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Saturday, April 11, 2015

The Worst Lie of All: Calling Evil Good





Matthew Continetti: Calling Evil Good

I have never before encountered a more evil force in American politics than the Kochs and their ilk. Never.

Since March 2009 I have been researching the funding patterns of the right wing and their activity with regard to the tea party movements, how they move money through Republican establishment organizations, and the impact of their investment in organizations and publications intended to legitimize ideas that work against the interests of 99% of the citizens of this country. I'm not alone. Many others are also digging deep. AlterNet. Think Progress.

My reasons for searching and paying attention go beyond ideology. Regardless of what their views are, emergency sirens sound when I consider exactly how much control two people and one corporation have over right-wing politics. It transcends ideology. It's anti-democracy. In my travels I've found the same information that many others have found but which always seems to languish in the shadows of the Internet.

Influence is held in the hands of the very few, and right now the Koch brothers hold the reins. Consider this list, created in 2004. It lists every organization that has received funding from the Koch Family Foundations. Then it was $120 million. Fast forward to 2010, where they spent millions we know about, and more millions we don't. For 2012, they've pledged $49 million toward a goal of $88 million.

All of this to say one thing: The Koch threat isn't just to liberal politics. It is a threat to the very democracy we treasure in this country. And like Glenn Greenwald, I view them as the most dangerous type of ideologue: the True Believer. True Believers are dangerous because they don't have any goal other than to make all of us True Believers. They proselytize free markets the way evangelicals preach Jesus. And when those same free markets fail? They facepalm and admit shock that perhaps there is a flaw in their flawless philosophy, then go right back to preaching and selling the free market gospel like it's God's word in the flesh.

News flash for the Koch devotees: Markets are not people. Not yet. They don't breathe, eat, cry, love, hate. They do, however, determine the future of people who are at their mercy. It's one thing to control markets like Koch and a few others do. It's entirely another to be at their mercy.

I would still have a job that I adored, but for capricious markets and their puppetmasters. Which is why when I read nonsense like this Weekly Standard Koch Brothers Rehab Piece by Matthew Continetti, I get angry. Really angry. And when I read self-pitying, whinging comments like the one I'm about to quote from a man who wouldn't know what it's like to have your livelihood and your self-respect ripped away in ten minutes' time, I get angrier.

Forget the facts, folks. Charles and David Koch are just bewildered and overwhelmed rich men who cannot for the life of them understand how the left can be so oblivious to the good free markets can do for the world and every individual in the United States who has a set of bootstraps and a pair of arms to use to yank on them.
The left’s inability to understand where the Kochs were coming from puzzled Charles and David. Wasn’t it obvious that small government and free markets resulted in a better world? “Why don’t we teach in schools things that make society more prosperous, and more peaceful, and people will respect each other more? It’s a strange thing, isn’t it?” said Charles. “It’s unbelievable how they distort what your message is!” said David. The Kochs thought their aim was to increase the standard of living for everyone. The way to do this, they believed, was by applying to society the same methods that had grown their company.
Small governments and free markets resulted in a better world? Really? Was it big government that allowed Wall Street to run amok and gamble away people's retirement savings in markets they knew were doomed to fail? What society does David Koch mean when he says "teach in schools things that make society more prosperous"? Surely he doesn't mean this one, because the facts speak otherwise. This society is NOT more prosperous, though Mr. Koch certainly has prospered. What the Kochs do is corrupt government, then blame it for screwing the rest of us.

This world is not better because Koch pollutes it while denying there might be even an iota of truth in climate change science.

This world is not better because our children's educations are being raped and sold to the "free markets" so we can create yet another "market" which will put "prosperity" ahead of education.

This world is not better because Koch Industries put millions into propaganda campaigns to convince people to act against their own interests in order to further Charles and David's "prosperity".

This world is not better because the faith in "free markets" brought the entire world economy to the brink of ruin.

