Government by Ideology – The Tea Party Way

The Tea Party movement, fresh from savoring their victory over Eric Cantor in Virginia and undeterred by the close loss of Tea Party candidate Chris McDaniel to Thad Cochrane in Mississippi, is flexing its muscles again through various congressional leaders to put an end to the Export Import Bank. Despite much economic evidence to the contrary, the new House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy from California wants to let the charter of the bank expire when it ends in the fall.

House Financial Services Committee Jeb Hensarling has also committed to opposing the renewal of the Ex-Im Bank’s charter, notwithstanding that it would negatively affect companies in his congressional district.

It’s not clear that this will happen, but certainly there is growing support among Tea Party supporters for seeking its demise.
Surely the Ex-Im Bank’s operations can be improved and surely there are problems that should be corrected, but at this moment in time with our economy again showing signs of economic weakness and slowing of growth, this is not the moment to suppress a financial agency that helps many American companies to increase their exports and their employment.

Though considerable amounts go to large corporations like Boeing and General Electric, as you can see in the article in yesterday’s Washington Post smaller companies are increasingly benefitting from financing from the Ex-Im Bank (see the details in The Ex-Im Bank battle is personal for these small business owners – The Washington Post)

Now we have a report from the Washington Post about the fiscal situation in the state of Kansas, where Governor Brownback and the state legislature cut taxes drastically in 2012 and now the state finds itself with a serious fiscal deficit, battling to meet it’s financial obligaciones and provide the public services it is committed to provide to its citizens.

As Josh Barrow reports yesterday in his column The Upshot in the Washington Post, Kansas expected in April and May to collect $651 million dollars in personal income taxes and instead they collected $369 million.

It turns out that the tax cut the legislature granted in 2012 as promoted by Governor Brownback created a hole much larger than anticipated in the state budget. Over the next few months the state will find out just how large the fiscal deficit created by the tax cut will be.

Even more damaging perhaps than the fiscal problems created by the tax cut in 2012, Kansas’s job creation has lagged significantly behind job growth in general as can be seen in this graph published yesterday in the Post Wonkblog article by Christopher Ingraham:

tax_cuts

Ingraham cites a reference from a nonpartisan think tank:

“Earlier this year, my colleague Niraj Chokshi reported on a Center and Budget Policy Priorities study of Kansas’ cuts. In an unusually frank assessment from the nonpartisan think tank, the study’s authors concluded that “Kansas is a cautionary tale, not a model. As other states recover from the recent recession and turn toward the future, Kansas’ huge tax cuts have left that state’s schools and other public services stuck in the recession, and declining further — a serious threat to the state’s long-term economic vitality. Meanwhile, promises of immediate economic improvement have utterly failed to materialize.”

You can read the article here: Tax cuts in Kansas have cost the state money — and job creation’s been terrible – The Washington Post.

These are two examples among many that I could cite of the increasing tendency of the Republican Party, pressured by their Tea Party base, to govern by ideological convictions without regard for legitimate and rigorous economic analysis. Decisions are being taken based on how the Republican Congressional leadership wants the world to be instead of on how it really is. As a result, as in Kansas, serious problems are being created by ill-conceived policies born of ideological convictions instead of real-world analysis.

This is what our near future augurs for us and if the Republicans gain control of the US Senate in November, we can expect more of this, in addition to the problems being created in red states like Kansas where state houses and legislatures are trying to promote the ill-conceived, short-sighted and erroneous policies promoted by the Republican Tea Party base.

We must work hard in this election year to assure that there is a proper political balance in Congress and that the Republicans do not gain control of the US Senate.

Middlemarch by George Eliot – Time to Read It. Again.

Kathryn Schulz's review in New York Magazine (What Is It About Middlemarch? — Vulture) of Rebecca Mead's My Life in Middlemarch, which relates the role that George Eliot's novel Middlemarch played in her own life. It followed closely another review of Mead's book in I read less than a week ago.

