After his wins on Tuesday, Mitt Romney is clearly the Republican standard bearer in the 2012 election, and he is already flailing about attempting to find some mud to throw at President Obama in hopes some of it will stick. He has trotted out a tired talking point attempting to blame Obama for high gasoline prices, saying that the president’s environmentalism has gotten in the way of US drilling. The charge is full of factual and logical holes.
Romney had it right the first time. Oil prices are a matter of supply and demand, and Romney only wants to talk about supply. The US imports 8.7 million barrels of petroleum per day (the world produces roughly 87 million barrels a day). If you wanted to put down its price, you could begin by slashing imports by not wasting so much gasoline. If we moved more things by train instead of by trucks; if we gave more tax breaks for buying hybrids and electric vehicles; if we did more to encourage wind and solar energy and integrated it with electric vehicles; if we lowered the speed limits; if we held Detroit’s feet to the fire and required much higher gasoline efficiency much sooner, if we set policies that encouraged people to live in cities near their work– if we did all that we’d put down the price of petroleum. We only have 4% of the world’s population and we use about a fifth of the world’s petroleum, and that is one of the problems.
Of course, the upward pressure on prices is coming mainly from increased use of petroleum by China and India, where large numbers of people have forsaken bicycles and discovered the joys of urban gridlock. Prices jumped the other day on good news about China growing a little faster this year than had earlier been forecast. When China grows, the price of petroleum goes up. So to get firm downward pressure on pricing you’d need China and India and Europe to stop wasting so much gasoline, too.
We can’t affect the supply part of the equation. The United States just doesn’t have many petroleum reserves by world standards, and drilling in nature reserves and off pristine beaches is not going to produce enough fuel to lower world prices. We’ve already increased our production of petroleum and liquid fuels by about a million barrels a day since Obama has been president, and Obama isn’t doing anything to stand in the way of that kind of thing.
And, there are currently some international issues affecting supply:
1. the boycotts on Iran (which Romney supports, in fact he wants more! The more you boycott Iran’s oil, the more you put up the price of petroleum; hint: you’ve reduced supply). Talk of war also raises gasoline prices because the futures markets get nervous.
2. Declining production from old fields. China’s domestic production is down 200,000 barrels a day this spring because an old field is being worked out. China’s good economy is also roaring along, so that Chinese demand was up about 18% in February.
3. Political instability and quarrels. The Kurds in northern Iraq say they will stop pumping oil until the central Iraqi government gives them the share of profits it had promised. Syria used to produce 400,000 barrels a day and is now not doing much because of the upheaval there. South Sudan has shut down production as part of its quarrel with Sudan, through which it pipes its oil, over how much Khartoum skims off.
Romney doesn’t have a magic wand to address these issues, and most of his policies would make things worse (he’d pursue heightened tensions with Iran, would oppose green energy and more efficient use of fuel, etc.)
So why is Romney flipflopping and lying about the president and gasoline prices?
Petroleum companies, oil services companies, and pipeline companies, which can collectively be called Big Oil, spend millions on lobbying politicians in Washington. Some 90% of their contributions go to Republicans. As the likely incoming leader of the Republican Party, Mitt Romney is eager to attract more Big Oil campaign money (the industry liked Rick Perry slightly better) and to support a major constituency of his party.
That constituency is a coddled one.
The Center for American Progress points out, US taxpayers give the 5 biggest oil companies $4 billion a year in tax breaks, even though they made nearly $140 billion in profits last year:
“High oil and gasoline prices in 2011 enabled the big five companies to rake in $137 billion in profits last year. These enormous earnings contributed to the $1 trillion in profits they earned from 2001 through 2011. Despite a profit figure with 12 zeroes—count them: $1,000,000,000,000—these oil giants are major players in the lobbying efforts to retain $4 billion in annual tax breaks for oil and gas companies that they clearly do not need. In the scheme of all things Big Oil, these tax breaks are small, particularly in relation to their profits and in light of the fact that in 2011 these companies also had a combined $58 billion in cash reserves, nearly 30 times more than they received in special tax breaks.”