This world is not better because David and Charles Koch think it's better for people to die after losing everything because they were unfortunate enough to be uninsured and sick at the same time.

So what "better world" is it that Mr. Koch sees? I want to see that world too. Instead what I see are people like me, who are educated, motivated, intelligent and have a strong work ethic unable to find work. Why can't we find work? Well, the 'markets' are flooded right now with lots of young people looking for work, and when the markets write the rules, they're written to maximize profits. That means people like me won't find a job until the "market" has eaten its fill of the younger generation.

Commentary like this makes my head explode:
The raw emotions and mindless smears left employees of Koch Industries hurt and befuddled. They kept searching for an answer. It was as if the universe had turned upside down. “All of us are given something, some more than others, and it’s up to us to build on it,” said Koch Minerals executive Steve Tatum. “Charles and David did. They built on what they inherited from their family. Hopefully, I have too. And I inherited nothing but a little help with college.
“What doesn’t seem right is when a person works to get through college, gets a degree, works for 25 years to become successful—and now you’re the bad guy,” Tatum said. “And I think, that’s the American dream, isn’t it?”
I'll leave you all to parse the first part about Charles and David building on their inherited money. But that second comment? The one about it not being right when a person works their way through college, gets a degree, yadayada? Yeah. Well, here's my counter-question: What doesn't seem right is when a person works to get through college, build a business, is a faithful employee for years and years, has a strong work ethic, pays their taxes, tries to raise their family and gets kicked in the teeth by those "free markets." That doesn't seem quite right either.

Jamie Johnson, heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune and now a blogger at Vanity Fair, made a documentary in 2006 about the differences between the very wealthy and the rest of us called The One Percent. If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it. You won't necessarily come away knowing more than you did before you watched it, but it's the attitude of that 1% -- the utter separation from the reality the rest of us live in -- that stands out. The resistance of his family and the financial advisers behind them is almost comical, but the attitudes are simply out of touch with what it's like for everyone else. One of the finest moments is when Milton Friedman rises up and calls the young heir to the Johnson and Johnson fortune a socialist who's afraid to admit it.

It's easy to point to bootstraps when yours were inherited, after all.
To Charles, the call for bigger government was egalitarianism run amok. Liberals, he thought, fetishized equality of condition at the expense of personal liberty. “They cannot stand that some people are better off than others,” Charles said. “I think part of it fits Mencken’s definition of a Puritan: someone that’s miserable because he knows that someone, somewhere, is enjoying himself. He cannot stand that. And I think they all slept through Economics 101.”
He has this so wrong. Let me clear it up. I don't care that some have more than others. I care that some have more than others because they took it out of my bank account and my hard work. That's what I care about. I care about Wall Street moguls taking home big fat bonuses while the Dow Industrial-Military Complex sits on trillions and leaves people without work, without prospects, without hope, and without self-respect.

Here's a proposal for Charles and David. How about if they live for a year without their billions, just like the rest of us? How about they find out what it's like to be told over and over and over again that you're not hired even though you know you were as qualified as the guy who got the job? How about if they subject themselves to the whim of the markets, the uncertainty of not knowing whether they'll have a home tomorrow or food to eat? Perhaps they should try scratching out a living without any government in a world with no regulation where the food they dig out of the dumpster might be contaminated with chemical pollutants because the industrial customer who used that dumpster last didn't care to be careful about how they disposed of toxins. Perhaps they should try it before they condemn liberals as people who are miserable because someone else is enjoying themselves.

Perhaps Charles and David should put their grandchildren in public schools (along with the little DeVos children) and see how teachers struggle with no budget, no supplies, larger class sizes, more children with problems, and a test looming at the end of each year that stresses children to their breaking point while proving nothing other than that there's a market for test writers and scantron forms.

