Think Again: As We Leave Iraq, Remember How We Got In

This article was published by the Center for American Progress.

By Eric Alterman

Two weeks ago in this space, I employed the 70th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to examine the unhappy precedent set by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in failing to level with the American people about the level of conflict between the United States and the Axis Powers that preceded the attack.

Using this analogy, and speaking of the manner in which President Lyndon B. Johnson deliberately deceived the nation about the imaginary second Gulf of Tonkin incident and thereby entangled the nation in the unwinnable Vietnam War, I noted Sen. J. William Fulbright later remarked that “FDR’s deviousness in a good cause made it much easier for [LBJ] to practice the same kind of deviousness in a bad cause.”

The consequences of President Johnson’s campaign of deliberate deception regarding Vietnam could hardly have been more catastrophic for the nation, the military, the president, his party, and the presidency itself. And while there is no reason to minimize either the level of lying or its consequences, one cannot be impressed by the refusal of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney to learn from his mistake.

As we salute the final American soldiers leaving Iraq, we also remember the enormous costs paid not only by our soldiers and our nation but also denizens of the region, millions of whom were turned into refugees and injured, hundreds of thousands of whom were killed, and countless who were tortured or otherwise abused. But it behooves us to recall the underhanded manner in which President Bush and Vice President Cheney manipulated a quiescent press corps into making it appear as if an American invasion of a nation that had no intention of harming us (and next-to-no capacity to do so, regardless of intentions, as it turned out) was warranted.

At the same time, if we care about our nation’s ability to act as a democracy, we need to ask ourselves and our mainstream media hard questions about how it happened. To do so, I return to some of the research I undertook for When Presidents Lie (where specific citations for all of the quotes below can be found).

The almost ostentatious lack of concern for veracity was evident in almost every area of governance but was most prominent in the administration’s foreign policy pronouncements. Recall the famous (albeit anonymous) Bush press aide who, in response to a string of revelations of falsehoods relating to the president’s reasons for the invasion, replied, “The President of the United States is not a fact-checker.”

Yet the case President Bush made to convince the nation to embark on its first-ever “preventative” war was riddled with deception from start to finish. The examples of purposeful fraud in the Bush White House’s portrayal of the level of alleged threat to Americans’ safety and security posed by Iraq’s Saddam Hussein are so extensive that only a few examples can be offered here.

For instance, in September 2002, with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, President Bush claimed, “I would remind you that when the inspectors first went into Iraq and were denied—finally denied access, a report came out of the Atomic—the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency]—that they were six months away from developing a [nuclear] weapon. I don’t know what more evidence we need.” In fact, the estimate to which President Bush was referring was more than a decade old and was made before Iraq’s military capabilities were decimated in the Gulf War.

The president’s then-press secretary, Ari Fleischer, tried to claim in The Washington Post that “It was in fact the International Institute for Strategic Studies that issued the report concluding that Iraq could develop nuclear weapons in as few as six months.” But that report, which was unavailable at the time President Bush originally made his claim, did not support his statement either.

In a speech to the nation, President Bush also added, “Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists,” an alliance that “could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints.” But this claim, too, was wholly unsupported and contradicted by CIA intelligence. The testimony, declassified after President Bush’s speech, rated the possibility as “low” that Hussein would initiate a chemical or biological weapons attack against the United States but might take the “extreme step” of assisting terrorists if provoked by a U.S. attack.

In the same speech President Bush warned the nation that Iraq possessed a growing fleet of unmanned aircraft that could be used “for missions targeting the United States.” But a CIA report suggested that the fleet was more of an “experiment” and “attempt” and labeled it a “serious threat to Iraq’s neighbors and to international military forces in the region.” The report said nothing about the fleet having sufficient range to threaten the United States.

President Bush’s repeated acts of dishonesty did not become widely known to the public until the famous controversy regarding “16 words” in his 2003 State of the Union address, referring to the story he told about Iraq’s alleged purchase of “yellow-cake” uranium from the African nation of Niger. But the focus on the mere “16 words” by the media was most notable for the successful spin that the White House managed to put on the story.

It wasn’t that these 16 words alone in the president’s State of the Union message were false. Much of what was presented as evidence for the American attack on Iraq dissipated upon receiving postwar scrutiny. Some of these examples derived, no doubt, from honest errors, relating to the difficulty of accurately assessing decidedly murky intelligence. But President Bush and his staff could easily have communicated the complexity of this judgment to the country had honesty been among their primary concerns.

In fact, they purposely argued on exactly the opposite: certainty of knowledge where none was possible. The president and his advisers were virtually unanimous in insisting that the threat facing the United States from Saddam Hussein and his alleged weapons of mass destruction was all but inarguable. Just a few examples suffice:

• “Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.” — President George W. Bush, address to the nation, March 17, 2003.
• “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.” — Vice President Dick Cheney, speech to Veterans of Foreign Wars National Convention, August 26, 2002.
• “We know they have weapons of mass destruction. … There isn’t any debate about it. [It is] beyond anyone’s imagination that U.N. inspectors would fail to find such weapons if they were given the opportunity.” — Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, September 2002.
• “I’m absolutely sure that there are weapons of mass destruction there, and the evidence will be forthcoming.” — Secretary of State Colin Powell, remarks to reporters, May 4, 2003.
• “We do know, with absolute certainty, that he is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs in order to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon.” — Vice President Dick Cheney, NBC’s “Meet the Press,” September 6, 2002.

These statements are all demonstrably false, as the president’s own weapons inspections team judged them to be. While many in and out of government shared the misperception that Iraq might be in possession of such weaponry, only the Bush administration—supported by the Blair government in Britain—insisted that there could be no possible room for disagreement in assessing the conflicting shards of evidence. Indeed, a number of experts within the U.S. government itself were fully aware of how sketchy and incomplete were the government sources about Iraq’s WMD program, but these people were either ignored or purposely discredited.

For instance, a secret September 2002 report by the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency informed Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, “There is no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons, or whether Iraq has—or will—establish its chemical warfare agent production facilities,” according to U.S. officials interviewed by the Los Angeles Times.

Also, according to Patrick Lang, former head of human intelligence at the CIA, when Bruce Hardcastle, a defense intelligence officer for the Middle East, South Asia, and counterterrorism, explained to Bush officials that they were misreading the evidence, the Bush administration not only removed Hardcastle from his post:

They did away with his job. They wanted just liaison officers who were junior. They didn’t want a senior intelligence person who argued with them. Hardcastle said, ‘I couldn’t deal with these people.’ They are such ideologues that they knew what the outcome should be and when they didn’t get it from intelligence people they thought they were stupid. They start with an almost pseudo-religious faith. They wanted the intelligence agencies to produce material to show a threat, particularly an imminent threat. Then they worked back to prove their case. It was the opposite of what the process should have been like, that the evidence should prove the case.

Greg Thielman, the former head of the Department of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, likewise observed, “What everyone in the intelligence community knew was that the White House couldn’t care less about any kind of information that there were no WMDs or that the U.N. inspectors were very effective. Everyone knew the White House was deaf to that input. It was worse than pressure; they didn’t care.”

Despite being disproven by its own experts, the Bush administration attempted to maintain the fiction that the president’s prewar arguments and warnings had been borne out with false claims of imaginary discoveries. When asked in the summer of 2003, “Where are the weapons of mass destruction?”, President Bush replied, “We found them.” Vice President Cheney, too, claimed months later, “Conclusive evidence now demonstrates that Saddam Hussein did in fact have weapons of mass destruction.”

