Could There Still Be A Race For The Republican Nomination?

DonkeyHotey

by Fuzzyone

I have thought for a long time that there was little chance that anyone but Romney could capture the Republican nomination. He has the money and organization that all but Ron Paul lack, and Paul just can't appeal to enough Republicans. But now Public Policy Polling has a poll out showing Gingrich with a six point lead over Romney in South Carolina:

Newt Gingrich ................................................. 34%
Mitt Romney..................................................... 28%
Ron Paul ........................................................... 15%
Rick Santorum................................................... 14%
Rick Perry .......................................................... 5%
Buddy Roemer.................................................... 3%
Someone else/Not sure ...................................... 2%

Even more interesting, or at least entertaining, is that if Stephen Colbert is included he gets 8%, taking a bit from everyone. Colbert's Super PAC, now run by Jon Stewart (which lovechilde wrote about the other day) is running ads urging people to vote for Herman Cain, who has dropped out but whose name still appears on the ballot, but it is hard to know how that will impact things.

What is likely to have an impact is Perry's announcement that he is dropping out and endorsing Gingrich.  That leaves only Gingrich and Santorum fighting for the non Romney, non Paul vote.  The problem they both have is lack of organization and money. But a strong showing in South Carolina could bring in the money and after Florida on January 31 there are not any really big events until March 6, Super Tuesday.

I still doubt anyone can beat Romney, at least anyone who is in the race, and tonight's ABC interview with Newt's second wife does not seem likely to help him. Still, this might be a more interesting race than I would have expected a few weeks ago.

G.O.P. In A Nutshell

DonkeyHotey

So what are the overarching characteristics of each of the hopefuls for the GOP nomination for president?  Newt Gingrich is mean-spirited, polarizing, arrogant and, as Paul Krugman said, "a stupid man's view of what a smart man sounds like;" Mitt Romney is a liar who will say anything and take any position to get elected; Ron Paul is an anti-Semitic, racist, homophobe; Rick Perry seems to be cognitively impaired, once accurately describing his own brain as "like chicken pot pie;" Michele Bachmann must be insane given the things that come out of her mouth; and Rick Santorum is a religious zealot obsessed with gay sex.

Robert Reich wrote last week that our democracy can't work when one of our two political parties is not "grounded in the realities of governing."  What is so disturbing about the half-dozen candidates who embody the hopes and dreams of the Republican Party is that they don't seem in to grounded in reality at all.

Rick Perry And The Bankruptcy Of Modern Day Conservatives

By Robert. Borosage, cross-posted from Campaign for America's Future

by Donkey Hotey

Texas Governor Rick Perry touts himself as the most conservative candidate who is electable. He prays with the fundamentalists, hunts with the Second Amendment gang, decries federal tyranny with the 10th Amendment crowd, and “pokes” around with the birthers. He just released an economic plan that looks like a conservative wish list. And in doing so, he reveals the essential bankruptcy of today’s conservative politics.

Perry’s plan is anchored in the belief that the rich have too little money. He would eliminate taxes on million dollar estates, coddling the heirs to the wealthy. He would tax work but eliminate all taxes on wealth – on capital gains, interest and dividends. Warren Buffett’s tax rate will plummet towards zero. He’d install an optional flat tax at 20%, offering the affluent their choice of the old code or the flat tax, insuring full employment for accountants.

In the US, the richest 1% now make about as much as the bottom 60% combined, and have as much wealth as the bottom 90%. Perry would insure that the rich do even better. Asked about this, Perry said “I don’t care” if my proposals add to inequality. He assumes that if the rich have more money, they will use it to create jobs. But there is no evidence to support that fact. Over the last decade, with the top end Bush tax cuts and the wealthiest 1% capturing all the rewards for growth, we suffered the worst job creation record since the Depression, and wages for the typical US household lost ground for the first time when the economy was growing.

Perry’s plan believes that corporations have too little in profits. So he slashes taxes on corporations. He calls for lowering the corporate tax rate to 20%, offers multinationals the chance to repatriate the trillion in profits they’ve parked abroad at 5.25%, and would establish a “territorial tax” on corporations, ending US taxation on profits earned abroad. This too would generate jobs, he argues.