Until they've done these things, until they've shed their silver spoons and ideological turtle shells, Continetti can write apologetics all day long and it won't change a thing. They are an evil force in today's politics, feeding evil men with evil ambitions, and they should be called evil every single chance we get until they figure out how ignorant and out of touch they are. Which will be about the time hell freezes over and the cows come home, I'm sure.

Make no mistake. The Kochs are not the only billionaires who perpetrate this evil. Back in Clinton's day, it was Scaife and the Tobacco Puppets. They're all part of the same group, but the Kochs have chosen to put themselves at the front as the evangelists of the New Free Market Ayn Rand/John Birch Society. By that choice, they receive the bulk of my criticism, but no one is exempt. If you don't know how the other 99% lives, don't bother trying to tell us what's wrong with our thinking.

Now that I've ranted, one question lingers. How do we counter their message and their money before it's too late?

Copyright 2011 Crooks and Liars

Thursday, April 9, 2015

5 signs America is devolving into a plutocracy


SALON



5 signs America is devolving into a plutocracy

 

One-percent elections. Congressional gridlock. An increasingly demobilized public. Our democracy is on life support





 
5 signs America is devolving into a plutocracy  
 
 
 
 
This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch
 
Have you ever undertaken some task you felt less than qualified for, but knew that someone needed to do? Consider this piece my version of that, and let me put what I do understand about it in a nutshell: based on developments in our post-9/11 world, we could be watching the birth of a new American political system and way of governing for which, as yet, we have no name.

And here’s what I find strange: the evidence of this, however inchoate, is all around us and yet it’s as if we can’t bear to take it in or make sense of it or even say that it might be so.

Let me make my case, however minimally, based on five areas in which at least the faint outlines of that new system seem to be emerging: political campaigns and elections; the privatization of Washington through the marriage of the corporation and the state; the de-legitimization of our traditional system of governance; the empowerment of the national security state as an untouchable fourth branch of government; and the demobilization of “we the people.”

Whatever this may add up to, it seems to be based, at least in part, on the increasing concentration of wealth and power in a new plutocratic class and in that ever-expanding national security state. Certainly, something out of the ordinary is underway, and yet its birth pangs, while widely reported, are generally categorized as aspects of an exceedingly familiar American system somewhat in disarray.

1. 1% Elections

Check out the news about the 2016 presidential election and you’ll quickly feel a sense of been-there, done-that. As a start, the two names most associated with it, Bush and Clinton, couldn’t be more familiar, highlighting as they do the curiously dynastic quality of recent presidential contests.  (If a Bush or Clinton should win in 2016 and again in 2020, a member of one of those families will have controlled the presidency for 28 of the last 36 years.)

Take, for instance, “Why 2016 Is Likely to Become a Close Race,” a recent piece Nate Cohn wrote for my hometown paper.  A noted election statistician, Cohn points out that, despite Hillary Clinton’s historically staggering lead in Democratic primary polls (and lack of serious challengers), she could lose the general election.  He bases this on what we know about her polling popularity from the Monica Lewinsky moment of the 1990s to the present.  Cohn assures readers that Hillary will not “be a Democratic Eisenhower, a popular, senior statesperson who cruises to an easy victory.”  It’s the sort of comparison that offers a certain implicit reassurance about the near future.  (No, Virginia, we haven’t left the world of politics in which former general and president Dwight D. Eisenhower can still be a touchstone.)

Cohn may be right when it comes to Hillary’s electability, but this is not Dwight D. Eisenhower’s or even Al Gore’s America. If you want a measure of that, consider this year’s primaries. I mean, of course, the 2015 ones. Once upon a time, the campaign season started with candidates flocking to Iowa and New Hampshire early in the election year to establish their bona fides among party voters. These days, however, those are already late primaries.