Finally, when pressed by ABC News’s Diane Sawyer to address the disjunction between his prewar claims and his postwar discoveries, President Bush laughed off the reporter’s distinction between desire and capability. “What’s the difference?” he asked. Later, in his third State of the Union address, instead of acknowledging to the nation the misguided nature of his previous warnings following these revelations, President Bush attempted a rhetorical sleight of hand, speaking not of Hussein’s actual weaponry but of something he termed “weapons-of-mass-destruction-related-program-activity.”

All of the information presented here was available in open, mainstream sources published by early 2004. How much happier and healthier the world would be if the media had simply carried out their collective responsibility and held the administration accountable for a simple matter such as truth. Who knows whether the Arab Spring might have made it to Iraq and deposed that dictator without the unending catastrophe caused by President Bush and Vice President Cheney’s hubris and dishonesty and the fecklessness of the people whose job it was to prevent its happening.

History may not repeat itself but it is a rule of thumb that the sequel is almost always worse than original. The consequences of LBJ’s deception were far worse than those of FDR’s. But sadly for everyone involved, President Bush’s trumps them all.

Eric Alterman is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and a Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. He is also a columnist for The Nation, The Forward, and The Daily Beast. His newest book is Kabuki Democracy: The System vs. Barack Obama. This column won the 2011 Mirror Award for Best Digital Commentary.

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Poll: 60 GOP House Members Out-of-Touch

As they block an extension of a payroll tax cut for 160 million Americans, 60 Republican House members in battleground districts are out-of-touch with key voters, and "the election year from a position of profound weakness," according to a new survey released by Democracy Corps/Women’s Voices. Women Vote Action Fund (WVWVAF).

These incumbents particularly are out-of-touch with what the pollsters call the "the Rising American Electorate (RAE)."

"These voters—unmarried women, African Americans and Hispanics voters and youth—account for a majority of the nation’s voting eligible population (53 percent)," says the pollsters' memo describing the poll results. "They drove progressive victories in 2006 and 2008, delivering 69 percent of their vote to congressional Democrats in national surveys. Opportunities in 2012 for progressive candidates would be much broader if the RAE vote was consolidated and achieved those historic support levels."

Voters, including those in the RAE, believe Republicans are out-of-touch on taxes and the deficit and prefer a more cooperative approach to governance from the Republican majority, rather than a strategy of obstruction and delay, the pollsters say.

"As a result, this class of battleground Republican incumbents enters the election year from a position of profound weakness," the memo says. "Electorally, they are held under 50 percent in a named trial heat for Congress; less than 40 percent commit to reelecting their incumbent 'because he/she is doing a good job and addressing issues that are important to us.'"

As real legislation has ground to a halt in Washington, a 60-percent majority of voters in these Republican-held districts want their incumbent “to try and work with President Obama to address the country’s problems,” and this jumps to 66 percent among voters in the RAE, the pollsters say. Just a third (34 percent; 27 percent in the RAE), want their representative to block the president.

To succeed, however, Democrats must highlight the contrast between the two parties, the pollsters say.

"Voters in the RAE deliver higher support for President Obama and the Democrats than other voters; there is less differentiation in their support for Republicans. Notably, after voters hear balanced criticism of both sides, key segments of the RAE, most notably unmarried women, move to the Democrats," their memo says.

The survey of 1,000 likely 2012 voters in 60 Republican battleground districts was conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner for Democracy Corps and Women’s Voice Women Vote Action Fund from December 4-7. The pollsters report a margin of error = +/- 3.1%


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Better Buildings Initiative Drives Investment, Creates Jobs

This article was published by the Center for American Progress.

By Bracken Hendricks, Jorge Madrid, Adam James

The business of creating jobs and leading our country to a cleaner and more prosperous future must continue even in the face of perpetual stalemate in Congress. President Barack Obama has found a way to continue leading on energy efficiency by using his executive power over federal agencies and he is getting help from a diverse coalition including commercial real estate developers, bankers, universities, and local governments, as well as partners as diverse as organized labor and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Earlier this month the president announced a series of commitments under the Better Buildings Initiative, a historic public-private partnership that will leverage $4 billion in new investment for job-creating energy-efficiency upgrades to more than 4 billion square feet of public and private buildings over the next two years. These commitments will cut our nation’s energy use by 20 percent by 2020.

They will create jobs, too. Doing this work will create new demand for approximately 114,000 jobs in the building trades and domestically sourced construction materials at a time when the industry continues to suffer from near-depression levels of unemployment.

It will also be completed at zero cost to taxpayers by using energy savings to pay back upfront public investments in government buildings and leveraging private investment to jumpstart retrofits—energy-saving technologies that span everything from insulation and sealant to water heaters and solar panels—in commercial office buildings.

Altogether, this voluntary partnership—which brings together a wide range of organizations including federal agencies, labor unions, retailers, colleges, and hospitals, among others—will generate $1.4 billion in savings on energy costs for American businesses.

This critical venture will also help jumpstart the market for energy-efficiency financing and make it easier for private companies, pension funds, and other financial entities to invest in these projects.

The Obama administration used executive action as part of the initiative by directing federal agencies’ procurement strategies, a decision that requires no additional fiscal requests and fits within their existing budgets.

The bold leadership and public-private partnerships just described are precisely what the country needs to cut through partisan gridlock in Congress and get back to work. The partnerships will open up new investment streams to build a market around low-cost, low-risk capital improvement projects that will immediately create jobs, save consumers money, and reduce pollution and harmful emissions.

Here we tell the story of how the Better Buildings Initiative came together. It’s a great example of how government can get job-creating energy-efficiency programs up and running during tough fiscal times.

How the program built partnerships

Solving big problems requires innovative and streamlined governance as well as robust participation from a diverse set of actors. In today’s reality of constrained budgets and limited cooperation from Congress, mutually beneficial partnerships between government and nongovernment entities that transcend partisan interest are needed more than ever.

This is exactly what happened when President Obama announced the Better Building Initiative on February 3 of this year—a national challenge to spur private investment for energy efficiency in commercial buildings.

The initiative, spearheaded by former President Bill Clinton and President Obama’s Council on Job’s and Competitiveness, included an initial boost of support from two unlikely allies: the U.S. Chamber of Congress and organized labor groups such as the AFL-CIO and the American Federation of Teachers.

The chamber recognized that this program would be critical for creating jobs and spurring economic activity for the nation’s struggling businesses. The labor groups affirmed their support for this program by committing $150 million in capital from pension funds over the next few months, a first step toward investing billions more over the next decade. While Congress remains stuck in counterproductive bickering, American workers stepped up to the plate and invested their retirement security to pay forward a new generation of good jobs with decent wages, rebuilding the smart infrastructure and more efficient buildings that will make the whole economy more competitive.

This early leadership by businesses and working families was absolutely critical to growing the coalition that ultimately culminated in the $4 billion investment in the program. Moving forward this sort of public-private partnership to build a sound market for productive capital investments in energy efficiency may be our best hope of breaking the political impasse and restoring the health of the struggling U.S. economy.

