The Political War in Washington is Damaging Business

The Republican Party claims to be the party of business - well, maybe big business since GOP policies sure don't do much for small "mom and pop" businesses - but it's efforts to shut down the U.S. government and push the nation into default are taking a toil on business and helping to create an atmosphere where business are inclined to sit on cash due to uncertainty of where the economy is headed under a system that is focused on anything and everything except the economy despite lip service to the contrary. So says the venerable British magazine The Economist. And the fault rests primarily on the GOP which continues to pander to crazies and extremists. Here are some story highlights:

THE great Calvin Coolidge reputedly said that “the business of America is business.” These days the business of America is carpet-chewing rage. American politicians are intent, not on improving their country’s competitiveness, but on gouging each other’s eyes out.

Businesspeople still enjoy huge advantages from being in America. Business is part of its DNA in much the same way that la dolce vita is part of Italy’s. America has a disproportionate number of the world’s most innovative businesses, from greybeards such as 3M to toddlers such as Salesforce.com.

Yet America’s politicians are intent on squandering this painfully accumulated capital. As it revoked America’s triple-A credit rating on August 5th, Standard & Poor’s explained that the gulf between the political parties was becoming unbridgeable, and that policymaking was becoming unpredictable. Other sober institutions concur. The World Economic Forum has downgraded America from second place in 2009 to fourth place in 2010 in its annual global competitiveness rankings. By the forum’s reckoning, America comes a lowly 40th for the quality of its institutions, 54th for trust in its politicians, 68th for government waste and a dismal 87th for its macroeconomic environment. The World Bank sees a relentless decline in various indicators of American governance.

This ideological civil war has led to the marginalisation of corporate America. In the Republican Party country-club types have been elbowed aside by Rush Limbaugh listeners. . . . . The civil war is creating two obvious problems for American business: paralysis and uncertainty. The Obama administration is still pockmarked with vacancies because Congress refuses to approve routine appointments. Important trade deals have been languishing for months. The Republicans are fighting a war of attrition against Barack Obama’s health-care reforms and his new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. All this has immediate consequences for business.

The direst consequences of all this lie in the future, however. America’s health-care system consumes a sixth of GDP but produces only mediocre results. America’s schools produce run-of-the-mill results despite generous funding. The immigration system leaves 11m people in the shadows and condemns many of the brightest graduates of American universities to years of grovelling before bureaucrats if they want to stay in America. Many give up and take their skills back to India or China.

American companies are sitting on a gigantic pile of cash; Apple alone has $76 billion in the bank. Why won’t corporate America invest in America? It does not help that domestic demand is feeble, and that the global economy is in turmoil. But American politicians deserve some of the blame. Their unpredictability erodes confidence.

Even more dangerously, the gulf between business and the rest of the country is widening: opinion polls show that American businesspeople are losing faith in their country even as ordinary Americans are losing faith in business. Calvin Coolidge’s statement was once denounced as the height of bourgeois complacency. Today it sounds like a reminder of an America that is in danger of disappearing.

The Texas Unmiracle

In a column in the New York Times Paul Krugman looks at the economic reality in Texas under Rick Perry's time as governor versus the political spin that can be expected from Perry's campaign PR machine. One can only hope that the mainstream media will look at the real facts rather than merely parrot the sound bites released by the Perry Camp. Combined with Perry's social issues extremism, the true economic facts ought to send rational folks running screaming. Needless to say, the Christofascists will be so focused on Perry's anti-abortion, anti-gay, and small government bullshit spin that the truth will have no chance of sinking in. Here are highlights from Krugman's column:

As expected, Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, has announced that he is running for president. And we already know what his campaign will be about: faith in miracles. . . . . if he wins the Republican nomination, his campaign will probably center on a more secular theme: the alleged economic miracle in Texas, which, it’s often asserted, sailed through the Great Recession almost unscathed thanks to conservative economic policies.

So what you need to know is that the Texas miracle is a myth, and more broadly that Texan experience offers no useful lessons on how to restore national full employment.