So Romney wants a political narrative that casts the oil companies as heroic victims. Why, they could supply us with cheap gasoline if only mean Obama didn’t interfere so much with their attempts to drill in Santa Monica beach and in nature reserves.
But they can’t, and Obama isn’t. And besides, Romney already praised the high prices as a good impetus for greater private sector efficiency. Is that cold comfort to the middle class vacationers this summer paying an arm and a leg at the pump? Yup, but Romney is going to provide the middle classes with so much cold comfort this summer that they won’t need air conditioning.
It turns out that from a hard-right American evangelical point of view, the US public may have a choice between two Muslims, or two ‘may as well be Muslims’ for president this fall.
He underlined that the fact that someone is not a professing Christian (sliding over from Mormons not being orthodox Christians to not being Christians at all) should not disqualify him from running for president. He quotes Martin Luther that “I would rather be governed by a competent Turk [i.e. Muslim] than an incompetent Christian.”
at 12:04:
[Everything Land says earlier about Ahmadinejad, Iran and Israel is factually incorrect by the way.]
Ironically, Land’s quotation of Luther, which is historically without any basis in fact, actually points to another analogy that Protestant leaders once made, between Islam and Roman Catholicism. Throughout history, evangelicals have used Islam to represent “the other.” Now it is Mormonism, but once it was the papacy.
The rumor that Luther felt this way about accepting Muslim rule was actually promulgated by Leo X. George W. Forell, “Luther and the War against the Turks,” Church History, Vol. 14, No. 4 (Dec., 1945), pp. 256-271, explained,
“It was at that time that Luther published his first major statement in regard to the Turkish danger. It appeared in 1529 under the title On War against the Turk, and was written to counteract the prevalent opinion that Luther considered the war against the Turks a war against God. This impression of Luther’s position had been fostered by the notorious papal bull, Exsurge Domine, in which Pope Leo X had condemned Luther’s theses as heretical. In his fifth thesis Luther had said that the pope cannot remit any other punishments than those which he or canon law had imposed. He had claimed that the pope cannot remit God’s punishments. And in his defense of the ninety-five theses of 1518 he had tried to make his point even more emphatic and had added that if the pope was as well able to remit divine punishment as he claimed, he should stop the advance of the Turk. Luther said that he must indeed be a poor Christian who does not know that the Turks are a punishment from God, and invited the pope to stop that punishment.
The pope had countered by condemning as heretical the following sentence of Luther: “To fight against the Turks is to fight against God’s visitation upon our iniquities.” In this misleading form, Luther’s attitude toward the war against the Turks had been widely publicised. This had given the general impression that Luther considered a war against the Turks sinful and preferred the rule of the Turks to the rule of the emperor.
Luther had to answer this accusation. He did that in a detailed reassertion of all the articles condemned by Leo X. In regard to the Turks he said that unless the pope were put in his place, all attempts to defeat the Turks would prove futile. The wrath of the Lord would continue to be upon all Christendom as long as Christian nations continued to honor those most Turkish of all Turks, even the Romanists.
But this answer merely showed that Luther’s pronouncements in regard to the Turks were not a defense of the Turks but an attack against the pope.”
Actually, Luther believed that Muslims were being allowed to advance into Central Europe in the 1500s as a punishment on European Christians for being Roman Catholics. He understood that Muslims often lived moral lives and had mystics among them, but considered them ‘saints of the devil.’ He saw both the pope and Islam as ‘anti-Christs’. Forell explained,
‘Luther’s identification of the Turk with the Antichrist sounds confusing in view of his frequent claims that it is the pope in Rome who is the real Antichrist. But for Luther two Antichrists presented no problem. He said, “The person of the Antichrist is at the same time the pope and the Turk. Every person consists of a body and a soul. So the spirit of the Antichrist is the pope, his flesh is the Turk. The one has infested the Church spiritually, the other bodily. However, both come from the same Lord, even the devil.” ‘
Luther rejected the idea of a crusade or a religious war as blasphemous. Human beings are too sinful to wage war in the name of a holy cause. But he did believe that Germans had a civil obligation to fight the Ottoman advance to defend their homes. The idea that he would have accepted an Ottoman ruler is absurd.