I have not read George Eliot since university, but when I came across a quote like the one that follows here, I am stirred to read Middlemarch again before reading Mead's autobiographical / literary reflection. I was so struck by Eliot's sensibility:

“As Dorothea [central character and soul of the novel] learns to her dismay, other people do not necessarily crave the treatment we expect them to appreciate. To thrive in sustained intimacy requires learning to provide not what we think someone else wants, or should want, but what actually makes him or her happy.”

How often do you find a passage like this one, striking so close to your soul and forcing you to reflect on what really goes into a long-term intimate relationship. It certainly set me on my heels.

Read the review in New York Magazine article by Kathryn Schulz. It's very good and pushed me to get serious about reading both Middlemarch and Mead's new book before the month is out.

These are difficult times we live in and this timeless work of fiction by George Eliot is just what is called for. The sensibility she brought to her work, particularly as a woman living in 1830's England, is extraordinary, as Schulz asserts in her review. There is so much more there we can learn from and reflect on. Good reading.

Environment in Mortal Danger – What’s to Be Done?

In the April 7 issue of The New Yorker is a “Letter from West Virginia” (Evan Osnos: A Chemical Spill in West Virginia : The New Yorker) written about the January chemical spill near Charleston, what happened since the spill, and how the coal industry operates in West Virginia to stifle, block, or eliminate any meaningful attempt to protect the environment and in particular in this case our water.

The article is a remarkably dispassionate chronicle of the chemical spill and its aftermath and of what has been happening in West Virginia (WV) over the last few decades as it has turned from a reliably blue, democratic state empowered to a large degree by the miner's unions to an almost fully red, Republican state controlled in large part by the coal industry through money and lobbying.

Once again we find a case study of how serious-minded and responsible citizens support policies and politicans who are working against the well-being of those same citizens. The history of West Virginia is tightly tied to the history of their coal industry. Now that the coal industry in WV is waning as it is in many other parts of the country as natural gas and other energy sources are replacing coal, we find the coal industry there strengthening its political operations to pressure and influence politicians to vote in alignment with their industry's interests.

The article does a thorough job of providing background as to the political evoluation of WV from a blue to a red state. The waning of influence of the Democratic Party in the state coincides with the dramatic reduction in employment in WV in the coal industry. Additionally, the ecological damage created by the coal industry and its allied industries (like the one which created the chemical spill in January) has created pressure for tighter enforcement of environmental laws by the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Since the EPA depends extensively on state environmental agencies for enforcement and vigilance of environmental standards set in federal law, the coal industry in WV has created a powerful lobbying operation in the state to defang the state environmental agency by starving it of funds. They accomplish this by influencing the votes of state legislators who either vote with the coal industry or lose their next re-election campaign. The article provides clear examples of how this works in WV.

What continues to interest and confound me is how consciencious citizens in WV support the coal industry even as it and its related industries are polluting its water and its air. I understand the despicable, cowardly and self-interested behavior of politicans like former governor and now senator Joe Manchin and many of the state legislators mentioned in the article. This is nothing new in our political history – we have always had politicians willing to sell themselves to the highest bidder. What stuns me is how much greater is the support now for these politicians who now abound in the Republican Party and to a lesser degree in the Democratic Party than there was before.

One obvious explanation provided in the TNY article by Even Osnos is that through massive lobbying and publicity by the coal industry and outside interests such as the political fronts of the Koch brothers, these conservative influence peddlers have convinced too many West Virginians that their fate and their welfare is closely tied to the interests of the coal industry.

Osnos cites the example of a couple who was enraged by the chemical spill and its aftermath but when asked what percentage of their fellow West Virginians were employed by the coal industry guessed 15% when in fact it is only 3%. The power of persuasion in TV advertisements and other media to convince the WV public that their interests are aligned with the coal industry is obviously greater than we would like to think.

I just cannot leave it at that, however. I want to believe that we as citizens of whatever state and whatever economic level are capable to understanding what is really going on. I want to believe that we can learn what is in our interest to support and then exercise our vote in support of those interests, not those with the most money to persuade us to vote against our own welfare and our own economic and environmental interests.

