscience is less burdened. Had I whipped Romney's ass ten years ago I might only have delayed his awakening. But I fear for the country.
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Rick Santorum Protects the Freedom of Con-Men |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104"><span class="small">Charles Pierce, Esquire</span></a>
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Thursday, 05 January 2012 17:00 |
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Pierce writes: "Rick Santorum, papist nutter and GOP It Boy of the moment, is well and truly energized by his recently demonstrated ability to get 25,000-odd Iowans to show up and write his name on a piece of paper. The way you know this is because his stump answers are no longer stumps. They are fully blossomed trees, ripe with pious arrogance, vicious social policies camouflaged with luxurious rhetorical foliage within which the bullshit birds sing their sweet songs of 'dependency' and 'freedom,' and low-hanging hypocrisy just so ever-ripe for the picking. No kidding. The crazy is in full flower in this one."
GOP primary contender Rick Santorum, the two term Pennsylvania Senator and former pro-wrestling lobbyist, in an undated campaign ad, 01/05/12. (photo: Reason Magazine)
Rick Santorum Protects the Freedom of Con-Men
By Charles P. Pierce, Esquire Magazine
05 January 12
 ick Santorum, papist nutter and GOP It Boy of the moment, is well and truly energized by his recently demonstrated ability to get 25,000-odd Iowans to show up and write his name on a piece of paper. The way you know this is because his stump answers are no longer stumps. They are fully blossomed trees, ripe with pious arrogance, vicious social policies camouflaged with luxurious rhetorical foliage within which the bullshit birds sing their sweet songs of "dependency" and "freedom," and low-hanging hypocrisy just so ever-ripe for the picking. No kidding. The crazy is in full flower in this one.
Begin simply with the place last night's even took place. It was an assisted-care facility/nursing home run by Rockingham County here in the southern part of New Hampshire. It has disabled residents on Medicaid and it has 200 people in its nursing-home section, almost all of whom are on Medicare. It is a government-run facility, and a very well-regarded one, which is impossible because, as we all know, the government has no business interfering with the health-care "market." The facts about this facility will become important later on. Stay with us.
You can also tell he's energized because he's back to being the legendary dick he's always been reputed to be by those who knew him best in Washington. A kid from Haverhill, Mass., got up to ask a question, and Santorum hung him out to dry for the benefit of his assembled fans from New Hampshire. While discussing President Obama's recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board, which the president made because the congressional Republicans refused to give his nominees a hearing, because the congressional Republicans don't want the NLRB - a fully legitimate agency of the federal government - to work, the grandson of a coal miner sneered, "I'm suurrrre they'll be soooo friendly and hospitable to American business." His entire pitch now is an extended nyah-nyah in the general direction of whatever White House exists at the moment in his imagination.
"You can't be trusted with freedom."
"He believes you are incapable of freedom."
"The president believes you need him. He'll solve all your problems. Remember all those people at the rallies in 2008? People would say, 'Oh, Mr. President, I know you'll help me with this.' He convinced Americans that they needed to believe in a president. You want a president who believes in you."
(I use italics because there is no "Seventh Grade Sarcasm" function on this computer. Sorry.)
You can also tell he's energized because he's not at-all shy about taking his more outre views out for a walk. Take Iran, for a moment. Did you know that the Iranians are building their nuclear weapons in Qom? (Santorum couches a lot of his answers this way, in the manner of a middle-school civics teacher who's read Time twice this month.) Do you know why? Well, he's going to tell you. Qom is a holy city to the Shi'a population of Iran. (The return of the 12th Imam is mixed up in this somewhere, too. Listening to Santorum on Iran is like accidentally tuning in one of those ancient astronaut documentaries on the History Channel.) "It is a very important town dealing with the end times for Shi'a Islam," he says.
In other words, Rick Santorum believes that the current Iranian regime is building a nuclear weapon not merely as leverage for power in that region and the world, and not merely to defend itself, and not merely, as he himself says, "to protect itself from retaliation while it engages in acts of terrorism." He believes it is building a bomb, and is more than likely to use it, in order to bring on the end times and the return of the 12th Imam.
(And you are not incorrect in wondering at this point how he feels about those millions of evangelical Christians over here who encourage belligerence on the part of Israel because of their desire to see the big show open on the plains of Megiddo, starring the famous Disemboweling Christ, action hero of the Left Behind novels. Rather not have those folks influencing nuclear policy myself.)
But he doesn't really reach full bloom until he's talking about ethics, and decency, and "living a moral life." It is here where his sanctimony, his hypocrisy, and his carefully refined dickitude truly burst forth in interesting ways. He was asked last night about the recent revelations of "insider trading" among members of Congress. He began his answer carefully, parsing the legitimate difference between actual insider trading of the kind that takes place on Wall Street, and the kind of thing in Congress most recently exposed by 60 Minutes - in which members of the Congress trade on information concerning pending laws that might effect certain industries.
