This would be so much park-bench babbling but for Adelson’s resolve to spend tens of millions to elect his chosen candidate.39 And so Republican aspirants flock to Las Vegas in the hope that winning the “Adelson primary” will make them our next president. But Rubio goes the extra thousand miles. As New York magazine quoted an Adelson intimate, every two weeks “Rubio calls and says ‘Hey, did you see this speech? What do you think I should do about this issue?’ It’s impressive. Rubio is persistent.” And now Rubio has backed away from the two-state solution and pledged to hamstring the multinational nuclear pact with Iran.
Rubio’s panders abound. But what marks this callow candidate—and the shame of Citizens United—is his willingness to delegate his views on vital foreign policy issues to an ignorant and imperious donor. For once Donald Trump is trenchant: “Adelson is looking to give his money to Rubio because he feels he can mold him into his perfect little puppet.” He has every reason to hope. For Marco Rubio and Sheldon Adelson, money buys so much more than speech.40
The GOP’s Faith-Based Climate
NOVEMBER 2, 2015
Webster’s defines faith as a “belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence.” Traditionally, this connotes theology. But the Republicans now offer us faith-based politics—that intellectual lotus land where dogma, blissfully unmoored from fact, suffocates reality. One stellar example, climate change, captures the party’s intricate pas de deux between ignorance and venality.
By now, denying global warming should be no more respectable than it was, thirty years ago, to assert that those hacking coughs emitting from terminal cancer patients could be ameliorated by smoking. The scientific consensus is no less compelling: a recent survey of scientific papers on the subject showed that 97 percent affirmed man-made climate change.
Little wonder. Nine of the ten hottest years on record have occurred since 2001; the tenth was three years earlier. Reaching further back, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen 40 percent since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. The evidence accumulates—droughts, melting ice caps, cod dying off New England, rising sea levels menacing the Florida coast. Worldwide, 2015 will be the hottest year ever. And for those sentimentalists who care about the world we leave behind, by century’s end the Persian Gulf will be close to uninhabitable. Given all that, most Republican voters are inclined to believe in climate change.
But not for those Republicans we would call the party’s thought leaders was there any thought involved.41 Their cartoonish face is Senator James Inhofe, a man whose words and deeds cry out for H. L. Mencken. Global warming, Inhofe assures us, is the “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.” Deriding climate science as a “secular religion,” he gives us the real thing: “[A] lot of alarmists forget God is still up there.” The actual problem? It’s “the arrogance of people who think that we [can] change what He is doing to the climate.”
To preserve our faith in the Almighty, Inhofe and his confrere, Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, seek to prevent us from biting the apple of knowledge—Inhofe by hostile inquisitions into federal climate research; Smith by cutting $300 million from NASA’s budget in order to defund it. Inhofe’s sense of the scientific method refutes the need for such extravagance, as exemplified by the priceless moment he rebutted global warming by throwing a snowball onto the Senate floor.
Only cynics would note that the oil and gas industry is his leading funder; a more charitable assessment of the senator’s intellect and grasp of science gives one ample reason to credit his sincerity. So let us leave him in that so very sunny world where, as he tells it, “increases in global temperature may well have a beneficial effect on how we live our lives.”
But one must cast a more wintry eye on his senatorial colleagues, all but five of whom opposed a resolution stating that “human activity significantly contributes to climate change.” Of particular interest are two senators now widely touted as presidential finalists: Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz.
On the subject of climate change Rubio is, as ever, finely attuned to the political moment. While a Florida legislator, he believed that action on climate change—including “emissions caps and energy diversification”—could make Florida “the Silicon Valley of [the energy] industry.” Such was his fervor that he voted in favor of regulating greenhouse gases.
But that, truly, was then. Five years later, Rubio coined the “I’m not a scientist” dodge to avoid opining on the subject altogether. Now, as a candidate, he is a full-fledged climate change denier, armed with a three-pronged attack: first, “I do not believe that human activities are causing these dramatic changes;” second, it is “absurd” that laws could change our weather; and third, instead these laws “will destroy our economy.” One is left to imagine Rubio staring at his backyard in perplexity as it sinks beneath the Atlantic.
