Romney's Economic Plan Relies on Magic, Not Math

Romney's Economic Plan Relies on Magic, Not Math

Joseph Stiglitz has a decent résumé. He won the Nobel Prize in economics and served as chairman of Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers before being named chief economist of the World Bank. His C.V. , however, pales before his passionate commitment to pushing for economic policies that help the poor and powerless — inside and out of the United States. For Stiglitz, economics and social justice can’t be separated.

Since the election of Barack Obama, Stiglitz has also been something of a thorn in the side of the current administration, consistently critiquing the White House for falling short. He wasted no time in pointing out that Obama’s stimulus was too weak and his housing policy woefully ineffective — and he’s been particularly biting on the topic of Obama’s subservience to banking interests. But with Election Day fast approaching, it’s always useful to look at what the other guys would do, instead. Stiglitz took some time out to explain to Salon why, when the topic is economy, there’s really no choice for progressives in this election.

What’s at stake in this election for the U.S. economy?

Quite a lot. First, there’s what we call the macro-economy. The budget cuts that Romney/Ryan propose will certainly slow growth. If the European downturn continues that could tip us into a recession. The cuts certainly won’t provide the kind of stimulus that Obama’s jobs bill, for instance, pushes. Romney’s plan is based on magic: Just because he gets elected, the economy is supposed to take off. There is no evidence that anything like that would happen. Quite the contrary — I think the opposite would happen. The business community would see the cutbacks coming and that would itself cause a slowdown in the economy.

So that’s the macroeconomy. Secondly, the Romney/Ryan budget promises to spend more on the military while cutting taxes and cutting the deficit, and that means only one thing. If you look at the arithmetic, it means less investment in infrastructure, R&D, education … it just can’t add up any other way. And that means we’ll be growing more slowly in the future.

The irony is that these two things — lower growth now and lower growth in the future — means that our debt-to-GDP ratio won’t improve, it will get worse. So even if you were foolish enough to think that the debt-to-GDP ratio is the main determinant of future prosperity — which it’s not — the Romney agenda will fail.

And although I don’t like what’s called “presidential economics,” where you look solely at what happens under a particular presidential regime, the fact is that Romney has many of the same economic advisers that Bush did. Those economic advisers essentially doubled the debt in eight years. And that was in a period of relatively high growth. Why would we think that wouldn’t happen again? I don’t see any reason for that. Particularly when the global environment is more adverse.

And then the third part has to do with what kind of society we will be. If Romney wins, we will become a more divided society, a more unfair society. And that in turn will bring greater inequality, and will also undermine our growth.

Your most recent book is titled “The Price of Inequality.” Conservatives are pushing back, however, at the very idea that inequality is growing. One of Romney’s advisers just published an Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal declaring, basically, that because everybody has a cellphone and an HDTV now, we’re better off than we were 10 years ago.

A lot of people living in shacks in South Africa also have cellphones and TVs, but that doesn’t mean they have an adequate standard of living — adequate nutrition or access to adequate healthcare, adequate life expectancies …

In any case, when we measure inequality we take into account the fact that the prices of some things go down while the prices of other things go up. That’s what we call “real income” — adjusting for those prices. And median household real income today is lower than it was 15 years ago.

You’ve made the negative case for how the economy will suffer if Romney is elected. Is there a positive case to be made for Obama? You’ve been one of the people on the left most critical of Obama’s efforts on the economy. Why should progressives vote for him now?

I think the main reason, quite honestly, to vote for him is that if he loses there could be a major step backward in every aspect. Not the least important of which is the importance of the Supreme Court, which would affect inequality of political power, as with the Citizens United case. The Court will also rule on basic human rights, gender rights, discrimination, things I think progressives should care a lot about.

But in terms of the economy, while I’ve been critical, there still has been progress in an awful lot of areas. Less progress than there should have been, less progress than was promised, but progress all the same.

Where do you see that progress?

Healthcare. Access to healthcare for everybody is an important step. It wasn’t the kind of deep reform that one would have liked where you would have done something about the pharmaceutical industry and health insurance industry and so forth, but it did result in increased access and that was terribly important. In education, getting the banks out of student loans saved $80 billion over 10 years. That’s a big deal. So while the housing program …

I was about to ask, what have been your biggest disappointments?

Housing policy has been a big disappointment. But compared to Bush, who didn’t do anything, and the Republicans, who haven’t proposed anything — Romney has been totally silent on the issue — at least Obama did something. So I am disappointed, but it represents a small step forward rather than zero. And I am worried that under Romney we will go back to the kind of deregulatory environment where we allow the banks to exploit our homeowners once again.

Looking ahead, are there things Obama could do that would represent a real step forward, rather than just consolidate what has already been achieved, or simply prevent going backward?

There aren’t many magic bullets, but let me talk about a couple things. Obviously, more progressive taxation — getting rid of the distortionary provisions in corporate welfare, special treatment of capital gains, carried interest — would make our economy more efficient and less unequal.

Conservatives seem to think if they try the same failed policies over and over again with different faces those regressive policies will magically work eventually.

How Fox News Created a New Culture of Idiots. Just a caution that this article makes some good points about how Fox has dumped down the news, but there is some strong language.

Last-Minute Ohio Directive Could Trash Legal Votes And Swing The Election

Mitt Romney and Family Are Not Capitalists, They're Looters and Plutocrats

 Mitt Romney and Family Are Not Capitalists, They're Looters and Plutocrats

Marc Leder, a wealthy investor, played host to Mitt Romney last May at a private fundraiser at his $4 million home in Boca Raton. Little did Leder know at the time, however, that someone would videotape the event and later leak it to the world, revealing the GOP standard-bearer in the act of caustically dismissing 47 percent of the country as too “dependent upon government” even to consider voting for him this year.

Leder attempted to duck the ensuing storm of media attention, telling Fortune that he had simply “hosted a fundraiser for an old friend.” But Leder’s ties to the candidate run deeper than campaign contributions or an old friendship. As an investor, he is part of a network of links to the Romney family business empire that will acquire enormous relevance if the GOP nominee manages to ascend to the White House.

In 2008, soon after Romney ended his first bid for the presidency, his eldest son Tagg and his chief fundraiser, Spencer Zwick, formed Solamere Capital, a private equity firm named after the exclusive community in Utah where Romney owned a vacation ski lodge.

What Tagg lacked in experience in the world of high finance, he made up for with a vast network of political connections forged through his father, who seeded the firm with $10 million and was the featured speaker at its first investor conference in January of 2010. Romney also reportedly gave strategic advice to the company, which secured prominent campaign donors as some of its first investors.

Unlike most private equity firms dedicated to analyzing and buying companies, Solamere specializes in something else: billing itself as a “fund of funds” with “unparalleled networks,” it provides investors with “unique access” to an elite set of other private equity firms and hedge funds. Sun Capital Partners, the fund founded by Leder, is one of at least thirteen Romney-linked firms in Solamere’s network, according to a prospectus circulated among potential investors and uncovered by The Boston Globe last year. Solamere also has an investment relationship with Bain Capital, the pioneering fund founded by Mitt Romney.

