The Fox Effect by Media Matters for America, David Brock and Ari Rabin-Havt (Excerpt)

Based on the meticulous research of the news watchdog organization Media Matters for America, David Brock and Ari Rabin-Havt show how Fox News, under its president Roger Ailes, changed from a right-leaning news network into a partisan advocate for the Republican Party

http://www.scribd.com/doc/81739775/The-Fox-Effect-by-Media-Matters-for-America-David-Brock-and-Ari-Rabin-Havt-Excerpt

Vilifying the Poor Part II - Facts About the GOP, Poverty and Unemployment

Daniel Patrick Moynihan is attributed with saying, "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts."

Many of my friends who are members of the GOP and proudly call themselves conservative - or at least would say they are way right of me - seem to cling to Reagan's belief in trickle-down economics. A recent email from one such friend said that his opinion was that "...the war on poverty and the Great Society are abysmal failures..."

My response was, "You can have your own opinions, but you don't get to have your own facts." The rest of this post offers some facts about the relationship between which party controls the White House and the affects on poverty rates and unemployment in America.
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Here are a few sources of data - facts - that should offer a clear picture of reality if only one takes some time to look.

Census Bureau Poverty Data, 1959 - 2007
http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/poverty07/pov07fig03.pdf (from http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/trends.html)

A Visual Guide: The Balance of Power Between Congress and the Presidency, 1945-2010
http://uspolitics.about.com/od/usgovernment/l/bl_party_division_2.htm

Bureau of Labor Statistics' Employment status of the civilian non institutional population, 1940-2008
http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat1.pdf


Here's how I interpret the facts presented in these documents.....

1. Poverty rates declined dramatically in this country from 1960 to 1970, after which they remained pretty much flat before rising again in 1979
Unemployment in America, BTW, had risen from 2.9% in 1953, Eisenhower's first full year after taking the reigns from Truman, to 5.5% in 1960, his last year in office.

2. JFK and LBJ held the White House from 1961 to 1969
Unemployment drops from 6.7% during JFK's first year in office in 1961 to 3.6% by 1968, LBJ's last full year in office.

3. Democrats controlled both houses of Congress from 1955 to 1979
Unemployment ranged from a low of 3.5% in 1969 to a high of 8.5% in 1975 (the heart of Ford's administration).

4. A Democratically-controlled Congress seemed to somehow overcome what can only be characterized as the failed presidency of Nixon and the stagnant presidency of Ford from the years 1969 to 1977, at least as far as poverty was concerned.
Unemployment, however, rises during the Nixon and Ford administrations reaching a high of 8.5% in 1975 and falling back to 7.7% in Ford's last full year in office in 1976.

5. The second half of Carter's presidency was marked primarily by inflation from rising oil prices thanks to our "friends" in OPEC and the image of weakness over the Iranian embassy.
Poverty begins to rise as his presidency comes to an end.
Unemployment had fallen during his first two years in office and was back up to 7.1% for his last full year in office, 1980.

6. Reagan's platform of smaller government and Reaganomics helped him to win the 1980 election.
Admittedly, he came into a bad economic situation but his cure seemed to be worse than the disease. Reagan succeeded only in introducing us for the first time ever to the word "trillion" as part of the national debt.

"By buying into the supply-side notion that the U.S. could cut income taxes while simultaneously paying for massive increases in defense and certain highly popular domestic programs, Reagan may be justly dubbed the Father of the 12-Digit Deficit."
The Federal Deficit, Time. June 1992. p2. (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,975829-2,00.html)

Prophetic in many ways considering W did exactly the same thing 20 years later - cut taxes and increase spending. We never learn....


7. Reagan's election helps the Republicans to take back the Senate but not the House.

8. Poverty skyrockets in Reagan's first term and begins a modest downward trend in his second term
Unemployment continued to rise - in fact, leapt - hitting highs of 9.7% and 9.6% in 1982 and 1983, rates that hadn't been seen in 40+ years.
Unemployment begins to decline in 1984 (how could it not?), hitting 5.5% his last year in office, 1988, perhaps thanks in part to the fact that Americans returned control of the Senate, and thereby Congress, to Democrats in 1987.

