Quote of the Day: Alan Simpson on homophobes and hypocrites in the GOP

By Michael J.W. Stickings

And, oh, is this quotable. Here's the former Republican senator from Wyoming on Hardball yesterday:

Who the hell is for abortion? I don't know anybody running around with a sign that says, "Have an abortion! They're wonderful!" They're hideous, but they're a deeply intimate and personal decision, and I don't think men legislators should even vote on the issue.

Then you've got homosexuality, you've got Don't Ask, Don't Tell. We have homophobes on our party. That's disgusting to me. We're all human beings. We're all God’s children. Now if they're going to get off on that stuff -- Santorum has said some cruel things -- cruel, cruel things -- about homosexuals. Ask him about it; see if he attributes the cruelness of his remarks years ago. Foul.

Now if that's the kind of guys that are going to be on my ticket, you know, it makes you sort out hard what Reagan said, you know, "Stick with your folks." But, I'm not sticking with people who are homophobic, anti-women, moral values -- while you're diddling your secretary while you're giving a speech on moral values? Come on, get off of it.

No one ever accused Simpson of being verbally delicate, and while he doesn't really have anything to lose, he deserves a lot of credit for telling it like it is. It's just a wonder he still calls himself a Republican. Because, let's face it, there's an awful lot more he could have said.

Here's the clip:

In union, there is strength

By Carl 

I don't think I have to tell you where I stand on the issues unraveling in Wisconsin.

I am a union man. My father was union, blue-collar, working class. I'm union, in fact, three unions. "You don't get me, I'm part of the union," as the song goes.

There's a logic here that goes beyond greed (I'll get back to that in a minute). In early American history, companies were small. Certainly, none were of the size of the conglomeratic multinational corporations that control this nation today.

In early American history, it was likely that a line worker in a factory knew his boss. He may even have socialized with him on occasion, in church or some community function. Owners were in touch with their workers. They saw first hand the abject poverty many of them lived in. Many, if not most, acted appropriately.

Some did not, of course, else how would Dickens have made a career, British or not?

As corporations agglomerated and grew disproportionately to their communities, there really was nothing to stand in their way. The "company store" of song was very real: a corporation would hire entire towns, situate them in the company's thralls, pay them next to nothing, provide next to zero benefits, and then overcharge them for buying food.

Enter unions. As unions gathered strength in numbers, they were able to force companies to deal with the plight of their workers. In union, in unity, came strength. If the union advised its members to strike, they did. Usually, they'd win concessions that genuinely improved the lot, not just of their members, but of workers across the land.

You see, when you're the 800 lb gorilla in the room, people notice what you're up to. And when the 800 lb gorilla has to share more bananas to the troops of chimps who gather those bananas, other smaller gorillas realize they'll have to pony up or lose workers and therefore efficiencies and revenues.

Even if those gorillas aren't unionized.

A curious event happened in the 1980s, one that was a long time coming, but still surprising.

PATCO, the air traffic controllers union, went out on strike.

They struck the single biggest silverback in the world: the U.S. government. Of course, they broke a law doing it (most unions give up the right to strike with regards to public service employees.)

Ironically, they did this because they felt they would have the support of the president of the United States, Ronald Reagan, a) whom they endorsed and b) who was himself a former union president (the Screen Actors Guild).

Not so lucky: he promptly decertified them, effectively disbanding the union and firing the strikers.

That was the death knell for unions in America. Nevermind that our manufacturing base had been eroding steadily if slowly (and was about to accelerate rapidly ni the wake of the mergers and acquisition bubble of the 80s). Never mind that unions themselves had become pockets of corruption in many cases, greedy criminals running them, like Jimmy Hoffa.

The ill-advised PATCO strike probably was the single body blow that brought unions to their knees. If the government could fire them, then anyone would give it a try. And they did. And they succeeded, if only by filing bankruptcy (which is where the merger craze comes in) and dissolving the collective bargaining agreements as contracts null and void in the bankruptcy. Workers became mere creditors of the company, in effect.

But today, this week, this month, this year, we're starting to see the backlash of unions and union-minded people. The budget cuts that municipalities and states have been placing in effect has caused workers to shout "Basta!" and take to the streets. In Wisconsin, even the unions exempt from Governor Walker's edicts have stood shoulder to shoulder with their union peers.

In union comes strength. The firefighters remember the words of Pastor Reinhold Niebuhr: "Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love." 

Or to put it more prosaic terms, if they can screw with you, they can screw with me, so I stand with you now. 

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)

Elephant Dung #13: Beck and Kristol trade insults over Egypt

Tracking the GOP Civil War

By Michael J.W. Stickings

(For an explanation of this ongoing series, see here. For previous entries, see here.)

The right has had a hard time figuring out where to stand on the situation in Egypt.

Or, rather, it has had a hard time coming up with a unified position, simply because there isn't one, what with some conservatives backing Mubarak (and U.S.-friendly dictatorships generally), some of them because they support Israel no matter what and Israel backs Mubarak, others lashing out against Islam as the great threat to America and asserting, without a shred of convincing evidence (the Muslim Brotherhood is not evidence), that the pro-democracy movement in Egypt is basically Iran-style Islamism, others, on the other side, still buying into Bush's democracy-promotion agenda and approving the prospect of change in Cairo.