Solamere, a firm predicated on its founders’ relationship with Romney, presents a channel for powerful investors to influence the White House if he wins. Private equity executives looking to lobby a Romney administration may very well have a leg up if they are already doing business with the firm that the president created for his son.

Requests for comment from a Solamere representative for this article were not answered.

The looming conflicts range from general matters that affect all private equity firms—such as tax changes or the new rules mandated by the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill—to more specific concerns relating to businesses owned or controlled by Solamere’s partner firms. Many of these businesses, in fact, depend on government contracts; indeed, some have been accused of fleecing taxpayers (which is ironic given that many private equity titans claim to support Romney for his unabashed belief in small government and free enterprise). A Romney administration could directly affect the profitability of these companies—and, by extension, potentially the success of Tagg’s venture.

“It’s absolutely a conflict of interest,” says Adam Smith, the communications director for the group Public Campaign, which works on issues concerning money in politics. “Romney can’t un-know that his son’s investment company could benefit financially from his policies. And the other investors—many of whom are likely Romney campaign donors—will have extra access and influence in a Romney administration.”

* * *

Take Leder, Romney’s Boca Raton host, whose Sun Capital firm bought a stake in the Scooter Store last year. The company, known for its ubiquitous television ads promising seemingly free motorized wheelchairs for Medicare beneficiaries, has struggled as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the federal agency that governs the programs, implements rules to curb rampant billing fraud. As a CMS report noted last year, 80 percent of the claims for scooters and power wheelchairs did not meet Medicare requirements, meaning that $492 million a year is being improperly spent.

In 2007, the Scooter Store gave up $13 million in Medicare payments and paid $4 million to settle with the Justice Department over allegations that it had overbilled for its electric wheelchairs. The company, which has been bleeding money over the years as regulators moved to curb waste, still faces challenges that could make or break its business model—challenges that could be mitigated by pressure from the executive branch.

A Romney administration, for example, would have a role in the fate of a recently launched pilot program ensuring that patients see a doctor face to face to determine if a Medicare scooter is medically necessary—a program that has reportedly already reduced billings to the Scooter Store. Another challenge for the company is Section 3136 of the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act. If Romney wins and repeals significant portions of the ACA, would he retain this provision, which compels Medicare to have a competitive bidding process for motorized wheelchairs?

Leder, who has donated nearly $300,000 to Romney and other Republicans in this campaign and another $225,000 to a pro-Romney Super PAC, didn’t respond to a request for comment. Disclosures, however, suggest that pressuring the government is the only way his investment in the Scooter Store can turn a profit.

Since Leder’s firm invested in the Scooter Store, the company has spent nearly $900,000 on lobbyists to push back on these two latest challenges to its motorized-scooter empire. Lobbyists not only try to influence legislation; they are also paid to gather information. Tips about government regulatory decisions can be as good as gold to investors who can act before the information is public knowledge. But what if the company had the ultimate lobbyists: the president’s oldest son, brother and personal fundraiser?

The Birth of Solamere

Shortly after his father conceded the Republican nomination to John McCain in 2008, Tagg Romney and Spencer Zwick went to dinner at a San Diego resort with John R. Miller, the CEO of National Beef Packing Company. The pair had a proposition for Miller: that he should invest in their new business venture.

Miller, who has served as a top fundraiser in both of Mitt Romney’s presidential campaigns, signed on and even became an operating partner at Solamere. The scene, recounted earlier this year by The New York Times, is one of the precious few details made public about Solamere’s investment portfolio and client list, both of which are kept secret.

What is known has been drawn largely from a trail of documents filed by the investment group. Records indicate the firm was incorporated at the same Boston office where Romney’s campaign headquarters had been located, and later shared an office address with Romney’s PAC.

Zwick first worked for Romney during the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. A student at Brigham Young University at the time, he has been at Romney’s side ever since, serving on his campaigns, working as an aide and leading his fundraising efforts since 2007. He has been referred to as Romney’s “sixth son.” And by all accounts, he’s one of the most trusted advisers in Romney’s circle. “When you’re talking to him, you know he’s got the ear of the candidate,” one Romney donor remarked to the press.

Two weeks after Romney’s concession speech in February 2008, Solamere Capital registered with the State of Massachusetts. Zwick and Tagg joined with Eric Scheuermann, a former Jupiter Partners executive, as the three managing partners of the firm.

Scheuermann was the only one with prior experience in private equity; Zwick had none, and Tagg’s previous experience ranged from working at the Monitor Group, an international consulting firm, to sports marketing jobs with Reebok and the Los Angeles Dodgers.

However, success for the firm seemed preordained. A press release the following year hinted at the type of assistance Solamere was enjoying from the Romney network. It announced that Lee Scott, the former Walmart CEO, was joining the firm as an operating partner. Eric Fehrnstrom, Romney’s longtime press aide, was listed as the contact name on the release. The former Walmart chief’s entry came after G. Scott Romney, Mitt’s brother, signed up as an adviser with the firm. So did Matt Blunt, the former Republican governor of Missouri.

Solamere surpassed its $200 million fundraising goal with help from an elite set of “high net worth” individuals, many of whom are close Romney allies. Meg Whitman, the former eBay executive, current Hewlett-Packard CEO and Republican gubernatorial nominee in California two years ago, invested with Solamere (and her son scored a job at the firm). Two Romney donors, L. Scott Frantz, an investor and Connecticut state senator, and Mark Chapin Johnson, the CEO of a medical supply company, were also among the sixty-four investors to entrust Solamere with their money.

As a managing partner of Solamere, Tagg stands to make millions of dollars. The three managing partners will receive $16.8 million in management fees over the first six years, as well as “performance-based incentive” pay, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Little is known about the exact investment decisions at the firm. A tax return filed by Mitt and Ann Romney, made public in September, showed that Solamere has used an array of Cayman Islands entities to reduce its investors’ tax liability on its income. Rebecca Wilkins, a tax expert with Citizens for Tax Justice, says that Solamere likely uses “blocker corporations” to help its tax-exempt investors avoid paying the unrelated business income tax.

It seems that Tagg has taken after his father, whose former firm Bain Capital also uses these offshore structures. Most of the offshore entities do not have to file a tax return in the US or anywhere else in the world, making them an ideal shelter for Solamere’s investors, says Wilkins. “To me, the most egregious part of this is that they’re facilitating tax evasion.”

A complaint filed in August with the US Office of Government Ethics argues that Mitt Romney’s investment portfolio violates the Ethics in Government Act because so much of his money rests in opaque funds, like private equity firms and limited partnerships. The law states that presidential officeholders must disclose their investments and their investments’ underlying assets worth more than $1,000. The law, however, carries an exemption for qualified blind trusts.

In June, the Romney campaign announced that if he’s elected, the candidate would move his assets into a federally qualified blind trust, and would also likely sell off any assets that “are not fully compliant with federal disclosure and other rules applicable to the office of the presidency.” But if Romney wins, there’s almost no chance that the underlying assets of his son’s firm, Solamere, will be revealed. Solamere could have assets involved in healthcare, energy, telecommunications or any number of other industries, but the public will be left in the dark.