It’s true that Texas entered recession a bit later than the rest of America, mainly because the state’s still energy-heavy economy was buoyed by high oil prices through the first half of 2008. Also, Texas was spared the worst of the housing crisis, partly because it turns out to have surprisingly strict regulation of mortgage lending. Despite all that, however, from mid-2008 onward unemployment soared in Texas, just as it did almost everywhere else.

So where does the notion of a Texas miracle come from? Mainly from widespread misunderstanding of the economic effects of population growth.

For this much is true about Texas: It has, for many decades, had much faster population growth than the rest of America — about twice as fast since 1990. Several factors underlie this rapid population growth: a high birth rate, immigration from Mexico, and inward migration of Americans from other states, who are attracted to Texas by its warm weather and low cost of living, low housing costs in particular.

[T]he high rate of population growth translates into above-average job growth through a couple of channels. Many of the people moving to Texas — retirees in search of warm winters, middle-class Mexicans in search of a safer life — bring purchasing power that leads to greater local employment. At the same time, the rapid growth in the Texas work force keeps wages low — almost 10 percent of Texan workers earn the minimum wage or less, well above the national average — and these low wages give corporations an incentive to move production to the Lone Star State. . . . .

[D]oes Texas job growth point the way to faster job growth in the nation as a whole? No. What Texas shows is that a state offering cheap labor and, less important, weak regulation can attract jobs from other states. I believe that the appropriate response to this insight is “Well, duh.” The point is that arguing from this experience that depressing wages and dismantling regulation in America as a whole would create more jobs — which is, whatever Mr. Perry may say, what Perrynomics amounts to in practice — involves a fallacy of composition: every state can’t lure jobs away from every other state.

So when Mr. Perry presents himself as the candidate who knows how to create jobs, don’t believe him. His prescriptions for job creation would work about as well in practice as his prayer-based attempt to end Texas’s crippling drought.

Oh, and as for that drought? It has worsened under Perry's prayer initiative.

More Sunday Male Beauty

The "Double Speak" of the Far Right

A column at The Bilerico Project by Dr. Warren J. Blumenfeld, an Associate Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at Iowa State University in Ames Iowa, looks at a phenomenon that I've long noticed: the use of words and phrases by the far right that if implemented in the form of Christianist/GOP policies would actually result in the exact opposite of what the phrases suggest. A classic and among the most disingenuous is the Christianist cry for "religious freedom." It sounds good, but in reality translates to the imposition of Christianist religious views on all citizens and fourth class status - if not criminalization - for LGBT Americans. Here are some highlights from Professor Blumenfeld's piece:

As I walked through the extensive crowd [at the Ames Straw Poll], this virtual sea of White faces -- old, young, and in between -- and as I saw the staffs of a relatively large group of presidential hopefuls lobbying my Iowa neighbors for their votes, I was conscious of a unanimity of message, a virtual lock-step thought and expression of ideas.

And I was particularly reminded of the notion of "doublespeak": that language of deliberate distortion and contradiction in the meaning of words.

Leaders on the political and theocratic right use terms like "liberty" and "freedom" to advance their agendas, which include such tenets as shrinking the size of government and giving more control to state and local governments; ending governmental regulation of the private sector; privatization of state and federal governmental services, industries, and institutions including schools; permanent incorporation of across-the-board non-progressive marginal tax rates; market driven unfettered "free market" economies, which ultimately, they argue, will ensure individuals' autonomy.

But will their agenda enhance personal and national "liberty" and "freedom," or rather, are they engaging in mere doublespeak? Doublespeak? Yes indeed!

And the terms "freedom" and "liberty"? How "free" are we as individuals when the upper ten percent of our population controls approximately 80-90 percent of the accumulated wealth and 85 percent of the stocks and bonds, and the Right's agenda will only increase this enormous imbalance?

How "free" are we as individuals when corporate executives currently pay lower tax rates than their secretaries as the Right fights to maintain these advantages for the super rich?

How "free" are we as individuals when 50 million people in our country go uninsured and their only form of health care is the hospital emergency room that the remainder of the population must pay for because our government will not provide a single-payer health care system, but instead, we all must accept the exorbitant profit-motive insurance premium rates of private health care insurers?

