The 99 Percent Election

When Mother Jones published a video of comments by Mitt Romney at a private upscale fundraising dinner about the 47 percent of the electorate who would never vote for him—

who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it …

and (the payoff)“who pay no income taxes”—New York Times columnist Ross Douthat asked whether these comments were “a window into the elusive ‘real Romney’ and proof that his moderate-seeming façade has always been a sham?”

Douthat’s answer to his own question was “Who could possibly know?”

Romney has built his career, in business as in politics, on telling people what they want to hear in order to persuade them to let him manage their affairs.  This is a man who tried to get to the left of Ted Kennedy in their 1994 Senate race and to the right of Rick Perry in 2012. The idea that he would reveal his true political beliefs to a group of people he’s trying to flatter, cajole and spook into giving him more money may be appealing to his critics, but it isn’t necessarily convincing.

That answer made sense to me.  Throughout his long campaign for the Republican presidential nomination and for the presidency itself, Romney took so many different positions that they were referred to as etch-a-sketches.

In the first Presidential debate on October 3, 2012, Romney introduced a brand new sketch in an effort to flatter, cajole and spook potential voters tuned into the debate into voting for him as a moderate.  And Douthat was one of those who were flattered, cajoled or spooked.  As he saw it, Romney might just have become the effective leader of the leaderless Republican party by “channeling the base’s passions in a constructive direction and by reinterpreting the party’s ideology to meet the challenges of the present day.”

That’s quite a accomplishment for an etch-a-sketch—transforming Romney from someone whom no one could possibly know what he stood for into a party leader.  But Douthat’s “only question, as we head into the final four weeks of the campaign, is whether [this new sketch came] a little bit too late.”

According to the polls, maybe not.  Nate Silver’s Five Thirty Eight blog showed Obama free-falling from an 87-to-13 favorite to win the election on October 4 to a 61-to-39 favorite on October 12.  Evidently a lot of the polled electorate did their own Douthat flip, suddenly willing after an hour and a half debate to trust a candidate whom they had never trusted before.

This election is a rarity in that the core issue that has divided the country since the passing of the New Deal’s Social Security Act—whether it is a proper role of the federal government to provide social insurance (aka entitlements) to its people—is pretty much the explicit core issue of the campaign.  In past campaigns the issue has been buried beneath symbolic issues such as whether government is too big or taxes are too high.  And so it might have been this year until Romney chose Congressman Paul Ryan as his vice presidential running mate.

Ryan is the author of two successive budgets adopted by all Republicans in the House of Representatives and supported by all Republican Senators.  If Democrats had not blocked them, both budgets would have eviscerated Medicare and Medicaid, enacted in 1965 by the Johnson administration, leaving Social Security (one has reason to suspect) for future dismembering.  And both Romney and Ryan have vowed to repeal the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010 by the Obama administration.

A vote for Romney and Ryan in the 2012 election is a vote for the Republican party and a vote to take down the social insurance programs.  The Republican party in Congress “cares solely and exclusively about its rich contributors.”  These rich contributors care about not having their taxes raised or their activities regulated or their being prevented from obtaining monopoly profits.  They’re rent-seekers, seeking to profit from activities that don’t add to the economy but do increase their share of it, rather than free-market capitalists.  They thrive not on fair and open competition but on preferential treatment from Congress and especially the Republican party.  Nor are they friends of small businesses, which represent potential competitors.

The Republicans’ rich contributors may be more interested in privatizing the social insurance programs than in taking them apart, since privatizing creates new rent opportunities with all risks borne by the insured or the federal government.  But if privatizing is not a viable option, the Republican party in Congress is on record (by voting for the Ryan budgets) as favoring the weakening or eliminating of social insurance to make sure that taxes will never have to be raised on their rich contributors.

At the opposite end of the Republican base are the newly self-described Tea Partiers, mostly aging white male workers who partake of government benefits (as have 96% of Americans at some point in their life), often without being aware of their source, but don’t believe that the government should provide benefits for those they perceive as not having earned them—like Romney’s 47%.  Their views can be quite stark.  Times columnist Nicholas Kristof was recently “taken aback by how many readers” of his column about his uninsured, dying former roommate “were savagely unsympathetic.”