According to Republicans they're all risk takers that build stuff. Pull back the curtain and they're just mostly lazy pigs feeding at the trough.

How The Media Used Biden's Smile To Deflect From Ryan's Dishonesty

At The Vice Presidential Debate: Ryan Told 24 Myths In 40 Minutes. Ryan arrived thinking that it was not a debate, but a race to see how many falsehoods and bizarro conservative talking points he could spew. Ryan should not be vice president or a congressman or allowed anywhere near government. He is barely qualified to walk a dog much less govern this great country.

Memo to Joe Biden and All Concerned Americans About Debate With Radical Zealot Paul Ryan

Memo to Joe Biden and All Concerned Americans About Debate With Radical Zealot Paul Ryan

Beware: Paul Ryan will appear affable. He’s less polished and aggressive than Romney, even soft-spoken. And he acts as if he’s saying reasonable things.

But under the surface he’s a rightwing zealot. And nothing he says or believes is reasonable – neither logical nor reflecting the values of the great majority of Americans.

Your job is to smoke Ryan out, exposing his fanaticism. The best way to do this is to force him to take responsibility for the regressive budget he created as chairman of the House Budget Committee.

Ryan won’t be able to pull a Romney — pretending he’s a moderate — because the Ryan budget is out there, with specific numbers.

It’s an astounding document that Romney fully supports. And it fills in the details Romney has left out of his proposals. Mitt Romney is a robot who will say and do whatever he’s programmed to do. Ryan is the robot’s brain. The robot has no heart. It’s your job to enable America to see this.

I suggest you hold up a copy of the Ryan budget in front of the cameras. You might even read selected passages.

Emphasize these points: Ryan’s budget turns Medicare into vouchers. It includes the same $716 billion of savings Romney last week accused the President of cutting out of Medicare – but instead of getting it from providers he gets it from the elderly.

It turns Medicaid over to cash-starved states, with even less federal contribution. This will hurt the poor as well as middle-class elderly in nursing homes.

Over 60 percent of its savings come out of programs for lower-income Americans – like Pell grants and food stamps.

Yet it gives huge tax cuts to the top 1 percent – some $4.7 trillion over the next decade. (This is the same top 1 percent, you might add, who have reaped 93 percent of the gains from the recovery, whose stock portfolios have regained everything they lost and more, and who are now taking home a larger share of total income than at any time in the last eighty years and paying the lowest taxes than at any time since before World War II.)

As a result it doesn’t reduce the federal debt at all. In fact, it worsens it.

On top of all this, Ryan is on record – as is Romney – for wanting to repeal both ObamaCare (taking coverage away from 30 million Americans) and the Dodd-Frank law (thereby giving cover to Wall Street).

Your challenge will be get this across firmly and clearly, with an appropriate degree of indignation – on a medium that rewards style over substance, glibness over detail, and optimistic happy talk over grim reality.

My suggestion: Be cheerfully aggressive. Take Ryan on directly and sharply but do so with a smile. Force him to take responsibility for the regressiveness of his budget and the radicalism of his ideology.

Prepare your closing carefully (unlike the President seemed to have done last week), and tell America the unvarnished truth: Romney and Ryan plan to do a reverse Robin Hood at a time in our nation’s history when the rich have never had it so good while the rest haven’t been as economically insecure since the Great Depression.

Their agenda is all the more remarkable in that we have a growing budget deficit to deal with, along soaring healthcare costs and aging boomers without enough to retire on because their net worth went down the drain with their homes.

The fundamental question is whether we’re still all in it together – whether as American citizens we continue to have obligations to one another to assure equal opportunity and help for those who need it – or we’re on our own, without a common bond or a common good. Romney and Ryan represent the latter view, a view utterly at odds with what we have accomplished as a nation.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License


Robert Reich, one of the nation’s leading experts on work and the economy, is Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley.

If conservative plans for the economy, education, foreign policy, the environment, climate change ( or lack there of) are so wonderful how come conservatives cloak those radical anti-American plans in clouds of double-talk and code words. They're afraid that Americans will see the truth about how radical and utterly devoid of American values those plans are and not vote for them. Romney and Ryan are stealth candidates, trying to portray their deeply anti-progress positions as moderate. Biden and America should not let these wackos get away with such atrocious dishonesty and treacherous agenda.

Coal Miner’s Donor - A Mitt Romney benefactor and his surprisingly generous employees.

IT IS BOTH a pundit’s truism and a mathematical reality that Mitt Romney’s path to the White House runs through Ohio. And that path, in turn, runs through a firm called Murray Energy.

Over the years, CEO Robert Murray has brought in GOP pols from as far away as Alaska, California, and Massachusetts for fund-raisers. In 2010, the year John Boehner became House speaker, the firm’s 3,000 employees and their families were his second-biggest source of funds. (AT&T was in first place, but it has nearly 200,000 employees.) This year, Murray is one of the most important GOP players in one of the most important battleground states in the country. In May, he hosted a $1.7 million fund-raiser for Romney. Employees have given the nominee more than $120,000. In August, Romney used Murray’s Century Mine in the town of Beallsville for a speech attacking Barack Obama as anti-coal. This fall, scenes from that event—several dozen coal-smudged Murray miners standing behind the candidate in a tableau framed by a giant American flag and a COAL COUNTRY STANDS WITH MITT placard—have shown up in a Romney ad.

The ads aired even after Ohio papers reported what I was told by several miners at the event, a bit of news that an internal memo confirms: The crowd was not there of its own accord. Murray had suspended Century’s operations and made clear to workers that they were expected to attend, without pay. “I tell ya, you’ve got a great boss,” Romney said in acknowledging Robert Murray from the stage. “He runs a great operation here.”

The accounts of two sources who have worked in managerial positions at the firm, and a review of letters and memos to Murray employees, suggest that coercion may also explain Murray staffers’ financial support for Romney. Murray, it turns out, has for years pressured salaried employees to give to the Murray Energy political action committee (PAC) and to Republican candidates chosen by the company. Internal documents show that company officials track who is and is not giving. The sources say that those who do not give are at risk of being demoted or missing out on bonuses, claims Murray denies.

Republicans claim that anyone who belongs to a union is a thug. Unions have a lot of catching up to do to be as big a thugs as businesses run like Antebellum plantations such as Murray Energy.

Why Does millionaire hedge-fund manager, the Anti-American Robert Mercer and his pal Republican House candidate radical Randy Altschuler Hate America

Why Does millionaire hedge-fund manager, the Anti-American Robert Mercer and his pal Republican House candidate radical Randy Altschuler Hate America

Robert Mercer, the millionaire hedge-fund manager has been a consistent funder of right wing causes. In recent years, the co-CEO of Renaissance Technologies has bankrolled an Islamaphobic effort to stop a Muslim Community Center in New York City, given $1 million each to the pro-Mitt Romney Restore Our Future super PAC and Karl Rove’s American Crossroads, and spent $200,000 on ads against Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR), an advocate for more regulation of hedge funds. Now, public disclosure forms reveal he is the main benefactor for a new super PAC helping to elect New York Republican House candidate Randy Altschuler.