But corporations are now sitting on over $2 trillion in profits. They don’t lack cash; they lack customers. And multinationals have been shipping good jobs abroad, while perfecting methods to avoid taxes by parking profits in overseas tax havens. Perry’s plan would simply give them greater incentives to move jobs and report profits abroad.


Perry’s plan assumes that Wall Street has too little freedom and corporations have too much accountability. He would repeal the financial reforms passed in the last Congress, removing any guard rails on Wall Street excesses. He would repeal the corporate reforms, passed after Enron, that require company CEOs to certify the accuracy of their audits, freeing companies to go back to cooking their books. He assumes this will help create jobs. But, it is hard to forget, it was Wall Street’s wilding that blew up the economy and caused mass unemployment; and it was the excesses of corporate boardrooms that undermined investor confidence. Removing the cop on the corporate and financial beat only insures a new crime streak.

Perry’s plan assumes that retired Americans have too much security. He would raise the eligibility age for Medicare, turn Medicare into a voucher system and cut Medicaid and turn it over to the states. (While he ducks offering details on this; he embraces Sen. Coburn’s Back to Black plan which follows these lines). He savages Social Security, raising the retirement age and instilling a lower cost of living index - - which would cut retirement support by approximately 30% for retirees in future years. Then he calls for offering a new benefit – private accounts for young workers – which would blow a trillion dollar hole into the Social Security trust fund. He does not say how he would pay for this. In fact, Americans rely increasingly on Social Security for their retirement. Half have no retirement plan at all at work. The few with savings found their hopes dashed as their homes plummeted in value. Retired couples on Medicare who live a normal life will need to spend over $160,000 on health care over the course of their lives.

Perry promises a balanced budget amendment, and a budget balanced by slashing spending. He would limit spending to 18% of GDP, which would require cutting the current budget by about one-fourth. (Far deeper cuts would be needed to cover the decline in tax revenue and the financing of private accounts in Social Security). The federal budget, as Paul Krugman has pointed out, is basically an insurance program with an army. To cut government by one-fourth, you must savage Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Veteran’s health care. Perry focuses on cutting the domestic discretionary budget – he boasts about cutting the education budget in half, gutting support for schools in poverty areas. But eliminating all domestic programs won’t come close to covering the cuts required to balance the budget under his tax program.

“There’s nothing wrong with lower revenue,” Parry said, “Americans are ready for Washington DC to quit spending money.” No doubt Americans think their tax dollars are often wasted. They want loopholes closed, an end to corporate subsidies and insider privileges. But they want Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid protected. They want investment in education.

And lost in the Perry cuts would be any hope of rebuilding America. Perry says he wants to make America friendly to business again. But his budget choices will insure that vital public investments in America are starved. Our decrepit and outmoded infrastructure will continue to decline. Our education system will fail to provide the basics, from pre-K to affordable college. Vital investments in research and development will be short changed. We’ll surrender any hope of leading the new green industrial revolution that will be the growth global markets of the future, in a world of global warming that Rick Perry denies. Perry will rail against waste and big government, but his budget leaves no choice but to cut out bone and muscle, not just fat

Perry has plummeted in the polls after abysmal debate performances that suggest he isn’t the brightest light bulb in the closet. But he remains the best funded conservative alternative to Romney, and has the resources to sustain a national campaign.

His candidacy thus reveals the essential bankruptcy of today’s conservatism. In a time of Gilded Age inequality, conservatives want to end taxes on wealth. As good jobs are shipped abroad, they would give corporations added incentives to move jobs and report profits abroad. In the midst of the Great Recession caused by Wall Street’s excesses, they would reopen the financial casino, and remove what limited safeguards were passed. With America’s boomers moving into retirement, they would undermine the basic promises the society made to them for retirement security. With the millennium generation flooding our public schools, they would gut federal support for public education.

Conservative policies – from top end tax cuts, to corporate trade policies, to Wall Street deregulation— blew up the economy, leaving us with mass unemployment, a sinking middle class and spreading poverty. And conservatives have learned nothing and changed nothing. Led by Rick Perry, they argue only for more of the same. They offer a road to more riches for the few and ruin for the many.

