Firing Back

Firing Back on the Birthers: Where's Their Evidence?

Sara Robinson — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 09:13:33 -0700

Amid the huge media pile-on that's gradually taking down the Birther fantasy, nobody's actually bothered to point out that almost every element of their argument is based on a near-total ignorance about how U.S. citizenship works.

There's nothing like moving abroad (which I did five years ago) to make you acutely aware of exactly what being an American citizen means, and who gets to claim it, and how that privilege is gained or lost. Living abroad is a sort of involuntary immersive education in citizenship law. My life, liberty, and property depend daily on the agreements worked out between my home country and my adopted one; and even the most mundane travel and financial choices are deeply affected by the rights and protections granted to me by each country. (If you think dealing with one federal tax authority is bad, try reconciling the demands of two.) Based on this working understanding of U.S. citizenship, three things have become obvious to me:

Those promoting the Birther fiction don't have the first clue about almost anything having to do with how American citizenship really works.
Given that Dr. Orly Taitz (one of the main poo-stirrers spinning the fan in this fracas) is herself both an immigrant and a licensed member of the California bar, she should presumably know this stuff cold. But the national case that she's built almost entirely on spurious legal fictions is one of incompetence.
The Google's been around for over a decade now, but nobody on the right seems to have figured out how to use it yet. You can find confirmation for most of what I'm about to tell you in about 0.86 seconds, assuming you can type and spell and think well enough to concoct a basic search string. Apparently, nobody in Birtherland has that level of skill.

I'm well aware that trying to introduce objective reality into this whole irrationally absurd mess is probable futile. We all know that a conservative whose mind is that thoroughly made up (in both senses of the phrase) will never be persuaded by mere facts. Still, there are people out there—especially on our side—who are reality-based enough that this kind of information will matter. So I'm giving it the old Firing Back try. Here's the rundown:

1. Obama doesn't have a valid birth certificate. Or if he has, nobody's ever seen it.

False. A sealed (stamped, in other words) copy of Obama's official state-issued birth certificate has been available since spring of last year to anyone who wanted to view it. Many media outlets, from factcheck.org to World Net Daily, took them up on it. (The factcheck.org piece pretty much takes apart every possible objection.)

When a birther screeches, "I DEMAND that he present his birth certificate," ask them: Present it to whom? When? In what form? Under what circumstances? What would you consider to be sufficient evidence? It's apparently not good enough that the Obama campaign presented it freely to reporters -- or even that World Net Daily verified it.

Under this line of questioning, it will soon become obvious that anybody making this demand will accept no proof short of holding it in their own hands and seeing it with their own eyes -- which ain't gonna happen. At some point, they're going to need to drop the paranoia and trust somebody to do the vetting for them. Who would they accept as a proxy? Odds are, there's nobody whose word they'd be willing to take.

And that admission, right there, makes it very clear to anyone watching that this person doesn't actually give a damn about actual evidence.

2. A "certificate of live birth" is not the same thing as a "birth certificate.".

False. They are, for all functional purposes, the same thing.

The best comeback to this is to ask the blithering birther if they've got an official copy of their own birth certificate at home. If so, tell them to go take a look at it: In a lot of counties across the country, it, too, will be headed "Certificate of Live Birth." If they have a problem with that, they need to take it up with their county clerk's office, who will be glad to set them straight on this point.

The U.S. government recognizes no effective distinction between a "Certificate of Live Birth" and a birth certificate. The government will accept a sealed "Certificate of Live Birth" as sufficient evidence of citizenship in all circumstances. So do banks, notaries, corporations, and all private entities that ask for birth certs as a form of ID. (I have a lifetime history of passports, bank accounts, stock purchases, notarized contracts, marriage licenses, international visas, and even a foreign green card issued on the strength of my own "Certificate of Live Birth." None of the officials I've ever dealt with have had a moment's quibble with this document.)

This argument does have interesting roots, though. The far-right racist Sovereign Citizen movement has long made a lucrative business out of making up and "teaching" phony theories of citizenship that have no relationship with actual American law. (These theories, of course, are mostly aimed at proving that only native-born white males have any rights worth respecting in America. And yes, the perpetrators of this fraud have frequently gone to jail for it.)

This "live birth" controversy is merely the latest in a long series of efforts by racists to concoct some kind of new, rarified standard of citizenship that has nothing to do with the standards set by the government itself. In that, it's a clear statement that the Birthers don't regard the US government as legitimate; and there's a nasty racist undercurrent at work here that's trying very hard to disqualify Barack Obama from the presidency because he's black (since everybody knows black people aren't Real Americans).

3. The birth certificate matters.
4. Where he was born matters.
5. The citizenship of his father matters.

False. None of this matters. The only thing that matters is whether or not his mother was a U.S. citizen.

Accept, for the sake of argument, the unproven contention that Obama was born abroad. In that case, according to the U.S. State Department's website, here's the rule that applies:

A child born abroad to one U.S. citizen parent and one alien parent acquires U.S. citizenship at birth under Section 301(g) INA provided the citizen parent was physically present in the U.S. for the time period required by the law applicable at the time of the child's birth....For birth between December 24, 1952 and November 13, 1986, a period of ten years, five after the age of fourteen are required for physical presence in the U.S. to transmit U.S. citizenship to the child.

Nobody has yet tried to argue that Obama's mother wasn't a citizen. According to everything we know about her, she was born and raised in the U.S. And that, right there, is enough to establish the American birthright citizenship of her son. Nothing else is required.

The birthers insist that the above clause doesn't apply because 1) she was living abroad when she had him (though they have never provided proof of this claim); and 2) Obama's mother was only 18 when she had him, which means that she hadn't yet completed the "five years after the age of 14" part of the residency requirements. In other words: Assuming Obama was born somewhere other than Hawaii (a big leap right there), his mother was a year too young to transmit citizenship.

Let's invite the birthers to take this into court, and see what happens. I suspect that no judge in the land would be willing to set a precedent that would revoke the citizenship of all children of alien fathers born abroad to American mothers simply because of the mother's age. I mean, seriously. If Mom was 20 when you were born, you're a citizen—but if she was 18, you're not? Sorry. The law is badly worded, granted; but unlike the birthers, the government takes citizenship much too seriously to revoke it on the basis of that kind of trivial loophole.