9. Bush 41 is elected in 1988 and poverty skyrockets again.
Unemployment is back up to 7.5% by 1992, GHWB's last full year at the helm.

10. Clinton is elected in 1992 and takes office in 1993.
Poverty drops dramatically from the start of and throughout his presidency until.....you guessed it....W takes office
Unemployment drops immediately in Clinton's first year in office, going from 7.5% in 1992 to 6.9% in 1993
Unemployment continues to fall during the Clinton administration, hitting a low of 4.0% in 2000, Clinton's last full year in office

(GOP took back the Congress in 1995 and held both Houses essentially for the next 10 years until the 2007 elections. Republicans have W to thank for that.)

11. W is elected in 2000
Poverty skyrockets again during his presidency
Unemployment didn't climb dramatically, but it did go up to a high of 6.0% in 2003 and was at 5.8% in 2008


CONCLUSIONS
The number of people living in poverty has generally trended upward and unemployment tends to rise whenever there's a Republican in the White House. This is especially true since the Reagan years but can be traced back to Eisenhower at least as far as the affect on unemployment.

I really don't see how or why the poor keep getting blamed. This question of the affects the poor have on the economy is really a pretty sad and tired red herring of the Right.

So, it's perfectly fine to have an opinion about whether or not J-Lo has too much junk in her trunk (haven't seen her lately, but I say no), or whether or not you like Ted Nugent's music regardless of his politics (I love his music and now no longer believe he never did drugs because he's clearly brain-damaged!) but you don't get to have your own facts.

If you want to debate cause and effect, that's ok. But what you cannot debate is whether or not poverty and unemployment go up when Republicans have been in the White House at least over the last almost 60 years. This is quite evident from the data presented here.

Vilifying the Poor - Rebuttal to Star Parker

So, a friend sends an email to me containing a piece written by Star Parker summarizing (pitching?!?!) her 6 year old book, Uncle Sam's Plantation. This was my response....
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Let's face it. One has to deal in facts - true facts or lies that are claimed to be facts - to get the attention of Factcheck.org. Star Parker offers neither. She only has opinions. Maybe her absence from sites like Factcheck ought to be read as testimony to her utter irrelevance in the larger debate about federal spending, policy matters, budgets, and the poor.

In my opinion, she's nothing more than the African-American Ann Coulter. Have a listen to her at: http://www.urbancure.org/article.asp?id=3162 She and Ann make about the same amount of sense to me, too.......none.

And it comes as no surprise to me that only the yellowest of all the news networks, The Hannity/Beck Network, would even care about what she has to say.

If anyone is interested in some facts about the programs she vilifies, here are some links you might find useful.
* Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF): http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/ofa/tanf/about.html
"Under the welfare reform legislation of 1996, (the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act – PWRORA – Public Law 104-193), TANF replaced the welfare programs known as Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the Job Opportunities and Basic Skills Training (JOBS) program and the Emergency Assistance (EA) program. The law ended federal entitlement to assistance and instead created TANF as a block grant that provides States, territories and tribes federal funds each year. These funds cover benefits, administrative expenses, and services targeted to needy families. TANF became effective July 1, 1997, and was reauthorized in February 2006 under the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005."

The Goals stated are
" States receive a block grant to design and operate their programs to accomplish the purposes of TANF.

These are:

• assisting needy families so that children can be cared for in their own homes
• reducing the dependency of needy parents by promoting job preparation, work and marriage
• preventing out-of-wedlock pregnancies
• encouraging the formation and maintenance of two-parent families."

Now we can't have any of that, now can we?

