The Morning Line – Pulling Up the Ladder of Success

8/2/2013 11:02 AM

Writing’s been sparse. My nose hates me right now. But I’m still reading the news, and here’s what I see:

America has given up on the old American Dream. The new American Dream is “I got mine, and will now pay lobbyists to eliminate that path to success.” Granted, it’s not catchy, (I’m working on it) but it’s the frame that reality seems to fit.

Specifically, people who aren’t already successful, and don’t already own homes, are being actively screwed by the current system, whether they’re poor, or immigrants, or students, or “lower middle class” or some combination thereof. Most of the screwing is coming from the right, but, sad to say, the left has often participated, as in the removal of credit card debt from debts that can be discharged through bankruptcy.  

Here are the high (low?) points:

Good paying manufacturing jobs are gone, and the Republicans are doing their best to make the few public service jobs that are left, like police and fire and teachers, more insecure and less valuable every day.

To get a good job in the private sector,  you need, at minimum, a college degree, maybe even an MBA. By the time that’s over, even at a public university, most students are more in debt than their parents ever were when they bought  a house.  So students’ll take whatever job, at whatever wage, to try to pay off that loan. Which suppresses wages in the private market, continuing to increase the profit margins for the companies they go to work for.

Meanwhile, because of these loans, and these crap wages, a lot of these students can’t afford to move out of their parents homes. 36% of folks ages 18 – 31 are living with their parents, an all-time high.

By the way, did I call them student loans? They’re actually indenture contracts: they cannot be forgiven, they cannot be discharged in bankruptcy, they do not count towards your credit rating (although failing to pay them counts against,) and they cannot be renegotiated to different, more favorable terms.

Meanwhile, as I mentioned before, a lot of low-income people can’t get bank accounts. I didn’t say “don't”, I said “can't”. On the up-side, the New York state Attorney General, Eric Schneiderman, has opened an inquiry into this (mostly as a result of the story in the NY Times), but who knows when any of these folks will be able to join the land of the financially-recognized?

And regardless of whether it’s a job or a credit card, your rights as a worker or a consumer are pretty much gone. You are required to sign a contract to get the job, the credit card or the cell phone, and that contract includes signing away your right to sue. Arbitration, rather than court, is the only place where most disputes can be brought these days. And since the corporations pay for the arbitrators, guess who always wins. 

PS: The Supreme (Republican) Court recently ruled that these agreements prevent class-action suits, so even if 50,000 people figure out a company is overcharging, they each have to go to arbitration alone. Because no lawyer will take a case over a couple hundred dollars. Meanwhile, having cheated 50,000 people out of $200, the company reaps $10 million in illegal gains. Who says the game’s not rigged?

While actual Consumer Prices have remained almost flat for the last few years, (look it up,) the asset investments needed to get ahead in America have gone through the roof: Education and Health Care, which are investments in self, and Housing, which is a ‘real’, leverageable investment. These have rapidly moved beyond the reach of the entire middle class, resulting in devastating inequalities, to the extent that America no longer leads in upward mobility, but actually has almost no upward mobility anymore, only marginally more than Mexico and Turkey.

And what little that can be done to turn this around is fought tooth-and-nail by the Republicans and their corporate masters. While several states (including California and New York, two of the biggest) have announced lower group rates for individuals and small employers, as a result of  ObamaCare’s health insurance reform , the House Republicans yesterday voted for the 40^th time to defund ObamaCare.  And GOP party leadership announced that they would refuse to fund the federal government at all, to prevent a single dollar of health care support to be spent on ObamaCare.

Republicans have no plan to help Americans with health care costs, the number one cause for personal bankruptcy. They’re more than happy to see you bankrupt, still owing for your student loans and the credit card debts you ran up to pay for your child’s illness or injury.  That way, you’ll be willing to work for slave wages. Haven’t you heard, the fast-food workers are walking out ? The companies will need these indentured college grads to be scabs and cross those picket lines.

8/2/2013 12:25 PM Gotta go pick up my niece at LAX

8/2/2013 3:16 PM

So what to do about all this? Well, get politically active, get engaged, get out there and vote for better representatives in government.

Which is why the same people are working so hard to make the lower middle class, the poor, the students and all non-white citizens unable to vote. Especially since they got the Voting Rights Act overturned.

“Voting Rights? You don’t need no sticking Voting Rights.”

Depressing enough. Need a palette cleanser? Something to remind you of the goodness in people (current GOP leadership excepted)? Here’s a sports figure obituary. No, really. Read this.