Yet another irony is that the Ottoman Empire was interested in Protestantism as a way of dividing and ruling Christian lands, and perhaps they knew enough of it to know its leaders often rejected holy war against the Ottomans or even that some had pacifist tendencies. They also viewed it as closer to an Islamic sensibility. Ultimately Protestantism in eastern Europe sometimes benefited from Ottoman protection. Luther himself was aware of this tendency, and rejected it. Forell:
‘a little episode reported in the Table Talk. At one time Luther was informed by a member of an imperial mission to the Turkish Sultan that Suleiman had been very much interested in Luther and his movement and had asked the ambassadors Luther’s age. When they had told him that Luther was forty-eight years old, he had said, “I wish he were even younger; he would find in me a gracious protector.” But hearing that report, Luther, not being a realistic politician, made the sign of the cross and said, “May God protect me from such a gracious protector.” ‘
Land’s position is therefore actually much more tolerant and admirable than that of Luther himself, insofar as he says, at least, that he would accept a non-Muslim president and he lacks Luther’s animus toward Roman Catholicism. But in likening Mormonism to Islam (to the detriment of both in his own mind), Land is deploying the same intellectual gesture, of amalgamating the internal Christian Other to the external Muslim Other, that Luther engaged in. And while Land believes that evangelicals will in the end prefer Romney to Obama, so far they are not voting that way, and they may well stay home on election day. What with having only Muslim or Muslim-like choices.
This is the ultimate chicken hawk, who had 5 deferrals from serving in Vietnam, and who sent thousands of US troops to protect his oil in Iraq, where 30,000 were seriously wounded and nearly 5000 killed.
But, you know, he might be scalded by Tim Horton’s coffee or fatally confused when drivers stop to let jaywalkers cross the road.
Let’s take up a collection to send him to speak in Baghdad, which he made dangerous for millions of Iraqis.
Limbaugh is not just an entertainer. He is a major force in Republican politics and in shaping political discourse in the United States. None of the Republican candidates wants to admit that they are joined at the hip with Limbaugh.
More important, Limbaugh’s defamation of Sandra Fluke is simply a logical extension of what Rick Santorum has said. He wasn’t being “absurd.” He was engaged in a reductio ad absurdum, taking an argument to its ultimate conclusion.
Santorum said that contraception is not all right because it allows people to do things sexually that they aren’t supposed to do. (His discomfort with the very subject and awkward phrasing are in themselves very suspicious).
In other words, Santorum believes that freely-available contraception encourages people to engage in casual sex, which he believes the government should forestall by abrogating any right to privacy. While there isn’t a typical pejorative for a man who sleeps around, there are lots of words for a woman who does. One of them is “slut.”
So when Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke that, he was simply making explicit something that Santorum had already said.
Limbaugh isn’t “entertaining” when he lashes out at a private citizen like that. He is putting into practice the principles Santorum had enunciated. Limbaugh is just Lenin to Santorum’s Marx. Indeed, we ought to speak of Limbaugh-Santorumism.
Santorum says he is in a very different business than Limbaugh. He isn’t. Both of them are in the business of Inquisition.
You don’t have to have had Economics 101 to know that Mitt Romney is peddling snake oil. Massively cutting government spending when the economy is fragile would risk throwing the country into another Very Deep Recession. Tax cuts don’t create jobs– often they send them abroad since they concentrate wealth in the hands of the super-rich, who don’t really care whether the jobs are created in the US or abroad.
But the biggest scam of all is the “across the board” tax cut.
Let us imagine that we were five friends. And let us say that we each paid annual income taxes but at much different rates.
Toni makes minimum wage and doesn’t pay Federal income taxes, though she has to pay the 15% payroll tax that goes toward Social Security.
Jimmy has a wife and two children and makes $60,000 a year, and pays $16,000 in Federal taxes.
Veronica makes $150,000 a year as an attorney and pays $44,000 in Federal taxes.
Jake makes a million a year from his business and pays $200,000 in Federal income taxes.
Mitt makes $20 million a year and pays $2.4 million because it is mostly investment income taxed at a very low rate.