Prosperity First Inc. registered in April as a super PAC and reported on its July quarterly report that it had raised $635,500 in its first three months in operation. Of that, a whopping $500,000 came from Mercer. Until this weekend, it was unclear what Prosperity First would do with the money. Friday, the group reported its first $273,472 independent expenditure — an ad supporting Altschuler. This expenditure — the vast majority of which was funded by Mercer — is in addition to a pair of $2,500 contributions directly from the hedge-fund millionaire to Altschuler’s official campaign. In the post-Citizens United world, wealthy donors like Mercer can legally circumvent the legal limits and attempt to buy elections for their favorite candidates.

Why would Mercer spend so much to elect this candidate? After narrowly losing in 2010, Altschuler is again challenging Rep. Tim Bishop (D-NY). One key difference between the two candidates is their view on Wall Street regulation: Bishop voted for the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2009 (commonly known as Dodd-Frank), while Altschuler blasted the law as a “flawed piece of legislation” that would “kill jobs and shrink tax revenues for New York State.” Renaissance Technologies did not much like the bill’s regulations for hedge funds — the company has spent over $1 million since the start of 2010 on federal lobbying including a significant focus on Dodd-Frank’s hedge-fund provisions.

Altschuler promises that if elected, he would “roll out the red carpet” for businesses like Renaissance Technologies, instead of “red tape.” He says he will make the elimination of what he calls “job-killing government regulations” a priority. Altschuler’s let-business-do-whatever-it-wants approach would probably be good for the bottom line for hedge-fund millionaires like Mercer — though they would likely not be so good for consumers anxious to avoid a repeat of the 2008 financial sector meltdown. For a person who earns $125 million in one year, the Supreme Court’s effective elimination of campaign finance limits may have made buying a House seat — or several — a legal and doable proposition.

The USA lost about $17 trillion dollars in wealth from 2007 to 2008 thanks to anti-American sleazebags like Mercer and Altschuler. If they hate America so much, if things are so terrible here for millionaires, they can afford to move to anywhere they like.

Mitt Romney Wants To Stack His Administration With The Same Corrupt Plutocrats Who Crashed The Economy. Republicans See Corruption As A Virtue

Mitt Romney Wants To Stack His Administration With The Same Corrupt Plutocrats Who Crashed The Economy. Republicans See Corruption As A Virtue

In May, Mitt Romney suggested a new eligibility test in the U.S. Constitution requiring that the President first "spend at least three years working in business." It was bad enough that America's would-be second Harvard MBA President forgot the disastrous record of the first. Now, Mitt has chosen the worst possible week to announce that President Romney's Cabinet will feature people who had "real jobs" and "have experience in the real world, in the private sector." After all, while Romney's campaign was getting battered by mounting questions over his AWOL tax returns and mysterious tenure at Bain Capital, some of the biggest banks on both sides of the Atlantic were revealed to be cheats, gamblers and frauds. And as it is turns out, recent studies suggest those abysmal business ethics are not exceptions to the rule.

To be sure, the Republican nominee and his former firm weren't the only ones to be on the receiving end of headlines like "50 Shades of Bain" and "Did Romney Make a False Statement on His Financial Disclosure?" The mushrooming scandal over Barclay's rigging of the crucial London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) came to the U.S. with word that the New York Fed knew of manipulation in the UK dating back to 2008. (That scandal has already claimed the job of Barclay's CEO Bob Diamond, a man who was to have co-hosted Mitt Romney's upcoming fundraising event in London.) On Friday, JP Morgan once again found itself the under the microscope as the bank reported its growing losses from bad bets placed by the notorious "London whale" may have cost the firm $7 billion. That same day, the New York Times reported that "MasterCard, Visa and major banks, including JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America, agreed to pay more than $6 billion to settle accusations that they engaged in anticompetitive practices" in processing credit card payments to retailers. Meanwhile, the nation's largest bank, Wells Fargo, beat earnings expectations on Friday even as it announced a $175 million settlement with the Justice Department over "accusations that it discriminated against some minority homeowners seeking loans from 2004 to 2009."

Reflecting on the LIBOR scandal, University of San Diego Law School professor Frank Partnoy lamented, "I wish I could say I'm shocked, because it is shocking, but regulators have not been particularly effective or aggressive in the past two decades of finance." Simon Johnson summed up the banking scandal that may have impacted $800 trillion worth of business and consumer credit transactions with this powerfully simply headline:

    "Lie More, as a Business Model."

Conservative Republicans like Mitt have be successful in repealing most of the financial regulation that would have prevented the Great Recession. What regulation we had left they were negligent about enforcing. If terrorists had done this much damage to the USA conservatives would be back in shrill paranoid mode. Instead they're asking to help elect more congressmen, senators, governors and a president so they can commit some more domestic terror on working and middle-class America's finances.

Fox's Latest Attempt To Deflect Blame For Recession Away From GOP

Questions of Character - Mitt Romney's Bain Stories Do Not Add Up

Questions of Character - Mitt Romney's Bain Stories Don't Add Up

Romney didn’t start pushing the idea that he’d severed all ties with Bain in ’99 until late in the ’02 campaign, when Democrats played up Bain’s closure of a Kansas City steel plant, a move that cost 700 workers their jobs. Confronted with this potentially damaging attack, Romney pleaded ignorance, insisting he couldn’t have had anything to do with the closure because it came two years after he’d left. That’s the story he’s stuck with ever since – and especially this year, as national Democrats have taken up the GST story.

The point here isn’t that Romney was running Bain Capital and making all of its key decisions from 1999 to 2002. But the story he tells now absolves him of all responsibility for anything and everything Bain did in those years. This would be reasonable if Romney had forged a clear and total break with the company in 1999, but he didn’t. His statement to the ballot law commission 10 years ago was supported by just about all of his actions between 1999 and 2002: Until the final few months of his Olympic tenure, Romney’s break from Bain was supposed to temporary.

According to Fortune magazine - who is being fed documents by a Bain employee, we are supposed to believe that while Romney was listed as exclusive owner of Bain from 1999 until 2002 he had zero say in how the company was run. Did Romney tell the water-cooler guy to come twice a week instead of once - probably not, but Bain moved around hundreds of millions of dollars during that time and Romney claims he did not have a clue what Bain was doing - even though he was collecting income from Bain. Only a kool-aid drinking conservative could believe that load of BS. Another bad news cycle for Mitt Romney, even Republicans want him to come clean

Comically Awful Survey Says 83 Percent Of Doctors Might Quit Over Obamacare . Republicans live in their own little world with their own version of reality.

How a Brutal Strain of Conservative Republican Aristocrats Have Come to Rule America

How a Brutal Strain of Conservative Republican Aristocrats Have Come to Rule America

It's been said that the rich are different than you and me. What most Americans don't know is that they're also quite different from each other, and that which faction is currently running the show ultimately makes a vast difference in the kind of country we are.

