AMERICAN FUTURE

Thanks to the Supreme Court, their chances have improved.

After noting that just two dozen or so individuals, couples and companies have given more than 80 percent of the money collected by SuperPACs, the New York Times delves into the backgound of three of the biggest contributors:

¶Harold Simmons, a billionaire corporate raider, has given $1 million to Mr. Gingrich’s political action committee, $1.1 million to Rick Perry’s PAC, $100,000 to Mitt Romney’s PAC, and $10 million to American Crossroads, the super PAC advised by Karl Rove that is supporting many Republican candidates. Mr. Simmons’s companies make metals, paints and chemicals, among other things, and have gotten into trouble over lead and uranium emissions from previous decades. He also runs a radioactive waste dump in Texas that has clashed with environmental regulators over its proximity to a nearby aquifer. He controls Waste Control Specialists, which has contracts to clean up federal hazardous waste sites, including emissions from other companies he controls.

¶Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal and an outspoken libertarian, gave $2.6 million to Ron Paul’s PAC. In 2009, he wrote that the 1920s were the last decade when one could be optimistic about American politics, lamenting the subsequent rise of the welfare state that he blamed in part on giving women the right to vote.

¶Foster Friess, who gave $1 million to Rick Santorum’s Red White and Blue PAC, is a mutual fund manager who recently declared that aspirin used to be an effective contraceptive when women put it between their knees. He is a former president of the Council for National Policy, a secretive club of some of the country’s most powerful conservatives, which opposes unions, same-sex marriage and government regulation.

“We went into a recession in 2008. People forget why. They thought it was a housing bubble. The housing bubble was caused because of a dramatic spike in energy prices that caused the housing bubble to burst. People had to pay so much money to air condition and heat their homes or pay for gasoline that they couldn’t pay their mortgage.”

No kidding — he actually said this while campaigning in Colorado.

He also said science has been hijacked by politicians on the left, and that climate change is

“an absolute travesty of scientific research that was motivated by those who, in my opinion, saw this as an opportunity to create a panic and a crisis for government to be able to step in and even more greatly control your life. I for one never bought the hoax. I for one understand just from science that there are one hundred factors that influence the climate. To suggest that one minor factor of which man’s contribution is a minor factor in the minor factor is the determining ingredient in the sauce that affects the entire global warming and cooling is just absurd on its face. And yet we have politicians running to the ramparts — unfortunately politicians who happen to be running for the Republican nomination for president — who bought into man-made global warming and bought into cap and trade.”

While Santorum isn’t alone in asserting that human activity has next to nothing to do with climate change, his analysis of why the housing bubble burst is, as far as I know, unique. As I can’t think of any political reason for him to make this assertion, I conclude that this is what he actually believes. Should he become president, his economic policies would, therefore, likely be — how shall I put it? — unique.

Just in case, make sure your passport won’t expire before election day. It would be better to live in a country whose head of state doesn’t reside in an economic fantasyland (apologies to Disneyland).

“[President Obama is] telling the country that simply getting re-elected is bigger than standing on principle.”

The above is the concluding sentence of a New York Times editorial criticizing Mr. Obama for deciding to take super-PAC money. In an ideal world, of course, there wouldn’t be any of these Supreme Court-created monsters threatening our democracy. But that’s not the world we live in.

Here’s the rest of the editorial:

Two years ago, while delivering his State of the Union address, President Obama looked the Supreme Court justices in the face and told them they were wrong to have allowed special interests to spend without limits on campaigns. “I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests,” he said. “They should be decided by the American people.”

On Monday, the president abandoned that fundamental principle and gave in to the culture of the Citizens United decision that he once denounced as a “threat to our democracy.”

His aides announced that the Obama campaign would begin to assist the “super PAC” that can raise and spend unlimited sums to support the president’s re-election effort. Even White House and cabinet officials are expected to appear at fund-raising events for Priorities USA Action.

The announcement fully implicates the president, his campaign and his administration in the pollution of the political system unleashed by Citizens United and related court decisions. Corporations, unions and wealthy individuals are already writing huge checks — with no restrictions — to political action committees supporting individual candidates, which have become bag men for campaigns that still nominally operate under federal limits.