* Job Opportunities and Basic Skills Training (JOBS): was replaced 13 years ago by the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) (see above and http://www.childtrends.org/Lifecourse/programs/JOBS.htm)

* Emergency Assistance to Needy Families with Children (EANF)
One of the rare situations where you can actually stump Google.
Your search - "Emergency Assistance to Needy Families with Children (EANF)" site:.gov - did not match any documents.
If she's going to criticize a program - one that looks like it no longer exists (see above), was administered by states and, at least in New York, required conditions like you to be homeless with little or no food (http://www.dads.ny.gov/main/ta/default.asp) - she should at least get the name right. Those kinds of errors tell me a lot about the credibility of the source......again, none.


So what's my point? To point out what I consider to be the obvious, of course! ;-) Like most people with an agenda, she's not letting facts get in the way.


And why this fascination with vilifying the poor?
...They don't make laws
...They don't have lobbyists
...They don't have much, if any, money
...They don't own banks, brokerages, or insurance firms
...They aren't typically registered as members of the party who passed such legislative gems in the name of capitalism and free markets as the Graham-Leach-Bliley act which, as you all know, removed all the safeguards, oversights, regulations, and restrictions on financial services companies created by the Glass-Steagall act which, as you also know, had to be passed by a Democratically-led Congress in 1933 to try and protect us from the greedy motherf***ing capitalists who gave us the first Great Depression and are back with their sequel, "Great Depression II: You Dumb-Asses Didn't Learn a Thing the First Time, Did You?"
...The poor didn't create bullshit investment instruments like collateralized debt obligations that tanked the whole friggin' world's economy while the modern day heros of capitalism were still getting paid their obscenely large bonuses
...The poor weren't the ones buying homes they couldn't afford, nor were they the ones writing the mortgages without so much as a passing interest in anyone's ability to repay the loan because the mortgages were being bundled and sold to someone else which eventually turned into the CDOs which.....oh hell, my head is spinning.
...They don't lobby their Senators and Representatives for tax cuts to wealthy Americans that accomplished nothing except to piss away a federal surplus and didn't create any noticeable improvement to the economy
...They didn't leave the Obama administration with a wrecked economy, a $500billion deficit (which probably doesn't really account for everything since W did Iraq off the books), a financial system in total ruin thanks to a lack of regulation, and a world roiling in political, social, and cultural turmoil

Do I really need to go on?

So what's her message - all you poor African Americans stop sitting around pretending that there's no work and go out there and make your mark in the world? Is that it? Is that all that's needed to get our economy growing again?

So Obama should abandon social programs and keep funneling money to the wealthy? Will that solve our problems?

Or is she also complaining that the president didn't just let W's utter and complete disaster culminate in the closing down of the world's economy? Let them fail, is that it? No such thing as too big to fail? Now that really would have been poetic justice for those who really think there is such a thing as capitalism and free markets, now wouldn't it?

I've news for you.....there's no such thing. The world is run by an oligarchy of rich and powerful people. It's not James Bond versus Specter, but it's not truly capitalism or free markets, either. And Oboma ain't no savior and he ain't no devil. He's one of them, too, just a little further to the left than others.

Hell, it's starting to look more and more like how Bill Mahr recently described our two-party system, "Democrats have moved to the right, and the right has moved into a mental hospital."

So let's say that Star (is that really her name?) is right. How could she not be, right? Hell, just look at the facts.
1. Our primary and secondary public education is extremely well-funded, progressive, and effective especially in inner city neighborhoods.
2. Higher education is eminently affordable to anyone who wants to go.
3. And the Republican administration of the last 8 years with all of their free market deregulation, tax cuts for the wealthy, and sound economic and fiscal policies has left us with an economy so sound and robust that it's just chock full of great paying jobs whether or not you even have a degree and so long as you get your sorry, shiffless, ass of the front stoop and go looking.

Right........

;-)

Bush and Chaney can't lose

No matter how badly things will continue to go in the Middle East and in the world in general as a result of the greed, incredibly piss-poor judgment and cowboy politics that have governed this great country for the last 8 years, the Bush/Chaney cabal can't lose.