Speaking personally, I cannot deny the legitimacy of the Tea Partiers’ lack of sympathy or political views, although I’m of the opposite persuasion and always have been.  But like many others I can point out the one-sidedness of Romney’s emphasis on who pays federal income taxes.  Counting all taxes, state and local as well as federal, and payroll, sales, gasoline and property taxes along with income taxes, all Americans pay taxes.  And the share paid by the lower 40% or 60% or 99% relative to their income is not much different than what the top 1% pays.  In 2010, the 1% claimed just over one-fifth of all income and paid 21½% of all taxes, which amounted to 30% of their income.  The 99% claimed just under four-fifths of all income and paid 78½% of all taxes, which amounted to 28% of their income.  Where’s the beef?

Whatever the disappointments of the Obama administration, this election is about preserving social insurance or getting rid of it, which will depend on whether the Republicans in Washington have the power to get rid of it or the Democrats have the power to preserve it.  Ignore third parties, outlier views and issues not at issue in the campaign (such as the Afghan War or climate change) until after the election next month.  This is the 99%’s election to win, if only they get out and vote.  I’m not sure which way they’ll choose on social insurance, but I’ll trust their judgment far more than the 1%’s.

Vote 99

My excuse for scant posting to this blog recently (and tweeting not at all) is that my head has been focused on writing a short e-handbook (21 pages in print format) about today’s critical political issues which divide conservatives from non-conservatives and reduce Congress to impotence.  The book, cover shown below, is dedicated to the 99 Percent and seeks their participation in an effort called VOTE 99 to elect candidates for Congress who are pro-99% on the issues and are not beholden to the 1%.

The ultimate goal, which I imagined in my first blog post last October and which will take multiple elections to accomplish, is a Congress controlled by members who refuse large individual campaign contributions (over $200 per contributor, or even less) which, as the Center for Responsive Politics concluded here, here and here in the 2009-2010 election cycle, are predominately made by “business executives and professionals”—that is, the 1%.

The book discusses 12 issues presented as questions for Congressional candidates followed by a short explanation and hyperlinks for further information.  Here’s the first issue in its entirety.

Candidate Question #1

Which is more important in 2012—creating jobs or cutting the deficit?

The right answer for the 99% is creating jobs.  Here’s why.

According to mainstream economists, problem #1 today is lack of jobs.  During 2000 when the economy was booming, 81.5 percent of working-age Americans between 25 and 54 years of age were working.  In 2011 only 75.1 percent were working.  Although the percent improved in early 2012, our economy still employs 6 fewer people per hundred than it should.  

The US government has a lot of public debt, but what’s keeping the economy in a deep slump is all the private debt that many homeowners took on during the recent housing price bubble.  (Two-thirds of 99% households own their homes.)  When housing prices collapsed along with the value of retirement savings invested in the stock market, homeowners began worrying about their finances and started saving more and consuming less.  Since our economy depends on consumer spending, businesses responded by cutting back on production and construction and laying off workers.  Then consumers worried about jobs and spent even less, causing more layoffs.

The fastest way to create jobs in a deep slump is by government spending.  Cutting the government’s budget deficit does just the opposite—it eliminates jobs.

The best way to cut the budget deficit is to restore full employment and full production, thereby increasing the government’s tax receipts from workers and businesses and reducing unemployment compensation and slump-related safety-net spending.  If more adjustments are needed to balance the budget, that’s the time to make them—during the economic boom created by full employment and production, not during the slump.

Links for further information

Economists saying jobs are #1 concern include Nobel winners Stiglitz and Krugman

US Bureau of Labor Statistics data on working age employment to population ratio

According to Keynes, the boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity

4 million lost their jobs in 1937-1938 when the New Deal cut spending to reduce deficit

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Historically, US voter participation has been terrible, declining from 80 percent of adult citizens in 19^th century Presidential election years to hardly more than 50 percent today.  If we can interest some significant margin of the 99 Percenters—and I’m thinking especially of those in the 18 to 29 year old age group—in the issues that divide those who believe in Social Security, health care for all, unemployment insurance, food stamps and school lunches from those who believe in cutting taxes to the level where they support a strong military and little else, then perhaps more of the 99 Percenters will become regular voters.

If that happens, the day will come when we’ll able to replace a corrupt Congress beholden to the 1% who buy favoritism from its members with a new Congress beholden to the 99% who don’t.  And then we’ll have the power to end needless subsidies of Corporate America and the 1% who control it, restore free-market capitalism with appropriate regulation to keep it transparent and competitive, balance the budget with a fair tax system, insure economic freedom for all, take care of the only planet we have to live on and recover the democracy that our Founding Fathers entrusted to us.  VOTE 99 can change the world.

