Sunday Morning Coffee

~ R. Stanton Scott ~ Leave a comment

It’s difficult to overstate how much the Select Committee on Benghazi hearing on Thursday helped Hillary Clinton.   Republicans on the panel came across as defensive, dishonest, and disrespectful.  Secretary Clinton looked…Presidential…while withstanding a total of about 11 hours of interrogation.  She appeared to be in control of the facts, the proceedings, and herself.  Conservatives by and large agreed.

Republicans held this hearing because they wanted to showcase their attacks on Secretary Clinton.  The problem is that their attacks have no real factual basis – they cannot show that Clinton did anything wrong.  That they refused to back off – and instead gave her a golden opportunity to prove it – showcases the poor political judgement of the people Republicans send to Congress these days. But if you think Trey Gowdy is an amateur, wait until the new special committee to investigate Planned Parenthood.starts holding hearings.  This Committee will attempt to use demonstrably fake videos to make a case for withdrawing federal funding from the organization.  Like the Benghazi Committee hearings on Thursday this will backfire by giving those they’re out to get a prominent platform on which to defend themselves.

Check out this post attacking Congressman Dave Brat on immigration at Bearing Drift, self-described as “Virginia’s Conservative Voice.” This blog provides a broad range of conservative voices and sometimes even offers valid and well-reasoned challenges to liberal thought.  But the real fun comes in the comments when the more…activist…wing of the Republican Party stops by to show its bigotry. As an example take a look at this comment from “mpolito.”  To this person blacks and Hispanics “are more prone to crime [and] welfare use…emphatically, unequivocally, and consistently.”  And the only way to stop them is to put them all in jail.  As of right now this post has 231 comments, all too many of them in this bigoted vein.

An Actual Act of Journalism

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I’m not a huge Andrea Mitchell fan.  She is a true Washington insider – married to Alan Greenspan – and I wonder sometimes if the bubble she lives in affects her reporting.

But yesterday on Meet the Press she actually committed an act of journalism and challenged a claim made by Representative Mike Pompeo (R-KS).  When asked why the Benghazi Committee had called on Clinton aides like Sid Blumenthal and Huma Abedin rather than those who could actually speak to the security situation and possible failures, Mr. Pompeo responded that “…Secretary Clinton relied on Mr. Blumenthal for most of her intelligence.”

Though I expect this kind of claim will resonate with many conservatives – it could feed their general sense of the Clintons as corrupt officials who rely on a shady cabal of allies – to most this claim sounds silly on its face.  Ms. Mitchell challenges the claim: “That is factually not true.”  Transcript below the fold. Continue reading →

Sunday Morning Coffee

~ R. Stanton Scott ~ Leave a comment

Federal ruling allows Texas to deny birth certificates to some US-born children.  Not sure why the validity of the parents’ identification documents matters.  These children are US citizens, whoever their parents are and whatever their status, and their birth certificates belong to them and no one else.

David Brat’s appearance on Meet the Press last week apparently annoyed some conservatives as much as it did me, though perhaps for different reasons.  My chief complaint: his repeated claim that “the American People” support his Freedom Caucus priorities.

David Neiwert is one of the best writers out there on white supremacists, domestic terrorism and…orcas.  This rundown of the way rhetoric in the US promotes Islamophobia is worth a read.  I can also recommend his Rush, Newspeak, and Fascism (PDF), an important “journalistic survey of the academic literature on fascism” how it relates to American politics.

Booman thinks Vice President Biden should run for President.  I disagree.  The conversation Bernie Sanders has started is the one the Democratic Party needs to have, and I think he and Hillary are the right candidates to have it.  (Psst…Hillary…maybe a “join the official campaign” screen designed to capture my email address isn’t what you want new visitors to see when they visit your website.)

And finally…One of many reasons why I am slowly migrating to Apple products.

Taxpayers Subsidize Wealthy Capitalists

~ R. Stanton Scott ~ Leave a comment

Steven Attewell, over at Lawyers, Guns and Money, gives a pretty good rundown of the politics behind Mario Cuomo’s call for increasing the minimum wage for some workers in New York City. Can’t think of anything to add on this.