How Romney Helped Perry Break The Law

By Mark Hertsgaard, cross-posted from his website

“Follow the money” is an elementary rule for understanding American politics, and in the case of Texas Gov. Rick Perry, the money trail leads to a case of apparent money laundering that involves his Republican presidential rival Mitt Romney and a $1 million contribution from the same Texas tycoon who bankrolled the “Swift Boat” attacks against the 2004 Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. John Kerry.

Bobby Jack “Bob” Perry, a residential construction magnate in Houston, is not related to Rick Perry by blood, only money. But there has been lots of that. As with the Swift Boaters to whom he donated $4.45 million, Bob Perry ranks as the single largest donor to Rick Perry during the latter’s 10 years as governor of Texas, according to official figures tabulated and analyzed by Texans for Public Justice, a nonprofit watchdog group in the state capital of Austin.

Bob Perry contributed $2,531,799 directly to Rick Perry from January 2001 to July 2011, TPJ reports in “Crony Capitalism: The Republican Governors Association in the Perry Years.” That puts him well ahead of such other notable donors as Koch Industries, the energy conglomerate owned by David and Charles Koch, the chief funders of the Tea Party, and Contran Corp., whose efforts to establish a nuclear waste dump in Texas have succeeded thanks to regulators appointed by Perry. (As Justin Elliott reported this week, Perry is also a leading funder of Karl Rove’s American Crossroads political action committee.)

But to truly understand Rick Perry’s “pay-to-play” approach, TPJ executive director Craig McDonald told Salon, one must also look at contributions to the Republican Governors Association, which he chaired from 2008 through August 2011.

In an apparent and possibly illegal attempt to hide the money’s true origins, Bob Perry has routed $11,450,000 — five times the amount he has contributed to Gov. Perry directly — through the Governors Association since 2006.


That same year, Perry donated $1 million to the Governors Association, which days later channeled $1 million to Gov. Perry’s troubled reelection campaign. When Chris Bell, Gov. Perry’s Democratic challenger in 2006, filed suit alleging campaign finance violations, Perry’s campaign agreed to settle the case and pay Bell $426,000, nearly half the amount of the contribution at issue.

The Governors Association, however, refused to settle. In 2010, state Judge John K. Dietz ruled that the group had violated Texas law by not registering as a political committee and not reporting the $1 million contribution until after the election. The judge awarded $2 million to Bell, a ruling the Governors Association is appealing.

“I think it was a pass-through,” Bell told Salon. “They were trying to hide the source of the contribution.”

Bell speculated that the Perry campaign wanted to avoid charges of hypocrisy after criticizing Bell for accepting a $1 million contribution from a Texas trial lawyer, a contribution that Bell announced publicly. Texas law allows individuals to contribute unlimited amounts to candidates.

“Bob Perry had contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to Rick Perry’s campaign prior to 2006,” Bell said. “So why else would he pass it through the Republican Governors Association, if they weren’t trying to hide the source of the contribution?”

That $1 million contribution by Bob Perry could come back to bite Rick Perry during this year’s presidential campaign. Romney could also face trouble. He was the chairman of the governors group in 2006 and reportedly participated in the decision to channel money to Perry’s campaign.

As reporters Murray Waas and David Henderson of Reuters revealed on Wednesday, court documents describing Romney’s role indicate that two of Gov. Perry’s closest aides may have given “false or misleading testimony under oath” in their depositions for Chris Bell’s civil suit:

“[T]he testimony of [top Rick Perry] aides David Carney and Deirdre Delisi was directly contradicted by a sworn statement from Perry’s own gubernatorial campaign committee … which said that Delisi and Carney met with Romney in Washington DC on October 4, 2006 to discuss a last-minute contribution to [Perry's campaign] .”

Carney has long been Perry’s top political advisor. Delisi, who served as his chief of staff in the governor’s office, is now senior policy advisor to the campaign.

When asked about the Oct. 4, 2006, meeting, Mark Miner, press secretary of the Perry presidential campaign, told Salon that “due to a settlement by both sides we cannot comment on this case.” The Romney campaign did not respond to questions about the meeting.

To have the two presumed front-runners for the Republican presidential nomination and the funder of the infamous “Swift Boat” attacks implicated in a single money laundering scandal is a remarkable development in the Republican race. It raises a host of questions that other GOP  candidates — and the media — may want to address.

