Given these last weeks, who doesn’t know what an AR-15 is? Who hasn’t seen the mind-boggling stats on the way assault rifles have flooded this country, or tabulations of accumulating Newtown-style mass killings, or noted that there are barely more gas stations nationwide than federally licensed firearms dealers, or heard the renewed debates over the Second Amendment, or been struck by the rapid shifts in public opinion on gun control, or checked out the disputes over how effective an assault-rifle ban was the last time around? Who doesn’t know about the NRA’s suggestion to weaponize schools, or about the price poor neighborhoods may be paying in gun deaths for the present expansive interpretation of the Second Amendment? Who hasn’t seen the legions of stories about how, in the wake of the Newtown slaughter, sales of guns, especially AR-15 assault rifles, have soared, ammunition sales have surged, background checks for future gun purchases have risen sharply, and gun shows have been besieged with customers?
If you haven’t stumbled across figures on gun violence in America or on suicide-by-gun, you’ve been hiding under a rock. If you haven’t heard about Chicago’s soaring and Washington D.C.’s plunging gun-death stats (and that both towns have relatively strict gun laws), where have you been?
Has there, in fact, been any aspect of the weaponization of the United States that, since the Newtown massacre, hasn’t been discussed? Are you the only person in the country, for instance, who doesn’t know that Vice President Joe Biden has been assignedthe task of coming up with an administration gun-control agenda before Barack Obama is inaugurated for his second term? And can you honestly tell me that you haven’t seen global comparisons of killing rates in countries that have tight gun laws and the U.S., or read at least one discussion about life in countries like Colombia or Guatemala, where armed guards are omnipresent?
After years of mass killings that resulted in next to no national dialogue about the role of guns and how to control them, the subject is back on the American agenda in a significant way and — by all signs — isn’t about to leave town anytime soon. The discussion has been so expansive after years in a well-armed wilderness that it’s easy to miss what still isn’t being discussed, and in some sense just how narrow our focus remains.
Think of it this way: the Obama administration is reportedly going to call on Congress to pass a new ban on assault weapons, as well as one on high-capacity ammunition magazines, and to close the loopholes that allow certain gun purchasers to avoid background checks. But Biden has already conceded, at least implicitly, that facing a Republican-controlled House of Representatives and a filibuster-prone Senate, the administration’s ability to make much of this happen — as on so many domestic issues — is limited.
Bill Moyers interviews Paul Krugman, who attacks the GOP deficit hawks for interfering with our emergence from the Great Republican-caused Depression of the early 21st century. What we need, he says, is more government stimulus. But we’re not going to get it.
The irrational GOP insistence on bankrupting our government by insisting on exempting the rich from taxes has reached the point where they just kicked 300,000 poor children off food stamps to give millionaires another tax break.
Their constant refrain is that Americans are over-taxed in world terms and that there is a danger of our firms (such patriots) going abroad if we tax them. But actually… no:
Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire casino magnate and emblem of the Citizens United-era of campaign finance, spent gobs of money on the 2012 elections — more money than anyone else in American history.
Exactly how much, you ask?
We don’t really know, and it’s likely we never will. Many of the groups that spent the most on the election aren’t required to report their donors. But thanks to recent campaign finance filings, we can get a better idea.
We dug through Federal Election Commission and Internal Revenue Service records and found that Adelson and his wife, Miriam, spent at least $101 million this election cycle. The money went to at least 30 different candidates and groups, with contributions ranging from $2,000 for a Florida congressional candidate to $30 million for Restore Our Future, the super PAC that supported Mitt Romney.
One of the more puzzling contributions was a $1 million check Adelson wrote in October. The money went to Hardworking Americans, a super PAC that attacked Sen. Debbie Stabenow, a Michigan Democrat who had a big lead in the polls and was re-elected three weeks later by a 21-point margin.
A spokesman for Adelson’s company, Las Vegas Sands, did not respond to a request for comment.
The $101 million figure matches up with the $100 million that Adelson, who is worth a reported $21 billion, had vowed to spend to defeat President Obama. But it doesn’t include the checks he wrote to “dark-money” groups — organizations that don’t have to disclose their donors, making their spending harder to track. These groups have proliferated since the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which opened the door to unlimited corporate and union giving.
The Huffington Post recently reported that Adelson’s total spending may have approached $150 million.