The early primaries, the ones that count, take place among a small group of millionaires andbillionaires, a new caste flush with cash who will personally, or through complex networks of funders, pour multi-millions of dollars into the campaigns of candidates of their choice.  So the early primaries — this year mainly a Republican affair — are taking place in resort spots like Las Vegas, Rancho Mirage, California, and Sea Island, Georgia, as has been widely reported. These “contests” involve groveling politicians appearing at the beck and call of the rich and powerful, and so reflect our new 1% electoral system. (The main pro-Hillary super PAC, for instance, is aiming for a kitty of $500 million heading into 2016, while the Koch brothers network has already promised to drop almost $1 billion into the coming campaign season, doubling their efforts in the last presidential election year.)

Ever since the Supreme Court opened up the ultimate floodgates with its 2010 Citizens United decision, each subsequent election has seen record-breaking amounts of money donated and spent. The 2012 presidential campaign was the first $2 billion election; campaign 2016 is expected to hit the $5 billion mark without breaking a sweat.  By comparison, according to Burton Abrams and Russell Settle in their study, “The Effect of Broadcasting on Political Campaign Spending,” Republicans and Democrats spent just under $13 million combined in 1956 when Eisenhower won his second term.

In the meantime, it’s still true that the 2016 primaries will involve actual voters, as will the election that follows. The previous election season, the midterms of 2014, cost almost $4 billion, a record despite the number of small donors continuing to drop. It also represented the lowest midterm voter turnout since World War II. (See: demobilization of the public, below — and add in the demobilization of the Democrats as a real party, the breaking of organized labor, the fragmenting of the Republican Party, and the return of voter suppression laws visibly meant to limit the franchise.) It hardly matters just what the flood of new money does in such elections, when you can feel the weight of inequality bearing down on the whole process in a way that is pushing us somewhere new.

2. The Privatization of the State (or the U.S. as a Prospective Third-World Nation)

In the recent coverage of the Hillary Clinton email flap, you can find endless references to the Clintons of yore in wink-wink, you-know-how-they-are-style reporting; and yes, she did delete a lot of emails; and yes, it’s an election year coming and, as everyone points out, the Republicans are going to do their best to keep the email issue alive until hell freezes over, etc., etc.  Again, the coverage, while eyeball gluing, is in a you’ve-seen-it-all-before, you’ll-see-it-all-again-mode.
However, you haven’t seen it all before. The most striking aspect of this little brouhaha lies in what’s most obvious but least highlighted.  An American secretary of state chose to set up her own private, safeguarded email system for doing government work; that is, she chose to privatize her communications.  If this were Cairo, it might not warrant a second thought.  But it didn’t happen in some third-world state.  It was the act of a key official of the planet’s reigning (or thrashing) superpower, which — even if it wasn’t the first time such a thing had ever occurred — should be taken as a tiny symptom of something that couldn’t be larger or, in the long stretch of history, newer: the ongoing privatization of the American state, or at least the national security part of it.
Though the marriage of the state and the corporation has a pre-history, the full-scale arrival of the warrior corporation only occurred after 9/11.  Someday, that will undoubtedly be seen as a seminal moment in the formation of whatever may be coming in this country.  Only 13 years later, there is no part of the war state that has not experienced major forms of privatization.  The U.S. military could no longer go to war without its crony corporationsdoing KP and guard duty, delivering the mail, building the bases, and being involved in just about all of its activities, including training the militaries of foreign allies and even fighting.  Such warrior corporations are now involved in every aspect of the national security state, including torturedrone strikes, and — to the tune of hundreds of thousands of contract employees like Edward Snowden — intelligence gathering and spying.  You name it and, in these years, it’s been at least partly privatized.

All you have to do is read reporter James Risen’s recent book, Pay Any Price, on how the global war on terror was fought in Washington, and you know that privatization has brought something else with it: corruption, scams, and the gaming of the system for profits of a sort that might normally be associated with a typical third-world kleptocracy.  And all of this, a new world being born, was reflected in a tiny way in Hillary Clinton’s very personal decision about her emails.

Though it’s a subject I know so much less about, this kind of privatization (and the corruption that goes with it) is undoubtedly underway in the non-war-making, non-security-projecting part of the American state as well.

