Political Irony

Don’t get me wrong — I love non-partisan fact checking sites like PolitiFact and FactCheck (even when I don’t entirely agree with their findings). But PolitiFact hit one of my hot buttons the other day when they perpetuated what I think is one of the biggest propaganda bamboozles of modern times.

The story that hit my hot button was PolitiFact checking a statement made by Donna Brazile, saying that the governor of Wisconsin had “proposed tax giveaways to corporations”. They found that governor Walker had not just proposed tax cuts for corporations, but had already signed bills that actually cut taxes for corporations. For example,

Walker signed a law on Jan. 31 that says that companies that relocate to Wisconsin will not have to pay corporate taxes for two years.

In other words, if anything her statement was conservative and truthful. And yet, they didn’t rate her statement as fully “True”. Why?

It’s debatable whether these could fairly be considered “giveaways,” since they are intended to reward companies for creating jobs.

Ever since the days of “trickle down” (“voodoo”) economics, I’m suspicious of politicians who use the jobs excuse as the reason for the most outrageous boondoggles, but this example is particularly annoying to me.

Relocating a company from one place to another does not “create” jobs — at best it simply rearranges them. And at worst, it weakens the local tax base, causing reduced funding for libraries, roads, job training, and other programs, resulting in an area that is less likely to create new small local businesses. And it is small businesses that create the majority of jobs (even PolitiFact agrees with that).

And yet, state and local governments are falling all over each other to hand out huge tax breaks for corporations in the name of jobs. If that isn’t a giveaway, I don’t know what is.

You can’t blame corporations for going after these big tax breaks. Walmart alone has received more than a billion dollars from cash strapped local governments, including “free or reduced-price land, infrastructure assistance, tax increment financing (TIF), property tax abatements or discounts, state corporate income tax credits, sales tax rebates, enterprise zone tax breaks, job training funds and low-interest tax-exempt loans”. What makes this worse is that these subsidies are not actually necessary. A study in 2004 found that even in cases where Wal-mart had sought subsidies and didn’t receive them, they still built new stores.

So local governments give tax breaks to corporations that are not even necessary, using the excuse that they create jobs, which they don’t. Again, if that isn’t a giveaway, I don’t know what is. And then the politicians claim they have to cut back teacher salaries and other programs that actually do help our economy. I can’t understand why people put up with this crap.

This is the clearest explanation I’ve heard of what is really going on in Wisconsin. Republicans are using budget shortfalls for political gain.

UPDATE: It is always difficult to sort out the truth from the political fiction in cases like this, but a good starting point is the PolitiFact Wisconsin website.

UPDATE 2: The governor of Wisconsin received a prank call today from a blogger who pretended to be conservative billionaire David Koch — a major contributor to governor Walker’s campaign. If the caller had actually been David Koch, then the strategy discussions they had would likely be illegal.

As they say, steal a loaf of bread and you will go to jail, steal millions of dollars and you go free. Or in this case, billions.

Federal prosecutors have dropped the charges against Angelo Mozilo, the former CEO of Countrywide Financial. Mozilo was one of the highest paid executives in the country — between 2000 and 2008 he was paid more than half a billion dollars in compensation.

Mozilo was accused of insider trading when he sold $140 million in Countrywide stock even though he knew the company was failing — defrauding millions of shareholders. He settled that charge for $67.5 million (almost certainly less than the money he made selling his shares). Just to add a bit more of irony, $45 million of the settlement was paid by Countrywide (and by Bank of America, who purchased Countrywide in 2008) further costing the shareholders money.

Other than being allowed to keep most of his ill-gotten gains, Mozilo was punished by being banned from being an officer or director of a public company. I find even that ironic, since it implies that they have to ban him or else some company would want hire him as an officer or a director.

At one time, Countrywide Financial was the largest home mortgage lender in the country. Hundreds of billions of dollars were lost by investors, and millions of borrowers lost their homes. There were emails from Mozilo discussing his company’s lending practices and describing some of its loans as “toxic” and “poison”. But they kept selling those loans. A former Countrywide executive sent an email to a friend explaining that he had not recognized the looming financial meltdown because “we were having too much fun” processing risky mortgage instruments “and getting loaded on Miller Lite.” Seriously.

Countrywide had a special program called “Friends of Angelo” that gave mortage loans to politicians that Mozilo liked, at severely reduced rates. Countrywide also had a large political action committee (PAC) that made large contributions to political campaigns.

And now, Mozilo goes free.

A majority of Republicans are not convinced that Obama was born in the United States. In fact, only 28% of Republican voters admit that Obama was born in the US, with 51% saying that he was not, and 21% unsure. Where in the world did they get that crazy idea?

But what is really hilarious is that Bush’s Brain (Karl Rove) has a new conspiracy theory that the birther movement is a trap set by the Obama administration to distract people from the real issues and make Republicans look kooky.

Of course, when asked, Michelle Bachmann said “we should take the president at his word” on where he was born, but she would not definitely state that he was born in the US. And Speaker of the House John Boehner made similar remarks, saying “It’s not my job to tell the American people what to think”. I guess the Republican leadership is not ready to jettison the kooks in their base.