AROUND NEW HAMPSHIRE
1. Assorted
Sununu v. Shaheen: The next generation
by Kevin Landrigan, seacoastonline.com, September 22, 2015
We should have known something was up whenStefany Shaheen, the eldest daughter of Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-NH, would look down the barrel at a certain trip to become mayor of Portsmouth and say, "No thanks.’’
When Portsmouth Mayor Robert Lister passed on his own re-election, the mayor’s spot (top council vote getter) was Shaheen’s for the asking
But like New Hampshire Democrats are famous for, the power elite was already making plans.
Who’s behind the we want Stefany Shaheen for Governor movement? Let’s start with Emily’s List, the largest political action committee on the left and the one dedicated to supporting mostly women, pro-choice candidates for high office.
They were behind the push to the elder Shaheen to first run for governor and for Maggie Hassan to first run for the State Senate and then the corner office.
In case you hadn’t noticed, Hassan has been looking more and more like a candidate for Senate rather than one for re-election. She’s appeared with Sen. Shaheen, three times in the past month and twice enlisted Shaheen to help her make a state budget pitch.
Hassan has also appeared with U.S. Sen. Kelly Ayotte at two public events including side by side at the Labor Day parade in Milford.
And many believe that the deal she made on the state budget — to cut both business taxes and give a pay raise to state workers — helps blunt charges that she had become a partisan chief executive and a tax and spender.
Meanwhile, leading Democrats are given the brazen okay to talk openly about the prospects of a Hassan Senate campaign, as US Rep. Annie Kuster, D-NH2, did last week.
This will be no coronation if it comes to pass, however.
Councilor Colin Van Ostern, D-Concord, has been waiting in the wings for Hassan to make the call and would not move an inch until Hassan made the move.
And Van Ostern has his fans. Progressives Change Campaign Committee are their own real force on the left and they raised $1 million to draft Elizabeth Warren to run for and win the US Senate seat in Massachusetts from Republican Scott Brown.
The New Hampshire Political Report obtained an e-mail survey they had sent out on Thursday without advance notice this would be the day the Stefany Shaheen speculation would leak.
"As you know, New Hampshire has many exciting races on the ballot next year. Not just for president. If Maggie Hassan runs for Senate, the Senate and Governor races will be super exciting, wrote Adam Green, PCCC co-founder.
Here’s how they show enthusiasm for Van Ostern in their self-described, "super-short survey.”
"If Maggie Hassan runs for US Senate, some New Hampshire activists say that progressive Executive Councilor Colin Van Ostern [-] who has advocated for debt-free college and to protect Planned Parenthood [-] should run for governor. Do you think he should?’’
It then asks you: "Are there others you think should run for governor if Maggie Hassan runs for US Senate?’’
***
Sure it’s a little late but there continue to be head scratchers at the timing and manner of Chris Sununu’s bid for governor in 2016.
Sununu chose to make the announcement without warning or alerting reporters to even bother showing up at an otherwise routine, Labor Day party in his hometown of Salem.
Fortunately for Sununu, 2016 GOP contender Scott Walker was stopping in at the holiday celebration so some reporters were there including NH1 News Political Director Paul Steinhauser.
Even Democrats who don’t wish Sununu well publicly cringe at the move since they know as fellow politicians Sununu did not get the media bang or buzz he should have gotten from it.
"I mean don’t they drop news about scandals during the Labor Day holiday weekend,’’ jokedSenate Democratic Leader Jeff Woodburn of Dalton. "It’s a day you put out news you don’t want to get covered. It was strange to say the least.’’
All that said, Sununu’s early move will lead to its intended result: it should convince many prominent Republicans in the state to reconsider going for the corner office.
***
Another potential congressional candidate finds other employment.
Longtime BAE executive and former 1st District hopeful Rich Ashooh of Bedford is out of the potential running for that seat in 2016 after having taken over as interim president of the UNH School of Law.
"There’s a fantastic group on this campus that already is going to make me look very good,’’ Ashooh said during a brief interview at NH1. "I’m very excited about this opportunity and going to be going 95 miles an hour to prove worthy of their trust in me.’’
