Carly Fiorina Wants Stuff

Failed CEO Carly Fiorina, with $40m retirement package, says union pensions too high
11/26/2012 by Chris in Paris
http://americablog.com/2012/11/carly-fiorina-fiscal-cliff-budget.html

The other day it was the CEO of a bailed out bank demanding cuts to Social Security.

But nobody whines about the fake “fiscal cliff” better than failed GOP candidate and “19th Worst CEO of All Time” CEO Carly Fiorina.

You might remember Fiorina from the days when she worked at HP, and was sent packing in 2005 with a whopping $40 million severance benefits package. Was that “fair,” Carly?

Fiorina is widely considered one of the worst CEOs in recent years, though that didn’t stop her from receiving millions in cash, stock, benefits and pension when she was fired. It rarely does.

Carly Fiorina Says You Can’t Want Stuff Too

But no, in her entitled little world, the problem is not the fat cats like her, but the unions.

“It is not fair that public employee union pensions and benefits are so rich now that cities and states are going bankrupt, and college tuition is going up 20 and 30%… There is a lot that isn’t fair right now.”

Failed investments and drastic tax cuts by governments have nothing to do with the problem. Imagine that. As Think Progress noted, Fiorina whined on TV that she “only” received a $21 million severance, though she somehow overlooked the rest of the redundancy plan. But to be fair to Fiorina, what Republican candidate hasn’t overlooked another $20 million plus?

She starts at about 2 minutes into the video below.  More from me after the video.Other than being an expert on living off of a platinum parachute and failing as a political candidate, it’s not clear what special expertise Fiorina has to offer for NBC News or any other media outlet. She’s certainly not even considered to be a corporate jobs creator, the way Jack Welch is (wrongly) considered by the media. She has a pretty good agent though if she can get TV spots despite her awful record.

So tell me who is really part of the moocher class that corporate CEOs and 1%-ers keep talking about? Are they the people asking for basic healthcare or the people who have enough money to build moats and personal golf courses around their mansions? Another tip off sign of a moocher is that no matter how much they have, it’s not enough and they want more of your money.

Damn if these Republicans don’t always want stuff.

The other sign of who belongs to the moocher class is to listen to who actually believes in the so-called fiscal cliff. Anyone who believes it’s for real is probably a moocher, but a moocher who grabs a lot more money than anyone who actually needs Social Security or Medicare.

As we get closer to the end of the year, expect the moocher class to be in your face a lot more, explaining how the situation is dire and the world will end if we don’t address the “fiscal cliff” but cutting everything we hold dear while leaving the GOP tax and war machine firmly in place to kill the budget yet again another day.

Ignore them and remember, it’s not a fiscal cliff, it’s an austerity bomb.

Republican Voting Laws Focused On Suppression

Jim Greer, Ex-Florida GOP Chair, Claims Republican Voting Laws Focused On Suppression, Racism
Ian Gray
11/26/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/26/jim-greer-florida-voting-laws_n_2192802.html

Jim Greer, the former head of the Florida Republican Party, recently claimed that a law shortening the early voting period in the state was deliberately designed to suppress voting among groups that tend to support Democratic candidates, the Palm Beach Post reports.

“The Republican Party, the strategists, the consultants, they firmly believe that early voting is bad for Republican Party candidates,” Greer told the Post. “It’s done for one reason and one reason only...‘We’ve got to cut down on early voting because early voting is not good for us.’"

The HB 1355 law, which was passed by Florida's Republican legislature and signed by Gov. Rick Scott (R) in Nov. 2011, cut the number of early voting days from 14 to eight. It was publicly sold as an effort to reduce voter fraud and to save money, but Greer says that this was simply a "marketing ploy."

Greer served as Florida's GOP chairman from 2006 until 2010 when he was forced to resign after allegedly stealing money from the party. He was arrested and his case is pending.

Scott's predecessor, Republican-turned-Independent Charlie Crist, resisted efforts from Republicans to shorten the state's early voting period, citing reasons that mesh with Greer's claims.

In an interview with The Huffington Post earlier this month, Crist said the new law is clearly aimed at curbing turnout among Democrats.

"The only thing that makes any sense as to why this is happening and being done is voter suppression," he said.

Crist added, "People have fought and died for our right to vote, and unfortunately our legislature and this governor have decided they want to make early voting less available to Floridians rather than more available ... It's hard for me as an American to comprehend why you don't make democracy as easy as possible to exercise for the people of our state. It's frankly unconscionable."

Greer also acknowledged that the effort to restrict early voting would directly affect turnout among Florida's African Americans, a demographic that consistently supports Democrats.

“The sad thing about that is yes, there is prejudice and racism in the party but the real prevailing thought is that they don’t think minorities will ever vote Republican,” he told the Post.

Greer went on to suggest that there was "absolutely nothing" state Republicans wouldn't do in following their "absolute obsession with retaining power."

Parts of HB 1355 were overturned by a panel of federal judges in August, partially due to its anticipated impact on minority turnout. The three judge panel ruled that a "dramatic reduction in the form of voting that is disproportionately used by African-Americans would make it materially more difficult for some minority voters to cast a ballot than under the benchmark law.”

The court's ruling, however, only affected five of Florida's 67 counties -- those covered by the section of the Voting Rights Act cited by the court in its ruling. The vast majority of Florida voters were subject to the shortened voting period.

Despite lines as long as nine hours on Election Day in Florida, Scott said he stands by the new law. "Well I'm very comfortable that the right thing happened," he told WKMG Orlando after the election. He later promised to order a review of electoral issues.

Obama and progressives

Obama and progressives: what will liberals do with their big election victory?
With fights over social security, Medicare, ongoing war, and other key progressive priorities looming, what will they do with their new power?
Glenn Greenwald
Wednesday 7 November 2012
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/07/obama-progressives-left-entitlements

The greatest and most enduring significance of Tuesday night's election results will likely not be the re-election of Barack Obama, but rather what the outcome reflects about the American electorate. It was not merely Democrats, but liberalism, which was triumphant.

To begin with, it is hard to overstate just how crippled America's right-wing is. Although it was masked by their aberrational win in 2010, the GOP has now been not merely defeated, but crushed, in three out of the last four elections: in 2006 (when they lost control of the House and Senate), 2008 (when Obama won easily and Democrats expanded their margins of control), and now 2012. The horrendous political legacy of George Bush and Dick Cheney continues to sink the GOP, and demographic realities – how toxic the American Right is to the very groups that are now becoming America's majority – makes it difficult to envision how this will change any time soon.

Meanwhile, new laws to legalize both same-sex marriage and marijuana use were enacted in multiple states with little controversy, an unthinkable result even a few years ago, while Obama's late-term embrace of same-sex marriage seems to have resulted only in political benefit with no political harm. Democrats were sent to the Senate by deeply red states such as Indiana, Missouri and North Dakota, along with genuinely progressive candidates on domestic issues, including Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts and Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin, who became the first openly gay person elected to the Senate. As a cherry on the liberal cake, two of the most loathed right-wing House members – Rep Joe Walsh of Illinois and Allen West of Florida – were removed from office.

So the delirium of liberals this morning is understandable: the night could scarcely have gone better for them. By all rights, they should expect to be a more powerful force in Washington. But what are they going to get from it? Will they wield more political power? Will their political values and agenda command more respect? Unless the disempowering pattern into which they have voluntarily locked themselves changes, the answer to those questions is almost certainly "no".

Consider the very first controversial issue Obama is likely to manage, even before the glow of his victory dims, literally within the next couple of weeks. It is widely expected - including by liberals - that Obama intends (again) to pursue a so-called "Grand Bargain" with the GOP: a deficit- and debt-cutting agreement whereby the GOP agrees to some very modest tax increases on the rich in exchange for substantial cuts to entitlement programs such as social security and Medicare, the crown legislative jewels of American liberalism.

Indeed, Obama already sought in his first term to implement sizable cuts to those programs, but liberals were saved only by GOP recalcitrance to compromise on taxes. In light of their drubbing last night, they are likely to be marginally if not substantially more flexible, which means that such a deal is more possible than ever.