This chemical spill and its sad and discouraging aftermath provide a pessimistic vision of our political system and of the capacity of our citizens to vote for what is best for them, not what is best for big business. We can be better than this.

 

Gun Control – More murders in Kansas – still no will to stop this carnage

Yesterday a former KKK leader and white supremecist murdered three people in Kansas at two separate community centers, both of which were Jewish, so we must suppose their race was the motive for these murders. You can find the note in Slatest at Kansas shooting KKK ties: Frazier Glenn Miller's white supremacist past.

This racist murderer is able to buy guns with no impediment yet our cowardly, craven politicians continue to kow-tow to the NRA. These murders are on our politicians, both at state and federal levels, who continue to misconstrue the meaning of the second amendment of the Constitution to mean that any crazy person with a grudge can get a gun to murder anyone he wants. The blood is on their hands, even if they refuse to own it.

How many more people will be murdered by these gun-toting, hateful extremists who roam free throughout our country to carry out their murderous sprees against innocent people? How much longer will we as citizens remain silent and do nothing to stop this insane practice of gun trafficking to anyone who has the money to pay?

This has nothing to do with the second amendment. This has to do with gun manufacturers who want to keep selling freely with virtually no meaningful control over who buys their weapons. What does the manufacturing of assault weapons have to do with the “right to bear arms” as protected in the second amendment? Surely there are ways allow responsible hunters and sportsman to purchase weapons that are legitimately for sport, and not for killing other human beings as assault weapons are designed to do.

When will those who ardently support the NRA and who want to continue to be free to use weapons resposibly for hunting and sport wake up to the reality that as a society we cannot continue to allow these murderers and extremists continued access to deadly weapons. We must find common cause with the serious people in the NRA and other conservative organizations and individuals to work together to find a way to limit access to deadly weapons without imperiling the access that true hunters and sportsmen want as they exercise their right to responsible use of firearms.

 

Syria – And Still the World Does Nothing

UNICEF chose a haunting image of an injured and bleeding Syrian child as its 2013 Photo of the Year Award.  Taken by Niclas Hammarström, a Swedish war photographer, this photo is of an 11 year old girl named Damia being cradled in her brother’s hands after she was injured by shrapnel while playing on the streets of Aleppo.   This is the photo:

Gewinner des Wettbewerbs UNICEF-Foto des Jahres 2013

You can read the story behind this photo here http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/06/unicef-photo-of-year_n_4912782.html

An entire generation of children in Syria is being lost to the war.   Traumatized, homeless, injured as was Damia, and losing all contact with schooling, what will the future bode for these children?

Why doesn’t the United Nations act?    Why doesn’t the United States act?    Or Britain?  Or France?   Or Germany?  Or anyone?   All these governments and international organizations stand by and wring their collective hands while these children suffer the destruction of  their families, their homes, their education, and the lives  by a monster posing as the President of Syria.   I am ashamed that I can do nothing to stop this carnage.

Tea Party & CPAC – Why do they vote against their own interests?

Understanding why sincere and committed conservatives repeatedly vote against their own self-interests continues to elude me. It's hardly a new question and writers far more knowledgable and talented that I have dealt with it. Thomas Frank wrote at length about it in “What's the Matter with Kansas? (How Conservatives Won the Heart of America)” I recommend it to anyone interested in this theme.

During this week of the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) we read many declarations by politicians of different stripes within the conservative political movement. From libertarians like Rand Paul to political opportunists like Ted Cruz we heard the anti-government, anti-tax messages from all angles. This represents what has become the so-called “base” of the Republican Party.

We have all followed the actions of these men and women in the Congress. We saw them close down the government last fall. We saw them agitating to let our government default on its debt not too long ago. We see them now gearing up for the Republican primary season that started last week in Texas, where there was a failed attempt to unseat John Cornyn, the very conservative number two Republican in the Senate in Washington. We saw the fight among too many candidates for Governor and Lieutenant Governor, each one driving as far to the right of the political spectrum as he could. Over the next few months many more will follow.

