Obama vs. FDR

Cannon here. Happy Halloween! I know that many of you are still recovering from Mother Nature's big trick. Well, here's a treat.

I prepared this post at a time when I feared that a Sandy-related power loss might prevent blogging. Jim DiEugenio -- the best reviewer of political books on the internet -- has graciously allowed his work to appear here. (This piece was previously seen on Consortium News, which more of you should visit.)

This is a review of the book Winner Take All by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson -- but it's also a review of the Obama years, as seen through the eyes of a historian who reveres the legacy of Franklin D. Roosevelt. A word of warning: Jim's reviews run deep. But he always has something important to say, even if you have no intention of acquiring the book under discussion.

As readers know, I think Mitt Romney is sufficiently vile to warrant support for Barack Obama in this election. But the day after that election, we should try to implement the key recommendation of this piece -- an independent movement designed to pressure the Democratic party to become, once again, a true alternative.

There's a difference, of course, between a movement and a third party. In American history, movements create change; third parties do not. The civil rights movement did a lot a good; the Peace and Freedom Party, not so much.

Everything below the asterisks was written by Jim DiEugenio.

*  *  *

In the last year or so, I have been contemplating writing a book about President Barack Obama and how he reacted to the economic blowout of 2007-08, compared to how President Franklin Roosevelt grappled with the Great Depression.

In that comparison, I thought, one could gauge not only the character and politics of the two men, but also how the Democratic Party had lost its way and why. After all, Obama said on 60 Minutes that — prior to taking office but after being elected — he had read several books about FDR and the Depression in preparation for handling a similar collapse.

Winner-Take-All Politics, the book under discussion in this review, strictly speaking, does not fit under the rubric of the Wall Street collapse at the end of George W. Bush’s presidency. But it takes pains to describe why Obama and the Democratic Party could not mount the kind of program necessary to revive the economy.

And consequently, why, in 2012, five years after the first phase of the collapse, many Americans still find themselves in the throes of this recession, an economic disaster which, unlike any since the Great Depression, has impacted almost every aspect of American public life: cutbacks in municipal and state services and employment, teacher layoffs which have raised some student class sizes to well over 40, a collapse in real-estate prices in many states, leading to a foreclosure and bankruptcy rate that has been unprecedented.

For instance, in the state of Florida, the abandonment rate of homes and condominiums is over 15 percent. That is, the rate of occupiers who have simply walked away from their dwellings and left them empty. And Nevada is not very far behind. Further, there is no end in sight to this housing debacle, which many people think is the key to reviving the economy.

How It Happened

The authors of Winner-Take-All Politics, Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, have put together a thesis that tries to tell the great untold story of the last 30 odd years. That is, how did the redistribution of wealth in this country become so concentrated in the highest echelons, to the point that, in the wake of the collapse, the middle class — or what is left of it — simply does not have the purchasing power to recharge the economy?

Hacker and Pierson spend the first part of the book proving this is so. And they do that in a very convincing manner, through an array of statistical charts that show that the concentration of wealth today is at a point unsurpassed since the Gilded Age, the Age of the Robber Barons — like Jay Gould, Cornelius Vanderbilt, J. P. Morgan and John Rockefeller Sr. — the days when there was no middle class and when these men essentially owned the government through outright bribery.

That was also a time when there were no strong unions to hold the Robber Barons in check. There also were no real laws regulating banking and the stock market. Because of all this, the Robber Barons were allowed to do as they wished with no regard to anyone else. According to Teddy Roosevelt, they even arranged economic downturns to hurt presidents who were opposed to their total dominion. There really was no democracy, since elections were bought and sold.

As notorious Republican campaign manager Mark Hanna once said, “The single most important thing about winning elections is money. I forgot the second thing.” Therefore in the key election of 1896, Hanna backed William McKinley against the full-throated populist William Jennings Bryan, who crisscrossed the country by train, hitting as many as four cities in a day. McKinley sat on his front porch with his mother and wife, while Hanna brought the media to him. Bryan got more votes than any previous candidate for president, but McKinley still won.

What Hacker and Pierson are arguing here is that, for all intents and purposes, the USA is now back in the Gilded Age. Even though we have a president who is a Democrat, and even though Democrats control the Senate, it does not matter. The intent of the book is to show why the top 1 percent really does not care about party affiliation.

Flooding the Rich with Money

The authors say the real story behind the bail-out begun by George W. Bush and completed by Barack Obama was not the amount delegated to TARP (with its original $700 billion price tag though later scaled back considerably). That was just the amount handed over in daylight. The amount handed over secretly, through the Federal Reserve (an amount estimated in the trillions of dollars), dwarfed TARP.

The excuse of these combined bailouts was “to save the system,” but the appearance was that the money was going into the wallets of Wall Street swindlers who had created the crisis in the first place. Rather than suffering for their greed and recklessness, they simply were allowed to get to their feet and dust off their top hats – or rather have the taxpayer dust off their top hats.

But the authors explain this galling reality as part of a longer-term favoritism toward the wealthy. They ask, “Why have politicians slashed taxes on the rich even as the riches of the rich have exploded?” (p. 5)

This is one of the main tenets of the book. As the Wall Street denizens had their taxes lowered, they also successfully lobbied to be deregulated, a process that, in turn, caused the collapse. But then, because of their lobbying connections, they were bailed out of the consequences of their own actions, mostly with tax money from the dwindling middle class which has had to shoulder a larger share of the tax burden or watch the costs get passed on to future generations.

To compound the injury inflicted by the rapaciousness of the rich, the middle class also has suffered disproportionately from the severe recession: the widespread layoffs, the stagnating wages, the loss of home values and the decline in public services. A key point of the book for Hacker and Pierson is to figure out how democracy got so undemocratic.

Not Always This Way

Hacker and Pierson compare the contemporary economic scene to America after World War II. From about 1945 to about 1975 the American economic system was much more evenly balanced, both in taxes and in wealth. (p. 11) In those years, overall, the benefits of the economy were distributed more to the middle class and working class than to the upper classes. (p. 15) This changed dramatically from 1979 to 2006, when the top 1 percent received 36 percent of all the income growth generated in the American economy. (p. 290)

The authors then bring out an economic study which shows just how this curve was reshaped in the last 30 or so years. For example, in 1974, the top 1 percent earned 8 percent of the income. In 2007, that more than doubled to 18 percent. If one includes capital gains and dividends, that rate goes up to 23.5 percent. So 1 per cent of the population was getting almost one-quarter of the wealth. Since these records began in 1918, in only one year has distribution been more extreme: In 1928, the year before the great Wall Street Crash of 1929, it was 24 percent.

The authors then dissected what was happening inside the 1 percent by examining the top one-tenth of the 1 percent. This group now averages $7.1 million per year in income, yet in 1974, they averaged $1 million per year, or to put it as a percentage, in 1974, the top 0.1 percent earned 2.7 percent of the nation’s income, while in 2007, they earned 12.3 percent, a huge statistical increase.

Then, the authors go one better. They break down what the top one-hundredth of the top one per cent earns. In 1974, it was $4 million per year. In 2007, it was $35 million per year, which is the highest rate in recorded history. (All these figures are adjusted for inflation, p. 16)

Putting these gains on a graph, the concentration of wealth in the hands of the top 1 percent has more than doubled from the Kennedy/Johnson years to the last years of George W. Bush. (p. 18) Or as the authors put it, America has gone from a nation in which most of our growth went to the bottom 90 percent, to one in which more than half that growth goes to the richest 1 percent. And this acceleration has been sustained over three decades, not significantly altered by the business cycle or who occupies the White House.

The One Percent Paradigm

The theoretical underpinning of this enrich-the-rich paradigm was first postulated back in the 1920s by Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, himself one of the key Robber Barons of the Gilded Age. In the 1970s, Arthur Laffer recast it as “supply-side economics” for Ronald Reagan, who – as president – proceeded to slash the top marginal tax rates on the rich by more than half.

In comparing incomes adjusted for inflation (and for benefits from employment), the authors conclude that the magic elixir of Mellon and Laffer has not worked as advertised, that is, it did not create an economy that broadly boosts living standards by having the wealth trickle down. To the degree that this paradigm has worked at all, it’s worked for the upper classes, not the middle classes, and certainly not for the poor and working class. (p. 20) The standard of living for the latter two groups has gone down.

Plus, there are more Americans in the lower-income groups, and the only way the middle class has avoided taking a major hit is, unlike the Sixties, most middle-class families have both parents working.

