Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) is a world class moron unfit to be in Congress - Accuses Obama Of ‘Harming’ Auto Company That Went Defunct In 1988

Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) is a world class moron unfit to be in Congress - Accuses Obama Of ‘Harming’ Auto Company That Went Defunct In 1988

A Republican congresswoman accused the Obama administration of promulgating regulations that are undermining job creation at an auto manufacturer that has been defunct since 1988. She was responding to a question on Monday about Mitt Romney’s dishonest claims regarding Jeep moving its production overseas.

During an appearance on MSNBC, Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) dodged a question about Romney’s debunked Jeep claims and instead attacked the Obama administration for issuing regulations that are harming workers at American Motors Corporation, a company once headed by George Romney. AMC was sold to Chrysler during the Ronald Reagan administration and its brands were then discontinued..

Conservatives consider complete and utter incompetence a bonus rather than a disqualifying feature for public office.

Conservative Republican Strategist Defends Romney’s Plan To Dismantle FEMA

Conservative Republican Strategist Defends Mitt Romney’s Plan To Dismantle FEMA

Mitt Romney’s past comments about dismantling FEMA and privatizing disaster relief have come back to haunt him as Hurricane Sandy begins to wreak havoc on the East Coast. Still, one Republican strategist, Ron Bonjean, agrees with him. On CNN Monday morning, Bonjean, a private consultant who advises GOP congressional leaders, defended Romney, suggesting that even talking about federal disaster relief is politically toxic:

    Most people don’t have a positive impression of FEMA and I think Mitt Romney was right on the button. But I don’t think anybody cares about that right now. I think people care about whether or not their power’s on, whether or not their basement’s going to be flooded. And I think that if the president gets too far in front of this and something goes wrong, people are going to remember, hey, my power’s not out, and the president’s talking about FEMA. I’m not a real big fan of FEMA. That could sway their vote.


Sandy has already caused severe flooding in the Northeast, hours before the worst of the storm is projected to hit. President Obama has declared a state of emergency in 7 states and DC after several governors’ urgent requests for federal aid to combat the storm. Though Bonjean fails to make the connection between FEMA’s services and people worrying about their power going out, the agency has already dispatched emergency power teams to try to reinforce vulnerable power grids before the storm hits and provided hundreds of generators and other back-up power sources. Americans are unfortunately well-acquainted with the agency, despite Bonjean’s insistence that they “don’t care” about it; a recent study of FEMA data found that, since 2006, 4 out of 5 Americans have been affected by weather-related disasters.

No one wants government that is too big, that is just common sense. Conservative Republicans have take that to the wacko extreme, they just plain do not want government to work. Like Exxon, BP, chemical, mining and insurance companies always do the right thing and are never unethical or inefficient. To be a conservative takes tremendous powers of denial about reality.

Morally Corrupt Romney campaign falsely training Wisc. poll watchers that IDs ‘must include photo’

Never let a tragedy go unexploited: Sleazebag Romney playing campaign videos at ‘storm relief events’

What is a Nightmare? The Day After Morally Bankrupt Mitt Romney is Elected

What is a Nightmare? The Day After Morally Bankrupt Mitt Romney is Elected

Despite the difficulty nailing down a chameleon-like candidate's positions, we've tried to discern some of the economic measures that Romney would likely champion if he wins. We'll follow up with a look at non-economic policies in the coming days.

1. The Romney-Ryan Budget

Let's assume, for the moment, that the Republicans take the Senate.

Mitt Romney has at times embraced Paul Ryan's “roadmap [3],” and he's also distanced himself from it. But there will be quite a bit of pressure from conservative activists and the Republican House to enact something along the lines of the roadmap.

There are two things to understand about Paul Ryan's budget. First, it has been carefully written so that most of its provisions can be passed under a process known as budget reconciliation, which requires only a simple majority of votes in the Senate. Second, it is a right-wing fantasy that, if enacted as written, would trigger a major drop in employment and send the economy into a tailspin. Its cuts are so deep, and would effect so many constituents – including traditionally Republican constituents – that it would have to be modified. It's one thing to campaign on such a plan and another to govern with it.

What does it do? According to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities [4], “by 2050, most of the federal government aside from Social Security, healthcare and defense would cease to exist, according to figures in a Congressional Budget Office analysis.”

    The CBO report, prepared at Chairman Ryan’s request, shows that Ryan’s budget path would shrink federal expenditures for everything other than Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and interest payments to just 3¾ percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) by 2050. Since, as CBO notes, “spending for defense alone has not been lower than 3 percent of GDP in any year [since World War II]” and Ryan seeks a high level of defense spending — he increases defense funding by $228 billion over the next ten years above the pre-sequestration baseline — the rest of government would largely have to disappear. That includes everything from veterans’ programs to medical and scientific research, highways, education, nearly all programs for low-income families and individuals other than Medicaid, national parks, border patrols, protection of food safety and the water supply, law enforcement, and the like.

Ryan has already modified his plan in response to the outcry over a CBO analysis that found future retirees would face $6,400 more in out-of-pocket healthcare costs. We can expect further modifications because no Republican administration is actually going to slash veterans' benefits to the bone, to name just one example. It's untenable, but that doesn't mean President Romney wouldn't push through something moderately less damaging.

2. Tax Cuts or rewarding rich people for being rich, not for work.

Romney promises to slash taxes by 20 percent across the board, maintain deductions enjoyed by the middle class and not decrease the share of taxes paid by the wealthy (or anyone else). We know Romney's math simply doesn't work [5] – it's impossible. http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3708

But while the whole doesn't add up, Romney could get a number of those provisions passed, like eliminating the inheritance tax, the Alternative Minimum Tax (which hits high earners), and certainly keeping the “Bush tax cuts” on income investment in place.

When a candidate presents a plan that literally does not add up, it's not possible to predict what he'd do with any specificity once in office. Based on the recent history of GOP governance, the sharp right turn the party's taken in recent years and Mitt Romney's own background, one can be reasonably confident that Romney would cut taxes on high earners and corporations, but projecting by how much – and whether it would be financed through deficits, additional cuts or higher taxes on the middle class – is an exercise in reading the tea leaves.

3. ObamaCare

Mitt Romney has pledged to repeal ObamaCare and replace it with a plan that, while light on details, would be centered around health savings accounts and insurance deregulation. Employers would throw some cash into the accounts, people would get some tax breaks and then the miracle of the free market will supposedly swoop in and fix our broken healthcare system.

Repealing ObamaCare may not be as cut-and-dried as the Republican base has been led to believe, however. Contrary to the mythology surrounding the program, the Congressional Budget Office projects ObamaCare to reduce the deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars in the coming decade and beyond. According to Senate rules now in effect, the reconciliation process cannot be used to pass anything that increases the budget deficit 10 years from now.

There are ways to get around procedural rules, and failing that, the executive branch has a lot of discretion in terms of implementation. A Romney adviser told Politico [6] that if the Dems hold the Senate, “we would just have to try to grind out changes by starving ObamaCare through regulations.”

If Romney is able to repeal ObamaCare and replace it with his plan, a study by the Commonwealth Fund [7] projects that it will leave 72 million uninsured by 2022 – 45 million more than is projected under ObamaCare.
A tragic irony is that Romney's healthcare plan would likely prove to be a fatal blow [8] to the best thing he's ever accomplished in public service – the “RomneyCare” scheme in Massachussetts.

4. Medicare

There is little doubt that Mitt Romney would pursue a variant of Paul Ryan's plan to voucherize Medicare for those who retire after a given date (in Ryan's plan it's 2023). Seniors would at first get a voucher sufficient to cover the cost of a private insurance plan comparable to Medicare. But the value of that voucher would only increase by the rate of overall economic growth plus 0.5 percent. The problem is that healthcare costs grow a lot faster. The difference would be borne by seniors themselves – it does nothing to contain healthcare costs, it just shifts them from the government to the backs of individuals.

When the CBO scored Ryan's first plan in 2011, it found that seniors would face an additional $6,400 in out-of-pocket expenses by 2022. After Democrats jumped on that figure, Ryan released a new plan, which called for Congress to come up with some unspecified remedy. CBO wasn't able to score it, but said [9] “beneficiaries might face higher costs.”

