Just how stupid does Mitt Romney think we are? If you’ve been following his campaign from the beginning, that’s a question you have probably asked many times.
But the question was raised with particular force last week, when Mr. Romney tried to make a closed drywall factory in Ohio a symbol of the Obama administration’s economic failure. It was a symbol, all right — but not in the way he intended.
First of all, many reporters quickly noted a point that Mr. Romney somehow failed to mention:George W. Bush, not Barack Obama, was president when the factory in question was closed. Does the Romney campaign expect Americans to blame President Obama for his predecessor’s policy failure?
Yes, it does. Mr. Romney constantly talks about job losses under Mr. Obama. Yet all of the net job loss took place in the first few months of 2009, that is, before any of the new administration’s policies had time to take effect. So the Ohio speech was a perfect illustration of the way the Romney campaign is banking on amnesia, on the hope that voters don’t remember that Mr. Obama inherited an economy that was already in free fall.
How does the campaign deal with people who point out the awkward reality that all of the “Obama” job losses took place before any Obama policies had taken effect? The fallback argument — which was rolled out when reporters asked about the factory closure — is that even though Mr. Obama inherited a deeply troubled economy, he should have fixed it by now. That factory is still closed, said a Romney adviser, because of the failure of Obama policies “to really get this economy going again.”
Actually, that factory would probably still be closed even if the economy had done better — drywall is mainly used in new houses, and while the economy may be coming back, the Bush-era housing bubble isn’t.
But Mr. Romney’s poor choice of a factory for his photo-op aside, I guess accusing Mr. Obama of not doing enough to promote recovery is a better argument than blaming him for the effects of Bush policies. However, it’s not much better, since Mr. Romney is essentially advocating a return to those very same Bush policies. And he’s hoping that you don’t remember how badly those policies worked.
For the Bush era didn’t just end in catastrophe; it started off badly, too. Yes, Mr. Obama’s jobs record has been disappointing — but it has been unambiguously better than Mr. Bush’s over the comparable period of his administration.
This is especially true if you focus on private-sector jobs. Overall employment in the Obama years has been held back by mass layoffs of schoolteachers and other state and local government employees. But private-sector employment has recovered almost all the ground lost in the administration’s early months. That compares favorably with the Bush era: as of March 2004, private employment was still 2.4 million below its level when Mr. Bush took office.
Oh, and where have those mass layoffs of schoolteachers been taking place? Largely in states controlled by the G.O.P.: 70 percent of public job losses have been either in Texas or in states where Republicans recently took control.
Which brings me to another aspect of the amnesia campaign: Mr. Romney wants you to attribute all of the shortfalls in economic policy since 2009 (and some that happened in 2008) to the man in the White House, and forget both the role of Republican-controlled state governments and the fact that Mr. Obama has faced scorched-earth political opposition since his first day in office. Basically, the G.O.P. has blocked the administration’s efforts to the maximum extent possible, then turned around and blamed the administration for not doing enough.
So am I saying that Mr. Obama did everything he could, and that everything would have been fine if he hadn’t faced political opposition? By no means. Even given the political constraints, the administration did less than it could and should have in 2009, especially on housing. Furthermore, Mr. Obama was an active participant in Washington’s destructive “pivot” away from jobs to a focus on deficit reduction.
And the administration has suffered repeatedly from complacency — taking a few months of good news as an excuse to rest on its laurels rather than hammering home the need for more action. It did that in 2010, it did it in 2011, and to a certain extent it has been doing the same thing this year too. So there is a valid critique one can make of the administration’s handling of the economy.
But that’s not the critique Mr. Romney is making. Instead, he’s basically attacking Mr. Obama for not acting as if George Bush had been given a third term. Are the American people — and perhaps more to the point, the news media — forgetful enough for that attack to work? I guess we’ll find out.
If the Koch brothers didn't exist, the left would have to invent them. They're the plutocrats from central casting – oil-and-gas billionaires ready to buy any congressman, fund any lie, fight any law, bust any union, despoil any landscape, or shirk any (tax) burden to push their free-market religion and pump up their profits.
But no need to invent – Charles and David Koch are the real deal. Over the past 30-some years, they've poured more than 100 million dollars into a sprawling network of foundations, think tanks, front groups, advocacy organizations, lobbyists and GOP lawmakers, all to the glory of their hard-core libertarian agenda. They don't oppose big government so much as government – taxes, environmental protections, safety-net programs, public education: the whole bit. (By all accounts, the Kochs are true believers; they really buy that road-to-serfdom stuff about the the holiness of free markets. Still, you can't help but notice how neatly their philosophy lines up with their business interests.) They like to think of elected politicians as merely "actors playing out a script," and themselves as supplying "the themes and words for the scripts." Imagine Karl Rove’s strategic cunning, crossed with Ron Paul’s screw-the-poor ideology, and hooked up to Warren Buffett's checking account, and you’re halfway there.