3. The De-legitimization of Congress and the Presidency


On a third front, American “confidence” in the three classic check-and-balance branches of government, as measured by polling outfits, continues to fall.  In 2014, Americans expressing a “great deal of confidence” in the Supreme Court hit a new low of 23%; in the presidency, it was 11%, and in Congress a bottom-scraping 5%.  (The military, on the other hand, registers at 50%.)  The figures for “hardly any confidence at all” are respectively 20%, 44%, and more than 50%.  All are in or near record-breaking territory for the last four decades.

It seems fair to say that in recent years Congress has been engaged in a process of delegitimizing itself.  Where that body once had the genuine power to declare war, for example, it is now “debating” in a desultory fashion an “authorization” for a war against the Islamic State in Syria, Iraq, and possibly elsewhere that has already been underway for eight months and whose course, it seems, will be essentially unaltered, whether Congress authorizes it or not.

What would President Harry Truman, who once famously ran a presidential campaign against a “do-nothing” Congress, have to say about a body that truly can do just about nothing?  Or rather, to give the Republican war hawks in that new Congress their due, not quite nothing.  They are proving capable of acting effectively to delegitimize the presidency as well.  House Majority Leader John Boehner’s invitation to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to undercut the president’s Iranian nuclear negotiations and the lettersigned by 47 Republican senators and directed to the Iranian ayatollahs are striking examples of this.  They are visibly meant to tear down an “imperial presidency” that Republicans gloried in not so long ago.

The radical nature of that letter, not as an act of state but of its de-legitimization, was noted even in Iran, where fundamentalist Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei proclaimed it “a sign of a decline in political ethics and the destruction of the American establishment from within.” Here, however, the letter is either being covered as a singularly extreme one-off act (“treason!”) or, as Jon Stewart did on “The Daily Show,” as part of a repetitive tit-for-tat between Democrats and Republicans over who controls foreign policy.  It is, in fact, neither.  It represents part of a growing pattern in which Congress becomes an ever less effective body, except in its willingness to take on and potentially take out the presidency.

In the twenty-first century, all that “small government” Republicans and “big government” Democrats can agree on is offering essentially unconditional support to the military and the national security state.  The Republican Party — its various factions increasingly at each other’s throats almost as often as at those of the Democrats — seems reasonably united solely on issues of war-making and security.  As for the Democrats, an unpopular administration, facing constant attack by those who loath President Obama, has kept its footing in part by allying with and fusing with the national security state.  A president who came into office rejecting torture and promoting sunshine and transparency in government has, in the course of six-plus years, come to identify himself almost totally with the U.S. military, the CIA, the NSA, and the like.  While it has launched an unprecedented campaign against whistleblowers and leakers (as well as sunshine and transparency), the Obama White House has proved a powerful enabler of, but also remarkably dependent upon, that state-within-a-state, a strange fate for “the imperial presidency.”

4. The Rise of the National Security State as the Fourth Branch of Government

One “branch” of government is, however, visibly on the rise and rapidly gaining independence from just about any kind of oversight.  Its ability to enact its wishes with almost no opposition in Washington is a striking feature of our moment.  But while the symptoms of this process are regularly reported, the overall phenomenon — the creation of ade facto fourth branch of government — gets remarkably little attention.  In the war on terror era, the national security state has come into its own.  Its growth has been phenomenal.  Though it’s seldom pointed out, it should be considered remarkable that in this period we gained a second full-scale “defense department,” the Department of Homeland Security, and that it and the Pentagon have become even more entrenched, each surrounded by its own growing “complex” of private corporations, lobbyists, and allied politicians.  The militarization of the country has, in these years, proceeded apace.