8/2/2013 3:30 PM

8/2/2013 3:40 PM

The Filibuster, Redistricting and Breadlines: The Long Game

To start with, I called 'no filibuster change' back on January 4th.
I can prove it: I called it in the to the Randi Rhodes radio show. (She even mentioned it on yesterday's show.) Not that I wasn't calling my electeds,  asking for a repeal of the 1975 filibuster change that made it so that the majority had to prove it had 60 votes, rather than the old, conservative version, that had the minority having to prove it had 41 votes. This is what Norm Ornstein at AEI recommended. (Look him up.)

But there was only one thing Reid could have offered to get McConnell not to give Reid the big F-U and filibuster Obama's tax deal: no real filibuster reform.

When Reid started playing with the Senate calendar, claiming that the first day of the session, Jan 3rd, hadn't actually ended by the time the Jan 4th workday was over in Washington, I was pretty sure of what was coming.

And I was right.

With the other political news that's been coming this month, I think I'm glad, too. After all, we're gonna need the filibuster after the GOP gets the House, the Senate and the White House back by 2016's elections.

Here's why, and how.
1) The House is GOP-owned now, and is stopping almost every initiative the Dems and Obama want to enact. And if you think they capitulated on the debt ceiling, you haven't read this. They capitulated alright, to Grover Norquist.

2) The 2014 election is going to suck for Dems. In the House, Republican-run states are re-redistricting (that's not a typo), while in the Senate, there are even more Dem seats to defend, in even redder states, than there were in 2012.

And that was with all the Obamaniacs coming out to vote this year. But we've seen how well they show up for the mid-terms, haven't we? 2010 is how we ended up in this f-ing mess.

So when 2015 rolls around, after the next mid-terms, the GOP will be running both the House and Senate, both full of GOP drones voting on strict leadership lines, running the GOP's cut-taxes, cut-services, cut-enforcement playbook.

At least we'll still have Obama to veto stuff, and the GOP won't have two-thirds of either house, so it won't be able to override his vetoes.

But that's only for his last two years. Then the shit hits the fan.

3) I've written here before about the GOP plan to change the way presidents get Electoral votes, rather than actually face up to the demographic changes that let Obama give Romney a 5-million-vote ass-kicking in November. There's absolutely nothing unconstitutional about their plan, since it's how Nebraska and Maine have done it for years, at least for the votes related to a state's House seats. The new filip is the allocation of the votes related to a state's Senate seats: these would no longer go to the candidate who won the state's popular vote, but to the candidate who won the most congressional districts in the state, which the Republican legislatures in these states can draw and redraw pretty much at will, to assure that majority.

When I wrote that piece above, a good friend recommended I stop scaring people. Now that this plan is common news, I don't see the point. 2016 is going to be a real shitstorm.

Remember, the Supreme Court said it was fine that Tom DeLay redistricted Texas twice after the 2000 Census, in 2001 and 2003, that second time giving 'W' the only House gains he got during his 'landslide' in 2004. Why not as many times as the GOP wants, in as many states as it they own?

And as long as the redistricting makes sure blacks and hispanics have a few districts that will elect them, the ever-so-pliant Supreme Court will give these new redistricting plans a pass, and screw the Voting Rights Act.

So 2016 stands a real good chance of the Dems winning a thin majority of the popular vote, and the GOP getting a huge majority of the Electoral votes. That's if Dems run a candidate with the same party support they gave Gore and then Kerry. Which is, not much.

But if Hillary runs, giving all her supporters from 2008 a second bite at the apple, and giving most of the Obamaniacs the excuse to vote for a 'third term for Obama' through his first Secretary of State, Dems could win by a margin even larger than the 2012 spread.

And still lose the Electoral College by a huge amount.

At which point we may find out how many of those "law-abiding gun owners" are willing to stand up for the framers of the Constitution, or for the GOP. And it's gonna be ugly.
REAL ugly.  

There was a way out of this, back when we'd seen how the GOP ran elections (2000) and how they would redistrict again and again (Texas 2003) to gain any advantage. Screw the future, says the GOP, we'll take whatever advantage we can get, right-damned-NOW. A way out of this, back when Dems had the House, the Senate, and the White House. That golden filibuster-proof 42-day period back in 2009, after Franken was finally declared the winner but before Teddy died.
But we wasted it doing ObamaCare. (That's snark, for those who care.)

Our Constitution gave us a way out, in Article I, sxn 4, saying "The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Place of Chusing Senators."

See that? "...but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations." This clause underpins the Voting Rights Act of 1965, as well as the Help America Vote Act of 2002.  Each fulfilling its intention, by helping or hindering American voters, by the Democrats and the Republicans, respectively.