For years, the brothers shunned the spotlight. David Koch used to joke that the family business, the Wichita, Kansas-based Koch Industries – with annual profits estimated at $100 billion, it's the second-biggest private firm in America – was "the largest company you’ve never heard of." But when Barack Obama became president, the Kochs, like a lot of right-wingers, flipped out. They threw their weight behind a stealth campaign to turn back the president’s "socialist" agenda: They were early backers, some say puppet masters, of the Tea Party movement, and when the tea-infused GOP retook the House in the famous midterm "shellacking" of 2010, it was with a big assist from Koch money. (They later blessed the brief, ill-fated presidential run of Tea Party-favorite Herman Cain. That's how crazy – or cynical – these guys are.) Progressive activists and the news media started paying attention – most notably ThinkProgress and Jane Mayer of The New Yorker – and pretty soon the Kochs had become the poster boys of "the 1 percent" and a surefire fundraising tool for the Democratic Party; at the mere mention of the Koch name, liberal wallets fall open.
Now the Kochs are the subject of a blistering (but to all appearances factual) documentary by the activist filmmaker Robert Greenwald. Koch Brothers Exposed aims to show how the brothers' machinations affect the lives of "living, breathing human beings," as Greenwald put it to me at the film’s New York premiere in late March. "When I learned about the damage the Kochs were doing to our democracy, I wanted to make sure more Americans understood what they're up to."
On the evidence of Koch Brothers Exposed, the more relevant question is: What aren't they up to? The film – scrappy and low-budget, but effective all the same – weaves together a string of shorter videos produced over the past year by Greenwald’s nonprofit Brave New Films, each looking at a separate tentacle of the "Kochtopus," as lefty wags have dubbed the Kochs' network. It recounts how the brothers have:
• helped fund efforts to undo a model diversity policy in the Wake County school system in North Carolina, effectively resegregating the district – part of a larger campaign, the film alleges, to weaken the public school system and prepare the way for widespread privatization;
• pushed voter ID laws – purportedly aimed at combating ballot fraud but really designed to keep Democrats from voting – through their financial support for the American Legislative Exchange Council, an increasingly radioactive business group specializing in the drafting of corporate-friendly pick-up-and-pass legislation for state lawmakers. (ALEC is also behind the insane "Stand Your Ground" gun laws at issue in the Trayvon Martin shooting case);
• pumped millions of dollars into more than 150 colleges and university in exchange for control over hiring and curriculum decisions, to ensure students will be exposed to the free-market fundamentalism of Ayn Rand, Freidrich von Hayek and like minds;
• bankrolled a coordinated campaign to swing public opinion in favor of privatizing Social Security, deploying Koch-funded think tanks, experts, and pundits to spread the myth that the program is on the brink of bankruptcy.
(Greenwald might equally well have documented Koch-funded efforts to repeal Obama's health care law, deny climate change, undermine collective-bargaining rights, or block Wall Street reform, but there's only so much a single film can cover.)
All diabolical stuff, from the liberal point of view. Of course, you might want to argue that even if the scale of the Kochs' doings puts them in a league of their own, they're just exercising their constitutional right to play politics at the platinum level, like plenty of other high rollers on the right (and on the left, for that matter). Which of course gets at the basic problem – the gigantic power of money in American politics makes a joke of our democracy. And, for sure, without ever touching the subject directly Greenwald's film makes a powerful case for campaign finance reform, by showing the malign sway a couple of rich guys with radical views can have over millions of lives. But Greenwald isn't just saying the system is rotten, or that the Kochs are wrong (though he is saying both); he wants to persuade us – viscerally – that these guys are bad.
He makes a strong circumstantial case. The film brings us to Penn Road in Crossett, Arkansas, a low-income black community where, by all appearances, the residents who haven't already died from cancer are stuck at home, tethered to oxygen tanks. Could all this death and illness have anything to do with the stream of stinking toxic waste water out back oozing downstream from the Koch-owned Georgia-Pacific plant? The residents sure think so. A woman named Dolores Wimberley sobs at the grave of her non-smoking, non-drinking 43-year-old daughter, who died of lung cancer, and says, "I feel that Georgia Pacific and Koch is responsible for my daughter’s death."
Koch Industries vehemently denies any responsibility for the cancer deaths in Crossett and touts its environmental record as "exemplary." As ThinkProgress and others have documented, it is not: Koch Industries has been named one of the top ten worst polluters in the country and found criminally liable in more than one pollution-related case, including one involving the discharge of (carcinogenic) benzene. And, wouldn't you know, the company has lobbied hard to prevent the E.P.A. from classifying formaldehyde, produced in huge quantities by none other than Georgia-Pacific, as a "known carcinogen" in humans.
Greenwald lays it on a bit thick here and there, but that's kind of the point. "A lot of progressives really believe that if we can turn out one more white paper with bullet points about how to fix Problem X, we can fix it," Greenwald says. "But that's not primarily the way you reach people or move them. You reach the heart first. What I always try to do is make the political personal."