In other words, the political leader in whose triumph liberals are today ecstatically basking is likely to target their most cherished government policies within a matter of weeks, even days. With their newly minted power, will they have any ability, or even will, to stop him? If history is any indication, this is how this "fight" will proceed:

STEP ONE: Liberals will declare that cutting social security and Medicare benefits – including raising the eligibility age or introducing "means-testing" – are absolutely unacceptable, that they will never support any bill that does so no matter what other provisions it contains, that they will wage war on Democrats if they try.

STEP TWO: As the deal gets negotiated and takes shape, progressive pundits in Washington, with Obama officials persuasively whispering in their ear, will begin to argue that the proposed cuts are really not that bad, that they are modest and acceptable, that they are even necessary to save the programs from greater cuts or even dismantlement.

STEP THREE: Many progressives – ones who are not persuaded that these cuts are less than draconian or defensible on the merits – will nonetheless begin to view them with resignation and acquiescence on pragmatic grounds. Obama has no real choice, they will insist, because he must reach a deal with the crazy, evil GOP to save the economy from crippling harm, and the only way he can do so is by agreeing to entitlement cuts. It is a pragmatic necessity, they will insist, and anyone who refuses to support it is being a purist, unreasonably blind to political realities, recklessly willing to blow up Obama's second term before it even begins.

STEP FOUR: The few liberal holdouts, who continue to vehemently oppose any bill that cuts social security and Medicare, will be isolated and marginalized, excluded from the key meetings where these matters are being negotiated, confined to a few MSNBC appearances where they explain their inconsequential opposition.

STEP FIVE: Once a deal is announced, and everyone from Obama to Harry Reid and the DNC are behind it, any progressives still vocally angry about it and insisting on its defeat will be castigated as ideologues and purists, compared to the Tea Party for their refusal to compromise, and scorned (by compliant progressives) as fringe Far Left malcontents.

STEP SIX: Once the deal is enacted with bipartisan support and Obama signs it in a ceremony, standing in front of his new Treasury Secretary, the supreme corporatist Erskine Bowles, where he touts the virtues of bipartisanship and making "tough choices", any progressives still complaining will be told that it is time to move on. Any who do not will be constantly reminded that there is an Extremely Important Election coming – the 2014 midterm – where it will be Absolutely Vital that Democrats hold onto the Senate and that they take over the House. Any progressive, still infuriated by cuts to social security and Medicare, who still refuses to get meekly in line behind the Party will be told that they are jeopardizing the Party's chances for winning that Vital Election and – as a result of their opposition - are helping Mitch McConnell take over control of the Senate and John Boehner retain control of the House.

And so it goes. That is the standard pattern of self-disempowerment used by American liberals to render themselves impotent and powerless in Washington, not just on economic issues but the full panoply of political disputes, from ongoing militarism, military spending and war policies to civil liberties assaults, new cabinet appointments, immigration policy, and virtually everything else likely to arise in the second term.

Indeed, nobody takes STEP ONE in that depressing ritual even a little bit seriously. Nobody believes the declarations of progressives about what is "unacceptable", about what their "red lines" are, about how they will refuse to go along with what they are given if it contains what they declare intolerable. That's because STEPS TWO THROUGH SIX always follow, and until that pattern is broken, STEP ONE will continue to be viewed as a trivial joke.

With last night's results, one can choose to see things two ways: (1) emboldened by their success and the obvious movement of the electorate in their direction, liberals will resolve that this time things will be different, that their willingness to be Good Partisan Soldiers depends upon their core values not being ignored and stomped on, or (2) inebriated with love and gratitude for Obama for having vanquished the evil Republican villains, they will follow their beloved superhero wherever he goes with even more loyalty than before. One does not need to be Nate Silver to be able to use the available historical data to see which of those two courses is the far more likely one.

Stephen Colbert's Advice to the GOP

"I just want to address my fellow conservatives who are running for office this year -- fellas, you may not be aware of this, but in 1920 women got the right to vote. And since then, among likely voters, rape's approval rating has plummeted."

Beast of the Year 2012: Paul Ryan

The votes are in, and The Konformist readers have spoken. Paul Ryan is your choice for the 2012 Beast of the Year - a choice that is well deserved.

Perhaps the biggest news story of the last year - if not of the last four years - is just how scary crazy the entire GOP has gone in the age of Obama.  And no figure has been more important in the Republican Party to the right-wing movement than Paul Ryan, currently their VP nominee in this year's election.  His 2012 federal budget plan would abolish korporate income taxes, estate taxes, taxes on capital gains, dividends and interest, and heavily reduce tax rates on the wealthy while ruthlessly cutting social programs, partially privatizing part of Social Security to Wall Street and fully privatizing Medicare.  Some would call this "Ayn Rand on Crack" (which may be an unfair smear of Ms. Rand, who was at least a gifted writer) yet all but four Republicans in the the HOR and five in the Senate voting for it.

Runner-Up: Brian Moynihan

In the unlikely event that Ryan can no longer fill his duties as Beast of the Year, Brian Moynihan is ready to take over the crown. Rest assured the BOTY trophy is in good hands either way, as Mr. Moynihan has had great Beastly practice as CEO of Bank of America.

In any case, we salute you, Paul Ryan and Brian Moynihan.  Congratulations, and keep up the great work, dudes!!!

The Worst Teacher in Chicago

by Greg Palast | For the Occupied Chicago Tribune
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
GregPalast.com

This is a true story.

CHICAGO.  In a school with some of the poorest kids in Chicago, one English teacher – I won't use her name – who'd been cemented into the school system for over a decade, wouldn't do a damn thing to lift test scores, yet had an annual salary level of close to $70,000 a year.  Under Chicago's new rules holding teachers accountable and allowing charter schools to compete, this seniority-bloated teacher was finally fired by the principal.

In a nearby neighborhood, a charter school, part of the city system, had complete freedom to hire.  No teachers' union interference. The charter school was able to bring in an innovative English teacher with advanced degrees and a national reputation in her field - for $29,000 a year less than was paid to the fired teacher.

You've guessed it by now:  It's the same teacher.

It's Back to School Time!  Time for the editorialists and the Tea Party, the GOP and Barack Obama's Education Secretary Arne Duncan to rip into the people who dare teach in public schools.

And in Arne's old stomping grounds, Chicago, Mayor Rahm Emanuel is stomping on the teachers, pushing them into the street.

Let's stop kidding ourselves. This is what Mitt Romney and Obama and Arne Duncan and Paul Ryan have in mind when they promote charter schools and the right to fire teachers with tenure:  slash teachers salaries and bust their unions.

They've almost stopped pretending, too.  Both the Right Wing-nuts and the Obama Administration laud the "progress" of New Orleans' schools–a deeply sick joke.  The poorest students, that struggle most with standardized tests, were drowned or washed away.

One thing Democrat Emanuel and Republican Romney both demand of Chicago teachers is that their pay, their jobs, depend on "standardized tests." Yes, but whose standard?

Here is an actual question from the standardized test that were given third graders here in NYC by the nation's biggest test-for-profit company:

"...Most young tennis stars learn the game from coaches at private clubs.  In this sentence a private club is...."   Then you have some choices in which the right answer is "Country Club - place where people meet."

Now not many of the "people [who] meet" at country clubs are from the South Side of Chicago--unless their parents are caddies.  A teacher on the South Side whose students are puzzled by the question will lose their pay or job. Students on the lakefront Gold Coast all know that mommy plays tennis at the Country Club with Raul on Wednesdays. So their teacher gets a raise and their school has high marks.

And while Mayor Rahm promises kids in "bad" schools new teachers (the same ones at lower pay) at high-score schools, in fact, they are never actually allowed in.

But Rahm, after all, is just imposing Bush education law which should be called, No Child's Behind Left.

You want to know what's wrong with our schools?  Benno Schmidt, CEO of the big Edison Schools teach-for-profit business is a creepy, greedy privateer.  But he told me straight: that before Hurricane Katrina, his company would never go into New Orleans because Louisiana spent peanuts per child on education.  He made it clear: You get what you pay for.  Not what you test for.  

So the charter carpetbaggers slither in, cherry-pick the easy students, declare success. The tough cases and special ed kids are left in the public system so they can claim the public system fails.