To put it another way, from 1979 to 2006, the top 1 percent saw a gain of 256 percent in their after-tax income. (p. 23) No other percentile even approached that rise. The second highest gain was the top 20 percent with a 55 percent rise. In other words, trickle-down economics was really trickle-up. Or, as Reagan’s disillusioned budget director David Stockman said, supply-side economics was a gift of a Trojan horse from the wealthy to everyone else.

At this point, the authors stop and zoom in for a very dramatic comparison. They ask: What if they altered the chart by using the rate of wealth distribution that existed in the Sixties? How would the wealthy be doing then, versus everyone else, (sort of an It’s a Wonderful Life alternative reality, speculating on how the various classes would have done if “supply-side” or “trickle-down” economics” had never been born)?

This one graph, more than any page in the book, shows us how the political system has been turned upside down. For if the Sixties’ rate of wealth distribution were applied, today’s top 1 percent would see a decline in their annual income by more than 50 percent! The income of the top 10 percent would drop by about 12 percent, and everyone else would gain significantly. For instance, the middle fifth would see a rise in income of about 16 percent.

Skewed Wealth

But today’s reality is quite different. There is no way around it: America has become a country with one of the most skewed rates of wealth distribution in the Western world. (p. 28) And it has happened in the last three decades, under the doctrine of supply-side economics.

According to the authors, the worst time period for this economic imbalance was the presidency of George W. Bush, under whom the rise in income for the top 1 percent went up on average about 10 per cent a year. As if they really needed the money!

Also, contrary to supply-side propaganda, trickle-down policies have not created a dynamic meritocracy that rewards the enterprise of the hardworking downtrodden who then soar into the upper classes. Instead, social mobility in the United States has stagnated. Today, there is much more opportunity to climb the economic ladder in other Western countries, like Australia, Sweden, Norway, Germany, Spain, France and Canada. In fact, the only two countries that have a worse mobility rate than the U.S. are England and Italy, whose rates are just slightly lower. (p. 29)

Even benefit packages for employees have worsened as a result of trickle-up economics. Employers today give much less to retirement packages than in the Seventies, and Americans pay much more for health insurance than, in say, Canada, while getting less in return. (p. 31) And today, the ratio of people not covered by health insurance is higher than in 1979.

After producing all this impressive data, the authors conclude that America has the worst income inequality in the industrial world. (p. 37) In fact, in the last 30 years, the United States has literally left its cohorts in the dust in this dubious category.

How Did It Happen?

So, how did this remarkable transformation happen? The book offers three main reasons:


(To read the rest, click "Permalink" below)

–The gifts given to the rich in taxes and benefits.

–What the writers call “drift,” the inability of government to adapt to a new economic landscape.

–The freeing up of market regulations while minimum wage laws and the ability of unions to provide a check on corporate power were lessened.

In regards to the gifts to the rich, Winner-Take-All Politics contains a very telling chart about who has benefited the most from the lessening of stock market restrictions. This depicts the occupations of those within the top one-tenth of the 1 per cent.

Over 40 per cent of these people are from the world of corporate managers and CEOs who have benefited as rules limiting compensation, such as stock options, were gutted, especially in comparison to other countries. The next largest group, about 20 percent, is from the financial speculation sector, or Wall Street.

No other group has even 7 percent representation. (p. 46) In other words, while much of American business has been declining, corporate chieftains and investment bankers have become, by far, the most well-off personages in American society.

Gutting Progressive Taxation

One way this transformation has occurred was the gutting of the idea of progressive taxes. Today, the top 1 percent pays a full third less in taxes than in 1970.  The top tenth of that 1 percent pay less than half of what they did then. In other words, the rich do not just get a larger cut of the pie, they pay less for it. (p. 48)

The steep progressivity of the American income tax code, which existed from the post-World War II era through the start of the Reagan era, is gone today. The 90 percent rate applied to the top tranche of a rich person’s income in the 1950s was trimmed to 70 percent in the 1960s, but the biggest change occurred in the last 30 years, resulting from the Reagan tax cuts of the 1980s which lowered the top rate to 28 percent (before they were raised somewhat under George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton and then dropped again by George W. Bush).

The supposed goal of Reagan’s tax cuts was to spur the economy by having the rich invest more in the productive sector and thus create more jobs, with the benefits then trickling down to working people. But the tax cutting spree mostly diverted the nation’s wealth into the hands of the upper classes without achieving the promised productive investments inside the United States.

Not only did Reagan’s tax cuts help out rich people who didn’t need the help, but many of the investments that the upper classes did make went to finance overseas factories that exploited cheaper labor and caused more unemployment for working-class Americans. Those lost jobs, in turn, put more pressure on cities and towns — with shuttered factories, decaying neighborhoods and depressed U.S. living standards.

In terms of numbers, the authors described it this way: the total after-tax income of the top tenth of 1 percent was 1.2 percent of the national total in 1970.  In 2000, it was 7.3 percent. Yet if the tax rate had remained the same as it was in 1970, that figure would decline to 4.5 percent. In other words, the gulf in inequality would be much narrower. And the government would have much more revenue to spend reviving the American economy and putting teachers and policemen back to work.

Undemocratic Results

What is so remarkable about this skewing of benefits to the rich is that the majority of Americans don’t agree with the idea of simply letting the rich have more of the nation’s wealth. In 2007, even before the Wall Street crash that required the unpopular TARP bailout, 56 percent of the public believed that the government should redistribute wealth by imposing taxes on the rich. (p. 50) But it’s not happening, not by a long shot.

One reason that the tax code has been all but gutted of progressivity is that the political and social counterweight of union membership has declined so much. Indeed, among private businesses it has all but collapsed. In 1947, in the wake of Franklin Roosevelt’s union-building policies, one in every three Americans was in a union. Today that figure is one in nine. But in the private sector it is even worse, at 7 per cent . (p. 56)

And as we have seen of late, the Koch brothers and other wealthy Americans are investing in politicians and policies with the intent to eliminate the last bastion of union membership, public sector unions.

Yet, historically speaking, unions have been a powerful balance to the power of corporate money in Washington. Unions were one of the few groups interested in things like health care, pensions and adequate pay, in other words the standard of living for average people. As the authors point out, it is no coincidence that as the influence of unions has waned, the upper classes have become a political juggernaut.

Again, Winner-Take-All Politics makes a telling comparison. This steep decline in U.S. union membership is not matched in other Westernized countries. For example, in Canada and the European Union, union membership has slipped very little in recent years.

And, the book points out that American public opinion isn’t onboard with the marginalizing of unions. In a 2005 poll, more than half of the respondents in the non-unionized private sector replied that they wanted to be in a union. In 1984, that number was 30 percent.

Reagan’s Union-busting

The authors note here the great public milestone in union-busting: Reagan’s firing of the air traffic controllers in 1981. But they also note that Reagan began to stack the National Labor Relations Board, which is supposed to assure fair play in union-company relations, with pro-management people. The NLRB then began to accept more company dodges to union organizing and reduced fines for abusive management tactics.

As a consequence, organizing in the private sector has become much more expensive for unions, one reason organizing has now spread more to the public sector, explaining why the Koch brothers are now taking aim there.

Another way that the corporate managers have weakened unions is with “right-to-work” laws passed by state governments, preventing “union shops” where all workers must join the union. By ensuring weaker unions with fewer dues-paying members, “right-to-work” states, especially in the South, have attracted businesses seeking cheaper and more compliant workers.

The bottom line for this three-decade-long “class war” has been the increasing disparity between what the average worker makes versus what the average CEO makes. In 1965, that CEO made 24 times what the worker made. Today, the CEO makes 300 times what the average worker makes.

And again, this huge disparity ratio is not prevalent in other countries, where unions have organized to monitor executive pay and pushed back against huge increases in compensation packages. (p. 65) In the United States, however, top executives have faced much less pressure against lavishly rewarding themselves with the help of friendly corporate board committees.

Another way companies have weakened American unions is by getting out of U.S. manufacturing and conducting domestic operations that have very little union influence. For example, in 1980, General Electric derived 90 percent of its profits from manufacturing. In 2007, GE got over 50 percent of its profits from its financial business, which was much more lucrative for managers since there was so little regulation as to what they could do and there was even less of it as time went by.

Making Money with Money

In the financial sector, potential rewards were staggering. For example, in 2002, a hedge fund manager had to make $30 million a year to be in the top 25 in his field. In 2005, just three years later, he had to make $130 million to be on that list. In 2007, just two more years later, the top 25 hedge fund managers averaged over $360 million a year.