Did two of Perry’s closes aides commit perjury? Why the divergent statements about the last-minute contribution? Did Romney endorse passing along Bob Perry’s  $1 million to Gov. Perry? If so, why? And what did Rick Perry know about the source of the contribution?

In short, did the two now-bitter rivals for the Republican nomination forge a friendly backroom deal in 2006 that was possibly illegal?

An offensively low price

“Other Texas politicians have done pay-to-play before, but Rick Perry has taken it to a high art,” said Craig McDonald of TPJ. “In his 10 years as governor, he has raised $102 mil[lion], and half of that came from an inner circle of 200 mega-donors. George W. Bush never raised anything like that amount during his years as governor [1994 to 2000]. Bush raised $43 million for two election campaigns, and most of that came in the second campaign when everyone knew he was running for the president and people wanted to cozy up to him.”

At times, though, Perry’s pay-to-play proclivities have been less high art than low comedy. In the Sept. 22 candidates’ debate, Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., hammered Perry for issuing an executive order requiring Texas high school girls to get a vaccine that prevents cervical cancer. Right-wingers had previously attacked the morality of his order, saying it would encourage teenage promiscuity. Bachmann ventured a new line of attack, noting that the vaccine was manufactured by one of Perry’s campaign donors. Far from backing down, Perry took the offensive, naming the donor, the drug company, Merck, and stating — inaccurately — that the pharmaceutical giant had contributed only $5,000 to him. In point of fact, Merck has given $28,500 to Perry since 2001.

“I raise about $30 million,” Perry continued. “And if you’re saying that I can be bought for $5,000, I’m offended.”

Like many of Perry’s public comments, this one was more revealing than he seemed to realize. The Texas governor did not protest that he could not be bought; he simply joked that $5,000 was an offensively low price.

Which it may well be in Texas, a state where bragging about bigness is common.

After all, Bob Perry had to contribute 45 times that much to Gov. Perry before the state created what amounted to Perry’s own regulatory agency. To wit, the Houston home-builder gave the governor $225,000 between May of 2001 and August of 2003, according to the TPJ. Its “Crony Capitalism” report, based on contemporaneous accounts in the Texas news media, recounts what happened next:

Texas lawmakers created the Texas Residential Construction Commission in 2003. The agency ostensibly was supposed to mediate disputes between the buyers and builders of new homes. But construction defects made a lemon of this lemon-home agency. John Krugh, Bob Perry’s general counsel, helped draft legislation to create the agency. Governor Perry then skewed the agency’s foundation by only appointing housing-industry representatives — including Krugh — to the new commission. “In Texas you can buy your own state agency, then regulate yourself,” Houston Democratic Rep. Garnet Coleman quipped at the time.

The results were predictable. The de facto Bob Perry housing commission issued such egregiously one-sided rulings that public anger led the Texas Legislature to abolish it in 2009. Which, according to McDonald, “shows you that Bob Perry is not all-powerful.”

But it’s crucial to recognize, McDonald added, that beyond such direct business benefits, Bob Perry has also gotten his central ideological desires serviced by Rick Perry: “Bob Perry is for low or no taxes and regulation, no civil lawsuits. And Rick Perry has delivered on that broader ideological agenda day in and day out as governor.”

A second example of the hilariously blatant cronyism under Gov. Perry involves Harold Simmons, the billionaire CEO of Contran Corp. Contran ranks second only to Bob Perry as Gov. Perry’s most generous contributor. The company has given $1.12 million to Gov. Perry directly and $1.875 million to the Republican Governors Association for a total of $2.995 million.

Some people look at radioactive nuclear waste and recoil. Harold Simmons saw it as a profit-making opportunity. Waste Control Specialists Inc., a subsidiary of Simmon’s Contran Corp., had been operating a hazardous waste dump in west Texas since the 1990s; Simmons wanted the facility to handle nuclear waste as well.

In 2003, Simmons finally persuaded the Texas Legislature to allow a private company to store so-called low-level nuclear waste within the state’s borders. The Legislature stipulated, however, that Texas state regulators would have to approve the operating plans of any such waste site before granting a license.