Here's what the teacher who was terrible at $70,000 but brilliant at $41,000 told me:
"They're not doing this in white neighborhoods.  And they want to get rid of the older, experienced teachers with seniority who cost more.  Get rid of the teachers and, ultimately get rid of the kids.  And the charter school gets to pick the kids who get in."

It's simple.  When you look at the drop-out rates in New York (41%) and Chicago (44%), the solution offered is to pay teachers less. They punish those who dare to work in poor schools where kids struggle and you can bet that "washing away" half the kids in our schools is, in fact, exactly what they've planned.

It's notable that, when he lived in Chicago, Barack Obama played basketball with city school chief Arne Duncan, but Obama sure as hell didn't send his kids to Arne's crap public schools. Those are for po' folk.

His kids went to the tony "Lab" School in Hyde Park.  Obama believes what Duncan believes and what Romney believes:  there's no need for universal education and no need to spend money on it.  Yes, they like to say that "children are our future."  But they mean the children of China are our future, the Chinese kids who will make the stuff we want and the children of India who will program it all for us.

After all, how much education does some obese kid from Texas need to stack boxes from China in a Wal-Mart warehouse?

Education is no longer about information and learning skills.  It's now about "triage."  A few selected by standardized tests or privileged birth will be anointed and permitted into better and "gifted" schools.

The chosen elite are still very much needed:  to invest in India and Vietnam, to design new derivatives to circumvent the laughable new banking laws, and to maintain order among the restless hundred-million drop-outs squeezed out of the colon of our educational system.

Democrats' Bantustans, Republicans' Value-less Vouchers.

The Obama/Duncan/Emanuel plan is to create Bantustans of un-chartered, cheaply-run dumpster schools within a government system.  But Romney and the GOP would give every child a "choice" even outside government schools with "vouchers."

Of course, the "vouchers" don't vouch for much.  Romney's old alma mater, Cranbrook Academy, runs at $34,025 a year, not counting the polo sticks and horse.  The most generous voucher program is Washington DC's, beloved of the GOP, which pays about $7,500, or if the student's "choice" is Cranbrook, about 2 months of school.  Hyde Park Day School Chicago is $35,900.  To give each kid a real choice, not just a coupon, means a massive increase in spending per pupil.  I didn't see that in the Republican platform, did you?

The experienced teacher in Chicago who took the pay cut was offered one consolation.  She was told she could make up some of the pay loss by quitting the union and saving on union dues.

So that's the program.  An educational Katrina: squeeze the teachers until they strike, demolish their unions and drown the students.

Chicago's classroom war is class war by another name.

Class dismissed.

Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Armed Madhouse and Vultures' Picnic.

Palast's brand new book Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps, will be out on September 18. You can pre-order Billionaires & Ballot Bandits from Barnes & Noble, Amazon or Indie Bound. Author's proceeds from the book go to the not-for-profit Palast Investigative Fund for reporting on voter protection issues.

Or donate and get a signed copy of the book.

The Billionaires' Brokered GOP Convention

Greg Palast, Truthout Thursday, February 9, 2012
The Plan is working.

Mitt Romney's biggest backer didn't want him to win.

We know that Paul "The Vulture" Singer, Romney's Daddy Warbucks, organized the "grassroots" campaign to replace Romney with Gov. Chris Christie back in September.

That flopped, so Singer and the billionaire boys' club that courted Christie moved over to Romney. Not that they had a choice. They knew Moonrocks Gingrich, who thinks he's running for Master Jedi, and Saint Santorum who thinks he's running for pope, would end up road kill in November.

But despite their million-dollar checks for Romney's campaign, the billionaires are handling the ex-governor with very long and slippery tweezers. The fact that Singer and the Koch brothers went on bended knee to Christie means they are just nauseated over Romney, a man losing a war with the English language and his own tax returns, carrying their standard against President Obama.

These billionaires are smart men. Devious men. I've followed them for years, and they do nothing in a straight line. The super PAC that Singer and the gang control, Restore Our Future, is supposed to be for Romney. But it's not; it's for Singer and Bill Koch. The future they want to restore is their own, not yours or mine - or Romney's.

Now, if your ultimate goal is to beat Obama and you need Christie to do it, you want the GOP race to end in a brokered convention. Then, the billionaires become the brokers. In the best of all worlds for these super PAC men, no candidate gets the 1,144 delegates needed to win. Restore Our Future can then restore the nomination to Christie (or, say, Sen. Marco Rubio, or both), someone who can win.

So, think about it. The Singer-Koch super PAC has access to more money than Fort Knox. It has raised over $30 million and has left as much as half sitting unspent. Yet, they didn't bother to run major ads in cheap media markets like Grand Junction, letting Romney go down in Colorado by less than 4,000 votes.

For a few bucks, they could have sealed it for Governor Romney this week. But they chose not to. Why?

By moving money in and out of selected primaries like a piston, Restore Our Future can shoo Santorum and Gingrich away from the nomination - and, with a bit of luck, the Romney campaign ends up in Tampa dead on arrival.

Then the Vulture and the Richie Rich Club can gnaw at Romney's political corpse and regurgitate the nomination for the cat's paw of their choice.

Greg Palast is the author of Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Carnivores, released in the US and Canada by Penguin.

Support the Palast Investigative Fund and keep our work alive.

GregPalast.com

Vote Obama – if you want a centrist Republican for US president

Because Barack Obama has adopted so many core Republican beliefs, the US opposition race is a shambles
Glenn Greenwald
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 27 December 2011
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/27/vote-obama-centrist-republican

American presidential elections are increasingly indistinguishable from the reality TV competitions drowning the nation's airwaves. Both are vapid, personality-driven and painfully protracted affairs, with the winners crowned by virtue of their ability to appear slightly more tolerable than the cast of annoying rejects whom the public eliminates one by one. When, earlier this year, America's tawdriest (and one of its most-watched) reality TV show hosts, Donald Trump, inserted himself into the campaign circus as a threatened contestant, he fitted right in, immediately catapulting to the top of audience polls before announcing he would not join the show.

The Republican presidential primaries – shortly to determine who will be the finalist to face off, and likely lose, against Barack Obama next November – has been a particularly base spectacle. That the contest has devolved into an embarrassing clown show has many causes, beginning with the fact that GOP voters loathe Mitt Romney, their belief-free, anointed-by-Wall-Street frontrunner who clearly has the best chance of defeating the president.

In a desperate attempt to find someone less slithery and soulless (not to mention less Mormon), party members have lurched manically from one ludicrous candidate to the next, only to watch in horror as each wilted the moment they were subjected to scrutiny. Incessant pleas to the party's ostensibly more respectable conservatives to enter the race have been repeatedly rebuffed. Now, only Romney remains viable. Republican voters are thus slowly resigning themselves to marching behind a vacant, supremely malleable technocrat whom they plainly detest.

In fairness to the much-maligned GOP field, they face a formidable hurdle: how to credibly attack Obama when he has adopted so many of their party's defining beliefs. Depicting the other party's president as a radical menace is one of the chief requirements for a candidate seeking to convince his party to crown him as the chosen challenger. Because Obama has governed as a centrist Republican, these GOP candidates are able to attack him as a leftist radical only by moving so far to the right in their rhetoric and policy prescriptions that they fall over the cliff of mainstream acceptability, or even basic sanity.

In July, the nation's most influential progressive domestic policy pundit, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, declared that Obama is a "moderate conservative in practical terms". Last October, he wrote that "progressives who had their hearts set on Obama were engaged in a huge act of self-delusion", because the president – "once you get past the soaring rhetoric" – has "largely accepted the conservative storyline".

Krugman also pointed out that even the policy Democratic loyalists point to as proof of the president's progressive bona fides – his healthcare plan, which mandates the purchase of policies from the private health insurance industry – was designed by the Heritage Foundation, one of the nation's most rightwing thinktanks, and was advocated by conservative ideologues for many years (it also happens to be the same plan Romney implemented when he was governor of Massachusetts and which Newt Gingrich once promoted, underscoring the difficulty for the GOP in drawing real contrasts with Obama).