Ryan would also raise the retirement age to 67, a measure Romney has endorsed.

It's entirely possible that a President Romney would sweeten the deal a bit to make those numbers look better in the medium-term, but any voucher plan that doesn't keep up with the actual increase in healthcare costs achieves the same thing -- eventually shifting part of the burden onto seniors.

5. Medicaid

While Medicare has received the most attention, Ryan's plan for Medicaid, which Mitt Romney has endorsed, would be a more devastating hit to our threadbare social safety net.

Ryan's plan would turn Medicaid into a block-grant program, cap its funding – cutting $800 billion from the program over the next decade -- and then send it to the states to administer. The first problem is that states – presumably red states – would be free to make it harder to qualify, and the second is that the program wouldn't have the funding flexibility to enroll more people during economic downturns.

Medicaid serves 60 million Americans, about 10 million more than Medicare. Most people think Medicaid only serves the poor, but Medicaid is indespensible for the disabled, especially the severely diabled who require a lot of care. It also covers Medicare's out-of-pocket expenses for retirees with limited incomes.

6. Social Security

George W. Bush learned the hard way that privatizing Social Security is a great way to make voters hate you. That's why the Ryan plan is quite vague. It calls for "action on Social Security by requiring both the President and the Congress to put forward specific ideas and legislation to ensure the sustainable solvency of this critical program." The budget does tout "reforms that take into account increases in longevity, to arrest the demographic problems that are undermining Social Security's finances” – which sounds a lot like raising the retirement age.

7. State Children's Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP)

S-CHIP is likely to be hit hard under a Romney administration if he has a Republican Congress. Under the Ryan plan, S-CHIP could only increase by the rate of inflation, which again, is much slower than the projected rate of healthcare cost inflation. The CBO looked at Medicaid and S-CHIP together, and found that spending on the two programs would be about 70 percent less than currently projected by the year 2050 under Ryan's "roadmap."

8. The Rest

If the Republicans run the field in a big win, expect a lot of talk about a constitutional amendment capping federal spending at a given share of our gross domestic product. It will only be talk. It's a right-wing fantasy of a policy that can only be enacted with a constitutional amendment, which isn't going to happen.

That doesn't mean there won't be deep, deep cuts to non-defense discretionary spending under a Romney administration. Under the Ryan plan, non-defense discretionary spending would be on a downward trajectory leading to 39 percent less funding than currently projected by the year 2040. What is “non-defense discretionary spending”? Well, about 40 percent is education, training and research, and the rest is veterans' programs, various programs for low-income families, public safety and disaster response and the like. It's basically government, absent the Pentagon budget, Social Security and Medicare.

9. If Dems Have 40-50 Seats in Senate (With Ryan the Tie-Breaking Vote)

Although he has been vocal in his opposition in the past [10], there's a good chance that as Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, might embrace filibuster reform – dropping the number of votes needed to overcome a filibuster from 60 -- if the Dems hold a minority in the upper chamber.

Either way, one thing not to expect in this scenario is Senate Democrats turning the tables on the GOP and blocking their legislative agenda at every turn. That's a strategy the Republicans can undertake because their overarching narrative is that governent doesn't do anything right – it ultimately works to their benefit when they can “prove” that theory by rendering Congress incapable of action. Democrats still adhere to the idea that good governance can improve our society, so they can't play the same game and get away with it.

10. If Dems Hold Senate

If the Dems hold the Senate they will act as a firewall against the radical restructuring of the public sector promised by the Ryan budget.

That means maintaining the status quo, more or less, at least through 2014, with one painful exception. Cheered on by the Beltway media, the Democrats, having embraced the non-existent recommendations of the Simpson-Bowles commission (the chairmen drafted recommendations but the gang of 18 didn't vote to approve them), would almost certainly be willing to strike a “grand bargain” with President Romney along those lines.

The only question is whether Speaker Boehner (or Cantor?) would have any trouble coming up with the votes for a “balanced” deficit reduction deal – for a deal that raises some new revenues. If history is any guide, even the most ideological House Republicans will support a Republican president in such an effort.

Currently, non-defense discretionary spending is expected to hit its lowest level since 1962, and Simpson-Bowles would cut deeper still – with a 3:1 ratio of spending cuts to tax increases. That means programs that help the poor and middle class will be on the chopping block. Simpson-Bowles also called for a hike in the Social Security retirement age, despite the fact that life expectancies have only increased significantly for the well-to-do who don't rely on the program as heavily as working people and the poor.

The U.S. is still the richest nation in the world ( maybe 2nd, some economists think China passed us) yet Romney-Ryan would have half the population living in their own 3rd world like conditions. Conservatives talk about imgiinary death panels - the reality is that a conservative president and a conservative Congress will literary mean the deaths of millions of senior citizens and disabled. besides their wacky UnAmerican ideology, why are conservatives going to try and pass this kind of cruel legislation/ Because they do not want to rise taxes on billionaires who are complaining they're not making enough money. Seriously. These same billionaires and multimillionaires are also threatening to fire employees if they do not vote for immoral Mitt.

Paul Ryan Takes a Side in the War on Poverty: He's Against What Works

Condi Rice Pours Cold Water On ‘Benghazi-Gate’

The Republican propaganda channel and Anti-American Fox New's John Roberts Whitewashes Romney's Position On Auto Rescue

What Would a Mitt Romney Economy Look Like, Stealing From The Working Class To Give More to The Wealthy

Does Mitt Romney hate The USA. He has created more jobs in other countries than he has in America

What Would a Mitt Romney Economy Look Like, Stealing From The Working Class To Give More to The Wealthy

Mitt Romney’s best argument on the campaign trail has been simple: Under President Obama, the American economy has remained excruciatingly weak, far underperforming the White House’s own projections.

That’s a fair criticism.

But Obama’s best response could be this: If you want to see how Romney’s economic policies would work out, take a look at Europe. And weep.

In the last few years, Germany and Britain, in particular, have implemented precisely the policies that Romney favors, and they have been richly praised by Republicans here as a result. Yet these days those economies seem, to use a German technical term, kaput.

Is Europe a fair comparison? Well, Republicans seem to think so, because they came up with it. In the last few years, they’ve repeatedly cited Republican-style austerity in places like Germany and Britain as a model for America.

Let’s dial back the time machine and listen up:

“Europe is already setting an example for the U.S.,” Representative Kenny Marchant, a Texas Republican, said in 2010. (You know things are bad when a Texas Republican is calling for Americans to study at the feet of those socialist Europeans.)

The same year, Karl Rove praised European austerity as a model for America and approvingly quoted the leader of the European Central Bank as saying: “The idea that austerity measures could trigger stagnation is incorrect.”

Representative Steve King of Iowa, another Republican, praised Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany for preaching austerity and said: “It ought to hit home to our president of the United States. It ought to hit all of us here in this country.”

“The president should learn a lesson from the ‘German Miracle,’ ” Representative Joe Wilson of South Carolina, a Republican, urged on the House floor in July 2011.

Also in 2011, Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the top Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, denounced Obama’s economic management and said: “We need a budget with a bold vision — like those unveiled in Britain and New Jersey.”

O.K. Let’s see how that’s working out.

New Jersey isn’t overseas, but since Sessions and many other Republicans have hailed it as a shining model of austerity, let’s start there. New Jersey ranked 47th in economic growth last year. When Gov. Chris Christie took office in 2010 and began to impose austerity measures, New Jersey ranked 35th in its unemployment rate; now it ranks 48th.

Senator Sessions, do we really aspire for the same in America as a whole?

Something similar has happened internationally. The International Monetary Fund this month downgraded its estimates for global economic growth, with only one major bright spot in the West. That would be the United States, expected to grow a bit more than 2 percent this year and next.

In contrast, Europe’s economy is expected to shrink this year and have negligible growth next year. The I.M.F. projects that Germany will grow less than 1 percent this year and next, while Britain’s economy is contracting this year.

Karl Rove, that sounds a lot like stagnation to me.

All this is exactly what economic textbooks predicted. Since Keynes, it’s been understood that, in a downturn, governments should go into deficit to stimulate demand; that’s how we got out of the Great Depression. And recent European data and I.M.F. analyses underscore that austerity in the middle of a downturn not only doesn’t help but leads to even higher ratios of debt to economic output.