But for those inclined to see Rubio as a perfectly lubricated weathervane, Ted Cruz is made of sterner stuff. With his usual ferocity, he denounces climate science as a front for “power-greedy politicians” who want to control the energy industry. As for the scientists themselves, these “global warming alarmists are the equivalent of the flat-Earthers.” And Cruz? He is, well, the modern Galileo in his intellectual bravery: “It used to be it was accepted scientific wisdom that the Earth was flat, and this heretic named Galileo was branded a denier.”
Here we pause for some corrective science. First, Galileo had nothing to do with refuting flat Earth theory. Second, his actual belief—that the Earth revolves around the sun—was supported by scientists but opposed by the Catholic Church as heresy. No surprise, then, is Cruz’s stunningly counterfactual insistence that “satellite data demonstrate for the last seventeen years there has been zero warming.”
It is cold comfort that Rubio and Cruz are nowhere near that clueless, because their reality is so much worse. They signed a pledge to “oppose any legislation relating to climate change that includes a net increase in government revenues” for the simplest of reasons: the Koch brothers wrote it. Which returns us to the brave new world of Citizens United.
The Kochs’ many billions are rooted in the fossil fuel industry; after Citizens United, the only limit on the brothers’ political spending is their estimate of how much it takes to purchase their own US president. And they are vehement climate deniers. In recent years, they have poured an estimated $79 million into front groups that oppose climate legislation. Now the Koch funding network has pledged nearly $900 million to elect their candidates in 2016—more than double the amount spent by the Republican National Committee in 2012.
In sheer seductive power, this pending windfall dwarfs the $15 million Cruz’s Super PAC received from two billionaire frackers, the Wilks brothers, in appreciation of his proposal to ban federal regulation of greenhouse gases. So it is also unsurprising that Rubio, Cruz, and other candidates flock like lemmings to conferences held by the Kochs’ donor network, or that Rubio would “love to earn their support” because, after all, “we are clearly aligned on issues.” No doubt that is why he is deemed the favorite to receive the Koch brothers’ ultra-lucrative anointment—Marco Rubio will never, ever be out of alignment.
Indeed Rubio has already hit pay dirt—three days ago, New York venture capitalist Paul Singer, the epicenter of a huge soft-money network, pledged the senator his support. As it happens, Singer also helps fund a foundation that castigates climate science as “utopian alarmism.” At whatever cost to the planet, Rubio and Cruz will keep on fighting to outdo each other in assuring Republican voters that climate science is a luxury and a fraud, the better to propitiate their wealthy patrons.
In a more innocent time, Daniel Patrick Moynihan adjured, “You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts.” No more. In post–Citizens United America, billionaires can not only buy their own facts, but their own environment.42
Fun Questions for the Next GOP Debate
DECEMBER 1, 2015
Let’s get
real. For four GOP debates now, watching journalists solicit crazy answers to serious questions—mostly serious, anyhow—has become as surreal as taking acid. In between, all we can do is listen to the most amazing stuff and talk back to our television.43 So wouldn’t the next debate be much more fun if we took the candidates’ positions to their logical conclusion? Before it’s too late, don’t you want to find out how nuts some of these people really are?
I sure do. So here are my suggested questions for a truly enlightening evening:
Mr. Trump, you have called for surveillance of mosques and requiring Muslims to register. Do you intend to identify Muslims by pigmentation, or by the wild look in their eyes? If so, how do you tell them apart from Mexicans? Looking forward, do you see Japanese internment camps as a definitive model for solving both problems? In conceiving such camps, will you wall off the Mexican section, and will you allow the Muslims to celebrate their favorite holidays, like Ramadan and 9/11?44
Dr. Carson, you have compared Obamacare to slavery. In your mind, was slavery more like being stuck in the emergency room or paying high deductibles? Have you ever interviewed a slave?45 If so, did you inquire about their health care? And do you think the movie 12 Years a Slave was wildly exaggerated?
