Live Blog: Elizabeth Warren vs. Scott Brown, Massachusetts Senate Debate, Round 2

Posted: October 1, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 elections, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , | 81 Comments

Good Evening!! The second debate between Elizabeth Warren and Scott Brown will take place tonight from 7-8PM at the Tsongas Center at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. There will be a live audience of more than 5,000 people. Unfortunately, the debated will be moderated by Dancin’ Dave Gregory.

The debate will air live on C-span and will be live streamed at a number of sites, including C-Span and Mass Live.

Mass Live sees audience reaction as one of the five things to watch for in the debate. The first debate was held in a studio without a live audience. How will that affect the debaters? The audience will be told not to react, but they probably will anyway. The other four things to watch for (supposedly) are (commentary is mine):

(1) How will the candidates deal with the endless, boring Native American “issue”? Will Brown continue to claim he can psychically determine another person’s ethnic heritage? Will Warren find a way to smack him down for good? Maybe she should try raising her voice.

(2) “Brown’s perceived aggressiveness”: He has been criticized quite a bit for his boorish behavior in the first debate, but will he tone it down? I’m betting no, because he just can’t stand losing to a girl.

(3) Will Dancin’ Dave allow any actual issues to be addressed, like maybe foreign policy? I sure hope so, because I think it would be a hoot to see Brown try to talk about something complex and still make sense. And maybe he’ll tell us more about those meetings with kings and queens and how he talks to Hillary Clinton on the phone all the time.

(4) The last “issue” is Scott Brown’s trumped-up attacks on Warren for doing legal work for some corporations, including Travelers’ Insurance. Brown has demanded that Warren release the names of all the clients she has worked for. But Brown refuses to release his client list, because he’s a man and Warren is just some female who is inexplicably trying to take his Senate seat away.

I’ll add one more thing to watch for: Will Warren explicitly tie Brown to Mitt Romney and the Republican Party? In the last debate, she repeatedly said that she supports President Obama but she didn’t confront Brown on whom he is supporting. She needs to do that, repeatedly and explicitly.

The latest polls by The Boston Globe and Boston University’s NPR station WBUR both show Warren still ahead of Scott Brown by 43-38 and 46-44 respectively.

Just a couple of links on the Native American “controversy.” The Washington Post did a fact check last week in which they found Scott Brown guilty of two Pinocchios. Only two?

Brown said that Warren “checked the box claiming she was Native American” when she applied to Harvard and Penn, suggesting the Democratic candidate somehow gained an unfair advantage because of an iffy ethnic background. But there is no proof that she ever marked a form to tell the schools about her heritage, nor is there any public evidence that the universities knew about her lineage before hiring her.

The senator’s debate comments also suggest Warren actively applied for positions with Harvard and Penn, but the evidence suggests the schools recruited her because of her groundbreaking research and writings on bankruptcy. Harvard, in fact, did not give up on her after she first turned down a tenured position with the university.

Some might assume that Warren listed herself as a minority in the law school directories to attract offers from top schools, which would be a pro-active measure. The explanation that she was reaching out to other Native Americans — when she was merely listed as a “minority” — certainly appears suspicious, but there is no conclusive evidence that she used her status in the listing to land a job.

But Warren appears to have been well-qualified for the teaching positions and excelled once she was hired.

Gee, no kidding. I think the problem Brown is having is that Warren is far more intelligent, educated, and professionally accomplished than he is. But she’s a girl! So it doesn’t count.

Today the WaPo published an article on Why the Native American heritage fight isn’t hurting Elizabeth Warren. Because it’s idiotic? The article doesn’t really answer the question in the headline–just provides poll results that demonstrate that Massachusetts voters aren’t a moronic as Scott Brown.

A Boston Globe poll released Sunday showed Warren leading Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) 43 percent to 38 percent. A deeper dive into the survey’s crosstabs reveals that most voters aren’t swayed by the tussle over Warren’s ancestry….

More than eight-in-ten likely voters (86 percent) have at least some familiarity with the Native American heritage story. Of those with at least some knowledge of it, about seven in ten (71 percent) said the story would have no impact on their vote for Warren, while 24 percent said it would make them less likely to vote for the Democratic nominee.

Among voters who are undecided about whether they support Brown or Warren – a crucial subset of the electorate — nearly three-in-four (74 percent) said the story would have no impact on their vote for Warren, while nearly one-in-five (19 percent) said it would make them less likely to vote for her.