So, yes, Republicans have a legitimate point about the long-term need to curb deficits and entitlement growth. But, no, it isn’t reasonable for Republicans to advocate austerity in the middle of a downturn. On that, they’re empirically wrong.

If there were still doubt about this, we’ve had a lovely natural experiment in the last few years, as the Republicans in previous years were happy to point out. All industrialized countries experienced similar slowdowns, and the United States under Obama chose a massive stimulus while Germany and Britain chose Republican-endorsed austerity.

Neither approach worked brilliantly. Obama’s initial economic stimulus created at least 1.4 million jobs, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. But that wasn’t enough, and it was partly negated by austerity in state and local governments.

Still, America’s economy is now the fastest growing among major countries in the West, and Britain’s is shrinking. Which would you prefer?

I’m not suggesting Obama distribute bumper stickers saying: “It Could Be Worse.” He might want to stick with: “Osama’s Dead and G.M. Is Alive.”

Yes, there are differences between Europe and America. But Republicans were right to call attention to this empirical experiment.

The results are in. And, as Representative King suggested, the lessons “ought to hit all of us here in this country.”

If a modern radical political movement - like modern conservatism that hates freedom, democracy, genuinely competitive markets and most of all hates American workers for having any rights at all - wanted to sell its wacky agenda to the public it would not admit it hates the USA. No, on the contrary it would wrap up its radicalism in the flag, in faux patriotism. Conservative Republicans have cleverly used the tools of democracy to destroy in little pieces at a time. You don't have to be smart to be clever. You just have to tap into some base emotions and superstitions, while cultivating contempt for reality based studies, reality based history and reality based public policy.

 Top Six Lies Romney Has Told Women in This Election Cycle an Election Season Full of Whoppers

Reality TV has-been (and congressman) Rep. Sean Duffy (R-WI)  would totally love Planned Parenthood except ...

The Economist Pounds Romney on the Economy

Mitt Romney Endorsed Senate Candidate Richard Mourdock (R-IN) Who Calls Rape Pregnancies A ‘Gift From God’

Inside Bain's Chinese Sensata Factories (they used to be in Illinois), Where Workers Put in 12-Hour Days for $.99-$1.35 an hr

President Obama handled a tough situation fairly well; Romney offers no credible alternative

Mitt Romney Endorsed Senate Candidate Richard Mourdock (R-IN) Who Calls Calls Rape Pregnancies A ‘Gift From God’

Mitt Romney Endorsed Senate Candidate Richard Mourdock (R-IN) Who Calls Calls Rape Pregnancies A ‘Gift From God’

NEW ALBANY, Indiana — At a debate this evening with his Democratic opponent Rep. Joe Donnelly (D-IN), Indiana GOP Senate candidate Richard Mourdock claimed that raped women should be forced to carry their rapist’s baby to term because their forced pregnancy is a “gift from God”:

    I believe life begins at conception. The only exception I have for to have an abortion is in the case of the life of the mother. I struggled with myself for a long time but I came to realize life is that gift from God, even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape. It is something that God intended to happen.



Throughout his campaign, Mourdock has left no doubt that he believes in a sacred right to life that begins at conception and ends at birth. Earlier this year, Mourdock mocked the very idea that Social Security and Medicare — programs that millions of seniors depend on to save their lives — are even constitutional.

Update

In his post-debate press conference, Mourdock repeatedly asserted that he believes “God creates life” but, seemingly contradicting his own remarks from the debate, said God does not “pre-ordain[] rape.”

“What I said was, in answering the question form my position of faith, I said I believe that God creates life. I believe that as wholly and as fully as I can believe it. That God creates life,” Mourdock said. “Are you trying to suggest that somehow I think that God pre-ordained rape? No, I don’t think that. That’s sick. Twisted. That’s not even close to what I said. What I said is that God creates life.”

Mourdock did, however, re-assert his belief that abortion should be illegal even for victims of rape and incest.

“I’ve said that consistently,” Mourdock said. “I’ve said that for a long, long time.”

Watch his post-debate comments:

Update

Earlier this week, GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney starred in an ad calling upon Indiana voters to “join me in supporting Richard Mourdock for U.S. Senate.” This is the first time this election that Romney cut such an ad for a fellow Republican candidate.

So voting for Mitt Romney or  Richard Mourdock (R-IN) is not too different from voting for Islamic fundamentalists who believe that men and their interpretation of what God wants should be the culture and law that America lives under. Conservatives in Iran and Indiana seems to think that women are only three-fifths a person and thus should not have the same rights as men.

Conservative Media Pundits Help Romney Hide His Opposition To The Successful Auto Rescue. Romney's editorial attacking the rescue of the American auto industry might be too widely known for even the well oiled Republican propaganda machine to cover-up.

The ultra radical conservative Koch brothers and an assortment of wacky right-wing think tanks are determined to destroy Social Security because they believe it is part of a communist plot to take over America.

President Obama handled a tough situation fairly well; Romney offers no credible alternative

President Obama handled a tough situation fairly well; Romney offers no credible alternative

The question before presidential voters is simple: Who will better serve this country for the next four years, Mitt Romney or Barack Obama? When couched in straightforward terms, the answer is clear: President Obama should be re-elected.

Obama has done a reasonably good job handling an almost unprecedented economic mess – a situation that has proved far worse than anyone knew as it developed. Still, there is room for debate about the direction the country is headed.

Unfortunately, the Republican Party has offered no credible alternative. Its platform consists of little more than nostalgia for the 1950s, and its presidential candidate largely remains a mystery.

Romney has publicly demonstrated no core convictions beyond his obvious belief that he should be president. He apparently thinks that simply not being Obama is qualification enough.

It is not.

When Barack Obama took office, the country was mired in two wars, one pointless and neither properly funded. The economy was tanking and jobs were disappearing by the thousands. The automotive industry was on the verge of collapse – threatening to take with it the entire upper Midwest. And, while no one knew it at the time, the Middle East was about to explode into chaos and confusion.

On balance, Obama’s handling of all that has been good. U.S. forces have left Iraq and the end is in sight in Afghanistan. Muammar Gadhafi was ousted with no American troops involved. Democracy has a tenuous but real toehold in some Arab countries. And while the U.S. economy is recovering too slowly, it is recovering. As Vice President Joe Biden put it, Osama bin Laden is dead and GM is alive.

Amid all that, Obama kept a campaign promise and signed into law a sweeping health-care reform package.

All told, that is not a bad record. But in considering the way forward, Americans are always interested in alternative visions.

Mitt Romney, however, has not effectively offered one. Instead, this race has been presented as a referendum on the economy and the president’s personal style. Romney has failed to explain himself or his agenda, and the voters still do not really know who he is or how he would govern.

By all accounts, Romney’s Mormon faith is central to who he is. To listen to him campaign, however, one would never know that. His business acumen is touted as his core competence, but he will not release his tax records for more than a couple of years. He promises to cut taxes, increase defense spending, lower the deficit and make the seemingly impossible math work out by reforming the tax code. But he cannot, or will not, explain what those tax changes might be.

Romney rails against Obamacare, although it was modeled on the program he enacted as governor of Massachusetts. He governed that state as a moderate, but won the presidential nomination describing himself as “severely conservative.”

He has gone from supporting reproductive rights when running for the Senate in 1994 to saying in 2007 that he would gladly ban abortion in all cases. He now says he would allow exceptions for rape, incest and the health of the mother.

Romney has shown some consistency on other women’s health issues. He has repeatedly said he would strip Planned Parenthood of all funding and allow employers to exclude contraception from health-insurance coverage. He wants to talk about the economy but fails to understand that reproductive autonomy is an economic issue for women.

Barack Obama is an imperfect president, of course, and to what extent he can achieve his goals for the nation remains to be seen. But he has and can articulate a vision for a better, fairer, more successful America. His opponent offers nothing of the sort.

Vote to re-elect Barack Obama.

Romney has no real jobs plan. It is all smoke and mirrors. The only way he can make his very stretchy budget and tax plan work is to raise taxes on families making under $150k per year.