That “greed-is-good” philosophy was driving the markets headlong into the crash of late 2007 and 2008 when the losses far exceeded profits of previous years. (p. 67) Just north of the U.S. border, Canada, with much stronger laws on real estate and stock market transactions, Canada did not endure anything like the economic meltdown in America. (p. 68)

Hacker and Pierson also address the corollary to the concentration of wealth in the United States, the concentration of political power that money makes possible.

The health of a nation’s democracy tracks closely to the distribution of wealth, a point that Walter Lippmann made in 1914 in his book Drift and Mastery, a book that was one of the hallmarks of the Progressive Era arguing that without a strong push-back to concentrations of wealth, society as a whole suffers and the quality of life declines.

Hacker and Pierson identify the political reform part of FDR’s New Deal as a model of reaction to a concentration of wealth and power, like what existed prior to the 1929 crash and helped cause it. (p. 88) This political reform program also strengthened the image of the Democratic Party among average people.

Roosevelt did not just look at the Great Depression as an economic collapse, but also as a political collapse, a failure of government to rein in the unmitigated greed of the upper classes. The authors call this understanding the politics of renewal, an approach that began to sprout in the Progressive Era of the early 20th Century and flowered from the New Deal and into the Kennedy-Johnson era of the 1960s.

But this recognition of government’s vital role in assuring a fair shake for the average American began to fade away amid the economic struggles of the 1970s and nearly disappeared under an avalanche of Reagan’s anti-government rhetoric of the 1980s. A resurgence of this reform movement has yet to emerge, even as the upper classes have looted the country.

Lost Opportunity 

The authors argue that Obama had the perfect opportunity to initiate such a renewal upon his election, but they imply that he failed to do it. I would be more forthright. I would say he utterly failed to do it. (p. 90)

Much of the rest of the book explores why there has been no politics of renewal to counteract the runaway upper classes. Though interesting, this part of the book is not as solid as the earlier sections. Hacker and Pierson are fine social scientists, but here they put on more of an historian’s hat and identify the rise of an invisible Third Party, consisting of giant lobbying houses that rose in the late Seventies, exemplified by Jack Abramoff’s influence-buying scandal.

As an historian myself, I found most of this useful but I disagreed with some of the analysis. For instance, the authors say that the imbalance between the upper classes and everyone else did not really begin with what most people consider the historical milestone of 1968, i.e. the assassination of Martin Luther King, then Robert F. Kennedy and the election of Richard Nixon. They chart the beginning as the famous letter by Lewis Powell in 1971 when the future Supreme Court justice told America’s corporate chieftains that the “American economic system is under broad attack” and that this attack demanded a response.

“Business must learn the lesson,” Powell wrote, “that political power is necessary; that such power must be assiduously cultivated; and that when necessary, it must be used aggressively and with determination –without embarrassment and without the reluctance which has been so characteristic of American business.” (p. 117)

The authors argue that Powell’s call to arms started a powerful march by business interests to establish PR centers in Washington and gave rise to the lobbying giants of today, what is now a $3 billion a year industry known as K Street. Powell wrote his memo apparently as a response to Ralph Nader’s then effective role as a consumer advocate behind Citizen Action.

Giant War Chests

As Corporate America built up its Washington army, the number of registered lobbyists grew from less than 500 in 1970 to over 2,500 in 1982. (p. 118) Huge business organizations also sprang up, like the Business Roundtable. (p. 120)

Labor unions found themselves outgunned in campaigns. An alliance between Big Business and Republican National Chairman Bill Brock (1976-1981) enabled the targeting of key Democratic members of Congress, especially in the South where Republicans exploited white resentment against desegregation and other programs aimed at helping disadvantaged blacks.

The business-oriented groups also began searching for more conservative Republicans to run against what they perceived as moderates.  Key figures in this phase were Richard Nixon’s Treasury Secretary William Simon and neoconservative war hawk Irving Kristol. Both highly combative, Simon came from the business world and Kristol from intellectual circles. In the same time frame, well-founded conservative think tanks emerged, like the American Enterprise Institute.

The first target of this new alliance was Jimmy Carter’s attempt to get a bill through Congress to make it easier to organize unions. It was defeated by a powerful political drive fronted by Sens. Richard Lugar, R-Indiana, and Orrin Hatch, R-Utah. Later, Carter’s tax bill was changed to reduce the capital gains tax rate from 48 percent to 28 percent. (pgs. 131-34)

Winner-Take-All Politics argues that the Democrats, rather than fighting this new system of organized money, chose to imitate the Republicans by joining in the money chase. That approach left the middle class even more an orphan of the political system. For instance, Rep. Tony Coelho, D-California, became the Democrat’s chief emissary in pursuit of Wall Street donations.

After Reagan’s 1984 landslide win over Walter Mondale, Democrats created the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), a think tank that sought to reposition the party in the “center” on defense and spending issues. The men who formed this group were largely southern Democrats who would soon dominate the party, including Rep. Dick Gephardt of Missouri, Sen. Al Gore of Tennessee, Gov. Bill Clinton of Arkansas, and Sen. Chuck Robb of Virginia.

What made the DLC’s influence even greater was the continuing decline in the size and influence of unions. Thus, Democrats began to support pro-business issues like “free trade” and NAFTA. In filling key government jobs, President Clinton turned to the same stable of Wall Street investment bankers that the Republicans traditionally relied upon, such as Goldman Sachs chairman Robert Rubin to be Treasury Secretary. The culminating image was probably Hillary Clinton’s service on the board of Wal-Mart. Angry voters at the polls might understandably think, “Who do we shoot?” (p. 286)

Meanwhile, other Democratic groups that sprang up focused on narrower issues, like EMILY’s List seeking to bolster the number of pro-choice women in elected government positions. These organizations contributed to a view of the Democratic Party that was becoming a collection of sub-groups promoting narrower issues, rather than a party predominantly fighting for the working and middle classes.

Pro-Business Democrats

With the Democratic Party redefining itself as more “pro-business,” Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas, a onetime-conservative-Democrat-turned-Republican, could pass one of the longtime heart-throb issues of the GOP, the effective repeal of the Glass-Steagall, a law from the New Deal that separated investment banking from commercial banking. The goal of Glass-Steagall was to ensure that if Wall Street crashed again, it would not take down the banks where small investors entrusted their money.

Amid the “boom” economy of the late 1990s, Gramm convinced majorities in Congress – and key economic advisers to President Clinton – that it was time to “modernize” American banking laws by jettisoning much of Glass-Steagall.

Then, Gramm went further. In 2000, he shepherded through the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which essentially freed up the creation and trading of derivatives from any kind of real regulation. Indeed, if any single bill caused the crash of 2008, it was this one. After leaving the Senate in 2002, Gramm and his wife then made millions of dollars as financial sector consultants and lobbyists. (p. 198)

This analysis by Hacker and Pierson is a useful one and has some truth to it. But I would disagree with any historical survey which discounts the effects of Richard Nixon on a disintegrating polity. For example, the authors make much of the GOP power base in the South, yet it was Nixon who fostered the Southern Strategy to attract working-class whites to the GOP through thinly veiled appeals to racial animosities. There was also the political polarization caused by the divisive Vietnam War.

I also would question any analysis that does not mention the Democratic drift under Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s. Party stalwarts like Arthur Schlesinger and Tip O’Neill found Carter’s lack of passion for traditional party ideals like full employment and universal health insurance problematic. In fact, that was why Sen. Ted Kennedy ran against Carter in 1980. Kennedy did not think such a colorless leader could galvanize the Democratic base enough to defeat an ideological candidate like Reagan.

The authors mention the assassinations of leading progressives but only briefly. However, wouldn’t the likes of King, RFK and Malcolm X have fought the corporate greed as it sought to take over the political system? At the time of his death in 1968, King was preparing the Poor People’s March on Washington. I also question the book’s failure to assess the impact of political smear specialists like Terry Dolan and NCPAC in clearing the way for Ronald Reagan’s 1980 victory.

What Next?

At the end in recommending a way back from the current catastrophe, Winner-Take-All Politics seems to suggest that Obama and the Democratic Party need to curtail the ability of elites to block progressive change (as in reforming the filibuster); to facilitate more participation at the ballot box (by increasing voter turnout); and to encourage development of middle-class groups (to energize the political process).

The last point has already been more or less accomplished through the rise of the liberal blogosphere, but the vehicle would remain the compromised Democratic Party.

I disagree with this limited agenda. One of the great opportunities that the blogosphere had when it arose at the beginning of the millennium was to create a new opening with a new political potency and a new way of raising money. But the choice was: Do we try to reform a Democratic Party that has been corrupted to the point that it is now GOP-Lite? Or do we back an alternative to the Democrats thereby putting pressure on them not to rush to the center?

