Is this man Presidential?

Presidential candidate Mitt Romney refuses to release his income tax records beyond the last two years and he will not talk about his dealings when he was at Bain Capital. Yet, he claims to have created “100,000″ jobs through the process of “creative destruction.” Given this claim, it’s worth emphasizing that, for a private equity firm to make money and provide high yield returns to its investors and partners, the number one enemy of such an organization is labor. If you keep that one fact in mind, then you can understand why Romney doesn’t like to talk about his history at Bain and his absurd claim to have created “100,000 jobs.” Anyone running a private equity firm that did not reduce labor costs in the new company, sometimes by firing workers and hiring them back at reduced wages, would himself be fired or voted out by the company partners. With that in mind, it’s a little easier to see that what counts for job creation by Romney, takes place for example,  when a retirement fund that made profits through Bain investments goes out and hires someone or takes on a retiree for benefits. And since Bain is a private company, they have no obligation to make their actions and investments known to the public, which suits Romney just fine.

While Romney tries to make a case that he was a job creator at Bain, others have done enough homework to show that this was not the case, and a recent article in City Pages by Pete Kotz provides a good summary of Romney’s record as a “job creator.” Just reading that article alone will help you understand why candidate Romney doesn’t want to talk about his history at Bain Capital. Texas Governor Rick Perry, former Presidential candidate, claimed that Mitt Romney practiced “vulture capitalism” at Bain, but author Pete Kotz has a more accurate description of Romney’s role at Bain as an “American Parasite.” Private equity firms take perfectly healthy striving companies and destroy them by saddling them with excessive debt and management fees. Indeed, Romney parasitized healthy manufacturing companies many of which went bankrupt.  Given the stories that Kotz describes, we can only imagine how many manufacturing jobs would have stayed here in America, if we had made it illegal to have “leveraged buyouts” back in the early days of the Reagan Presidency, when this activity first got underway. But, unchecked, the leveraged buyout contributed to the destruction of manufacturing in America.

When Romney ran against Ted Kennedy for his Senate seat in 1994, early in the campaign, it seemed like he might be successful. But then Kennedy learned of Bain Capital’s purchase of a company called “AMPAD” (American Pad and Paper) in 1992 and how Bain had loaded the company with debt and management fees and laid off workers. Kennedy ran television ads of interviews with workers who had lost their jobs at AMPAD and won re-election rather handily. So here’s a good question for Romney: how many more manufacturing jobs would exist in America today if there had been no leveraged buyouts and no private equity firms?  The man who believes that corporations are people should have no trouble responding to this form of interrogation, yet he wants to avoid the discussion altogether. Leveraged buyouts evolved into private equity firms and contributed to the predatory reach of business and finance. Private equity firms–the destroyer of labor. If somehow we could rewrite the Old Testament, that line should be in there somewhere and Moses should be asked to deal with it.   As for Romney and his Bain Capital experience, will the mainstream media cooperate with Romney and let him remain silent on his doubtful past as a job creator? I am betting that the Occupy movement has now raised income inequality in American consciousness, such that Romney will not be able to dodge the fact that his actions at Bain contributed to the pathological state of our income distribution and the silly boring state of our politics, where trivial topics rule the airwaves.  Romney is betting that people won’t give a damn and he can throw enough advertising at the problem to distract voters from thinking his job creation history. But, Romney made his fortune destroying businesses in ways that should have been illegal;  we need to help fan the flames of the Occupy Movement to return our country to economic sanity. We need to rebuild America and force our financial institutions to play a role in financing that task, or form new banks and force them to do it. Had we broken free from the rescue of our banks and created new ones, with restrictions on how they could use the money, we would already be seeing signs of solid recovery and not the anemic one we are in now where people at the top are thinking about debt, rather than thinking about jobs.
RFM

Representative Jason Altmire D-PA voting in primary 2012 (Keith Srakocic - AP)

One of the major problems with the Democratic party is that it has too many conservative members, too many Blue Dog Democrats that  vote with Republicans on many issues and often support positions of the Tea Party–anti-healthcare and anti-climate change legislation to name just two issues. They are fiscal conservatives at a time when our government needs to respond very differently to our economic circumstances–they are Hooverites! While many conservative Democrats come from Southern states, others come from states like Pennsylvania and other regions of the Midwest. At a time when it should be obvious that our economy is badly in need of a second stimulus to address jobs, student loans and mortgage foreclosures, like their Republican counterparts, conservative Democrats are interested in solving the Great Recession by austerity, which can only make things worse. To endorse a strategy other than providing stimulation to the economy is dispiriting to the entire nation–not just the unemployed. In these times, those that have employment worry about losing their job and by hearing stories about the unemployed (which our mainstream media tries to hide from us), the gloom of helplessness cuts an ever wider swath through our culture. There’s a reason they call it a depression. Couple the issue of decent jobs to the ongoing mortgage crisis, which must also be solved before we can think about trimming the sails of our economy, and one can begin to see the depth of the problem and why governments are in a state of denial and paralysis.  But these issues are not insoluble. We tackled similar problems during the Great Depression and the longer the current recession goes on, the more we are in danger of sliding backwards rather than moving forwards in our economy.  Add to that the idea that we have to fix the planet and you realize we must bring back Rosy the Riveter, while adding Ronny the Riveter to the new mix. We need to make things again, and use the ingenious, creative character of an energized Middle Class to fan the flames of a new economy. It is too dangerous for us to have an economy dominated by the financial industry, which does not serve Main Street very effectively. The bankers know this as well as anyone.  Paul Krugman has an editorial in the NY Times describing how leaders in Europe and the United States are finally beginning to admit that the austerity plans they have imposed on their economies are making things worse, even though they probably won’t do anything about it, at least not yet. British Prime Minister David Cameron is experiencing sinking popularity as he tries to explain why he didn’t follow the economic prescription described in the Economics 101 textbook–good old fashioned Keynesianism. Belt-tightening works for a person who is in debt and wants to cut spending to balance their own personal economic circumstance, but it does not work for a nation, because then everyone’s belt gets tightened whether they like it or not. Greek Economist Yanis Varifoukas explains this simple concept very effectively. Anyone comparing  the impact of austerity on a person’s single budget, claiming the outcome would be the same for the economy at large, has flunked Economics 101, and he/she is in need of remedial course work.

One reason we still have a hard time doing something more effective about our chronic unemployment situation is that within the Democratic Party, we have too many conservatives and not enough liberal, more progressive-minded representatives: the Republicans are against anything that would work, hoping to have the bad economy stick around until the election this fall, thus leading perhaps  to a victory by Romney over Obama and a trifecta for the party, giving them command of the Senate, House of Representatives and the Presidency. Then they can get busy and really screw things up. But conservative Democrats are also part of the problem.