How "free" are we all when lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people are denied their basic human and civil rights, and when they are vilified and scapegoated?

How "free" are we really when the political and theocratic right push for school vouchers to funnel money into their parochial institutions at the expense of public education, and when forces are gathering to reintroduce prayer into the public schools, and when the lines between religion and government are increasingly blurred?

Unfortunately, many people from middle and working class backgrounds are succumbing to the politics of doublespeak. By supporting these conservative and ultra-conservative politicians and agendas, they are, in actuality, operating against and undermining their own economic self-interests and others within the middle and working classes. We all must, therefore, expose the language for with it is: Doublespeak!

NOM Loses Fight To Keep Anti-Gay Marriage Donors Secret

The National Organization for Marriage ("NOM") has arrogantly thought itself above campaign finance disclosure laws aimed at allowing voters to know who is funding different political advertising campaigns. I've long suspected that NOM is a front for perhaps the Roman Catholic Church and/or the Mormon Church or principally financed by a few deep pocket donors rather that actually being any sort of grass roots organization as Maggie Gallagher and Brian Brown would have the public believe. Now, NOM has lost two (2) lawsuits where it was challenging disclosure laws in Maine and Rhode Island. The U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the First Circuit upheld both states' disclosure laws. NOM can try to appeal to the U. S. Supreme Court, but based on that Court's ruling in a Washington State case by anti-gay forces, the prospects look bleak that the Court would even take the case. On Top Magazine has coverage. Here are highlights:

In the Rhode Island case, the court ruled that the state's law imposed little burden on the group and served a valuable government interest, the Providence Journal reported.

In the Maine case, NOM argued that the state's reporting requirements are vague and over-broad, Maine Public Broadcasting Network reported.

Maine's laws “neither erect a barrier to political speech nor limit its quantity,” the court wrote. “Rather, they promote the dissemination of information about those who deliver and finance political speech, thereby encouraging efficient operation of the marketplace of ideas.”

I always maintain that if an organization has nothing to hide, then it doesn't act as if it does. NOM's disingenuous statements that disclosure would subject its donors to harassment just don't fly. Moreover, if one lacks the courage to publicly stand behind their convictions, then perhaps they need to be rethinking their convictions. The Providence Journal noted in part as follows on the lawsuits:

[District]Judge Lisi concluded the disclosure law imposed little burden on the group and had a valuable governmental interest in identifying the people who give more than $100 to a support or defeat a candidate.

U.S. 1st Circuit Court of Appeals Judges Juan R. Torruella, Michael Bounding, and Kermit V. Lipez upheld Lisi’s ruling Thursday in a decision that echoes a similar ruling delivered the same day regarding election laws in Maine.

Common Cause Rhode Island, which weighed in on the state’s side in the case, argues the organization’s suit challenges the interests of Rhode Islanders to be informed about the source of political messages advocating for or against people who will be their elected officials.

David Gregory Shreds Michele Bachmann

Appearing on Meet the Press today, Michele "Crazy Eyes" Bachmann got shredded by David Gregory on the issue of gays and gay marriage. Her refusal to give a direct answer and/or disavow her past hateful and judgmental statements spoke volumes. Nothing is more inconvenient for bigots like Bachmann than having their own words used to show their true colors. Under grilling, Bachamnn showed herself to be not only a bigot, but also a disingenuous liar

National Catholic Reporter: RomeFFiddles While We Burn

The Vatican seems to exist at times in some alternate universe and it is hard to know whether its because of incredible arrogance or because the Church leadership is utterly detached from reality and believes that more of the same disingenuous apologies will somehow make a difference if repeated often enough. Fortunately, some Catholics are over the Vatican's mindless dithering as the Church's brand becomes increasingly toxic to many. Unfortunately, until more Catholics vote with their feet and more importantly stop placing money and checks in the collection plate, Rome has little reason to do anything substantive. Nonetheless, it is fun to see some Catholics ripping Rome a new one. A piece in the National Catholic Reporter is a case in point. Here are some highlights:

The sex abuse crisis among priests and other church personnel has now exploded like napalm across the entire Catholic world. New revelations tell an old story almost every day: that of the suffering of its victims, often in secret and compounded by ecclesiastical ineptitude, inattention, or moral insolvency.