Mitt Romney Supporters Show Love For China, Hatred For American Workers

GOP congressman admits Paul Ryan, GOP will “end” Medicare

Immoral Mitt Romney is hoping for another 1979 Iranian Hostage Crisis,..." I will work to take advantage of the opportunity.” w/video

Inside Romney Bain's Chinese Sensata Factories, Where Workers Put in 12-Hour Days for $.99-$1.35 an Hour

A Few Good Reasons Not To Vote Romney or For Any Conservative Republican

Where Mittens puts his money

A Few Good Reasons Not To Vote Romney or For Any Conservative Republican

There is no shortage of reasons not to vote Republican. The litany includes tax cuts for the rich, cutbacks in government programs, obstructing needed legislation, disregard for the environment, denial of women's and other human rights, military escalation.

But the following five reasons have to do with money -- specifically, who's paying for the $1 trillion of annual tax savings and tax avoidance for the super-rich? And who's paying for the $1 trillion of national security to protect their growing fortunes? The Republicans want that money to come from the rest of us.

1. Economic Darwinism -- Republicans want the Poor to Pay

Paul Ryan's proposed budget would take about a half-trillion dollars a year from programs that support the poor. This is a continuation of a 15-year shredding of the safety net by Republicans. The GOP-controlled Congress of Bill Clinton created Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), which has experienced a 60% drop in its caseload despite growing poverty, and which, according to the Urban Institute, provides "maximum benefits [that] even in the more generous states were far below the federal poverty level of $1,525 a month for a family of three."

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), another vital program that serves 50 million "food insecure" Americans, would be cut by $16 billion under the House version of the Farm Bill. The average recipient currently gets $4.30 a day for food.

Republicans also voted to end the Child Tax Credit, and favor a tax plan that would eliminate the Earned Income Tax Credit.

2. Payroll Tax -- Republicans want the Middle Class to Pay

Encouraged by the steady Republican demand for lower corporate tax rates, big business has effected a stunning shift in taxpaying responsibility over the years, from corporate income tax to worker payroll tax. For every dollar of payroll tax paid in the 1950s, corporations paid three dollars. Now it's 22 cents.

It's gotten worse in recent years, as corporations decided to drastically cut their tax rates after the start of the recession. After paying an average of 22.5% from 1987 to 2008, they've paid an annual rate of 10% since. This represents a sudden $250 billion annual loss in taxes.

Republicans claim that almost half of Americans don't pay taxes. But when payroll and state and local taxes are considered, middle-income Americans pay at about the same rate as the highest earners. Only about 17% of households paid no federal income tax or payroll tax in 2009. And average workers get little help from people who make most of the money. Because of the $110,000 cutoff for payroll tax deductions, the richest 10% of Americans save $150 billion a year in taxes.

3. Job Shrinkage -- Republicans want Young People to Pay

The jobs that exist for young Americans are paying much less than just a few years ago. During and after the recession, according to the National Employment Law Project, low-wage jobs ($7.69 to $13.83 per hour) dropped by 21 percent, and then grew back at a 58 percent rate. Mid-wage jobs ($13.84 to $21.13 per hour) dropped by 60 percent and grew back at a 22 percent rate. In other words, the median wage is falling fast.

Unemployment for workers under 25 stands at 16.4 percent, twice the national average. Half of recent college graduates are jobless or underemployed.

Yet Republicans killed a jobs bill that was supported by two-thirds of the public.

An academic study of employment data over 64 years found that an average of two million jobs per year were created under Democratic presidents, compared to one million under Republican presidents. Similar results were reported by the Bloomberg Government Barometer.

4. Retirement Planning -- Republicans want the Seniors to Pay

There's a common misconception in our country that most seniors are financially secure. Actually, Census data reveals that elderly people experience greater inequality than any other population group, with the poorest one-fifth receiving just 5.5% of the group's total resources, while the wealthiest one-fifth receives 46%.

The senior wealth gap is further evidenced by data during the great 30-year surge in inequality. The average over-60 wealth was five times greater than the median in 1995, as would be expected with a small percentage of ultra-high-net-worth individuals and a great majority of low-wealth people. Further confirmation comes from 2004 Harvard data that shows rising inequality within all age groups, including the elderly. Indeed, an MIT study found that about 46% of U.S. senior citizens have less than $10,000 in financial assets when they die.

For the vast majority of seniors, Social Security has been life-sustaining, accounting for 55% of their annual income. Because of this successful and popular program, the senior poverty rate has dropped from 50% to 10%, and due to life-long contributions from working Americans the program has a $2.7 trillion surplus while contributing nothing to the deficit. Yet Republicans want to undo it.

5. Public Fire Sale -- Republicans want Society to Pay

The common good is threatened by the Republican disdain for public resources. Drilling and mining and pipeline construction continues on public lands, and the House of Representatives has voted over 100 times since 2011 to subsidize the oil and gas industry while weakening environmental, public health, and safety requirements. The "land grab" is pitting corporate muscle against citizens' rights.

Sadly, most of America envisions a new era of energy independence that increases our world-leading consumption of energy while depending on a proliferation of dirty technologies to extract it. Threats of methane emissions, water pollution, and earthquake activity don't deter the fossil fuel enthusiasts.

It gets worse. Republicans are eager to sell public land. Paul Ryan's "Path to Prosperity" proposes to sell millions of acres of "unneeded federal land" and billions of dollars worth of federal assets. His running mate Mitt Romney admits that he doesn't know "what the purpose is" of public lands.

That brings us to the heart of the reasons not to vote Republican. Their reckless belief in the free market, and their dependency on corporatization and privatization to run the country, means that middle-class Americans keep paying for the fabulously wealthy people at the top who think they deserve everything they've taken from society.

 Fellow bloggers might consider re-posting this article on their blogs and sending it to everyone on their e-mail list. Conservatism has come to mean remaking the USA into very much what old European monarchies looked like. The vast majority of the population relegated to be being wage slaves for their wealthy overlords, with very little chance to move up the economic ladder, no matter how hard you work.

Right-Wing Media Ignores President Obama's Plan For Economic Growth. Sure unemployment figures could be better. Guess which party has pulled very legislative trick to stop three job creation bills. Conservatives say that government does not create jobs, yet Romney claims he is a veritable job wizard that will create jobs if elected. Go figure on how the conservative mind reconciles the hypocrisy of stalling jobs bills, saying government cannot create jobs and the claim they will use government to create jobs.

Mitt Romney Supporters Show Love For China, Hatred For American Workers

Republicans Are Shamelessly Immoral, The Embassy Attacks in Libya Are The Iranian Style Crisis Immoral Mitt Was Hoping For

Is Romney really a job creator? Ronald Reagan’s budget director, David Stockman, takes a scalpel to the claims

Is Romney really a job creator? Ronald Reagan’s budget director, David Stockman, takes a scalpel to the claims

Bain Capital is a product of the Great Deformation. It has garnered fabulous winnings through leveraged speculation in financial markets that have been perverted and deformed by decades of money printing and Wall Street coddling by the Fed. So Bain’s billions of profits were not rewards for capitalist creation; they were mainly windfalls collected from gambling in markets that were rigged to rise.
Romney

Mitt Romney was not a businessman; He was a master financial speculator who bought, sold, flipped, and stripped businesses.

Nevertheless, Mitt Romney claims that his essential qualification to be president is grounded in his 15 years as head of Bain Capital, from 1984 through early 1999. According to the campaign’s narrative, it was then that he became immersed in the toils of business enterprise, learning along the way the true secrets of how to grow the economy and create jobs. The fact that Bain’s returns reputedly averaged more than 50 percent annually during this period is purportedly proof of the case—real-world validation that Romney not only was a striking business success but also has been uniquely trained and seasoned for the task of restarting the nation’s sputtering engines of capitalism.

Except Mitt Romney was not a businessman; he was a master financial speculator who bought, sold, flipped, and stripped businesses. He did not build enterprises the old-fashioned way—out of inspiration, perspiration, and a long slog in the free market fostering a new product, service, or process of production. Instead, he spent his 15 years raising debt in prodigious amounts on Wall Street so that Bain could purchase the pots and pans and castoffs of corporate America, leverage them to the hilt, gussy them up as reborn “roll-ups,” and then deliver them back to Wall Street for resale—the faster the better.