The book, when I get it converted to the proper format, will be published as a 99 cent Kindle book and possibly later in other formats.  Aaron Nickles is developing a model web site as an integral part of VOTE 99 for local organizers to provide voters with information on the candidates running in their election district and present local requirements for registering to vote and for voting.  When the site is ready, it will include a copy of the book that can be read online for free.

Any suggestions for implementing VOTE 99, including how to locate local organizers and qualify them for licensing (which will be without charge) will be appreciated.  You can reach me by e-mail here.

Peak Denial

When I was 11 or 12, I started worrying about what would happen if the world ran out of natural resources.  I can’t remember which I had in mind, but this was during World War II when availability of resources was talked about.  My father’s response was reassuring: we would invent some substitute, as we invented synthetic rubber during the war when natural rubber supplies were cut off.  Necessity is the mother of invention, as the phrase went.

I can imagine that I might have given my son the same answer -- but not my grandson.

One difference between now and when I was 11 or 12 is world population.  It was 2.4 billion then and 2.5 billion in 1950 when I entered college.  Today it’s seven billion, almost three times larger.

But in the same time period the world economy has grown almost ten times larger.  The Earth Policy Institute tells us that “consumption has begun to outstrip natural assets on a global scale."  Leaving aside non-regenerative assets like oil and fossil aquifers,

“demand has surpassed the earth’s regenerative capacity.  We are overharvesting forests, overplowing fields, overgrazing grasslands, overdrawing aquifers, overfishing oceans, and pumping far more carbon into the atmosphere than nature can absorb.”

Again leaving out oil, the demand for and growing scarcity of all important commodities in the last decade has led to a surge in prices that erased the benefits of a century of declining prices.  Investment guru Jeremy Grantham believes that rising prices are very probably here to stay, representing a “Paradigm Shift” that is “perhaps the most important economic event since the industrial Revolution.”

 

“We all need to develop resource plans,” he concludes, “particularly energy policies.  There is little time to waste.”

Tell  that to the US Congress, and what do you get?  Policies that encourage overplowing, overdrawing and the pumping of more carbon into the atmosphere than nature can absorb without warming the globe and acidifying its oceans.

By way of explanation (or excuse), Grantham suggests that humans are genetically ill-disposed to dealing with “long horizon issues and deferring gratification,” possibly because “we could not store food for over 99% of our species’ career and were totally concerned with staying alive this year and this week.”  He also thinks humans are “optimistic and overconfident,” traits which may have been important to our survival.  Especially Americans.

In Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (Viking Penguin 2005), Jared Diamond’s examination of human societies that succumbed to environmental problems and others that survived them, the author said that in planning the book he assumed it would just be about environmental damage.  But later he realized he had to add other factors including the only one that proved significant in every society’s failure or success -- “the society’s responses to its environmental problems.” 

The environmental issues for these societies, chiefly deforestation and soil and water problems, were similar to those we face today.  Global warming, however, is a modern issue, derived from industrialization and the growth in human population that it made possible.  President Johnson was officially advised of it in 1965, but neither he nor any of his eight successors nor any Congress in the almost half-century since has taken action.

Global warming is a long horizon issue, of course, though not so distant that it won’t affect our grandchildren.  It also requires a global response involving other nations.  But we acted with other nations to control toxic chemicals (another modern environmental issue) creating a hole in the ozone layer.  The fault is not in our stars but in our politics.

Since fossil fuel emissions account for most of the increase in greenhouse gases that cause global warming, an obvious first response to reduce and eventually reverse this increase is to raise the price of fossil fuels by taxing them or capping their use, thereby making non-fossil energy more competitive.  But enough members of Congress are indebted to corporate interests that profit from fossil fuels or depend on them to block any such response.

Most of these members claim to doubt global warming.  But considering “the consensus scientific view” that global warming is occurring and that greenhouse gases emitted by human activities are the primary cause, their claim seems more like self-induced self-delusion -- a fig leaf we could call Peak Denial hiding their representation of the corporate interests held by the 1% rather than the interests of the 99% among their voters and the public good.

Global warming, left unchecked, will eventually create an environment that’s different from the one to which both we as a species and the food that we grow are genetically adapted.  How the world society responds to it may determine whether the society succeeds or fails.

Congress is consistently choosing to fail.  To make sure that society succeeds, we must choose a Congress that is not dependent on the 1%.