The next part of the story has been well told by reporter Forest Wilder of the Texas Observer:

Three years into the review process at [the Texas Council for Environmental Quality], a team of geologists and engineers unanimously decided that the proposed dump was fatally flawed. The main problem, they wrote in a memo to superiors, was that the dump was within 14 feet of groundwater, raising the potential for radioactive contamination of water that could be part of the vast Ogallala Aquifer. Nonetheless, then-TCEQ executive director Glenn Shankle [who had been appointed by Gov. Perry] issued the license anyway and denied all the citizen protestors the right to contest the permit in an administrative court. Six months later, Shankle went to work for Waste Control Specialists as lobbyist taking in at least $100,000.

There’s more. Originally, Harold Simmons’ dump was to handle nuclear waste only from Texas, New York and Vermont. But in 2011, another set of Perry appointees at the Texas Low-Level Radioactive Waste Compact Commission voted to open the facility to nuclear waste from 36 other states.

And in another example of the shamelessness that permeates the pay-to-play culture under Gov. Perry, Simmons later publicly boasted about his achievements, telling the Dallas Business Journal:
“We first had to change the law to where a private company can own a license [to handle radioactive waste], and we did that. Then we got another law passed that said they can only issue one license. Of course, we were the only ones that applied.”

All of which recalls the old Texas political joke:

“What’s the difference between a bribe and a campaign contribution?”

“You report the contribution.”

“Who butters his biscuits?”

Few if any Texans have watched Rick Perry longer or more closely than Jim Hightower, the populist rabble-rouser and author. Perry first gained statewide office in Texas by beating Hightower, the incumbent, in the 1990 election for agriculture commissioner. The Svengali behind the scenes of Perry’s success was a political operative by the name of Karl Rove.

Perry and Hightower first crossed swords when Hightower, as agriculture commissioner, issued regulations limiting the amount of pesticides that could be applied in Texas.

“The chemical lobby was really pissed off,” Hightower told Salon, “so they wrote legislation to take pesticide authority away from my office and make my office appointed rather than elected.”

Perry, then a state legislator, carried the chemical lobby’s bill in committee, Hightower recalled, but it failed after Hightower drew hundreds of people to the hearing by inviting singer Willie Nelson as his lead witness. “When Perry called for a motion on his bill, nobody [else on the subcommittee would speak up] in front of this crowd. I remember Perry saying, “C’mon guys!’”

“That made the chemical lobby even more furious,” added Hightower. “So suddenly Karl Rove appears, recruits Perry to switch parties from Democrat to Republican and run against me.”

“Perry was a terrible campaigner back then, and Rove sent him out to attend [Texas] Farm Bureau meetings in the Panhandle to keep him away from the media. Then Rove raised millions of dollars for TV attack ads — typical stuff of a hippie burning a flag, and my face appears out of the flag.”

“What I learned from this about [Perry] is, he knows who butters his biscuits,” Hightower said. “He saw what they could do, which is to raise bucks and win him an election he probably didn’t think he could win. And that’s still who he is today: a corporate crony. You want an appointment to state office? You want a state contract? Just give him a contribution.”

“Twenty cents of every dollar he’s raised as governor has come from someone he appointed, or that someone’s spouse,” McDonald of TPJ noted. And the quid pro quo works in the other direction as well. Forty-three of Gov. Perry’s largest contributors have employed 89 people whom Perry has appointed to state boards and commissions, Crony Capitalism reports.

The “Wild West political past”

Whether Rick Perry’s apparent weakness for cronyism will hurt his chances of becoming president remains to be seen, but it does not appear to have affected his standing in Texas.

“He’s certainly been attacked on it, by both his Republican and Democratic opponents,” said McDonald. “Deborah Medina, the Tea Party candidate in the 2010 Republican primary, went after him for pay-to-play, as did [former Texas Sen. Kay Bailey] Hutchison. [Democrat] Bill White tried it in the general election too. White’s people would tell you, though, that cronyism and pay-to-play didn’t focus-group or poll very well with Texas voters. White kept pushing it, but it never did stick.”
“Why the hell not?” McDonald asked, chuckling. “Well, maybe there’s just less outrage about this stuff in Texas than in other parts of the country because of our Wild West political past and the extremely corrupt system it left us with. We have very few restrictions about how much money people can give to politicians; there’s actually no limit on what an individual can give, as long as it’s not during the legislative session. It’s outrageous, but it’s the system we’re used to.”