How do you scorn a president as a far-left socialist when he has stuffed his administration with Wall Street executives, had his last campaign funded by them, governed as a "centrist Republican", and presided over booming corporate profits even while the rest of the nation suffered economically?

But as slim as the pickings are for GOP candidates on the domestic policy front, at least there are some actual differences in that realm. The president's 2009 stimulus spending and Wall Street "reform" package – tepid and inadequate though they were – are genuinely at odds with rightwing dogma, as are Obama's progressive (albeit inconsistent) positions on social issues, such as equality for gay people and protecting a woman's right to choose. And the supreme court, perpetually plagued by a 5-4 partisan split, would be significantly affected by the outcome of the 2012 election.

It is in the realm of foreign policy, terrorism and civil liberties where Republicans encounter an insurmountable roadblock. A staple of GOP politics has long been to accuse Democratic presidents of coddling America's enemies (both real and imagined), being afraid to use violence, and subordinating US security to international bodies and leftwing conceptions of civil liberties.

But how can a GOP candidate invoke this time-tested caricature when Obama has embraced the vast bulk of George Bush's terrorism policies; waged a war against government whistleblowers as part of a campaign of obsessive secrecy; led efforts to overturn a global ban on cluster bombs; extinguished the lives not only of accused terrorists but of huge numbers of innocent civilians with cluster bombs and drones in Muslim countries; engineered a covert war against Iran; tried to extend the Iraq war; ignored Congress and the constitution to prosecute an unauthorised war in Libya; adopted the defining Bush/Cheney policy of indefinite detention without trial for accused terrorists; and even claimed and exercised the power to assassinate US citizens far from any battlefield and without due process?

Reflecting this difficulty for the GOP field is the fact that former Bush officials, including Dick Cheney, have taken to lavishing Obama with public praise for continuing his predecessor's once-controversial terrorism polices. In the last GOP foreign policy debate, the leading candidates found themselves issuing recommendations on the most contentious foreign policy question (Iran) that perfectly tracked what Obama is already doing, while issuing ringing endorsements of the president when asked about one of his most controversial civil liberties assaults (the due-process-free assassination of the American-Yemeni cleric Anwar Awlaki). Indeed, when it comes to the foreign policy and civil liberties values Democrats spent the Bush years claiming to defend, the only candidate in either party now touting them is the libertarian Ron Paul, who vehemently condemns Obama's policies of drone killings without oversight, covert wars, whistleblower persecutions, and civil liberties assaults in the name of terrorism.

In sum, how do you demonise Obama as a terrorist-loving secret Muslim intent on empowering US enemies when he has adopted, and in some cases extended, what was rightwing orthodoxy for the last decade? The core problem for GOP challengers is that they cannot be respectable Republicans because, as Krugman pointed out, Obama has that position occupied. They are forced to move so far to the right that they render themselves inherently absurd.

How the rich created the Social Security “crisis”

The Bush tax cuts coupled with a decades-long smear campaign are the real threat to the successful program Gene Lyons
Wednesday, Nov 2, 2011
http://www.salon.com/2011/11/03/how_the_rich_created_the_social_security_crisis

Now and then, George W. Bush told the unvarnished truth—most often in jest. Consider the GOP presidential nominee’s Oct. 20, 2000, speech at a high-society $800-a-plate fundraiser at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria. Resplendent in a black tailcoat, waistcoat and white bow tie, Bush greeted the swells with evident satisfaction.

“This is an impressive crowd,” he said. “The haves and the have-mores. Some people call you the elites; I call you my base.”

Any questions?

Eight months later, President Bush delivered sweeping tax cuts to that patrician base. Given current hysteria over what a recent Washington Post article called “the runaway national debt,” it requires an act of historical memory to recall that the Bush administration rationalized reducing taxes on inherited wealth because paying down the debt too soon might roil financial markets.

Eleven years later, the Post warns in a ballyhooed article, reading like something out of Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22,” that Social Security—the 75-year-old bedrock of millions of Americans’ retirement hopes—has “passed a treacherous milestone,” gone “cash negative,” and “is sucking money out of the Treasury.”

Anybody who discerns a relationship between these events, that is, between a decade of keeping the “have-mores’” yachts and Lear jets running smoothly and a manufactured crisis supposedly threatening grandma’s monthly Social Security check must be some kind of radical leftist.

That, or somebody skeptical of the decades-long propaganda war against America’s most efficient, successful and popular social insurance program. It’s an effort that’s falsely persuaded millions of younger Americans that Social Security is in its last days and made crying wolf a test of “seriousness” among Beltway courtier-pundits like the Post’s Lori Montgomery, who concocted an imaginary front page emergency out of a relatively meaningless actuarial event.

All in service, alas, of a single unstated premise: The “have-mores” have made off with grandma’s money fair and square. They have no intention of paying it back. That’s the only possible interpretation of the Post’s admonition that “the $2.6 trillion Social Security trust fund will provide little relief. The government has borrowed every cent and now must raise taxes, cut spending or borrow more heavily from outside investors to keep benefit checks flowing.”

Little relief? In fact, the law’s working precisely as intended. After 28 years of generating huge payroll tax surpluses to cover the baby boomers’ retirement benefits, the system must now begin to draw upon those funds to help pay current benefits—the vast majority still covered by current payroll tax receipts.

“Rather than posing any sort of crisis,” explains Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, “this is exactly what had been planned when Congress last made major changes to the program in 1983 based on the recommendations of the Greenspan commission.”

Again, this is the beneficiaries’ money, invested by the Social Security trustees in U.S. Treasury bonds drawn upon “the full faith and credit of the United States.” Far from being “meaningless IOUs” as right-wing cant has it, they represent the same legally binding promise between the U.S. government and its people that it makes with Wall Street banks and the Chinese government, which also hold Treasury Bonds.

A promise not very different, the Daily Howler’s Bob Somerby points out, from the one implicit in your bank statement or 401K (if you’re lucky enough to have one). Did you think the money was buried in earthen jars filled with gold bullion and precious stones?

Raise taxes, cut spending or borrow? What other options does the U.S. government, or any government, have?

On his New York Times blog, Paul Krugman dissects the Catch-22 logic behind the Post’s bogus crisis. You can’t simultaneously argue “that the trust fund is meaningless, because SS is just part of the budget, then claim that some crisis arises when receipts fall short of payments, because SS is a standalone program.” For practical purposes, it’s got to be one or the other.

So is Social Security a “Ponzi scheme”? No, it’s group insurance, not an investment. You die young, somebody else benefits. Its finances have been open public record since 1936. Do fewer workers support each beneficiary? Sure, but who cares? It’s denominated in dollars, not a head count. The boomers were nearing 40 when the Reagan administration fixed the actuarial tables. No surprises there.

Are longer life expectancies screwing up the numbers? Not really. Most of the rise is explained by lower infant and child mortality, not by old-timers overstaying their welcome. Kevin Drum points out that gradually raising the payroll tax 1 percent and doubling the earnings cap over 20 years would make Social Security solvent forever.

But that’s not good enough for the more hidebound members of the $800-a-plate set. See, over 75 years Social Security has provided a measure of dignity, security and freedom to working Americans that just annoys the hell out of their betters.

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Gene Lyons is a National Magazine Award winner and co-author of "The Hunting of the President" (St. Martin's Press, 2000). You can e-mail Lyons at eugenelyons2@yahoo.com

Cain Dropping Like a Rock

Herman Cain's repeated attempts to brush aside sexual harassment charges are faltering and his once high-flying presidential campaign is likely to suffer, according to neutral Republicans.

Cain had managed to tread water for more than a week after news reports first surfaced of two anonymous charges of sexual harassment made when he led the National Restaurant Association in the 1990s. But when Sharon Bialek went public Monday to say he'd once groped her, the story started to seriously threaten Cain's public support.

"He was already slipping before these stories came out. This will accelerate his decline," Republican pollster Whit Ayres said.

"Now we see Cain supporters having pause," Iowa Republican analyst Craig Robinson added. "He can no longer laugh it up. This is serious, serious stuff."

"My sense is he's dropping like a rock," South Carolina Republican strategist J. David Woodard said...