How Irish that the scandal has turned into a brawl between the Irish prime minister and the Roman authorities he has criticized for their handling of the crisis. That reveals that Ireland's green is really base metal beneath the phony gilt of its claims to be the land of saints and scholars.

Things are even worse in Germany where the non-stop revelations of sex abuse have stunned the world and embarrassed Pope Benedict XVI who, while all this is going on, is busily promoting a return of the church to the pre-Vatican II period that served as the incubator for a tragedy that has brought immeasurable grief to innumerable people . . . .

Now, while Catholics burn with the shame inflicted on them by this crisis, Rome seems so pre-occupied with re-entering the shadowed yesterday of clerical domination that it has no interest or enough spiritual energy to lead the church to a fresh dawn of self-examination and self-cleansing.

The latest example is found in promising plenary indulgences to those who fulfill certain conditions when they attend World Youth Day in Madrid, Spain, Aug. 18-21. BUT WAIT -- as they say on infomercials -- partial indulgences are also available to those who pray appropriately during this gathering even if they cannot attend in person.

As part of the Reform of the Reform, this unfortunately rings like a church bell with associations of selling such indulgences during medieval times when bartering for grace and time off from Purgatory with cash scandalized Catholics and helped bring on the Reformation.

By turning back to the concept of giving "Get Out of Purgatory" cards to those who attend an event in time demonstrates how estranging to human experience this return to another age really is. The world's victims are burning with suffering that is not cured by the passage of time and Rome fiddles, neglecting to plumb the depths of the still continuing sex abuse crisis, while talking irrelevantly in the language of plenary and partial indulgences.

To promise to relieve the so called temporal punishment due to sin through indulgences while failing to understand the timeless nature of the suffering of the sexually abused makes one think that Nero may have had it right when he did the fiddling while letting Rome do the burning.

Sunday Male Beauty

Voter Intensity and 2012

From what we've seen so far, the intensity of the Christian extremists elements of the electorate is running high. If that continues to November, 2012, and the Republicans nominate a wing nut, it will translate to a high turnout of the far right. The question then becomes whether or not other segments of the electorate will be similarly motivated to get out and vote. For Barack Obama, he has seemingly almost deliberately alienated many in the Democratic base - something that doesn't bode well for intensity in turn out. Moderates and independents are similarly disaffected at the moment based on polls, so intensity is obviously a huge question. Yes, the progressive may turn out to stop a truly scary GOP nominee, but what about the crucial middle? The Daily Beast looks at the issue of voter intensity and here are some highlights:

Intensity drives turnout. And as Wisconsin goes, so goes the nation: the 2012 presidential election will be all about intensity. Candidate Barack Obama benefited from intensity—a high positive intensity for himself and negative intensity for the opposing party in 2008, thanks in part to “Bush fatigue.”

Intensity is a mix of emotional and cognitive responses. Team Obama was masterful at marketing in 2008, connecting his brand to the emotional needs and aspirations of a broad cross-section of voters. The emotional intensity caused regular folks to faint and the media to swoon.

But now, with far more folks registering strong disapproval than strong approval of the president, an approval gap of -22 as measured by Rasmussen among likely voters, the presidential election this time around will be more about negative intensity—President Obama’s.

Marketers know—no matter how deep the emotional connection or brand loyalty—when a product does not perform, rational thought overtakes emotion, and most consumers make a new choice. With the continuing economic uncertainty and high unemployment, voter frustration isn’t going away. And intensity for the Obama brand is waning because the brand is not delivering the promised results. Once passionate followers are experiencing cognitive dissonance. The president’s team is going to learn it’s easier to launch a new brand than revive a damaged one.

Obama’s reelection campaign runs three risks: losing voters to the other party, losing voters to apathy, and losing the election because of the growing negative intensity against Obama that will drive Republican turnout. But that doesn’t clear all the hurdles for Republicans. Although the outcome of the GOP primary will likely be determined by positive intensity for the candidates, voters are much more wary and still divided. Who will drive more of the Tea Party, establishment, and moderate voters to the polls?

