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“I believe for every drop of rain that falls,
A flower grows.”
-Tom Jones

“I believe that for every tax that is cut,
The deficit falls.”
-Mitt Romney

Mitt Romney’s victories in Michigan and Arizona establish him as the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. Now his actual views deserve more serious attention than they have been accorded in the Republican primaries, where he has benefited by appearing less nutty than the competition.

Romney claims that he has a plan for “more jobs, less debt and smaller government.”

He also says that he has the “integrity” to “speak honestly with the American people.”

But his “plan” simply doesn’t add up. He wants to lower taxes, raise spending on the military, protect Social Security and Medicare for a decade, and cut $6 trillion out of spending to balance the budget. He gets there only by projecting fantastical rates of growth and using magic asterisks to indicate cuts or loophole closings that he isn’t prepared to reveal. (more…)

The right wing is attacking unions, suppressing the vote and taking over municipal governments.

The longer the Republican presidential contest drags on, the more uncomfortable Mitt Romney seems around blue-collar Americans, and the more antagonistic Rick Santorum seems toward America’s professionals, current and aspiring, and their ideals. This does not portend Republican success in November, whatever the outcome of Tuesday’s primaries in Arizona and Michigan.

Romney’s stabs at seeming a regular guy have provided the most painful moments of his campaign. How to come off as a car buff in Michigan? Mention your wife’s Cadillacs. How to be a good ol’ boy at Daytona? Say you’re friends with some of the race car owners. Not since Richard Nixon has a national political leader appeared so excruciatingly ill at ease with the simplest public encounters.

The roots of Romney’s awkwardness are shrouded in mystery. Perhaps, while going door to door in France in quest of converts to Mormonism, he came to believe that encounters with ordinary folks were an ordeal with which God tests the faithful. Certainly, his career in private equity did nothing to prepare him for conversations with actual workers. A good leveraged-buyout operator — and Romney was one of the best — doesn’t sit down with workers to hear their concerns, lest he end up heeding any interest save those of the bottom line. Whatever the reason, Romney’s encounters with ordinary men and women seem fraught with peril and grow steadily more surreal.

Santorum, by contrast, seems comfortable only with ordinary guys, provided “ordinary” is defined as white, working-class, traditional, patriarchal, borderline theocratic and seething with resentment at everyone except the rich. Santorum is the latest right-wing demagogue who rails at the real and imagined sins of liberal cultural elites (joining Joseph McCarthy, George Wallace and Spiro Agnew, to name but a few), but in his zeal to damage Romney in Michigan, he has more effectively damaged himself throughout professional America.

Not since McCarthy decided to attack the U.S. Army for allegedly coddling communists has a reactionary populist been so wide of the mark as Santorum was in attacking President Obama as a “snob” for saying he would like more young people to go to college. “There are good, decent men and women who go out and work hard every day and put their skills to the test that aren’t taught by some liberal college professor to try to indoctrinate them,” Santorum said this weekend. “I understand why [Obama] wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his image.” (more…)

Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed led a presentation on his city’s initiative to retrofit a wide range of commercial, public and residential buildings in a 400-block area of downtown that proved the highlight of a gathering of investors, pension fund managers, business, labor and community leaders at Heartland Capital Strategies’ first Responsible Investment Forum.

The forum, sponsored in collaboration with the BlueGreen Alliance, addressed the need for greater alternative investments to sustain the real economy, an investment arena largely abandoned by Wall Street.

In contrast, the responsible investment specialists attending the forum were characterized by Heartland Managing Director Thomas Croft as “a community interested in forging a new alternative path for responsible investment in manufacturing, community development and clean economy growth,” an approach that Heartland brands  as “doing well by doing good.

Mayor Reed urged forum attendees to consider investing in the Better Buildings Challenge, the city’s retrofitting initiative to create a more sustainable economy, improved air and water quality and job growth.

“Capital goes where it is needed and stays where it is well cared for,” he told the gathering. Aided by staff of the Better Buildings Challenge and the Emerald Cities Collaborative, the Mayor provided a comprehensive presentation on how investments in the project would be managed to minimize risk.

Many of the participants in Heartland’s one-day forum committed to further conversations to discuss possible investments in the Atlanta project, which hopes to put many of city’s 57,000 unemployed union tradesmen to work in the massive undertaking. (more…)

My father was a Republican for the first 78 years of his life. For the last twenty, he’s been a Democrat (he just celebrated his 98th.) What happened? “They lost me,” he says.

They’re losing even more Americans now, as the four remaining GOP candidates seek to outdo one another in their race for the votes of the loony right that’s taken over the Grand Old Party.

But the rest of us have reason to worry.

A party of birthers, creationists, theocrats, climate-change deniers, nativists, gay-bashers, anti-abortionists, media paranoids, anti-intellectuals, and out-of-touch country clubbers cannot govern America.

Yet even if they lose the presidency on Election Day they’re still likely to be in charge of at least one house of Congress as well as several state legislators and governorships. That’s a problem for the nation.

The GOP’s drift toward loopyness started in 1993 when Bill Clinton became the first Democrat in the White House in a dozen years — and promptly allowed gays in the military, pushed through the Brady handgun act, had the audacity to staff his administration with strong women and African-Americans, and gave Hillary the task of crafting a national health bill. Bill and Hillary were secular boomers with Ivy League credentials who thought government had a positive role to play in peoples’ lives. (more…)

United Steelworkers (USW) Local 207L members ratified by a 2-to-1 margin a new five-year contract with Cooper Tire and Rubber Company The vote ends a three-month lockout at the company’s Findlay, Ohio tire plant.

USW Local 207L President Rodney Nelson says:

We are proud to have remained united and delivered a fair contract, despite Cooper’s best attempts to divide us.