How the program builds markets

Experts agree that energy efficiency is the “low-hanging fruit” in tackling our nation’s energy security and economic challenges. These are smart investments that pay for themselves over time. And at a time when few analysts predict resurgence in new construction any time soon, making buildings more efficient through retrofits can be an important catalyst to economic recovery by creating much-needed jobs. But despite the promise of these investments, real barriers have blocked their growth. We outline below how these barriers were overcome for the Better Buildings Initiative.

Overcoming hurdles to financing projects

One of the primary challenges in deploying large amounts of capital into energy-efficiency projects is the lack of clear pathways for investors to finance this infrastructure.

Energy-efficient building improvements result in immediate savings and lower operation costs, improving the overall profitability of real estate investments. They accelerate capital improvements in existing assets and strengthen real estate markets overall. But unlocking these savings requires large amounts of upfront capital.

Another issue is that traditional lending is secured by clearly defined assets: When you take out a mortgage it is secured by the property itself. But when you want to finance a new boiler, some duct work, and replacement windows, the collateral to back that loan is less clear.

Plus, while everyone agrees these investments are a good deal and save real money, it takes time for banks to assemble the deep data they need to assess the risks and returns that investors can expect to face.

As a result, this very secure and productive investment opportunity lacks “mainstream” credentials, clearly understood investment vehicles, and a mechanism to move capital into a market hungry to get to work.

Private capital responds to movement and trends in the marketplace, and investments flow to ventures that are considered stable and economically sound. For the Better Buildings Initiative partnership, private-sector actors such as Citi and emerging financial service providers such as Green Campus Partners and Transcend Equity committed to make direct investments in commercial retrofits and structure innovative financial products that met the risk thresholds of private real estate owners.

Additionally, the White House will use its own procurement power by directing federal agencies to finance $2 billion up front in these energy-saving retrofits, saving much more money over time. These savings are passed along to the taxpayers because the federal buildings will consume less energy than they would have otherwise.

This arrangement will be accomplished through Energy Service Performance Contracts, or ESPCS, in which future energy savings are used to purchase upfront capital investments. Payback on these ESPCs is structured so that a portion of the savings is kept by the contractor, providing a guaranteed return on investment, while the other portion is used to capitalize these projects.

ESPCs are a well-understood tool for driving productive investments, and the White House showed real leadership in building on the success of this program. To date, more than $2.46 billion has been invested in federal energy efficiency and renewable energy through these contracts, resulting in 309.5 trillion BTU (British thermal unit) saved and $6.66 billion in energy-cost savings.

Energy Service Performance Contracts are particularly advantageous in a gridlocked legislative atmosphere since they do not require additional appropriations from Congress or upfront capital from tight agency budgets.

In this context, President Obama’s leadership in launching the Better Buildings Initiative is all the more important. The $4 billion pipeline of public and private financing cut through the red tape to catalyze a growing industry and an emerging sector of the capital market. The private sector is now on notice that energy-efficiency markets are open for business.

Generating demand for projects

With financing secured and repayment through energy savings set in place with ESPCs, the federal government will generate demand for energy-efficiency projects by opening billions of square feet of its own property for retrofits—hiring thousands of contractors and hundreds of thousands of construction workers around the country to upgrade federal buildings.

Additionally, the partnership secured commitments from large property owners across the country to upgrade 4 billion square feet of commercial and industrial property. These include corporations such as Nissan and General Electric; national retailers such as Best Buy and Walgreens; hospitals; cities and states; and colleges and universities.

The initiative now has a built-in customer base with solid financing and stable repayment structures through energy savings. The demand represents a pipeline of work that businesses can start to serve. The nongovernmental entities and businesses that get put on the job will hire contractors and workers and the virtuous cycle of savings, investment, and job creation will continue.

Furthermore, from an investment perspective, the opportunity in the commercial sector is vast, totaling 87 billion square feet of floor space. This represents 25 percent of the total efficiency potential in the United States, amounting to $290 billion in savings. The Better Buildings Initiative sends a signal that this massive market is open and ready for business.

Together, these financial and real estate commitments are already helping to jumpstart the market and drive additional investments from the private entities mentioned above, propelling energy-efficiency finance further into the mainstream.

The program is a success

The indispensable element in achieving the results of this program was the significant leadership vision of Presidents Obama and Clinton, and the deep bipartisan support of their partners in business and labor, state and local government, and across the construction and financial services industry.

At a time of bitter tensions in the federal government, Congress would do well to stop debating whether clean energy jobs are real and instead get to work creating some. If they need any help getting started, they need look no further than the White House Better Buildings Initiative.

Bracken Hendricks is a Senior Fellow, Jorge Madrid is a Research Associate, and Adam James is a Special Assistant for the Energy team at the Center for American Progress.

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Think Again: Is Inequality Over? News That’s Not Fit To Print

This article was published by the Center for American Progress.

By Eric Alterman

In an article entitled “Top Earners Not So Lofty in the Days of Recession,” by the star New York Times journalist Jason DeParle, we are told to “hold the condolence cards the recession cost the rich. The share of income received by the top 1 percent—that potent symbol of inequality—dropped to 17 percent in 2009 from 23 percent in 2007, according to federal tax data,” he explains. “Within the group, average income fell to $957,000 in 2009 from $1.4 million in 2007.”

DeParle admits, almost immediately, that “analysts say the drop largely reflects the stock market plunge, and most think top incomes recovered somewhat in 2010, as Wall Street rebounded and corporate profits grew.” Nevertheless, he notes, “The drop alters a figure often emphasized by inequality critics, and it has gone largely unnoticed outside the blogosphere.”

Unnoticed? DeParle then quotes Occupy Wall Street critics such as Steven Kaplan of the University of Chicago and Megan McCardle of The Atlantic who insist that the 2009 numbers demonstrate the irrelevance of the arguments of the “99 Percent.” “We don’t want to spend years focused on income inequality, only to learn that the financial crisis fixed it for us,” wrote McArdle in a blog post for The Atlantic. DeParle also quotes James Pethokoukis, a blogger at the American Enterprise Institute, as if they constitute genuine wisdom. “Get a time machine, Occupy Wall Street,” wrote Pethokoukis.

To be fair, DeParle gives the “other side” a fair shake, quoting former White House official Jared Bernstein saying, “The structural forces driving inequality remain very much in place.” (The mere fact that DeParle is forced to quote right-wing bloggers compared to someone with Bernstein’s credentials is itself revealing.) And DeParle himself does a pretty good job of enumerating all of the reasons why inequality, “driven by political and economic forces,” has been growing for more than 30 years. He reports:

Globalization created larger markets for those with scarce talents but hurt less educated workers by pitting them against cheap foreign labor. New technology also hurt unskilled workers, by replacing many with machines.

Unions declined, eroding blue-collar bargaining power. The financial industry grew, with paydays heavily weighted toward the top. Corporate culture accepted the growing gap between the executive suite and the factory floor.

Falling tax rates on the highest earners added to the net income divide, by allowing top earners to keep more of their pay and increasing their incentive to maximize it.

But the real, underlying truth is that the 1 percent’s loss of income is a blip in which the super rich in America experienced a decidedly modest and temporary hit when financial markets collapsed. Structural factors have been driving this process well beyond the rate that any other western democracy has seen. The intensity of the U.S. case is discussed (and can be seen in graphs) published in this essay by University of Texas economist James Galbraith.