Right now, a lot of our problems stem directly from the fact that the wrong sort has finally gotten the upper hand; a particularly brutal and anti-democratic strain of American aristocrat that the other elites have mostly managed to keep away from the levers of power since the Revolution. Worse: this bunch has set a very ugly tone that's corrupted how people with power and money behave in every corner of our culture. Here's what happened, and how it happened, and what it means for America now.

North versus South: Two Definitions of Liberty

Michael Lind first called out the existence of this conflict in his 2006 book, Made In Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics. He argued that much of American history has been characterized by a struggle between two historical factions among the American elite -- and that the election of George W. Bush was a definitive sign that the wrong side was winning.

For most of our history, American economics, culture and politics have been dominated by a New England-based Yankee aristocracy that was rooted in Puritan communitarian values, educated at the Ivies and marinated in an ethic of noblesse oblige (the conviction that those who possess wealth and power are morally bound to use it for the betterment of society). While they've done their share of damage to the notion of democracy in the name of profit (as all financial elites inevitably do), this group has, for the most part, tempered its predatory instincts with a code that valued mass education and human rights; held up public service as both a duty and an honor; and imbued them with the belief that once you made your nut, you had a moral duty to do something positive with it for the betterment of mankind. Your own legacy depended on this.

Among the presidents, this strain gave us both Roosevelts, Woodrow Wilson, John F. Kennedy, and Poppy Bush -- nerdy, wonky intellectuals who, for all their faults, at least took the business of good government seriously. Among financial elites, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet still both partake strongly of this traditional view of wealth as power to be used for good. Even if we don't like their specific choices, the core impulse to improve the world is a good one -- and one that's been conspicuously absent in other aristocratic cultures.

Which brings us to that other great historical American nobility -- the plantation aristocracy of the lowland South, which has been notable throughout its 400-year history for its utter lack of civic interest, its hostility to the very ideas of democracy and human rights, its love of hierarchy, its fear of technology and progress, its reliance on brutality and violence to maintain “order,” and its outright celebration of inequality as an order divinely ordained by God.

As described by Colin Woodard in American Nations: The Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, the elites of the Deep South are descended mainly from the owners of sugar, rum and cotton plantations from Barbados -- the younger sons of the British nobility who'd farmed up the Caribbean islands, and then came ashore to the southern coasts seeking more land. Woodward described the culture they created in the crescent stretching from Charleston, SC around to New Orleans this way:

    It was a near-carbon copy of the West Indian slave state these Barbadians had left behind, a place notorious even then for its inhumanity....From the outset, Deep Southern culture was based on radical disparities in wealth and power, with a tiny elite commanding total obedience and enforcing it with state-sponsored terror. Its expansionist ambitions would put it on a collision course with its Yankee rivals, triggering military, social, and political conflicts that continue to plague the United States to this day.

David Hackett Fischer, whose Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways In America informs both Lind's and Woodard's work, described just how deeply undemocratic the Southern aristocracy was, and still is. He documents how these elites have always feared and opposed universal literacy, public schools and libraries, and a free press. (Lind adds that they have historically been profoundly anti-technology as well, far preferring solutions that involve finding more serfs and throwing them at a problem whenever possible. Why buy a bulldozer when 150 convicts on a chain gang can grade your road instead?) Unlike the Puritan elites, who wore their wealth modestly and dedicated themselves to the common good, Southern elites sank their money into ostentatious homes and clothing and the pursuit of pleasure -- including lavish parties, games of fortune, predatory sexual conquests, and blood sports involving ritualized animal abuse spectacles.

But perhaps the most destructive piece of the Southern elites' worldview is the extremely anti-democratic way it defined the very idea of liberty. In Yankee Puritan culture, both liberty and authority resided mostly with the community, and not so much with individuals. Communities had both the freedom and the duty to govern themselves as they wished (through town meetings and so on), to invest in their collective good, and to favor or punish individuals whose behavior enhanced or threatened the whole (historically, through community rewards such as elevation to positions of public authority and trust; or community punishments like shaming, shunning or banishing).

Individuals were expected to balance their personal needs and desires against the greater good of the collective -- and, occasionally, to make sacrifices for the betterment of everyone. (This is why the Puritan wealthy tended to dutifully pay their taxes, tithe in their churches and donate generously to create hospitals, parks and universities.) In return, the community had a solemn and inescapable moral duty to care for its sick, educate its young and provide for its needy -- the kind of support that maximizes each person's liberty to live in dignity and achieve his or her potential. A Yankee community that failed to provide such support brought shame upon itself. To this day, our progressive politics are deeply informed by this Puritan view of ordered liberty.

In the old South, on the other hand, the degree of liberty you enjoyed was a direct function of your God-given place in the social hierarchy. The higher your status, the more authority you had, and the more "liberty" you could exercise -- which meant, in practical terms, that you had the right to take more "liberties" with the lives, rights and property of other people. Like an English lord unfettered from the Magna Carta, nobody had the authority to tell a Southern gentleman what to do with resources under his control. In this model, that's what liberty is. If you don't have the freedom to rape, beat, torture, kill, enslave, or exploit your underlings (including your wife and children) with impunity -- or abuse the land, or enforce rules on others that you will never have to answer to yourself -- then you can't really call yourself a free man.

When a Southern conservative talks about "losing his liberty," the loss of this absolute domination over the people and property under his control -- and, worse, the loss of status and the resulting risk of being held accountable for laws that he was once exempt from -- is what he's really talking about. In this view, freedom is a zero-sum game. Anything that gives more freedom and rights to lower-status people can't help but put serious limits on the freedom of the upper classes to use those people as they please. It cannot be any other way. So they find Yankee-style rights expansions absolutely intolerable, to the point where they're willing to fight and die to preserve their divine right to rule.

Not everyone in the South believes in reliving the Southern Plantation culture - replacing slaves with wage slaves who have no power. By way of relatively small majorities the radical conservatives just happen to get their way. With the exception of Texas most southern states have a disproportionate amount of federal representation because everyone gets two senators - conservatives are thus over represented in Congress. Wherever conservatives are from - the east, west or south they share a dream of an America where there are no morals restraining anything that will generate a profit or more profits. That is why they hate labor laws that protect workers and environmental laws that protect your family's health. They hate science and education because they do not want anyone reading about their rights or learning about rationalism and The Enlightenment. 

Sleaze Bags of the Week - Conservative Republican Super PACs Buying Democracy Like Its French Champagne

I love screwing over seniors and the disabled. My plan would gut that Marxist program called Medicare

Sleaze Bags of the Week - Conservative Republican Super PACs Buying Democracy Like Its French Champagne

If you’re visiting a candidate this summer and looking for a thoughtful Super PAC donors have money to spare, but it's democracy they're burning to the ground.house gift, might we suggest a nice Super PAC? Thanks to the Supreme Court and Citizens United, they’re all the rage among the mega-wealthy. All it takes is a little paperwork and a wad of cash and presto, you can have, as The Washington Post describes it, a “highly customized, highly personalized” political action committee.