Two anonymous Republican fundraisers told the Huffington Post that Adelson had given between $30 and $40 million to Crossroads GPS, the dark-money group founded by Karl Rove, and at least $15 million to groups affiliated with Charles and David Koch, the billionaire industrialist brothers. Adelson also gave millions to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Republican Jewish Coalition, the fundraisers said.
If accurate, those numbers would place Adelson’s total spending on the election at around $155 million.
Bill O’Reilly set the frame for an “angry white male” understanding of the bath Mitt Romney took at the polls Tuesday night, even before it was entirely clear to Fox Cable News that their guy was going down.
O’Reilly, for all the world like a liberal arts assistant professor, explained it in terms of class, race and gender. He said that the “white establishment” is no longer the majority, and that African-Americans, Latinos and Asians are now 50% of the electorate and they, along with white women, “want things” from “the government.”
O’Reilly’s premises, that “whites” are “50%” of the population and don’t want “things” from “the government,” are false. Euro-Americans considering themselves “white” are 72% of the national population.
Further, the business elite of the US, the ‘top 1%’, is disproportionately “white.” The Forbes 400 wealthiest Americans include just one African-American. This white elite receives massive tax breaks and other government perquisites largely denied to working people of color. “United for a Fair Economy” points out:
“Tax policy is tilted in favor of the wealthy members of the Forbes 400 list.
Tax rates on capital gains have been slashed, which especially benefits members of the Forbes list. The richest 0.1% receive half of all net increases in capital gains.
Drastic cuts to the federal estate tax passed in the Bush tax cuts and the 2010 Obama tax deal allow the Forbes 400 to pass on more of their massive fortunes to their heirs, contributing to the growth of inequality and entrenching a class of super-wealthy heirs.
Class comes into O’Reilly’s analysis when he says that “the white establishment is now the minority.”
What is the “white establishment?” Perhaps O’Reilly is referring to the WASP elite, or the self-described White Anglo-Saxon Protestants who dominated business and government for the first 170 years of the Republic. That elite has been losing its virtual monopoly on power for some time. (WASP, by the way, as historians originally used it, did not refer to just any white Protestant of English heritage, but rather to a specific set of extended Northeast families; poor English-heritage Baptists in the South were not WASPs and neither were German-Americans. On the other hand, puzzlingly, Scottish-Americans were part of the elite, even though Scots were not thought of as Anglo-Saxons).
Of course, O’Reilly has expressed himself poorly. The “white establishment” he dreams of was never a “majority.” It was a small elite. So it cannot now be said to be “no longer the majority.” Perhaps by “majority” O’Reilly meant “hegemonic” or “dominant.”
With the election of John F. Kennedy and subsequent developments, some Catholic Euro-Americans were allowed into the white elite (they now account for six of the Supreme Court Justices and both vice presidential candidates this year). And maybe it is this joint Protestant-Catholic Euro-American elite of more recent vintage whose demise O’Reilly regrets.
Except that if we look at the composition of the 2010 Congress, for instance, we find that it was 57% Protestant and 29% Catholic and 7% Jewish. The general population is 51% Protestant and 24% Catholic, so that these two branches of Christianity are actually over-represented in the political class. And, Episcopalians and Presbyterians, the members of the old WASP denominations, are over-represented among the Protestants. Only 43 members of that Congress were African-American, i.e. less than 10% and less than their proportion in the general population. 28 members were Latinos. Women held 90 seats, or about 17% and were obviously grossly under-represented in favor of men.
If Congress is an indication of the political class’s make-up, then the white establishment seems well ensconced. Likewise in the Supreme Court and in state legislatures and other state high offices.
So what is really going on is that a small male, Euro-American elite along with white constituents in the Red States have been robbing the rest of us blind and dominating our politics for decades.
The white vote was 72%, of which Obama won four tenths, or 29 percent of the total vote. That 40% of the white vote, though, was very disproportionately white women. Then of the 21 percent of voters who are non-white, Obama picked up all the African-Americans and 2/3s of Latinos and Asians. (Some 7% of the voters appear to have refused to identify in exit polls as white or non-white and I suspect Obama got most of them, too). So that gave him the lead over Romney.
It is true that Obama could not have won with only 40% of the white vote, and only 33% of the white male vote, in 1996. But what has changed is not that minorities are now half the electorate or that minorities plan to loot the government. What has changed is that the rest of the country is asserting itself against a small, patriarchal and oligarchic class that had unfairly dominated politics and business and received the lion’s share of government largesse.
What has happened is that America is democratizing, and people want a fairer system than dominance by male WASPs.