Indeed, using more recent data, Larry Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute explains, in a critique of DeParle’s article, that what DeParle predicted has already taken place:

Wage and salary data show wage inequality rising from 2009 to 2010 (recovering more than a third of lost ground), suggesting that it is too early to shed crocodile tears for the top 1 percent. Regardless of last year’s trend, it remains the case that income inequality in 2009 was still substantially greater than it was in the late 1970s. Moreover, the conclusion that a lion’s share of income gains accrued to the top 1 percent or even the top 0.1 percent, while income growth was modest for the bottom 90 percent remains absolutely true.

What’s more, despite the temporary drop in stock market valuations, and therefore Wall Street bonuses, Mishel notes, “Corporate profits are now substantially greater than they were before the recession.” The share of corporate income going to profits was 26.2 percent last year, its highest share since World War II, when we had wage and price controls. Moreover, in 2010, Mishel explains, “The wages of those in the top 1 percent grew 6.8 percent in inflation-adjusted terms while those in the bottom 90 percent saw their real annual earnings fall 0.7 percent.”

Look at the overall picture: Today half the U.S. population owns barely 2 percent of the country’s wealth, putting the United States near Rwanda and Uganda and below such nations as pre-Arab Spring Tunisia and Egypt when measured by degrees of income inequality.

And contrary to the passive voice employed in DeParle’s article, tax rates do not “fall” by themselves. As political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson demonstrate, these falling tax rates are the direct result of the purchasing of political power by the extremely wealthy in the United States to rewrite the laws in their favor. (The reduced tax rate on capital gains is among the greatest and most unfair boons to the super rich.)

Now all of this wealth accruing to the extremely wealthy may strike some ideologically driven conservatives as necessary and even desirable. Lower taxes, less regulation, and less government are seen as goals in and of themselves, regardless of their impact on public policy, because they weaken government’s ability to intervene in the lives of its citizens. Milton Friedman argued, “Freedom in economic arrangements is itself a component of freedom broadly understood, so economic freedom is an end in itself.”

But why The New York Times would wish to use outdated data to give careless readers the impression that all is hunky-dory in this nation regarding its remarkably skewed distribution of wealth is a question that only its editors and reporters can answer.

Eric Alterman is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and a Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. He is also a columnist for The Nation, The Forward, and The Daily Beast. His newest book is Kabuki Democracy: The System vs. Barack Obama. This column won the 2011 Mirror Award for Best Digital Commentary.

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One in Five Conservatives Believe Mitt Romney Is Too Liberal

A new poll demonstrates just how much trouble Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney's having with the conservative GOP base.

Once the putative frontrunner, Romney's standing has ebbed and flowed against several potential Republican rivals. He's currently battling former House Speaker Newt Gingrich as the candidates head into the first GOP caucuses and primaries starting next month.

Among all Americans, two in five like Mitt Romney as a person (40 percent), over one-third (36 percent) say they like his track record as governor and one-third (33 percent) like his political opinions, according to a new Harris poll. But over one-third of U.S. adults also say they are not sure about Mitt Romney as a person (34 percent), not sure about his track record as governor of Massachusetts (38 percent) and not sure about his political opinions (34 percent).

These are some of the results of the Harris poll of 2,499 adults surveyed online between November 7 and 14.

Among Republicans almost three in five (58 percent) like Romney as a person, half (49 percent) like his track record as governor and 57 percent like his political opinions. Among conservatives, these numbers drop a little. Just half of conservatives like Romney as a person (49 percent) and like his political opinions (48 percent) while just two in five conservatives like his track record as governor (39 percent).

When given some statements about Romney, again there is a little bit of the unknown. Just over half of Americans (54 percent) say Romney is an intelligent person with one-third (32 percent) saying they are not sure and while half (49 percent) believe his business experience would be an asset, again one-third (32 percent) are not sure. Romney has also been charged with "flip-flopping" and 44 percent of Americans agree that his stance on issues depends on who he is talking to, not his core convictions, with over one-third (36 percent) not sure about this.

However, just 20 percent of Americans say Romney lacks experience and is not qualified to be president with half (48 percent) disagreeing with that statement but, again, one-third (32 percent) are not sure.

The issue of religion has also been raised and while 52 percent of Americans say Romney being Mormon is not an issue, one-quarter say it is (23 percent) and the same number are not sure (25 percent). The one thing that evenly divides Americans is if he inspires confidence personally. One third of Americans think Romney does (35 percent), one third says he does not (33 percent), and one-third are not sure (32 percent).

Among Republicans, two-thirds believe Romney is intelligent (69 percent) and that his business experience would be an asset (67 percent), while over half (53 percent) say he inspires confidence personally. Just over one-quarter (27 percent) say his being Mormon is an issue but two in five Republicans (41 percent) say his stance on issues depends on who he is talking to and not his core convictions. His numbers are a little weaker among conservatives as just three in five say he is an intelligent person (61 percent) and that his business experience is an asset (61 percent) with less than half (46 percent) agreeing he inspires confidence personally. Slightly over two in five (43 percent) agree his stance on issues depends on who he is talking to and not his core convictions while one-quarter (26 percent) say his being Mormon is an issue.

Looking at Romney's political ideology, one in 10 Americans (8 percent) say he is too liberal, compared to 15 percent of Republicans and one in five conservatives (20 percent). On the flip side, 16 percent of U.S. adults say Romney is too conservative. One-third of Americans (32 percent) say he is neither too liberal nor too conservative but almost half (45 percent) are not sure, including one-third of Republicans (34 percent) and two in five Conservatives (39 percent).
If Romney was the Republican nominee, one-third of Americans (33 percent) would vote for him, 38 percent would not and 25 percent are not sure. Two-thirds of Republicans (65 percent) would vote for him, but just over half of conservatives (57 percent) say the same. Two in five independents (40 percent) would vote for Romney while one-third would not (34 percent) but among moderates two in five would not vote for him (39 percent) while 27 percent would.


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How the Nixon Pardon Strained a Presidential Friendship

by Patrick Flanary, Special to ProPublica

Thirty-one days into his presidency, Gerald Ford, with the stroke of a pen, granted a full and absolute pardon to his predecessor, Richard Nixon, who had resigned from office on Aug. 9, 1974. It was the only time an American president had pardoned another. And Ford did so as television cameras rolled, minutes after dealing with another resignation -- that of his press secretary and longtime friend, Jerald terHorst.

"He made a blunder on the Nixon pardon," terHorst said during a previously unpublished interview in November 2009. "It wasn't so much that I objected to the pardon as it was that it set one man above the law. We don't do that in our country."

terHorst died last year at age 87. But his lifelong conviction that Ford had overreached reflects the lasting echoes of history's most controversial pardon and highlights a philosophical divide over this unchecked presidential power: Are pardons acts of justice for righting wrongs and healing a nation's wounds? Or do they turn justice on its head by giving special favors to a few?

In 1974, Ford's pardon further shocked a country divided over Nixon's exit amid the ongoing Watergate scandal. It also tested a friendship of some 25 years -- terHorst had met Republican Ford in 1948 while covering his first congressional campaign in Grand Rapids, Mich.

Ford explained the pardon in his 1979 autobiography. Putting a former president on trial, in his view, was not worth the additional national trauma from scrutinizing Nixon's actions, especially when prosecutors already were pursuing Nixon's top aides on Watergate charges.

"Although I respected the tenet that no man should be above the law, public policy demanded that I put Nixon -- and Watergate -- behind us as quickly as possible," Ford wrote. "Being forced to resign the Presidency and live with that humiliation the rest of his life was a severe punishment in itself, the equivalent to serving a jail term."