It’s easy -- Super PACs come in all amounts and party affiliations. You don’t have to spend millions, although a gift that size certainly won’t be turned aside.  Cable TV tycoon Marc Nathanson got a Super PAC for his friend, longtime Democratic Congressman Howard Berman from California, and all it cost was $100,000. Down in North Carolina, Republican congressional candidate George Holding received a handsome Super PAC that includes $100,000 each from an aunt and uncle and a quarter of a million from a bunch of his cousins. Yes, nothing says family like a great big, homemade batch of campaign contributions.

You can start a Super PAC on your own or contribute to one that already exists. Super PACs are available for every kind of race – presidential, congressional or statewide. But there are other ways you can help buy an election. Look at the Wisconsin recall campaign of Republican Governor Scott Walker. At least fourteen billionaires rushed to the support of the corporate right’s favorite union basher. He outraised his Democratic opponent, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, by nearly eight to one. Most of his money came from out of state. More than sixty million dollars were spent, $45 million of it for Walker alone.

Here are just a few of the satisfied buyers:

Wisconsin billionaire Diane Hendricks contributed more than half a million dollars on Scott Walker’s behalf. Her late husband built ABC Supply, America’s largest wholesale distributor of roofing, windows and siding.  Fearful the United States might become “a socialistic ideological nation,” she’s an ardent foe of unions and, in her words, “taxing job creators.” True to her aversion to taxes, she paid none in 2010, despite being worth, according to Forbes magazine, about $2.8 billion dollars.  

Before he launched his crusade against the collective bargaining rights of working people, Governor Walker had a conversation with Diane Hendricks, in which she asked, “Any chance we’ll ever get to be a completely red state and work on these unions… and become a right to work [state]? What can we do to help you?”

Walker replied, “We`re going to start in a couple weeks with our budget adjustment bill. The first step is, we`re going to deal with collective bargaining for all public employee unions, because you use divide and conquer.”

And so he did.

Walker also hauled in checks for nearly half a million from the Texas oligarch Bob Perry. He made his fortune in the home building business and is best known nationally for contributing four and a half million to the Swift Boat campaign that smeared the Vietnam War record of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry back in 2004.

In Texas, Bob Perry is known for his cozy relationship with the state’s Supreme Court.  He once gave money to every one of its nine elected judges.  And guess what?  Those same nine judges later overturned an $800,000 judgment against his building company for faulty construction.  Bob the Builder, who’s naturally eager for help in the cause of tort reform -- that is, making it hard for everyday people to sue corporations like his for malfeasance -- has so far given four million to the pro-Romney Super PAC, Restore Our Future, and millions to Karl Rove’s American Crossroads Super PAC.

Then there’s casino king Sheldon Adelson, who gave Scott Walker’s cause $250,000. That’s a drop in the old champagne bucket compared to the $21 million Adelson’s family gave to the Super PAC that kept Newt Gingrich in the race long after the formaldehyde had been ordered.  According to The Wall Street Journal, Adelson did not long mourn Gingrich’s passing, and has now given at least $10 million to the Restore Our Future Super PAC supporting Romney. By all accounts, what he expects in return is that his candidate hold unions at bay and swear that Israel can do no wrong.

Next up on Scott Walker’s list of beneficent plutocrats: Rich DeVos, owner of the Orlando Magic basketball team and co-founder of the home products giant Amway, which, thanks to Republican leaders in Congress, once shared in a $19 million tax break after a million-dollar DeVos contribution to the Republican Party.  He’s a long-time member of the secretive Council for National Policy, a who’s who of right-wing luminaries.

Let’s not forget cowboy billionaire and born again Christian, Foster Friess, Rick Santorum’s moneyman, who told us about the good ol’ days when womenwould “use Bayer aspirin for contraceptives. The gals put it between their knees and it wasn't that costly.”And Louis Moore Bacon, the billionaire founder of the hedge fund Moore Capital – which in 2010 was fined $25 million for attempted commodities manipulation. A big backer of Romney, he, too came to Walker’s aid in Wisconsin.

So did Dallas oil and gas wildcatter Trevor Rees-Jones, who’s given millions to Karl Rove’s American Crossroads, in anticipation of another administration as friendly to taxpayer subsidies for big oil as the Rove-Bush White House. Last year, Rees-Jones’ company, Chief Oil, and a partner sold to Chevron nearly a quarter million acres in northeast America’s Marcellus Shale – the epicenter of the raging controversy over fracking. Estimated price: one billion dollars.

We could go on and name more, but you get the picture. These are the people who are helping to fund what the journalist Joe Hagan describes as a “tsunami of slime.” Even as they and their chosen candidates are afforded respectability in the value-free world of plutocracy, they can hide the fingerprints they leave on the bleeding corpse of democracy in part because each Super PAC comes with that extra special something every politician craves: plausible deniability. When one of their ads says something nasty and deceitful about an opponent – when it slanders and lies – the pol can shrug and say: “Not my doing. It’s the Super Pac that’s slinging the mud, not me.”

And that’s how the wealthy one percent does its dirty business. They are, by the way, as we were reminded by CNN’s Charles Riley in his report, “Can 46 Rich Dudes Buy an Election?” almost all men, mostly white, “and so far, the vast majority of their contributions have been made to conservative groups.”  They want to own this election.  So if there are any of you left out there with millions to burn, better buy your candidate now, while supplies last.

by Bill Moyers. Reprinted for educational purposes.

Since that column was written Sheldon Adelson has said he plans to give -not $10 million to Romney, but a $100 million. Democracy has always been tainted by money. It has simply become worse then ever, a nightmare of perverted democracy. Conservatives Republicans have no conscience or moral qualms about it because winning is everything, If they have to win down and dirty, they will. Conservative Republicans have given lip service to morals for decades, but they never actually live up to their moralizing.

TV Media Ignore Romney's Clean Energy Contradictions. Admittedly it will take a little more than money to become president. Romney is going to lie about everything all the time.

Romney's Big Lie on the Economy Now Bigger than Ever 

Mitt Hypocrite - Romney Bashes Stimulus, Then Fundraises In Home Of Stimulus Recipient

Romney Bashes Stimulus, Then Fundraises In Home Of Stimulus Recipient

Mitt Romney spent this morning in Florida trashing the stimulus, saying the Obama administration “borrowed almost a trillion dollars but used it to protect government.”

But just hours after the speech, Romney boarded a plane to Tennessee to fundraise with a beneficiary of Obama’s stimulus funds.

Romney will spend Tuesday night at a $10,000-a-head fundraiser at the house of Orrin H Ingram II, Chairman of the Ingram Barge Company — which received $130,000 in federal stimulus money. Ingram Barge Company is a private company, not a government entity.

Romney has a record of saying one thing and doing another when it comes to the stimulus. He once even attacked the stimulus at a college that took stimulus funds.

Romney, never having done an honest day's work in his life considers himself a "success". No wonder he says the stimulus did not work, but will take funds from a business that benefited from the stimulus. Inside Romney's head is a full-time fairy tale machine that makes everything make sense to Romney and his supporters, yet seems like what it is to normal Americans - the insular world of a true elitist where no one has ever told hum he is wrong.