But I would like to highlight this statement in the Cuomo op-ed Attewell cites:

Fast-food workers and their families are twice as likely to receive public assistance compared with other working families. Among fast-food workers nationwide, 52 percent — a rate higher than in any other industry — have at least one family member on welfare.

Yes, US taxpayers support fast food workers with $7 billion in public assistance every year while the industry generates huge profits and generous CEO salaries.  And it’s not just the fast food industry.  Retail giants like Wal-Mart generate huge fortunes for small groups of people while taxpayers subsidize their wages to the tune of billions of dollars.  Fast food and retail CEOs take multi-million dollar salaries, and wealthy families and stockholders take billions in profits while their workers live in poverty and taxpayers subsidize their business models.

These CEOs and shareholders will argue that paying higher wages would cut into profits and force them to raise prices.  But BLS statistics show about 3.3 million workers making the minimum wage or less.  Paying them all $15 an hour, plus employer contributions for Social Security and Medicare, comes to less than $110 billion a year.  This is not the total cost of increasing the minimum wage from $7.25 to $15 – this is the total cost of paying all current minimum wage workers $15 an hour, 40 hours a week, for 50 weeks each year.

This is less than 1.5% of all US corporate after tax profits in 2014.  This means that Corporate America could pay a $15 minimum wage to all current minimum wage or below workers – and still generate more than $7 trillion in profits.

Why don’t they do this?

The Tea Party Misrepresents the Founders, Henrico County VA Edition

~ R. Stanton Scott ~ Leave a comment

This sign, place by the Henrico County Tea Party, stands on highway 156 north between I64 and I295 in eastern Henrico County, Virginia:

IMG_1053In case you cannot read the text, it says “Dependence and entitlement were not concepts of the Founding Fathers.  Self reliance was.”

Except maybe not.  Prominent Virginia Founders like Washington and Jefferson owned slaves.  These men did not rely on their own ingenuity and hard work to make themselves successful in life.  They relied instead on the hard work – and reproduction – of the human beings they held in human chattel slavery.  These men did not start businesses or farms, employ others, and make a profit.  They purchased – or mostly inherited –  human beings and then worked them almost literally to death so they could live a comfortable life.

Thomas Jefferson wrote that “…a child raised every 2. years is of more profit than the crop of the best laboring man.”  He relied not on his own ingenuity and hard work but on breeding human beings like livestock.¹

Washington and Jefferson, along with the other men who signed the Declaration of Independence and wrote the Constitution, indeed began a bold experiment in republican government – at least for the time.  And I expect they believed in the virtues of hard work.  But many of these men, including all of them from Virginia, did not rely on their own selves.  They relied on, and built their wealth on, the backs of human beings who worked as slaves in labor camps.

The Henrico Tea Party should remove this sign.

¹Wiencek, Henry, (2012).  Master of the Mountain, Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves. New York, NY: Farrah, Strauss and Giroux, page 259.

 

 

Why Democrats Got Hammered

~ R. Stanton Scott ~ 1 Comment

Jamelle Bouie at Slate riffs on a Charlie Cook article to ask “What Could the Democrats Have Done Differently?”

“Democrats are still reeling from the Great Whupping of 2014, trying to orient themselves for the next two years of Republican control in Congress. The recurring question, even now, is: What happened? Unemployment is down, and Republicans are unpopular. How did Democrats lose so badly?”

Cook argues that “Bad Decisions Came Back to Haunt Democrats in Midterms.”  His case boils down to a claim that Americans still blame Democrats for shifting to climate change and health care after “checking the box” on economic stimulus in 2009.  Dems should have focused on “action that would have turned the economy around and created jobs for many working-and-middle-class Americans.

Bouie agrees that “economic anxiety drove last Tuesday’s results,” but disagrees that ‘a ‘focus’ on the economy would have saved Democratic prospects.”  He rightfully points out that the first stimulus debate “strained the Democratic coalition,” and Democrats could have “talked about the economy more” and “kept a rhetorical focus on economic growth.” But he doesn’t see how this would have changed the 2014 election results.