Some opponents of the pardon immediately suspected there had been a backroom deal between Nixon and his vice president in which Nixon would go free in return for Ford getting his job. When journalist Carl Bernstein heard the news on the radio, he called Bob Woodward, the Washington Post colleague with whom he had broken the Watergate story. "You're not gonna believe it," Bernstein told Woodward. "The son of a bitch pardoned the son of a bitch!"

terHorst acknowledged that Ford's motive was to scrub the Watergate stain out of the national fabric. But terHorst believed there was something fundamentally amiss. "This was a violation of the oath Ford and I took," he said in the 2009 interview. "We both took the same oath: Uphold the Constitution. We are all under the law. But Nixon got away. How could I defend that?"

In his resignation letter, terHorst cited "the absence of a like decision to grant absolute pardon to the young men who evaded Vietnam military service as a matter of conscience, and the absence of pardons for former aides and associates of Mr. Nixon who have been charged with crimes -- and imprisoned -- stemming from the same Watergate situation."

Ruling for the majority in the 1915 case Burdick v. United States, Supreme Court Justice Joseph McKenna ruled that a pardon "carries an imputation of guilt; acceptance a confession of it." For a time, Ford reportedly carried this excerpt in his wallet. Biographer Douglas Brinkley wrote that the Burdick case "had redefined the whole concept of a pardon. Issuing a pardon did not mean exoneration of the recipient, as most people thought. Instead, a pardon rendered a verdict without a trial -- or punishment. Ford seized on the point."

terHorst, writing in "Gerald Ford and the Future of the Presidency," a biography published just two months after he quit, had argued for more accountability: "How could Ford grant an unconditional pardon to the former President without getting in return a signed ‘confession' of his Watergate participation?"

Some say terHorst's views show a basic misunderstanding of the Constitution. "Setting one man above the law is exactly what the pardon power is all about," said Margaret Colgate Love, who served as the Justice Department's pardon attorney from 1990-97.

"The president may grant a pardon for reasons you don't agree with, and the result may not be acceptable to some or even most people," Love said, "but it is what the power is."

Love noted George H.W. Bush's pardons of participants in the Iran-Contra, arms-for-hostages affair and Ronald Reagan's pardon of Mark Felt, who had been convicted of felony civil-rights violations while a top FBI official. Decades later, Felt was identified as "Deep Throat," Woodward's shadowy, off-the-record source for Watergate stories.

Time has changed Bernstein’s opinion of the Nixon pardon, he told ProPublica. When it happened, he said, he sided with terHorst's decision to walk away from what appeared to be further corruption. Now Bernstein believes Ford did the right thing.

"It turns out it really was a courageous and necessary act," Bernstein said. "Gerald Ford, I think partly by being a member of Congress before he was vice president, understood how necessary it was for the system no longer to be so enmeshed in Watergate in such a way that it would go on for another couple of years."

The Nixon pardon abruptly ended Ford's honeymoon period and shadowed his presidency. Ford narrowly lost to Democrat Jimmy Carter in the 1976 election; Ford's efforts to move the country beyond the scandal seemingly had worked against him. Though he and terHorst had publicly split, they spoke shortly before Ford died in 2006. "We were never unhappy with each other," terHorst recalled in the interview. "He went one way, I went the other."

terHorst's view of the pardon stood firm. "I have never changed my mind," he said in 2009. "It was a bad deal then, and it's a bad deal today. Presidents are not exemptions to the law."

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Trouble For Obama Campaign? Justice Party Launches Calif. Ballot Drive

In a move which could cloud President Obama's re-election campaign, a new third party called the Justice Party has begun a ballot-access drive in California.

Headed by presidential candidate Ross "Rocky" Anderson, the Justice Party could complicate Obama's left flank in a way that Ralph Nader helped frustrate Democrat Al Gore's election to the White House in 2000.

He may be a former mayor of Salt Lake City in the deep-red state of Utah, but Anderson and his Justice Party appear to be staking out highly progressive positions on corporate influence of government, environmentalism, and national security.

Anderson and his party don't appear to be sitting back as minor players.

The Justice Party National Committee (JPNC) on Thursday launched its California "Force for Justice" Ballot Access Campaign. The Golden State requires that 103,000 California residents, who are eligible to vote, file a new voter registration form and designate their party affiliation as the Justice Party, by Jan. 2, 2012. Only paper voter registration forms must be used.

"Californians are being invited to join the Justice Party and lead the Force for Justice Campaign in a grassroots community-by-community mobilization. Already, we have dozens of people that are mobilizing to set up events and activities to register people to vote," says Paul Zeitz, acting chair of the JPNC Steering Committee. "Media, events, and mobilization efforts are envisioned to be locally led and run around the State of California during the period of December 17, 2011 – January 2, 2012. The Justice Party calls on all Californians to take action now to show the nation and the World the promise of the Justice Party. California can lead the nation, as the old saying goes 'as California goes, so goes the nation.'"

A former Democrat who led Salt Lake City for two terms as mayor, Anderson introduced his nascent presidential campaign two weeks ago on Rachel Maddow's MSNBC program, in which he emphasized a number of left-leaning themes which appear designed to appeal to the national Occupy Wall Street movement.

Among his issues, Anderson says he will tackle unemployment and income inequality.

"We are in a new Gilded Age in this country with the greatest disparity of wealth since the 1920s. And people are suffering, the lack of a decent jobs program," he says. "This party, the Justice Party, will fight for the people."

While Anderson has little real chance of being elected president, he could challenge Obama on the left and complicate the president's ability to win a second term.

Longtime consumer advocate Ralph Nader played a similar role in 2000, when he ran for president on the Green Party ticket. Nader ran to Vice President Al Gore's left that year, arguably siphoning support.

Nader won just 2.74 percent of the vote nationally, but his candidacy could have pulled enough support from Gore in the key state of Florida, in which he trailed George W. Bush by just 537 votes.

The Florida results, and subsequent U.S. Supreme Court decision, ultimately cost Gore any chance of becoming president.


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Emails Suggest Ohio’s New Republican-Friendly Maps Save the GOP ‘Millions’

by Lois Beckett, ProPublica

As we’ve been documenting in our ongoing series, political parties and other powerful players use the once-a-decade redistricting process to advance their own goals — often at the expense of voters.

A recently released trove of email messages from Ohio offers a rare inside glimpse into how it works.

The messages, sent from June to September, show collaboration between the national GOP and state Republicans to redraw Ohio’s maps and thus cement control of both the statehouse and a majority of congressional districts.

In one email, a Republican consultant working on redistricting for the state suggested that the new political maps could save the GOP “millions" of dollars in campaign funds by making districts safer for Republican candidates.

The maps, approved by the Republican-run state legislature in September, favor Republicans in 12 of Ohio’s 16 new congressional districts. And they strengthen the majority of likely Republican supporters in at least 17 state house districts, according to the mapping consultants' own calculations.

The congressional maps also split voters in Toledo into three separate districts, a move the mayor said would make the city “politically irrelevant,’’ and put two longstanding Democratic members of congress who live 110 miles apart in the same district, a tactic redistricting experts call "hijacking." (See our rundown of various redistricting techniques, such as packing, cracking and hijacking, or watch our redistricting music video.)