Meanwhile, the duplication to be found in the U.S. Intelligence Community with its 17 major agencies and outfits is staggering.  Its growing ability to surveil and spy on a global scale, including on its own citizens, puts the totalitarian states of the twentieth century to shame.  That the various parts of the national security state can act in just about any fashion without fear of accountability in a court of law is by now too obvious to belabor.  As wealth has traveled upwards in American society in ways not seen since the first Gilded Age, so taxpayer dollars have migrated into the national security state in an almost plutocratic fashion.
New reports regularly surface about the further activities of parts of that state.  In recent weeks, for instance, we learned from Jeremy Scahill and Josh Begley of the Intercept that the CIA has spent years trying to break the encryption on Apple iPhones and iPads; it has, that is, been aggressively seeking to attack an all-American corporation (even if significant parts of its production process are actually in China).  Meanwhile, Devlin Barrett of the Wall Street Journal reported that the CIA, an agency barred from domestic spying operations of any sort, has been helping the U.S. Marshals Service (part of the Justice Department) create an airborne digital dragnet on American cell phones.  Planes flying out of five U.S. cities carry a form of technology that “mimics a cellphone tower.” This technology, developed and tested in distant American war zones and now brought to “the homeland,” is just part of the ongoing militarization of the country from its borders to its police forces.  And there’s hardly been a week since Edward Snowden first released crucial NSA documents in June 2013 when such “advances” haven’t been in the news.

News also regularly bubbles up about the further expansion, reorganization, and upgrading of parts of the intelligence world, the sorts of reports that have become the barely noticed background hum of our lives.  Recently, for instance, Director John Brennan announced a major reorganization of the CIA meant to break down the classic separation between spies and analysts at the Agency, while creating a new Directorate of Digital Innovation responsible for, among other things, cyberwarfare and cyberespionage.  At about the same time, according to the New York Times, the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications, an obscure State Department agency, was given a new and expansive role in coordinating “all the existing attempts at countermessaging [against online propaganda by terror outfits like the Islamic State] by much larger federal departments, including the Pentagon, Homeland Security and intelligence agencies.”

This sort of thing is par for the course in an era in which the national security state has only grown stronger, endlessly elaborating, duplicating, and overlapping the various parts of its increasingly labyrinthine structure.  And keep in mind that, in a structure that has fought hardto keep what it’s doing cloaked in secrecy, there is so much more that we don’t know.  Still, we should know enough to realize that this ongoing process reflects something new in our American world (even if no one cares to notice).

5. The Demobilization of the American People

In The Age of Acquiescence, a new book about America’s two Gilded Ages, Steve Fraser asks why it was that, in the nineteenth century, another period of plutocratic excesses, concentration of wealth and inequality, buying of politicians, and attempts to demobilize the public, Americans took to the streets with such determination and in remarkable numbers over long periods of time to protest their treatment, and stayed there even when the brute power of the state was called out against them.  In our own moment, Fraser wonders, why has the silence of the public in the face of similar developments been so striking?

After all, a grim new American system is arising before our eyes.  Everything we once learned in the civics textbooks of our childhoods about how our government works now seems askew, while the growth of poverty, the flatlining of wages, the rise of the .01%, the collapse of labor, and the militarization of society are all evident.

The process of demobilizing the public certainly began with the military.  It was initially a response to the disruptive and rebellious draftees of the Vietnam-era.  In 1973, at the stroke of a presidential pen, the citizen’s army was declared no more, the raising of new recruits was turned over to advertising agencies (a preview of the privatization of the state to come), and the public was sent home, never again to meddle in military affairs.  Since 2001, that form of demobilization has been etched in stone and transformed into a way of life in the name of the “safety” and “security” of the public.

Since then, “we the people” have made ourselves felt in only three disparate ways: from the left in the Occupy movement, which, with its slogans about the 1% and the 99%, put the issue of growing economic inequality on the map of American consciousness; from the right, in the Tea Party movement, a complex expression of discontent backed and at least partially funded by right-wing operatives and billionaires, and aimed at the de-legitimization of the “nanny state”; and the recent round of post-Ferguson protests spurred at least in part by the militarization of the police in black and brown communities around the country.