Forgive me for a moment if I now bring out the tin drum again and point out that, as one of Jack Abramoff's primary rentboys in the Senate, Santorum is well qualified to make this Jesuitical distinction. But then he goes on to make a learned simpleton's disquisition on why we have of laws in our society, and we move deeply into the upper branches, the lush green canopy, that overarches his entire purpose in public life, at least as he sees it.
"The point is, this is something we shouldn't even have to have a law for," he says. "People should behave ethically. When people don't behave as they should, we gotta pass laws. Now we have a law, and it has to be enforced, and that means someone has to hire staff to enforce it, and these are people that you pay for, and all because people don't live decent moral lives like they should. If people don't live good decent moral lives, government is going to get bigger."
(As with so many things, Mr. Madison said it better: "If men were angels, no government would be necessary.")
Let us unpack this, shall we? First we have the mournful condemnation of the various members of Congress who did these dastardly but altogether legal deeds, which is very rich coming from a guy - tin-drum alert - whose brief on behalf of one of the greatest scams in the history of the Republic included:
Every week, the lobbyists present pass around a list of the jobs available and discuss whom to support. Santorum's responsibility is to make sure each one is filled by a loyal Republican-a senator's chief of staff, for instance, or a top White House aide, or another lobbyist whose reliability has been demonstrated. After Santorum settles on a candidate, the lobbyists present make sure it is known whom the Republican leadership favors. "The underlying theme was [to] place Republicans in key positions on K Street. Everybody taking part was a Republican and understood that that was the purpose of what we were doing," says Rod Chandler, a retired congressman and lobbyist who has participated in the Santorum meetings. "It's been a very successful effort."
His efforts on behalf of the K Street Project, which eventually redounded to the great benefit of Abramoff, landed Santorum on a watchdog group's list of the Most Corrupt Members of Congress in 2006. And thus did Rick Santorum enable people to avoid living decent moral lives and, by his own logic, thus is Rick Santorum a primary architect of big government in this regard. Ron Paul Is Right!!!!
Even Santorum's unremarkable contention that, if it weren't for criminals, we wouldn't need laws, is wholly reminiscent of the preacher caught out behind the barn with a sheep. Like every other Republican candidate, Santorum favors repeal of the Dodd-Frank law, which was passed as a rather pale attempt to rein in the excesses of the financial industries. He calls it "job-killing." Just last night, he announced his support for a lawsuit contemplated by the Senate Republican leadership to fight President Obama's recess appointment of Richard Cordray to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, another appointment held up by those same Republicans because they do not approve of a law duly passed by Congress and signed by the president. Santorum doesn't like that law, either. Last night, he made quite a show of not remembering the name of the CFPB.
But, wait. Don't we need this law? Don't we need a law because a bunch of Wall Street pirates declined to live "good, decent moral lives" as they were stealing most of the national economy and wrecking what was left? Don't we need a law because those people, declining to live good, decent, moral lives, looted pensions, cheated people on mortgages, and left one poor county in Alabama in hopeless debt from now until the 12th Imam really does come back? Aren't the people behind credit-default swaps and collateralized debt obligations and all the rest of the vehicles of exotic economic pillage the real reason why government had to expand its power in this area? Here, alas, possibly with the sound of Jack Abramoff's voice echoing softly in his ear, Rick Santorum wants people to live "good, decent moral lives" and, yet, if they don't, well, that's just the way it goes. Let us all be free again to be swindled the same way.
Rick Santorum is yet another example of a conservative to whom "freedom" means protecting the free speech rights of con-men. That's how he managed, during his demi-victory speech in Iowa, to compare much of the social safety net to the actual fascism his grandfather fled Italy to avoid. He treats - caveat emptor as a basic principle of human freedom. Toward the end of the evening, he got into a long wrangle about health-care and announced his support for "the Ryan plan," the Medicare phase-out designed by zombie-eyed granny-starver Paul Ryan. Remember now where he said it - in a well-regarded government-run nursing home containing 200 patients, all of whom depend on Medicare for one reason or another. Rick Santorum believes that these people are not free. If they were, they'd get up tomorrow morning and shop for the best deal they could find on a open market, which naturally would be run by people in the insurance industry who are living good, decent moral lives, especially in their business practices. It was about here where I fell out of the tree.
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ith Mitt Romney's almost certain win in New Hampshire next week, the race for the White House has now resolved to what was predicted almost a year ago: Mitt vs. Barack. The more extreme and entirely irrational voices of the Republican Party have nearly burned out, and the Republicans will be offering up a rather bland and opportunistic middle-of-the-roader who nonetheless has a credible record in the big leagues of private equity and as a one-term governor of Massachusetts.* Romney has successfully navigated a minefield of debates and attacks from the right without marginalizing himself so that he lost his capacity to appeal to the undecided voters who will determine the election in November. So let's be clear: Democrats cannot easily dismiss Mitt Romney. This will be a tight race, and the economic data of the late spring and summer will help determine the emotional state of the electorate.