A spokesman for Ohio’s House of Representatives said the email messages and accompanying report, released by the Ohio Campaign for Accountable Redistricting, were an attempt to garner “salacious” and “malicious” headlines. Mike Dittoe, director of communications for the Ohio House of Representatives and for Republican Speaker Bill Batchelder, said Ohio’s redistricting was “a fully transparent process that yielded a fair and legal map.”

Redistricting is supposed to benefit voters by equalizing districts as the nation's population shifts. But with few strict requirements for how to shape districts — they must have roughly equal populations and not discriminate against minority voters — political parties often can draw political lines largely to their own benefit.

Much of the time, the toughest balancing act in the map-drawing process is how to please multiple incumbents at once.

In the email messages obtained by the Ohio Campaign for Accountable Redistricting, such partisan concerns were central. In one email, the president of the state senate, Republican Thomas Niehaus, noted that "I am still committed to ending up with a map that Speaker [John] Boehner fully supports," even though the U.S. House speaker and Ohio Republican "has no official role in the redistricting process," as a spokesman said in November.

Among those consulting closely by email regarding the district lines was the executive director of Team Boehner, a group created to help Republican House candidates across the nation, and the redistricting coordinator from the National Republican Congressional Committee. Rather than work in the state house, the state’s redistricting staffers rented a hotel room for three months.

Dittoe, the House spokesman, said the state received redistricting input from many stakeholders, including all 18 of Ohio’s current members of Congress — Ohio loses two seats in the latest redistricting — and Ray Miller, a former Democratic state politician.

The redistricting consultants also pushed through an 11th-hour change to the maps that switched the location of The Timken Company back to the district of U.S. Rep. Jim Renacci. Timken, a manufacturer of bearings, alloy steels and related components, is one of Renacci's top donors. Members of the Timken family, company officials and a company PAC have given at least $210,000 to Renacci in the past two years, according to The Cleveland Plain Dealer.

“Thanks guys. Very important to someone important to us all,” Tom Whatman, the executive director of Team Boehner, wrote after the change was completed.

“In no way do campaign contributions influence how lines are drawn,” Dittoe said.

The redistricting emails included a consideration of partisan advantage down to the level of individual streets.

In an email to Ray DiRossi, one of the two staffers responsible for drawing the state’s maps, a Republican state senator said she knew that another Republican state legislator was “looking for Republicans” in her county and suggested a list of more than 80 streets in 10 neighborhoods where she had received a “good response.”

In September, as the redistricting maps were being approved, the chief of staff for the Republican state house speaker sent DiRossi a list of 43 of the state's legislative districts, ranked according to the total of so-called in-kind contributions made to House races in each district.

According to the Federal Election Commission, "The donation of office machines, furniture, supplies — anything of value — is an in-kind contribution. … A donation of services is also considered an in-kind contribution."

In nine of the districts, in-kind donations totaled more than $2 million over the past decade.

The rankings appeared to be a measure of which districts had been most competitive over the past 10 years, since many of the districts that received the most in-kind contributions had alternated between Republican and Democratic control.

"Ray was running a quick analysis on inking contributions made to house races over the last decade and thought you'd find it interesting which districts were on top," Troy Judy, Ohio House Speaker Batchelder's chief of staff, wrote in an email.

DiRossi wrote back a few minutes later, expressing surprise at the position of two districts on the list. "But we have made significant improvements to many HDs [House districts] on this list. Hopefully saving millions over the coming years," he added.

DiRossi’s comment seemed to suggest that the new maps would be less competitive and thus require fewer campaign donations — a potential savings of millions of dollars.

"It's 1AM—go to bed you political junkies," Heather Mann, another of the state's redistricting staffers, wrote back.

Dittoe said the contribution statistics were sent to several people, and that since the redistricting maps had already been completed by the time the email was sent, the statistics could not have prompted any changes in the maps.

DiRossi and Mann, who is currently a deputy legal counsel in Batchelder’s office, were each paid $105,000 in public money for a few months of redistricting work, according to public documents obtained by the Ohio Campaign for Accountable Redistricting.

Anything said about redistricting by politicians can be used as evidence in a legal challenge of a mapping plan, so politicians are typically warned to keep silent in public about redistricting plans. In a ProPublica interview last week, Georgia Congressman Lynn Westmoreland, a point man for the Republicans' redistricting effort, said congressional delegations were briefed on redistricting protocol and warned that whatever they said could be used in court.

Westmoreland said he also warned members of Congress to work as a team and “not to get greedy.”

“Pigs get fat; hogs get slaughtered,” he said.

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Union Chief Blasts House GOP for Vote on Unemployment Insurance

Calling them "callous," a prominent labor leader denounced House Republicans for their approach to extending unemployment benefits to jobless Americans.

The GOP-led House voted Tuesday to extend emergency unemployment insurance beyond the end of the year for Americans, but only after also cutting and restricting the benefits.

"It's bad enough that Republicans blocked bills to create jobs, but now they cut unemployment benefits for people who can't find work," says Jim Hoffa, general president of the Teamsters labor union. "People can't 'just get a job' when there are four unemployed people for every job opening."

Meanwhile, independent Washington analysts also criticized the Republican approach as both unfair and potentially bad for the overall U.S. economy.

The House voted to extend the payroll tax cut and unemployment insurance (UI) beyond the Dec. 31 expiration date. However, the bill cuts unemployment benefits by 40 weeks, requires recipients to have a high school diploma or GED and charges them for re-employment services. Republicans insisted on these cuts.

"Our economy will continue to stall unless we put money in the pockets of people who will spend it," Hoffa says. "This is a callous move by House Republicans, who apparently don't care if America's middle class disappears."

Unemployment, now at 8.6 percent, has exceeded 8 percent for nearly three years, the longest since the government began keeping records in 1948.

The National Employment Law Project estimates that the cuts in the House bill would cost $22 billion in lost economic growth and 140,000 fewer jobs next year.

The changes to the unemployment-insurance system approved by the House would not only make it harder for workers who lose their jobs through no fault of their own to qualify for benefits, but also make the system more costly to administer, according to an analysis by from the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), a Washington think tank.

The "punitive elements" of the House Republican bill "imply that unemployed workers aren’t looking hard enough for a job and that too many of them are eligible for UI in the first place," the CBPP analysis says.

"In reality, there are about four jobless workers for every available position, so even if every available job were filled by an unemployed worker, nearly 10 million people would still be unemployed," it says. "Moreover, unemployed workers already must satisfy numerous requirements to claim UI benefits; largely as a result, only about 40 percent of the unemployed in a normal labor market receive UI.

"Today’s economic conditions, plus forecasts that unemployment will remain high for at least the next two years, justify continuing federal emergency UI as it is currently," the CBPP analysis says.

Some 40 percent of unemployed Americans have been looking for work for over six months, a larger share than at any time in the last 60 years prior to the current downturn, the analysis finds.

Further, CBPP concurs that cutting unemployment insurance would take needed cash out of the U.S. economy at a time when it needs it. The analysis cites the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which says UI benefits represent the biggest “bang-for-the-buck” to keep the economy moving.

Tuesday's House vote sets up a likely confrontation with the Senate, where the Democratic majority has advocated for an extension of unemployment benefits free from the cuts and restrictions imposed by the House bill.


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Lending a Hand to the Maxed-Out Consumer

This article was published by the Center for American Progress.

By Christian E. Weller

Congressional Republicans are dithering on critical assistance for America’s middle class—a temporary payroll tax holiday—at a time when families and the economy are in dire need of help.