President Obama’s reelection should mean more to progressives than simply dodging the bullet of a Romney presidency indebted to the Tea Party. Democratic politics has to be more than relief, while playing Russian Roulette, that this time we got the empty chamber. Progressives are a significant wing of the Democratic Party, and if we continue to be ignored, the party will ultimately falter.
Clearly, Obama does not have progressive instincts, and prefers to rule from the center. This impulse is wrong-headed, since the center didn’t man his campaign offices or make phone calls for him. Ruling from the center means taking his base for granted while reaching out to relatively conservative constituencies. This tactic is why we don’t have a single-payer health insurance plan. It is why Wall Street reform has consisted of half-measures. It is why we are imposing a financial blockade on Iran that could easily spiral into a war. When it comes to the arch-conservatives, for the most part, Obama has never learned to just say ‘no.’
It does not help that Obama will face virtually the same, obstructionist Tea Party House of Representatives that stymied him for the past two years. Instead of going to them and asking how he could make them happy, he has to threaten to make an all-out push to turn them out of office in 2014 if they continue to say ‘no’ to everything.
As for positive accomplishments, here are a few we should pressure him and Congress on:
1. We need the tax break for wind energy to be continued. Uncertainty here is deadly to the industry. And it is facing competition from cheap fracked natural gas (which is itself an environmental disaster every which way from Sunday). Wind energy could easily provide a quarter of all the electricity the US produces annually, and it is a way of slowing the rapidly rising average temperature of earth’s surface. Obama should deploy Republicans from high-wind states such as Iowa and Colorado to help make his case. It is to Obama’s credit that green energy doubled in the US from 3% to 6% during his first term. But 6% is almost nothing, with Portugal, Germany, Scotland and others being far more ambitious. Scotland wants to be 100% green by 2020.
Obama should emulate John F. Kennedy, Jr., and give a major address committing the the nation to try to go green in 8 years, just as Kennedy pledged to put us on the moon.
2. The Citizens United and other such rulings of the Supreme Court that allow dark money to dominate our elections needs to be undone by legislation. Corporations are not people, and Superpacs shouldn’t be buying our elections. Obama should start the work on a constitutional amendment that would permit actual campaign finance reform so that our elections look more like those of Western Europe and less like those of Pakistan.
3. Banking regulation still needs to be strengthened. There is nothing really in place that would prevent a repeat of the 2008 meltdown. Moreover, relief for homeowners under threat of losing their mortgages unfairly or arbitrarily needs to be pushed for again.
4. Obama needs to show leadership in pushing back against Koch Brother attempts to destroy public sector unions. Moreover, he needs to create a legal framework for the protection of the right to unionize in the private sector, a right that has been gutted by corporations such as Walmart. It was the unions that gave Mr. Obama Ohio, and if they are undermined during the next four years, they won’t be there to deliver the state again.
5. He needs to have the Department of Justice look into the Koch Brother-backed legislation in two dozen states restricting the franchise by requiring a paid-for state i.d., which is a kind of poll tax. In many states, this legislation violates the 1965 Voting Rights act. We can’t let a couple of sour billionaires undo the achievements of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., achievements for which he gave his life.
6. That use of the Department of Justice would perhaps make its workers and its head, Eric Holder, too busy to go around kicking down the doors of medical marijuana clinics and confiscating their computers, records and cash, in states where the state has legalized marijuana. Obama was elected the first time by the youth, and had promised to cease Federal harassment of pot clinics, but reneged and proved much worse than Bush on this issue. Holder should stop denying the clear medical uses and benefits of pot. In Colorado and Washington states, the same people who voted for him have legalized recreational marijuana. Moreover, the RAND Corp. concludes that legalization would defund the Mexican cartels. If the the Democratic Party continues on this Draconian path, it should not be surprised when it begins losing elections because a substantial younger constituency deserts it for the Green Party.
7. Obama put off further consideration of the PATRIOT Act until 2014. Several of its remaining provisions have been tagged by Senators Wyden and Udall as unconstitutional and pernicious because of the way law enforcement is interpreting them “secretly.” These unconstitutional provisions must be repealed altogether. Moreover, Obama needs to come clean about the extent of Federal violations of fourth amendment rights, warrantless surveillance of citizens, and the data mining of our emails and possibly their storage by the National Security Agency. As a victim of illegal White House/ CIA surveillance myself, I am furious that Obama has continued Bush-era abuses, and moreover that the Democratic Party has not so much as bothered to launch an investigation of my case.