Ashooh was widely viewed as a serious challenger to US Rep. Frank Guinta’s, R-NH1, bid for a third term in 2016 if that race had come to pass.
Guinta already has a real fight on his hands as 2014 candidate and Portsmouth businessman/educator Dan Innis is exploring another go at it next year.
2. A State Bank?
DOES NH NEED A STATE BANK?
On Tuesday, September 22 the Commerce and Consumer Affairs Committee will discuss a bill to establish a state bank in New Hampshire.
A state bank isn’t like a private bank. According to the bill – HB 672 – the state bank of New Hampshire would hold public funds and partner with local banks and credit unions to back business loans. The bank could also handle mortgages. Ideally a state bank promotes development and returns any revenue to the state.
Supporters of a state bank point to the success of the Bank of North Dakota, the only state-owned bank in the U.S. North Dakota was not as hard-hit by the recession of 2008, in part because the state bank did not take as many lending risks as private banks. The Bank of North Dakota also returns a profit to the state each year, $60 million or more.
However, North Dakota is different from New Hampshire in that the state’s economy is driven by agriculture and oil production. That may have had as much to do with North Dakota’s success during the recession as a state bank.
After analyzing HB 672, the New Hampshire Department of Treasury wrote, “this bill may likely increase state expenditures, although not necessarily revenues.”
Other opponents of a New Hampshire state bank note that organizations such as the business finance authority, the community development finance authority, and the municipal bond bank already handle business development funding for the state.
3. NH Backing for Clean Power
NH Business and Health Delegation Urges Congress to Support Clean Power Plan
CONCORD, N.H. - It's no secret Congress has a budget battle brewing, and Granite Staters including a local brewer just delivered a message to lawmakers, don't mess with the Clean Power Plan.
Peter Egelston, president of Smuttynose Brewery, was a member of the delegation that traveled to the nation's capital last week to tell lawmakers the EPA's carbon pollution limits need to be protected. He says climate changes plays a major role in the price and availability of two of the prime ingredients for beer, barley and hops.
"Businesses understand that in their own self-interest it's the right thing to do and that's a very powerful force in a market-based economy," says Egelston.
The next step is for the EPA to publish the Clean Power Plan, which calls for a 32 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2030. Opponents argue the rule is too strict, but the delegation which included business, health and conservation advocates urged both New Hampshire senators to stick with the plan.
Katy Robert, board president with the New Hampshire Public Health Association, says the timing is important because supporters don't want to see the Clean Power Plan blocked or delayed while Congress considers key budget legislation to avoid a government shutdown.
"There's a couple of must-pass pieces of legislation coming up," says Robert. "We just hope that nothing will be attached to those bills that would affect implementation of the rule."
Egelston says while Senator Kelly Ayotte has been straddling the fence on this issue, she did support the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, also known as "RGGI."
"One of the questions she had about the Clean Power Plan was whether states that have been participating in RGGI benefit," says Egelston. "The answer to that is a definitive yes."
Robert says one in nine New Hampshire children already suffer from asthma, and they would be on the front line for negative health impacts if the plan is rolled back.
"Our children and our elders are going to be more susceptible to lung and asthma issues," says Robert. "Tick-borne diseases are going to continue to increase with the rising number of ticks in New Hampshire."
4. Ayotte and Women's Health
As Kelly Ayotte Continues To Mislead Voters About Her Record On Women’s Health, The Facts – And Ayotte’s Own Record – Get In The Way
Concord, N.H. – As Kelly Ayotte continues her attempts to mislead voters about her record on women’s health, her gauzy rhetoric cannot gloss over the facts about her true record.
Since going to Washington, Ayotte has repeatedly voted to block women’s access to health care by voting to eliminate funding for Planned Parenthood and thousands of family planning centers across the country, fighting to allow bosses to deny women insurance that covers their full health needs, and working to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
“Kelly Ayotte has voted repeatedly to block women’s access to health care, and she’s even tried to cover up her true record by pushing a sham birth control bill that’s ‘specifically designed to deceive voters,’” said New Hampshire Democratic Party Communications Director Lizzy Price. “But Ayotte won’t be able to cover up her true record on women’s health because voters will see right through her transparent efforts to deceive them.”