Conservatives like to stick together. You know, like with "taxes are bad," "abortion is wrong," etc. The Iraq War ultimately exposed huge fault lines on the right. And now, with Egypt, conservatives are actually coming to blows, including two of the most prominent, Krazy Bill Kristol and even crazier Glenn Beck:

Fox News's Glenn Beck lashed out at Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol on his radio show this morning, accusing Kristol of betraying conservatism and missing the significance of what Beck sees as an alliance between Islamism and socialism.

"I don't even know if you understand what conservatives are anymore, Billy," Beck said in his extended, sarcastic attack on Kristol. "People like Bill Kristol, I don't think they stand for anything any more. All they stand for is power. They'll do anything to keep their little fiefdom together, and they'll do anything to keep the Republican power entrenched."

Kristol this weekend took Beck to task for the latter's skepticism of the Egyptian uprising:

When Glenn Beck rants about the caliphate taking over the Middle East from Morocco to the Philippines, and lists (invents?) the connections between caliphate-promoters and the American left, he brings to mind no one so much as Robert Welch and the John Birch Society. He's marginalizing himself, just as his predecessors did back in the early 1960s.

Kristol's words drew an approving nod from National Review's Rich Lowry, a rare public repudiation of the influential Fox host from a conservative elite that quietly dislikes him. 

And all this at the time of the Reagan birth centennial. What was that about some 11th commandment?

Now, there's really no contest between Kristol and Beck. Kristol's a smart guy who often knows what he's talking about, while Beck is paranoid and insane. And Kristol is right that Beck is "marginalizing himself" with this conspiracy-theory nonsense. It's good to see that Kristol, a vicious Republican operative who has never shied away from spewing nonsensical and utterly ridiculous talking points, isn't even pretending to play along with Beck.

But, you know, Beck is sort of right, too, isn't he? I mean, Kristol may talk principle but he's really all about power, about getting Republicans elected and keeping them there. Think back to the '90s, when he was the source of the Republican opposition to "Hillarycare," all because he didn't want Bill Clinton to have a victory on a key, and historic, social policy issue.

And yet Kristol isn't necessary all about power. He isolated himself in 2000, for example, with his support for the renegade John McCain and he has certainly spent much of his career in Washington, and inside Republican circles, pushing a specific neocon agenda, specifically around a neocon view of American global hegemony. That's about power, too, but national rather than personal, and I suppose Kristol has at times been willing to run counter to the prevailing winds in the Republican Party, even if, in public at least, he is generally a good team player.

Anyway, it's fun to see these two go after each other. And yet it's not just about two prominent conservatives trading insults, it's about a serious divide on the right, with Republicans unable to land on a coherent message, let alone one they can all agree with.

The situation in Egypt will slowly drift away from American consciousness and will likely have no play at all in next year's Republican primaries, but this divide and others will remain, and deepen, and Republicans, divided against themselves, might just unravel into all-out civil war.

Enjoy.

Ronald Reagan Film Festival

By Distributorcap

In honor of the Gipper's one hundred years (and of his eight years of horrendous policies poisoning this planet), we have the first centennial Ronald Reagan Film Festival. Forget the No-doz, bring Thorazine.

The United States of Goldman Sachs

By Edward Copeland 

In 2007, Charles Ferguson directed the great documentary No End in Sight. Last year, he helmed another that told the story of an entirely different type of destruction, Inside Job, only this time the war wasn't against another country, it was against the world's financial system and instead of only those actually in Iraq and their families paying a price, we all suffered for Wall Street's greed and Washington's malfeasance.

As Ferguson did in No End in Sight, he makes a very complicated subject easier to understand through his masterful presentation of the facts and history of the situation (narrated by Matt Damon here) and interviews with key subjects. It's not an easy task in Inside Job because trying to explain the mechanics of financial derivatives and its role in the economic collapse is nowhere near as easy to do as it was to show all the mistakes and blunders involved in the Iraq war.

Not surprisingly, most of the key figures such as Alan Greenspan, Timothy Geithner, etc., refused to be interviewed for the film, but what's shocking is that Wall Street and financial service figures who do give interviews feel completely at ease showing their arrogance and defending the industry's actions.

Inside Job, briskly edited by Chad Beck and Adam Bolt, shows how decades of deregulation under presidents of both parties led to one crisis after another, each bigger than the last, with seemingly no one in Washington learning any lessons.

The film also provides fascinating tidbits such as the fact that as recently as the early 1970s bond traders' salaries were low enough, that some had to take second jobs to make ends meet. It also tells how employees of various financial firms engaged in cocaine-fueled parties with prostitutes which were billed to the companies as things such as computer supplies.

The handful of firms who would tell their clients a purchase was good while betting on its failure behind their back is staggering, though not as staggering as the refusal of regulators to do any regulating or the number of former top Goldman Sachs executives who end up serving in presidential administrations of both parties. (When Hank Paulson stepped down as Goldman CEO to be Dubya's treasury secretary, he had to sell $450 million in Goldman Sachs stock but thanks to a law signed by the first Bush, he paid exactly zero taxes on it and some say the rich are taxed too much?)

Ferguson's No End in Sight proved to be not only informative, but to provoke outrage at all of the things that were and weren't done prior to the Iraq war. Inside Job does just the same for the history of the financial collapse, especially when you see all of the names who profited from Wall Street's greed that have populated the Obama Administration, not that he invented the problem.

It began with Reagan, got worse with the first Bush, declined further under Clinton and took the big nosedive under the second Bush. Now, Obama's advisers come from the same group and Congress passes reforms without teeth because Wall Street controls what happens. Inside Job tells this infuriating story in great detail and it tells it well.

(Cross-posted at Edward Copeland on Film.)