Fox's Karl Rove Accuses Obama Campaign Of Attempting To Buy The Election

On Sean Hannity's radio show today, Fox contributor Karl Rove said that the Obama campaign will attempt to win the election by "trying to take their wallet and buying it."

Karl Rove, of course, is the co-founder of a large Republican Super PAC. In an interview with Reuters in April, Rove said he intended to spend $300 million through his Super PAC during the 2012 election cycle: [emphasis added]

    This year, thanks to the American Crossroads "Super PAC" organization that he co-founded, Rove will have vast resources to fertilize Romney's campaign: a massive wallet, one of the loudest megaphones in conservative media, and close ties to Romney's campaign.

Karl Rove has the usual Conservative Republican standards - toss out all honor, all truth, all integrity, all genuine patriotism - what matters is the radical anti-American agenda of conservatism.

Despite The Media Narrative, Obama Was Right About Private Sector

Why President Obama was right even if his choice of words was not perfect. The Private sector is doing well and the public sector is under assault, thus slowing the recovery, America’s Hidden Austerity Program

Why is the recovery from this recession different from recoveries from past recessions? In the previous two recessions, it took 32 months for nonfarm employment to reattain its June 1990 peak, and 48 months for it to reattain its January 2001 peak. Assuming the economy keeps adding nonfarm employment at the current rate, it will have taken 88 months to reattain its January 2008 peak. The explanation most often heard is that “financial crises are different”: after a debt crisis, shaken consumers are reluctant to spend and shaken firms are reluctant to hire, slowing private-sector job growth even after the recession has bottomed out.

There is some truth in this, but it is not the whole story. In fact, while the latest recession was particularly deep, the recovery in private-sector employment, once it finally started, has not been particularly slow by recent historical standards. In the 27 months since the start of the current employment recovery, the private sector has added 4.3 million jobs, fewer than the 5.0 million it added in the 27 months after February 1992 but not many fewer than the 4.5 million it added in the equivalent period after August 2003.
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

But there is something historically different about this recession and its aftermath: in the past, local government employment has been almost recession-proof. This time it’s not. Going back as long as the data have been collected (1955), with the one exception of the 1981 recession, local government employment continued to grow almost every month regardless of what the economy threw at it. But since the latest recession began, local government employment has fallen by 3 percent, and is still falling. In the equivalent period following the 1990 and 2001 recessions, local government employment grew 7.7 and 5.2 percent. Even following the 1981 recession, by this stage local government employment was up by 1.4 percent.
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

Who is losing these local government jobs? In 1981 it was mostly teachers. Now, the losses are shared by teachers and other local government workers alike.

State government is much less important than local because it is a much smaller share of total nonfarm employment: 4 percent versus 10 percent. Nevertheless, a similar story can be told there. This far into each recession since 1955, state government employment had grown. Since the start of the latest recession, state government employment is still down 1.2 percent.

Without this hidden austerity program, the economy would look very different. If state and local governments had followed the pattern of the previous two recessions, they would have added 1.4 million to 1.9 million jobs and overall unemployment would be 7.0 to 7.3 percent instead of 8.2 percent.

This post is just pissing in the wind. The Conservative Republican media has already written its narrative and turned a poor choice of words into what they see as one of the biggest gaffes ever. The private sector has been growing. Corporate profits are still high. Executive pay is still very high. At the same time public sector employees are being laid off. Some teachers and police can find other work, but those are specialty skills. If you trained to be a teacher that does not translate into easily find a job in engineering or programming, and the same is true for police and firefighters.

Stimulus funds are still creating some jobs- FTA Deputy Administrator McMillan Joins Missouri and Illinois Officials to Kick Off Eads Bridge Rehabilitation Project.

The Crazy Anti-Americans at National Review Cling To Fantasy That Obama Is A Secret Radical

In The World of Shadowy Campaign Cash, Mitt Romney, Who has The Values of a Thug, Rules

Thank Your Conservative Republican Neighbors For Killing America The Land of Opportunity

Thank Your Conservative Republican Neighbors For Killing America The Land of Opportunity

America likes to think of itself as a land of opportunity, and others view it in much the same light. But, while we can all think of examples of Americans who rose to the top on their own, what really matters are the statistics: to what extent do an individual’s life chances depend on the income and education of his or her parents?

Nowadays, these numbers show that the American dream is a myth. There is less equality of opportunity in the United States today than there is in Europe – or, indeed, in any advanced industrial country for which there are data.

This is one of the reasons that America has the highest level of inequality of any of the advanced countries – and its gap with the rest has been widening. In the “recovery” of 2009-2010, the top 1% of US income earners captured 93% of the income growth. Other inequality indicators – like wealth, health, and life expectancy – are as bad or even worse. The clear trend is one of concentration of income and wealth at the top, the hollowing out of the middle, and increasing poverty at the bottom.

It would be one thing if the high incomes of those at the top were the result of greater contributions to society, but the Great Recession showed otherwise: even bankers who had led the global economy, as well as their own firms, to the brink of ruin, received outsize bonuses.

A closer look at those at the top reveals a disproportionate role for rent-seeking: some have obtained their wealth by exercising monopoly power; others are CEOs who have taken advantage of deficiencies in corporate governance to extract for themselves an excessive share of corporate earnings; and still others have used political connections to benefit from government munificence – either excessively high prices for what the government buys (drugs), or excessively low prices for what the government sells (mineral rights).

Likewise, part of the wealth of those in finance comes from exploiting the poor, through predatory lending and abusive credit-card practices. Those at the top, in such cases, are enriched at the direct expense of those at the bottom.

It might not be so bad if there were even a grain of truth to trickle-down economics – the quaint notion that everyone benefits from enriching those at the top. But most Americans today are worse off – with lower real (inflation-adjusted) incomes – than they were in 1997, a decade and a half ago. All of the benefits of growth have gone to the top.

America has become a country not “with justice for all,” but rather with favoritism for the rich and justice for those who can afford it – so evident in the foreclosure crisis, in which the big banks believed that they were too big not only to fail, but also to be held accountable.

Defenders of America’s inequality argue that the poor and those in the middle shouldn’t complain. While they may be getting a smaller share of the pie than they did in the past, the pie is growing so much, thanks to the contributions of the rich and superrich, that the size of their slice is actually larger. The evidence, again, flatly contradicts this. Indeed, America grew far faster in the decades after World War II, when it was growing together, than it has since 1980, when it began growing apart.

Conservative Republicans seem to be stuck in permanent adolescent mode with a wild crush on the super rich kids. That is not politics, that is some kind of deep-seated physiological problem. Conservatives are concerned that some poor kid and his mother might be getting some apple juice they do not deserve, but could care less that billionaires - 1% of so of the population - are sucking up three fifths of the nation's productivity.

Romney's (non) military record faces new scrutiny. Just call Mitt, Mr. Deferment.

