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Progressive Victory In Oregon: Voters Approve Tax Hikes On Corporations And The Wealthy To Close Budget Gap

By Zaid Jilani on Jan 27, 2010 at 8:00 pm

cheeriiiiiiiiiiion As states around the country face budget crises, “deficit peacocks” continue to demand cutting social spending while ruling out tax increases on those who have benefited immensely from years of conservative policies. Oregon is one of the states that is faced with a budget crisis on the horizon. With a projected shortfall of $2.5 billion between 2009 and 2011, the state is on the verge of having to freeze salaries for public employees, end forest protection rules, and make deep cuts to education spending. Oregon’s deficit peacocks, of course, argued vigorously against considering any new taxes, arguing that harmful cuts to social spending were inevitable.

Oregon progressives, however, had a different idea. Pointing out that Oregon has one of the lowest corporate tax rates in the nation — the corporate minimum income tax is a paltry $10 a year — and that Oregon’s wealthy have benefited enormously from years of conservative policies — they organized around two ballot initiatives, Measures 66 and 67, that would raise taxes on the upper-income tax bracket and corporations, which would protect $1 billion in services while not raising taxes on 97.5% of taxpayers and 93% of small business owners.

Corporate leaders formed front groups like Oregonians Against Job-Killing Taxes and flooded the airwaves with fear mongering ads about how small tax increases on the wealthiest Oregonians would harm the state. Unions, community organizations, and progressive businesses fought back with a grassroots campaign of their own in favor of the measures. Yesterday, Oregon’s voters went to the polls and “handily” passed both measures, marking the first time since 1930 Oregon voters had voted to increase taxes:

Backers of two Oregon tax increases say the easy victories Tuesday night are an indication of voter support for public services. Measure 66 will raise taxes on upper income households and Measure 67 will increase taxes on most businesses. Both measures passed by about 54-to-46 percent. [...]

The director of the Vote Yes campaign, Kevin Looper, says in the end, voters agreed. Kevin Looper: “This wasn’t about trying to soak the rich. This was about trying to protect the middle class. And it is the case that you have to ask those who can afford to, to pay a little more in order to do that. But these taxes were not a huge burden to be asking for those who can afford to, to cover. And I think most of them understood that.”

Following the passage of both measures, Oregon Republican Party Chairman Bob Tiernan was unable to cope with the fact that voters flatly rejected conservative free market fundamentalism, saying that the “success of a nationally-bankrolled campaign does not accurately reflect the views of all Oregonians. Voters across the state want their legislators to tighten their belts along with the rest of us.”

The truth is that Oregon is hardly alone when it comes to rejecting the right’s anti-tax philosophy. 29 states have “passed tax and fee increases totaling $24 billion this budget year, according to the National Governors Association, up from $1.5 billion a year earlier. ” Reflecting on the Oregon victory, Calitics notes, “What it also shows is that progressive policies, supported by smart progressive organizing led by folks such as former US Senate candidate Steve Novick and the Oregon Bus Project, which reached out to younger voters and had a strong ground game, can beat well-funded, well-organized corporate/teabagger alliances. ”

Update

The Senate is currently considering its version of the upcoming jobs bill. The House’s version includes billions in support for cash-strapped states. The New York Times notes today that including aid to states in the Senate bill is essential because it is “among the surest ways to preserve and create jobs because the money is pushed through quickly to employees, contractors and beneficiaries. The alternative is recovery-killing spending cuts … on the state level.”

Climate Progress

Ben Nelson’s Logically Incoherent Stance On Cap And Trade

By Brad Johnson on Jan 27, 2010 at 7:31 pm

Ben NelsonThere seems to be something about climate policy that encourages senators to take positions that are logically impossible. In the latest instance, Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) has now managed to simultaneously oppose and support a carbon command-and-control regime. Nelson is one of three Democrats to co-sponsor Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s (R-AK) resolution overturning the EPA’s greenhouse gas endangerment finding, supposedly because “EPA regulations would be a government-directed command-and-control regime”:

I am very concerned about the impact on Nebraska if EPA moves to regulate carbon emissions. Many Nebraska agricultural, industrial and energy-related businesses and organizations have warned about the costs they would have to shoulder from EPA regulations. Because EPA regulations would be a government-directed command-and-control regime, they would raise the price of energy in Nebraska, add greatly to administrative costs, and create new layers of bureaucracy. The burden would fall squarely on Nebraska families, farmers and businesses.