The Birth of a New System

Otherwise, a moment of increasing extremity has also been a moment of — to use Fraser’s word — “acquiescence.”  Someday, we’ll assumedly understand far better how this all came to be.  In the meantime, let me be as clear as I can be about something that seems murky indeed: this period doesn’t represent a version, no matter how perverse or extreme, of politics as usual; nor is the 2016 campaign an election as usual; nor are we experiencing Washington as usual.  Put together our 1% elections, the privatization of our government, the de-legitimization of Congress and the presidency, as well as the empowerment of the national security state and the U.S. military, and add in the demobilization of the American public (in the name of protecting us from terrorism), and you have something like a new ballgame.

While significant planning has been involved in all of this, there may be no ruling pattern or design.  Much of it may be happening in a purely seat-of-the-pants fashion.  In response, there has been no urge to officially declare that something new is afoot, let alone convene a new constitutional convention.  Still, don’t for a second think that the American political system isn’t being rewritten on the run by interested parties in Congress, our present crop of billionaires, corporate interests, lobbyists, the Pentagon, and the officials of the national security state.
Out of the chaos of this prolonged moment and inside the shell of the old system, a new culture, a new kind of politics, a new kind of governance is being born right before our eyes. Call it what you want. But call it something. Stop pretending it’s not happening.
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, "Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World" (Haymarket Books), has just been published.

Monday, April 6, 2015

Rand Paul and the GOP’s plutocrat problem


msnbc





Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY)

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) during an address at the University of California in Berkeley, Calif., on March 19, 2014.
Jason Henry/The New York Times/Redux

 

Rand Paul and the GOP’s plutocrat problem

Updated

Rand Paul has had it up to here with these billionaires.

“We cannot be the party of fat cats, rich people, and Wall Street!” he told conservative activists at the New Hampshire Freedom Summit earlier this month. The summit was organized by the Americans For Prosperity Foundation, a project of the billionaire industrialist brothers Charles and David Koch.

“We can’t be the party of the plutocrats and the rich people!” Paul added later.
With that call to arms, Paul exhorted conservatives to don their culottes, grab a pitchfork, round up the big business elites and cut off their … tax rates.

“What did Ronald Reagan do, did he come forward and say ‘Oh, lets just cut taxes for low-income people?” he said. “No! He said forthrightly ‘Let’s cut everyone’s taxes.’ He did dramatically. The top rate, that’s what rich people pay, the top rate was 70%, he lowered it to 50% then he lowered it again to 28% and 20 million jobs were created!”

Mocking the naysayers who might think better of cutting taxes on the 1% during a period of exploding inequality, Paul quipped: “Anybody here ever work for a poor person?”

That’s a message that might go over well when Paul meets with top donors for Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign. But it also illustrates the struggle GOP candidates face in getting past the party’s rich guy image, which the Republican National Committee warned was “doing great harm to the party and its candidates” in its autopsy of Mitt Romney’s presidential loss in 2012.

Democrats are preparing to run harder than ever on income inequality in 2014 and beyond,  and their latest round of Koch-related attacks are part of a broader effort to paint the GOP as hopelessly captured by the ultra-rich. Republicans know it’s coming, but there isn’t any clear consensus as to what to do about it. Nobody has figured out an answer that satisfies the party’s competing goals of securing tax cuts for the donor class, balancing the budget, and appealing to the 99%.

Paul’s pitch to the plutocrat wing is that you can still get your tax cuts if he’s elected president. He’ll even fight for the tax cuts the multimillionaire Romney was too chicken to endorse, like eliminating the capital gains tax, a move that would reduce Romney’s own tax bill to almost nothing. All that rich folks have to do is to stand by and let Paul complain about corporate subsidies a bit and run against the NSA in order to bring in some young voters.