See below for the facts about Ayotte’s record on women’s health:
Ayotte Has Repeatedly Voted to Block Women’s Access to Health Care
In addition to voting three times to defund Planned Parenthood, Ayotte has also voted to eliminate all funding for the Title X Family Planning Program, which helps fund 4,200 Family Planning Centers that serve 4.5 million individuals across the country. Title X family planning centers provide critical health services including cancer screenings and contraception.
Ayotte also voted for and was an original co-sponsor of the Blunt Amendment, which would have allowed employers to deny women coverage for birth control and for other important preventive health services. The American Cancer Society opposed the amendment because it would allow employers deny coverage to life-saving preventive services like mammograms.
Not to mention that Ayotte is fighting to repeal the Affordable Care Act, despite the fact that more than 150,000 New Hampshire women have received expanded preventative services without cost-sharing thanks to the ACA.
Ayotte’s Birth Control Bill Is Opposed By Doctors and Women’s Health Experts Because It Would Actually Make Birth Control More Expensive
In announcing its opposition to Ayotte’s birth control bill, the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists said, “Unfortunately, instead of improving access, this bill would actually make more women have to pay for their birth control, and for some women, the cost would be prohibitive.”
Politifact rated the claims that Republicans’ proposals would make birth control “cheaper and easier for you” as “mostly false.” Politifact added, “We found that even the groups that advocate making the pill available over the counter… did not believe it was a cheaper alternative for consumers than requiring insurance companies to cover contraceptives without cost sharing.”
Other women’s health experts have called Ayotte’s bill a “sham and an insult to women” and pointed out that it’s “specifically designed to deceive voters.”
Salon called the bill a “giant fraud,” adding, “no cost reduction through market force could match what’s offered by the new healthcare law: no cost. There simply is no competing with zero dollars when it comes to access.”
AND NATIONALLY
5. The Real Fiorina
Meet The Real Carly Fiorina
There used to be something called “the HP Way.” This was the description of the way Hewlett-Packard (HP) conducted its business and treated its employees and customers.
Management was informal, and the majority of the company’s engineers worked in an open environment, rather than offices, to encourage communication and teamwork. In Bill Hewlett’s word, “the HPa Way is a core ideology … which includes a deep respect for the individual, a dedication to affordable quality and reliability, a commitment to community responsibility, and a view that the company exists to make technical contributions for the advancement and welfare of humanity.”
In a 2010 Reuters’ article, “Fiorina, Hurd: no practitioners of ‘The HP Way’?” Alex Dobuzinskis wrote,
“The HP Way” had its heyday in the 1960s, and today is credited with helping grow the corporation from a $538 garage outfit in 1939 into the $125 billion behemoth it is today.There was an emphasis on life outside of work: HP bought up land for recreational activities around the world, and pioneered Friday afternoon beers at the office, for instance.Experts like Malone say that approach became a model adopted by many in Silicon Valley –including crosstown peers like Apple Inc and Cisco – and helped differentiate the technology giants on the U.S. West Coast from their more strait-laced brethren back east.
That was the old way that HP did business.
Then Came Carly
Then came Carly Fiorina and the new American business model. Fiorina was appointed CEO of HP in 1999 and began to rid the company of its old-fashioned way of doing business – and employees. In 2002 she pushed through a merger with Compaq over the objection of 49 percent of the company’s shareholders (along with the vocal objections of Walter Hewlett, son of one of HP’s founders. See definition: “divisive“.) The goal of the merger was to grow the company, to reduce costs by shedding a huge number of duplicated employees – and to become big enough in the computer industry to make Microsoft reduce its licensing fees for their operating system. But profits and HP’s stock price sank.
In a 2004 analysis, “Losing the HP way,” the Economist reported, “Ms. Fiorina reacted by giving another glimpse of her tough side, firing three top executives on the spot, and stubbornly sticking with her strategy.”