Perry will appeal to many concerned about our fiscal picture with his unmatched track record stewarding an economy (inherited from George W. Bush), helping create 40 percent of the net new jobs in the nation over the last two years alone, and expanding the state’s economy to the second largest in the nation while balancing the budget and not increasing taxes—proving he can deliver on his promises. But will Perry’s positive intensity survive the onslaught of attacks to come, from the middle and the left and the media?


Perry has his faults, which will be exposed over the course of the campaign. He’s far too conservative and hard for my taste. But as a political observer looking at the current environment, I know that intensity counts for a lot. And Perry’s got a lot of heat.

Rick Perry's Anti-Gay Agenda

It's hard to determine who hates LGBT citizens more, Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann (putting aside, of course, the fact that Bachmann appears to be living with a closeted gay man). It seems that if elected and given the chance (and a GOP majority in Congress), both appear to be of a mindset where gays might be well advised to consider getting the Hell out of the USA. Perry for instance would re-criminalize sodomy which under the Texas statute struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in Lawrence v. Texas included just about all sex acts other than the missionary position (Virginia's statute which remains in the Virginia Code is similar). It's a scary world when people like Bachmann and Perry are considered serious contenders for the GOP nomination. Personally, I view both Perry and Bachmann (and Santorum) and their Christian dominionist supporters as an example of mass scale mental illness/insanity. The founding fathers must be rolling over in their graves. Think Progress provides a sampling of Perry's agenda against LGBT citizens.

Perry’s anti-gay record should speak for itself:

1. Perry has come down fiercely against gay marriage, both in Texas and nationally. “Gay marriage is not fine with me,” Perry told Tony Perkins of the anti-gay Family Research Council last month. Contrary to his states’ rights rhetoric on issues like health care and education mandates, he is in favor of a federal amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman. While serving as governor, he pushed for a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage in Texas. After voters approved the amendment, he signed it symbolically at a Christian school, declaring that now gay marriage is “beyond the reach of activist judges.”

2. He supports a Texas law that criminalizes sodomy, even though it has been unconstitutional since 2003. When asked for his views on the 2002 U.S. Supreme Court decision ruling an anti-sodomy law unconstitutional, Perry responded with, “I think our law is appropriate that we have on the books.” He later blamed the decision on the Supreme Court’s “nine oligarchs in robes” in his second book, Fed Up! Texas lawmakers have introduced legislation to repeal the statute during three separate legislative sessions, and yet Perry has not supported any of them. In 2010, he even ran for re-election on a GOP platform explicitly supporting the criminalization of gay sex.

3. Perry criticized President Obama for signing hate-crimes legislation in 2010. When running against U.S. Senator Kay Hutchinson in 2009, his campaign conducted a series of robocalls calling out Obama for “making homosexuality a protected class” by signing hate-crimes protections for the LGBT community into law. Instead, he is looking to hire Robert Black, one of his former staffers who is prone to hateful speech himself. Black made the papers in 1998 for likening the Log Cabin Republicans, a group of gay conservatives, to the Ku Klux Klan and characterizing the organization as “deviant.”

4. He is cultivating relationships with anti-gay hate groups. As has been widely reported, the American Family Association–which the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated an “anti-gay hate group”–organized and funded in large measure Perry’s Aug. 6 prayer rally in Houston. The Response, which drew around 30,000 attendees, was also affiliated with pastors who described the gay movement as coming from the “pit of hell” and who blamed Hurricane Katrina on gays. He has also reportedly spoken with several members of the New Apostolic Reformation in a June closed-door meeting aimed at developing a counter-strategy to Obama in 2012. Rachel Maddow described anti-gay sentiment as “prominent in NAR preaching, where hurricanes, tornadoes, dead birds and the rise of the Nazis are all blamed on gays and lesbians.”

5. And if you don’t agree with him, Perry thinks you should live elsewhere.When asked by a local NBC anchor for his response to the gay veterans protesting the new constitutional ban on same-sex marriage in 2005, Perry retorted, “Texans made a decision about marriage and if there’s a state that has more lenient views than Texas, then maybe that’s a better place for them to live.”