You just type your name and credit card information in on a keyboard and click. It’s amazing!
I think ActBlue stole the idea from WaWa.
by DougJ| 45 Comments
This post is in: Bleg, C.R.E.A.M.
You just type your name and credit card information in on a keyboard and click. It’s amazing!
I think ActBlue stole the idea from WaWa.
by Zandar| 178 Comments
This post is in: Activist Judges!, An Unexamined Scandal, C.R.E.A.M., Don't Mourn, Organize, Election 2012, Fables Of The Reconstruction, Kochsuckers, Vote Like Your Country Depends On It, Our Awesome Meritocracy
Money can’t buy happiness, but in post-Citizens United America, you can sure as hell buy a presidency.
Forbes has confirmed that billionaire Sheldon Adelson, along with his wife Miriam, has donated $10 million to the leading Super PAC supporting presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney–and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. A well-placed source in the Adelson camp with direct knowledge of the casino billionaire’s thinking says that further donations will be “limitless.”
Adelson, who has built Las Vegas Sands into an global casino empire, will do “whatever it takes” to defeat Obama, this source says. And given that Adelson is worth $24.9 billion–and told Forbes in a recent rare interview about his political giving that he had been willing to donate as much as $100 million to his initial presidential preference, Newt Gingrich–that “limitless” description telegraphs potential nine-digit support of Romney.
One. Hundred. Million. Dollars. And he has literally billions more where that came from. So when Sheldon Adelson buys himself a President, what will he get for his purchase? Even if Adelson spends a mind-blowing billion on this election (and there’s nothing stopping him, frankly) he’s still ridiculously wealthy. And you can bet the expectations are that Romney will give Adelson whatever he wants.
And now keep in mind that Adelson is just one of that many billionaires backing the GOP this year at the local, state, and national level. Every politician in the country is bought and paid for now by the top fraction of the 1%. The rest of us cannot compete with this. And should Romney win due to a never ending deluge of money and attack ads to reach every American voting this year, he’ll make sure that Citizens United will remain the law of the land permanently.
We’re basically screwed as a result. SCOTUS will have to revisit the decision I’m sure, but by then it will be far too late, and with another pair of conservatives on the court or so from a Romney presidency, the game’s over. What’s to stop Adelson and his buddies from putting together a ten or even eleven digit figure and simply buying state legislatures, Governor’s mansions, Congress and the White House?
Oh wait, they’re pretty much doing that now.
By no means am I saying we should give up, but the headwinds now are a jet engine pointed in our faces that shoots out bricks of cash. They’re investing billions now to reap trillions later. Can’t beat a return like that.
by DougJ| 55 Comments
This post is in: C.R.E.A.M.
Suck on this, Cory Booker:
In the sustained flood of advertising, the one thing that stands out is how strong the reactions to Mitt Romney are– particularly in Ohio — where he has been defined as hurting workers in his work at Bain….
All the oh-noes-class-warfare concern trolls are in the pocket of Galtian overlords who don’t want their fee-fees hurt by mean tv commercials.
It’s as simple as that.
by DougJ| 112 Comments
This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., David Brooks Giving A Seminar At The Aspen Institute
Bobo’s latest whinefest about the erosion of elite authority is epic. I’ll give you a bit, but don’t hesitate to click through: you will find his salty tears very tasty.
The old adversary culture of the intellectuals has turned into a mass adversarial cynicism. The common assumption is that elites are always hiding something. Public servants are in it for themselves. Those people at the top are nowhere near as smart or as wonderful as pure and all-knowing Me.
You end up with movements like Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Parties that try to dispense with authority altogether. They reject hierarchies and leaders because they don’t believe in the concepts. The whole world should be like the Internet — a disbursed semianarchy in which authority is suspect and each individual is king.
[…]I don’t know if America has a leadership problem; it certainly has a followership problem. Vast majorities of Americans don’t trust their institutions. That’s not mostly because our institutions perform much worse than they did in 1925 and 1955, when they were widely trusted. It’s mostly because more people are cynical and like to pretend that they are better than everything else around them. Vanity has more to do with rising distrust than anything else.
Bad choice of years. In 1925, the country was in a (albeit soon-to-end) boom, in 1955 it was in the middle of the greatest 25-year-period in human economic history. Now, by contrast, we are at the end of a five-year stretch during which the average American family has seen its total assets drop in value by 40%, which means there has been no growth (zero) in the wealth of the average American family over the past 20 years. And then throw in a disastrous war that elites almost uniformly supported.