By the end of her term at HP, Fiorina had laid off up to 30,000 people. In the five months after she left in 2005 HP had to lay off another 15,000. In “Why I Still Think Fiorina Was a Terrible CEO,” Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (Lester Crown Professor in the Practice of Management at Yale School of Management) writes at Politico:
“In the five years that Fiorina was at Hewlett-Packard, the company lost over half its value. … During those years, stocks in companies like Apple and Dell rose. Google went public, and Facebook was launched.… And I have to point out the obvious: If the board was wrong, the employees wrong, and the shareholders wrong—as Fiorina maintains—why in 10 years has she never been offered another public company to run?”
Bill Taylor, writing at the Harvard Business Review, in “How Hewlett-Packard Lost the HP Way” quotes Thomas Perkins, “the legendary venture capitalist and a former HP director (who has hardly covered himself in glory during this mess), who told the New York Times back in August: ‘I didn’t know there was such a thing as corporate suicide, but now we know that there is. It’s just astonishing.’ ” Perkins was talking about circumstances under a different CEO, but those circumstances commenced under Fiorina’s leadership at the company.
“Corporate suicide.” Perkins may not have understood this at the time, but he was also talking about how the new American business model and adherents like Fiorina have divided and destroyed our country.
Republican Corporate Establishment Pushing Fiorina Over Trump
The HP Board felt that Fiorina would come in, cast aside the old-fashioned “HP Way” and transform HP into a modern, streamlined, neoliberal money-making machine.
Skip ahead a few years and the Republican establishment appears to have decided that Carly Fiorina, disgraced HP CEO, “debate winner,” maker-up of stuff, will save them from Donald Trump. So the corporate media outlets are pushing Fiorina hard. Blogger Atrios, in “I Guess Jeff Sent A Memo” (referring to Amazon CEO and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos), included this picture of a list of Washington Post columns, which is representative of what is going on across the media right now:
Defining Moments In Republican Debate
There were two defining moments for Fiorina in the second Republican debate. One was when she responded to Trump’s insult about her looks, saying, “I think women all over this country heard very clearly what Mr. Trump said.”
Fiorina played the victim card well. Republicans love being victims.
But in the 2010 California Senate race in which Fiorina ran against incumbent Barbara Boxer, Fiorina did to Boxer exactly what Trump did this year. Talking Points Memo has that story, in “That Time Carly Fiorina Got Caught Dissing Her Opponent’s Hair On Camera“:
In 2010, Fiorina was caught on an open mic commenting on Boxer’s hair as she was prepping for an interview with CNN affiliate KXTV. Fiorina told her staff that someone saw Boxer on television and “said what everyone says, ‘God what is that hair?’ So yesterday!”
Fiorina lost that campaign for U.S. Senate – her first and only previous attempt to gain political office and experience inside government. Starting at the top: First a run for the Senate and then, losing that, a run for the presidency.
Fiorina’s other defining moment in the debate was her emphatic description of the contents of a video supposedly catching Planned Parenthood selling baby parts for profit. She asked debate viewers to watch the videos and, “watch a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking, while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.”
But this does not appear in the videos. Among several sources making that clear was Sarah Kliff at Vox, in a post headlined, “Carly Fiorina is wrong about the Planned Parenthood tapes. I know because I watched them.“
Fiorina is wrong: Nobody watching the Planned Parenthood tapes would see those things. I know, because I recently watched the 12 hours of video that included all footage shot inside clinics.The videos were produced by the Center for Medical Progress, an anti-abortion group that argues Planned Parenthood has profited from procuring fetal tissue for researchers. The videos do show Planned Parenthood officials discussing fetal tissue, sometimes in ways that are callous and jarring. But there is no moment where Planned Parenthood discusses procuring fetal tissue for profit, nor is there the scene that Fiorina describes.… Either Fiorina hasn’t watched the Planned Parenthood videos or she is knowingly misrepresenting the footage. Because what she says happens in the Planned Parenthood videos simply does not exist.