The workers were locked out by Cooper on Nov. 28, despite the union’s good-faith offer to continue working under the terms of the previous agreement while negotiations toward a new one proceeded, says USW District 1 Director Dave McCall.

Cooper needs to acknowledge that its loyal, productive and efficient USW workforce is the company’s most valuable asset in Findlay and treat them with the respect and dignity they have earned. For many years, Cooper was a good example of how workers and management could work together toward common goals and the greater good of the community.

Click here to read more from the USW. (more…)

If you’ve been following the mainstream news cycle over the last month you know that the culture wars are back. With a vengeance. We’ve seen the supporters of women’s health care and Planned Parenthood respond so vehemently when Susan G. Komen for the Cure announced funding cuts that the popular breast cancer foundation reversed its decision. We’ve seen the return of Catholic Bishops and Rick Santorum arguing to limiting access to birth control. We’ve seen hundreds of laws restricting abortion and access to birth control passed in state capitols across the country.

The cultural wars may not, at first glance, have much to do with class, though a look at history provides a context that can help us see the connection. In the 1980s, the culture wars were defined by questions like “what literature should we be teaching?” Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind and E.D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy had one answer: core curricula in “great books” and “Western Civ.” Many of us offered different answers: Ethnic Studies, Third World Studies, American Studies, Post Colonial Studies, and Transatlantic Studies—curricula that would be diverse, inclusive, and a featuring a non-Western-centric narrative.

Race and ethnicity were at the heart of this debate, but class wasn’t far behind. Ironically, perhaps, Hirsch argued that when we lost our common literacy we fractured along class lines as well as racial and ethnic lines. His argument had little basis in sociology, but he was, in some ways, democratic in his goals. At the same time, many of us rejected his thesis because his “cultural literacy” left out the accomplishments of the subaltern, those “under others” not only because of race but also because of class, whose cultures had been left out of the classroom. (more…)

Over 1,000 have joined the Call Mass Action Against the Suppression of the Occupy Movement including: Cornel West, Scott Olsen, Boots Riley, Robert Hass, Chris Hedges, Rebecca Solnit, Michael Ratner, Gideon Oliver, and the General Assemblies at Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Chicago, Occupy Cleveland, Occupy Houston, Occupy Lincoln, Occupy Minneapolis, Occupy San Francisco, Occupy St. Paul. For more information go here or here.

There’s just something about manufacturing. Ask Rosie the Riveter. Ask the computer geeks and artists across America who create “Hacker Space” workshops to help each other invent and fabricate to their imaginations’ content.

Yeah, it’s cool to make stuff. The “maker,” whether an inventor or engineer or welder gets a thrill out of performing work that results in visible, viable products.  Manufacturing also gives the “makers” the feeling of empowerment that can be seen all over Rosie the Riveter’s face.

Manufacturing is powerful. And power is coveted. That’s why mother America always loved manufacturing most. Since the early days of this country, visionary political leaders like Alexander Hamilton and Abraham Lincoln nurtured manufacturing. They knew manufacturing builds a country’s economic strength. And the capacity to manufacture secures a nation’s military might. So President Obama’s focus on reviving American manufacturing, including his proposal last week to give American manufacturers a small tax break, is wise, even if the banking brother and service sector sister feel aggrieved as a result.

President Obama said in his State of the Union address that his goal was to forge an economy built to last. That, he said, would be based on American manufacturing and American know-how, American-made energy and skilled American workers.

Since then, he has talked up his plans to reinvigorate manufacturing during several factory tours. At Master Lock in Milwaukee, Wis., he applauded the company for bringing 100 jobs back to America from overseas.  The tax code should reflect that, the President said. He proposed the government give tax breaks to companies that on-shore jobs, instead of granting them to those that offshore.

It’s illogical, even unpatriotic to use tax dollars to subsidize companies that send jobs overseas, transferring America’s manufacturing power to foreign countries like China.

Later, in Everett, Wash., President Obama lauded The Boeing Co. for manufacturing planes in America. Orders for Boeing’s commercial aircraft rose by more than 50 percent last year, and it hired 13,000 Americans.

During a tour of the plant where Boeing manufactures its 787 Dreamliner, the President said:

 “We can’t go back to an economy that was weakened by outsourcing and bad debt and phony financial profits.”

While Wall Street’s financial gambling took down the nation’s economy, the solid, steady, circumspect practices of manufacturers are facilitating recovery. No wonder manufacturing is the favored child.

Manufacturing, Obama pointed out, supports jobs throughout the economy, from mines to machines shops to malls. At the Boeing plant, he said:

“Every Dreamliner that rolls off the assembly line here in Everett supports thousands of jobs in different industries all across the country. Parts of the fuselage are manufactured in South Carolina and Kansas. Wing edges, they come from Oklahoma. Engines are assembled in Ohio. The tail fin comes from right down the road in Frederickson.”

In addition, those supply chain factory workers, whose jobs pay about eight percent more than comparable ones outside manufacturing, support service sector jobs in their communities. (more…)

In a 2010 episode of “30 Rock,” Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin) coins a term to describe the act of succeeding marvelously at solving problems: Reaganing. I’ve been wondering what to call a habit of Mitt Romney’s — his occasional, accidental mentions of how wealthy he is. Romney rarely “gaffes,” in the sense that he usually keeps strictly on the message of the day. (This is made easier by his hands-off approach to the press. Example: He has not held an open “availability” for reporters in three weeks.) Romney’s gaffes are almost always related to his economic status. See: Making a $10,000 bet with Rick Perryon a debate stage. Or see the one nugget of news that escaped his Daytona 500 visit.