Elites have been making out like bandits, quite literally, through all of this. They’ve lost a little over the past couple years, but over the past 20 their income and share of the total wealth of the country has skyrocketed. At the Times itself, there’s been some outright looting by top execs:
Despite the shrinkage, the company has retained essentially the same top-heavy management, which it has kept well compensated. Even though the paper froze executives’ pensions in 2009, as it is threatening to do with union employees, the company created two loopholes, called the Restoration Plan and the Supplemental Executive Savings Plan, which allowed certain high-earning executives to take money out anyway. As a result, Janet Robinson received an additional lump-sum payment of over half a million dollars upon exiting the Times.
All in all, I’m happy to know that once elites have destroyed everything, at least they’ll cry about the fact that the peasants don’t respect them anymore.
This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Don't Mourn, Organize, Excellent Links, Show Us on the Doll Where the Invisible Hand Touched You
Our Netroots Nation correspondents probably have more to tell us, but in the interim, thanks to commentor Amir Khalid for the TPM2012 link:
PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman on Saturday morning called the current state of the U.S. economy “incredibly awful.”
“If you don’t know multiple people who are suffering, then you must be living in a very rarefied environment,” he said in a brief address to the Netroots Nation conference. “You must be maybe a member of the Romney clan, or something.”
Krugman is out with a new book, “End This Depression Now!”, and he told the progressive gathering that the country’s economic problems are solvable.
“None of this has to be happening. We didn’t have a plague of locusts, we were not hit by a tsunami, there wasn’t some act of God that created this terrible situation. It was acts of man.”…
Krugman concluded that Americans are living under the tyranny of “very serious people” — people like Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, he said. “Solving this depression is not fundamentally an economic problem, it’s a political problem.”
The man keeps himself busy. My pathethic google-fu has not uncovered a transcript of his keynote speech at the Texas Observer‘s 2012 Molly (Ivins) Awards, beyond a note from the Austin American-Statesman’s Michael Barnes:
He made trenchant remarks about the economy and what he feels are misinformed responses the political class. But he also pinpointed the value of the investigative work done by reporters who don’t just act as scribes to the powerful. (Some other famous prizes often reward that kind of insider sleight of hand.)
Has anybody had the chance to read End This Depression Now! yet?
by DougJ| 153 Comments
This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Election 2012, Ever Get The Feeling You've Been Cheated?
This is the third Netroots Nation that I’ve attended. The first two (2007 and 2008) were happy and hopeful, this one seems sad. There is a palpable sense that the middle-class is being destroyed in no small part by unelected judges and central bankers, and that it isn’t clear what we can do about it, at least in the short term.
So I can’t bring myself to get angry at the fire-baggers, not even those who write things like “Thanks to Obama, American Left Lies in Smoldering Wreckage“, or to sneer too much at the wonky young bucks, even if they hang out with pink himalayan salt-eaters. The former pour their hearts into the cause, and the latter make solid, substantive arguments in favor of pro-middle-class economic policies. We all agree — liberals of every stripe — that the 99% is getting screwed by the 1%, and that’s what matters.
Demographic changes will likely shift things in our favor over the next 10-20 years, so much so that we can probably eventually get not only better legislation, but also a non-winger SCOTUS and a Fed that cares about unemployment. We can’t wait for the calvary, it won’t be coming directly. Until then, we have to wage what will mostly be a losing battle, and I have some respect for anyone who is willing to fight it.
This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Election 2012, Open Threads
(Tom Toles via GoComics.com)
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Greg Sargent is querulous about the “Dems push for national debate on whether GOP is sabotaging economy“:
… There was a time when charges like these were approached with a bit more caution by Democratic leaders. Now top Obama and Dem officials are going out into every conceivable forum and repeating the claim that Republicans are actively rooting for widespread economic misery and are doing all they can to block solutions designed to alleviate it.
I don’t really know how effective this strategy will be. Paul Krugman writes today that Obama has no choice at this point but to run with this argument as aggressively as possible. The bad jobs numbers mean Obama no longer has the option of running on claims of economic success. Better to admit that the policies he was able to get passed weren’t enough, and that we’d be doing better today if it weren’t for determined GOP obstructionism…
But all this aside, let’s face it: If Dems want a national media debate over whether the GOP is deliberately sabotaging the economy or is actively rooting for economic failure, they aren’t going to get one. This is not a topic that will get sustained media attention or discussion, no matter what Dems do.
I think the determined unwillingness of the mainstream media to acknowledge the dead Republican elephant currently stinking up the room may be related to one of the far-below-the-lede graphs from Thomas Edsall’s much-circulated NYTimes piece on “political heterogeneity“:
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If I am reading this correctly, it would seem that Republicans just choose not to care about fairness — a stance always easier for those to whom inequality has always tipped in their favor. Such as, for instance, those members of the media paid to explain that highlighting inequality and its consequences is at best shrill and at worst unpatriotic. And such high-minded ‘agreements’ are always seen as unbreakable… right until they shatter catastrophically.
Tuesday Morning Open Thread: Money ChangesPost + Comments (50)