Sleaze Bag of the Week - Scott Brown (R-MA) is Getting Desperate and Dirty with Sexist Attack On Warren

Sleaze Bag of the Week - Scott Brown (R-MA) is Getting Desperate
and Dirty with Sexist Attack On Warren

In my latest column, “Dems' war FOR women,” I suggested that a power-hungry politics and rightist extremism has led Republicans into attacks on programs vital for women and against pay equity for women. These attacks at times veer into personal campaigns against the women themselves. Witness the many efforts against Hillary Clinton over the years and now, in Massachusetts, witness the slander against Elizabeth Warren by Scott Brown.

In a recent column suggesting that Warren is the great voice of workers, consumers and men and women who are the backbone of the nation I did suggest that Scott Brown was decent. It did not take long for Brown to prove me wrong about that. His dishonest and scandalous attacks against Elizabeth Warren put to shame Brown's argument that he is some sort of "bipartisan" "reasonable man.”

In the end, Scott Brown is just another politician, a handsome and charming guy who will ultimately do anything to win when he fears he could lose.

First Brown implied that Warren was a Harvard elitist. Presumably Brown would attack John F. Kennedy for the same reason. Now Brown suggests that Elizabeth Warren is not really qualified to teach at Harvard. Huh? Brown's using the old Karl Rove-style "dog whistle" attack, suggesting Warren just maybe got the Harvard job because of affirmative action.

What sexist garbage it is that Scott Brown is trying to sell?

Elizabeth Warren got the Harvard job because she was supremely qualified, as are most women who are attacked in this way.

Elizabeth Warren is outstanding by any and all measures at Harvard, admired by her peers and respected by her students.

What is special about Elizabeth is that given her enormous talents she could have sold out like so many others, and made her fortune with any law firm or investment bank, but did not. Instead:

She has fought for women and men who are workers and consumers, fought for economic fairness and financial integrity, fought for lower credit card rates and against banks that charge Mafia-like rates, fought for homeowners against banks that would foreclose upon them (which is why many of those banks hate Warren and support Brown).

If you like the banks, vote for Brown. If you like the consumers, vote for Warren.

Warren has fought in support of active-duty military troops, in support of America's military families, and against those who cheat and abuse our military families and vets (who desperately favor Brown).

Warren has fought for the middle class, for the poor, for the workers and military families and consumers of Massachusetts.

No, Sen. Brown, Elizabeth Warren is not some woman who got a job through affirmative action. She is partially Native American but she has achieved much in life not because of her gender or heritage as you, Sen. Brown, and your great ally, Karl Rove, would suggest, but because of her talent, ability, integrity and hard work.

Elizabeth Warren could have made tens of millions of dollars selling out to greed, as so many of Scott Brown's campaign donors have, but instead, she is one of the most courageous fighters on behalf of workers and consumers and veterans who has ever served in public life in Washington or anywhere else.

Shame on you, Scott Brown.

Thank goodness there are still good people like Elizabeth Warren who are still willing to serve in public life in a system too often dominated by charmers who use dirty politics to support those who cheat the workers and consumers and vets Elizabeth Warren has used her God-given talents fighting for throughout her career.

Many Americans were wondering just who Scott Brown is, he has so many faces it is hard to keep up. Now desperate that he might lose the election to someone who is genuinely concerned with working families, brown has shown his real face. he is a petty pathetic little wing-nut conservative in the pocket of special interests and he cannot compete with a woman of substance and the kind of integrity America needs in Washington. What is Elizabeth Warren's big unforgivable crime? her parents told her she was part Native-American.Conservatives, you know those people who lied us into a 3 trillion dolar war and bankrupted the country wants an election decided on what might be slight exaggerations from someone's parents. Conservatives are once again taking Americans for fools. Let us hope for the future of this great country that this time conservative smears do not work.

11 Ways Mitt Romney Shows He is a Clueless Rich-Guy

The Austerity Agenda is just an excuse to give working class Americans the shaft.

Memorial Day Thoughts on National Defense Spending and Priorities

Memorial Day Thoughts on National Defense Spending and Priorities

We can best honor those who have given their lives for this nation in combat by making sure our military might is proportional to what America needs.

The United States spends more on our military than do China, Russia, Britain, France, Japan, and Germany put together.

With the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, the cost of fighting wars is projected to drop – but the “base” defense budget (the annual cost of paying troops and buying planes, ships, and tanks – not including the costs of actually fighting wars) is scheduled to rise. The base budget is already about 25 percent higher than it was a decade ago, adjusted for inflation.

At a time when Medicare, Medicaid, and non-defense discretionary spending (including most programs for the poor, as well as infrastructure and basic R&D) are in serious jeopardy, Obama and the Democrats should be calling for even more defense cuts.

One big reason: It’s almost impossible to terminate large defense contracts. Defense contractors have cultivated sponsors on Capitol Hill and located their plants and facilities in politically important congressional districts. Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and others have made spending on national defense into America’s biggest jobs program.

So we keep spending billions on Cold War weapons systems like nuclear attack submarines, aircraft carriers, and manned combat fighters that pump up the bottom lines of defense contractors but have nothing to do with 21st-century combat.

For example, the Pentagon says it wants to buy fewer F-35 joint strike fighter planes than had been planned – the single-engine fighter has been plagued by cost overruns and technical glitches – but the contractors and their friends on Capitol Hill promise a fight.

The absence of a budget deal on Capitol Hill is supposed to trigger an automatic across-the-board ten-year cut in the defense budget of nearly $500 billion, starting January.

But Republicans have vowed to restore the cuts. The House Republican budget cuts everything else — yet brings defense spending back up. Mitt Romney’s proposed budget does the same.

Yet even if the scheduled cuts occur, the Pentagon is still projected to spend over $2.7 trillion over the next ten years.

At the very least, hundreds of billions could be saved without jeopardizing the nation’s security by ending weapons systems designed for an age of conventional warfare. We should shrink the F-35 fleet of stealth fighters. Cut the number of deployed strategic nuclear weapons, ballistic missile submarines and intercontinental ballistic missiles. And take a cleaver to the Navy and Air Force budgets. (Most of the action is with the Army, Marines and Special Forces.)

At a time when Medicare, Medicaid, and non-defense discretionary spending (including most programs for the poor, as well as infrastructure and basic R&D) are in serious jeopardy, Obama and the Democrats should be calling for even more defense cuts.

A reasonable and rational defense budget would be a fitting memorial to those who have given their lives so we may remain free.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License

Robert Reich, one of the nation’s leading experts on work and the economy, is Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. Time Magazine has named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the last century. He has written thirteen books, including his latest best-seller, Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future; The Work of Nations; Locked in the Cabinet; Supercapitalism; and his newest, an e-book, Beyond Outrage. His syndicated columns, television appearances, and public radio commentaries reach millions of people each week. He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine, and Chairman of the citizen’s group Common Cause. His widely-read blog can be found at www.robertreich.org.

Editorials like this are just so much pissing in the wind. Both political parties reap buckets of campaign cash from the defense industry. No Congressional representative wants to see a defense plant closed down in their district. Defense is not even a good way to create jobs.

Conservative Republican Sleaze Bag Sites Baselessly Accuse WH Of Leaking Bin Laden Raid "Classified Information" To Filmmakers

How Florida Governor & Known Criminal Rick Scott(R) Could Steal The Election For Mitt Romney