This point is critical, because Stanley Ann Dunham's own unequivocal citizenship status makes the whole fuss over the birth certificate, his father's nationality, or the place of birth totally irrelevant. If his father was the Man in the Moon and she'd birthed him in low-gravity orbit around Mars, he'd still be a US citizen on the strength of her citizenship (plus, as we'll see below, her decision to raise him in the US) alone.

6. Obama's mother renounced his citizenship while the family was living in Indonesia.

No such evidence. The story here is that Obama's mother listed him as "Indonesian" when filling out an elementary school application; and this is taken as evidence that she renounced U.S. citizenship on his behalf.

Trust me: It takes a hell of a lot more than this to renounce a U.S. citizenship. Again, according to the U.S. State Department's website, there are three non-negotiable steps that must be taken to renounce one's American citizenship:

A person wishing to renounce his or her U.S. citizenship must voluntarily and with intent to relinquish U.S. citizenship:

appear in person before a U.S. consular or diplomatic officer,

in a foreign country (normally at a U.S. Embassy or Consulate); and

sign an oath of renunciation

Renunciations that do not meet the conditions described above have no legal effect. Because of the provisions of section 349(a)(5), Americans cannot effectively renounce their citizenship by mail, through an agent, or while in the United States. In fact, U.S. courts have held certain attempts to renounce U.S. citizenship to be ineffective on a variety of grounds ...

The website goes on to say that you cannot renounce your citizenship via any agent—you have to do it in person, yourself. And the regulations state very specifically that parents absolutely cannot take this step on behalf of their minor children. Furthermore, in practice it's vanishingly rare for American consulate staffers to accept a renunciation attempt made by anybody under the age of 18.

The State Department keeps very careful records on people who renounce their citizenship. If the birthers want us to take the "renunciation" argument seriously, they need to start by producing valid government paperwork proving that Barack Obama, in person, appeared before a U.S. consulate officer and executed an oath of reununciation. We're waiting....

7. The fact that his father was Kenyan makes him a dual citizen, and thus ineligible to be President.

False (with a little True mixed in).

The true part: Obama did hold dual Kenyan citizenship until he was 21 years old— and automatically lost it on his 21st birthday. Under Kenyan law, he would have had to return to live in Kenya and claim that citizenship in order to retain it. Since he didn't, he lost it. The only citizenship he still holds is American.

If, by chance, Obama had retained that citizenship, there would be government documents proving it. Until they can produce such documents, the birthers have zero evidence for any kind of Kenyan connection.

Not that even that would matter anyway. The bottom line here is that the United States government doesn't recognize any form of dual citizenship. At all. In the government's eyes, if you're an American citizen, that's the only citizenship that matters—no matter which other countries may also try to claim you. (This is why dual American/Canadian citizens can't show a Canadian passport when crossing into the U.S.. As far as the US border officers are concerned, you're an American, period -- and they want to see your American passport. The red Canadian one cuts no ice with ICE.)

8. Obama's 1981 trip to Pakistan proves must have had Indonesian or Kenyan citizenship, because Americans couldn't go to Pakistan then.

Not only can't they manage Google; they can't even manage a calendar.

If the birthers are making any kind of claim that involves a sequence of dates, don't take it at face value. They seem to have a really hard time with keeping timelines straight.

According to factcheck.org, the New York Times travel section ran an article in August 1981 offering tips for American tourists wanting to travel to Pakistan. As you can see here, 30-day visas were readily available; no State Department advisories are mentioned; and the Pakistani government was welcoming American travelers to Lahore. So Obama could readily have taken this trip on his U.S. passport.

(Another common timeline distortion is the argument that Obama can't possibly be an American citizen, because Hawaii wasn't a state in 1961. In fact, Hawaii became a state in 1959. You could look it up.)

9. He used a Social Security number from a dead person.

Show your work, please.

Dr. Orly Taitz, mentioned above, has been making the rounds (most recently, on The Colbert Report) claiming that she's found 149 addresses and 39 different Social Security numbers linked to Obama—one of them from a man who would now be 119 years old.

Uh-huh. Back in the early 50s, Joe McCarthystood up on the floor of Congress and claimed to be holding a file proving that there were 205 (or 57 -- the number varied on any given day) known Communists working in the federal government , too. Nobody ever saw what was in that file—William Manchester once speculated it might have been his laundry list—but Congress took his word for it, and the witch hunt was on.

Sorry, birthers. We don't take the right wing's word for this kind of stuff any more. If Dr. Taitz wants us to take her seriously, we need to see her evidence and evaluate it for ourselves. Until she does that, there's nothing about this claim that's credible.

10. Somewhere, there exists evidence that the Birthers will find acceptable.

We wish.

The bottom line on shutting up a birther is to ask him or her: What would it take for you to drop this idea, and accept that you're wrong about Barack Obama? Specifically—what evidence, delivered where, evaluated by whom?

I'd lay better than even odds that they won't have an answer to this question, because this whole fantasy is entirely faith-based and thus impervious to all real-world evidence. Forcing them to come up with an acceptable refutation at least gets them to start thinking about this in reality-based terms.

We also need to point out—loudly— that they are demanding a standard of evidence from us that they are not willing to apply to themselves. If they want to be taken seriously, we demand that they start by producing the following documents:

Actionable evidence—the kind that you can take to court and make a serious case with -- that Barack Obama's Hawaii birth certificate is fraudulent. (It's already been thrown out of court at least once.)
Irrefutable documentation proving that Obama was born somewhere other than Hawaii.
Government records proving that Obama made an approved adult application for citizenship in another country.
State Department records proving that he voluntarily renounced his citizenship of his own accord in the presence of a foreign consulate officer.
A list of the multiple SSID numbers he's purported to have used.

Out here in the reality-based world, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Until we see the same level of evidence from them that they're demanding from us, there's no reason we should consider any of their accusations legitimate.

Mythbusting the Obama Recovery Package

Sara Robinson — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 21:16:29 -0800

Here it is: our moment of economic truth. We're standing at that historic fork in the road where the nation decides, now and for the foreseeable future, whether it's going to hang on to the catastrophic assumptions of the free-market fundamentalists and rely once more on the nostrums that have so far failed to fix the mess, or take a bold step down a new, more progressive path that will finally re-empower the American people to build an economy that works for us all.