“It’s not that young people don’t like our message of low taxes and less regulation and balanced budgets, they just don’t have any money,” Paul said in New Hampshire.

Heck, one of Paul’s proposals to woo minority voters is to cut taxes for rich people even more. How hard is it to say yes to that?

Paul’s isn’t the only emerging pitch to wealthy donors out there, though it’s the most explicitly mapped out. For Mike Huckabee, it might be “You can keep your tax cuts, let’s just talk about social issues more and so we can turn out evangelicals.” For Paul Ryan: “You can keep your tax cuts, let’s just talk about poverty too.”  For Marco Rubio: “You can keep your tax cuts, let’s just pass immigration reform.”

As a libertarian true believer, Paul might be more concerned with purity than how his combination of massive tax cuts for billionaires and draconian cuts to the welfare state will play out politically. But for pragmatic candidates who are more worried about the rich guy issue, the quest for a better approach remains problematic.

Republican leaders run into trouble reconciling their fervent devotion to lower taxes with their other stated goals. If you cut taxes on the rich, you have to blow up the deficit, take a hatchet to social spending, or raise taxes on the non-rich to pay for it.

For Paul, the answer so far seems to be the “blow up the deficit” route on taxes – he sneers at the phrase “revenue neutral tax reform” in speeches and argues that explosive economic growth will close fiscal gaps – and the “take a hatchet to social spending” route on spending. In other words, peak plutocrat.

Romney tried to get around this problem in 2012 by proposing a revenue-neutral 20% cut on tax rates, which he pledged to offset by eliminating tax breaks that primarily benefit the wealthy. But as the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center quickly figured out his plan was mathematically impossible without raising taxes on vast swaths of the middle class, making it an easy target for Democratic attacks. Notably, the same report mentioned that Ryan’s plan to cut tax rates even further, a version of which is included in his most recent budget, encountered the same problem.

Senators Rubio and Mike Lee, who are collaborating on a plan to expand tax credits for middle class families, are running into problems of their own – an early draft of Lee’s idea reduced revenues by $2.4 trillion over ten years. They’re still working out the kinks, but part of the reason the gap is so big is that Lee’s supposedly populist proposal still slashes taxes for the ultra-rich.

Any of these plans could offset the revenue losses elsewhere, but that means even more severe cuts would be necessary to achieve the GOP’s other ironclad goal: eliminating the deficit. Ryan effectively abandoned his much vaunted poverty focus in his latest budget, which reduced spending on anti-poverty programs even more than his previous proposals. As the GOP’s base gets older, the party is also getting more reluctant to tear into big ticket entitlement items like Medicare.

The various GOP proposals could tweak the math to keep things both revenue neutral and from getting more regressive, but that would just enrage the rich guys who are the main force behind the party’s tax cut platform in the first place. Just look at GOP Rep. Dave Camp, whose recent plan took the most ambitious stab yet at lowering income tax rates, protecting the non-rich from a tax increase, and maintaining revenue. He achieved his goals with a package that included new taxes on the finance industry and a 35% top rate versus Ryan’s 25%. Republican leaders blew it off, 50 GOP members of Congress signed a letter decrying Camp’s ideas, and Camp announced his retirement soon after.
Finally, Republicans could just accept a tax increase, full stop, as part of a deficit cutting deal. Of the major prospective candidates, only Jeb Bush has even flirted with the idea and it promises to be one of his biggest vulnerabilities if he runs for president.

Jeb’s older brother, George W. Bush, got around all these issues by putting his entire tax cut on the national credit card while bumping up spending too, effectively having his political cake and eating it. None of the candidates running in 2016 will have that option, which means that absent a stunning reversal of party leaders’ priorities, the GOP’s plutocrat problem isn’t going anywhere.

Thursday, April 2, 2015

How the Wealthy Rob Our Most Productive People



News & Politics

Lives are being trashed by klepto-remuneration: theft through excess rewards to rapacious bosses.