You only have to look what’s happening in Europe to understand that they are going down the wrong path; by doubling down on austerity they are doubling down on misery. When recession hits, it’s the responsibility of  government to temporarily create demand to soften the blow and in the United States we did that when Obama was first elected and it worked. But it wasn’t big enough or long enough, as the magnitude and depth of our recession wasn’t properly calibrated. But, with the huge Republican victory of 2010, the Democrats were forced out of control in the House and are in the process of rebuilding their party, so the interesting elections to watch are those taking place in the Democratic primaries–right now.  Of course, we have the recall election of Governor Scott Walker  in Wisconsin at the head of our watch list, but we already have results in a few test cases in the country.  The NYT reported on the results of a Democratic primary in Pennsylvania, where two conservative House Democrats, Representatives Jason Altmire and Tim Holden lost out to two more progressive opponents. In Altmire’s case, he lost to fellow incumbent Mark Critz in a district that had been redrawn because of census realignment: both representatives ran against each other for the same, newly created district. Tim Holden lost out to newcomer Matt Cartwright. In each case the opponents criticized their more conservative incumbents for their opposition to the healthcare bill and votes against global climate change issues. As the Times pointed out in their article “The ouster of the Democratic incumbents — and the tough primaries being waged against some House Republicans — suggest that redistricting ultimately is going to send more liberal Democrats and more conservative Republicans to the House.” If the Democrats gain control of the House, through primaries like those in Pennsylvania, it will mean that a more progressive Democratic Party will be in charge. What this might mean too, is instead of Obama leading the party in a more progressive direction, something his policy of triangulation has largely prevented, the newly elected Democrats in Congress, could mean that a more progressive party would be leading Obama in a direction more favorable for progressive causes. So instead of hope that arrived on the day Obama was elected in 2008, we might have hope through more effective legislation that deals with the real problems of this country and avoids the devastating budget cuts scheduled to go in place during the first of 2013. This year, the Democratic primaries are everything, though redistricting has probably created lots of safe seats for Republicans and Democrats. It has been estimated that the effects of redistricting means that only about 100 of the 435 seats are up for grabs–true contests. However, the Blue Dog Democrats, who peaked at 54 members in 2010, have dropped to 23 and could drop further in the future. If the Supreme Court rules against The Affordable Health Care Act, these new progressive Democratic candidates could be further energized with the message that a single payer plan is already waiting for us–it’s “Medicare for All”–a simple one page bill.
RFM

Shortly after the 2010 election dust had cleared, we began to hear about the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and their fabrication of legislative templates for state laws that can be passed in the wink of an eye or the nod of a head. ALEC-sponsored laws were rapidly introduced by Republican legislators only too eager to cooperatively destroy our tattered democracy. ALEC recruits right-wing state legislators and meets with them, in sessions not open to the public, where they extract promises from legislators to introduce ALEC’s template laws into their state legislative process to further advance their neoliberal cause. But just within the past week, public outrage over the  shooting death of Trayvon Martin and its connection to Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law (coupled with the very sluggish legal system in Florida) has started to focus on how such a law got on the books in the first place. The “Stand Your Ground Law” was promoted by the National Rifle Association (NRA), working through ALEC, who is also responsible for introducing photo-ID voting laws and disbanding unions for public employees, something that caught our attention in Wisconsin and was associated with massive public demonstrations in Madison, followed by an ongoing effort to recall Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker  (Walker has assisted the recall effort when  many members of his staff, during his position as Milwaukee County Executive, now face criminal charges for mishandling funds: this is discussed in Ruth Conniff’s article in The Progressive– stay tuned on this one).

Now ALEC is becoming more infamous through increased exposure from websites like ALEC EXPOSED a site that separately lists the state legislators and governors that have ties to ALEC and Color of Change. Democracy Now recently did a piece on ALEC, adding additional insight into their very shady techniques and raising serious doubts as to whether they are in violation of the rules for tax-exempt organizations. On Sunday, April 22, the NYT has a front page, above- the-fold article on ALEC, revealing more about how the organization works and the corporate influence in the design of specific bills. The article points out that ALEC has 2000 state legislators as members and all but one are Republicans. These legislators get their marching orders from ALEC and push these bills through their state houses, without acknowledging the source of the legislation. ALEC is funded almost entirely by major corporations and, in the wake of the national outrage over the Trayvon Martin shooting, many of these corporations have announced they will no longer support ALEC (according to the ALEC EXPOSED site, Coke, Pepsi, Kraft, McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Intuit, Reed-Elsevier, and others have dropped their membership in the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and in turn ALEC quickly announced they will no longer push “social legislation” (one of their next projects is to get a law passed that prevents family members of patients who die, as a result of taking FDA-approved drugs, from suing the pharmaceutical company, giving drug companies increased motivation to introduce new, unproven drugs at an accelerated pace).   ALEC’s immediate drop of its social agenda, whatever that mans, is an attempt to stop the bleeding of corporate sponsorship. What the Trayvon Martin shooting case has demonstrated, lest there was some doubt, is that our mainstream media are brain dead. The only chance left for Democracy in America is through the power of the internet to make issues go viral and have demands land on the desks of corporate officers–no corporate CEO wants to stand up for issues that will hurt sales and diminish profits. Put ALEC in the way of corporate profits through a national boycott of the products of the corporation (foundations are more problematic–but they have boards) and profits will prevail every time. But if we have found a medium that can challenge groups like ALEC, we are also confronted, by the rise of social media within the internet, a force which seems to be converting Americans into narcissistic tools of capitalism.

RFM

Hacker-Pierson Winner-Take-All Politics

Graphing an American story: the Bill Moyers website shows a graph derived from Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson and their excellent book “Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer–and Turned its Back on the Middle Class.” The book itself is worth a read, while the graph, electronically upgraded so when you move your mouse pointer over different features of the graph (like the downward arrows at along the top), pop-ups appear and give some of the historical context to explain how income was  dramatically elevated for the top 1% while that for the bottom 90% changed very little. The graph uses the dollar value in 2008 to illustrate gains for the top 1 percent, while the bottom 90% have been flat-lined for 38 years. The period covered is from 1970 to 2008, so it included the decline and fall of The New Deal and the rise and dominance of the neoliberal financial agenda. During that period of flat-lining for everyone else,  the top 1% of wage earners started in 1970 at more than $ 318,000 and by 2008 they tipped the scales at more than $905,000. The graph covers the presidencies of Nixon all the way through to GW Bush; a few of the facts along the way included Reagan’s firing of PATCO (Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization), which began the steep downward decline in union representation in the United States work force and the introduction of supply-side economics, the idea that lowering taxes actually increases Federal Revenue: the execution of this concept pushed the Reagan budgets into deep debt. Before Reagan, America was the biggest creditor nation in the world and after Reagan, we were the biggest debtor country on the planet. If a graph about income distribution can make you angry this one should do the trick. We now have a culture where the neoliberals consider most Americans to be a bunch of losers, with a small number of winners based strictly on income; since the most recent recession/depression, we have done nothing to change this hostile dynamic, and, as we all know, this trend continues unabated and will not change until we change it. By change, I don’t mean just recovering what we lost during the current recession/depression, but making gains in such a way that everyone in our culture can be treated as a stakeholder, living a life with the expectations of someone who is living in a wealthy country that cares for its citizens, not the soundbite, throw-away culture that we have created by chasing the illusory objective of winning the lottery. This graph does not illustrate the creation of new wealth–that is not what happened–the differences between the 1% and the 90% were created by the transfer of wealth from the middle and lower classes to the wealthy. It does not reflect creativity, but exploitation and it cannot continue. Our current version of casino capitalism has failed to create a just and decent society and, if anything, the Tea Party members are merely the most recent victims, even though they are too obliging for comfort.  We need to demand changes in the way we grow, educate and care within our society. We need a new revolt!