I don't want to focus on the candidates striving so desperately and earnestly for political office, convinced that they can best represent the interests of the conversative movement. I want to look at the people who come to the polls and vote for their favorite ultra-conservative candidate.

Why do they support the politicians who are ruining our economy, who are wrecking the middle class and destroying the dreams of those born poor and disadvantaged in one way or another? Why have they fallen into the clutches of the conservative movement that is working so very hard to increase the plenty enjoyed by the super-rich while they and their families are being undermined by the blatant inequality so rife in our economy? Why do these consciencious and hard-working people support economic and fiscal policies that will bring low their children or their grandchildren who fail to be born into the privileged classes?

As I listened to some of the reports on NPR this week about CPAC, I was struck by one theme in particular. Virtually all of these conservatives rail at high federal and state taxes and demand that their representatives continue to lower taxes to the point of bankrupting our government while putting these putative taxes go into the pockets of the super-rich? How can we be right with the fact that the 40 richest hedge fund managers make more money than 300,000 teachers in our country?

This economic crisis starting in 2007 from which the lower and middle classes have yet to emerge and which has produced millions of long-term unemployed who look for jobs that still are not there (there are three candidates among this group for every job available) was produced by the tax reduction strategies of the conservative administration of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. How the conservative movement convinced this conservative voter base that the problem is too many taxes instead of too little economic growth and prosperity continues to evade my understanding.

If you are as interested as I am in this, take a look at this video by Robert Reich, economist and former Secretary of Labor during the Clinton administration. The link is here: http://www.upworthy.com/an-economist-with-2-minutes-and-a-marker-explains-the-greedy-selfish-things-some-rich-people-do?c=ufb1. If that brief explanation of two minutes piques your interest, watch his movie on Netflix, entitled “Inequality for All“. In the coming weeks I will return to this conundrum.

It’s about time the Republican Party stands against Tea Party anarchy

I questioned in several posts last month the ill-advised reticence of Republicans and the reluctance of the Republican Party “establishment” to speak against and stand up to the anarchist tactics of the Tea Party in Congress, particularly in the House. It's clear from the leadership of the Tea Party movement that their objective is to seize control of the party aparatus and drive any remaining closet moderates from their ranks. Until now I had not seen any change in this situation.

I am pleased to note, as many pundits have now reported and analyzed, that in several elections this month the Chamber of Commerce and other organizations forming the Republican Party “establishment” have finally taken concrete steps backed by concrete funding to support moderate Republican candidates against extreme Tea-Party.

The most publicized election was in Alabama's 1st District where Bradley Byrne received more than $200,000 in support from the national Chamber of Commerce and defeated Dean Young who ran under the Tea Party banner and likened himself in his campaign to Texas Senator Ted Cruz.

Though I do not sympathize even with the platform of the moderate Republican establishment, much less its radical Tea Party wing, we need a more moderate Republican Party willing to work with the Democrats to address our many serious problems and work across the aisle to govern our country.

It's clear from the reaction of numerous business groups and interests that the willingness of the Tea Party anarchists to drive the government to default is unacceptable to them and dangerous to their interests. It remains to be seen if they can stem the tide of the Tea Party in the next 3 years before the 2016 Presidential election. If they fail in this effort, it's hard to foresee any possibility of a Republican President taking the oath of office in 2017.

I hope to see these developments gain force as we get closer to the 2014 elections. Whether the Republican Party knows it or not (I think they do), it is in a fight for its life as a governing party. If they allow the Tea Party radicals to continue to gain ascendance in the party, they face the very real risk in the not too distant future of discovering that the radicals have taken over their party. I would hate to see that happen. It would do great damage to our democratic system and moreso to our government.