As misguided as it was, the Citizens United decision naïvely believed that the super PACs would remain separate from individual campaigns. The White House’s decision to allow insiders like Kathleen Sebelius, the health and human services secretary, and Jim Messina, the Obama campaign manager, to speak at Priorities USA Action events shows how ludicrous that notion has become, raising questions about whether the law is being violated.

Up to now, Republicans have been the main defenders of this corrupt system, and the main beneficiaries of it. Two of Karl Rove’s political groups raised $51 million last year to use against Mr. Obama and other Democrats, and the Republican presidential candidates’ PACs have raised $40 million.

Priorities USA Action and other Democratic groups have raised only $19 million. And, as Mr. Messina wrote on the Obama campaign’s blog, “with so much at stake” Democrats decided that they would not “unilaterally disarm.”

But if President Obama had refused to join in this downward spiral — and if he had proudly campaigned on that refusal — he and his campaign might have made up for that deficit in other ways: with more small contributions, and more support, from a public disgusted by the outsize influence of big money.

A president has a megaphone bigger even than Mr. Rove’s bloated bank account, and Mr. Obama could have impressed many wavering voters if he had chosen to use it against campaign corruption. He could have pointed out that it was Republicans who blocked the Disclose Act, which would have ended secret corporate donations, and that it was Republicans who used unlimited corporate funds to win back the House in 2010, pressing a corporate agenda that has severely hurt the middle class.

He could have ridiculed Mitt Romney’s super PAC for accepting $18 million from just 200 donors in the second half of last year, including million-dollar checks from hedge-fund operators, industrialists and bankers.

But now Mr. Obama has given up that higher ground. He had already undermined the public financing system for presidential campaigns by refusing to use it in 2008, but this is much worse. In that campaign, he at least forswore money from independent groups and lobbyists. Now he is relying on a super PAC that can accept money from anyone.

The Wall Street Journal can’t deny the fact that today’s surprisingly good employment report makes for pleasant reading:

After such a long wait for healthy job growth, only a curmudgeon would deny the good news.

The Journal editorial asserts that the “the economy’s natural recuperative powers” and the “the gridlock that arrived a year ago with the Republican House” are responsible for the improvement in the labor market:

Why the better news now? One likely reason is that the U.S. economy is so large and dynamic that left to its own devices it is bound to expand. After such a long trough, the economy’s natural recuperative powers are taking hold.

Washington has also stilled some of its damaging impulses, at least temporarily, thanks to the gridlock that arrived a year ago with the Republican House. Regulators are still doing damage, but less than they would have without new political scrutiny, and Congress has stopped spending more and ceased doing active harm.

In a nutshell, the most powerful voice of American conservatism is saying that the economy is improving in spite of and not because of the Obama Administration’s economic policies and programs.

Talking about role reversal! No longer does Obama have to persuade the people that, had it not been for his policies and programs, the economic recovery would have been even more anemic. Now, his Republican opponent — presumably Romney — has to convince the people that, in the absence of these policies and programs, the economic recovery would have been more robust.

The shoe is on the other foot. The tall order is now faced by the Republicans, not the Democrats. The likelihood of a second term for Mr. Obama has risen. So has the likelihood that the Democrats will retain control of the Senate. Finally, the possibility that the Democrats will regain control of the House is no longer remote.

Any comment by me would be superfluous.

Well (as Ronald Reagan said on numerous occasions), it’s time for this blog to start focusing on American politics — a subject I’ve come close to ignoring since I started posting last June.

I’ll start with “Incoherent party, incoherent candidates” from the Economist, which hits the mark:

REPUBLICANS are clearly not too enthused about Mitt Romney. Nor are they wild for any of the alternatives . . .

Mitt Romney looks like a weak phony in this election campaign because he has to pretend to believe with all his heart in orthodox tea-party conservative positions that he transparently doesn’t really believe in. We know this because in the past, Mr Romney supported health-care reform including an individual mandate along the lines of the system he instituted in Massachusetts, essentially the same system as Obamacare. And in the past, he supported a cap-and-trade system for limiting greenhouse-gas emissions to address climate change. But at the time, both of those were orthodox Republican Party positions . . . There were very few established Republican politicians who hadn’t taken positions in the George W. Bush era (or the Newt Gingrich era!) that pose ideological problems for them in the tea-party era . . .