That is the modus operandi of the leveraged-buyout business, and in an honest free-market economy, there wouldn’t be much scope for it because it creates little of economic value. But we have a rigged system—a regime of crony capitalism—where the tax code heavily favors debt and capital gains, and the central bank purposefully enables rampant speculation by propping up the price of financial assets and battering down the cost of leveraged finance.

So the vast outpouring of LBOs in recent decades has been the consequence of bad policy, not the product of capitalist enterprise. I know this from 17 years of experience doing leveraged buyouts at one of the pioneering private-equity houses, Blackstone, and then my own firm. I know the pitfalls of private equity. The whole business was about maximizing debt, extracting cash, cutting head counts, skimping on capital spending, outsourcing production, and dressing up the deal for the earliest, highest-profit exit possible. Occasionally, we did invest in genuine growth companies, but without cheap debt and deep tax subsidies, most deals would not make economic sense.

VICTORY FROM THE JAWS OF DEFEAT

The startling fact is that four of the 10 Bain Capital home runs ended up in bankruptcy, and for an obvious reason: Bain got its money out at the top of the Greenspan boom in the late 1990s and then these companies hit the wall during the 2000-02 downturn, weighed down by the massive load of debt Bain had bequeathed them. In fact, nearly $600 million, or one third of the profits earned by the home-run companies, had been extracted from the hide of these four eventual debt zombies.

The most emblematic among them was a roll-up deal focused on down-in-the-mouth department stores and apparel chains that were falling by the wayside in small-town America due to the arrival of Wal-Mart and the big-box retailers. Bain invested $10 million in 1988 and nine years later took out 18X its money—that is, a $175 million profit.

Fittingly, Stage Stores Inc. was the last deal underwritten by the Drexel-Milken junk-bond machine before its demise. And the $300 million raised for this incipient LBO was exactly the kind of slush fund that Milken’s stable of takeover artists had used to acquire corporate castoffs and other bedraggled pots and pans that got rechristened as “growth” companies.

During the next eight years, Bain slogged it out, accumulating about 300 small Main Street storefronts under such forgettable banners as Royal Palais, Bealls, and Fashion Bar. Yet the company wasn’t making much headway. By 1996, it had paid back none of the Milken debt and was only earning $14 million—exactly what it had generated back in 1992 on half the number of stores.

In the spring of 1997, when Chairman Greenspan decided that “irrational exuberance” was not such a worrisome thing, Bain Capital decided to indulge, too. It caused Stage Stores Inc.—which was already publicly traded—to raise $300 million of new junk bonds and used the proceeds to buy a faltering 250-store chain of family clothing stores called C.R. Anthony.

These 12,000-square-foot cracker-box stores sold mid-market shoes, shirts, and dresses right in Wal-Mart’s wheelhouse. In hot pursuit of “synergies,” Bain promptly rebranded these Anthony stores to the purportedly more compelling Stage and Bealls banners. While the name change did nothing to ward off the grim reaper from Bentonville, it suddenly gave Stage Stores Inc. the “growth” story that Greenspan’s bull market craved. Within five months of this ostensibly “transformative” deal and long before the results of the ritual “synergies” and “rebranding” could be determined, the company’s stock price had doubled. Bain Capital and its partner, Goldman Sachs, quickly unloaded their shares at the aforementioned 18X gain.

As a matter of plain fact, the “transformative” C.R. Anthony deal was a bull-market scam. Almost immediately, results headed south. After growing 4 percent during the year of Bain’s quick 1997 exit, same-store sales turned to a negative 3 percent in 1998 and negative 7 percent in 1999, and were still falling when Stage Stores Inc. filed for bankruptcy shortly thereafter. The company hemorrhaged $150 million of negative cash flow during 1998-99—that is, during the two years after Bain and Goldman got out of Dodge City.

Bain Capital subsequently claimed the company was “a growing, successful and consistently profitable company during the nine years we owned it” but then immediately ran into “operating problems.” That was a doozy by any other name but typical of the standard private-equity narrative that confuses speculators’ timing with real value creation on the free market. The fact is, the bad inventory and vastly overstated assets that took the company down did not suddenly materialize out of the blue during the 24 months after Bain’s exit: they were actually the result of financial-engineering games from the very beginning.

Worse still, the Stage Stores deal embodied all of the hidden leverage that had become par for the course in the era of bubble finance. When the crunch came, the company had no assets to fall back on because Bain had hocked virtually everything; it sold all the company’s credit-card receivables to a third party, and among its 650 stores it owned exactly three! By my calculation, the capitalized debt embedded in its store leases was nearly $750 million and when added to its disclosed balance-sheet debt, the company’s true debt of was $1.3 billion or a devastating 25X its peak-year free cash flow.

The bankruptcy forced the closure of about 250—or 40 percent—of the company’s stores and the loss of about 5,000 jobs. Yet the moral of the Stage Stores saga is not simply that in this instance Bain Capital was a jobs destroyer, not a jobs creator. The larger point is that it is actually a tale of Wall Street speculators toying with Main Street properties in defiance of sound finance—an anti-Schumpeterian project that used state-subsidized debt to milk cash from stores that would not have otherwise survived on the free market.

Bain’s acclaimed success with another retailer—Staples—is also not what it is touted to be. Tom Stemberg was a visionary entrepreneur who got $5 million of seed money from Bain in 1986 when it was still in the venture-capital business; the Milken-style LBO schemes came later. As it happened, Bain exited the Staples deal after only a few years with a $15 million profit, a rounding error in the scheme of things.

Stemberg made Staples a free-market success, a relentless generator of efficiency in the retail distribution of office supplies. Yet this honest capitalist efficiency, which benefited millions of customers, was achieved by a rampage of job destruction among tens of thousands of Main Street stationery and office-supplies stores and other traditional distributors. These now-defunct operations could not compete with Staples due to their high labor costs per dollar of sales—including upstream labor expense in the traditional, inefficient wholesale and distribution layers that stood behind Main Street retailers.

Ironically, the businesses and jobs that Staples eliminated were the office-supply counterparts of the cracker-box stores selling shoes, shirts, and dresses that Bain kept on artificial life-support at Stage Stores Inc. At length, Wal-Mart eliminated these jobs and replaced them with back-of–the-store automation and front-end part-timers, as did Staples, which now has 40,000 part-time employees out of its approximate 90,000 total head count. The pointless exercise of counting jobs won and lost owing to these epochal shifts on the free market is obviously irrelevant to the job of being president, but the fact that Bain made $15 million from the winner and $175 million from the loser is evidence that it did not make a fortune all on its own. It had considerable help from the Easy Button at the Fed.

Romney and his crony pals have simply found a way to to use tax subsidies, leveraged buy outs and assorted financial tricks to pay themselves use fees and sell off the bones of the company they stripped apart in the name of plutocratic plundering, not capitalism. Capitalism is this great system for competing to sell the best products and services to actually create jobs and improve the quality of people's lives. Romney would probably laugh in your face if you told him that in private.

Romney and Paul Ryan are just your garden variety conservative Republican stealth candidates, hiding their real selves and real agenda behind fake patriotism and fake values, Charity president says Paul Ryan 'ramrodded' way into fake dish washing photo-op

Mitt Romney Running Anti-China Trade Ad Against Obama Yet Has Money in China, Cayman Islands and Switzerland

Mitt Romney Running Anti-China Trade Ad Against Obama Yet Has Money in China, Cayman Islands and Switzerland

The tale of Asimco Technologies, an auto parts manufacturer whose plants dot eastern China, would seem to underscore Mitt Romney’s campaign-trail complaint that China’s manufacturing juggernaut is costing America jobs.

Nine years ago, the company bought two camshaft factories that employed about 500 people in Michigan. By 2007 both were shut down. Now Asimco manufactures the same components in China on government-donated land in a coastal region that China has designated an export base, where companies are eligible for the sort of subsidies Mr. Romney says create an unfair trade imbalance.

But there is a twist to the Asimco story that would not fit neatly into a Romney stump speech: Since 2010, it has been owned by Bain Capital, the private equity firm founded by Mr. Romney, who has as much as $2.25 million invested in three Bain funds with large stakes in Asimco and at least seven other Chinese businesses, according to his 2012 candidate financial disclosure and other documents.