Cain sinking like a stone, neutral GOP analysts say
Steven Thomma | McClatchy Newspapers
11-8-2011
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/11/08/129690/cain-sinking-like-a-stone-neutral.html

Inside the Cain Tax Plan

BRUCE BARTLETT October 11, 2011
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/11/inside-the-cain-tax-plan/

Bruce Bartlett held senior policy roles in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations and served on the staffs of Representatives Jack Kemp and Ron Paul.

With recent polls showing increased support for Herman Cain as the G.O.P. presidential nominee, attention is being drawn to his platform, especially what he calls the 9-9-9 tax plan. News reports describe it as a 9 percent tax rate on business and personal income, combined with a 9 percent national sales tax.

Little detail has been released by the Cain campaign, so it’s impossible to do a thorough analysis. But using what is available on Mr. Cain’s Web site, I’m taking a stab at estimating its effects.

First, the 9-9-9 plan is actually an intermediate step in Mr. Cain’s plan to overhaul the tax system and jump-start growth. Phase 1 would reduce individual and business taxes to a maximum of 25 percent, which I assume means reducing the top statutory tax rate to 25 percent from 35 percent.

No mention is made on the site of a tax cut for those now in the 10 percent, 15 percent or 25 percent brackets. This means that the only people who would get a tax rate cut are those now in the 28 percent, 33 percent or 35 percent brackets. According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, only 4 percent of taxpayers pay any taxes at those rates.

As for corporations, Mr. Cain’s proposal is primarily going to benefit those with revenues of more than $1 million a year, because they account for 98.7 percent of all receipts by C corporations. (A C corporation is a legal entity separate and distinct from its owners that is taxed as a corporation; its shareholders pay taxes individually on their gains.) Those companies with receipts over $50 million account for 88.8 percent of total receipts.

Other business entities — sole proprietorships, S corporations (which have between 1 and 100 shareholders and pass through net income or losses to shareholders) and partnerships — would not benefit because they are not taxed on the corporate schedule. But they represent 92 percent of all businesses.

Second, Mr. Cain would eliminate all taxes on profits earned by multinational corporations outside the United States. It’s hard to know the impact of this provision, but according to Martin Sullivan, an economist with Tax Analysts, the 50 largest corporations in the United States generated half of their profits in other countries.

The actual benefit of Mr. Cain’s proposal would be much greater to many of them, because, according to Mr. Sullivan, while some of these 50 companies have no foreign operations, others derive 100 percent of their gross profits in foreign countries. In 2010 these included Philip Morris, Pfizer and Abbott Laboratories.

Third, Mr. Cain would abolish all taxes on capital gains. Such taxes typically generate more than $100 billion in federal revenue annually, according to the Tax Policy Center. According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, two-thirds of all capital gains are reported by those with incomes over $1 million.

Mr. Cain says these three proposals, which he would put into effect immediately without offsetting the lost revenue, will jump-start economic growth. He offers no evidence for this assertion; it is simply put forward as self-evident. But the experience of the George W. Bush administration was that cuts in tax rates on the wealthy and on capital gains had no effect whatsoever on growth, according to the Congressional Research Service.

And this is only Phase 1 of the Cain plan. In Phase 2, the payroll tax would be eliminated, causing more than $800 billion in revenue to evaporate. The estate and gift tax would be abolished, further reducing taxes on the wealthy. And the 9-9-9 plan would be implemented.

It’s important to understand that the 9 percent rates on personal and business income would apply to very different tax bases than now exist. For individuals, the tax would apply to gross income less only the deduction for charitable contributions. No mention is made of a personal exemption.

This means that the 47 percent of tax filers who now pay no federal income taxes will pay 9 percent on their total income. And elimination of the payroll tax won’t even help half of them because the earned income tax credit, which Mr. Cain would abolish, offsets both their income tax liability and their payroll tax payment as well.

Additionally, everyone would now pay a 9 percent sales tax on all purchases. No mention is made of any exemptions from this tax, so we may assume that it will apply to food, medical care, rent, home and auto purchases and a wide variety of other expenditures now exempt from state sales taxes. This would increase their cost of living by 9 percent while, at the same time, the poor would pay income taxes.

The business tax in the Cain plan bears no resemblance to the present corporate income tax. The tax would apply to gross sales less dividends paid and all purchases from other companies, including investment goods. Thus, there would be no deduction for wages.

How benefits would be treated is unclear, because purchases of things like health insurance might constitute a purchase from another company and remain deductible. If so, what is to stop a company from paying its employees by leasing their cars and homes for them and even buying their food and clothing? That would reduce their taxable revenue.

The abolition of any deduction for wages is likely to raise the cost of employing workers, even with abolition of the employers’ share of the payroll tax. And since the dividend deduction doesn’t appear to be related to profitability, companies could borrow to pay dividends and still get the deduction. Even a novice tax lawyer could easily make a tax shelter out of that.

And here’s the kicker in the Cain plan. Phase 2 is merely a transition to yet another fundamental tax reform. In Phase 3, the United States would adopt the so-called Fair Tax, which would replace all federal taxes with a 30 percent sales tax on all goods and services. In a previous post, I explained why the Fair Tax is a bad idea. I went into more detail in testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee on July 26.

Whatever one thinks of the Fair Tax, it makes not the slightest bit of sense to have a plan that requires fundamental changes to the federal tax system twice to achieve its objective.

Veterans of tax reform attempts in the United States know reform is very difficult and time-consuming even once. If the Fair Tax is a good idea, Mr. Cain ought to just do it, without confusing the issue with his unnecessary and highly complicated 9-9-9 plan. After all, one of the prime selling points of the Fair Tax is its simplicity, and the 9-9-9 plan is far from that.

Because so little detail exists, it’s hard to do either a proper revenue estimate or distributional analysis of the Cain plan. It’s obvious, however, that Phase 1 would represent a huge tax cut for the wealthy at a time when federal revenues are at a historical low as a share of the gross domestic product and the economy’s fundamental problem is a lack of aggregate demand.

Thus the Cain plan would increase the budget deficit without doing anything to stimulate demand, because rich people can already spend as much as they want and are unlikely to spend more even if their taxes are abolished.

The poor and the middle class might increase their spending if they could keep more of their earnings, but they will unquestionably pay more under Phase 2 of the Cain plan. With no tax on capital gains, the rich would pay almost nothing, while elimination of all deductions and credits, as well as imposition of a national sales tax, must necessarily raise taxes on everyone else, especially those not now paying income taxes.

At a minimum, the Cain plan is a distributional monstrosity. The poor would pay more while the rich would have their taxes cut, with no guarantee that economic growth will increase and good reason to believe that the budget deficit will increase.

Even allowing for the poorly thought through promises routinely made on the campaign trail, Mr. Cain’s tax plan stands out as exceptionally ill conceived.

Cain’s ’999' Plan Would Cause Largest Deficits Since WWII

Cain’s ’999' Plan Would Cause Largest Deficits Since WWII, While Increasing Taxes For Most Americans
Pat Garofalo
Oct 5, 2011
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/10/05/336649/cain-999-analysis-deficits

2012 GOP presidential hopeful Herman Cain — who has seen a recent surge in the polls — has been trumpeting the supposed benefits of his “999? economic plan, which would implement a 9 percent flat-tax on personal income and corporate income, along with a 9 percent national sales tax, while scrapping the rest of the tax code (including all of the deductions and all of the taxes on investment income such as capital gains).

Cain claims that his plan would not be “regressive on the poor,” but economists disagree due to the imposition of a national sales tax that would wallop the poor significantly harder than the rich. Cain also claims the plan will be revenue-neutral, in that it would raise as much revenue as the current tax code. I had Center for American Progress Director of Tax and Budget Policy Michael Linden run the numbers on Cain’s plan, and it turns out that it wouldn’t be deficit-neutral — not even close (all calculations are based on 2007 tax data, the last year before the Great Recession):

– For the income tax portion: In 2007, total Adjusted Gross Income on all income tax returns was $8.7 trillion. Since Cain’s plan would exempt investment income, but would have no other deductions, that brings taxable income down to $7.4 trillion. A flat 9 percent tax would therefore have yielded about $665 billion in income tax revenue.