But in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling that corporations are free to contribute unlimited amounts of money to political candidates, are the Wild West ways of Texas really so out of step with the rest of America? And if not, doesn’t that leave Rick Perry, with his abundant pay-to-play experience, better positioned than most to exploit the new rules on behalf of the rich and powerful in 2012?

Mark Hertsgaard (www.markhertsgaard.com) is an independent journalist who has covered politics, the media and the environment for 20 years for leading outlets around the world, including Vanity Fair, Time, The Nation, L’espresso and the BBC. He is the author of six books, including most recently, “HOT: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth.”

The Election of 2012: Why the Most Important Issues May Be Off the Table (But Should Be On It)

By Robert Reich, cross-posted from his website

We’re on the cusp of the 2012 election. What will it be about? It seems reasonably certain President Obama will be confronted by a putative Republican candidate who:

Believes corporations are people, wants to cut the top corporate rate to 25% (from the current 35%) and no longer require they pay tax on foreign income, who will eliminate capital gains and dividend taxes on anyone earning less than $250,000 a year, raise the retirement age for Social Security and turn Medicaid into block grants to states, seek a balanced-budged amendment to the Constitution, require any regulatory agency issuing a new regulation repeal another regulation of equal cost (regardless of the benefits), and seek repeal of Obama’s healthcare plan.

Or one who:

Believes the Federal Reserve is treasonous when it expands the money supply, doubts human beings evolved from more primitive forms of life, seeks to abolish the Internal Revenue Service and shift most public services to the states, thinks Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, while governor took a meat axe to public education and presided over an economy that generated large numbers of near-minimum-wage jobs, and who will shut down most federal regulatory agencies, cut corporate taxes, and seek repeal of Obama’s healthcare plan.

Whether it’s Romney or Perry, he’s sure to attack everything Obama has done or proposed. And Obama, for his part, will have to defend his positions and look for ways to counterpunch.

Hence, the parameters of public debate for the next fourteen months.


Within these narrow confines progressive ideas won’t get an airing. Even though poverty and unemployment will almost surely stay sky-high, wages will stagnate or continue to fall, inequality will widen, and deficit hawks will create an indelible (and false) impression that the nation can’t afford to do much about any of it – proposals to reverse these trends are unlikely to be heard.

Neither party’s presidential candidate will propose to tame CEO pay, create more tax brackets at the top and raise the highest marginal rates back to their levels in the 1950s and 1960s (that is, 70 to 90 percent), and match the capital-gains rate with ordinary income.

You won’t hear a call to strengthen labor unions and increase the bargaining power of ordinary workers.

Don’t expect an argument for resurrecting the Glass-Steagall Act, thereby separating commercial from investment banking and stopping Wall Street’s most lucrative and dangerous practices.

You won’t hear there’s no reason to cut Medicare and Medicaid – that a better means of taming health-care costs is to use these programs’ bargaining clout with drug companies and hospitals to obtain better deals and to shift from fee-for-services to fee for healthy outcomes.

Nor will you hear why we must move toward Medicare for all.

Nor why the best approach to assuring Social Security’s long-term solvency is to lift the ceiling on income subject to Social Security payroll taxes.

Don’t expect any reference to the absurdity of spending more on the military than do all other countries put together, and the waste and futility of an unending and undeclared war against Islamic extremism – especially when we have so much to do at home.

Nor are you likely to hear proposals for ending the corruption of our democracy by big money.
Although proposals like these are more important and relevant than ever, they won’t be part of the upcoming presidential election.

But they should be part of the public debate nonetheless.

That’s why I urge you to speak out about them – at town halls, candidate forums, and public events. Continue to mobilize and organize around them. Talk with your local media about them. Use social media to get the truth out.

Don’t be silenced by Democrats who say by doing so we’ll jeopardize the President’s re-election. If anything we’ll be painting him as more of a centrist than Republicans want the public to believe. And we’ll be preserving the possibility (however faint) of a progressive agenda if he’s reelected.

Remember, too, the presidential race isn’t the only one occurring in 2012. More than a third of Senate seats and every House seat will be decided on, as well as numerous governorships and state races. Making a ruckus about these issues could push some candidates in this direction — particularly since, as polls show, much of the public agrees.