The EPA’s rules will function as a soft cap on large emitters of global warming pollution, most of whom are already covered by Clean Air Act permits for traditional pollution. No new layers of bureaucracy will be created. However, the cost of fossil-based energy would slowly rise. Because it would be legally difficult for the EPA to establish an emissions trading system, companies could not use market means to mitigate those costs.

The ability of trading markets to reduce compliance costs for pollution reduction is the key selling point of a Congressionally established cap-and-trade market as opposed to a command-and-control regime. However, Nelson has also indicated he opposes a cap-and-trade system:

Nelson said he has not had detailed conversations yet with Kerry, Graham and Lieberman. But he said he is open to negotiations on setting a limit on greenhouse gas emissions. “I want to see what the legislation does,” he said. “I said I can support cap. I have trouble with cap and trade, the trade part of it. So if it’s cap and trade, watered down, and it’s only the trade watered down, that won’t satisfy me.”

A cap without “trade” is by definition a command-and-control regime — which Nelson has said he opposes on economic grounds. But he claims to oppose a cap with “trade” on populist grounds. In short, he’s using logically inconsistent excuses to block both executive branch and legislative branch action on global warming.

Nelson may be trying to pander to polls, which show that the phrase “cap and trade” is unpopular by comparison to Americans’ desire for the government to regulate polluters and support clean energy investment. Or maybe he’s pandering to his corporate polluter donors, who need senators like Nelson to maintain the Bush-Cheney status quo.

Climate Progress

Lobbyists for foreign corporations begin fight to ensure foreign money can influence American elections

By Climate Guest Blogger on Jan 27, 2010 at 7:06 pm

This is Think Progress repost.

Last week, the 5-4 Supreme Court ruling in the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision invalidated a sixty-three year-old ban on corporate money in federal elections. The ruling gives corporations essentially the same rights as individuals in their ability to spend freely on political advertising, even if those advertisements explicitly advocate the election or defeat of a federal candidate. One consequence of this decision is that foreign corporations with U.S.-subsidiaries are likely to be able to now spend unlimited amounts on American elections.

Congressional Democrats, led by Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL), Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), are drafting legislation to curb the influence of foreign corporations and foreign governments following the decision. However, the National Journal reported today that corporate lobbyists representing foreign corporations are already organizing to defeat such a proposal.

Read more

Alyssa

State of the Union

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Jan 27, 2010 at 6:32 pm

I’m covering it tonight for the day job, so blogging on Thursday will probably be pretty slow since I won’t have time to write posts.  But can I register a brief note of regret that no State of the Union will ever be this badass? (Minus the dorky-sounding “I’m going to get the guns” line, of course.)

Politics

Rep. King Offers Conspiracy To Support O’Keefe: ‘Seems Really Convenient That This Would Happen Now’

By Lee Fang on Jan 27, 2010 at 6:16 pm

On Monday, conservative activist James O’Keefe and three others were arrested by the FBI and “charged with entering federal property under false pretenses with the intent of committing a felony.” The gang was caught in what appeared to be an attempt to wiretap Sen. Mary Landrieu’s (D-LA) office in New Orleans. O’Keefe, who had been trained by several well-funded conservative institutes and had been working for right-wing blogger Andrew Breitbart, gained notoriety for dressing up as a pimp and videotaping ACORN staffers offering to help the supposed pimp and his prostitutes secure funding for a brothel.

Last October, 31 House Republicans introduced a congressional resolution honoring O’Keefe for his efforts against ACORN. Rep. Steve King (R-IA), one of the resolution’s cosponsors, has fought to ban funding to an ACORN affiliate and has been one of O’Keefe’s most vocal fans. At a press conference, ThinkProgress asked King if he would withdraw his support for the resolution, given news of O’Keefe’s arrest. But King dodged the question repeatedly, at one point defending O’Keefe, then later suggesting his resolution praising the conservative activist is frivolous compared to what Congress should be debating right now. At one point, the Iowa congressman floated the possibility of a conspiracy against O’Keefe, noting, “It seems really convenient that this would happen now”:

TP: Several of you, and I think some of your colleagues signed onto a resolution honoring James O’Keefe, the conservative activist who was in the news recently because he was caught trying to wiretap Sen. Landreu’s office.