Michael Klare on America as the new Third World petro-state. If you still have energy left after reading about our wage history from the 1970s on, then you won’t want to miss Michael Klare’s article in Tomdispatch which appeared today. Klare discusses how Big Oil has exhausted its search for oil reserves in Third World countries and is increasingly focused on North America as the new epicenter of oil and gas exploration. But to be successful in this new enterprise the major oil companies will have to roll back years of regulatory restrictions that have prevented oil and gas drilling because of environmental concerns. Of course the environmental concerns were precipitated by disastrous oil spills that did extensive environmental damage, like that in Santa Barbara in 1969, the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989 and the Macondo blowout in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.   Using their influential weight in the art of political persuasion, Big Oil is intent on unraveling these restrictions as they lay an aggressive  strategy to establish North America as another Third World energy source. One component to their motivation for refocusing on North America is the increasing resistance that Third World countries have against giving Big Oil a blank check for extracting their oil while trampling on the environment. Oddly enough this resistance to unfettered access to Third World oil has been created by more democratic or socialist governments who either nationalize their oil reserves or demand a far larger share of the oil wealth extracted from their oil fields. Thus, in North America, we can expect a far more intensive push from the oil companies in the coming months and the high cost of gasoline will keep pressure on any U.S. President to continue giving out leases for oil exploration even on our most environmentally sensitive regions that have heretofore been off limits. As Klare puts it, “in the process, as has so often been the case with Third World petro-states, the rights and wellbeing of local citizens will be trampled underfoot.” Will we allow oil companies to run roughshod over our national parks and other Federal lands that have long been considered off limits to these interests? Are we willing to reverse the long-standing taboos against oil exploration in sensitive regions in order to serve the interests of economic arguments and our failure to engage in a more robust development of alternative energy sources?

None of us expect that North America will become another Nigeria, which has been described by NY Times writer Adam Nossiter as (quoting from Klare’s article) “the Niger Delta, where the [petroleum] wealth underground is out of all proportion with the poverty on the surface, has endured the equivalent of the Exxon Valdez spill every year for 50 years by some estimates.” But do we carry with us today, the same capacity for public outrage that we demonstrated over the Exxon Valdez oil spill (where today you can put a shovel into the nearby shoreline and see oil oozing around the shovel mark)? And will it make any difference who is elected President and who controls Congress in this coming debate? The oil companies see our internal weakness in the form of a bad economy and deep concerns about our economic future and they see the opportunity to strike while the iron is hot, while we are disarmed and confused.  Oil exploration will be pushed as a source of new jobs and the model of North Dakota, with the lowest unemployment in the country as a result of their oil reserves, will make it difficult for any politician to resist, especially if the environmental lobby remains on life support. It seems that in the present climate, Big Oil may have the upper hand.  Congress has already banned the EPA from regulating the controversial method of hydro-fracking in which huge quantities of water and toxic chemicals are forced under pressure to release oil and gas and the growth of this technique is unparalleled as a potentially dangerous source of contamination to our water supply.  We cannot allow energy companies to make decisions about threats to our health and safety and yet this is precisely what Big Oil is pushing to achieve in this coming election. If the oil industry gets their way, then as Micheal Klare would say, stay tuned for the Third Worldification of the North American continent. To win this war we will first have to mobilize and declare one of our own.

RFM

According to former Miami Police Chief John F. Timoney, writing an opinion piece in the NYT on Friday, March 23, 2012,  “Trying to control shootings by members of a well-trained and disciplined police department is a daunting enough task. Laws like “stand your ground” give citizens unfettered power and discretion with no accountability. It is a recipe for disaster.” Timoney and many other police chiefs in Florida were opposed to the law, though their concerns were ignored when the bill was passed in 2005. According to Timoney, “Homicides categorized as justifiable have nearly tripled since the law went into effect.” As he points out, Florida was the first state to pass a “stand your ground” law, but since then at least 20 other states have passed laws of their own. He recommends that current Florida Governor Rick Scott could do the citizens of Florida a big public service by being the first governor to reject and repeal this odious ALEC-NRA-driven law: it serves to increase public apprehension and sharpen racial tension at a time when we should be concerned with reducing these conflicts, as we try to develop a badly needed more holistic society.

The right-wing corporatist culture of America is concerned about diminishing opportunities for profits and wants to convert our public functions into new opportunities for profiteering. Among the the right-wing wealth that funds ALEC are such luminaries at the Koch brothers. Organizations like ALEC approach their objectives by promoting fear in our society–fear not just from our many inflated enemies abroad, but fear from our own citizens, perhaps our next door neighbors, fear of people violating our voting laws, fear from people of other races or minorities, fear of illegal immigrants, fear of Muslims and even fear of those belonging to other Christian religions. Religious fundamentalism promotes a literal interpretation of the Bible and creattes attitudes of Biblical solutions to our problems. The post-9/11 era that we are in has been promoted as a post-apocalyptic period in which freedom from fear is found in the false promise of having more guns in the streets and arming our citizens for the Armageddon that we will face just around the corner. Intelligence cannot be the daughter of fear!

The public is slowly beginning to understand the special role that ALEC has played in formulating templates for state laws and promoting them within Republican-controlled state legislative bodies.  So far, I haven’t seen any evidence of an ALEC-promoted law that did anything other than starkly serve corporate interests by further privatizing our public functions (they are a big supporter of privatizing prisons) and dividing our culture. The Center for Media and Democracy is an excellent source of material on ALEC, including coverage of the tragic killing of Trayvon Martin. They also provide coverage of state activities that are attempting to spread light on the right-wing corporatist nature of ALEC.