So implement the 20 percent across the board cut.
Toni ends up paying for some things now provided by the government, so she loses what little money she has. Jimmy would save $3200 on the surface, but will lose a child to cholera when the water isn’t any longer purified.. Veronica would save $8,800 to outward seeming but will have to buy a new $25,000 car because her automobile will get totaled because of a pothole on the interstate that the government doesn’t any longer bother to fix. Jake would save $40,000. And Mitt would save $480,000. Do you see how that “across the board” thing works in favor of the very rich?
Taxes are used for common purposes. They pay for interstate highways, environmental cleanup, and all kinds of national infrastructure. If Mitt gets an extra $480,000 to keep, it is not free money. It is being subtracted from the common pot of money that pays for the things we need government to deliver to us. Mitt’s investments are in companies that need their goods trucked around the US, but now he’s cutting money to pay for road building and maintenance. He’s eating the nation’s seed corn.
And so this is what his 20% across the board cut looks like in general (a quintile is a fancy word for a fifth of the population).
In other goods, what Romney promotes is what is good for Mitt and for a few billionaire buddies. He doesn’t care about you if you are in the 99% percent, but he will try to convince you to let him do “across the board” tax cuts that mainly benefit large corporations.
When he says he is going to “fix” social security and medicare (which aren’t broken, aren’t on the verge of bankruptcy, and don’t need any dramatic rescue) what he really means is that he is going to try to get rid of them gradually.
The super rich in the US really, really like 1928, and they hate the New Deal like the devil hates holy water, and they are trying to repeal it. Repealing the New Deal is 80% of Romney’s agenda.
Rick Santorum said Monday that when he first heard John F. Kennedy’s speech on religion and politics, it made him want to puke. Santorum misrepresented what Kennedy said, of course. Kennedy welcomed the participation of religious people in American public life. Santorum is a secret dominionist, desiring a takeover of the US by rightwing religion, which is why he really objects to Kennedy’s statement. (Santorum is deeply under the influence of the scary Opus Dei cult.) But Santorum’s attack on President Kennedy started me thinking about the differences between these two Americans who put themselves forward as leaders of this country.
10. John F. Kennedy was a war hero who fought in the Pacific theater after America was the victim of a war of aggression.
JFK PT 109
Santorum is a chickenhawk who voted to send US soldiers into Iraq on false pretenses.
Santorum wants to repeal the Health Care Reform that provides for every American to have health insurance
8. John F. Kennedy was a liberal who cared about people:
“If by a “Liberal” they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people — their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties — someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a “Liberal,” then I’m proud to say I’m a “Liberal.” — Acceptance of the New York Liberal Party nomination (14 September 1960)
Rick Santorum is a rightist radical who wants to abolish the Federal safety net for those who need it and who plays politics with race resentments.
“I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money; I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money.”
“I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty, which will protect the beauty of our natural environment, which will preserve the great old American houses and squares and parks of our national past, and which will build handsome and balanced cities for our future.”
6. John F. Kennedy launched a US government project to land an American on the moon within a decade, saying “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills…”
Santorum, no visionary, views space exploration as a “wasteful” “government program” and wants to hang competition with the Chinese in space on the US private sector (as if there is money to be made in the black vacuum of outer space)
5. John F. Kennedy praised science and scientists, saying, , “Science contributes to our culture in many ways, as a creative intellectual activity in its own right, as the light which has served to illuminate man’s place in the universe, and as the source of understanding of man’s own nature.”
4. John F. Kennedy supported peaceful revolutions:
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” – Address to Latin American diplomats at the White House (13 March 1962)
3. John F. Kennedy opposed government secrecy and censorship on national security grounds:
“The very word “secrecy” is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it. Even today, there is little value in opposing the threat of a closed society by imitating its arbitrary restrictions. Even today, there is little value in insuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it. And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment. That I do not intend to permit to the extent that it is in my control.”
2. John F. Kennedy opposed wars of aggression, saying, “The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war. We do not want a war. We do not now expect a war. This generation of Americans has already had enough — more than enough — of war and hate and oppression.”
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