People like Markos Moulitsas, Arianna Huffington and Jane Hamsher chose the former and so far the results have been meager, as far as I can see. In my view, the choice should have been the latter, an independent-minded movement that puts external pressure on the Democrats not to cave.

That would have been a real politics of renewal. And the platform could be informed by the first section of this book regarding the huge transfer of wealth from the middle to upper classes. In that way, this new movement or party would have preceded Occupy Wall Street, although as a more organized, less guerrilla-style uprising, though just as threatening to the entrenched classes.

Still, Winner-Take-All Politics explains what went wrong with America and it offers a persuasive diagnosis that can inform anyone who believes in the necessity of taking action toward rebuilding a strong middle-class democracy.

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Bob Kerrey

As you know, Bob Kerrey -- whom I've always liked -- is running for Senate in Nebraska. Until quite recently, nobody gave him much of a chance against Deb Fischer. But the latest poll puts Fisher ahead by only 48 to 45, and that means Kerrey is within the margin of error. He has a chance!

If you have a few bucks, consider a last-minute donation...

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Mitt's flips

Norm Coleman, acting as a Romney surrogate, has assured voters in Ohio that Mitt Romney would do nothing to overturn Roe-v-Wade.

Mitt Romney assures voters that he really loves FEMA and would do nothing to dismantle it -- despite his promises to do so during the primaries. 

Team Romney recently ran an ad in Ohio which tried to convince voters that Mitt would have saved GM.

How much lying can voters rationalize?

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After Sandy

Millions of people have no power, and our TV screens convey surreal images of flooded coastal towns. God only knows how they'll bring down that dangling crane in NYC. All our thoughts go toward those hit hard by this storm. Fortunately, there have been few casualties, thanks to advanced preparation.

Our household got through without a problem -- somewhat to my surprise. The only difficult part was trying to walk the dog...

Pastors and priests have told their flocks that Hurricane Sandy is God's punishment for gay marriage. The millions who believe that sort of thing will scoff if you suggest that man-made climate change might have helped create the Frankenstorm. That idea is just goofy.

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Strapped in! Plus: Around and about...

Well, Sandy hits tomorrow. (Update: Today. Yikes!) I have no idea if this home will have power. I'll be fine, but if you're the praying sort, offer up a few thoughts for the folks in the evac zones. And if you are in the path of the beast, heed these words.

Even if I'm rendered powerless, Cannonfire will feature guest posts uploaded by someone outside the impact area. So stay tuned!

Added note: The magnificent ship built for the under-appreciated Brando version of Mutiny on the Bounty is moored off of North Carolina. Alas, the ship has been taking on water, and 17 crewman have been rescued by the Coast Guard. Let's hope the HMS Bounty survives. (The original -- a smaller vessel -- met a fiery end many years ago.)

Update: The ship sunk, and two crew members are missing. Horrible news.

Right now, I still have power. And insomnia. So here are a few random observations about politics:

Barack Obama, a Human Devil: The Hurricane Sandy Conspiracy Theory is coming along nicely. This stuff is hilarious.

Romney hates FEMA: Mitt Romney said during the primary debates that he would shut down FEMA and shift it to the states. Of course, that move would force the states to raise sales taxes, which will hit working class people hardest. Romney also endorsed the Ryan budget, which would have destroyed FEMA. In this YouTube video, from a time when Mitt was trying to out-reactionary his rivals, he went so far as to say that disaster relief was immoral.

Would Obama be within his rights to plaster that piece of video all over the nation's airwaves during the final days of this election? Yes. The president's team would be foolish not to use Romney's words against him.

Unions: Did you know that unions are making a comeback in Canada? Did you know that Canada has weathered the worldwide recession better than we have? Did you know that a Canadian worker on the floor in a big-box store like Home Depot lives better than does a similar worker in the U.S.?

Will Sandy insure a loss of Virginia? As you know, I'm watching VA more closely than I'm watching OH. Politico argues that the hurricane could damage Obama's much-vaunted ground game:

If transportation and power are out in Virginia’s northern suburbs and coastal cities for more than a week, Obama could have a turnout problem on his hands — but his team would also have a week to adjust.

Maybe. But transpo is a serious issue, especially for seniors.

Will the right get worse if Obama wins? So says Frank Rich. But I don't agree. Our reactionaries were never more obnoxious than they were after George W. Bush's initial victory. Right-wingers are ignoble winners.

Remember "We're an empire now"? Remember "We are history's actors"? Remember Ann Coulter's claim that liberal critics of the war were in the pay of Saddam Hussein? Remember the people who -- on a daily basis -- accused you of "hating the troops" if you didn't support the invasion of Iraq? Remember Dick Cheney saying "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter"? Remember the calls to "physically intimidate" liberals?

Romney surged forward when he became Moderate Mitt in the first debate. After a Republican victory, there will be no need for a mask of moderation.

That Stoller piece: As many of you know, Matt Stoller published a piece in Salon arguing that a Mitt Romney victory would be better for progressives. Stoller is giving us the latest variant of an old argument that a certain type of prog has spewed since (at least) the 1970s: "The worst things get, the better things get...for The Cause. So root for the most vile right-wingers, because their victory will force the people to rebel."

Well, the country's been going further and further to the right for more than 40 years, and the only revolution I see a-brewin' is a fascist/libertarian one.

Scott Lemieux offers a good corrective to Stoller:

To its credit, the occasional inexplicable book-plugging interview aside Salon no longer promotes Camille Paglia. Alas, it is now fairly regularly publishing Matt Stoller, who is sort of Paglia but 1)with fewer references to Madonna and uses of the word “Dionysian,” and 2)less coherent.

…and, yes, the idea that throwing the election to Romney would be a good idea because opposition to awful policies is a worthwhile end in itself is insane.  By the same logic, we should have wanted Bush’s Social Security privatization plan to succeed, because that would have created even more opposition.

Mahablog takes this further:

I have always thought of Paglia as the Thomas Kinkade of philosophy, and I don’t think Stoller rises to that level. He’s possibly attempting to be the Glenn Beck of firebaggers, but he’s not flamboyant enough to pull that off.

In fairness to Stoller, I do think that it is important not to blind oneself to Obama's many failings. (Nobody can accuse me of such blindness.) But I also think that voting for the lesser or two evils is virtuous, especially if the "eviller" of the evils is really, really, really evil. The proper solution is to mount an truly progressive movement which will hector Obama from the left -- a task best left for the day after the election returns him to office.

You aren't going to get President Keynesian-of-Your-Dreams if there is no popular base for such a candidate. First comes the movement, then comes the man. Or, better, woman.

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Various: Hurricanes, polls, Obama-vs-Taibbi, crooked voting machines, conspiracies and more...

Batten down the hatches! That's what I'll be doing today in preparation for Hurricane Sandy. The idea of living on canned food for a week doesn't have much appeal, but the authorities tell us to stock up, so stock I shall.

If the grocery stores lose power, what will they do with the meat? They really ought to give it away...

At any rate, if this blog takes a hiatus, you'll know why.

Lest we forget... Arnold Scwarzenegger's governorship may not have been the disaster that many California liberals feared, but that fact should not blind us to the slimeball circumstances that allowed him to attain office. Jim DiEugenio, of Consortium News, has written a superb account of what really happened, as a corrective to Der Arnold's new book Total Recall (which might better be titled Selective Amnesia)...

The main culprit behind the phony crisis was Enron, the high-flying Houston-based energy-trading company which had been lobbying for a deregulated electricity market in California for years. In fact, in advance, Enron — which specialized in marketing natural gas – had purchased an electricity company on the West Coast, Portland Gas and Electric.

But the deregulation bill was not passed under Davis. It was passed under his predecessor, Republican Pete Wilson, a close friend and colleague of Schwarzenegger.

Very few people understood how a deregulated electricity market worked. But since Enron had helped engineer it, the company assigned an employee to find out how it could be rigged to make huge profits for out-of-state companies...

What happened in 2000-2001 was perhaps one of the most shocking and nauseating examples of private enterprise raping the common good in modern American history. The blackouts started in early 2000, that is the winter months, which should have been an indicator of how phony the blackouts were because in California much more electricity is consumed in the summer due to overuse of air conditioning.

And as many experts in the field have stated, the blackouts were never about a lack of power. As measured in megawatt-hours, California always generated more electricity than it consumed. The shortages were later revealed to be manmade.

At the time, if you dared to suggest in public that the shortages were man-made, respectable people made snickering references to tin-foil chapeaus. The Great Enron Energy Screw is the prime example of a conspiracy theory that turned out to be 100% true.