That and other China-related holdings by Bain funds in which Mr. Romney has invested are a reminder of how he inhabits two worlds that at times have come into conflict during his campaign for the White House.

As a candidate, Mr. Romney uses China as a punching bag. He accuses Beijing of unfairly subsidizing Chinese exports, artificially holding down the value of its currency to keep exports cheap, stealing American technology and hacking into corporate and government computers.

“How is it China’s been so successful in taking away our jobs?” he asked recently. “Well, let me tell you how: by cheating.”

But his private equity dealings, both while he headed Bain and since, complicate that message.

Mr. Romney’s campaign insists he has no control over his investments since they are held in a blind trust. That said, a confidential prospectus for one of the Bain funds, obtained by The New York Times, promotes China as a good investment for some of the same reasons that Mr. Romney has said concern him: “Strong fundamentals” like manufacturing wages 85 percent lower than what Americans earn, vast foreign exchange reserves and the likelihood that China will surpass the United States as the world’s largest economy.

“Accordingly, Bain Capital expects to see an increasing array of high-growth companies available for investment,” the prospectus says, noting the relative dearth of private equity in China.

Among the companies in which the Bain funds have invested is a global auto parts maker that is in the process of closing a factory in Illinois and moving most of the equipment and jobs to Jiangsu Province, where the Chinese government has built it a new plant; a Chinese electronics retailer accused by Microsoft of selling computers with pirated software; and a Hong Kong-based Chinese appliance maker that was sued for copying another company’s design for a deep-fat fryer.

Asked if Mr. Romney sees any conflict between his Bain investments in China and his policy positions, the campaign said: “Only the president has the power to level the playing field with China. No private citizen can do that alone.”

The campaign said Mr. Romney put his fortune, estimated at $250 million, in a “blind trust” when he became Massachusetts governor in 2003. “The trustee of the blind trust has said publicly that he will endeavor to make the investments in the blind trust conform to Governor Romney’s positions, and whenever it comes to his attention that there is something inconsistent, he ends the investment,” the statement said.

Should Mr. Romney become president, however, the structure of the trust would most likely not meet the federal requirements for independent management. It is managed by a Boston-based law firm, Ropes & Gray, that has a long history of doing legal work for both Mr. Romney and Bain Capital, including representing some of the same Bain funds in which it invested Mr. Romney’s money.

Mr. Romney’s trustee, R. Bradford Malt, who is chairman of Ropes & Gray, declined to comment.

Bain Capital declined to comment on specific investments, but said in a statement that its Chinese holdings “are consistent with the widely accepted principle that the private sector has a critical role to play in the continuing interdependence of the world’s economies.”

For many sophisticated and wealthy investors, as well as for ordinary workers invested in pension funds, China is a part of any diversified investment strategy. President Obama, a former Illinois state senator, has as much as $100,000 in a state retirement plan that contains shares of Sensata Technologies, the same auto parts company controlled by Bain that is closing its Illinois factory.

Last year, Mr. Romney’s trust sold its stake in an array of foreign holdings, including two Chinese state-owned companies: an oil company and a bank that have done business in Iran. But Mr. Romney continues to have money in Bain funds with sizable holdings in China.

He has as much as $250,000 in the Bain Capital Asia Fund and as much as $1 million each in Bain Capital Funds IX and X, all Cayman Islands entities used by Bain to make sizable investments in China, according to the 2012 candidate financial disclosures and confidential Bain prospectuses obtained by The Times through a public records request.

Among those funds’ holdings is $234 million that Bain invested in 2009 in Gome Electrical Appliances, a major Chinese retailer that was accused by Microsoft this year of selling computers with pirated software. In 2007, Bain’s Asia fund also invested $39 million in Feixiang Group, a Chinese producer and exporter of chemicals that is a designated “state high-tech enterprise,” making it eligible for tax breaks and other government incentives. Ropes & Gray represented Bain in the partial sale of Feixiang three years later for a 53 percent return on the fund’s investment.

The Asia fund withdrew from another deal in 2008 that could have proved politically embarrassing to Mr. Romney. After the Bush administration objected, Bain dropped plans to team up with a Chinese technology giant, Huawei, to buy 3Com, a network equipment maker that supplies software and equipment to the Pentagon and other federal agencies.

Republicans like to say that Americans are lazy and there are plenty of jobs out there. There are jobs in Asia where conservatives stash a lot of their money. What ever happened to America first. And how is it that Romney claims to be a person with values, yet has run televison ads that set a new low for lies and hypocrisy.

Koch Sends Pro-Romney Mailing to 45,000 Employees While Stifling Workplace Political Speech

The billionaire Koch brothers have found a new way to influence the 2012 election—preaching to employees.

Astonishing, Paul Ryan May Be an Even Bigger Liar and Dangerous Wing-Nut Than Mitt Romney

Astonishing, Paul Ryan May Be an Even Bigger Liar and Dangerous Wing-Nut Than Mitt Romney

Paul Ryan spoke for 40 of the 90 minutes during Thursday night’s vice presidential debate and managed to tell at least 24 myths during that time:

1) “It took the president two weeks to acknowledge that [the Libya attack] was a terrorist attack.” Obama used the word “terrorism” to describe the killing of Americans the very next day at the Rose Garden. “No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character, or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for,” Obama said in a Rose Garden statement on September 12.

2) “The administration was blocking us every step of the way. Only because we had strong bipartisan support for these tough [Iran] sanctions were we able to overrule their objections and put them in spite of the administration.” Even the Israeli President has effusively praised President Obama’s leadership on getting American and international sanctions on Iran, which have significantly slowed Iran’s progress.

3) “Medicare and Social Security are going bankrupt. These are indisputable facts.” [T]he possibility of Medicare going bankrupt is — and historically has been — greatly exaggerated. In fact, if no changes are made, Medicare would still be able to meet 88 percent of its obligations in 2085. Social Security is fully funded for another two decades and could pay 75 percent of its benefits thereafter. There is also an easy way to ensure the program’s long-term solvency without large changes or cuts to benefits.

4) “The vice president was in charge of overseeing this. $90 billion in green pork to campaign contributors and special interest groups.” Multiple reviews, including an independent review of all Department Of Energy loan programs by Herb Allison –- finance chair for McCain for President 2008 –- have found no “pork” in the stimulus’ funding of green projects, concluding that the loans were not steered to friends or family, as Ryan claims.

5) “Was it a good idea to spend taxpayer dollars on electric cars in Finland, or on windmills in China?” As PolitiFact has pointed out, the money for electric cars in Finland did not come from the stimulus. Rather, it originated with the Energy Department’s Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing program, which predated the Obama administration. The claim about “windmills in China” is also inaccurate.

6) “When they see us putting – when they see us putting daylight between ourselves and our allies in Israel, that gives them encouragement.” The Israeli Deputy Prime Minister and Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, told CNN, “President Obama is doing … more than anything that I can remember in the past [in regard to our security].”

7) “You see, if you reform these programs for my generation, people 54 and below, you can guarantee they don’t change for people in or near retirement.” Here is how the Romney/Ryan Medicare plan will affect current seniors: 1) by repealing Obamacare, the 16 million seniors receiving preventive benefits without deductibles or co-pays and are saving $3.9 billion on prescription drugs will see a cost increase, 2) “premium support” will increase premiums for existing beneficiaries as private insurers lure healthier seniors out of the traditional Medicare program, 3) Romney/Ryan would also lower Medicaid spending significantly beginning next year, shifting federal spending to states and beneficiaries, and increasing costs for the 9 million Medicare recipients who are dependent on Medicaid.

8) “Obamacare takes $716 billion from Medicare to spend on Obamacare.” Ryan is claiming that Obamacare siphons off $716 billion from Medicare, to the detriment of Medicare beneficiaries. In actuality, that money is saved primarily through reducing over-payments to insurance companies under Medicare Advantage, cutting waste fraud and abuse, and eliminating inefficiencies in the system. Ryan’s budget plan keeps those same cuts, but directs them toward tax cuts for the rich and deficit reduction.