As usual, the conservatives have absolutely no conscience about what they did to create this mess. If they did, they'd all be holed up in their gated communities or on their private islands, embarrassed into silence at best and terrified of peasant uprisings at worst. Instead, they're jetting into D.C. en masse in a last-ditch attempt to head the country off—or at least make sure that any money that does get spent ends up, as it always has, in their pockets.

To that end, the self-serving myths are starting to fly so thick and fast that the staff here at CAF has been working full-time to keep ahead of them. Here's some of what they're flinging in this latest B.S. storm—and what you need to know to fire back.

1. The proposed recovery package is too big.

False. Most progressive economists agree (and Paul Krugman is downright emphatic) that it's going to take a minimum of a trillion dollars of well-placed investment to pull our economy out of this ditch. This is no time for half-measures, blue-ribbon committees, pilot projects, or trial balloons: this is a life-or-death crisis that requires immediate and massive intervention.

CAF Senior Fellow Bernie Horn puts it this way: "The American economy is huge and it’s at a standstill. It’s like a motionless 100-car freight train—or one going backwards slowly. A small locomotive simply can’t pull it forward. We need an engine large enough to work, one that can create millions of jobs. If anything, a $775 billion 2-year plan may be too small rather than too big."

Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research echoed this same thing on Rachel Maddow's show last Tuesday night. It's got to be big. And it's got to be now. Anything too small—or too late—and the American economy will be at serious risk of stagnating the same way Japan's did in the 1990s.

2. If we can't afford (insert pet project here), we certainly can't afford this.

Yes, we can. What we really can't afford is a huge recession that undercuts the tax base. That's a vicious cycle that will make it increasingly harder to dig out the longer this goes on. The Congressional Budget Office projects that the current slowdown will cost the federal government $166 billion in lost tax revenues in 2009—a number that could easily get even larger in coming years if we fall into a real depression. If we get on that trendline, we could lose a trillion dollars in government revenues by the end of Obama's first term. We need to invest what we have while we still have it if we hope to have a strong economy going forward.

This argument is based on the limited view that wealth is mainly generated by loaning or borrowing at interest—a common enough assumption among financial people over the past 30 years. A more progressive view is that real wealth is generated by labor, combined with access to resources required for production. Putting people to work creates wealth. So does ensuring that our current failing energy regime is replaced as rapidly as possible with one that's infinitely renewable and that we will finally be in full control of. And so do other kinds of infrastructure investments, which form the footing on which a new round of businesses can rise and thrive.

Businesses have always invested their capital to create more capital. The best parts of Obama's proposal involve getting the government to do the same thing. Conservatives are resisting this because don't believe that there's such a thing as the common wealth—which is how they've rationalized their plundering of our common assets. We need to make it absolutely clear that we do believe in the common wealth—and that their assaults on everything that allows America to generate national wealth are going stop, right here and right now.

3. It's more important to balance the budget. Fix that, and the rest will take care of itself.

Read history much? Herbert Hoover is history's poster boy for the idea that balancing the budget during a recession is the best way known to turn it into a full-on depression. And that wasn't a one-off: FDR repeated the lesson in 1937, when he succumbed to the pleas of budget-hawk conservatives and tried to balance the budget—a move that put the brakes on what had, until then, been a solid recovery.

Looking forward, this year's numbers also show the case clearly. Economists are already estimating that spending by individuals and businesses will be off by $300 to $500 billion in 2009. The upshot of this will be millions of lost jobs, which in turn will mean even lower spending and more job losses next year as the country accelerates toward depression.

The only way to halt this slide is for the government to step in and fill the hole with an additional $300 billion-$500 billion of its own spending—and to spend that money on investments that will create as many jobs as possible. The longer we wait, the more government spending it will ultimately take to pull us out of this—and the less able we'll be to muster that much cash.

Balanced budgets are important, but not as important right now as making sure every American has a paycheck they can count on. We can't afford to sacrifice the fate of the entire country to this one economic ideal.

4. The worst thing we can possibly do is raise taxes. Or borrow the money, God forbid.

More misplaced priorities.

As for taxes: Obama's already told us, without apologies to anyone, that he plans to raise taxes on people making over $250,000 a year—the people who've profited most from our current high levels of inequality. Practically, it makes sense to raise taxes on the affluent, since they're increasingly the only ones left who actually have any money. And morally, it's only fair that those who've gained the most from conservative mismanagement of the economy (regardless of their own political leanings) should be the first to pay the bills for it.

As for borrowing: Don't look now, but the whole planet is reeling from financial problems as least as big as ours. Even in the midst of this colossal fiscal mess we're in, if you're an individual, business, or government with excess capital to store somewhere, the USA is still the safest place on earth to park it.

They're so eager for our American brand of low-risk investment that they're even willing to lend their cash to us at interest rates that are very close to zero (and may actually turn out to be less than zero, once you add in inflation). If someone offered you the chance to borrow massive amounts of money without paying interest, you'd do it, right? Well, that money's already sitting on the table, just waiting for us to put it to work jump-starting our economy again. We'd be fools not to take it.

5. When you want to stimulate the economy, tax cuts always beat government spending hands-down.

Another conservative fantasy that disintegrates on contact with reality.

The chart that shows the effectiveness of various forms of government stimulus, based on recent attempts, is here. (Conservatives will be infuriated to learn that food stamps come out on top, generating $1.73 for every dollar spent. Infrastructure investments come in a respectable third. The bottom half of the chart is wall-to-wall tax cut schemes.)

The problem with tax cuts is that people don't spend them in ways that get the economy moving. The Wall Street Journal reports that only 10 to 20 percent of the money remanded to taxpayers in the 2008 tax rebate actually got spent. The other 80 to 90 percent ended up in people's personal savings, were used to pay off creditors, or were simply absorbed by inflation and higher living costs.

Knowing this, we're a bit dismayed Obama is proposing to sink as much as 40 percent of his stimulus package into tax cuts. That's too much, if you ask us. But at least they're targeted at the middle class—people who are more likely to spend that money here in the U.S., rather than ship it off to investments abroad.

6. Large-scale government investment would inevitably turn into an orgy of waste, fraud and abuse.

True—but only if we let conservatives run the show.