Speaking of conspiracy theories... You can write whatever you like about the JFK assassination and receive lots of publicity -- as long as you do not point to American intelligence as the culprit. You can blame the hit on Daffy Duck or Dobie Gillis or the Detroit Tigers, and no-one will insult you -- but if you point the finger at the CIA, there will be hell to pay.

Case in point: This new book, which offers yet another version of the KGB-diddit thesis, previously much beloved of Edward Epstein. (Epstein was a protegee of CIA counterespionage master James Jesus Angleton, whom I consider the actual mastermind of the assassination).

There's no evidence for this KGB nonsense, of course. Lee Harvey Oswald never had any left-wing friends or associates of any kind -- which is just one of many (many) indications that his "defection" was an intelligence ploy. (He wasn't alone. The CIA had set up a "fake defector" program in the 1950s.)

Obama vs Matt Taibbi. Here's an interesting exchange: President Obama engages Matt Taibbi in a "sort of" debate, via proxy. The topic: The Dodd/Frank regulations, which were designed to reign in the Wall Street abuses that created the 2008 mess.

Taibbi has argued that those regs are ridiculously insufficient. (Sure, they're better than anything Mitt Romney would ever sign, but that's not saying much.) In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Obama took pains to "correct" Taibbi's reportage.

Obama:

I've looked at some of Rolling Stone's articles that say, "This didn't go far enough, we didn't institute Glass-Steagall" and so forth, and I pushed my economic team very hard on some of those questions. But there is not evidence that having Glass-Steagall in place would somehow change the dynamic. Lehman Brothers wasn't a commercial bank, it was an investment bank. AIG wasn't an FDIC-insured bank, it was an insurance institution. So the problem in today's financial sector can't be solved simply by re-imposing models that were created in the 1930s.

Taibbi:

Now, it is true that Lehman Brothers was just an investment bank, and not one of those supermarket firms. But Lehman Brothers didn't cause the financial crisis all by itself (more on that in a moment). Moreover, many of the giant mega-merged companies that were spawned by Glass-Steagall did in fact play huge roles in the financial crisis.

For instance, President Obama failed to mention that the company whose merger was only made legal post-factum by Bill Clinton's repeal of Glass-Steagall – Citigroup – ultimately became the single largest recipient of federal bailout funds, taking in nearly half a trillion dollars in cash and guarantees, according to the Congressional Oversight Panel. Citigroup would almost certainly have gone under in 2008 without that massive $476 billion federal lifeline, and had Citi gone under, the impact would likely have dwarfed that of the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

Big problem here: Bill Clinton did not repeal Glass Steagall. Taibbi, brilliant as he is, keeps making this error, and it's really starting to bug me. How many times must I say it? Blame Phil Graham. Gramm created a bill which passed by a veto-proof majority.

Other than that, Taibbi makes sense.

But it's still odd that he would focus so intently on that one point, given that the president himself proposed and supported a sort of new version of Glass-Steagall, called the Volcker Rule. Almost all the pro-reform voices I know on Wall Street and in Washington liked the original version of the Volcker rule, and many would have been content to forget about Glass-Steagall forever had the original version of the Volcker Rule that President Obama himself supported actually made it through to become law.

But it didn't. Instead, the Volcker rule was gutted from within by members of both parties during the Dodd-Frank negotiations, and as we reported on several occasions, it was Geithner and the Obama administration that were particularly aggressive in scaling it back behind closed doors. That was what we criticized the president for – not so much for failing to reinstate Glass-Steagall, but for allowing his own policy proposal to be punched so full of holes that it would never be an effective law.

And that, friends, is the real history of the Obama administration. This presidency foundered because it repeatedly caved under pressure from Wall Street. Yet a ludicrous myth holds that the president is some sort of socialist.

The goddamned polls: Against my will, against my better judgment, against every instinct that yearns for psychological serenity, I'm going to spend much of this day watching the polls (including the scary electoral vote maps like this one and the less-scary maps like this one). You're going to do exactly the same thing, and don't try to convince me otherwise. We're all addicts right now -- pathetic, weak, helpless data-smack junkies -- and only the election (or a hurricane-induced power outage) can yank the needles out of our arms.

Right after this post, I'm hitting Electoral-Vote.com. Gimme some stuff, man.

The best news for Obama supporters is that the president has regained a lead in Virginia. I've been watching that state closely because, unlike everyone else, I take the "crooked Secretaries of State factor" into my calculations.

Most of the elections in swing states are run by scoundrels. They have proven their Republican bias by championing various attempts to keep blacks and Latinos from voting, and you can be damned certain that these rascals will do nothing to impede those who hope to rig the vote electronically. Of course, that kind of rigging must stay within certain limits, or the results will have no credibility. Obama must win Ohio by two points or more if he's going to win Ohio.

I am cautiously optimistic about Virginia's Janet Polarek. Yes, she's a Republican; nevertheless, I think she may have a conscience. Even though she owes her political career to Governor Bob McDonnell, whom I do not trust, I have hope that the voice of Jiminy Cricket will whisper in Janet's ear: "Do the right thing, Janet! Don't let anyone put his thumb on the scale, Janet! Always let your conscience be your guide, Janet!"

More on the Virginia vote: This story bodes ill. Even if Ms. Polarek is honest, she may not be able to stop the scoundrels from doing their dirty work.

The wireless technology is part of the AVS WinVote system, a touch screen voting machine used at 32 of Virginia’s polling localities, where more than a third of the swing state will cast ballots in November. To date, there have been no verified instances of hackers using wireless capabilities to influence the outcome of an election, but advocates – and many lawmakers – believe the potential for such malfeasance combined with the difficulty of verifying vote totals could undermine public confidence in elections.

Epstein, the computer scientist who helped draft the law and co-founded the advocacy group Virginia Verified Voting, testified that wireless technology would make it easier for hackers do more damage and go undetected.

“If you are attacking machines by physically going into a polling place, you have to do them one at a time, and there are opportunities to get caught,” Epstein said. ”Wirelessly you could affect all the machines in a polling place or in a precinct by driving from one location to the next.”

Here's the really freaky part...

The 2007 Virginia law entirely barred voting machines from communicating wirelessly. But with the presidential vote coming in 2008, election officials said the AVS WinVote machines were not able to function if the capability was shut off. Calls to reach Howard Van Pelt, CEO of Advanced Voting Solutions – the Frisco, Texas-based firm that sold the system, found the company’s listed number disconnected. Officials say the company has been non-operational for around four years.

Where did Howie go? And to whom do we complain if things go wrong? Who has the inside dope on how these machines work? Is the software code freely available? Do hackers have it?

According to this 2005 DU page, Howie and his partner at AVS (also called Shoup) were old Diebold hands. One reader's report is worth noting:

Their sales rep, Kimberlee Shoup-Yeahl, was at a Voting System Expo in Wilkes-Barre PA last summer and told me that as a Pollworker I would really like their system because, for example, I could take the machine out to a disabled voter's car (no matter that curbside voting is not legal in PA) and it can "beam the votes" back into the poll.

My own thought was, and still is, if I as a pollworker can beam votes into the poll, who else can???

Not to mention eavesdropping, radio interference, and radio jamming possibilties.

Oh yes, while Ms. Shoup-Yeahl was showing it to me, the WINvote crashed and she had to reboot it. Just for a second, I saw "Welcome to Windows" (I think XP) flash on the screen, so I asked, "oh... so this runs on Windows?" And she looked sort of sheepish and said, "Um yes...." And quickly added, "but we're porting it to Linux -- soon."

Yikes, this is one scary machine.

See also Brad Friedman's reportage here. And yet this thing continues to be used in Virginia.

Sandy isn't the only disaster poised to hit that state.

Speaking of Sandy: Did you know about the Great Hurricane Sandy Conspiracy Theory? The theory isn't fully-fledged yet, but if you want to see a paranoid meme in its gestative state, visit here and here and here.

About 2 weeks ago my mom called me to see if I had a bug out plan, which is interesting because we have never talked about anything like this. We have discussed politics, religion and various other issues, but nothing along the lines of "What do we do if the shit hits the fan?"

Her reasoning behind this is that her best friend of 37 years called her and said that her daughter and son-in-law were called into a private meeting on base regarding a probable evacuation scenario of the East Coast. (Son-in-law is in the Special Forces, apparently high up. I think the base was Ft. McPhearson in Georgia).