It is that 19 percent of voters that Brown is playing for.

Boston Mayor Tom Menino has released a video ad supporting Elizabeth Warren. Menino isn’t much of a public speaker, but he controls a powerful political machine.

I hope at least some Sky Dancers will be watching the debate. I won’t be able to comment for the first half, but I’ll be watching on C-span and will join in for the second half. Please give your reactions in the comments if you’re watching! The results of this race will affect all of us, whether we live in Massachusetts or not.

The Hurt Feelings of the Super-Sensitive Top .01 Percent

Posted: October 1, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, Mitt Romney, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , , | 23 Comments

Mega-billionaire Leon Cooperman

I just finished reading an article by Chrystia Freeland of The New Yorker: Super-Rich Irony: Why do billionaires feel victimized by Obama? I think I’m finally beginning to understand why wealthy assholes like Mitt Romney disdain almost half of the country as losers who think of ourselves as victims and are dependent on the government. It’s because the superrich believe that they are the victims, and anyone who works for a paycheck–as opposed to running a business–isn’t really working. Seriously, I know it’s a cliche at this point, but it really is time to break out guillotines. It’s time to show the entitled, self-involved, stuffed-shirt class what real class warfare looks and feels like. For the sake of humanity, they need to be humbled.

Freeland centers the article around the billionaire financier Leon Cooperman, who listed his grievances against President Obama in a lengthy open letter last November. Cooperman’s complaints sound remarkably similar to Mitt Romney’s endless whining. (Although he is nowhere near as rich as Cooperman, Romney’s fortune still puts him in to top .01 of earners.)

Like Romney, Cooperman is all bent out of shape about Obama’s “tone,” i.e., he has said mean things about rich people, and he doesn’t bow down and abjectly worship “success” often enough.  Cooper also shares with Romney the belief that “success” is indistinguishable from wealth and that ordinary wage earners are just useless drags on the productive few at the top. From The New York Times’ Dealbook, on Cooperman’s letter, November 29, 2011:

Last week, in a widely circulated “open letter” to President Obama that whizzed around e-mail inboxes of Wall Street and corporate America, Mr. Cooperman argued that “the divisive, polarizing tone of your rhetoric is cleaving a widening gulf, at this point as much visceral as philosophical, between the downtrodden and those best positioned to help them.”

He went on to say, “To frame the debate as one of rich-and-entitled versus poor-and-dispossessed is to both miss the point and further inflame an already incendiary environment.”

….

Mr. Cooperman’s complaint has less to do with the substance of taxing the wealthy than it does the president’s choice of words in promoting it, an emphasis that he says is “villainizing the American Dream.”

I always thought the American dream was owning a house, raising a family, doing work you enjoy, and having a dignified retirement. But I guess I was wrong.

Getting back to the New Yorker article, Freeland writes that:

One night last May, some twenty financiers and politicians met for dinner in the Tuscany private dining room at the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas. The eight-course meal included blinis with caviar; a fennel, grapefruit, and pomegranate salad; cocoa-encrusted beef tenderloin; and blue-cheese panna cotta. The richest man in the room was Leon Cooperman, a Bronx-born, sixty-nine-year-old billionaire. Cooperman is the founder of a hedge fund called Omega Advisors, but he has gained notice beyond Wall Street over the past year for his outspoken criticism of President Obama. Cooperman formalized his critique in a letter to the President late last year which was widely circulated in the business community; in an interview and in a speech, he has gone so far as to draw a parallel between Obama’s election and the rise of the Third Reich.

This was the beginning of a rebellion, what Cooperman termed “a sleeper cell.”  The superrich are sick and tired of being disrespected and they aren’t going to take it anymore!  But what about this Third Reich business?  According to Freeland,

Comparing Hitler and Obama, as Cooperman did last year at the CNBC conference, is something of a meme. In 2010, the private-equity billionaire Stephen Schwarzman, of the Blackstone Group, compared the President’s as yet unsuccessful effort to eliminate some of the preferential tax treatment his sector receives to Hitler’s invasion of Poland. After Cooperman made his Hitler comment, he has said, his wife called him a “schmuck.” But he couldn’t resist repeating the analogy when we spoke in May of this year. “You know, the largest and greatest country in the free world put a forty-seven-year-old guy that never worked a day in his life and made him in charge of the free world,” Cooperman said. “Not totally different from taking Adolf Hitler in Germany and making him in charge of Germany because people were economically dissatisfied. Now, Obama’s not Hitler. I don’t even mean to say anything like that. But it is a question that the dissatisfaction of the populace was so great that they were willing to take a chance on an untested individual.”