Republicans’ disenchantment with their current presidential candidates is not an incidental characteristic of this crop of candidates. It’s a structural feature of a contemporary Republican Party whose pieces don’t hang together. Pro-Iraq-war neoconservative Republicans cannot actually live with Ron Paul Republicans. Wall Street-hating anti-bail-out Republicans cannot actually live with Wall Street-working bail-out-receiving Republicans. Evangelical-conservative Republicans cannot actually live with libertarian, socially liberal Republicans. Deficit-slashing Republicans cannot live with tax-slashing Republicans. Medicare-cutting Republicans cannot live with Medicare-defending Republicans. These factions have been glued together over the past three years by the intensity of their partisan hatred for Barack Obama, and all of the underlying resentments that antipathy masks. Republicans have buried their differences by assaulting everything Mr Obama supports, and because Mr Obama is a pretty middle-of-the-road politician, that includes a whole lot of things that many Republicans used to support. They are disenchanted with their candidates because their candidates are incoherent, but their candidates are incoherent because the base is incoherent. If the GOP wins this election, the party’s leaders are going to be confronted with that incoherence pretty quickly.

He was for it before he was against it. From the New York Times:

A day after the Senate overwhelmingly approved legislation to extend a payroll tax cut for two months, House Republicans made clear Sunday that they would not support the measure.

Speaker John A. Boehner, who had urged his members on Saturday to support the bill, did an about-face on Sunday and said he and other House Republicans were opposed to the temporary extension, part of a $33 billion package of bills that the Senate passed Saturday . . . The measure would be effective through February.

But in an interview with NBC’s “Meet The Press” on Sunday, Mr. Boehner said the two-month extension would be “just kicking the can down the road.” “It’s time to just stop, do our work, resolve the differences and extend this for one year,” he said. “How can you have tax policy for two months?”

Mr. Boehner’s remarks on “Meet the Press” came less than 24 hours after a conference call in which he tried to sell the package to his rank and file, pointing to a provision that would speed Republican-supported construction of an oil pipeline, known as Keystone XL, from Canada to the Gulf Coast. But many Republican lawmakers were not buying what their leader was urging them to do, chiefly because they objected to the tax cut extension’s cost.

There’s only one possible conclusion: the rank and file — a.k.a. the Tea Party — has won another round. Can the approval rating of Congress drop below the recent 9 percent? It should.

And the American people have lost — again.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

If there were a dissembler-of-the-year award, my vote would go to Michele Bachmann. Just listen to this:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The next time you hear Newt trashing Fannie and Freddie, consider what he had to say about Government Sponsored Enterprises in April 2007, at which time the housing meltdown was already underway:

Certainly there is a lot of debate today about the housing GSEs, but I think it is telling that there is strong bipartisan support for maintaining the GSE model in housing. There is not much support for the idea of removing the GSE charters from Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. And I think it’s clear why. The housing GSEs have made an important contribution to homeownership and the housing finance system. We have a much more liquid and stable housing finance system than we would have without the GSEs. And making homeownership more accessible and affordable is a policy goal I believe conservatives should embrace. Millions of people have entered the middle class through building wealth in their homes, and there is a lot of evidence that homeownership contributes to stable families and communities. These are results I think conservatives should embrace and want to extend as widely as possible. So while we need to improve the regulation of the GSEs, I would be very cautious about fundamentally changing their role or the model itself.

But when questioned during the November 9 Republican debate about his ties to Freddie, he said:

I offered them advice on precisely what they didn’t do. I have never done any lobbying, every contract that was written during the period when I was out of the office specifically said I would do no lobbying, and I offered advice. And my advice as a historian…I said to them at the time: This is a bubble. This is insane. This is impossible.

And a statement from his campaign said:

Gingrich advised that a business model that involved lending money to people with bad credit and no money down was unsustainable and a bubble, and that it was dangerous to buy securities made up of these mortgages.