KING: you are innocent until proven guilty and it’s off topic so I won’t– [...] You know, I think that — I wanted to dig into that and find out some more details that I could pick up. Some of the behind the scenes information, because it seems really convenient that this would happen now. [...]

TP: Congressman King, I’m just trying to figure this out. You pushed an effort to defund ACORN, but at the same time you are saying James O’Keefe is innocent until proven guilty. You’ve already passed judgement on ACORN without a trial.

KING: We pass judgment all the time [...] He has been picked up and the allegations are that he committed an act. Now he is innocent until proven guilty. ACORN needs to be investigated.

TP: And if Pelosi forced a vote on the O’Keefe resolution would you vote on it.

KING: I’d want to see the language. Why would we focus on this?

Watch the video produced by Victor Zapanta:

It’s odd that King isn’t aware of the O’Keefe resolution’s language seeing that he cosponsored it. Also, while downplaying O’Keefe’s purported attempt to wiretap Landrieu, King brushed off the alleged crime as simply an “act.” If O’Keefe was attempting to wiretap the Senator — a suspicion reported in the press given the fact his cohorts were caught tampering with phones while posing as telephone company employees — he would be accessing private conversations that might deal with Landrieu’s sensitive work on the Homeland Security Committee, which deals with matters of terrorism and national security.

Security

Did Torture Apologist Thiessen Get Played By The CIA?

By Matt Duss on Jan 27, 2010 at 6:15 pm

thiessen1.jpgYesterday, Jeff Stein reported that “John Kiriakou, the former CIA operative who affirmed claims that waterboarding quickly unloosed the tongues of hard-core terrorists, says he didn’t know what he was talking about.”

Kiriakou, a 15-year veteran of the agency’s intelligence analysis and operations directorates, electrified the hand-wringing national debate over torture in December 2007 when he told ABC’s Brian Ross and Richard Esposito in a much ballyhooed, exclusive interview that senior al Qaeda commando Abu Zubaydah cracked after only one application of the face cloth and water.[...]

Now comes John Kiriakou, again, with a wholly different story. On the next-to-last page of a new memoir, The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA’s War on Terror (written with Michael Ruby), Kiriakou now rather off handedly admits that he basically made it all up. [...]

“I wasn’t there when the interrogation took place; instead, I relied on what I’d heard and read inside the agency at the time.”[...]

“Now we know,” Kiriakou goes on, “that Zubaydah was waterboarded eighty-three times in a single month, raising questions about how much useful information he actually supplied.”

Kiriakou also claims in his book “that the disinformation he helped spread was a CIA dirty trick: ‘In retrospect, it was a valuable lesson in how the CIA uses the fine arts of deception even among its own.’”

Kiriakou’s disavowal of his claims drew a frantic response from Bush administration speechwriter and leading torture apologist Marc Thiessen, who has cited the Abu Zubaydah stories repeatedly in his work. Thiessen insisted “I have spoken to the people who — unlike Kirakou — were in the room for the interrogations of Zubaydah, KSM and other terrorists held by the CIA.”

Thiessen admits, then, that he, like Kiriakou, wasn’t actually there for any of these interrogations, and that he, like Kiriakou, got all of his information second-hand. This raises the interesting question of whether Thiessen got played by his CIA sources, who saw Thiessen as a willing dupe in their effort to cover their behinds, as Kiriakou now claims to have been.

Meanwhile, Tom Ricks shares his account of a recent lecture given by intelligence and interrogation expert Army Col. Stuart Herrington. According to Ricks, “was one of the first people to blow the whistle on Abu Ghraib and on the broader abuse of prisoners that was occurring in many locations in Iraq back then.”

One of the most striking aspects of [Herrington's] talk is the cold professional contempt he has for Cheney, Rumsfeld and others who not only encouraged a brutal approach, but were amateurish in doing so.

Herrington began his talk by looking back to Vietnam, where he insisted on providing his prisoners(and intelligence targets) with “unconditional decent treatment-food, medical care and clothing.” He showed his Vietnamese colleagues, fond of using “water torture and electrocution,” that “One can employ legions of effective stratagems to achieve control over a potential recruit, but brutality, abuse and torture have no place.”

His bottom line:

“There was no room on our team for charlatans who believed in sleep deprivation, inducing hypothermia, stress positions, face slapping, forced nudity, water boarding, blaring heavy metal music, or other amateurish, ineffective and ethically flawed tricks.”