The fact is that all human endeavors—from running a household to running a nation—entail a fair amount of waste, fraud and abuse. Bad decisions get made. Greed gets the better of people. Not everybody is as honest as we'd wish them to be.

But in spite of that truth, nobody in history can top the Americans when it comes to planning and executing successful large-scale investment projects. (A thousand years from now, that's what they'll be saying about us: Not always smart about foreign policy, but man, could those people think big—and they usually pulled it off, too.) In our happier past, good management, careful oversight, and clear accountability have always gone a long way toward preventing really big problems, and ensured that we got the most for our collective buck.

Unfortunately, if we've learned anything about conservatives at this late date, it's that they'll defang or dismantle these mechanisms every chance they get. They think rules are for lesser mortals, oversight is a form of Big Brother-style oppression, and accountability is for people who can't afford lobbyists and lawyers. I don't think anyone would even try argue any more that when it comes to waste, fraud, and abuse, conservatives are the hands-down experts.

What's ironic is that they're now offering edifying moral guidance to the rest of us on the subject. All you can do is point and giggle at the stupefying hypocrisy of it all.

7. We need stimulus now—and tax cuts are the only way to get the money out there fast enough.

Not really, no. Much of the infrastructure spending in the recovery package will be targeted at projects that are “shovel ready”—the ones that are planned, approved, and sitting on the shelf ready to go as soon as there's money to fund them. Some of these could start generating jobs as early as April or May.

Some of this money will also be aimed at covering state budget deficits. That money will also be spent immediately on things like health care, child-care programs and other underfunded state services that employ large numbers of people.

That's a lot of direct funding that will put people to work quickly—quite likely, faster than giving people tax cuts and letting them trickle out through the economy.

8. It’s wrong to bail out spend-thrift states. Let them stimulate their own damned economies.

Please. Haven't we all had a lifetime bellyfull of tax revolutionaries and drown-the-government-in-the-bathtub crazies? I swear...can't live with 'em, can't just shoot 'em....

States aren't in trouble because they overspent their allowances. Almost every state constitution in the country requires that the government balance its budget every single year. You want fiscal sanity? Anybody who's put in their time in state government knows all about it. They've made the hard choices, and faced the consequences, too.

The problem is that the recession has undercut state tax revenues to the point where these governments can no longer afford to cover their obligations—some of which (like bonds) were taken on years ago, when times were better. Commitments that were fiscally prudent by any measure back then are wiping them out now. Budgets that were balanced and sound when they were first outlined a couple years ago are impossible monsters today.

And, unlike the federal government, the states can't deficit spend their way out of it. That's why they need federal help.

9. This whole Keynesian thing has been totally disproved. It didn’t work during the Depression. It didn’t work for Japan in the 1980s.

Say what? We know that rewriting history is a favorite conservative pastime. America is Christian country. Slavery was good for black people. Bush was never a real conservative. Saddam was in cahoots with al-Qaida. And on it goes.

The campaign to discredit Keynes (which is directly traceable to the Heritage Foundation) is a new and rather audacious fiction—one that leaves both progressive and conservative economists as gobsmacked and sputtering as scientists get when you bring up "intelligent design." And the factual basis for it is, if anything, even more specious.

Paul Krugman addresses both the Depression and the example of Japan in his new book, "The Return of Depression Economics." According to his telling of the tale, in both cases the affected economies strengthened as long as the government continued to infuse capital into them; but bobbled when there was enough improvement that the budget hawks could get some political traction. When the spending flagged, so did the recovery. In Japan, bold steps alternating with repeated failures of nerve created a liquidity trap that stagnated the country's economy through most of the 1990s.

Keynes' prescription has worked everywhere it's been tried—as long as governments acted boldly and quickly enough. It's not medicine that works if you take it in half-doses, or quit before the course of treatment is finished. In fact, doing it with less than full commitment can actually make the situation worse.

10. This is a partisan program that's designed to promote the Democratic agenda.

No. Almost every businessperson in America—including the conservative ones—are stepping forward in support of the stimulus package. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is on board with it. So (unsurprisingly) are most of the building trades and engineering groups who stand to prosper with a new round of infrastructure spending. The current economy is hurting everyone, regardless of political affiliation—and most Americans agree that it's time for the government to step in and get things going again.

TAKE ACTION

Write your member of Congress to ask for passage of a bold economic recovery plan now.

And Yes. I've written before about the way this kind of investment in the health and well-being of the middle class can, in the end, transform long-held conservative beliefs about how the economy should work. A stimulus package that works will prove that government can do important things that no other entity can do; that it can act effectively in the public interest; and that there's actually such a thing as a national common good that deserves to be protected. In short, it will reaffirm progressive values in a way that's irrefutable, and will earn the enduring respect of the country.

Bernie Horn and the Institute for America's Future research staff contributed extensively to this post. For other sources, follow the links provided.
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Updated 1/9/09: Dean Baker is now with the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Also, he appeared on the Rachel Maddow Show last Tuesday, not Countdown as previously reported. Your blogger regrets the error.

Talking Turkey: Ten Myths Conservatives Believe About Progressives

Sara Robinson — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 23:06:31 -0800

Oh, Lordy. It is that time again. Thursday is Thanksgiving— the official kickoff event of the 2008 holiday season. For a lot of progressives, these festivities also mean that we're about to spend more quality time with our conservative relatives over the next six weeks than is strictly good for our blood pressure, stress levels, or continued sanity.

Personally, I'm not a wholehearted fan of turkey—probably because the mere smell of it instantly slams me back into memories of several decades of Thanksgiving dinner arguments with conservative kin that took a turn for the ugly. We all know we're supposed to stick to "safe" topics like the kids, college football, and the weather; and avoid controversial issues like religion, politics and whether oysters belong in a proper bird stuffing. But the afternoon is long, and after the approved topics have been exhausted and that third bottle of Cabernet vanishes and the tryptophan torpor hits, decorum and discipline are at high risk of going all to hell. After that, things can and do get contentious, usually in ways that make everyone wish we could all just go back to fighting over oysters in the stuffing.