– For the corporate tax portion: In 2007, there was a total of $1.3 trillion in reported corporate income subject to tax. A flat 9 percent would have yielded $112 billion in revenue.

– For the sales tax portion: I used generally accepted estimates of the revenue generated from a value-added-tax (see here and here, for example). Those estimates suggest that a broad-based 5 percent tax on goods and services would generate about 2 percent of GDP in revenue. That implies that a 9 percent tax in 2007 would have generated about $500 billion.

– Together, then, the 9-9-9 plan would have generated a bit less than $1.3 trillion in total federal tax revenue. That may sound like a lot, but it’s only 9.2 percent of GDP. In 2007, we actually collected 18.5 percent of GDP in tax revenue. In other words, the 9-9-9 plan would cut federal revenue in half!

“Even if we reduced federal spending to the ‘historical average’ (when the population was younger and health care cost much less) it would still leave us with deficits over 11 percent of GDP (bigger than any deficit since WWII, including the deficits of the past three years),” Linden noted.

Linden also found that someone in the bottom quintile of earners — who currently pays about 2 percent of his or her income in federal taxes — would pay about 18 percent under Cain’s plan (9 percent on every dollar they make, plus 9 percent on every dollar they spent, which would likely be close to all of them). A middle-class individual would see his or her taxes go from about 14 percent to about 18 percent. But someone in the richest one percent of Americans would see his or her tax rate fall from about 28 percent to about 11 percent.

So Cain’s plan — which has earned accolades from the likes of supply-side guru Art Laffer — would explode the deficit, while increasing taxes on the poor to pay for a giant tax cut for the rich. As Center for American Progress Vice President for Economic Policy Michael Ettlinger put it, the plan “would be the biggest tax shift from the wealthy to the middle-class in the history of taxation, ever, anywhere, and it would bankrupt the country.”

Alan Grayson Blasts Tea Party Debate

Alan Grayson Blasts Tea Party Debate Audience's Reaction To Health Care Question: 'It's Sadism'
9/12/11
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/12/alan-grayson-tea-party-debate-health-care_n_959383.html

The jubilant shouts of members of the GOP audience encouraging the death of a hypothetical uninsured man bring to mind the 2009 House floor speech delivered by former Florida Rep. Alan Grayson, in which he famously charged: "The Republicans want you to die quickly if you get sick." Members of the crowd at the Tampa debate agree with Grayson.

CNN's Wolf Blitzer, the event's moderator, posed the hypothetical question to Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas): What do you tell a guy who is sick, goes into a coma and doesn't have health insurance? Who pays for his coverage? "Are you saying society should just let him die?" Wolf Blitzer asked.

"Yeah!" several members of the crowd yelled out.

HuffPost asked Grayson what he thought of the crowd cheering for the death of the uninsured man. He writes:

My speech was about the fact I had been listening to the Republicans for months, and they literally had no plan to help all those millions of people who can’t see a doctor when they’re sick. So I said, in sort of a wry manner, that their plan was "don’t get sick." All I really wanted to do was just call attention to the stark absence of a Republican plan. But Fox, trying to take the heat off Joe Wilson and Sarah Palin I guess, transmogrified that into a charge that Republicans want to kill people.

What you saw tonight is something much more sinister than not having a healthcare plan. It's sadism, pure and simple. It's the same impulse that led people in the Coliseum to cheer when the lions ate the Christians. And that seems to be where we are heading -- bread and circuses, without the bread. The world that Hobbes wrote about -- "the war of all against all."

Roger Ailes’ Secret Nixon-Era Blueprint for Fox News

John Cook
Jun 30, 2011
http://gawker.com/5814150/roger-ailes-secret-nixon+era-blueprint-for-fox-news

Republican media strategist Roger Ailes launched Fox News Channel in 1996, ostensibly as a "fair and balanced" counterpoint to what he regarded as the liberal establishment media. But according to a remarkable document buried deep within the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, the intellectual forerunner for Fox News was a nakedly partisan 1970 plot by Ailes and other Nixon aides to circumvent the "prejudices of network news" and deliver "pro-administration" stories to heartland television viewers.
The memo—called, simply enough, "A Plan For Putting the GOP on TV News"— is included in a 318-page cache of documents detailing Ailes' work for both the Nixon and George H.W. Bush administrations that we obtained from the Nixon and Bush presidential libraries. Through his firms REA Productions and Ailes Communications, Inc., Ailes served as paid consultant to both presidents in the 1970s and 1990s, offering detailed and shrewd advice ranging from what ties to wear to how to keep the pressure up on Saddam Hussein in the run-up to the first Gulf War.

The documents—drawn mostly from the papers of Nixon chief of staff and felon H.R. Haldeman and Bush chief of staff John Sununu—reveal Ailes to be a tireless television producer and joyful propagandist. He was a forceful advocate for the power of television to shape the political narrative, and he reveled in the minutiae constructing political spectacles—stage-managing, for instance, the lighting of the White House Christmas tree with painstaking care. He frequently floated ideas for creating staged events and strategies for manipulating the mainstream media into favorable coverage, and used his contacts at the networks to sniff out the emergence of threatening narratives and offer advice on how to snuff them out—warning Bush, for example, to lay off the golf as war in the Middle East approached because journalists were starting to talk. There are also occasional references to dirty political tricks, as well as some positions that seem at odds with the Tea Party politics of present-day Fox News: Ailes supported government regulation of political campaign ads on television, including strict limits on spending. He also advised Nixon to address high school students, a move that caused his network to shriek about "indoctrination" when Obama did it more than 30 years later.

All 318 pages are available here:

http://gawkernet.com/ailesfiles/ailesfiles.html

The Republican Death Wish

Robert Reich
Thursday, May 26, 2011
http://robertreich.org/post/5866971185

Forty Senate Republicans have now joined their colleagues in the House to support Paul Ryan’s plan that would turn Medicare into vouchers that funnel money to private health insurers. They thumbed their nose at the special election in upstate New York earlier this week that delivered a victory to Democrat Kathy Hochul, who made the plan the focus of her upset victory.

So now it’s official. The 2012 campaign will be about the future of Medicare. (Yes, it will also be about jobs, but the Republicans haven’t come up with any credible ideas on that front, and the Democrats seem incapable of doing what needs to be done.)

This spells trouble for the GOP. Polls show an overwhelming majority of Americans — even a majority of Republican voters — want to preserve Medicare. They don’t want to turn it over to private insurers.

It would be one thing if Republicans had consistency on their side. At least then they could take the high road and claim their plan is a principled way to achieve the aims of Medicare through market-based mechanisms. (It isn’t, of course. It would end up squeezing seniors because it takes no account of the rising costs of health care.)

But they can’t even claim consistency. Remember, this was the same GOP that attacked the President’s health-reform plan in 2010 by warning it would lead to Medicare cuts.

Former President Bill Clinton counsels Democrats not to say Medicare is fine the way it is. He’s right. But instead of talking about Medicare as a problem to be fixed, Democrats should start talking about it as a potential solution to the challenge of rising health-care costs — as well as to our long-term budget problem.

Can we be clear about that budget problem? It’s not driven by Medicare. It’s driven by the same relentlessly soaring health-care costs that are pushing premiums through the roof and causing middle-class families to shell out more and more money for deductibles and co-payments.

Some features of Obama’s new healthcare law will slow the rise — insurance exchanges, for example, could give consumers clearer comparative information about what they’re getting for their insurance payments — but the law doesn’t go nearly far enough.

That’s why Democrats should be proposing that anyone be allowed to sign up for Medicare. Medicare is cheaper than private insurance because its administrative costs are so much lower, and it has vast economies of scale.

If Medicare were allowed to use its potential bargaining leverage over America’s hospitals, doctors, drug companies, and medical providers, it could drive down costs even further.

And it could force the nation’s broken health-care system to do something it must do but has resisted with a vengeance: Focus on healthy outcomes rather on costly inputs. If Medicare paid for results — not tests, procedures, drugs, and hospital stays, but results — it could give Americans better health at lower cost.

Let the GOP go after Medicare. That will do more to elect Democrats in 2012 than anything else. But it would be wise and politically astute for Democrats to go beyond just defending Medicare. Strengthen and build upon it. Use it to reform American health care and, not incidentally, rescue the federal budget.