The vote of those 39 House Dems last Friday

The punditocracy has been prolix on the “abandonment” of those 39 House Democrats who voted for the Republican proposal on insurance policy cancellations. Most see it as a sign of the growing weakness of President Obama and his consequent loss of support and influence in Congress. I think they are wrong.

When I first heard of the House Republican legislative proposal I said (to myself) ” this will be the perfect escape for House Democrats in red districts”. The Republicans in the House gave the Democrats facing strong challenges from the right in red districts a way out at least for now.

They could go on record in support of the Republican proposal and would be able to use that vote to defend themselves against opponents from the Republican right in their districts. If the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) by the Obama administration continues to falter into next fall (an unlikely outcome in my view), these 39 Democrats can cite their vote last Friday. If the ACA rights its course and solutions to the problems encountered in October start to produce an positive result, this vote will not cost them much.

So I personally want to thank the Republicans in the House for giving their Democratic colleagues a way out of this problem in the short term. They continue to demonstrate their short-sightedness and myopia in their ardor to damage the Obama Presidency and in particular the ACA.

Yet despite so many warning from their own Party strategists, they totally fail to propose any real and meaningful alternative to the ACA to fix the horrific problem of those 30 to 40 million Americans who have no insurance coverage or access to affordable health care. It's not enough to be against the President and the ACA. What do they have to offer as concrete and realistic alternatives.

The political terrorism of the Tea Party demonstrated in October with the closure of the government demonstrates clearly that they have no alternative to propose. They serve only to disrupt, not to govern. This is not acceptable.

Tea Party – No Regrets, Full Speed Ahead

On the heels of their total defeat in Congress this week, the attitude of defiance from the Tea Party and its sympathizers is a remarkable display of their rejection of all the accepted norms for political discourse. They demonstrate no interest in bringing more Republicans over to their cause. In fact their initial response was to target for elimination in the Republican primary elections in 2014 those who voted against their cause in the final vote to fund the government and eliminate the threat of default

They continue to demonstrate that they are dangerous to the cause of democracy and even more dangerous to the future of the Republican Party. They insisted on closing down our government for more than two weeks, at a cost of more than $30 billion to our economy and more pressure on employment prospects for our unemployed. Talk about job killers. These Tea Party anarchists are determined to derail the Affordable Care Act (ACA) whatever the cost to our economy and to their fellow Americans who a have been struggling to find work.

The Tea Party plan to defund the ACA was ill-conceived and guaranteed to fail. Members of their own party in both the House and the Senate told them so. They are rank amateurs at governing and more amazingly, they demonstrate no interest whatever in governing. Knowing that our economic recovery from the recession of 2007 – 2008 has been tediously slow, they plowed ahead and forced the government to shut down. Then they guaranteed the pay of government workers at no small cost to our government while putting them all on a forced vacation.   One would have thought that given their dedication to ideological purity that for congruity they would have cut the wages of the Congress during the government shutdown, but no sign of that.

I have said previously that the leadership of the Republican Party would do well to consider if they can afford to allow the Tea Party to continue to represent themselves as Republicans.  This past weekend Matt Kibbe, the CEO of FreedomWorks, one of the major lobbying organizations in Washington for the Tea Party, declared that their intention is to take control of the Republican Party and drive out all the moderate Republicans who do not (blindly) support their positions.  Their idea is to consign the current membership of the Repubican Party to a fringe party which presumably would quickly disappear from the political scene.

The Tea Party has demonstrated a radical intolerance for diversity of opinion and point of view. Their creed is my way or the highway for anyone who does not blindly support their extreme positions and their anarchistic strategies.   I fear for the future of the Republican Party if they do not act to control this destructive element within their membership. The Tea Party does not serve the cause of political conservatism. Their cause is bound up with a rejection of democracy, of majority rule, and of diversity. They demand purity and blind obedience to their cause and all who do not comply are subject to the threats of elimination in their next primaries. They are already targeted for defeat a number of Republicans up for reelection in 2014.