8. The Bush tax cuts for the wealthy have to be allowed to lapse.
9. Obama must give up the fiction that a Department of Justice review of assassination targets is the same thing as a court trial that ends in an execution. The separation of powers is there in the constitution because King George III used to use the executive to declare people “outlaws” and have them killed on a whim, too. Maybe Obama and the national security state think they have invented something new. They haven’t. Targeted assassination by executive fiat has been around for a long time, and the Founding Fathers wanted it prohibited.
10. Obamacare has to be tweaked in the direction of a single payer system.
What will the United States look like in 2016 if Mitt Romney wins? While predicting the future is of course impossible, actually my experience is that if you play out known possible scenarios in your mind, you can often get a fair idea of the likely course of events.
2. Romney will abolish the Affordable Healthcare Act or “Obamacare,” throwing tens of millions of Americans back out of health insurance programs and leaving them, as he suggests, to the mercies of emergency room treatment. Emergency room treatment is much more expensive for taxpayers than would be the ACA, and having 30 or 40 million people dependent on it is highly undesirable. It cannot provide, e.g., pregnant women with prenatal care, which in turn is correlated with better health for mother and child. And, there simply are not enough ER doctors and nurses to care for that many people. With ACA, we have a chance to forestall the current 26,000 deaths a year resulting from people lacking health insurance. If ACA is repealed, they’ll still die, and over the four years of a Romney administration there will be 104,000 extra needless deaths among the uninsured.
4. Romney-Ryan are determined to outlaw abortion. Ryan does not even make any exceptions for it. Romney does, but he still wants to deprive women of choice and of the right to control their bodies. There is no scientific argument for the personhood of a cytoblast, and Bishop Willard Romney simply wants to impose religious doctrines on all women in contravention of the First Amendment of the US constitution. Romney will likely have the opportunity to appoint one or two Supreme Court justices, and will attempt to ensure that they are anti-choice.
6. Romney supports Republican/ Koch Brothers attempts at voter suppression. By requiring voter i.d. of people who do not drive, he would impose what is essentially a poll tax on urban voters, such that they’d have to lose a day of work and pay money for a state i.d. Voter suppression is a way of decreasing the youth, African-American and Latino vote and so unfairly weighting the votes of white drivers. These voter suppression measures pose the risk of further degrading American democracy and establishing what is increasingly a tyranny of the white minority.
7. Romney is determined to increase the amount of carbon dioxide spewed into the atmosphere by backing Big Oil against renewable sources of energy. His policies will accelerate climate change, increasing the average surface temperature of the earth, with more frequent droughts, forest fires, and extreme weather events.
8. Romney is in the back pocket of casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, who is spending $100 million to elect him. Adelson worships far rightwing Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu the way the wayward Children of Israel used to worship the Golden Calf. Romney says he will recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and it seems clear he will back to the hilt the creeping illegal Israeli annexation of the Palestinian West Bank.
9. Romney-Ryan will end Medicare as we know it, turning it into a privatized voucher system that will screw over the younger Baby Boomers, and then Gen X and the Milennials and the Nexters.
10. Romney has been the biggest liar among presidential candidates since Tricky Dick Nixon. He has repeatedly mouthed a whole litany of falsehoods. He tried to scare Toledo auto workers by saying that the Obama administration was moving their jobs to China, and the CEO of Chrysler was constrained to slap Romney down. Romney
So these are the contours of the America of 2016 under Romney. Unemployment could remain stubbornly high under austerity policies, and the budget deficit could grow, causing the US credit rating to be further cut and increasing the cost of borrowing money. The country could be at war in Iran and Syria (a further drain on the national budget). Israel would be turned decisively into an Apartheid state with the end of any possibility of a two-state solution, promoting further trouble for the US with the Muslim world. Tens of millions of Americans will be without health insurance. Social Security benefits could be taxed, and Medicare could be cut (voucherized), costing individuals thousands of dollars a year. Women’s rights will be chipped away at. Climate change will accelerate and dirty sources of energy like coal will be encouraged. Hot, dry summers could produce dust bowls in some parts of the US, while hurricanes will increase in their ferocity. And, public trust in democracy will be deeply undermined, since the president will repeatedly be caught in lies, and because the 47% will be effectively disenfranchised.
The US will be hotter, with more violent weather, will be poorer save for the 400 billionaires, will be a virtual nation of hobos, and will end up a brutal plutocracy where those too poor to afford private insurance will simply die in the tens of thousands each year, and where elections and legislation are openly bought and paid for.
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