Most importantly, by continuing to push and prod we give hope to countless Americans on the verge of giving up. We give back to them the courage of their own convictions, and thereby lay the groundwork for a future progressive agenda — to take back America from the privileged and powerful, and restore broad-based prosperity.

Robert Reich is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley.  He writes a blog at www.robertreich.org.  His most recent book is Aftershock.

Rick Perry: Inhumanity We Can Believe In

After proudly claiming he "has not struggled at all" with presiding over more executions (234) than any other modern governor, Rick Perry clearly is not going to quit while he's ahead.  On Tuesday, Steve Woods became number 235, despite the fact that his co-defendant admitted to personally committing the capital crimes as part of a plea deal that spared his life.

Duane Buck came within hours of being number 236 Thursday night, when the United States Supreme Court issued a stay to give the high court time to consider whether to review the claims Buck's counsel presented (including whether a defendant’s race may ever be used as a basis for the death penalty and whether the prosecution may rely on the defendant’s race as evidence that he would commit criminal acts of violence in the future).

If it had been up to Governor Perry, Buck would be dead.  Perry ignored a defense request for a 30-day reprieve, and was going to to let Buck's execution proceed despite the undisputed fact that his trial was tainted by racism.  In fact, Perry was not even in the State.  He was campaigning in Iowa, leaving any last minute decisions to his lieutenant governor. 

Let's think about that for a moment.  Rick Perry was too busy running for president to even bother with the decision whether to grant a temporary reprieve to allow further consideration of the race-related issues in Duane Buck's trial.

It is worth noting that it takes five Supreme Court justices to issue a stay.  That means at least one, if not more, of the conservative justices on the court disagree with Perry's cavalier approach to the death penalty.  And, given the majority's hostility to capital defendants, that is really saying something.

Two more men are scheduled to be executed in Texas next week, including Cleve Foster who, like Steve Woods, was not the actual killer. 

We've already had a former Texas governor in the White House who gave remarkably short shrift to clemency decisions in death penalty cases.  And we all know how that worked out.

Rick Perry's Chance At Redemption: Save Duane Buck

Duane Buck

Texas Governor Rick Perry is proud of his unprecedented record of 234 executions.  But even Perry should be ashamed if Duane Buck becomes number 235.  It is undisputed that Duane Buck's death sentence was tainted by race.  At his 1997 trial, a psychologist testified that although the double murder Buck committed was a crime of passion, he was likely to be more violent in the future because he is black.    

Buck was one of seven to receive a death sentence based on such testimony, all from the same expert.  This kind of evidence, subsequently prohibited by law, is particularly harmful in Texas because under its death penalty statute jurors are asked specifically to consider future dangerousness in deciding between life and death.  And in Buck's case, the prosecutor argued to the jury that they should find future dangerousness and impose death based on this testimony. 

 In 2000, then-Texas Attorney General John Cornyn (now a U.S. Senator) conceded that all seven men had been unfairly sentenced to death because of this improper racial testimony and called for new sentencing trials.  He said at the time: "It is inappropriate to allow race to be considered as a factor in our criminal justice system." 

The other six men received new sentencing hearings.  Duane Buck did not.  According to the state, Buck's attorneys failed to raise the issue in a timely manner on appeal.  And so he is scheduled to be executed on Thursday.  

The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles recommended against clemency yesterday, leaving Buck's fate in the hands of Governor Rick Perry, who has the power to grant a 30-day reprieve, and District Attorney Pat Lykos, who can seek to withdraw the execution date.

Linda Geffin, one of the prosecutors at Buck's trial (currently division chief of the Special Prosecutions Unit in the Office of the Harris County Attorney) is urging state officials to stop the execution.  She regrets "that any race-based considerations were placed before Mr. Buck's jury" and contends that "no individual should be executed without being afforded a fair trial, untainted by considerations of race."

 Also supporting a halt to the execution is Phyllis Taylor, the woman who survived the shooting which killed two.  She said: “This execution would only add to my pain, and it wouldn’t give me closure," said Taylor, who survived a shot in the chest. "I would ask that Duane Buck’s life be spared. I feel that he deserves a fair trial.” 