Because, you see, Obama only “worked” for a paycheck, like the majority of us losers in the 47 percent.

America’s super-rich feel aggrieved in part because they believe themselves to be fundamentally different from a leisured, hereditary gentry. In his letter, Cooperman detailed a Horatio Alger biography that has made him an avatar for the new super-rich. “While I have been richly rewarded by a life of hard work (and a great deal of luck), I was not to-the-manor-born,” he wrote, going on to describe his humble beginnings in the South Bronx, as the son of working-class parents—his father was a plumber—who had emigrated from Poland. Cooperman makes it known that he gets up at 5:20 a.m. and is at his desk at Omega’s offices in lower Manhattan, on the thirty-first floor of a building overlooking the East River and Brooklyn, by 6:40 a.m. He rarely gets home before 9 p.m., and most evenings he has a business dinner after leaving the office. “I say that I date my wife on the weekends,” he told me one August afternoon at his office. The space is defiantly modest, furnished with nineteen-nineties-era glass coffee tables, unfashionable yellow couches, and family photographs.

So Cooperman has devoted his entire life to making money. Has he ever read a book? Does he appreciate art or music? Probably not, because that would take time away from hoarding more and more money. If that’s the “American dream,” I’m just not interested. I also find it ironic that these millionaires and billionaires supposedly pride themselves on being self-made–different from the landed gentry; yet at the same time, they are demanding to be treated like kings and princes, expecting the rest of us to bow and scrape before their awesome “success.”

Cooperman’s pride in his work ethic is one source of his disdain for Obama. “When he ran for President, he’d never worked a day in his life. Never held a job,” he said. Obama had, of course, worked—as a business researcher, a community organizer, a law professor, and an attorney at a law firm, not to mention an Illinois state legislator and a U.S. senator, before being elected President. But Cooperman was unimpressed. “He went into government service right out of Harvard,” he said. “He never made payroll. He’s never built anything.”

You see? If you didn’t start a business, if you worked for the government or a university or even for a corporation that you didn’t own, you never worked a day in your life. You are a worthless layabout, deserving of nothing more than starving to death on the street or dying of an untreated illness. Cooperman even looks down his nose at educated professionals from dentist office rochester mn. He’s very relieved that he dropped out of dental school and went into finance .

“I probably make more than a thousand dentists, summed up.” (A thousand dentist would need to work for a decade—and pay no taxes or living expenses—to collectively earn Cooperman’s net worth.) During another conversation, Cooperman mentioned that over the weekend an acquaintance had come by to get some friendly advice on managing his personal finances. He was a seventy-two-year-old world-renowned cardiologist; his wife was one of the country’s experts in women’s medicine. Together, they had a net worth of around ten million dollars. “It was shocking how tight he was going to be in retirement,” Cooperman said. “He needed four hundred thousand dollars a year to live on. He had a home in Florida, a home in New Jersey. He had certain habits he wanted to continue to pursue.

“I’m just saying that it’s not an impressive amount of capital for two people that were leading physicians for their entire work life,” Cooperman went on. “You know, I lost more today than they spent a lifetime accumulating.”

And Cooperman isn’t even a far right winger. He thinks the rich should willingly pay more taxes, and he has “signed Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett’s Giving Pledge, promising to donate at least fifty per cent of [his] net worth to charity”–for which he was honored at the White House. Now we get to the deepest cut, the biggest slight to Cooper’s pride and self-image:

At the event, Cooperman handed the President two copies of “Inspired: My Life (So Far) in Poems,” a self-published book written by Courtney Cooperman, his fourteen-year-old granddaughter. Cooperman was surprised that the President didn’t send him a thank-you note or that Malia and Sasha Obama, for whom the books were intended as a gift and to whom Courtney wrote a separate letter, didn’t write to Courtney. (After Cooperman grumbled to a few friends, including Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark, Michelle Obama did write. Booker, who was also a recipient of Courtney’s book, promptly wrote her “a very nice note,” Cooperman said.)