Congress could have regulated how ALL states draw their Congressional districts to prevent this crap, and could have specified how often it could be done (like maybe 'ONCE as soon as practicable after each Census'), and could have specified that all Electoral votes go to the winner of a state's popular vote. All possible. All by simply writing into law the two-centuries-old customs of the United States.

Not a chance now.

There will be a steady string of Republican presidents who lose the popular vote but take the White House anyway, with those Republican-run state legislatures successfully fending off the 'popular vote' initiatives already passed by several states, and the Supreme Court continuing to point out that it's all Constitutional, even if it's nowhere near how the Founders intended our government to run. And with those Republican presidents appointing 40-year-old party faithfuls as replacements for Ginsberg and Stevens, the split on the Supreme Court will become 7 - 2 for decades, ruling against citizens, and in favor of the GOP and their corporate owners.

The only weapon the Democrats will have at the national level will be the Filibuster. And someone not afraid to use it just as often as the GOP does now.

But that won't last, because the GOP leadership has proven it won't be squeamish about changing any rules, including nuking the filibuster, once it's back in the majority in the Senate. So the filibuster will last until the first session of the 115th Congress, Jan 3rd, 2017, when the Republicans have all three houses: Senate, Representatives and the White one up at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

I do see how the Democrats will eventually get back into majorities at the federal and state levels.
And back into the White House.

But your children aren't going to enjoy those bread lines.

Kobayashi-Maru Lesson May Make Obama The Last Democratic President

I did a little analysis last November on the election we've just been through. I showed it to a friend, who read it over twice, and then made me promise not to mention to anyone. But now that Rachel Maddow used it as her last piece on tonight's show, I thought I'd add my own take.

While in Star Fleet Academy, the future Captain Kirk, as a student, was faced with a tactical problem which had no solution. Instead of failing as other students always did, he solved the problem by changing the rules. The problem is known as the Kobayashi-Maru test.

The GOP is facing its own Kobayashi-Maru. Women hate them, non-whites despise them, the young have no use for them, the 99% voted against them, and then there are the gays. Every growing demographic in America is voting against them, overwhelming the dwindling aging uneducated white male vote. It is an unwinnable test, since the GOP is unable to change who it hates.

But the GOP has learned to change the rules in order to pass the test. They intend to change how we elect our president.
Barack Obama may be the last Democrat in the White House for thirty years.

And you fuckers staying home in the 2010 election cycle, electing the people who would redistrict the nation after the 2010 Census, will be remembered long after Obama is a footnote.

The results of the 2010 elections, and somewhat in 2012, were that Republicans now completely own and operate the governments of several states that vote blue statewide, but vote Republican in the rural areas. So several of these states are now working to pass laws to change how they hand out Electoral votes:

Instead of the winner of the state's popular vote winning the state's electoral votes, the state will give them out by number of Congressional districts a candidate wins in the state. And since Republicants in these states draw the districts, they can tilt the balance.

Can't happen? Nebraska and Maine already do it. Have for years.
But as long as the Republicants are doing this, they might go for broke, and assign the two Electoral votes each state has for its Senators on the basis of which candidate won the most districts, not the most votes statewide.

Doing this in states that are reliably Red, like Utah or Alabama, might actually give a Democrat an Electoral vote for the district that holds their biggest city, where most Dems are. So they won't do it there.

They'll do it in states that they hold, but which usually, or occasionally, go Democratic. They tried in Virginia in 2011, and in Pennsylvania in 2007. And they lost the White House the next year both times. Republicants may always be wrong, but they're always persistent, too.

Here's the math for the Big Five I expect to do this before 2016. They all went for Obama in 2012.

                           Votes      CDs       Rep-Dem split

Wisconsin           10           8             5 - 3      

Florida                29           27           17 - 10  

Ohio                     18           16           12 - 4    

Michigan             16           14           9 - 5      

Pennsylvania     20           18           13 – 5  

(Votes is total Electoral Votes, CDs is Congressional Districts, R-D Split is how many CDs went for each party in 2012.)

And the result of using this new rule, handing out all Electoral votes in these five states by these new rules, if they'd been in place in 2012? 

56 CD-based Electoral Votes + 10 Senate-based Electoral Votes = 66 votes change from Democrats to Republicants, 

and the 332-206 Electoral landslide for Obama

becomes a 272-266 squeaker for President Romney

No shit. And don't think they won't try it. They're already briefing it at the RNC in Washington. And Obama may be the last Democratic president in my lifetime.