Paul/Ventura 2012?

From PrisonPlanet.com:

Former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura has an important message for Libertarian Congressman Ron Paul – ditch the Republican Party and run for President as an independent.

On the day that Obama officially announced his 2012 Presidential campaign underway, the spotlight will now turn on those who are expected to set the wheels in motion to run against the president.

One name mentioned over and over again for the past few months has been Republican Congressman Ron Paul. However, Ventura, who was victorious as an Independent himself in 1998, believes that Paul can mount a more powerful challenge by distancing himself from the GOP establishment.

And Ventura even offered to throw his own name into the hat as a possible running mate.

“If Ron Paul would quit the Republican Party, and he asked me, then I would give serious consideration to running with him.” Ventura told syndicated radio host Alex Jones today.

“I will not run as a Democrat or Republican. I want nothing to do with these parties. They are the problem, they are not the solution.” the former Governor added.

“They’re the ones that have been in control of this country, as Ralph Nadar calls them, the two party dictatorship. They are the ones that have us in this mess. They are the ones who have caused all the debt problems… it’s time to throw them out. The people of this country can do a major thing and its so easy. The next election, don’t vote for ANY Republicans or Democrats. That would be the greatest thing that could happen in this country, to bring down and destroy these two political parties.” Ventura urged.

Congressman Paul has recently been victorious in several Republican straw polls of potential presidential nominees, and he has raised a staggering $3 million already this first quarter via his various grass roots organizations. That is more than any other potential Republican nominee thus far.

Ventura believes Paul should fully capitalize on his political popularity and make the break from the GOP.

“He won’t get the Republican Party nomination, he has to understand that.” Ventura said.

“The Republicans are not going to put Ron Paul up as their Presidential nominee. He is too much of a rogue, he is not bought and sold by multinational corporations. Plus the biggest thing of all, he calls for an audit of the Federal Reserve.” he added...

Ventura is currently promoting his new book, 63 documents The Government Doesn’t Want You To Read. The former Governor explained that he had dedicated the book to Congressman Paul as a thank you for his tireless efforts to bring more transparency to Washington.

“He was the only Congressman we have that had the courage to go out on the floor of the Congress and support Wikileaks,” Ventura noted, alluding to the whistle blowing website.

“Like Ron Paul said, no one has died from Wikileaks. How many people have died from the trumped up intelligence and the lying that got us into the Iraq war. And then he said something even more profound. He talked about in a free country like ours, when the truth equals treason we are in big trouble.”

While Ron Paul has yet to announce whether he will mount another presidential run, he may want to take Ventura up on his offer before the former pro-wrestler turned political powerhouse looks toward an even more ambitious role.

“I never said who would be President and who would be Vice President.” Ventura quipped.

“Ron and I may have to flip a coin.”

Ventura Urges Ron Paul To Run For President As Independent
Steve Watson
April 4, 2011
http://www.prisonplanet.com/ventura-urges-ron-paul-to-run-for-president-as-independent.html

Everybody Loves Reagan

If Ronald Reagan was still alive, he would've turned 100 on Super Bowl Sunday. Actually, as far as the GOP is concerned, he IS still alive. And while their obsession with deifying Ronbo may continue, the hatred he inspires among liberal types has waned. This may be due to the last two guys who occupied the White House. George W. Bush, with his epic failures, has replaced Reagan as the ultimate right wing bogeyman of US politics. Barack Obama, meanwhile, has adopted positions so far to the right, he is easily more reactionary than Reagan ever was. The continued Bonzo-worship of him by the right and the collapse of criticism of him by the left is a case study of the Overton window framing him as more popular now than any time during his presidency.

The reframing of Reagan ignores history. Reagan was a divisive figure, with almost no support in the African-American community. Meanwhile, historian Douglas Brinkley, who edited The Reagan Diaries, told CNN The Gipper wanted to roll back the "excesses of the 'Great Society' domestically, not abolish them. He was never talking about doing away with Medicaid, Medicare, or abolishing HUD. It had more to do with trimming the federal budget." That actually sounds pretty reasonable and mainstream in 2011. Lou Cannon also explained that when it came to the Soviets, "he really wanted to negotiate and thought he had learned the art of doing so by bargaining with movie producers when he was president of the Screen Actors Guild." Hard to argue with that: after dealing with Hollywood producers, communist dictators would be a piece of cake. So maybe he deserves much of the credit given to him over the fall of communism.

Maybe you would expect more contempt and outrage over St. Ronald from The Konformist, but at this point, it seems any continued fixation on Ronald Reagan as the Anti-Christ would be an obtuse and unproductive obsession. There's bigger fish to fry out there.

In any case, one guy who has had a lot to do with enhancing the image of Ronald Reagan is Ron Reagan, his son. While Ron is an unabashed liberal, the genuine warmth apparent when he describes his father has helped humanize the once controversial figure. So for what it's worth, Ron Jr. pretty much dismisses Sarah Palin, who is trying to exploit the Reagan mantle for her own purposes: "Sarah Palin is a soap opera, basically. She's doing mostly what she does to make money and keep her name in the news. She is not a serious candidate for president and never has been,"

Reagan's myth has grown over time
Ed Hornick
February 5, 2011
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/POLITICS/02/04/reagan.legacy

Reagan's 100th birthday: 10 defining moments
Aaron Couch
2-5-11
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2011/0205/Reagan-s-100th-birthday-10-defining-moments/President-of-the-Screen-Actors-Guild-1954-1962

Palin: America Out Of Step With Reagan's Values
February 5, 2011
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=133494625

The Right Wing Plot to Destroy Public Pensions

If things go according to the right wing's plans, the Federal Government that bailed out Wall Street millionaires and billionaires won't help out state governments, in the process destroying public pensions and making public worker unions politically impotent. This is the plan according to of James Pethokoukis of Reuters, who declares: "This may be the biggest political battle in Washington, my Capitol Hill sources tell me, of 2011."
Pethokoukis reports that "the most intriguing aspect of President Barack Obama’s tax deal with Republicans is what the compromise fails to include — a provision to continue the Build America Bonds program. BABs now account for more than 20 percent of new debt sold by states and local governments thanks to a federal rebate equal to 35 percent of interest costs on the bonds. The subsidy program ends on Dec. 31. And my Reuters colleagues report that a GOP congressional aide said Republicans 'have a very firm line on BABS — we are not going to allow them to be included.'"

Without low-interest bonds, states suffering the squeeze from the economic downturn may be forced into bankruptcy, a scenario that delights many in the GOP. As The Weekly Standard notes with approval, "The bankruptcy law should give debtor states even more power to rewrite union contracts, if the court approves. Interestingly, it is easier to renegotiate a burdensome union contract in municipal bankruptcy than in a corporate bankruptcy." Pethokoukis summarizes: "From the Republican perspective, the fiscal crisis on the state level provides a golden opportunity to defund a key Democratic interest group. For the GOP, it’s an economic and political win."

There are some legitimate issues on the fiscal soundness of current pensions for public workers. You don't have to be a right-wing charlatan or a Wall Street asshole to admit that. (Although it doesn't hurt if you are.) But the supposed solution here is politically cynical and may be as economically damaging to the public as the "Fuck You!" attitude to subprime loan victims has been.

Secret GOP plan: Push states to declare bankruptcy and smash unions
James Pethokoukis
Dec 7, 2010
http://blogs.reuters.com/james-pethokoukis/2010/12/07/secret-gop-plan-push-states-to-declare-bankruptcy-and-smash-unions

Republicans Move to Block Ron Paul from Monetary Policy Subcommittee

http://www.prisonplanet.com/republicans-move-to-block-ron-paul-from-monetary-policy-subcommittee-chair.html

Republicans Move to Block Ron Paul from Monetary Policy Subcommittee Chair
Kurt Nimmo
Prison Planet.com
Friday, December 3, 2010

Ron Paul will not head up the House’s monetary policy subcommittee if John Boehner has anything to say about it.