A House GOP bill scheduled for a vote today does extend the payroll tax cut for a year. But it also cuts funding for health reform, freezes federal employee pay for another year, curtails the length of emergency unemployment insurance, blocks environmental protections from moving forward, and forces the president’s decision on a controversial oil pipeline project. Those provisions all but guarantee the bill’s defeat in the Senate and render the Republican proposal unserious.

That’s a tragedy for American families still suffering from crushing debts. They are putting off consumption, and in turn firms are holding back business investment because they can increase sales slowly without increasing capacity. Economic growth and job creation are slow as a result.

This column examines how continuing the payroll tax holiday, along with maintaining extended unemployment-insurance benefits, is the most effective way to allow families to reduce their debt burden and thus return consumption, investment, and economic growth to better health.

Low consumption is holding back economic growth

Consumption is the single-largest component of the economy. Consumer spending, outside of spending on owner-occupied housing, makes up about 70 percent of the entire economy. [1] Consumption, however, has grown by only 5 percent in inflation-adjusted terms from June 2009, when the economic recovery officially started, to September 2011. This is the slowest consumption growth for any economic recovery of this length since World War II. [2]

The most recent quarter, from July to September 2011, highlights consumers’ struggles with maintaining even modest consumption growth. Consumption grew at an annualized, inflation-adjusted rate of 2.3 percent in the third quarter of 2011, well below the long-term historical average growth rate of 3.5 percent before the Great Recession. [3]

This subpar performance required households to substantially decrease their saving. The personal saving rate dropped from 4.8 percent of after-tax income in the second quarter of 2011 to 3.8 percent in the third quarter in 2011. This was the lowest saving rate since the fourth quarter of 2007, just before the Great Recession.

Consumers cannot cut their saving much more to support consumption growth.

How to deal with heavy debt burdens that are weighing down consumer spending

Lack of consumption is partly driven by consumers having other priorities to worry about. Chief among them is a still-massive debt burden. Households owed a record-high 129.9 percent of their after-tax income in September 2007 but only 114.2 percent of their after-tax income in September 2011. [4] This reflects an unprecedented drop in the ratio of debt to after-tax income, but the total debt burden in September 2011 was still higher than at any point before the middle of 2004, dating back to 1952.

There are three options to reduce household debt burdens further.

One is for banks to write off more debt by continuing a massive wave of foreclosures and by agreeing to allow more short sales where homeowners sell their homes for less than they owe. Banks are reluctant to incur even larger losses than they already have, so debt write-offs are unlikely to grow.

Alternatively households could refinance their existing debt into lower-interest rate debt, but banks are still holding back on extending new loans, so refinancing opportunities are few and far between.

This leaves boosts to after-tax income growth to lower the household debt burden since more after-tax income will make it easier for households to repay their debt.

How extending the payroll tax would cut debt burdens, boost spending, and help grow the economy

A hypothetical example helps illustrate how faster after-tax income growth can cut households’ debt burdens.

Household debt stood at 114.2 percent of after-tax income in the third quarter of 2011, but as I pointed out earlier that is still too high. The average debt-to-after-tax-income ratio for the late 1990s, when the economy and the labor market were strong, was 89.2 percent.

It will take until June 2017 before households reach this level of debt again, if after-tax incomes continue to grow at the low annual rate of 2.9 percent and if debt continues to drop at the unprecedented annual rate of 1.5 percent that has occurred during the recovery so far. [5]

Households, however, will get to sustainable debt levels six months earlier for each year that personal after-tax income grows 3.1 percentage points faster. Increasing after-tax income by 3.1 percent for one year—which would happen if Congress continues the payroll tax cut for another year—means that households will get to sustainable debt levels in late 2016 instead of the middle of 2017.

Continuing the payroll tax holiday and the extended unemployment insurance benefits will thus accelerate the return to a healthier economy no longer held back by crushing middle-class debt burdens.

It’s important to point out that this income growth will not happen fast enough on its own. Income growth generally comes from job creation for most households. But economic growth is currently too slow to create a lot of jobs. As I mentioned earlier, businesses are holding back on investment and hiring since they can fill their slowly growing orders with much of their existing capacity. Economic growth and job creation stay low as a result, further holding back household-debt reduction, consumption, and investing. At this point only policy interventions to boost after-tax income can break this vicious cycle.

In short, strengthening middle-class after-tax incomes with the tax holiday is both expedient and efficient in returning the U.S. economy and the labor market to better health.

Christian E. Weller is an associate professor, department of public policy and public affairs, University of Massachusetts Boston, and Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress, Washington, D.C.

Endnotes

[1] Author’s calculations based on Bureau of Economic Analysis, “National Income and Product Accounts” (2011).

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Author’s calculations based on Board of Governors, Federal Reserve System, “Release Z.1 Flow of Funds Accounts of the United States” (2011).

[5] Ibid.

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Reid: GOP Proves That They Care About Partisanship, Not Pipeline

By tying legislation to force approval of a controversial pipeline to a bill to extend middle-class tax cuts, Republicans have proven their real aim is merely to embarrass President Obama, according to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Republicans don't actually care whether the 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline becomes reality at all, the Nevada Democrat charges.

The House is expected to vote Tuesday on legislation which would extend Obama's payroll tax cut for 160 million Americans, but also would force the president to act on the $7 billion pipeline from Canada to the Gulf Coast.

Taxes will rise on American workers starting in 2012 unless Congress acts by the end of the month to extend the tax cut. Republicans, who historically have been eager about tax cuts, have been less-than-enthusiastic over Obama's tax cut.

Obama delayed action on the Keystone pipeline last month until 2013 in order to give the project further review.

The independent inspector general of the State Department is investigating the process by which the pipeline was considered. Many on the left, including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), have charged that the approval process already has been overly influenced by corporate lobbyists.

The State Department must give its blessing to Keystone XL because the project would cross the U.S. border.

(You can read an overall explanation of the Keystone XL project, and its controversies, online here.)

Reid quotes Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee, as saying of the Keystone XL pipeline: “Frankly, the fact that the President doesn’t like it makes me like it even more.”

However, the truth is that Obama has not come out against the pipeline, Reid says.

"That’s not true. He believes it’s an important proposal that deserves proper review," Reid says. "And, as Secretary of State Clinton said yesterday, if Republicans push him to make an uninformed decision in three months – as this legislation would – he will be forced to deny the permit. If Republicans push this through, the pipeline is bound and doomed to failure."

Republicans, and their unlikely allies in organized labor, are pushing hard to approve the pipeline under the guise of job creation. However, the State Department has found that the pipeline would create between 5,000 to 6,000 temporary construction jobs but only 20 permanent jobs.


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Enviro Group: By Forcing Riders, Republicans Breaking Their Own 'Pledge To America'

By pushing a number of unrelated policy riders on spending bills and other key legislation, Republicans are breaking one of the promises they made to voters which helped them take control of the House of Representatives, a spokeswoman for a Washington environmental group charges.

By attaching conservative policy provisions on "must-pass legislation," Republicans have broken their own "Pledge to America," a list of promises they issued ahead of the 2010 midterm elections which turned the House back to GOP control. The pledge was modeled after the earlier "Contract for America" which Republicans used in 1994 to win control of Congress.

The so-called policy riders congressional Republicans are pushing include rollbacks of environmental regulations attached to spending bills required to avoid a potential government shutdown. They also include a provision to approve a controversial transnational oil pipeline attached to a bill to extend middle-class tax cuts.