Multiple choice question:

1. Gingrich liked GSEs before he disliked GSEs.
2. Gingrich disliked GSEs before he liked GSEs.
3. All of the above.

My apologies to the Beatles and I’m not taking about candidate Cain’s 9-9-9 tax plan.

I’m talking about the new New York Times/CBS News poll revealing that only 9 percent of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing. The disapproval toward Congress has risen 22 percentage points since the beginning of the year, when Republicans took control of the House.

• 89 percent of Americans say they distrust government to do the right thing.
• 74 percent say the country is on the wrong track.
• 49 percent say the economy is at a standstill and 36 percent say it is getting worse.
• 56 percent think that President Obama does not have a clear plan for creating jobs.

A great time for Republicans? Not so fast.

• 46 percent approve of  the job President Obama is doing.
• Two-thirds of the public said that wealth should be distributed more evenly. Nearly 9 in 10 Democrats, two-thirds of independents and just over one-third of all Republicans say that the distribution of wealth in the country should be more equitable, even as a majority of Republicans said they think it is fair.
• Two-thirds object to tax cuts for corporations and a similar number prefer increasing income taxes on millionaires.
• 71 percent of the public say that Congressional Republicans do not have a clear plan for creating jobs.
• In February, a CBS News poll found that 27 percent of the public said the views of the Tea Party movement reflected the sentiment of most Americans. In the current poll, 46 percent of the public said the same of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Regardless of who becomes the Republican nominee, he will — with virtual certainty — run on a platform that will oppose a more even distribution of wealth and higher taxes on millionaires and favor a reduction in the corporate tax rate. Their policies are out of joint with what the public wants. Sure, the nominee will move toward the center. But when he does, the Democrats will have an almost limitless collection of sound bytes with which to reply.

Sorry for the cliche, but Republicans shouldn’t count their chickens before they hatch.

“We should start moving toward fiscal responsibility by capping federal spending at 18% of our gross domestic product, banning earmarks and future bailouts, and passing a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution.”

– Rick Perry, “My Tax and Spending Reform Plan,” Wall Street Journal, October 25, 2011

In my view, this is the most important quote from candidate Perry’s op-ed in today’s Journal. While I have no problem with banning earmarks, I have serious reservations about limiting federal spending to 18 percent of GDP, banning future bailouts, and instituting a balanced budget amendment.

Let’s suppose that, when the financial crisis hit with full force in the fall of 2008, (1) Federal spending was capped at 18 percent of GDP, (2) it was illegal for the government to bailout the banks (or any other corporate entities), and (3) a balanced budget amendment was part of the Constitution. Keep in mind that no one, regardless of their ideological stripes, claimed then or claims now that the crisis was caused by out-of-control federal spending.

Under these conditions, the sequence of events would have been as follows:

• Without the TARP bailout, the world’s credit markets would have remained solidly frozen for an indefinite period of time. Not just Lehman, but other major financial institutions, would have gone under.
• Even with TARP, the financial crisis quickly spilled over into the real economy, resulting in a sharp contraction of economic activity and a surge in unemployment. Absent TARP, the economic contraction would have been even more rapid and the unemployment rate would have risen into the double-digits.
• With Federal spending limited to 18 percent of GDP, the decline in economic activity (which was made more severe by the no bail-out law) would have necessitated a reduction in federal spending. That reduction would have added to the downward momentum of the economy. Every decline in private sector activity would have led to a further mandated drop in public sector spending. The economy would have been trapped in a vicious circle.
• Watching the unfolding collapse of the economy, the President and the Congress would have eventually decided that it was time to reverse course by repealing the legislation limiting federal spending and preventing bailouts. But, because of the balanced budget amendment, repeal of these laws would have made no difference.
• Finally, there would have been a massive hue-and-cry for repealing the balanced budget amendment. The ratification process being what it is, that would have taken considerable time. In the meanwhile, millions more than are suffering now would be wondering why they had been abandoned by their government.

Nobody knows when the next financial and economic crisis will happen, or why it will occur. Absent such knowledge and knowing that the current crisis was not caused by excessive government spending, it is nothing short of insanity to put the government into a pro-cyclical straitjacket that would prevent it from responding to events that threaten the well-being of the American people.