“Five GOP leadership aides, speaking anonymously because a decision isn’t final, say incoming House Speaker John Boehner has discussed ways to prevent Paul from becoming chairman or to keep him on a tight leash if he does,” reports Bloomberg. “If Boehner, who will help determine who gets to chair subcommittees as early as Dec. 8, rejects Paul, he may have to contend with thousands of grassroots supporters and dozens of younger lawmakers who see Paul as a hero.”

Boehner and the establishment Republicans rode to victory last month on the shoulders of the Tea Party movement. Prior to the election, Tea Party activists in Maine, Colorado, and Utah focused on abolishing the Federal Reserve.

Some predicted that if Republicans were to sweep the House they would become much more confrontational with the Federal Reserve. “The popularity of Tea Party candidates in U.S. elections could spell renewed efforts to curtail the power and independence of the Federal Reserve, which has been cast as an emblem of big government overreach,” Reuters reported in late October.

Many establishment Republicans agree with senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina who insists the Tea Party and its vision of less government has no long-term vision or prospects for political viability.

Instead of dismantling the Federal Reserve, establishment Republicans have called for reforming the private bankster cartel masquerading as a government agency supposedly answerable to the American people.

On Tuesday, Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn. and Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind. called for Congress to change the Fed’s “dual mandate” now requiring it to promote both price stability and full employment and instead focus on keeping inflation low and not worrying about reducing unemployment.

“It is time that we work to clarify the mandate of the Federal Reserve,” said Corker, a member of the Senate Finance Committee, in a statement announcing his support for the change. “Providing our central bank with a clear and explicit focus on keeping inflation low will serve America better than the broader mandate approach we have today,” the National Journal reports.

Corker and Pence proffered their milquetoast bill after it was revealed the Fed gave a big chunk of its multi-trillion dollar Wall Street bailout to foreign banksters and transnational corporations.

“We now know that the Fed loaned trillions of dollars at zero or near-zero interest rates not only to the largest financial institutions in the country, but also to many of our largest corporations — including GE, McDonalds and Verizon,” said an outraged Bernie Sanders, the socialist senator from Vermont.

“Perhaps most surprising is the huge sum that went to bail out foreign private banks and corporations, including two European megabanks — Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse,” he said. “As a result of this disclosure, other members of Congress and I will be taking a very extensive look at all aspects of how the Federal Reserve functions.”

Bernie Sanders and Ron Paul may take a serious look at the Fed. But we shouldn’t expect the rest of Congress to support an effort to cut out the cancer that plagues the economy.

In July, Paul’s Federal Reserve Transparency Act that would have eliminated restrictions on GAO audits of the Fed and open its operations to congressional oversight was defeated.

“Since its inception, the Federal Reserve has always operated in the shadows, without sufficient scrutiny or oversight, while Congress has kept its hands off and its eyes closed,” Ron Paul wrote after language from his bill failed to make it into a conference report on the so-called financial reform bill (that ultimately gave the Fed more power, not less). “The Federal Reserve has presided over the near-complete destruction of the United States dollar. Since 1913 the dollar has lost over 95% of its purchasing power, aided and abetted by the Federal Reserve’s loose monetary policy. The Federal Reserve Transparency Act would achieve much-needed transparency of the Federal Reserve System.”

Now that Republicans are in charge of the House, they join the Democrats and make sure the Federal Reserve continues to operate in the shadows and remains unanswerable to the American people. The globalist financial train wreck will continue until it accomplishes its goal of pauperizing the American people and preparing the country to be merged into their world government scheme.

“The current Globalist Financial Crisis is a Financial False Flag operation,” writes Alfred Lambremont Webre. “It is a controlled collapse of the globalist economic system, engineered by an international war crimes racketeering organization…. The Financial False Flag [is] designed to accelerate the deterioration of First World economies, democracies, and prosperity, in aid of a larger program of global depopulation. The same powers who control the Federal Reserve Bank are intent on depopulating between 1/3 and 2/3 of the current human population, in service to a grotesque covert elite plan.”

Ron Paul, Bernie Sanders, and a handful of other House and Senate renegades who are not reading from the bankster script like John Boehner and the establishment Republicans will not be allowed to hold the Federal Reserve to account.

It will take the collective outrage of grassroots supporters of Paul’s End the Fed movement to force Congress to reconsider moving against the banksters and their cartel.

Insurers Press GOP on Its Health-Care Agenda

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704865104575588842204829432.html

HEALTH INDUSTRY NOVEMBER 3, 2010
Insurers Press GOP on Its Health-Care Agenda
Industry Wants Key Elements of Obama Administration's Overhaul Reversed, but Fears the Removal of Coverage Mandate
JANET ADAMY and JONATHAN WEISMAN

Health-industry groups are pressing to roll back key provisions in the Obama administration's health-care overhaul if Republicans recapture the House, but they're also worried that the party could go too far.

If they win the House, Republicans have promised that one of their first votes will be to repeal the health-care law passed in March. That would ultimately be stopped by the White House, or first by the Senate if Democrats retain control of it.

But Republicans will have the power to block appropriations funding for the least popular parts of the overhaul. And health-industry groups, which aligned themselves with Democrats to pass the overhaul, are now reaching out to Republicans to help shape the GOP's health-care agenda.

Insurers want to reverse tax increases and loosen restrictions on insurance premiums, and several groups hope to tack on medical malpractice protections.

At the same time, the health-care industry is concerned that Republicans want to remove the requirement that most Americans carry health insurance—a provision that rewards health-care providers with millions of new customers.

"Obviously you need good relations with the people who are crafting policy, because when they're crafting policy, they're shooting with real bullets," said Chip Kahn, president of the Federation of American Hospitals, which represents for-profit hospitals.

The insurance industry is working to persuade the next Congress to roll back a roughly $70 billion tax on insurance companies that takes effect in 2014, saying it will disproportionately hit small businesses that insure their workers. It also wants lawmakers to allow insurers to widen the rating bands that dictate how much more insurers can charge older customers.

Insurers also want to tackle the growth of health costs by enacting a new measure to give robust protections against medical malpractice lawsuits to doctors who follow certain "best practice" guidelines, said Karen Ignagni, the insurance industry's top lobbyist.

"We always reach out to both sides of the political aisle and we'll continue doing that because we have had concerns," said Ms. Ignagni, president of America's Health Insurance Plans. She said her group would be most focused on parts of the bill that it believes fail to lower the growth of health costs.

Drug makers want to eliminate a part of the law creating an independent committee to recommend cuts reducing the per-capita rate of growth in Medicare spending, known as the Independent Payment Advisory Board. Such a panel could lead to cuts in federal spending on prescriptions, which would hurt pharmaceutical companies.

"It will come down to specific policies," said Wes Metheny, senior vice president of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the drug industry's main lobby. "We were very supportive of health-care reform last year and there are some good things we think need to stay in place."

Republicans have been highly critical of the law's requirement that nearly all Americans carry insurance or pay a penalty. Some industry groups, which fought fiercely for such a mandate, say they are now looking for other ways of ensuring that healthy customers are funneled into insurance pools should that provision get dismantled.

"If there's a way to make sure that the primary goal" is met of ensuring access to affordable coverage, "we're open to lots of different ideas," Mr. Metheny said.

Health-care lobbyists say ideas under consideration include imposing higher rates for people who don't buy insurance in the law's early years and automatically enrolling people who are eligible for coverage subsidies. An administration official said Democrats initially looked at auto-enrollment and concluded it had drawbacks.

Most health-industry groups—including Ms. Ignagni's insurance group, which criticized the final law—say they're not ready to take a position on the Republicans' repeal effort.

Some of the architects of the health law say they fear a repeal less than inadequate funding for putting the law into effect. Two officials said underfunding could cripple efforts to set up federally regulated exchanges where individuals and small businesses can shop for insurance.

At the same time, the federal government will still have to enforce parts of the law that force insurers to cover people with pre-existing medical conditions and curb caps on coverage. Insurance companies fear that if they face new mandates but the law fails to bring millions of healthy uninsured Americans into the system, they could wind up with a relatively unhealthy customer base.

"It's absolutely the worst possible outcome," one former White House official said.

Write to Janet Adamy at janet.adamy@wsj.com and Jonathan Weisman at jonathan.weisman@wsj.com