From what she said, the daughter and SIL where brought in and made to sign a non-disclosure agreement saying they would tell no one, under the penalty of treason, what they were told during the meeting. They were told that in 4-6 weeks (this was around 9/20) the East Coast would experience some type of disaster that would cause it to be under water. They were also told to make a go bag and be prepared to leave at a moments notice. 

So we're supposed to believe that people with no security clearances would be called into a high-level meeting at Conspiracy Central. Riiiiiiight. Personally, I think we'd get a more honest vote if Sandy knocked out the power grid and forced everyone to use paper ballots. And I see no reason why Barack Obama would want to depress the vote on the Eastern seaboard, which is his stronghold.

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Screw you, Moulitsas

After the crap they pulled in 2008, Daily Kos has no freakin' right to publish this.

I may consider Romney sufficiently loathesome to justify a vote for Obama this time around, but that doesn't mean I've forgotten or forgiven all those daily references to the "Bush-Clinton crme family." I won't forgive the false accusations of racism. I won't forgive the "doctored video" smear. I won't forgive the actual no-holds-barred death threats against Hillary. I won't forgive the fact that the beasts of Kos never apologized for this shit, which they published on an hourly basis.

I will not allow them to minimize or shrug off the atrocities they committed then. Right now, I am so filled with rage at the Kossacks and their inability to face up to their own vile behavior, that I am this close to asking readers to support Romney.

I will never -- ever -- get over it. The bastards have never apologized. The bastards have never apologized. The motherfucking arrogant smug Obot bastards on Kos never once had the decency to offer one single apology.

NEVER FORGET WHAT THEY SAID THROUGHOUT 2008:

    if hillary is elected we're gonna be stuck with whomever she picks as a running mate for the remainder of the term after she gets assasinated.

    Hillary is in this for her own personal power trip, and a sense of entitlement.

    Hillary's gonna lose you feminazi cunts. Do the math, it's over.

    Hillary is a liar and a cunt

    They're all crazy cunts,taze them all!!!!!!

    Cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt CUNT cunt cunt cunt CUNT cunt cunt cunt CUNT CUNT CUNT CUNT . . .

    Yo! Cunt!

    the Clinton's squirm and look like the reactionary idiots they are

    it is really the Bush/Clinton crime family.

    Serves you right for putting your faith in the Bush Clinton Crime Family.

    Maybe if Huffington Post existed in 1992 and Americans, especially ALL Democrats were able to understand who and what you are and represent, you would never have become our President. You, sir, are unquestionably, A DOUCHEBAG and a criminal one at that.

    Bush Clinton crime family must be eradicated.

    8 years of being sold out by a DINO clinton is more than enough.

    It has nothing to do with her being a woman, it has nothing to do with feminism, and everything to do with the clintonian, rovian campaign she ran and the damage she is still doing to the Democratic Party.

    I thought Vince Foster was on the Clinton Body Count list

    The Clinton death list

    The following is a partial list of deaths of persons connected to President Clinton during his tenure as Governor of Arkansas and/or while President of the United States and thereafter. Read the list and judge for yourself...

    Has Hillary ever denouced the bigots who support her?

    Her strategy is CLEARLY to try to amplify racial tensions so she can get more votes. Hillary = Palpatine.

    Not voting for Hillary is blatantly sexist. But voting for her because you just won't vote for a black man is not racist at all. Didn't you get the memo?

    Hillary is enabling racism which is why I could not vote for her. As a black person...it would be like voting for a Nazi sympathizer and apologist if I were a Jew. What amount of self-hatred would I have to have to do that?

    That racist block is the constituency that is keeping her fight alive.

    Barack is all about unity -- he talks about it all the time, so there's no question about whether he wants people who foster divisions associated with his campaign. The thing is, Barack doesn't SAY one thing and ACT in a way that doesn't fit what he said.

    Hillary proved that the White in American racism trumps the FEMaleness in Feminism.

    When the dirty dealing 'sack Barack attack' was launched in New Hampshire and got shifted into high gear in OHIO, Mr. and Mrs. Clinton went fishing in the waters of the KKK and the Aryan nation's pool of most eligibles. Feminism and the Fem movement were the least thing on their Wealthy, White, Elitist, little minds.

    President Elect Obama dose not need Hillary's Help

    Many of her later votes were Rush Limbaugh fans. Others were people voting for her simply because she was white. She played on both of these to the maximum extent possible.

    Her complicite votes, her silence, Her Campaign tactics all point to the fact they are nothing more then covert operatives for the Corps. Once I pulled Up a List of DLC members, I was able to decipher their coded agenda.... Honestly the Clintons cause me as much concern as do the Neo Cons.Their allegiences are the Same and their under handed tactics come from the same playbook (because they are One in the Same).

    She certainly has not been acting like a Democrat. Neither has her husband. I do think she'll try to pull a Lieberman.

    Hillary's supporters are not needed by Obama. He'll have enough votes without them. Those fat old poor white women can go pound salt.

    Yes, please join Rush and McCain asap. The train has left. Catch it.

    ...Message to the base: stay home.

    We can win without them - but only by realizing what is actually at stake, and redoubling our own efforts for grassroots fundraising, volunteering, and being steadfast about our candidate, and our campaign.

    "Do you believe Obama can become President without the votes of folks who support Hillary?"

    ABSOFUCKINGLUTELY!

    good riddance. You *should* leave the party. And people like you.

    good riddance to bad trash, as granny would say.

    The numbers of hysterical, crazed old females who have emotionally latched on to Hillary is simply a phenomenon that can't be denied. I don't know what is causing this but it's REAL and can't be swept under the rug. There's a BIG bunch of unhinged, old white females, far beyond self-embarrassment, who are acting like screeching Hags for Hill.

    Obama does not have a white problem, he has a backwater inbred ignorant racist appalachian hillbilly problem. And we can win without them.

    As for their “threats” not to vote for Obama; I say good rithens. Not only do I not care if these people come around to support Obama or not, I would rather these vile, narrow minded, perpetrators of hate associated with the Democratic party, or Barack Obama.

    I say F*ck 'Em. If they want to split the party and go their own way then more power to them. We don't need their sour grapes. Maybe the Puma's shouldn't be in the party anymore.

    Good bye, good luck, and good riddance.

    Good riddance. I'd prefer working on winning back the greens.

    We can win without them, and we ought to! These are the same voters (perhaps a generation removed) that Nixon's southern strategy, and Reagan announcement speech in philidelphia mississippi declaring a "return to local control", were dog-whistles too...

    These people are not Democrats they are Hillacrats. So I encourage them to vote McCain b/c with party members who are loyal to their candidate first and party second especially when that candidate has done as much as HRC and especially when that opponent is a Republican. We are better off without them, and I could care less who doesn't agree.

    Who cares if older white women stay home? Got news for you. With the coalition Obama has put together we can win without them.

    If they are complicit in assassination tallk by their candidate, who the hell wants their votes in the first place. We can win without them. I suspect not that many will go for McCain as they threaten with a new found power they think they have and if they do, the next book out will be entitled: What Is The Matter With Feminists?

    LEAVE the party and form your own party. I think that a third of the Hillary supporters will either leave the party or stay home in November which is, in the final analysis, good for the Democratic Party because it will “purge” the party of the fetters of conservatism/negativism that keeps the party in disarray.

    Hillary was never more than Bush in a dress, and her supporters were never more than the George Wallace / Joe Lieberman wing of the Party with a large dash of untreated menopausal psychosis.

    It's not about his supporters reaching out or being kind. Hopefully, we can win without them by making sure that we register as many new voters as possible..

    What would be the point of kissing azz for some old hags/bigots? Again, they will not vote for him under any circumstance. He can win without them!!

    Let’s let this voting bloc leave the party once and for all.

    we can win without them. I think Obama puts the Dems in that position.

    I don't see a "conspiracy theory" at all, just a nascent campaign to narrow party definition - the beginnings of a purge that some people would cheer.

    Obama will win AR, FL, MS, NC, and many other states in the South. That’s a fact. He can win states Hillary cannot when all those ‘agents of intolerance’ stay home.

    Hillary supporters, needless Democrats.

    We don't need Hillary's supporters! They can go on and vote for McCain!

    NO UNITY!!!

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The Polls

Sorry for the lack of posting. I've had to deal with some real-life unpleasantries -- including a malfunctioning computer. Right now, I'm on an old XP machine -- and y'know what? Better that than Windows 8.

The thing that really fries me about 8 is that there are some genuine improvements "under the hood," but we can't get at 'em without having to deal with all of that Metro crap. Well, we're not supposed to call it "Metro" anymore, so let's simply use the phrase "Those damn tiles." They'll probably work just fine on the new Surface touchscreen tablets, but on a traditional desktop -- no freakin' way.