RFM

Lou Dubose, writing in The Washington Spectator has reported on how Voter-ID laws got started. The origin of this idea came from Mark “Thor” Hearne, a lawyer who had worked for the Bush-Cheney political campaign. Hearne founded the American Center for Voting Rights. This center produced a 72 page report entitled “Vote Fraud, Intimidation & Suppression in the 2004 Presidential Election.” The document was submitted to a House committee chaired by Ohio Congressman Bob Ney (who later went to prison over the Jack Abramoff scandal). The report did not include any documented examples of voter fraud, yet it recommended that states should adopt government issued photo-ID at the polls and for any voter seeking to vote by mail or through an absentee ballot. The Center soon closed its doors and Hearne returned to private practice. Hearne’s report had a much longer shelf live than that of his American Center for Voting Rights. Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund and Heritage Foundation Fellow Hans von Spakovsky began promoting photo-ID as an essential state protection against the undocumented cases of voter fraud. Republican state party officers began promoting photo-ID laws to defend against voter fraud, without providing evidence that this was a problem.  In 2009 ALEC drafted a model legislative bill that would serve as a template for Republican legislators to bring such bills into legislative reality. By 2011, Republicans in 38 states introduced legislation that would make state-approved photo-ID cards a requirement to vote. Seven states signed such bills into law, including Alabama, Florida, Kansas, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas and Wisconsin. These laws were assembled on the fast track–no state required photo-ID had existed before 2006. In the election of 2012, the states which have implemented photo-ID laws for voting will provide 171 electoral votes, 63 percent of what is needed to win the Presidency. How pervasive is voter fraud? A Loyola Law School professor (Justin Levitt) who works with the Brennan Center for Justice has gathered evidence on polling place voter fraud. As he says “I keep an open door” “I think I’m up to 11 or 12 possible attempts that people have pointed to across the country since 2000. During that time about 400 million ballots have been caste in the general elections. It does not sound like voter fraud at the polls is a major problem, but note that the historic origins of this issue were created by fiction working inside a bubble. Evicence-based legislative action has never been the strength of the modern Republican party. As you can imagine, most of these bills were passed in states where Republicans had control of state houses and the governorship–the trifecta for quickly getting conservative bills passed. The one exception to this general rule was Rhode Island who passed their voter-ID law with a Democratic legislature.

There is little doubt who these photo-ID laws are aimed at. As minorities grow in their representation, particularly with the growth of Hispanics, the Republicans feel their voter base is shrinking. The Wisconsin Legislative Fiscal Bureau evaluated the impact of their own law and learned that 20 percent of Wisconsin’s residents do not have the proper ID for voting: that includes 70 percent of African-Americans under the age of 25, 177,000 elderly people, 36 percent of young voters and about 224,000 college students whose ID cards fail to meet the state’s new ID requirement. In summary, voters that are likely to cast their ballot as  Democrats will be disproportionately cut out of the opportunity to vote by these voter-repressive laws. But in some states the situation is even worse: Florida has reduced the number of early voting days, cut in half the number of early voting hours, ended voting on the final Sunday before the election and imposed tough restrictions on civic groups conducting voter-registration campaigns. In Florida, the voting law has been so convoluted that voter-registration drives, one of the main methods used to get African-Americans on the voting rolls, will either be ineffective or impossible to run with any efficiency.

From the Lou Dubose Article in The Washington Spectator:

“Testifying at a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing on January 25, University of Florida political science Professor Daniel A. Smith questioned the color-blind provisions in Florida’s 2011 law:

[E]ven though African Americans comprised only 13 percent of total voters and 22 percent of early voters in Florida in the 2008 General Election, they accounted for 31 percent of early voters on the final Sunday of early voting. Hispanic voters, who comprised 11 percent of total voters and 11 percent of early voters in the 2008 general election, accounted for 22 percent of the early voters on the final Sunday of early voting.

By closing polling places on Sunday, Florida shuts down the nonpartisan, church-based “Souls to the Polls” campaigns in African-American and Hispanic congregations.” Voting registration drives will become virtually impossible to carry out under these new laws.” All these laws are voter-suppression laws, though they come advertised as keeping illegal immigrants from voting and gain in popularity using that threat to scare people into electoral alignment.

But these measures are about to by tested in court. Last December, Attorney General Eric Holder delivered a speech defending the 1965 Voting Rights Act and warned Texas and six other states that passed voter-ID laws: “We will examine the facts and enforce the law.” A week later the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department rejected South Carolina’s voter-ID bill on the grounds that it will result in retrogression of minority voting rights. South Carolina’s governor and state legislature will have to revise the law or challenge the Justice Department in Court. Preemptive law suits against the Justice Department have been initiated by Florida and Texas, and the Texas suit has asked the court to declare Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional. Expect more litigation to follow as the National Conference of State Legislators reports that voter-ID bills are pending in 26 states. Yesterday the voter ID laws in Wisconsin and Texas have been declared in violation of the civil rights voting act. Expect more of this kind of action to come in the near future and ultimately the entire civil rights voting act could be put to the test by the Supreme Court, probably long after the 2012 election. Other legal options for the states who want to protect Voter-ID laws cannot be eliminated however.

Ohio, is an important swing state. Most analysists believe that Obama cannot be re-elected without winning Ohio, a state that he carried by a 4.6 margin in 2008. There remains controversy about whether George W. Bush won Ohio legitimately in 2004, due to fraudulent handling of voter records. Ohio secretary of state officer Kenneth Blackwell, working with Karl Rove, presided over the election of 2004. Later, Blackwell lost the Ohio governor’s race (2006), and went on to become a Republican party official while progressive Democrat Jennifer Brunner succeeded him as secretary of state. She hired a consulting firm to audit the state’s voting system. The firm found “critical security systems failures that could impact the integrity of an election.” Brunner made a mistake by running for the U.S. Senate and lost that election, but turned her focus on fixing the architecture of the Ohio election system.

In the same issue of The Washington Spectator Lou Dubose writes on the voter ID laws in Ohio, one of the most critical states for the 2012 election. Prominent mention of Jennifer Brunner is made in his piece, but Brunner has a more updated report about the Ohio voting fraud law her article in Alternet. She has played a major role in reforming and opposing Ohio Republican attempts to twist the election laws of the state to favor Republican victories in perpetuity. In response to bill H.B. 194, a law that would seriously restrict voting access,  voting rights advocates sprang up from throughout the state and Fair Elections Ohio (FEO) formed a strong coalition of voting rights advocacy Ohioans, consisting of a wide spectrum of farmers, labor, voting rights advocates and religious organizations. The FEO has also interacted with Obama’s campaign “Organizing for America” to effectively block the law from taking effect through a statewide referendum petition that has qualified for a vote in the election this fall.  The organizers collected nearly 500,000 signatures, such that Ohio voters this fall will have a chance to decide if they want the voter-suppression bill H.B. 194 to become law. It is astonishing to see what H.B. 194,  if passed, would create for the voters of Ohio. Here is a sample of its odoriferous components:

• Reduce by mail absentee voting to three weeks from five weeks and reduce in-person absentee voting to two weeks.
• Ban in-person absentee voting on Sundays and Saturday afternoons.
• Ban in-person early voting during the last weekend before the election.
• Make it more difficult for the boards of elections to open extra offices in the community to make it more convenient to vote early.
• Stop local Election Boards from sending absentee ballot applications unsolicited to all voters.
• Stop local Elections Boards from paying postage on return absentee ballot requests or on the return of absentee ballots.
• Impose technical reasons not to count votes.
• Order a minimum voting precinct size in cities and villages only.
• Prohibit someone with no ID from having their ballot counted.
• Eliminate the 10-day period after the election to provide missing ID.
• Strike down disclosure rules for corporations participating in campaigns.

Do you see the words “Preventing Democrats from Voting” written into these rules?