Continue reading →

Cloward-Piven, Saul Alinsky, and Right Wing Fever Dreams

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On Election Day I met a gentleman named Tom White, a local Hanover County Virginia IT consultant and insurance salesman who runs a conservative blog called Virginia Right!  He seemed a nice enough man whose knowledge of local politics suggested connections to the Hanover County conservative political machines that I thought might be interesting.  We chatted for a few minutes about local and national politics.

Intrigued, I took a look at his website hoping for new insights into conservative thought and perhaps some discussion of local Tea Party strategy.  Sadly, Mr. White’s blog reproduces the misreading of reality found at NoVATownHall but with none of the intellectual/insider take offered at Bearing Drift. Continue reading →

From the Archives: The State of War (Originally posted on July 3, 2007)

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Semi-academic essay arguing for criminalizing international terrorism and constructing institutions to fight it as a crime vice using military force against states.  Basically a recount of the literature on the changing nature of war between States and the rise of non-state actors as managers of violence across borders.

Should probably update in light of Russia’s recent seizure of the Crimea from the Ukraine.  “Protecting our tribal cousins in other States” is certainly an excuse for invasion that once had traction – and that Finnemore argues no longer holds.  Here it did.

 

The State of War

The capture of 15 British sailors by Iranian naval forces on Friday brings to mind an interesting puzzle for international relations theorists: why has war between states become less common, even as fighting among groups within states more so? Several possible answers spring to mind, including the increasing cost of war between states as military power becomes more destructive, the growing interdependence between states as globalization proceeds apace, and the desire by intrastate groups to achieve the sovereignty required to be the masters of their own affairs.

Until the invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, it seemed that states had begun to agree on sovereignty principles that would “lock in” frontiers and create enormous stigma against changing them. States had, before World War II, accepted war in the name of territorial acquisition, dispute resolution, or punitive action. By the end of the Cold War they supported military action across state borders to stop genocide (Bosnia), protect humanitarian projects (Somalia), or to stop aggressive states (Iraq 1991), though even this principle was unevenly applied. It looks like one effect of the Bush Doctrine has been to reopen the sovereignty norm to conquering states, and by extension force states to become more defensive of their frontiers. If this is so, it makes the world a more dangerous place.

The literature on sovereignty is extensive—the rules establishing the nature of the state, how they form, live, and die, and systemic interactions among them call for intensive study of their origin, application, and legitimacy. Research into the application of sovereignty has blossomed with the idea that globalization has somehow diluted the power of the state by limiting state action and empowering new actors such as international organizations, advocacy groups, and corporations. In the last few years, scholars have published several books on the changing nature of sovereignty and the impact of these changes on the use of violence among international actors. Continue reading →

A Glibertarian View of the Minimum Wage at a Poorly Named Web Magazine

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Thanks to Whiskey Fire, I now know about a conservative online magazine called The Federalist.  It looks like former Rick Perry policy analyst Sean Davis started this thing last September.  Davis also writes at Media Trackers, and both offer a pretty standard glibertarian conservative line with a splash of neocon and social conservatism for good measure.  Ben Domenech publishes The Federalist, and employs David Harsanyi and Mollie Hemingway as editors, and this staff list makes me wonder about something:

Why would a bunch of folks who would happily reinstate the Articles of Confederation if they could just keep the Second Amendment name their magazine The Federalist?  Don’t they realize that a huge expansion of the Federal Government was the Founders’ central political goal when they convened the Constitutional Convention?  These guys have more in common with “Centinel” and “Brutus” than with Publius.

Anyway, once there I caught a piece by Davis complaining that Obama had left out some important things we all need to know about the minimum wage.  This response to the President’s SOTU section on the subject is not the standard (and incorrect) “hiring will slow if labor costs more-supply and demand” line – Davis directly responds to two specific items in the speech.  The rest, however, looks like an argument that since most minimum wage workers are young, part-time fast food workers with poor skills, their labor is worth no more and probably less than the current minimum.  But he never comes out and says this, so I’m left with a few questions. Continue reading →