This is the American ruling class. These are the people who want to destroy what is left of the American social safety net. They’re complete assholes, and they think the rest of us are the scum of the earth–even the President of the United States.

Monday Reads

Posted: October 1, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: morning reads | Tags: , , , , , , , , | 26 Comments

Good Morning!

Rabbit! Rabbit! Rabbit!

It’s the first of October!  This is how you know that I most identify with my English heritage because that’s a Brit superstition that my mother used to practice every first day of the month. It came over with my great grandfather from Hastings. I guess family stories from that far back actually do come down to you.  I’m a physically obvious Phillips, however, so I guess I would pass Scott Brown’s visual DNAdar for some one with a lot of  Brit heritage. A lot of my idiosyncrasies come from my mother through my great grandfather who only contributed 1/8 of my DNA.   She was really influenced by him since he lived in their house and she passed  lot of stuff on to me and my kids through her time with us.  So, I guess Elizabeth Warren probably could relate.  Hmmmm….

 “Why,” the man in the brown hat laughed at him, “I thought everybody knew ‘Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit.’ If you say ‘Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit’—three times, just like that—first thing in the morning on the first of the month, even before you say your prayers, you’ll get a present before the end of the month.”

I’ve been reading a lot of interesting things recently about the decline in upward mobility in the U.S.  Here’s some stories from The Atlantic that pretty much sum up my life since Dubya became president: ‘I’m Working Really Hard, but I’m Not Getting Ahead’: The New Middle Class Trap.

Only twice in U.S. history–in the heyday of the Western frontier and in the post-World War II prosperity–have Americans found it easy to rise. This isn’t one of those times. Middle-skill jobs (read: no college required) are disappearing from America’s sputtering economic engine–in factories, in back offices, even lately in state and local governments. For generations, these jobs were the ticket to a comfortable life for Americans who went directly from high school to work. But increasingly in recent decades, economic research shows, lower-wage workers in foreign lands have taken these jobs or automation has rendered them unnecessary. Today, job growth occurs mainly at the poles of the skills spectrum–in sweeping floors or flipping burgers, which can’t be outsourced, or in sophisticated engineering jobs that drive new industries.

Since 1980, the very lowest- and highest-skill jobs in the United States have each grown sharply as a share of the overall workforce, according to research published last spring by economists David Autor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and David Dorn of Spain’s Centro de Estudios Monetarios y Financieros. Meanwhile, the share of lower-middle-skill jobs has shrunk: For example, machine operators and assemblers, a classic storehouse of middle-skill jobs, fell from 13 percent of the workforce in 1950 to 4 percent in 2005. Real hourly wages have stagnated, simply as a matter of supply and demand. When too many workers compete for too few jobs, employers can hire qualified people at lower pay.

“The real question of the [displaced] middle class is: Where do they go?” asked Mark Doms, the chief economist at the Commerce Department’s Economics and Statistics Administration. “Only a few of them are going to go to the tippy-top”–the highest-skilled jobs. “The rest will go to the bottom.”

Another interesting read is this interview with a sociologist who has written a book about young black men in America. The book is called Invisible Men: Mass Incarceration and the Myth of Black Progress and is  written by Becky Pettit who is a professor of sociology at the University of Washington.  My life in inner city New Orleans and as a professor in its big urban university has really given me a front row seat in seeing the situation.  It’s a lot worse than most folks could even imagine. That’s because the unemployment rate and the labor force ignores the populace in prison and young black men are a huge part of that population.

The employment/population ratio for black males aged 16-24 was 33 percent in August, vs. 52 percent for white males of the same age group. But the black number is skewed upward by the exclusion of jail and prison inmates. The white number is also skewed upward, but less so because a smaller share of young white males are incarcerated.

“We’ve developed a distorted idea” of how young, black men are faring, Pettit told reporters on the call, which was hosted by the book’s publisher, the Russell Sage Foundation. The BLS methodology didn’t begin to distort the statistics until the mid-1970s, when the incarceration boom began.

I asked Pettit how this problem can be solved. The first thing she recommended was doing more to help young, black men get an education, since there is a strong link between failure in school and a life of crime and imprisonment.

A further idea is to reduce the penalties for nonviolent drug crimes, recommended another academic on the call, Ernest Drucker, who is a scholar in residence and senior research associate at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and adjunct professor of epidemiology at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. Imprisoning people for drug offenses can damage their ability to earn a living for the rest of their lives, dooming them to a life of poverty and recidivism, said Drucker, author of A Plague of Prisons.