But have the Ohio Republicans over-reached with their odious H.B. 194? The GOP is beginning to realize that public sentiment against H.B. 194 is reaching the level of a huge outcry and their fear now is that H.B. 194 will bring out those voters threatened by this bill in record numbers to the polls for this fall’s election. The current Republican secretary of state who began to recognize this problem has asked for repeal of the bill, to “avoid confusion” about voting rules this fall (2012). Right now the President of the Ohio Senate is offering a “peace pipe” to state Senate Democrats and hopes to adopt a new set of voting rules for the fall. However, it is not clear if the Republicans can effectively repeal H.B. 194. Even if they want to alter the voting laws for this fall, the Republican secretary of state has declared that no more changes can be made before the fall elections. And the referendum that was approved by the voters to have H.B. 194 appear on the ballot this fall will be defended by the FEO and the Obama election campaign–it’s a citizens referendum! The Minnesota legislature, where both houses are controlled by conservative Republicans, is considering a bill that, if passed in the 2012 election, would become part of the state constitution. They are not as far along as Ohio and Democratic governor Mark Dayton has attempted to propose an alternative to this new law without the use of a photo-ID requirement. While the Minnesota bill had 80% approval when first discussed last year, the bill has become much more controversial now that its true target has been identified. Stay tuned on this issue, the nature of our democracy is at stake.

RFM

Alberta Canada tar sand region before and after mining

This afternoon (Wednesday, January 18th, 2012), the Obama Administration announced that they are denying the permit for construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. This news represents a great victory for the environment and our planetary future. In the last Congressional budget action, approval for a two month extension of payroll tax reductions and unemployment insurance was adopted, with a provision tacked onto the bill which forced the President to decide within 60 days whether he would approve the Keystone XL pipeline, presumably feeling confident that putting him in such a box during an election year would increase the likelihood that the project would move forward. The Keystone XL pipeline proposal was designed to carry tar sand oil from Alberta Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, where it was to be refined.  Since big oil supports construction of this pipeline and is used to getting their way through lobbying and campaign donations, it would not have been surprising to anyone if Obama had yielded and approved the 1700 mile pipeline for construction.  But massive demonstrations, largely orchestrated by Bill McKibben’s 350.org, encircling at one point the White House with demonstrators linking arms (attended by arrests),  the environmental opposition beat out the oil lobby and encouraged Obama to deny the permit, an act for which he will face stiff opposition in a re-election year. It is worth noting that our most prominent climate scientist, James Hansen, has termed the Albert Sands project “game over” meaning that with the excessive carbon introduced by burning the dirty tar sands, we will reach a point of no-return on future climate change and very likely see large increases in sea levels as the polar and Greenland ice melts. Although we won the battle, the war isn’t over and it won’t be over until the environment and greenhouse gas emissions are finally recognized as the serious threat they pose to our future climate safety. You can bet that by tomorrow if not sooner, Mitt Romney will jump on this as a major job killer and announce he will reverse the decision once he’s elected to the Presidency. But let’s pause for a few minutes to express our gratitude to Obama for showing the courage necessary to reject the pipeline. It’s a major victory for environmentalists who worked hard to prevent the pipeline from becoming a reality. You can thank him by signing a petition at the NRDC site.

RFM

American Pad and Paper Company: A Bain Capital Story

Mitt Romney has already made my list for his dangerous, reckless attitudes towards Iran, for which he runs the risk of getting us into another war in the Middle East should he be elected President. But Romney also brings big baggage in his defense of our current casino economic model and that is the subject of this posting. Mitt Romney started and ran Bain Capital from 1984-1999; he still gets profits from the company. It has been estimated that 1/4 of the companies bought or managed by Bain during his tenure were driven into bankruptcy.  One of the companies purchased and managed by Bain Capital, under Romney’s leadership, was American Pad and Paper (AmPad), purchased by Bain in 1992.   The accompanying visual representation of the AmPad’s history under Bain is summarized in the elegant, detailed graphic, put together and available as a pdf by the Boston Globe: you can download it, put it on the wall and distribute as an educational blueprint for how private equity firms operate. The story of AmPad has a beginning, when Bain purchased AmPad in 1992 and it has an ending, when AmPad was forced into bankruptcy and liquidation in 2001. In between those bookends is the story of how private equity firms generate profits for their owners and investors, but fail the company that generated those profits and the workers who ran the business. It tells the story of how a private equity firm ran the company into bankruptcy by forcing it to carry a huge debt load  (measured by the negative numbers and the green line), compared to the company’s sales, indicted by the blue line. The management fees Bain collected are illustrated with bright green circles, while the “other payments” and their amounts are represented by the dark green circles. This graph is not an outlier of the performance of private equity firms and how they manage the companies they buy or control as the major share holder. Rather, this is a graphical template of how private equity firms operate. A decent American, someone who is committed to better equity in America’s income distribution, as well as good management practices for American businesses, should be shocked by this story, but the financial industry of America and the Republican Party as its political representative, celebrate this kind of predatory behavior, because it’s the free market economy at work! If they get their way, the future will be more of the same and then some. A huge failure of our own regulatory agencies, including the SEC,  led to the era of corporate raiding, which forms the basis of our failure to support American manufacturing and the jobs that were slowly created through this process. Private equity firms are a festering wound in America’s manufacturing integrity.

Bain’s initial investment for AmPad was $ 5 million, after which they charged the company “advisory fees” for managerial services. As you can tell from their website describing the private equity branch of the firm, Bain specializes in “leveraged buyouts.” These buyouts are accomplished by putting very little money up front to purchase the company, financing the rest, either by using the companies assets if they have any or saddling the company with a substantial debt load, used to payoff the loan to purchase the company  and provide lucrative profits for the new managers–putting the company in debt is the primary means by which private equity firms generate short-term profit for their investors. Leveraged buyouts should be illegal!

The story of AmPad is hardly unique, but it encapsulates the mechanisms by which private equity firms extract money from the companies they purchase and ostensibly “manage.”  They are not interested in job creation. Their interest is purely in short-term profit-making. For Romney to talk about his work at Bain Capital as one of job creation is absurd–no one else in the private equity industry considers that as one of their motivations (see quote below from the LA Times below). The array of profit-making mechanisms imposed on companies is mind-boggling: no businessman committed to a sensible, strategic growth of their business would ever endanger his company with the kind of debt Bains put on AmPad: debt forms include leveraged buyout loans, management fees and when Bain decided to take the company public, the profits earned from the stock sale, as well as the administrative costs of issuing the IPO (Initial Public Offering) were derived from the stock sales or charged to the company. The purpose of the IPO was to was to generate stock with some value: shortly after AmPad went public Bain sold 40% of their shares, making even more money from their ownership. Private equity firms are also inclined to enhance the growth of the company through the purchase of other companies creating further debt and more job loss through additional downsizing, something usually associated with increased stock value. It should be evident that private equity firms manipulate manufacturing firms without any consideration about the future of the firm–instead they are only interested in short-term profit.