Ms. Fiorina, you scored points by sticking it to Donald Trump when he ridiculed your appearance.46 Did you get this idea from your 2010 Senate race, when you ridiculed Barbara Boxer’s hairstyle? In your view, is same-sex ridicule okay? Is it conceivable that California’s voters rejected you because they didn’t like you? Or, like you, did they see the presidency of the most powerful nation on earth as a more appropriate entry-level job for a woman with your mastery of factually dubious talking points?
Senator Rubio, you bravely advocate special operations against ISIS in which “we strike them, we capture or kill their leaders, we videotape the operations” because “I want the world to see how these ISIS leaders cry like babies” and “begin to sing like canaries . . .”47 Have you run your cinematic ambitions past the generals charged with filming this operation, then getting American soldiers and their captives out of hostile territory alive? How do you know that these erstwhile jihadists will begin acting like stoolies in a ’30s gangster movie? Has it occurred to you that, as a military strategist, you may resemble George Patton less than George Armstrong Custer? Have you imagined the Battle of Little Big Horn reenacted by jihadists with videocams who think scalping is for sissies? As president, how will you react if murderous fanatics begin starring captured American soldiers in special movies of their own?
Senator Cruz, in claiming Galileo as a model for your vigorous denial of climate change, you confused his opponents with flat-earth advocates. Do you, in fact, believe that the earth is round? Does your remark reflect a genuine lack of basic scientific knowledge? Or are you striving to make your enthusiasts forget that you graduated from Princeton and Harvard?
Senator Rubio, you have advocated the “sunlight” of disclosing a candidate’s donors, while a “dark-money” group channels millions from undisclosed sources to pay for pro-Rubio commercials. Were you “shocked” to discover this, like the cop in Casablanca? Are there, in fact, two Marco Rubios? Or, like Sybil in the movie, do you have multiple personalities dedicated to each of your biggest soft-money donors?
Governor Christie, you favor refusing asylum to Syrian orphans. Might you, instead, vet people of small stature to screen out murderous jihadist midgets? Are traumatized six-year-old Syrians uniquely skilled and vicious?48 If radicalized children are such a threat, what would you do about Muslim preschools?
Ms. Fiorina, you have said that among your first acts as president would be to “call my friend Bibi Netanyahu.” How many times have you actually met your friend Bibi, and how elastic is your definition of friendship? Do you, in fact, have friends? Or is Bibi more like the imaginary friend kids make up when they’re five years old?
Mr. Trump, your solution to ISIS is to “take away all their oil.” Did you get this idea from watching retired army officers on Meet the Press? Can you be more precise about logistics? Or is the only problem how many oil tankers to send after your rhetoric reduces hardened jihadist killers to supplicants desperate to please you? If so, would you make them pay for the tankers?
Senator Cruz, your strong professions of evangelical faith seem to affect your stated view of science. Do you still believe that fracking is not just an oil extraction technique, but a “providential blessing”? If so, did God give us global warming to put date palms in our backyards? On the subject of evolution, do you believe that The Flintstones was a cartoon or a documentary?
Dr. Carson, you have referred to prospective Syrian refugees as “rabid dogs.” Given your fondness for Nazi references, are you by any chance familiar with how the Nazis characterized Jews? Do you still think that an armed Jewish populace could have taken out the entire SS and Gestapo, and that the shooting victims in Oregon should have tried harder? Back to Syria, are the Chinese still there?
Senator Rubio, by the estimate of a conservative tax research group, your tax cut for the wealthy would virtually double the deficit every year, adding about $4 trillion to the national debt over the next decade. How do you relate this problem to your experience with credit cards? Is there an undisclosed foreign entity—like, say, the Chinese—who would be willing to balance your budget by funneling $4 trillion through your dark-money group?
Ms. Fiorina, you claim to be qualified to be president because you “actually know how the economy works.” When did you acquire this knowledge? Was it after you got kicked out of Hewlett-Packard? Given that no one has offered you another CEO job, did you learn how the economy works by reading? If so, was your principal source of information Atlas Shrugged?