Indeed, one of the things that this story mentions is the appalling number of young black men trapped in prison over petty things like turn style jumping. There are a number of ‘crimes’ that are applied to young black men more than any other population. They can’t put bankers that stole billions from the economy in jail but they can imprison young people for years on a number of really petty things.

It is becoming appallingly apparent that some of the tactics used to create voter fraud are coming from Republican Operatives.  This is not a new story at all.  But, it is one that should make every one be very aware of who is registering who in  their state.  Isn’t it just typical that all these new Republican laws aimed at preventing voter fraud aren’t stopping Republicans from committing voter fraud?  This story is about Riverside County in California.

Formal complaints filed with the state by at least 133 residents of a state Senate district there say they were added to GOP rolls without their knowledge, calling into question the party’s boast that Republican membership has rocketed 23% in the battleground area.

More than 27,700 residents of the legislative district have become Republicans since January, according to the California secretary of state’s office — erasing a registration edge long held by Democrats.

The complaints have also shined a light on the political committee behind the registration drive, Golden State Voter Participation Project, and its biggest donor, wealthy GOP activist Charles Munger Jr. Other donors include the California Apartment Assn., Farmers Group Inc. and Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturing of America.

The problem has also raised anew the question of whether the state should ban firms that pay workers for each voter they register or signature they secure on a petition rather than paying them an hourly rate. Workers have an incentive to cut corners under such arrangements, according to Assemblyman Richard Pan (D-Natomas), who has proposed barring the practice in a bill that is on the governor’s desk.

Just when you think you’ve heard about all the kooky Republicans running for office you find out there’s yet another one crazier than the ones you thought were as crazy as they got. This one is a Beckster with an end-times obsession. This guy writes novels akin to the Left Behind Series.  Rapture any one?

In Chris Stewart, the Republican nominee in Utah’s 2nd Congressional District, Beck has found someone he feels pretty damn good about. “If he wasn’t running, I’d be trying to convince him to work for me, to help me stay the course, strategize, and save the country,”  he said last winter , as Stewart’s campaign was just getting off the ground. “I’ve actually tried to talk him out of running, because it’s a lion’s den in Washington.”

But, Beck added, “I believe he’s a Daniel.”

Like the Old Testament figure who emerged unscathed from a pit of lions, Stewart—an Air Force pilot turned consultant turned end times novelist—is also a prophet of sorts, and his message is grim: “If we don’t make some difficult decisions now, if we don’t show the courage to do what we have to do to save our country, we won’t make it for another 10 years,”  he said in February , in a campaign video that also served to promote a book he’d just published under Beck’s imprint. But there was hope. “At critical times in our history…we literally had miracles where God intervened to save us,” he said. Send me to Congress, Stewart seemed to imply, and it could happen again.

Read the article.  There’s all kinds of weirdness around this campaign.  The worst thing is that every one thinks this guy is a shoo-in.

Want to learn more about Marc Leder?  That’s the guy that held that fundraiser in Boca Raton that was captured in the Mitt 47% moment.  We’ve already heard about his orgies.  What else could be more “tawdry”? Evidently Leder and Mitt share a penchant for aggressive tax evasion.

Leder has been dogged by tabloid headlines recounting his nasty divorce and wild partying (replete with reported nudity and public sex around the pool at a summer house he rented on Long Island’s East End—for $500,000 a month). What he has in common with Romney, however, isn’t a taste for bacchanalian revels but a record of business and taxation practices that working Americans might find troubling.

At the moment, Leder is under investigation by New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who subpoenaed internal records from Sun Capital, Bain Capital, and several other private equity giants last July.

Issued by the Attorney General’s taxpayer protection bureau, the subpoenas were evidently designed to probe whether Leder and other executives had misused “carried interest,” a method of reducing tax liability by converting management fees into investment income—which is taxed at the lower capital gains rate of 15 percent that keeps Romney’s taxes lower than the rate paid by many middle-income families. (Tax analysts say that Bain Capital records released last August indicate that the firm may have saved more than $200 million in federal taxes thanks to the carried-interest maneuver.)

If Leder did benefit from such aggressive practices, he would merely be typical of executives in an industry where tax manipulations are not just widespread, but fundamental.

So, that’s my offering this morning.  What’s on you reading and blogging list today?

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