Perhaps the one thing that Texas Governor Rick Perry got right in his political campaign for the Presidency this year, was when he described private equity tactics as “vulture capitalism.” By forcing companies to run up huge debts and charging exorbitant “management fees,” companies lose their ability to make plant investments which would keep them more competitive and modernized. In its eagerness to provide a summary soundbite of private equity firms, the mainstream press is completely incapacitated. I watched on PBS news the other night as someone was trying to explain the value of private equity firms, based on whether they had created jobs or lost jobs. But that is only part of the problem–the major question is what are they doing to companies that secure their future and make them more competitive? What have they done to a company that couldn’t be done better by the ownership of the company and how stable was the company when acquired by the private equity firm?  It’s as if private equity firms and leveraged buyouts are an indication that financial institutions who make money through this sordid mechanism, have given up on American manufacturing and act as though it’s time to sell off the country’s assets and that is  a large part of what happened to the American manufacturing in the Neoliberal era (whose cloud hangs over us today). The first leveraged buyout took place in 1968, but gained momentum in the Reagan era. The practice could have been  stopped by the SEC and financial regulatory agencies, but they progressively proved to be emasculated by the frenzy of the corporate buyouts at the time. In addition, a hidden motivation for this strategy was the benefit of breaking the power of unions, whose presence made it more difficult to downsize companies and reduce wages. Wages, benefits and even whole retirement packages have been swallowed by the mechanisms that private equity firms have used to create wealth for a few investors.

Mitt Romney was hugely successful in running Bain Capital; during the time he ran the company, the investment return averaged 88 percent each year–phenomenal profit levels. These years were the fabulous growth years of our financial industry, which in the 1990s became the largest single sector of our economy and began to outpace manufacturing. In fact, the rise of financial America was created by buying, selling and destroying American manufacturing–that is how the financial sector grew–not by growing something new, but by tearing down what we already had built as a manufacturing economy. At one time America was the envy of the world for its manufacturing base. Where did it all go? And where is it written that a private equity company like Bain has people in their management structure that know how to run AmPad, better than the people running the firm in the first place? It is true that AmPad sales had a period of boom, accompanied by plant acquisitions and closures, but those kinds of performances are typically unsustainable: when a slowdown occurs or if good plant management doesn’t exist to make the appropriate investment decisions for maintaining productivity (and keeping the best people around that know what they’re doing), a company loaded with huge debts will show a drop in profits followed by a decline in the value of the stock, at which time it becomes more challenging for the company to stay afloat, something that AmPad couldn’t achieve. Many of the companies infected with the Bain virus were not new and had been around for a very long time. Take for example, Worldwide Grinding Systems (WGS), established in 1888; the went belly-up less than a decade after Bain became its majority stakeholder. Furthermore, WGS had to turn to a federal insurance agency to bailout its pension system, in large part because Bain  forced the company into a very heavy debt load.

A recent article in the Los Angeles Times describes Bain Capital as follows:

• Romney and his team also maximized returns by firing workers, seeking government subsidies, and flipping companies quickly for large profits. Sometimes Bain investors gained even when companies slid into bankruptcy.
• Romney himself became wealthy at Bain. He is now worth between $190 million and $250 million, much of it derived from his time running the investment firm, his campaign staffers have said.
• Bain managers said their mission was clear. “I never thought of what I do for a living as job creation,” said Marc B. Walpow, a former managing partner at Bain who worked closely with Romney for nine years before forming his own firm. “The primary goal of private equity is to create wealth for your investors.”

Private equity firms are predatory capitalists, willing to force the companies they buy or control to take long-term risks for short-term profits. In the process, part of the short-term profit involves down-sizing the companies they own, eliminating jobs, reducing wages and creating conditions that jeopardize the long-term future of the company. The financial interests who run companies into the ground have absolutely no interest in long-term outcomes, whether it’s related to profits way down the road or our planetary future. They are hooked on short-term profits like junkies in search of a new high. We live in a country turned upside down. Too many economists, those with whom we placed a certain level of confidence that they would be our watchdogs and make certain that the country had a healthy economy, vitalized by a concern for important issues like social stability, equitable income distribution, education opportunities and retirement pensions and programs, have abandoned the ship: our faith in them turned out to be completely misplaced. Most economists are completely supportive of the role that private equity firms play in improving the “efficiency” of companies. This word “efficiency” as derived from their vernacular equates to “downsizing” and increased corporate profitability. Few economists of today have a sufficiently broad enough view of their subject to clearly see the destructive social damage that financial investment organizations like private equity firms have created, not only in terms of our economic future,  but also for the future of our species on this planet. We are badly in need of a new discipline, one that fuses our economic future with the environmental crisis that we are in today. We are deeply in need of new kinds of experts for our badly needed new economy–a new compass that takes into account the needs of a shrinking planet. Where will these new experts come from? Not from economics departments–they had their chance and blew it. We need to build a new economy and put in the kinds of safeguards needed to prevent predatory capitalism from destroying these businesses, while at the same time investing appropriately in the infrastructure improvements needed to place the globe on a better trajectory for the future.

Perhaps we will eventually thank Mitt Romney for the social service he is about to perform as a candidate for the Presidency of the United States. By forcing the public as a whole to get better educated on the sinister motivations of greed that characterize companies like Bain Capital and how private equity firms create so much wealth for their investors, while actually diminishing the wealth of the Middle Class, Americans might finally wake up to the nature of the country we have become. Americans will also need to come to grip with their own naive trust of financial leaders and see the destructive swath that unfettered capitalism has reaped upon the stability of our society and the uncertain future we face as practicing humans trying to make it on this planet. We do not know how much of our manufacturing base was destroyed by the crazy leverage buyouts over the past thirty years and we can only imagine what kind of country we would have today if our government had intelligently stepped in and prevented these corporate disasters from ever taking place–they helped bring on the casino economy we have today.

In closing, I want to quote from a book by Walter Adams and James W. Brock, “Dangerous Pursuits: Mergers and Acquisitions in the Age of Wall Street” published in 1989, reflecting on the impact of leveraged buyout and the absurdity of the practice:

• “In 1983, Esmark, marketer of Swift meats, Butterball turkeys, Playtex products, and STP oil treatments, spent $1 billion to acquire Norton Simon, producer of Hunt’s tomato products, Wesson oil, Reddi-wip, Orville Redenbacher’s popcorn, Johnny Walker Scotch, the Avis car retinal service, and Max Factor cosmetics. The next year, Esmark-Noton Simon was acquired by Beatrice Foods, maker of La Choy, Rosarita, Tropicana fruits drinks, Jolly Rancher candies, Milk Duds, Air Stream motor homes, Samsonite luggage, Stiffel lamps and Culligan water softeners. Two years later, in 1986, Beatrice-Norton Simon-Esmark (which now ranked as the nations’s 26th largest industrial concern) was bought out by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts in a $6.2 billion deal. And for what purpose? To sell off the various Beatrice-Norton Simon-Esmark divisions that had just been consolidated.”

