It is hard to decide what is the most despicable thing about senatorial Republican hopeful Pete Hoekstra’s Superbowl ad attacking rival Democratic Senator Debbie Stabenow. The ad has a Chinese young woman speaking broken English and gloating about the indebtedness of the US to China and the export of US jobs to China. Given the ugly history in Michigan of Asian-bashing over economic competition in the automobile industry and the 1982 murder of Vincent Chin in Detroit, Hoekstra’s ad is incendiary and has offended right-thinking people in both major political parties.
Although the controversy that ensued mostly focused on the scapegoating of Asians and Asian-Americans for current US economic difficulties, there are other heavy duty issues in the ad.
The current US deficit was primarily the work of the Republican majority under George W. Bush, as this chart demonstrates:
Hoekstra and his colleagues voted to go to war with Iraq, which was an unfunded war, most of the so far $1 trillion price tag being borrowed. Hoekstra and his colleagues voted to cut taxes on the rich, much reducing revenues. And Hoekstra and his colleagues voted for an unfunded Medicare prescription benefit. The tax cuts on the rich have gone on raising the deficit every year since enacted by hundreds of millions of dollars. Hoekstra voted for the TARP bailout. Iraq was still costing billions in 2011. And the Medicare prescription benefit likewise. Hoekstra’s votes are an ongoing budget disaster, long after he got out of government.
Although it is true that China is a holder of a little over $1 trillion of our national debt, Japan comes in as a close second. And, the UK, Brazil, a group of oil exporters, Switzerland and Taiwan together hold more US debt than does China. Proportionally speaking, China doesn’t hold that much US debt. And, far from being a a threat in this regard, China is is doing us a favor. But it is Hoekstra who gave them that opportunity, by creating so much debt.
“Romney says, “I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs a repair , I’ll fix it. I’m not concerned about the very rich…. I’m concerned about the very heart of America, the 90-95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling.”
O’Brien asked him to clarify his remarks saying, “There are lots of very poor Americans who are struggling who would say, ‘That sounds odd.’”
Romney continues, “We will hear from the Democrat party, the plight of the poor…. You can focus on the very poor, that’s not my focus….”
•Nearly 47 million people were in poverty in the US in 2010, up from 37.3 million in 2007. That was the 4th year in a row in which the number of people in poverty increased. In the 52 years that poverty rates have been being published, this is the largest number ever.
•20.5 million Americans are in “extreme poverty.” That is, their family income is $10,000 or less a year for a family of 4, about half that of the poverty line. But since they’re so well taken care of, Romney is not interested in those 20 million people. Or maybe it is because he knows that they don’t typically vote, being too busy on Tuesdays trying to make a living.
• There were 17.2 million households or about 1 in 7 that were food insecure in the US in 2010, the highest number ever recorded. (“Food insecure” means “at risk of going hungry.” About 1/3 of these households, or over 6 million, actually went hungry at some points of the year because they were not able to afford food. This hunger encompassed the children as well. Romney’s safety net is leaving millions of children hungry at times. He seems to get plenty of nice meals.)
Taylor Marsh writes in a guest column for Informed Comment
The Party’s Over
There’s a reason Obama reelect doesn’t have a slogan.
All they’ve got is a question: Are you in?
Symbolic of this problem is what happened to Elizabeth Warren when her rise was met by Tim Geithner’s foot, and why Ron Suskin’s book Confidence Men made the Administration queasy. Since Pres. Obama was forced to make a recess appointment to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which Warren created, you have to ask why he didn’t fight for Warren in the first place, because he could have appointed her in the same way. Pres. Obama’s leadership style is also seen in Wall Street firms earning more in Pres. Obama’s first years than in both terms of George W. Bush.
Then there’s Obama’s foreign policy, which picked up where Bush left off. Pres. Obama’s “serious reservations” didn’t keep him from signing the NDAA, something any conservative Republican president would have signed. Indefinite military detention without trial is now the policy of the Obama administration, which is something Mitt Romney would also do. There is no habeas corpus at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. What is called “targeted killing” has actually increased under Pres. Obama, something Glenn Greenwald writes about regularly. As for “secret prisons,” it’s not quite as a bad as Bush, because now people are held for a “short-term transitory” basis. But Pres. Obama’s surveillance program is identical to his predecessor. Candidate Obama was against the Iraq war, but he had no trouble bombing Libya without congressional oversight or approval, even though it was not of strategic interest to the U.S. or a clear and present danger. We’ve supposedly gotten out of Iraq, but there is a 104 acre embassy, the biggest on planet earth, with support and logistics to match.
It’s also why Pres. Obama showing up in Osawatamie, Kansas to use the Occupy message didn’t fool smarter folks, because if his leadership matched the words he spoke Robert Reich wouldn’t be floating hail Mary posts about switching Biden with Hillary.
Today, women’s concerns are focused on economics. But is it enough that the 111th Congress passed the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which Pres. Obama signed? We should expect all 21st century politicians to support economic equality. But to laud something as fundamental as financial equity for the same job simply because Senate Republicans don’t reveals women, regardless of political party, are expecting way too little from our politicians who depend on our support to keep their job.