Mr. Trump, a recent Pew Research survey shows that more Mexicans are leaving the US than staying. How do you explain this? Do you have a formula for making sure that the millions of “rapists and murderers” are leaving, and the handful of “good people” are staying? Will Mexicans in both categories have to register?
Governor Bush, let’s talk. Do you ever wonder what you’re doing in the company of these pretenders? Would one of the “cool things I could be doing” include hanging out with a smarter group of people? For that matter, do you ever feel like you wandered into an insane asylum and can’t get out?49
If so, I sure do understand. You’re awfully stoic about it all, but that’s how it looks from here.
The GOP’s Tax Warfare
DECEMBER 8, 2015
The discovery was startling—since the millennium, middle-class and blue-collar whites are dying at sharply increased rates. The reasons are equally stunning. The primary causes are self-inflicted: drugs, alcohol, suicide.50 The victims are the least educated; the triggers are poor health and financial distress. Yet the mortality rate for blacks and Latinos is declining; so, too, for comparable groups in other economically advanced countries. In short, a segment of once secure Americans is suffering an epidemic of shattered dreams. This, it seems clear, is death by class.
How ironic, then, is the current Orwellian twist on the term “class warfare.” In Marxian parlance, this connotes the struggle for economic and political power between capitalists and workers. But for the GOP it means only this: opposing tax cuts for the rich. Thus the conservative echo chamber bewailed Obama’s plan to let Bush-era tax cuts expire—but only for the top earners—as “full-throated class warfare,” nothing less than “a pitchfork and torches attack on Republicans and America’s rich.”
But before imagining our first black president as America’s Robespierre, a brief look at the embattled class trembling behind the barricades.
To say the least, it is hard to fathom their self-pity. In 2013, the top 1 percent received 20 percent of the national income and held an equal percentage of our wealth—double their share thirty years ago. And a principal driver of their ever-cascading riches is our tax code, markedly more favorable to the privileged few than in other developed c
ountries.
For, far from being victims, they are the beneficiaries of an enormous tax windfall—over the last fifty years, our top income tax rate has fallen by 48 percent. As their assets swell, those of the poor and middle class decline, a trend accelerated by the Great Recession. Labor unions—a primary target of class warfare from the right—have weakened. Debt has increased; bankruptcies have quintupled. In macroeconomic terms, shifts in income to the wealthy slow consumption and retard growth—even as more political power flows to those who have the most and, all too often, care the least about those below them.
As to the phenomenon of rising deaths among the middle class, the late historian Tony Judt described the causal links: “There has been a collapse in intergenerational mobility: in contrast to their parents and grandparents, children born . . . in the US have very little expectation of improving [their] condition. . . . The poor stay poor. Economic disadvantage for the overwhelming majority translates into ill health, minimal educational opportunity, and—increasingly—the familiar symptoms of depression: alcoholism, obesity, gambling, and minor criminality.”
So what does the GOP offer us? More tax cuts for the rich.
This would make sense only if the cuts served some larger social benefit. But they don’t. So the GOP dresses them up as the Tax Fairy, cloaked in a hoary myth that history has long since proven false: that tax cuts magically pay for themselves or, at least, offset much of their cost by stimulating economic growth.
With apologies to my readers, the truth resides in numbers.
The first great tax cutter, Ronald Reagan, slashed the upper income tax rate by 42 percent; the deficit exploded by $1.4 trillion. Fans of economic reality noticed. When the second President Bush proposed cutting the top rate by 4.5 percent, 450 economists—including ten Nobel Prize winners—sent a letter protesting that “these tax cuts will weaken the long-term budget outlook . . . will reduce the capacity of the government to finance Social Security and Medicare benefits as well as investments in schools, health, infrastructure, and basic research . . . [and] generate further inequities in after-tax income.”
Fever Swamp: A Journey Through the Strange Neverland of the 2016 Presidential Race Page 5