These family gatherings were hard enough to stomach through the appalling years of the Bush Adoration—but this year, it's likely to be even worse. Our beloved family wingnuts were insufferable, in a grotesque Mayberry-on-acid surreal kind of way, while crowing into their succotash about the manly Godliness (or was it Godly manliness?) of Our Divinely Ordained Commander-in-Chief. But this year's different. This year, they're on the way out of power—and they're scared witless about it. Which means big steaming heapin' helpings of liberal-bashing are likely to be featured prominently on the menu next to the mashed potatoes, as they put fresh vigor into every paranoid anti-liberal fantasy ever spouted by Rush, Reverend Pat, or their new darling, Sarah Palin.

The black guy won. Armageddon—or, at the very least, socialism, atheism, gun control, and a national epidemic of erectile dysfunction—must certainly be at hand.

As you prepare to head once again into the family fray, it might be useful to note that most of the right wing's favorite anti-liberal slanders are rooted in some deeply-held—and deeply wrong—assumptions about who liberals are, and what we believe. If your relatives, God bless 'em all, insist on going down that road, your best defense this year might be to listen closely for these underlying myths and fables at work—and be prepared to challenge them head-on when they surface in the discussion.

Here's a basic set to get you started. Tuck it away in your bag with your Xanax and Maalox, and apply (liberally, of course) as needed.

1. Liberals hate America.

For the record: Liberals love America. In fact, what makes us liberals is that we actually read and believed all those pretty words in the Declaration of Independence about "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," and in the Bill of Rights about freedom of speech, religion, assembly, privacy, and all the rest of it.

We're idealists that way. We want to live in the country the Founders described. We believe that the nation's founding documents expressed a uniquely powerful moral contract between the people and their government, and an audaciously positive vision of people's ability and competence to shape their own future. When we get annoying and whiny, it's usually because we believe so much in America's astonishing promise—and our own responsibility for realizing it—that we're sorely disappointed when the country falls short of that standard. We really want to believe we can do better.

Conservatism, by contrast, tends to take a dim view of human nature, prefers hierarchy to liberty, and isn't completely convinced people can or should be trying to contravene the will of God or their betters by trying to arrange their own futures. This tends to lead to a selective reading of the Constitution (as well as the Bible), and—as we've seen in the Bush years—a far more flexible attitude toward its interpretation.

The proof, however, is in the history—and it's pretty irrefutable. America's greatest moments of progress, generosity, and moral strength occurred when the country stuck most closely to its progressive ideals. We loved America so much that we freed the slaves, passed child labor laws, built schools and colleges, gave the vote to women, enacted civil rights laws, rebuilt Europe after a war we helped win, and put a man on the moon. All of these were progressive projects—and all were fought tooth and nail by conservatives in their time, simply because they feared change and saw power as a zero-sum game. Yeah, we sometimes overshoot and miss—but you can't argue with the daring scope of our dreams.

Conversely, most of our worst moments—the Native American genocide, the continued justification of slavery and Jim Crow, the Japanese internment, Abu Ghraib —were conservative projects that were driven by narrow-minded xenophobia and short-term greed, and are regretted by everyone (including most conservatives) when we look back now.

Rick Perlstein has called this out as a predictable pattern: conservatives will loudly obstruct social progress for decades before finally accepting it—and then, they'll insist they were 100 percent for it all along.

Love us or hate us; but we're every bit as American as our conservative friends and relatives, and have been since the day the Declaration was written (by a liberal, in fact).

2. Liberals want to leave us defenseless in the face of evildoers around the world.

The big disconnect on security issues begins with the fact that we have a far more expansive definition of "security" than conservatives do. And, perhaps, a broader sense of what the actual threats are, and what can be done about them.

When conservatives discuss "security," they're usually thinking in terms of solving all our problems by sending in more guys and gals with guns. The flip side of this that they tend not to give much credence to real threats that can't be fixed by guys and gals with guns.

But as progressives, we know that the country's financial crisis is a security issue. And in a world of superbugs and epidemics, universal health care is a security issue. And global warming is, plain as day, a looming security issue (and the Pentagon agrees). We also know that sending in the Marines, hiring more cops, and taking off our shoes at the airport won't begin to address some of our most terrifying problems. Real-world security is far more complex, and requires a much wider range of solutions, than most conservatives are willing to consider.

3. Liberals hate the free market.

If that's so, why does everyone down at the Apple Store know my name?

The operative word here is "free." Liberals believe wholeheartedly in the amazing power of markets to deliver all kinds of important goods. But we've also noticed that some of the deepest human goods of all—a strong family, a caring community, a healthy environment, safe food, clean water and air, and time to enjoy them all—are assigned no economic value at all in unfettered markets. If we want to protect the value of things that money can't buy (and even conservatives will usually agree that such common goods exist, and deserve to be protected), then we need to put some restrictions on markets so they can't encroach into those areas.

Besides, any 10-year-old who's played Monopoly (or any adult who's been within reach of a TV or newspaper in the past two months) can tell you how free markets invariably end up. One person ends up owning the whole game board, and everybody else ends up broke. Game over. That's not an accident; it's just how capitalist systems work. Good regulation can go a long way toward preventing that, too.

It can also be argued that conservatives don't really believe in free markets, either. Truly free markets can only work if there's also a free market in labor—which means open borders (it's fun to drop this suggestion with a broad wink on border-fence grognards) and unfettered collective bargaining—neither of which are exactly pet conservative causes.

Because free-market theory also asserts that markets only work right when people can make rational, fully-informed choices, they break down if there's not a parallel free market in information, too. If conservatives really believed in free markets, they'd support efforts to preserve and maintain that market. Keeping good information flowing means putting tight regulations on media consolidation, and firm limits around how far advertising and PR firms can go to stretch the truth or bury negative information. It also means abolishing laws that deprive consumers of important purchasing information, like food-libel laws and federal bans on rGHB labeling. It's a rare conservative who's willing to go that far to protect the sanctity of the free market.

4. Liberals hate our troops.

We love our troops. We love them so much that we want them brought home safe and sound to their families, as soon as possible.

This one's almost depressingly easy. Who blocked the new GI Bill because it might encourage troops not to re-up? Who refused to increase VA funding? Who oversaw last year's debacle at Walter Reed? Who is making soldiers buy their own body armor?