Leveraged buyouts and corporate merger mania made no rational sense for building continuity in manufacturing experience and expertise. The government under Ronald Reagan helped to issue a new gaming license for a new kind of sport: corporate raiding. The new sport was aided by Reagan’s abandonment of antitrust enforcement, his corporate tax cuts and his relaxation of securities regulation. Reagan followed through with his political slogan that “government was the problem, not the solution.” These forces accelerated a reduced motivation to invest in America for fear of corporate takeover. The financial industry of America  had no problem adapting to this new gaming license and showed no concern for jobs lost, companies shattered or assets sold off for profit. The original corporate raiders and arbitrageurs had names like Ivan Boesky, T. Boone Pickens and Carl Icahn, who became the new robber barons preying on companies whose stock had been devalued by economic hard times and foreign competition, some of which was induced by the actions of these robber barons themselves. Bain capital is simply another version of the corporate raiders from an earlier era. We can’t afford to allow the continuation of this silly, but destructive behavior. Too much of our future depends on eliminating this disastrous “free-market” childish behavior and getting serious about human survival and our own economic well-being.

If you want to see how private equity funds have endangered the Danish Economy see my article “Borrowing From Denmark”

RFM

Mitt Romney (from Massimo Prandi)

Perhaps nothing can stop Mitt Romney’s destiny as the Republican nominee to face Barack Obama in this year’s run for the Presidency of the United States. After his victory in New Hampshire, it seems unlikely that anyone can put up a competitive race against him and by now the Republican aficionados  are meeting and making phone calls to smooth the pathway for a less confrontational nomination process to keep their powder dry for the general election.  In other words the message will go out to Newt Gingrich: stop bringing up Bain Capital and we will go out and buy several hundred thousand copies of your books–isn’t that why you were running in the first place, as a book salesman? But, no matter who the Republicans nominate, this will be a tense election year in which we have to recognize the possibility that the Republican Party could gain control of all three bodies of our national government and further push the agenda of right-wing fanatics, a step that I believe, could put us on the road to an American version of Nazism, through the invention of new enemies galore: think of global climate change theorists and scientists as terrorists. These people are scary, not because they are innately violent (though they certainly approve of violence against people they don’t like and very few disapproved of Sarah Palin putting gun-sight images on electoral maps of Democratic opponents such as Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona in the 2010 election), but because they are extremely naive ideologues, which means they are susceptible to being co-opted and exploited  by the corporate elites–those forces that more directly control Congress and the Presidency than the voters do–people like the Koch Brothers.  This year, the SuperPacs seem to be in charge of primaries and were apparently responsible for shooting down Newt Gingrich’s brief political resurgence in Iowa.  While Obama has often displayed corporatist leanings in many of his decisions and initiatives, including his healthcare bill (which offers a huge subsidy to the for-profit health care industry), his continuation of the Patriot Act and more recently his willingness, through signing the National Defense Authorization Act, to expose American citizens to the possibility that they can be arrested and detained without access to our Constitutionally guaranteed protections (Obama did issue a “signing statement,” but it’s unclear what that really means because the clause about indefinite suspension of citizen’s rights is now written into law; it is one more step along the pathway of confusing war and terrorism, which are two different things and should always be handled in two different ways–to fuse them is to place us on a path of further erosion of our civilization).

You only have to look what happened to the Tea Party movement, which was initially hostile to corporate complicity in our fiscal meltdown, to see how easily that mistrust of corporate greed got re-channeled into a new cause in which Tea Party members now favor gutting the limited oversight of financial institutions provided by the Dodd-Frank bill. The Tea Party members should be supporters of the Occupy Wall Street Movement, but they can’t find the right door to open. The Millennials need to open it for them and perhaps in time they will.

While virtually any Republican candidate can be competitive with Obama for the Presidency (now that Michelle Bachman is out of the race, with Rick Perry soon to follow), it is Mitt Romney that bothers me the most. I believe that if elected,  Romney is capable of promptly sending our country into war against Iran, because he faces the world as a Mormon  ideologue. In my experience (having been a Mormon myself), Mormon ideologues belong to a special class of believers, so inundated with an ideological interpretation of the world, combined with deep suspicions about government, that they coalesce around a belief system that verges on religious hysteria, a mental state that, quite uncharacteristic of the human species in general,  readily accepts the complete absence of any concept of verifiable truth, particularly in their construct of the outside world–they capitulate too easily to their leaders.  I have long accepted the insights of many historical judgements on how naive Presidents have taken us into wars that we had no chance of winning, but, like a child first getting hold of the steering wheel of a super sports car and stepping on the gas pedal, America went zooming into wars that still divide us as a nation and have made an indelible contribution to the polarization of our society. As an indication of the perpetuity of Vietnam into the fabric of American culture, who can forget how John Kerry’s Presidential candidacy was destroyed by the Swift Boat ad campaign that resulted in a majority of voters on election day believing that Kerry did not deserve his Vietnam Medals.

Historian Geoffrey Perret’s book “Commander in Chief: How Truman, Johnson and Bush Turned Presidential Power into a Threat to America’s Future” was the subject of two previous postings here and here. In Perret’s excellent book, he describes how Truman, Johnson and Bush shared a completely naive view of the world and, as a result, failed to understand the nature of the conflicts in which they got us involved (without following our Constitution, which says that only Congress can declare war) and under-estimated the deep cultural divide that controversial wars would create within our society. This was especially true of the Vietnam War, when we had a draft and most young males were vulnerable. But our invasion of Iraq, which was perpetrated purely by propaganda for oil and profit, was equally divided along the American political chasm, whose dimensions now deepen and widen because of more fundamental issues, such as the survival of our species on the planet. America seems a binary country on that single dimension–divided into climate change proponents who accept the science and climate change deniers who support the corporatist interpretation of the world: few seem to be on the fence.

Before GWBush was elected President, we didn’t hear from him on the campaign trail about how he wanted to go to war. It was after his election that we learned about his proclivity for making war and his plans  for invading Iraq. But Romney has consistently beaten the drums of war as he promises a more confrontational policy towards Iran; keep in mind that our own government’s best assessment from the National Intelligence Estimate (a summary of all our intelligence information) is that Iran is not making a bomb. But Romney’s advisers are hawks that want to push this issue and Romney promises to raise the military budget over the projections of Obama’s budget. Never mind that Obama’s military budget will still be larger than that of GW Bush. Romney has no experience with war–he never served in the military (neither did Obama, but we know Obama hates war).  So Romney will be more inclined to listen to his advisers, among whom are hawks who promote this more confrontational stance towards Iran and do not want to see America become a shrinking power.  Any war with Iran would lead to an immediate closure of the Strait of Hormuz and very likely would lead to a much wider war, to say nothing about running the risk of collapse in the global economy. Every day 20% of the world’s oil supply, or 17 million barrels of oil moves through the Strait of Hormuz, making it, economically, one of the most important passageways on the planet. As Michael Klare points out, we are entering the Geo-Energy-Era in which energy demands are escalating and easy access to oil is diminishing, with fever-pitch efforts by countries and companies to secure more oil contracts. Some analysts claim that blocking the Strait of Hormuz for any significant length of time could dramatically increase the cost of oil by 50% and trigger a global recession or depression.  It probably no longer matters whether there is a glut of oil on the market as the futures trading in oil seems permanently hyped into the perception that, as a planet, we are running out of oil at a time of skyrocketing demands needed to serve the exploding economies of China, India and other parts of Asia. Can we afford to elect a President who is so naive that he  is willing to go to war based on false premises about Iran’s nuclear weapons program? This is what I mean about a President that has no clue about the principle of verifiable truth. Of course it doesn’t help that the Obama administration seems to be hyping the Iran/nuclear bomb threat as well: is that for election purposes, like Kennedy’s famous “missile-gap” charge when running for the Presidency against Nixon in 1960?