This was entirely a fabrication on Fiorina’s part. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo writes of this:
Fiorina has a habit of simply making things up. In the case of the parts of the Planned Parenthood videos, the way she made it up seems to verge on the pathological. Again she says she saw something in these videos that completely wasn’t there. And she doubled down on it the next day. This is just lying through your teeth or just being so indifferent to whether things are true or not that it amounts to the same thing.… [J]ournalists have special responsibilities to look past caricatures and the familiar. In this case, they’re failing that test. You should not be able to tell a slew of small fibs in a big debate and one mammoth one and not have it become part of the campaign discussion at all.
Note that the videos themselves are almost entirely a manipulated fabrication as well. (Remember the doctored “you didn’t build that” video?) Republicans being who they are, Fiorina’s surge with the Republican base comes from a story that was made up from whole cloth. But that’s what the Republican base is – a cult immersed in fantasies created by propagandists hired by billionaires to push myths that end up with the enrichment of the billionaires after the elections that the lies and myths manipulate.
“Democrat Party”
Fiornia’s campaign created an online ad in response to Trump’s insult:
Brilliant marketing. But in the ad Fiorina refers to the “Democrat” party. As silly as this insult is, it is also significant and revealing. This phrase in the ad is a “dog whistle” to the far right. “Democrat Party” is an old Joe McCarthy/John Birch Society insult, used by the far, far right to identify themselves as part of their cult. Hendrik Hertzberg wrote in 2006 in the New Yorker about this word use, in “The ‘Ic’ Factor“:
There’s no great mystery about the motives behind this deliberate misnaming. “Democrat Party” is a slur, or intended to be—a handy way to express contempt. Aesthetic judgments are subjective, of course, but “Democrat Party” is jarring verging on ugly. It fairly screams “rat.”… In the conservative media, the phenomenon feeds more voraciously the closer you get to the mucky, sludgy bottom. “Democrat Party” is standard jargon on right-wing talk radio and common on winger Web sites like NewsMax.com, which blue-pencils Associated Press dispatches to de-“ic” references to the Party of F.D.R. and J.F.K.… This is partly the work of Newt Gingrich, the nominal author of the notorious 1990 memo “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control,” and his Contract with America pollster, Frank Luntz, the Johnny Appleseed of such linguistic innovations as “death tax” for estate tax and “personal accounts” for Social Security privatization. Luntz, who road-tested the adjectival use of “Democrat” with a focus group in 2001, has concluded that the only people who really dislike it are highly partisan adherents of the—how you say?—Democratic Party. “Those two letters actually do matter,” Luntz said the other day.
So this is an introduction to Carly Fiorina. New top-down “business models” that shed people and humanity, and divided and destroyed a time-honored company. Playing the victim for things she herself has done to others. Sneaky “dog whistles” to the anti-woman far right in a video that pretends to advance the cause of women.
Will the country go the way of HP if Fiorina and her backers succeed in winning the nomination and presidency? One former HP worker told me, “The one area that Carly succeeded in was this: destroying jobs at HP and creating tens of thousands of victims with lots of ill-will toward HP. Carly was a great job-destroyer. Why not send her to Washington to see what she can do for America?”
6. Why the Center Doesn't Hold
Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, candidates in the age of anxiety
The United States’ economic dysfunctions have been apparent for decades: The decline of manufacturing, which provided middle-income jobs to millions, and the burgeoning of the low-wage service sector were visibly underway by the 1980s. So, too, was the shrinking of unions, and with it, the ability of workers to bargain with their employers. By now, it’s clear that long-held beliefs about how an economy works — for instance, that declining unemployment should be accompanied by higher wages — need to be altered, or at least qualified. Since the depth of the Great Recession, in 2009, the unemployment rate has been cut nearly in half, but despite its decline over the past year to roughly 5 percent, wages haven’t budged, while median income and the rate of poverty, according to Tuesday’s Census Bureau report, have remained unchanged. A different litany of economic woes vexes most European nations, but on both sides of the Atlantic the belief that the economy generally produces broadly shared prosperity has been shaken, if not shattered.
Under these conditions, voters respond, and should respond, to political leaders who offer compelling explanations and solutions for the harsher economic realities. They respond to those who identify the culprits behind their troubles and say how they’ll diminish their sway. That’s why Donald Trump and Sen. Bernie Sanders have connected with millions of voters, and why politicians who haven’t gauged the depth of voters’ anger over the economy’s betrayal of their prospects and expectations have failed to connect.