But you have to ask: Who’s going to watch, or even hear about, Koch Brothers Exposed? The film isn't being released to theaters, since Greenwald reckoned few moviegoers would be willing to pony up $10 or more to see a no-frills documentary about a couple of oldster ideologues, however powerful or well researched. So to get the word out Brave New Films has teamed up with 40-plus progressive membership organizations and labor unions to form a far-flung anti-Koch coalition. The idea is that groups and individuals will hold screenings everywhere from their homes to bowling alleys, church basements, college campuses, and union halls. "The ultimate goal," Greenwald told Alternet, another partner, is "organize, organize — and then, organize." (Lefty activists are notoriously single-issue, but the all-enveloping reach of the Kochtopus makes opposing the brothers something all liberals can get behind: education, environment, labor rights, campaign finance, corporate malfeasance – everyone’s cause is on the line.) Available via streaming outlets and cable video-on-demand starting May 8, the film has the potential at least to reach beyond the choir into millions of American homes.
Have the Kochs caught Greenwald's flick? It has certainly crossed their radar. Google "Koch Brothers Exposed" and the first thing you see is a paid text ad that reads, "YouTube propagandist-for-hire dishonestly attacks Koch for cash." It links to Kochfacts.com, the company’s all-purpose damage-limitation website. A lawyer for Koch industries recently fired off a statement to Deadline Hollywood saying, "Mr. Greenwald's statements are maliciously false and misleading, and we urge the news media not to republish them," conveniently forgetting that the news media (from The New Yorker to the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times) is a major source of Greenwald's information. The film maker is pushing back with his Top Ten Koch Facts and a busy media schedule.
Whether or not Greenwald’s film reaches its hoped-for audience, we can expect to hear plenty about the Koch brothers this campaign season. Obama and the Democrats are going to make the election a referendum on a Republican Party hijacked by ideological zealots, 1 percenters, and religious nuts – we’re a long way from hope and change here – and the Kochs make a handy proxy for two out of the three. Team Obama regularly beats the Koch drum in their fundraising emails, leading to an angry public back-and-forth recently between a Koch lieutenant and the president's campaign manager. Meanwhile, Mitt Romney has been discreetly courting the Kochs, who backed him for president in 2008 and are said to have pledged to raise $100 million to defeat Obama. As Greenwald put it in a recent interview, Charles and David Koch "are going to do everything their money will allow them to do to influence this election negatively."
This video shows just how much the Koch brothers hate America. All they want to do is use it for their own greedy benefit. They are fascist in nature, since they buy political influence, buy legislation, and reward those in government once they leave through their sponsored Think Tank operations. They "train" their predators through the Think Tanks, and then, sponsor them to run for political office. And, once they serve, they are then returned to the Koch sponsored Think Tanks as a financial reward. This is fascist.
These predators want the Keystone Pipeline because they would be the oil refiners in the U.S. They are predators--evil predators. They don't care if they pollute, destroy lives, or destroy Democracy. It is all about THEM. They are Ayn Rand predators financing the Tea Party candidates.
The Mormon Liar-Mitt Romney has his hand in the Koch's wallet. From one predator to another.
"The Obama team isn't quite calling Mitt Romney a liar, but this week's back-and-forth brought the president's campaign about as close as ever to deploying the L-word.
The Obama campaign's term of art, instead of "liar," was "aversion to the truth" As in this statement, issued by Obama rapid response director Lis Smith, after Romney's speech in Ohio Thursday:
In a speech that he concluded by saying he’d ‘tell the truth,’ Mitt Romney actually didn’t tell the truth about President Obama’s record and his own failed record in Massachusetts—all while blaming the President for a plant closing that occurred before he took office. Mitt Romney is building quite a record of giving speeches filled with distortions and fabrications. Why does he have such an aversion to the truth? Contrary to Romney’s rhetoric today, under President Obama’s leadership every working American has received a tax cut, fewer new regulations have been approved than under President Bush, and we’ve gone from losing 750,000 jobs a month when he took office to creating over 4 million private sector jobs in the last 25 months. On the other hand, Mitt Romney’s record in Massachusetts was one of fewer jobs, higher taxes, more debt, and bigger government. And now he is embracing the same failed policies that created the economic crisis and closed the plant where he held his event today: tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires and letting Wall Street write its own rules.If Mitt Romney wants to ensure the American people that he will ‘tell the truth,’ he might want to start by getting a new speechwriter.
That was followed by a research document disputing the claims in Romney's speech, that was sent out to reporters under the subject line "Mitt Romney's Aversion to the Truth."
Part of the Obama message has long been that you can't trust the words coming out of Romney's mouth. But this strikes me as a ratcheting-up of that argument, and it's worth watching whether Chicago continues to sharpen the edge on that part of its contrast message."
[In other words, Mitt Romney, a devote Mormon, is a liar!]