What??? Yes, you read it correctly. Whatever happens, they can't lose.

First, they and their supporters will always say they weren't to blame for what I consider to be an absolute, utter and complete failure of their administration. They have become the masters of deception. They have taken every advantage at every turn to create and leverage fear in the minds of what used to be a rational populace. What I think is that their "failure" has been premeditated and warrants impeachment.

They and their supporters will always say ridiculous things like "Better to have fought them over there than over here", "Hussein presented a threat to Americans", and "We need to open up ANWR and the continental shelves to oil and gas production".

As for the whole "Better to have fought them over there", it's as if we all suddenly found ourselves in some bad World War II movie and were in jeopardy of a Normandy-like invasion. I had and still have no argument with removing the Taliban from power. They clearly were involved in the heinous crime of 911. The events of 911, however, were and always will be just that - criminal acts. They should have been viewed through the prism of law enforcement not some Bush-contrived declaration of war by some foreign government or sovereign nation. Just because some idiot like bin Laden "declares war" doesn't mean that war has been declared....unless, of course, such a declaration is exactly what is wanted.

Yes, the combined military forces of free nations under the auspices of the U.N. was the right move with Afghanistan. Everyone in the free world was in support of America on September 11, 2001. Everyone in the free world knew that we were the one country that could lead a global movement to address terrorism. Everyone was behind us starting that movement with the Taliban as it would send a clear signal to any government who harbors and supports terrorists that the world - not just America, but the world - would no longer stand for it.

Where we lost all credibility in the world was when Bush, Chaney, Rumsfeld, Powell and all the rest of them conjured up lies in order to justify their indefensible and inconceivable left turn into Iraq.

Bush and his supporters will continue most certainly cling to the lies about what a serious threat Hussein was because of his ties to terrorism and WMD programs. The facts are in. There weren't any of either. (http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/911/report/index.htm and http://www.carnegieendowment.org/publications/index.cfm?fa=view&id=1435)

And when it comes to oil, they'll keep saying that, in addition to Mideast instability (which they've done nothing but exacerbate), part of the reason oil is so high is because companies are being kept from opening new domestic fields. There's no debate if anyone's willing to look at the facts.

The amount of oil in places like ANWR and the continental shelves will have very little effect on the price of a commodity that is dictated by a global market. All anyone has to do is the math.

According to the CIA (yes, *the* CIA), 2005 estimates of American oil consumption are just over 20million barrels of oil a day (https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/print/us.html). The best estimates of domestic reserves in ANWR and the outer continental shelves (OCS) that are currently off limits are 42 billion barrels and 18 billion barrels, respectively. http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil_gas/petroleum/analysis_publications/arctic_national_wildlife_refuge/html/preface.html and http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/aeo/otheranalysis/ongr.html

Sounds like a lot of oil until you consider:
1. The technically-recoverable oil is more like 15.6 billion in ANWR, making for a total of ANWR and OCS of about 24 billion barrels. 24 billion (if it were even possible to have it all at once) divided by 20 million barrels consumed per day (making the silly assumption that consumption hasn't changed since 2005 estimates) works out to be 1200 days, or about 3 years and 3 months.
2. It will take years before even the first barrels reach the market and puts at risk eco-systems that can never be replaced.
3. Oil is a fungible. No matter what our paltry reserves are, they aren't enough to drive global markets on way or another.


So, in my opinion, there's one thing we can all be fairly certain about. No matter how unstable things become in the Middle East and around the world, Bush and Chaney can't lose. They will keep doing what they've always done - blaming every and anyone but themselves for failed political leadership - while personally profiting from the mess they've created.

What, after all, could be better for a couple of oil men financially and politically than a growing global demand for oil in the face of an ever-shrinking supply, coupled with political turmoil and social unrest which they helped to create, all of which combines to keep oil prices rising?