My limited net surfing time has been spent watching the polls, the polls, the goddamned polls. Isn't that what everyone is doing right now?

 Hear the pundits with the polls-
                   Swing state polls!
   Now we all descend within uncomprehended holes!
          And you're shaking, aching, quaking
              As you slip through every site!
          Every lead's a single digit,
          Every swing can make you fidget
             With foreshadowings of fright.
                Is there time, time, time,
             To fend off the Randroid slime
   And to save entitlements from shooters on the knolls?
             Follow polls, polls, polls, polls,
                   Polls, polls, polls...
   And you'll shiver from each quiver of the polls.

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Signs

If you read the comments on right-wing sites, you'll often encounter people who cite "signage" as evidence that the pollsters have deliberately under-counted Romney supporters. "Everywhere I go, I see yard signs for Mitt Romney. You never see Obama signs around here." That's the kind of thing they say.

And they're right. 

I can't recall the last time I saw an Obama/Biden yard sign in or around Baltimore. Romney signs are relatively common. 

Yet everyone knows that Maryland is as blue as a suffocating Smurf.

Conclusion: The relative dearth of Democratic signage proves only that Dems don't dig signs. Personally, I would never use my car or home to advertise a candidate, just as I would never use my shirt to advertise a beer company or a sports organization.

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Don't blame (or credit) Gloria

This meme is really starting to bug me:

Gloria Allred’s ‘October Surprise’: Mitt Romney Lied Under Oath to Help Staples Founder Keep Money From Wife in Divorce?

It was never "Gloria Allred's" surprise. That notion began with Matt Drudge, who -- it is now clear -- hoped to sic the attack dogs on the wrong party. And now Fox News is leading the misinformation crusade.

The fight to unseal those court records is being waged by the Boston Globe. The newspaper started this, not the attorney. Allred is simply representing one of the parties in that divorce fight. As far as I can see, Allred has done nothing more than convey her client's assent to having those records revealed. Any number of other attorneys could have done likewise.

Anyone who starts blathering on about why he or she doesn't like Gloria Allred is trying to mislead you. Of course, right-wing propagandists would rather direct a rage campaign against a feminist lawyer than against a newspaper.

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Data dump on THAT divorce...

Wow. I didn't know that the divorce of Mitt Romney's pal Tom Stemberg was this ugly.

Multiple sources connected with the divorce tell TMZ ... during Tom's uber nasty divorce case with ex-wife Maureen, Mitt Romney gave a deposition and testified during the trial that Staples was worth virtually nothing. Romney testified that the company was worth very little and Tom was a dreamer and "the dream continues."

Romney characterized the Staples stock as "overvalued," adding, "I didn't place a great deal of credibility in the forecast of the company's future."

Partly as a result of Romney's testimony, Maureen got relatively little in the divorce, but we're told just weeks after the divorce ended, Romney and Tom went to Goldman Sachs and cashed in THEIR stock for a fortune.  Short story -- Romney allegedly lied to help his friend and screw the friend's wife over.

And there's more ...  Our sources say years later, Maureen, who suffered from MS and had multiple bouts with cancer, got a visit from one of Tom's guys, who gave her papers informing her that Tom was cancelling her health insurance.  Our sources say the irony here is that we're told Tom was working as one of then Governor Mitt Romney's chief health care advisers.

Sources tell us ... Tom also got custody of the couple's one child, making allegations of abuse against Maureen.   And get this ... in the mid-90s, after the divorce, Tom sent the boy a letter saying, although he loved him, because of issues related to the divorce "it will not be possible for you to be a part of our family for the foreseeable future."

Maureen lost her home in the process and struggled financially.

Am I inclined to believe this? Yes, but I'm hardly objective, since I "fell in hate" with Romney a long time ago. On the other hand, I never had anything against Staples. They stock a particular type of mechanical pencil I favor.

So far, it seems that Romney has gone on record saying that he has no objection to the unsealing of those records. Stemberg apparently does. Far be it from me to suggest that Romney and Stemberg have discussed how best to respond to this matter...

The liberal Taylor Marsh considers this a case of "swiftboating." I cannot agree. Perjury is a serious accusation, and even an old charge of perjury speaks to character. The infamous "forced haircut" bullying episode occurred during Mitt Romney's school days, yet the incident remains a legitimate topic of discussion.

Mother Jones focuses on the film that Maureen tried to make some years ago:

It seems that Maureen Sullivan Stemberg has been trying to get her story told—including the Romney angle—for several years. Four years ago, Dragon-Lion Media, a movie production company based outside of Los Angeles, announced it was making a documentary about her, with her cooperation. It issued a press release noting that this "first-time tell all tale of the interweaving relationships and strange bedfellow[s]" in her life would feature Romney, without specifying what role he would play. But Edmund Druilhet, the founder and CEO of Dragon-Lion Media, tells Mother Jones that Stemberg had discussed with him her belief that Romney had testified falsely to help Tom Stemberg during the trial. "She told me all about that," he says. And Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti, who was tapped to be the writer on the documentary, says that when she was working with Maureen Sullivan Stemberg she read the Romney testimony and that Romney on the stand said that Staples at that time was just "a dream," and that stock in the company was not worth much. "That really stood out to me," Ranson-Polizzotti recalls. Maureen, according to Ranson-Polizzotti, firmly believed that Romney had lied on the stand to benefit her ex-husband.

AP's write-up includes a paragraph I don't understand...

"You have expert testimony about an investment that a presidential candidate made," Globe attorney Jonathan Albano told Judge Jennifer Ulwick on Wednesday. He said the public has a right to know what Romney said. Allred disputed the contention that Romney testified as an expert.

Why would she dispute that? Isn't it against the interest of Allred's client to dispute that Romney testified in his capacity as an expert witness? How could he not be an expert witness?

Also, I don't understand this news account...

The Globe is seeking only Romney’s testimony, which he delivered in June 1991.

Previous accounts have stated that Romney gave his testimony during divorce proceedings in 1988, before the public offering in 1989. The 1991 date doesn't make sense. Surely, after 1989, Maureen had a good idea what that stock was worth? Or are we talking about a later trial? Maureen hired a famed divorce lawyer named Monroe Inker to try to undo the damage done previously...

Obviously, there's a lot going on here that journalists have not yet clarified. We need a full, comprehensible linear narrative.

This much is obvious: If Mitt Romney really did say on the stand in 1988 that Staples was just "a dream," then one must ask why Bain maintained its investment.

Right-wing commenters are, predictably, going after Gloria Allred. Actually, the party seeking to unseal the records is the Boston Globe; Allred simply represents the interests of Maureen Sullivan Stemberg. Allred's background -- whether you admire it or despise it -- is not relevant.

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In praise of old tech

(Normally, this blog publishes non-political posts on the weekends. But we all need a break from this endless election, don't we? Besides, the big Donald Trump revelation turns out to be crap.)

Even if I had the money, I wouldn't buy the new ultra-thin iMac, cool as it looks. No, if I had the dough to upgrade, I'd put together the video editing system of my dreams -- and the whole thing probably wouldn't cost much more than a grand.

One thing's for sure: That dream system would have an optical drive, something the new iMac lacks. Alas, the designers of many new systems sneer at those old DVDs or CDs. Those shiny silver disks, once considered the Jungian archetype of high-tech hipness, are now viewed as close kin to 8-track tapes. They're ancient. Useless.

Or are they?

The DVD remains the best storage medium for a class of data that doesn't yet have an agreed-upon nomenclature. I call it "maybe-data" -- stuff you may or may not want to use at some point in the future. Even if you're 90% sure you'll never again want to see that maybe-data, that 10% of doubt keeps you from consigning the stuff to cyber-history. 

Being a Photoshop artist, most of my work files fall into the maybe-data category. A project may go through twenty or thirty iterations before reaching the final stage. That can add up to a whole bunch of gigs, just to reach a final 70mb PSD file. 

I don't want all of that stuff on my hard drives -- but at the same time, I feel queasy about tossing it all into the Recycle bin.

You probably have a lot of maybe-data clogging up your system right now. Raw video files from your camcorder. Back-up copies of your family photo album or your music. How about that rare old BBC documentary you downloaded from YouTube? You can't be sure that it'll stay on YouTube forever...

The cheapest, most reliable place to dump your maybe-data is the trusty old DVD. If you shop carefully, you can pick up a spindle of 50 DVDs for ten or twelve bucks. That comes to...what, maybe 225 gigabytes of storage. For ten or twelve bucks. You can't pick up a 200 gig hard drive for that kind of money.