9) “And then they put this new Obamacare board in charge of cutting Medicare each and every year in ways that will lead to denied care for current seniors.” The Board, or IPAB is tasked with making binding recommendations to Congress for lowering health care spending, should Medicare costs exceed a target growth rate. Congress can accept the savings proposal or implement its own ideas through a super majority. The panel’s plan will modify payments to providers but it cannot “include any recommendation to ration health care, raise revenues or Medicare beneficiary premiums…increase Medicare beneficiary cost-sharing (including deductibles, coinsurance, and co- payments), or otherwise restrict benefits or modify eligibility criteria” (Section 3403 of the ACA). Relying on health care experts rather than politicians to control health care costs has previously attracted bipartisan support and even Ryan himself proposed two IPAB-like structures in a 2009 health plan.

10) “7.4 million seniors are projected to lose their current Medicare Advantage coverage they have. That’s a $3,200 benefit cut.” Enrollment is actually projected to increase by 11 percent in Medicare Advantage (MA) in 2013. Since the Affordable Care Act was enacted in 2010, Medicare Advantage premiums have decreased an average of 10 percent and enrollment in these plans has increased 28 percent.

11) “This [Medicare premium support] plan that’s bipartisan. It’s a plan I put together with a prominent Democrat senator from Oregon.” Wyden not only voted against Ryan’s budget, he also called the idea that he supported it “nonsense.”

12) “Eight out of 10 businesses, they file their taxes as individuals, not as corporations.” Far less than half of the people affected by the expiration of the upper income tax cuts get any of their income at all from a small businesses. And those people could very well be receiving speaking fees or book royalties, which qualify as “small business income” but don’t have a direct impact on job creation. It’s actually hard to find a small business who think that they will be hurt if the marginal tax rate on income earned above $250,000 per year is increased.

13) “[Unemployment is rising] all around America.” In August, the unemployment rate dropped from a year before in 325 of 372 metro areas surveyed by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

14) “The average tax rate on businesses in the industrialized world is 25 percent, and the president wants the top effective tax rate on successful small businesses to go above 40 percent.” The U.S. is raising historically low amounts of revenue from the corporate income tax, and it already has the second lowest effective corporate tax rate in the world. U.S. corporations are taxed less than their foreign rivals, and the U.S. effective corporate tax rate is low compared to other developed economies.

15) “He’ll keep saying this $5 trillion plan, I suppose. It’s been discredited by six other studies.” The studies Ryan cites actually further prove that Romney/Ryan would, in fact, have to raise taxes on the middle class if he were to keep his promise not to lose revenue with his tax rate reduction.

16) “You can – you can cut tax rates by 20 percent and still preserve these important preferences for middle-class taxpayer. It is mathematically possible. It’s been done before. It’s precisely what we’re proposing.” If Romney/Ryan hope to provide tax relief to the middle class, then their $5 trillion tax cut would add to the deficit. There are not enough deductions in the tax code that primarily benefit rich people to make his math work. As the Tax Policy Center concluded, Romney’s plan can’t both exempt middle class families from tax cuts and remain revenue neutral. “He’s promised all these things and he can’t do them all. In order for him to cover the cost of his tax cut without adding to the deficit, he’d have to find a way to raise taxes on middle income people or people making less than $200,000 a year,” the Center found.

17) “So they proposed a $478 billion cut to defense to begin with. Now we have another $500 billion cut to defense that’s lurking on the horizon. They insisted upon that cut being involved in the debt negotiations, and so we have a $1 trillion cut.” Ryan has frequently gotten in hot water for criticizing President Obama for the very same defense cuts that he voted for in 2011.

18) “If these cuts go through, our Navy will be the smallest – the smallest it has been since before World War I.” PolitiFact rated this claim as “Pants on Fire,” noting that “a wide range of experts told us it’s wrong to assume that a decline in the number of ships or aircraft automatically means a weaker military.”

19) “Look at what they’re doing through Obamacare with respect to assaulting the religious liberties of this country. They’re infringing upon our first freedom, the freedom of religion, by infringing on Catholic charities, Catholic churches, Catholic hospitals.” Religious institutions haven’t been forced to “violate their conscience” by paying for contraception. Houses of worship and other religious nonprofits that primarily employ and serve people of the same faith will be exempt from offering birth control.

20) “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it. Try telling that to the 20 million people who are projected to lose their health insurance if Obamacare goes through or the 7-point million – 7.4 million seniors who are going to lose it.” The Affordable Care Act would actually expand health care coverage to 30 million Americans and all seniors will keep their guaranteed Medicare benefits, despite Ryan’s fear mongering. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that very few people will have to enroll in new coverage.

21) “We should not have called Bashar Assad a reformer when he was turning his Russian-provided guns on his own people.” In March 2011, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton noted that “many of the members of Congress of both parties who have gone to Syria in recent months have said they believe he’s a reformer.” However, she did not endorse their view.

22) “When Barack Obama was elected, they had enough fissile material — nuclear material to make one bomb. Now they have enough for five.” This is misleading and unproven. Iran now has enough fissile material, but has not yet enriched to the necessary level for a weapon. The Institute for Science and International Security says “it would take Iran more than two months to produce that amount if it started with 20%-grade uranium, and ‘several months’ to make enough for a bomb using low-enriched uranium. That would give the world community enough time to detect the operation and organize a response, ISIS noted in June.”

23) “[Iran is] racing toward a nuclear weapon.” Israeli and American intelligence officials aren’t so sure.

24) “We don’t want to do is give our allies reason to trust us less [by announcing a withdrawal timeline for Afghanistan].” It’s unclear how our allies would trust us less since they too agreed to the timeline. As Biden pointed outed, “That’s a bizarre statement. .. Forty-nine of our allies — hear me — 49 of our allies signed on to this position.”

More on the crazy bugged eyed jaw dropping lies that Ryan tried to get away with, If there is a prize for most shameless lies in debate, Paul Ryan won

A Devastating Expose of Mitt Romney's Mistreatment of Mormon Women Emerges

The two most disturbing stories in this excerpt of a new book are of Romney pressuring a woman to have a baby despite a life threatening condition where both doctors, and even the Mormon President of Stake of Massachusetts, recommended an abortion.  In the second example, Romney is alleged to have threatened a divorced single woman with excommunication if she did not relent and give her young son up for adoption to a "proper" LDS familiy, but showed no similar concern for her African American daughter.

Street criminals have it all wrong. Get a college education, wear a white shirt, talk about patriotism and the Bible and you can get away with all kinds of morally reprehensible acts.

What is the difference between Mitt Romney's Friend Murray Energy and Fascists? Not Much

What is the difference between Mitt Romney's Friend Murray Energy and Fascists? Not Much

IT IS BOTH a pundit’s truism and a mathematical reality that Mitt Romney’s path to the White House runs through Ohio. And that path, in turn, runs through a firm called Murray Energy.

Over the years, CEO Robert Murray has brought in GOP pols from as far away as Alaska, California, and Massachusetts for fund-raisers. In 2010, the year John Boehner became House speaker, the firm’s 3,000 employees and their families were his second-biggest source of funds. (AT&T was in first place, but it has nearly 200,000 employees.) This year, Murray is one of the most important GOP players in one of the most important battleground states in the country. In May, he hosted a $1.7 million fund-raiser for Romney. Employees have given the nominee more than $120,000. In August, Romney used Murray’s Century Mine in the town of Beallsville for a speech attacking Barack Obama as anti-coal. This fall, scenes from that event—several dozen coal-smudged Murray miners standing behind the candidate in a tableau framed by a giant American flag and a COAL COUNTRY STANDS WITH MITT placard—have shown up in a Romney ad.

The ads aired even after Ohio papers reported what I was told by several miners at the event, a bit of news that an internal memo confirms: The crowd was not there of its own accord. Murray had suspended Century’s operations and made clear to workers that they were expected to attend, without pay. “I tell ya, you’ve got a great boss,” Romney said in acknowledging Robert Murray from the stage. “He runs a great operation here.”

The accounts of two sources who have worked in managerial positions at the firm, and a review of letters and memos to Murray employees, suggest that coercion may also explain Murray staffers’ financial support for Romney. Murray, it turns out, has for years pressured salaried employees to give to the Murray Energy political action committee (PAC) and to Republican candidates chosen by the company. Internal documents show that company officials track who is and is not giving. The sources say that those who do not give are at risk of being demoted or missing out on bonuses, claims Murray denies.