Perry's bona fides are safe with the pro-death crowd which applauded the fact that he has presided over more executions than any modern governor.  If he would spare Duane Buck he could get applause from the rest of us.

Perry's Scheme Is Far Worse Than Ponzi's

Rick Perry is getting a lot of attention for describing Social Security as a "Ponzi scheme."  What is missed by focusing on this provocative soundbite is that Perry's point is not that Social Security must be fixed, but that it should be scrapped.  Perry believes that states should be permitted to opt out of Social Security and supports the radical, legally unsupportable and highly unpopular notion that Social Security, as well as Medicaid, is unconstitutional.

I don’t think our founding fathers when they were putting the term “general welfare” in there were thinking about a federally operated program of pensions nor a federally operated program of health care. What they clearly said was that those were issues that the states need to address. Not the federal government. I stand very clear on that. From my perspective, the states could substantially better operate those programs if that’s what those states decided to do. 

It would be helpful if the media would cease being enamored of another purportedly macho straight talker with a Texas twang, and realize that Perry is another dangerous case of All Hat and No Cattle. 

Inside Rick Perry's Brain

"My brain is like a chicken pot pie"  -- Rick Perry, 1994.

Earlier, I wrote about Rick Perry's (and the Republican audience's) disturbing response to questions about his unprecedented record on executions.  (See Ultimate Justice.)  Perry claims not to have "struggled at all" with putting people to death despite serious questions of innocence.

As Steve Benen notes, in the same debate Perry maintained that the science on climate change “is not settled,” and that he doesn’t care what “some scientist somewhere says."  

The governor balks when presented with evidence on evolution, abstinence education, and climate change, but embraces without question the notion that everyone he’s killed in Texas was 100% guilty. The scientific process, he apparently believes, is unreliable, while the state criminal justice system is infallible.

Perry will not let the facts get in the way of his policy positions.  While intellectually, morally and politically bankrupt, it is at least consistent. 

Rick Perry's Plan To Save Blue States From Red States

By Robert Reich, cross-posted from his website

Of all the nonsense Texas Governor Rick Perry spews about state’s rights and the tenth amendment, his dumbest is the notion that states should go it alone. “We’ve got a great Union,” he said at a Tea Party rally in Austin in April 2009. “There’s absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that.”

The core of his message isn’t outright secession, though. It’s that the locus of governmental action ought to be at the state rather than the federal level. “It is essential to our liberty,” he writes in his book, Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America from Washington, “that we be allowed to live as we see fit through the democratic process at the local and state level.”



Perry doesn’t like the Federal Reserve Board. He hates the Internal Revenue Service even more. Presumably if he had his way taxpayers would pay states rather than the federal government for all the services and transfer payments they get.

This might be a good deal for Texas. According to the most recent data from the Tax Foundation, the citizens of Texas receive only 94 cents from the federal government for every tax dollar they send to Washington.

But it would be a bad deal for most other red states. On average, citizens of states with strong Republican majorities get back more from the federal government than they pay in. Kentucky receives $1.51 from Washington for every dollar its citizens pay in federal taxes. Alabama gets back $1.66. Louisiana receives $1.78. Alaska, $1.84. Mississippi, $2.02. Arizona, $1.19. Idaho, $1.21. South Carolina, $1.35. Oklahoma, $1.36. Arkansas, $1.41. Montana, $1.47, Nebraska, $1.10. Wyoming, $1.11. Kansas, $1.12.

On the other hand, fiscal secession would be a boon to most blue states. The citizens of California – harder hit by the recession than most – receive from Washington only 78 cents for every tax dollar they send to Washington. New Yorkers get back only 79 cents on every tax dollar they send in. Massachusetts, 82 cents. Michigan, 92 cents. Oregon, 98 cents.

In other words, blue states are subsidizing red states. The federal government is like a giant sump pump – pulling dollars out of liberal enclaves like California, New York, Massachusetts, Oregon, and Michigan – and sending them to conservative places like Montana, Idaho, Oklahoma, Arizona, Wyoming, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Old South.

As a practical matter, then, Rick Perry’s fight to save America from Washington is really a fight to save blue states from red states.

Robert Reich is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley.  He writes a blog at www.robertreich.org.  His most recent book is Aftershock.