This isn’t to equate Trump and Sanders; far from it. The centerpiece of Trump’s story — that undocumented immigrants are the villains in the tale of Americans’ downward mobility and rising crime rates — is preposterous: The slice of the workforce in competition with the undocumented is small, and crime rates have declined significantly since the great migration from Latin America and Asia began. Trump’s ability to win over more supporters than his rivals in the Republican field is due in part to his non-politician status, but what really sets him apart is that the story he tells connects more deeply with the racism and xenophobia of many within the Republican base — a racism and xenophobia that have grown steadily more apparent as the economy has stubbornly refused to improve.
A similar dynamic has shaped the European reaction to the massive wave of refugees flooding into the continent. Only two European nations — Germany and Sweden — have welcomed those refugees and taken them in in large numbers. Not coincidentally, two of the few European nations in which real wages have increased in recent years are Germany and Sweden. Rising economic tides not only lift all boats; they also predispose voters to welcome more boats into port. Fifty years ago, when the U.S. changed its laws to permit the entry of more immigrants and to scrap the quotas that effectively limited immigration to all but Europeans, American voters were in the midst of a decades-long boom characterized by unprecedented economic mobility and security. Whatever the racial and cultural phobias that many American whites may have harbored, their economic anxieties were at a low ebb. More immigrants? Sure. Civil rights laws? OK.
If Trump is a candidate for an age of anxiety (albeit one who causes at least as much anxiety as he exploits), so is Sanders. The difference is that when Sanders identifies the culprits and cures for the hard times that have descended on us, he can substantiate his claims with reams of hard data. Profits have risen at wages’ expense; the ratio between top executives’ pay and that of their employees has soared; taxing financial transactions and raising the tax on investments to the level of tax on work will more adequately fund needed public programs; giving workers the power to bargain with their employers will help restart the American mobility machine. The key to Sanders’ success, beyond his unchallengeable authenticity, is that the story he tells, the villains he calls out and the remedies he proposes are more accurate a portrayal, and more adequate a prescription, than those of rival candidates.
Capitalism in Europe and the United States is no longer yielding mass prosperity. That’s why the center isn’t holding, and why left and right are rising.
7. A Nonsense Immigration Plan
'You're Wrong Donald!' 4 Reasons Trump's Immigration Plan Is Complete Nonsense
by Steven Rosenfeld, alternet.org, September 15, 2015
Donald Trump’s plan to build a wall to stop illegal immigration on the Mexican border and deport 11 million undocumented migrants would ravage the U.S. economy and cost at least $400 billion, according to California’s Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat.
“This week California will be hosting a Republican presidential debate,” Newsom said in a short graphic video, “You’re Wrong Donald.” He continues, “It’s a perfect time to show you the truth behind his immigration ideas and how they’ll hurt all of us.”
1. The Wall Won’t Be Built. Trump has proposed building a wall along the entire 1,900-mile Mexican border. “But that won’t work because of rivers, mountains, tribal land, private land and countless other challenges,” Newsom replied.
2. A Wall Won’t Stop Migrants. Trump claims that his wall would stop undocumented migrants from entering the U.S. “But a wall won’t secure out border or keep people safe,” Newsom replied, as a man is seen emerging from a tunnel.
3. You Can’t Deport 11 Million. Trump has said that he would round up and deport 11 million men, women and children—where people would be taken by police from their homes, job and schools. “A conservative think tank [American Action Forum] says deporting that many people would cost over $400 billion,” he replied, citing an early 2015 study that estimated the cost between $420 billion and $619 billion.
4. You’d Destroy The Economy. What would Trump’s plan do the the U.S. economy, Newsom asks. “Well, we’d lose half of our farm workers and 6 percent of America’s workforce,” he replies. “Trump’s plan would send our economy into a downturn worse than the great recession and cost our economy more than $1.6 trillion.”
“Trump’s plan would be a disaster,” concludes Newsom, who is expected to run for California governor in 2018. “And Donald, I’ll debate that plan anytime, anywhere.”
Watch the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?
FINALLY
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