This is a brilliant bit of satire that gets at the core of the GOP’s regressive politics.
Author: hankkalet
Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie.
Economic junkies
Junk bonds are back, which is bad news for the economy.
As The New York Times reports,
Companies with junk credit ratings have been increasingly issuing bonds for riskier purposes that could hinder their ability to pay back bondholders.
Demand for junk bonds has touched record levels this year as investors reach for their rich yields, a stark contrast to the meager returns available on Treasury securities and money market accounts. But the voracious demand has allowed companies to easily raise money for things that may actually end up weakening them.
Junk bonds, also called high-yield bonds, tend to offer higher yields when they pay off but carry significantly higher risk of default. The problem is not the bonds themselves, but the way they tend to be used — to financed forced takeovers that strip value from the company taken over, to fund the collateralized-debt obligations at the center of the 2008 crash and, as they are being used now, to pay off investors without thought to what they will do to the long-term health of the company.
And companies have been using more of the proceeds for the sorts of risky projects that were common before the financial crisis and in the go-go days of the 1980s — paying dividends to private equity owners and financing mergers and leveraged buyouts.
Jo-Ann Stores and Petco, for instance, both with junk ratings of CCC, sold a combined $875 million of bonds this month, with some of the money set to quickly leave the companies through dividend payments to their private equity owners. Many analysts say that the practice can hurt the financial health of the companies by increasing their regular interest payments to bondholders without strengthening the underlying business.
Basically, the companies are adding debt without adding value, which at some point is going to come back to haunt them — and us.
The abortion debate in a nutshell, or why I’m pro-choice
Gail Collins neatly sums up something I’ve been saying for a while: You are either pro-life with no exceptions or you are pro-choice. There can be no middle ground:
The idea of banning abortion except for rape and incest cases makes anti-choice politicians sound more evenhanded, but it doesn’t actually make much sense. If you believe life begins at conception, then that’s a life, and you should try to convince women not to terminate any pregnancy, no matter what the cause. Our difference of opinion is over whether you can impose your beliefs with the threat of cops and penitentiaries.
And if rape victims deserve exemptions because their situation is dire, what about other women with unwanted pregnancies and terrible stories? The real crime of people like Mourdock and Akin is that their inartful language throws a sudden stark light on a stance that sounds so unthreatening when a candidate simply says: “I’m pro-life.”
Pretty simple, don’t you think?
Who let these guys join the party?
With Mitt Romney shifting toward the center in his debate performances with Barack Obama, you could be forgiven for thinking the GOP has regained a sense of composure and rationality.
You’d be woefully mistaken, of course.
Just listen to the rank nonsense uttered regularly by its own candidates and campaign surrogates, who seem engaged in a competition to see who best show showcase the party’s collection of kooks and cranks.
We know about Todd Akin and his views on rape and pregnancy, and his misogynistic comments about his opponent, Claire McCaskill.
Then Richard Mourdock, who ousted longtime Sen. Richard Luger, in a primary and now leads in Indiana’s Senate race explained that,
“even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that is something that God intended to happen.”
This goes beyond the pro-life position to one in which he’s justifying the rape as god’s will. It is a truly disturbing comment that is completely indefensible.
Add Sarah Palin to the list, thanks to her racially charged attack on Obama. Then again, she’s been on this list all along, with notable race-baiters like Newt Gingrich and Donald Trump.
As for Trump, he made another in a long line of crazy proposals and claims, today offering a donation to charity in exchange for President Obama’s college transcripts and passport records.
What ever you think of the president, this obsession with his legitimacy is scary and has everything to do with his race. There remains an disturbingly large minority of Americans — most of whom affiliate with the GOP — who refuse to accept that a black man can or should be president. This unwillingness has been translated into a paranoia about birth certificates and official records that can not be dispelled no matter what kind of documentation is provided.
That these kinds of delusional ravings now come from the GOP mainstream is terrifying — and should be an indictment of a party that probably should go the way of the Whigs.
DOMA takes another hit
The Defense of Marriage Act was just dealt a major blow.
A federal appeals court in Manhattan ruled on Thursday that the federal statute defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman unlawfully discriminates against same-sex married couples by denying them equal federal benefits.
As The New York Times points out, it is the second time a federal appeals court has ruled against DOMA.
But this decision on Thursday is the first time that an appeals court has subjected the law to a relatively tough test for constitutionality that, in effect, elevates issues of sexual orientation to the constitutional level of cases involving sexual discrimination.
Think Progress described the decision this way:
This is a really big deal. Jacobs is not simply saying that DOMA imposes unique and unconstitutional burdens on gay couples, he is saying that any attempt by government to discriminate against gay people must have an “exceedingly persuasive” justification. This is the same very skeptical standard afforded to laws that discriminate against women. If Jacobs’ reasoning is adopted by the Supreme Court, it will be a sweeping victory for gay rights, likely causing state discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation to be virtually eliminated. And the fact that this decision came from such a conservative judge makes it all the more likely that DOMA will ultimately be struck down by the Supreme Court.