News flash: it ain't the libruls. Putting a yellow ribbon decal on your car is not enough. Making sure our troops have everything they need to do their jobs—and keeping our promises to them when they get home—is putting our money where our mouth is. Liberals have been there doing the heavy lifting from the start, while the conservatives in government have been nowhere on the scene unless there was a photo op involved.

5. Liberals are a bunch of elitists who hate decent working- and middle-class Americans.

...as opposed to those sainted corporate men-of-the-people who fly around in private jets and pull down eight-figure salaries while closing plants and cutting 10,000 jobs at a time. That's what real populism looks like, you betcha.

Liberals are funny people. We think that sending well-paid American jobs overseas is a bad idea. We think the minimum wage should be big enough to cover life's necessities, with some left over. We think it's insane that over half the bankruptcies in the country are due to lack of adequate medical insurance. We think everybody who has the grades should have a shot at college. And we believe that middle-class prosperity is absolutely essential for maintaining a healthy democracy—because history (via Kevin Phillips) has taught us that no democracy that's tolerated our current levels inequality has ever survived for long.

You'd be surprised (or maybe not) at how many conservatives making this accusation have never stopped and taken stock of the role government has played in making their own middle-class life possible. Their dad or granddad got through college on the GI Bill. They financed their own education with Pell Grants and federally-guaranteed loans. They grew up in FHA or VA-funded houses, and collected fat mortgage interest deductions—which, right there, ensured their family's place in the middle class. They went to decent public schools—and, perhaps, state universities. They're several thousand dollars richer every month because they're off the hook for Grandma's living expenses, thanks to Social Security and Medicare. They or their parents may have started businesses with help from the Small Business Administration, or relied on government advice and subsidies to keep the farm going. They work for businesses that depend on government contracts.

And then they'll sit there over the second helping of candied yams and loudly insist that they made everything they had, all by themselves, with no help from anybody and especially not from the government.

All you can do is laugh. And then, because they're family, go back to 1945 and start re-telling the family story—this time with Uncle Sam's forgotten role in the drama front and center.

6. Liberals are against "family values."

This is one of the biggest disconnects between us. As George Lakoff has pointed out, conservatives and liberals have very different ideas about what families look like, how they function, and what rules they should run under. The problem is that liberals are quite willing to recognize the conservative model as a legitimate and valid way to do family, even if we don't always agree with it. But when conservatives look at liberal families and their patchwork of made-up arrangements, they see a chaotic free-for-all that doesn't follow any of their strictly mandated rules of family organization—and thus doesn't qualify in their minds as any kind of "family" at all. We think it's creative and flexible. They think it's unstable and scary.

So it comes as a considerable shock to conservatives when you point out that progressive areas of the country have significantly stronger families, by almost any metric you can imagine. They have lower rates of divorce, teen pregnancy, infidelity, drug abuse, domestic violence, and juvenile delinquency than the more conservative areas do. Massachusetts—the first state to offer gay marriage—also has the lowest divorce rate in the country. They like marriage so much there they think everybody should have a shot at it.

Looking at the statistics, it's possible to conclude that the conservative obsession with "family values" may reflect the fact that families in Red America really are beset by devastating problems that aren't nearly as common in Blue America. Rather than admit that maybe we know something about creating healthy families that they don't, they'll usually try to fix the blame for their family chaos on us and our crazy anything-goes family arrangements. (If there are Bible readers at your table, you might suggest they re-read Luke 6:42 before holding forth.)

Liberals believe in family. We take our marriage vows just as seriously as conservatives do. We love our children just as much. Our families are at least as successful and happy as theirs. This shouldn't be a matter of debate; but it will continue to be one as long they refuse to believe that our families are just as healthy, valid, and sacred to us as theirs are to them.

7. Liberals want to raise our taxes.

It all depends on who is the "our" in this scenario.

If your dinner companions are well-off enough to be bringing in over $250K a year, there's no point in finessing this. Their taxes probably are going up. The only comeback is that between Clinton-era tax cuts, the housing bubble, and the hot stock market of the past 15 years, they've probably made so much money that it's time to start giving some back to the nation that made their boon possible. (Refer back to #5: they almost certainly didn't make that pile without at least some government help.)

If 's nobody at the table fits that happy description, then according to Obama's plan, they're going to get a tax cut. Sure, they're not going to believe it until they see it (and, quite possibly, not even then); but it's not an argument they even want to have until after an Obama tax plan is passed and the actual results are in.

Remind them also that there's just no way to pay for a $600 billion war and a $700 billion bailout (and that's just the current cost on both fronts—they're likely to soar in the future) without somebody somewhere paying some more taxes. The bill for the war alone currently stands $5,000 per American household; the bailout may cost that much again, depending on how much of the money the government can recoup. The GOP went shopping on our credit card—and now it's time to pay our share of the bill.

8. Liberals are Godless—and therefore, amoral.

This often sounds odd coming from people who raised you, who generally like you, and who usually think you're a fairly sound citizen...well, apart from that weird liberal thing. One good comeback is to personalize that accusation: Do you really think I'm less moral than you are? Seriously? In what way? Hmm. (It's good if you can resist the temptation to say: Gee, it must have been the way I was raised.)

Another twist on this: I'm liberal because you made me that way. You dragged me to church, where they taught me to love my neighbor and care for the poor and sick—and I became a progressive because I took the things you taught me to heart.

If personalizing the argument won't work with your crowd, go general. A lot of progressives are deeply religious—and our politics are guided by our religious faith. Evangelical churches are getting involved with environmentalism, poverty, and human trafficking—all issues where liberals have been active for decades. It's good to have the extra hands on board.

It's also true that a lot of progressives aren't religious. Unfortunately, many conservatives equate "secular" with "having no moral code whatsoever," since they honestly believe that nobody can possibly behave themselves unless there's some outside authority keeping a hairy eyeball on them. (It's tempting to speculate about what people who believe this might try to get away with when they think nobody's watching; personally, I think it's an incriminating admission that they can't be trusted behind closed doors.) Rejecting God means you refuse to follow His rules—which, according to their logic, can only mean that you hold nothing sacred and don't recognize any rules at all.

Call this out for the wrongness that it is. All non-religious progressives have things they hold deeply sacred: family commitments, community obligations, professional responsibilities, the Constitution, social and economic justice, the earth and its systems, the idea of democracy, the dream of a peaceful future. Those things form the basis of a demanding internally-driven moral code; and it's not uncommon to find secular progressives who live more uncompromisingly moral lives than many overtly religious people.