True, a spindle of DVDs takes up a certain amount of physical space. But so what? You can put three of 'em in a shoebox and store that box under your bed. Problem solved. 

How long will your maybe-data last? If you don't mistreat the disks, quite a few years. 

I'm turning into a bit of a Luddite when it comes to computer tech: Much-ballyhooed improvements don't impress me as much as they impress others. 

Impoverished as I am, I own an iPad, given to me as partial payment for a project. It's a great deal of fun, and very useful when traveling. But it's not a real computer. It's a book-reading device and a games machine, with more-or-less functional internet capability. That's all very cool, but don't tell me that this thing is a computer. 

The new Microsoft Surface seems intriguing, but only in its pricey Pro variant. Windows RT doesn't seem like anything I'd want to wrestle with.

No, to me a real computer is a tower. A tower with big fans and proper airflow and at least 8 GB of Ram and four or five or more hard drives of various sizes. And two monitors. 

A real computer is something I put together myself.

And until someone comes up with a better way to store maybe-data, it'll have an internal optical drive. 

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Scandals! (IMPORTANT UPDATE)

Supposedly, Donald Trump's big "reveal" tomorrow will be that Michele Obama once filed for divorce because the marriage had hit a rough spot after Obama's failed run for a House seat. See here and here and here.

Even if this is true, I don't think it will amount to anything.

The Allred thing: Meanwhile, we now have a pretty good idea as to what Gloria Allred may or may not have on Mitt Romney. It's another divorce story.

The divorce was between Staples co-founder Tom Stemberg and his first wife Maureen. We're told the divorce battle lasted for years and was extremely ugly.

Sources tell us Romney gave both a deposition in the divorce and testified in the trial. According to our sources, the Boston Globe got a tip that there was "juicy information about Romney" in the sealed documents.

Romney, Stemberg and Maureen were all served papers by the Globe notifying them that the paper was trying to unseal the case and lift the gag order enforced on all parties.
According to an article in the Boston Globe in 2005, Maureen received nearly 500,000 shares of Staples stock in the divorce ... but sold her shares before the company went public.

Presumably, Allred represents Maureen.

This is all very droll, but until we learn more about this "juicy information," I don't see how any of this can impact the election. Still...intriguing. For more on Romney's history with Stemberg, see this piece by David Stockman, then go here and here. (SEE UPDATE BELOW!)

One final scandal: An unnamed source approached Republican party leaders with a story about Barack Obama selling cocaine during his college years. The source claims that he saw this personally. He also claims that he has other dirt on other Dems. The fact that the Republicans decided not to pursue this man's allegations tells me all I need to know about his credibility.

UPDATE:  Now I understand why the Maureen Sullivan Stemberg story could hurt Mitt. See here and here and here. (This is all best understood in light of the Vanity Fair piece here.)

The Stemberg divorce occurred in 1988. At the time, Romney (and Bain) had been in business with Stemberg for two years, getting Staples off the ground. See here:

In prepared remarks released by the Republican National Convention, Stemberg describes Romney as an extraordinary financial backer: “Mitt was not a typical investor. He was a true partner...."

In 1988, Staples was a company with a lot of potential, and Romney was in the thick of things. Obviously, Romney believed in the firm, or Bain would not have invested in it so heavily. And yet, during the divorce proceedings, Mitt Romney argued in court that Maureen's shares were highly over-valued.

It was about a year and half later later, in 1988 when called as a witness by Tom Stemberg’s lawyers for a divorce case that Romney said on record that Staples stock was, essentially, “over-valued. In his own-words, Romney said, “I didn’t place a great deal of credibility in the forecast of the company’s future.” (p. 441, appeals court document No. 95 P 286, Norfolk County) Romney is then asked how many times in the past he has “reviewed these kinds of offerings” (441).  Yet in the early Spring of 1989 Staples went public..

Most stories about the divorce leave out the key facts: Based on Mitt Romney's "over-valued" remarks, Maureen sold a large portion of her shares back to her former husband. She was paid $2.25 a share. But when the public offering occurred one year later, she learned that her shares were not "over-valued." In fact, she could have made a great deal more money -- $19 dollars a share.

Feeling betrayed, Maureen hired a well-known divorce lawyer named Monroe Inker to attain restitution. He failed. She then sued Inker for malpractice and lost.

This site dismisses Maureen's claims on the grounds that she has a strongly pro-Obama internet history. But it is very clear that her problems with Romney occurred long before Obama became a politician.

All of that said, I don't see how perjury can be proven. On a personal level, I'm quite willing to believe that Mitt lied to benefit his friend and business partner -- if only because the debates have shown us so many examples of Mitt's mendacity. But a personal belief is not courtroom-quality proof. If there is hard evidence demonstrating perjury, why didn't Monroe Inker find it?

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Can't we all just vote today and have done with it?

This diseased warthog of an election can't end fast enough. Two more weeks is intolerable. Each waking hour, I feel compelled to seek out stories like this one by Nate Silver. Great work -- yet it churns my stomach. We're all sick of polls and analyses of polls and the spinning of polls and the criticizing of polls and the chewing of polls and the spitting of polls and the dissection of polls and the pallor of polls and the putrescence of polls. We're sick of the people who say that polls are paramount and of the people who say that polls don't matter.

I'm actually looking forward to whatever rabbits Donald Trump and/or Gloria Allred may pull out of their hats. At least they won't talk about polls.

Odd thing...it's hard to find any writer, right or left, who believes that The Donald has made a serious discovery. I predict that his announcement will shake the nation to its core. Lightning will flash and statues will bleed and newborn infants will recite from the Kalevala in Finnish. Why do I say such things? Because nobody else is saying such things and I want to be different.

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The debate, the chart, and the vote

I'm feeling rather good about last night's debate. Romney's constant attempts to revert to domestic topics seemed desperate. On foreign policy, he couldn't really differentiate himself from Obama without attacking from the left -- drone policy, kill lists and so forth. The phrase "horses and bayonets" was a slight error, since bayonets are still used. ("Cannonballs" might have served better.)

I'm not sure whether I'll make a video about this one. Mitt did tell quite a few whoppers.

ThinkProgress supplies a chart which tells you all you need to know about Mitt Romney's domestic and foreign policy...

Nuff said, as Stan Lee used to say.

I have one problem with ThinkProgress: This story, titled "Why Romney Isn’t Rigging Voting Machines." The article slams the work of Brad Friedman and Truthout without offering any real counter-argument. Instead, we get this:

The rigged machines myth is not only distracting, but harms the effort to get out the vote.... Spreading the myth that the system is so corrupt that these votes don’t matter tells voters they may as well sit out the election.

Neither Friedman nor Truthout has ever discouraged voting. Quite the contrary. The best way to encourage a higher turnout is to make sure that the vote is clean, and you can't accomplish that goal by imitating the ostrich.

Writer Aviva Shen argues that any focus on the possibility of rigged machines might distract from the other well-known and much-discussed tactics Republicans have used to dissuade Democrats from voting. But Friedman and Truthout have spoken about those other problems tirelessly -- as Aviva Shen has not.

Shen correctly notes that the Hart Intercivic machines are being used in just two counties in Ohio. But those are two key counties -- and over the past eight years, questions have been raised about all manufacturers of these devices. See (to cite but one recent example) this fine piece by Bob Fitrakis and Gerry Bello:

The Free Press has previously reported, Scytl, a Barcelona based e-voting company will be counting votes in 26 states. They will be doing so through something called the Federal Overseas Voting Program or FVAP. FVAP is a program designed to allow military personnel and other overseas Americans to vote in their home districts seamlessly through electronically delivered absentee ballots.

Intercepting and changing these ballots, as well as voting electronically on behalf of service people that have no idea such a thing is happening, is something that Scytl is uniquely positioned to do because of their cellphone spyware sister company, CarrierIQ. These stolen votes, distributed throughout jurisdictions across the country, could become a critical component of any scheme to defraud the 2012 presidential election. By means of changing a relatively small number of votes, and laundering those stolen votes in the correct places, the net effect would be a near silent theft.

Sources at Smartech, the company responsible for stealing the election in Ohio in 2004, revealed to Free Press journalist Jill Simpson that the next man in the middle attack would be launched by Scytl from its US headquarters, a location in suburban Virginia that was formerly owned by its managing director, Hugh Gallagher, and seems to serve as his private home.

The day after Fitrakis published this information, the company relocated to a "virtual" address located in Baltimore -- 400 East Pratt Street, very near the Barnes & Noble where I like to hang out.

Brad Friedman's excellent response is here.

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