If there is any advantage in having Mitt Romney run for President, it will be that finally, the American electorate, will get to know what a private equity firm is and how Mitt Romney, as the head of Bain Capital, managed to destroy many companies for the sake of profit.  Private equity firms, while bringing huge profits to the investors, destroy companies by saddling them with debt used to pay off the buyout of the company or give resources back to the investors and managers of the firm. If a company needs to buy plant equipment to improve their productivity, they cannot do it if saddled with debt, forced on them by their new owners. If you believe that Bain Capital has been good for our economy and jobs, then you should read the Think Progress article on Mitt Romney Job Killer. When Romney ran against Ted Kennedy for his Senate seat in 1994, just as in today’s campaign, he advocated his record of job creation and his business experience to challenge Kennedy. But Kennedy won that race by illustrating one of Romney’s “success stories” using the example of American Pad and Paper or AMPAD, a company that under Bain’s ownership, cut jobs and reduced wages. Kennedy played television ads featuring interviews with laid-off AMPAD employees and won the race at a time when Romney might have more easily unseated Kennedy.The AMPAD story continued after the election and according to the data presented in Think Progress, Bain invested $ 10 million in  AMPAD, but pulled $100 million out of the company. AMPAD had to cut 385 jobs and with $392 million in debt in 1999, filed for bankruptcy in 2000.  In our current depressed economy, with millions out of work, shedding light on predatory, private equity firms will not enhance Romney’s chances of unseating Obama, but it may help educate voters on whether it’s more important to have good-paying jobs or highly profitable investment firms that form one of the mechanisms by which the middle class shrinks as the wealthy get richer. Today more than ever before in our consumer-based economy, it is important to have good paying jobs in order for people to maintain consumption, create demand and grow the economy. Right now the imbalance of income distribution is slanted in such a way that consumer demand cannot get off the ground and Mitt Romney has no clue on how to fix the problem, unless of course he takes us into war.

RFM

Aftermath of Joplin MO Tornado 2011

It is innately human for us to recall and assess this past year’s major events and review the memories, as the end of the year winds down to the last few days. After that, the new year starts up and we supposedly have something to look forward to, as we turn our heads and point to the future, though not quite putting last year’s memories in a lock box. Whether this transition is cultural or more subtly linked to the events like the Winter Solstice, the transition we make on or about New Year’s day is a change from looking in the rear view mirror for a few moments, to catch a few fading memories and then switching to focus our eyes on the road ahead. Barack Obama will have to do that as he prepares for his re-election campaign. Right now, resting in Hawaii, he is probably soaking up the impact of his recent speech in Osawatomie, Kansas and trying to estimate how effectively it went down with the Millennial crowd, those for whom it was designed. I agree with other assessments that he will benefit more from the Millennial generation in the coming election compared to any other age group and that’s why his Osawatomie speech was so important. He currently holds a 25 point lead over Romney among Millennials–they alone will hold the key to his re-election and I think he finally knows this–they are strongly in support of the Occupy Wall Street Movement, but he will have to make a few more left turns in order to convince them and keep his big margin, enough so that the millennials will massively get out and vote in November 2012: they went missing in 2010.  This is an historic election coming up. Let’s hope that this election proves to be the year that we put the Republican Party, at least this iteration of it, in our rear view mirror on a more permanent basis.  On the other hand, for the older crowd, those that are in the pre-Baby Boomer generation, many of whom are members of the Tea party,  Obama trails Mitt Romney by a 54-41 margin, a very wide gap. Perhaps he can whittle away and gain a few points with this group, because as soon as Romney gets the nomination, he will shift his focus towards cutting benefits for Social Security and Medicare and eliminating the new healthcare bill he refers to as “Obamacare.” Those are issues that touch many of the Tea Party members–what they are actually mad about is not their benefits, but the idea that illegal immigrants and lazy young people will step in to get a share of the American pie while their own is increasingly at risk–that’s why they are conflicted with Romney’s candidacy. At the very moment Romney gets the nomination, many Tea Party members might be uttering “Hell hath no fury like a former private equity manager running for President.”

Not only do we as individuals assess the recent past, but it makes sense that our government agencies  try to do the same; one assessment among the U.S. government agencies stands out: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has tallied the cost of the many weather disasters we have been through in the past year. Justin Gillis reports on this in the New York Times: as he describes it, a typical year in this country for weather disasters usually has three or four incidents which reach the threshold of $1 billion or more each. But this year NOAA has done the math and, while the agency has not yet finished adding it all up, the final cost is likely to exceed $ 50 billion. It includes wildfires, floods, heat waves, dust storms and several deadly tornadoes, the likes of which have not been seen before.  According to  a weather expert who co-founded the website called “Weather Underground,” a search of the historical weather patterns going back to the late 1800s did not reveal anything comparable to 2011 for weather disasters. Though most climate scientists are certain that the heating of the earth from greenhouse gases accounts for many of these catastrophic events, right now it isn’t possible to say which events are global-climate-change-related and which are not. Climate scientists know that we are changing the scale of atmospheric events, because we are putting more energy into the atmosphere. This additional energy has to be dissipated in some way and more frequent and violent interactions with the Earth’s surface, whether over water or land, are about the only options. But things like tornadoes are hard to pinpoint in terms of their genesis because they are relatively small on a global scale and seem random. However, less random is the fact that funnels in some of the recent tornadoes, like that in Joplin Missouri, were a mile wide and touched down for much longer stretches than one’s experience would indicate. This was a violent tornado, destroying virtually everything in its path. Right now climate scientists are retooling climate models to deal with smaller regions and study more effectively the impact that global climate change has on these events. But there is some doubt about the accuracy with which these more refined models can be predictive and with public interest in global climate change at such a low ebb, and the economy in the tank, needed research resources to address these kinds of problems are not available.

In case you were thinking about serious mountain climbing this coming year, you might want to check out what has been happening to the large mountains on the planet, those with glaciers on top, most of which are in full retreat. One climber even reported seeing running water near the top of Mt. Everest, something never reported before. You might want to visit Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa before its glacier completely disappears, perhaps as early as 2015. Glaciers on major mountain tops have had serious erosion during the past few decades and because snow and ice have been the glue that keeps loose rocks and boulders bound together, hiking in many places has become more dangerous. While some climbing can be more accessible, it is often longer and more treacherous. To top it all off, a new report indicates that emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere had the largest increase ever recorded, with an increase of 5.9 percent in 2010.  This contrasts with  the 1.4 percent drop in emissions in 2009, the year the recession generated a significant drop in the economy and greenhouse gas emissions. Most climate scientists agree that we have reached a tipping point in the sense that we will have to live through a significant period of  impact from global climate change and that our planet is likely to change in irreversible ways as this century progresses. Here’s hoping that our fondest memories each year are not related to the weather patterns we enjoyed, but may never see again.

RFM