9. Liberals don't believe in personal responsibility.

Again, there's a definitional disconnect at work here. Conservatives tend to use the rule of law to enforce traditional morality and social hierarchies, which usually means light treatment for those at the top, and harsh penalties for those at the bottom. Liberals tend to use the rule of law to maintain some semblance of fairness and equality, which means that those who have more should be given sentences proportional to their greater wealth and power; and those with less should be given a more gentle hand. Naturally, each side finds the other side's reasoning and criteria appalling.

But there is common ground. The bare fact—which everybody at the table may agree on—is that in present-day America, nobody is happy with the way justice is being doled out, and people all over are getting away with things no civilized nation should allow to slide by. Absurd leniency abounds on both sides. You can either argue over whose side is getting the worst of it; or you can simply agree that the system is broken all over, and move on to the pumpkin pie.

10. Liberals are wimps.

Conservatives like to caricaturize liberals as being soft in all the places our society values toughness. Our refusal to adhere to any dogma must mean that we're soft in our convictions. Our reflexive open-mindedness is often derided as evidence that we're soft in the head. Our persistent and gentle insistence on humane government is evidence of hearts too soft to set hard boundaries or do what must be done. And all of this together makes it easy for them to portray us as a mushy bunch of feckless, effeminate intellectuals lacking in cohesion, backbone, focus, or purpose.

But you can only believe this if you don't know anything about the history or reality of American liberalism. The Constitution is, itself, a liberal document—the ultimate expression of Enlightenment principles. In every decade since the republic was founded, progressives have stepped up and put themselves on the line to further the purposes of government laid out in the Preamble. We're heirs to the people who fought and died to free slaves, organize unions, give the vote to women, end child labor, protect family farms, enact civil rights laws, and preserve our environment. Some of the boldest, bravest Americans in history— Harriet Tubman, Susan B. Anthony, Frederick Douglass, Teddy Roosevelt, Cesar Chavez, and of course Dr. King—have proudly called themselves "liberal" or "progressive."

Progressivism couldn't have survived and thrived if we were half as weak and indecisive as conservatives like to think we are. Our progressive forebears were not fearful people. Nor did any of them seem to be bedeviled by a lack of conviction. "Mushy" or "feckless" are about the last words I'd use to describe any of them. ("Stupid" isn't anywhere on the list, either.) When you sign up to become a progressive, this is the legacy you take on, and from then on attempt to live up to. It's not God's job to make the world a better place. It's yours. This has never been work for the faint of heart, mind, or spirit—and in this era of conservatism gone rotten, it still isn't.

It's going to be a stranger season than most, in no small part because the changing political winds are going to put some fresh twists and turns into the same old holiday discussions. But holiday arguments over religion and politics are a tradition that's as old as the republic. For most of us, wouldn't be an American family holiday without a little hot conversation served up over a freshly roasted bird.

Firing Back on the CRA Libel

Sara Robinson — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 18:12:10 -0700

Conservative pundits and politicians have piled onto the excuse like shipwreck victims clinging to a passing log: The real blame for the current economic crisis lies not with anything they did, but rather with the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act—a successful Carter-era program designed to get banks to stop covert discrimination, and encourage them to invest their money in low-income neighborhoods.

It's always easy to tell when the cons are completely lost at sea. The lies get more absurdly preposterous—and also more transparently self-serving. But when they go so far as to openly and unapologetically latch onto race and class as an excuse for their woes (which this is, at its heart), you know they're taking on water fast—and scared of going under entirely.

You can hear the conservative commentators burbling this CRA fable from the Wall Street Journal to the National Review; from Rush to YouTube. Neil Cavuto put the essence of the argument right out there on Fox News: “Loaning to minorities and risky folks is a disaster.” See! It's all the liberals' fault for insisting on social justice!

Conservatives are twisting the facts beyond the breaking point to support their revisionist history. But don’t be fooled: the financial crisis was caused by conservative financial follies and bankers run amok and nothing more. Here are the basic myths they're trying to push about the CRA—and the facts that will enable you to fire back.

1. The CRA was a liberal boondoggle designed to con banks into funding housing for undeserving, unqualified minorities.

False. The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 was the result of decades of disinvestment in poor and working-class neighborhoods. It was designed to put an end to "redlining"—a widespread practice in which banks refused to write mortgages for houses in certain neighborhoods, no matter who was applying or how creditworthy they were.

The Fair Housing Act of 1968 had made it illegal for real estate agents and banks to discriminate against homeowners on the basis of race. Redlining soon emerged as a not-so-subtle way to continue this discrimination, by declaring, ahem, certain neighborhoods as unfit to invest in. By 1977, the results of this practice were becoming all too obvious, so Congress stepped and gave lenders a choice: if you want the FDIC to insure your deposits, you need to knock off the redlining.

The CRA didn't force lenders to make riskier loans than they would have otherwise. It simply required that they take each applicant on his or her own merits, and give people in poorer neighborhoods the same fair chance at a mortgage that everybody else in town was getting. It wasn't about preferential treatment. It was just about basic equality.

2. The CRA forced banks to lower their standards and make loans to all low-income families and people with poor credit—and find banks that refused to comply.

No. The CRA has encouraged banks to lend fairly and responsibly for over 30 years. It does not impose fines. It does periodically examine FDIC-backed banks, and issues them a CRA compliance rating. A highly-rated bank must meet the financing needs of as many community members as possible, and must not discriminate against racial and ethnic groups or certain neighborhoods. However, a bank will not receive a high rating unless it is also maintains “safe and sound banking practices.”

In other words, the CRA requires banks to lend to working-class families and people of color—but only when those people have been deemed as creditworthy as anyone else.

3. The housing bubble burst when too many people with home loans mandated by the Community Reinvestment Act failed to make their mortgage payments.

False. The CRA only applies to FDIC member banks and thrifts. Back in the 1970s, these institutions were responsible for most of the country's mortgage lending. But starting in the 1980s and on up to the present, we saw a huge boom in lending businesses—such as finance companies like Countrywide—that weren't banks, and didn't take deposits that required FDIC insurance. Thus, they didn't have any obligation to the CRA. And they were free to set their own lending standards, which were often far less cautious than those required of FDIC-insured banks.