"The flip-flopping House Republicans got it right the first time. In their much-ballyhooed 'Pledge to America’ in September 2010, they vowed to 'end the practice of packaging unpopular bills with ‘must-pass’ legislation.’’ Such extraneous riders, they correctly noted, would 'circumvent the will of the American people,'" says Suzanne Struglinski of the Natural Resources Defense Council, which opposes the pipeline and other Republican-led environmental policy riders.

"Sadly, they now are singing a different tune. Instead of taking up major legislation one issue at a time, as they promised, this week the same lawmakers are larding up a must-pass spending bill and a tax relief measure with riders designed not for the public weal but for the benefit of special interests," Struglinski adds. "The growing laundry list of anti-environmental riders includes one that would force a premature judgment on the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, another that would block the Environmental Protection Agency from updating public health protections against mercury emissions and carbon dioxide pollution from power plants, and one that would weaken the Endangered Species Act."

House Republicans are preparing to vote Tuesday on legislation which would tie the extension of President Obama's payroll tax cut for the middle class with forced approval of the plan to build the 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to the U.S. Gulf Coast.

The pipeline could threaten an aquifer much of Nebraska uses for clean drinking water.

(You can read an overall explanation of the Keystone XL project, and its controversies, online here.)

The State Department must give its blessing to Keystone XL because the project would cross the U.S. border.

To the outrage of both Republicans and many in organized labor, Obama delayed approval for the pipeline last month until 2013. The independent inspector general of the State Department is investigating the process by which the pipeline was considered.

Many on the left, including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), have alleged undue lobbying influence on the process.


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NPR Poll Shows Long-Term Unemployed Desperate for Work

This article was published by the Center for American Progress.

By Sarah Jane Glynn

There’s never a good time to be involuntarily unemployed. But today’s conditions are among the worst in decades. For every new job created there are four people looking for work. With supply and demand this out of whack, it is not surprising that the average length of unemployment for a worker who loses his or her job is a little more than 10 months. But in the midst of this troubling scenario, House conservatives are proposing that the government should reduce the length of time people can collect unemployment insurance by 40 weeks.

A recent poll of the long-term unemployed, conducted by National Public Radio and The Kaiser Family Foundation, illustrates how disastrous being out of work in this economy can be, and the lengths people would be willing to go to find a new job:

• Seventy-four percent of the long-term unemployed have a negative outlook on their financial situation, and more than 60 percent are not confident they will be able to find a job that will provide them with the pay and benefits they need to get by.
• Only 22 percent of the long-term unemployed are currently receiving unemployment benefits. Among those who are, a full 94 percent think it is at least somewhat likely that their benefits will run out before they are able to find a new job. These fears are not unfounded. Among those who had previously received unemployment benefits but currently were not, 84 percent stopped getting them because they ran out.
• A majority of the unemployed would be willing to go to great lengths in order to find work. Eighty-seven percent would take an entry-level job in a different field, 68 percent would be willing to take a pay cut from their last job, and 44 percent would be willing to pack up and move to a new state if it meant that they would be able to find employment.

These findings echo what economists have been saying for some time now. The long-term unemployed are desperate to find work, their benefits are running out, and something needs to be done to assist them in this tough economy.

Nonetheless, conservative lawmakers such as Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) have argued that unemployment benefits discourage the unemployed from seeking work “because people are being paid even though they are not working.” This is not only a contradictory statement—because an individual must be actively seeking work in order to qualify for unemployment insurance—but it is also factually inaccurate according to recent research.

Jesse Rothstein, former chief economist at the Department of Labor and current professor of public policy and economics at UC Berkeley, recently released a paper that directly contradicts Sen. Kyl’s assertion. While some researchers have argued that extensions to unemployment insurance have contributed about 2.7 percentage points to the unemployment rate, Rothstein found that extending benefits to unemployed workers only raised the unemployment rate by approximately 0.3 percentage points. Less than half of this tiny effect was because people did not become re-employed, and there’s reason to believe that “the availability of extended benefits might have raised reemployment rates of displaced workers, by keeping them from abandoning their searches prematurely.”

Let’s be clear: Maintaining unemployment insurance doesn’t discourage a worker from finding employment again, and it can help some workers who are currently employed stay that way. Businesses cannot hire new workers unless there is demand for their services. People who are receiving unemployment insurance are more likely to spend the money they receive than save it, which means they are putting money back into local economies and supporting the jobs of their community members. For every $1 paid out in unemployment benefits, the economy grows by $2.

There are currently 13.3 million unemployed people looking for work in the United States, and 7.1 million are receiving unemployment insurance. A reduction in those benefits would not only spell further financial disaster to the individuals directly but would also further dampen the economic recovery of our nation as a whole.

Sarah Jane Glynn is a Policy Analyst at the Center for American Progress.

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SOPA Alternative Called 'Good News'

Internet freedom advocates are cheering as "good news" draft legislation introduced by a political odd couple as an alternative to legislation many fear could chill free speech online.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) are seeking public comment on their Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade (OPEN) Act, which is meant as an alternative to the highly controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

The lawmakers say their OPEN Act would use trade laws to address the flow of illegal digital goods into the United States without the potential for entire websites potentially shut down, as many say could be the case with SOPA.

Wyden and Issa are making their legislation available to the public online at http://www.keepthewebopen.com/, where visitors will have an unprecedented opportunity to review the legislation, submit comments, suggest edits and even ask questions about the legislation with a new tool they call Madison.

“Building on the International Trade Commission’s existing [intellectual property] expertise and authority makes it possible to go after legitimate cases of IP abuse without doing irreparable harm to the Internet. It also just makes sense,” says Wyden. “It is our hope that proponents of other approaches won’t just dismiss our proposal, but will instead take this opportunity to engage us on the substance. Yes, IP infringement is a problem, but the Internet has become such an important part of our economy and our way of life that it is essential for us to get the policies that shape its future right.”

The OPEN Act would combat the flow of infringing digital goods into the United States by expanding the International Trade Commission’s existing authority to enforce copyright and trademark infringement as it currently applies to the import of physical goods. While downloading a movie from a foreign-registered site is akin to importing a good from a foreign company, U.S. trade laws have failed to keep pace with the digital economy and have yet to extend the protections that U.S. rightsholders enjoy in the physical world to the online world.

The OPEN Act would expand those protections and empower U.S. rightsholders to petition the ITC to investigate cases of illegal digital imports just as they currently petition the ITC to investigate infringement cases involving physical goods.

By contrast, opponents of SOPA and its Senate counterpart say entire sites like YouTube could simply disappear if an entity even alleges copyright infringement.

“Butchering the internet is not a way forward for America,” says Issa. “The OPEN Act empowers owners of intellectual property by targeting overseas infringers while protecting the rights of lawful Internet entrepreneurs and users. The Internet is one of the fastest growing sectors of our economy, keeping it open is critical to job creation and our economic recovery.”

The OPEN Act would address "many of the most glaring flaws" of SOPA and its Senate counterpart known as PIPA, according to the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF).

"We'll continue to review and analyze this draft legislation, so watch this space," EFF blogs on its site. "In the meantime, the introduction of a true, targeted alternative to SOPA and PIPA, and the open process with which it's being introduced, is good news for the tech community, for the Internet, and for the democratic process.


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