Pres. Obama proved his economic timidity in the 2010 midterms, when you didn’t hear anything close to the speech he gave in Kansas, which didn’t come until he began campaigning for his own reelection. At least he always has his own back. Back in 2010, he and his pal at the DNC, Tim Kaine, now running for Senate from Virginia, refused to make any Democratic case at all on economics. Obama then followed that up by caving and extending the Bush tax cuts. Obama and the Democratic midterm shellacking is what delivered state houses in record numbers to the right, which led to an assault on unions, the middle class, as well as women’s individual freedoms.
Looking at reelection, Pres. Obama decided to put politics over science on Plan B, even though it was proven completely safe for females, regardless of age. To make matters worse, because he evidently thinks women are stupid, he hid behind Secy. Kathleen Sibelius, the head of Health and Human Services, saying it wasn’t his decision. This kind of cowardice in a grown man is unattractive; in a Democratic president it is unacceptable.
It’s not like Plan B is an abortificient like RU486. All Plan B does is stop pregnancy or implantation. If you want a non-scientific description, this basically means ingesting a pill that makes a female’s uterus inhospitable for fertilization; a chemical change in the female’s body so a pregnancy cannot begin. It’s absolutely not an abortion, because there’s no fetus yet.
Pres. Obama made a choice any Republican president would have made. That’s not what I voted for in 2008 and not what Democrats have promised for decades.
Leader Nancy Pelosi gave Pres. Obama a pass on his Plan B decision, while Rep. Diana DeGette, a member of the so-called “Pro-Choice Caucus,” said she was “disappointed.”
George W. Bush inspired the rise of the Tea Party, so one hoped that Barack Obama’s repeated applications of conservatism would unleash a requisite uprising on the left. However, there has been no challenge to Pres. Obama, with progressives in Congress and outside groups again and again rallying for him, while choosing to ignore his choice of conservatism over progressivism.
Pres. Obama can’t find a reelection slogan because his 2012 campaign boils down to the reality that “hope and change” has been reduced to “Republicans are worse.”
Graffiti from Mission Street, San Francisco in honor of Mohamed Bouazizi, whose self-immolation kicked off the Tunisian Revolution, inspired the Tahrir Square demonstrations, and the Arab Spring:
Mohamed Bouazizi Graffitti, Mission St., San Francisco
OWS San Francisco demonstration, California Street, January 20, 2012 (inspired by the Tahrir Square demonstrations of January 25, 2011, and after in Egypt):
Occupy Wall Street in turn put pressure on the Obama administration to get tougher with, well, Wall Street. So he announced in his State of the Union Address that he was establishing a financial crimes unit and would make sure the big banks would get no more massive taxpayer bailouts.
The election results for Egypt’s lower house have been announced, and the Muslim religious parties appear to have gained over 70% of the seats. The Muslim Brotherhood is claiming its Freedom and Justice Party took 47% of the 498 seats in the lower house of parliament.
The hard line fundamentalist Nur Party won 29% of the seats contested on a party basis.
To have 51%, the Muslim Brotherhood party needs a coalition with another party. Its leaders have at least said that they prefer to make that alliance with a secular party like the Wafd rather than with the hard line Salafis.
The other big political news is that Newt Gingrich won the Republican primary in South Carolina. I have noticed a big difference in the coverage of these two events in the US press. American journalists noted that 60-65% of Republican voters in South Carolina are evangelicals. But they did not then add reaction to this statistic. They did not then immediately quote pro-choice women or secularists as saying that they were afraid South Carolina’s church-goers have a dispropotionate influence on US politics (South Carolina’s population is only 4 million.). In contrast, US journalists who reported an MB win immediately added that women and secularists were worried about it.
Then, you don’t see much in the US press as to why Egyptians voted as they did.
Gingrich’s win is attributed to good debating skills. To Romney’s gaffes and inability to escape the image of a spoiled rich kid. To the state’s high unemployment rate. To evangelical discomfort with Romney’s Mormonism.
No similar reasons are given for the Muslim Brotherhood’s win in Egypt. Were their opponents good or bad debaters? Weren’t a lot of the candidates they defeated from the old rich elite?
Class resentments are seen as fuelling the defeat of Romney, but are seldom mentioned as a motive for voters in Egypt. But isn’t it likely that many secularists and persons with ties to the Mubarak regime who ran for office lost because they are thought to be rich and to have stolen people blind under Mubarak.
The result of this difference in approach is that it is implicitly deemed illegitimate for Egyptians to be religious or vote for a religious party. But it is legitimate for South Carolinians to be religious, to vote on a religious basis, to seek to impose their religious laws on all Americans.
But what if Egyptians voted for the religious parties because they saw them as uncorrupt and despite their religious platforms, not because of them? Polling shows a big increase in 2011 in the proportion of Egyptians who say they are Egyptians first and Muslims second– from 8% earlier in the decade to 50% today. Likewise almost no Egyptians think that the revolution against Mubarak was made to establish a religious state.
It is therefore probable that religious motivations actually played a larger role in the primary in South Carolina than in the election in Egypt! Likewise, an MB leader like Essam El-Erian is the voice of reason compared to Gingrich and is no worse in his own way than Gingrich’s sugar daddy, Sheldon Adelson.
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