4. The bulk of the "junk" loans that have been packaged into mortgage-based securities are CRA loans.

False. An analysis of Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) data in the country's 15 biggest metropolitan areas found that 84.3 percent of the high-cost loans made in 2006 were originated by non-CRA lenders—including 83 percent of high-cost loans to low- and moderate-income individuals. The Federal Reserve notes that, across the country, non-CRA lenders were twice as likely as CRA lenders to issue subprime loans to vulnerable borrowers. Furthermore, the Fed also reports that responsible mortgages made by CRA lenders have about the same low rate of foreclosure as other traditional mortgages.

5. If the government had just set the lenders free to do their thing, the market would have prevented this. It's just another example of how government oversight always leads to market failure.

Wrong again, buckaroo. As explained just above, up to four-fifths of these loans were issued by financial institutions that operated with little or no federal regulatory oversight. In fact, in 2006, only one of the top 25 subprime lenders was a CRA institution. A few others were mortgage/finance company affiliates of CRA-covered lenders, but even these were separate businesses that didn't operate under CRA rules (including Countrywide, CitiMortgage, and Wells Fargo Home Mortgage). Likewise: the vast majority of the top 20 issuers of risky interest-only and option ARM loans were not CRA-affiliated lenders.

If anything, the CRA example proves—once again—that government oversight not only works; it's essential to maintain safe and sane capital markets.

6. The CRA is just another failed liberal handout program.

No. The benefits of CRA have been substantial. Citibank executive and former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin recently estimated that the law has channeled upwards of $1 trillion into distressed neighborhoods across the country —including both inner cities and rural areas without much access to investment funds—without putting up any taxpayer money beyond what it takes to operate the CRA itself. In these areas, home ownership is up—and with it, the local tax base, which means more parks, more cops, more street repairs, and so on. There's more decent rental housing, too, because landlords can get loans for upgrades and improvements.

Small business ownership is also up. Low-income communities have become more attractive to outside investors, and more able to support community redevelopment efforts. And in places where people once cashed their paychecks at the convenience store and depended on payday loans, there are now full-service bank branches offering the same affordable financial services people in better neighborhoods take for granted.

The cons like to talk about the "ownership society." There is no ownership without access to capital. For 30 years, the CRA has been making private capital available to qualified people who want to bootstrap themselves into home and business ownership, and a secure place in the middle class.

7. OK—if it works so well, why do we still need it? Haven't the banks finally figured by now out that redlining was a stupid idea?

If only. The very fact that the conservatives are trying to blame the mess on the CRA is, in itself, ample proof that we still need anti-redlining laws on the books. Fifty years into the civil rights era, and they're still arguing that it should be acceptable to permanently exclude people from the capital markets on the basis of race and class. Different millennium, same ugly story: "See? This is what happens when you give money to minorities and poor people. You end up wrecking the country!"

In other words: no, they haven't learned their lesson; and yes, they still believe in redlining as much as they ever did. Racism is alive and well, and there are still plenty of Americans who would bring back housing discrimination in a heartbeat if the law allowed them to. Which is precisely why we can't allow them to.

8. If we can't blame the CRA, then who can we blame? How about the federal banking agencies, which outright told banks to go ahead and adopt risky lending practices? In particular, a 1992 Boston Federal Reserve Bank publication, Closing the Credit Gap: A Guide to Equal Opportunity Lending, told the banks that it was OK to adopt unsound lending practices.

Nice try, but still wrong. According to the National Community Reinvestment Association, the document cited above offered three new guidelines to lenders—none of which are applicable to the current subprime crisis.

The first guideline was that the lack of proper credit history shouldn't be counted as a negative factor for potential homebuyers. Banks could use other evidence to assess the borrower's payment habits, including the timely payment of rent, utility bills, and other scheduled loans. Borrows still need to prove that they're reliable; they're just allowed to use documentation besides a credit report.

The second was to remind bankers that some households with debt ratios above the standard 28/36 criteria might still qualify for home loans. This guideline is very conservative by today's standards. Many problematic subprime loans were granted to borrowers with debt-to-income ratios above 50 percent, which was in no way sanctioned by the 1992 guidance document.

The third was that lenders could count Social Security, second jobs, and other verifiable income streams as valid sources of income when evaluating loan applications. But most subprime loans failures aren't related to alternative income sources. The real problem has been with "liars' loans," in which the reported income streams are never verified at all.

9. Well, then...it must be Bill Clinton's fault, right? In 1995, Clinton changed the Community Reinvestment Act to allow the securitization of CRA and subprime mortgages. That's what started all this.

Talking point regurgitation at its worst. The 1995 revisions to the CRA only changed the way in which a bank’s CRA compliance is evaluated. They made no mention of mortgage securitization at all. Under the 1995 rules, banks are rewarded only for making mortgages in their communities, not for re-selling mortgages as securities.

10. OK, then—it's the Democratic Congress's fault! President Bush and Senator McCain tried to stop the subprime mortgage crisis, but Democrats blocked their efforts.

It's not lying. It's a gift for fiction. This one's actually made it into a TV ad. The claim is that Bush and McCain supported the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005, which would have created a new government agency to oversee Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and other federal housing programs.

However, there's no pony in this manure pile. This bill would have done nothing to stop the rash of subprime lending that preceded the housing bubble. It only provided oversight for Fannie and Freddie—but it said nothing at all about the companies that issued subprime mortgages.

11. No serious conservative economist would have ever approved of the CRA.

False. In March 2007, Federal Board Chairman Bernanke—no liberal he—noted that CRA has helped institutions discover and enter new markets that may have been previously underserved and ignored by insured depositories.

These myths are floating around everywhere this week—a Big Lie that's being repeated so often that Americans may well start to believe it. The real objective of the "blame the CRA" campaign is to pre-emptively discredit any future progressive proposals that involve using government regulation to make the capital markets behave—and to get the free-market fundamentalist faithful back in the fold.

Time to fire back, and replace the Big Lie with some real truth.

Sources:
National Community Reinvestment Coalition: CRA Myth and Fact
Campaign for America's Future Fact Sheet: The Truth About the Community Reinvestment Act
H/T to Steve Adamske