The Murray sources, who requested anonymity for fear of retribution, came forward separately. But they painted similar pictures of the fund-raising operation. “There’s a lot of coercion,” says one of them. “I just wanted to work, but you feel this constant pressure that, if you don’t contribute, your job’s at stake. You’re compelled to do this whether you want to or not.” Says the second: “They will give you a call if you’re not giving. .?.?. It’s expected you give Mr. Murray what he asks for.”

And what he asks for offers a lesson for 2012: Even in a year of hyperventilation about super PACs, dubious older ways of raising political dollars still matter.



BOB MURRAY, WHO is 72, is a legendary figure in Appalachian coal country. He hails from three generations of miners in southeastern Ohio; his father was paralyzed in a mining accident when Bob was nine. Murray himself has been injured while working below ground. Unlike his forefathers, though, Murray became a suit. He won a scholarship to study mine engineering and eventually rose to chief executive of North American Coal. In the late 1980s, he took out personal loans to start Murray Energy, which has grown to own eight mines in six states. It is the largest privately held coal-mining concern in the country.

Like a lot of mining executives, Murray’s a ferocious critic of federal mining regulations—even after the 2007 collapse at his Crandall Canyon mine in Utah, where nine people died. He also knows how to throw his weight around. In 2001, he sued the Akron Beacon Journal for $1 billion after a critical profile; that same year, he was acquitted of assault charges after allegedly throwing an environmental activist against a wall. In 2002, local media reported that he warned off mine safety inspectors with this line: “Mitch McConnell calls me one of the five finest men in America, and the last I checked, he was sleeping with your boss,” referring to Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, the senator’s wife. (Murray denied the account.) Murray’s fiery streak was on full display after the Crandall Canyon collapse. Wearing his trademark sweater-vest, he angrily insisted to reporters that the collapse had been caused by an earthquake—scientists disagreed—and railed against efforts to curb carbon emissions. At one point, he pulled back his collar to show the scar from his mining accident.

In southeastern Ohio, Murray’s dominance evokes an earlier era. Miners at the Century event told me he treats them well and aspires to know all their names. But the paternalism also features some unmistakable messaging. A huge sign draped outside Murray’s Powhatan No. 6 Mine—the only unionized facility among Murray’s properties—reads: SAVE EASTERN OHIO: FIRE OBAMA. At Century, a lobby notice tells employees where to call to order yard signs with the slogan STOP THE WAR ON COAL: FIRE OBAMA.

The message apparently gets through. Since 2007, employees of Murray Energy and its subsidiaries, along with their families and the Murray PAC, have contributed over $1.4 million to Republican candidates for federal office. Murray’s fund-raisers have feted the likes of Scott Brown, Rand Paul, David Vitter, Carly Fiorina, and Jim DeMint. Home-state pols get love, too. Murray’s PAC and staffers are the sixth-largest source for Ohio senatorial hopeful Josh Mandel. They’ve given $720,000 to candidates for state office in the past decade.

Internal Murray documents show just how upset Murray becomes when employees fail to join the giving. In missives, he cajoles employees to attend fund-raisers and scolds them when they or their subordinates do not. In cases of low participation, reminders from his lieutenants have included tables or spreadsheets showing how each of the eleven Murray subsidiaries was performing. And at least one note came with a list of names of employees who had not yet given. “What is so difficult about asking a well-paid, salaried employee to give us three hours of his/her time every two months?” Murray writes in a March 2012 letter. “We have been insulted by every salaried employee who does not support our efforts.” He concludes: “I do not recall ever seeing the attached list of employees .?.?. at one of our fund-raisers.”

Here’s what stubborn employees missed: The events are typically at Undo’s, an Italian restaurant and banquet hall in St. Clairsville. Dinner is pasta and salad. There’s a cash bar. There’s a receiving line. There are speeches by the visiting beneficiary who generally extols coal. (Employees in Ohio also get invitations to fund-raisers near Murray’s southern Illinois mine; they’re not expected to attend, but are encouraged to send checks.)

The ritual becomes expensive for Murray’s engineers, surveyors, and accountants. “People are very upset about being constantly asked for the checks, because people have lives and families and expenses,” says the first source, a political independent. “They say, ‘This isn’t right. .?.?. I don’t think they’re allowed to do this.’ Most people do it grudgingly.”

Those who decline, the source says, prepare to be questioned. “When they’re pressuring people to write checks, if they haven’t by the deadline, you hear people making excuses—I just had to repair my car, I had an unexpected bill, I just had to pay tuition.”

And yet the tin-cupping continues. “I am asking you to rally all of your salaried employees and have them make their contribution to our event as soon as possible,” Murray writes in a letter to managers ahead of a 2011 fund-raiser for Mississippi Senator Roger Wicker and Tennessee Senator Bob Corker. “Please see that our salaried employees ‘step up,’ for their own sakes and those of their employees.”

A September 2010 letter lamenting insufficient contributions to the company PAC is more pointed. “The response to this letter of appeal has been poor,” Murray writes. “We have only a little over a month left to go in this election fight. If we do not win it, the coal industry will be eliminated and so will your job, if you want to remain in this industry.”

The pressure to give begins as soon as employees enter the company, the Murray sources say. At the time of hiring, supervisors tell employees that they are expected to contribute to the company PAC by automatic payroll deduction—typically 1 percent of their salary, a level confirmed by a 2008 letter to employees from the PAC’s treasurer. (That letter also assures employees that they would not be “disadvantaged” by not giving.) Employees are given a form to sign, explaining that the giving is voluntary. “In the interview .?.?. I was told that I would be expected to make political contributions—that [Murray] just expected that,” says the first source. “But I was told not to worry about it, because my bonuses would more than make up what I would be asked to contribute.”

Later, the sources say, Murray sends letters to employees’ homes asking them to give to specific candidates. The letters feature suggested amounts depending on their salary level—one middle manager was encouraged to give $200 to then–Oregon Senator Gordon Smith—and include forms to fill out and return, with checks, to Murray headquarters. The letters come with great frequency. Before the 2008 election, there were nine fund-raisers in less than three months. Guests included then–New Hampshire Senator John E. Sununu, then–Alaska Senator Ted Stevens, and Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe.

Murray’s exhortations demonstrate more attention to ideology than to Strunk & White. In August 2011, Murray urged employees to attend a $2,500 fundraiser for Rick Perry, “likely to be the Republican Nominee to defeat the destructive Barack Obama.” And for the unconvinced, he attached a “brief, partial listing of the destruction that Barack Obama has reeked.” Murray employees and their households came through, becoming Perry’s second-largest source for funds in the entire country.

After Perry dropped out, Murray switched to Romney. In his April letter for the fund-raiser the next month, he told employees, “America needs business and job creation, not the ruthless destruction that we are seeing from Barack Obama and his Democrats supporters, whom are Hollywood characters, liberal elitists, radical environmentalists, unionists, and Americans who do not want to work.”

CEO Robert Murray has the same twisted view of "freedom" as mid century European fascists. because being a multimillionaire is not enough - he cut corners on safety that got nine miners killed. Murray is in no way, shape or form a patriot. he is a looter, a taker, that lives off the work of labor. Without labor he would just be a greedy bitter old man. The miners could go on without him - maybe open up the first community owned mine - give themselves better wages and working conditions and not treat ordinary working Americans like trash, as Murray surely does. he can do all the phony back slapping pretend to be your friend act he wants, that is just part of the charade of conservatives who think America should be run like a plantation - with the wage slaves down on their knees in gratitude.  Sure Romney loves Murray because they share the same world view.

Can Republicans scare their way to victory?
Make no mistake, this election has become a horse race -- thanks in no small part to the GOP's barrage of lies.

As Romney Repeats Trade Message, Bain Maintains China Ties
Romney is currently running an ad critical of Obama for allowing trade with China - you know what Republicans have been doing since Nixon opened up trade negotiations in the 1970s. Actually presidents do not have the last say over trade deals, Congress does. When is the last time anyone heard a Republican propose a bill to stop trade with them. Such a move would costs people like Romney too much money.