As of January 20, 2009, that’s America’s bottom line too.

Yglesias

SOTU Coverage

By Matthew Yglesias on Jan 27, 2010 at 6:14 pm

No “endgame” this evening, since I’ve got to keep working. I’ll probably be doing my main State of the Union coverage on my public twitter feed and I should also be on the post-SOTU edition of Countdown tonight, exact time TBD based on what actually happens.

Update

MSNBC appearance now looking canceled.

Security

Colin Powell: ‘Nuclear Weapons Are Useless’

By Max Bergmann on Jan 27, 2010 at 5:30 pm

General Colin Powell in an introduction to a new film called the Nuclear Tipping Point didn’t mince words. In a forceful and direct presentation, the former Cold Warrior talked about his experience in dealing with nuclear weapons throughout his military career. Powell discussed the nuclear planning that he conducted against the Soviets in Europe and the responsibility of having oversight of 28,000 nuclear weapons as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Through these experiences, Powell concluded that nuclear weapons are “useless” and ought to be eliminated.

POWELL: The more I got into nuclear weapons. The more I realized that these weapons must never be used. And then I became Chairman of the Joint chiefs of staff in 1989 and I had 28,000 nuclear weapons under my supervision. And every morning I looked to see where the Russian submarines were off the coast of Virginia and how far away those missions were from Washington. I kept track where the Russian missiles were in Europe and in the Soviet Union. The one thing that I convinced myself after all these years of exposure to the use of nuclear weapons is that they were useless. They could not be used. If you can have deterence with an even lower number of weapons, well then why stop there, why not continue on, why not get rid of them altogether…This is the moment when we have to move forward and all of us come together to reduce the number of nuclear weapons and eliminate them from the face of the earth.

Watch it:

Powell’s call for the elimination of nuclear weapons comes at a critical time. With President Obama in need of 67 votes in the Senate to ratify two treaties critical to the nuclear non-proliferation agenda, he must convince 8 GOP Senators to abandon the politics of obstruction and support these efforts that serve to enhance America’s security and reduce the likelihood for nuclear attack. Powell could certainly be a powerful force in that effort.

Furthermore, Powell’s statements just further expose a growing divide among the right. Nuclear Tipping Point was put together by the Nuclear Threat Initiative and is part of the robust efforts of former Secretaries George Schultz, Bill Perry, Henry Kissinger and Senator Sam Nunn to warn of the dangers of nuclear terrorism and to work for the elimination of nuclear weapons. While former senior Republican national security officials like Powell, Kissinger, Schultz, and Brent Scowcroft call for reductions in nuclear weapons, neoconservatives like Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) actually favor building new nuclear weapons.

Yglesias

Everything is Off The Table

By Matthew Yglesias on Jan 27, 2010 at 5:28 pm

According to Ezra Klein, before the Deficit Commission died in the Senate, a 97-0 vote backed an amendment from Max Baucus that would guarantee that the Commission couldn’t touch Social Security. RNC Chairman Michael Steel has made “protecting Medicare” from cuts a core plank of the GOP. And of course Republicans don’t want to raise taxes or cut defense spending either. But they think the deficit is too high. There’s kind of a problem here.

Climate Progress

In 3-2 Vote, SEC requires companies to disclose climate risks to investors

By Climate Guest Blogger on Jan 27, 2010 at 5:26 pm

Many major industries have climate risks, starting with insurers.  In this Wonk Room repost, Brad Johnson explains what the SEC did today to help investors understand what those risks are.  I’ll add a note on the two anti-science SEC commissioners at the end.

UPDATE:  SEC has put out a Press Release (and a video of the Chair’s statement).

Green InvestingIn a 3-to-2 vote, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission determined today that companies “must consider the effects of global warming and efforts to curb climate change when disclosing business risks to investors.”

Guidelines approved today require companies to weigh the impact of climate-change laws and regulations when assessing what information to disclose, the commission said. The SEC is responding to investors who said companies aren’t providing enough data on the potential risks to their profits and operations from environmental- protection laws. In the 3-to-2 vote, the commission said companies in the U.S. should also consider international accords, indirect effects such as lower demand for goods that produce greenhouse gases, and physical impacts such as the potential for increased insurance claims in coastal regions as a result of rising sea levels.

Read more

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