The only way to defeat them is to marginalize and ostrasize them. All reasonable Americans who believe in our democratic system, no matter whether conservative or liberal, should reject these extremist, anarchistic strategies.  Unfortunately the media, in particular television, is determined to give these anarchists and political bullies a pulpit from which to expound their extremist points of view.

Dana Bash of CNN has shown herself enthusiastically disposed to promote the cause of the Tea Party by giving Senator Ted Cruz repeatedly a pulpit from which to spout his vituperative opinions about the ACA and President Obama.  Senator Cruz for reasons he refuses to reveal holds not only a deep contempt for all who oppose the Tea Party cause but a deep hatred for President Obama.  Yet the media and the likes of Bash continue to shower him with opportunities to spout his ideology and make startlingly false assertions without questioning the veracity of any of them.  Where is the journalistic professionalism of reporters like Bash, who appear to be more interested in sharing the limelight with the likes of Senator Cruz than in demonstrating her integrity as a journalist dedicated to the pursuit of truth?

We all must stand strong against the tyranny of this small minority of our country and our political system. They make themselves heard easily not only through craven opportunists like Dana Bash but also through the funding by organizations backed by the Koch brothers and their like. We must pressure our Senators and Representatives to reject this totalitaraianism of anarchy that the Tea Party represents and stand up for democracy, diversity, and responsibility.

We need to unite against the tyranny of the Tea Party

We live in difficult times, times of spiritual crisis and times of polarization of opinion and belief. Our political system is betraying us by promoting intolerance, largely on the Republican side of the aisle but not exclusively.  People fear for their future and therefore for the future of our country and our way of life.

This new brand of politics of the Tea Party should be rejected by all conscientious Americans as a fraud which pretends to align itself with our values but in fact is the polar opposite our our values.  The extreme right wing of the Republican Party, represented though not exclusively by the Tea Party, is betraying our country’s values as they promote division, rejection of reason and of science, and a refusal to participate in our traditional political process which has always included the principles of consensus, compromise, and majority rule.

These zealous anarchists exploit the fears of so many people yet they offer no solutions or even any concrete proposals.   They are against Obama and anything he represents and works toward.  They are now engaged in a crusade to accomplish by extra-constitutional means what they could not accomplish through their votes in Congress, through the deliberations of the Supreme Court, and through the ballot box in 2012.  They have not been able to win their game of marbles, so they want to take up their marbles and go home, like elementary school children.  In the meantime they are causing untold harm and suffering through this government shutdown and through the threat of a government default on its financial obligations.

They are amateurs who did not understand the process of government and expected the President and Congress to give in to their blackmail and extortion and now that they understand that they seriously miscalculated, they don’t know what to do next.  So we have Congressmen complaining that they are being “disrespected” and that they must get something for this but they don’t know what it might be.

That fuzzy thinking and absence of reasoning is typical of true believers and anarchists who do not believe in democracy and who believe that they know better than the people what the people really want.   They have waged a campaign of lies, distortions and mis-information about the Affordable Care Act (ACA), popularly known as Obamacare, in order to defeat Obama in the public eye.   The fact that in doing so they seek to deprive millions of their fellow citizens of the right to have affordable medical care means nothing to them.

Now that the ACA law is going into effect and they know that their lies and distortions will be unmasked for what they really are, they are desperate, willing to go to any lengths to turn back the tide and nullify the ACA when Congress, the Supreme Court, and the electorate have refused to do so.

It’s time for all Americans, patriots and lovers of our country, to unite against this tyranny of the small minority of Tea Party anarchists who are trying to hijack our political process and plunge our country into a worse economic crisis than the one we suffered in 2007 – 2008.   Regardless of our political persuasion or party affiliation, we cannot let this act of apostasy and extortion of the Tea Party anarchists stand.   Democrats should stand firm against this tyranny and Republicans should appeal to their party and Congressional leadership to reject the politics of intolerance of the Tea Party Anarchists and move in the House to resolve the budget and debt ceiling crises before more serious harm is done.