Hullabaloo

Monday, November 28, 2011

 
I miss him already

by digby

O'REILLY: This is why Americans don't trust the government.
FRANK: No, this is why your stupidity gets in the way of rational discussion.

Barney's retiring:

It’s the end of an era in Congress, with Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) heading for retirement, capping off 32 years in the House of Representatives as an outspoken voice for liberal Democrats.

The Boston Globe reports that Frank’s decision was spurred in large part by redistricting, with him having lost some key strongholds and gained some relatively more conservative areas. On the other hand, Dem sources point out that the redrawn district is still heavily Democratic, having voted 61% for Barack Obama in 2008. A Dem source in Massachusetts says that a potential candidate is Brookline Selectwoman Jesse Mermell, who is said to have been putting her name around in case of a possible Frank retirement.

He deserves to retire. He's 72 and he's been fighting the good fight for decades. But he's one of the funniest, smartest people in politics and he will be missed.

Here's his most recent long form interview in Playboy.

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digby 11/28/2011 09:30:00 AM |

 
The New Realignment

by David Atkins

I'll have more thoughts on this later, but for now, this is a good and important read:

For decades, Democrats have suffered continuous and increasingly severe losses among white voters. But preparations by Democratic operatives for the 2012 election make it clear for the first time that the party will explicitly abandon the white working class.

All pretence of trying to win a majority of the white working class has been effectively jettisoned in favor of cementing a center-left coalition made up, on the one hand, of voters who have gotten ahead on the basis of educational attainment — professors, artists, designers, editors, human resources managers, lawyers, librarians, social workers, teachers and therapists — and a second, substantial constituency of lower-income voters who are disproportionately African-American and Hispanic.

It is instructive to trace the evolution of a political strategy based on securing this coalition in the writings and comments, over time, of such Democratic analysts as Stanley Greenberg and Ruy Teixeira. Both men were initially determined to win back the white working-class majority, but both currently advocate a revised Democratic alliance in which whites without college degrees are effectively replaced by well-educated socially liberal whites in alliance with the growing ranks of less affluent minority voters, especially Hispanics.

Less educated whites have been a stumbling block for Democrats for decades. Democrats held them together under the New Deal coalition pretty much until the Civil Rights movement, after which the conservative movement successfully transposed a "cultural" elite trying to enforce race and gender equality over the financial elite that this group had resented previously.

Democrats had been trying to "win back" these voters for decades with compromises designed to assuage their anti-welfare, anti-equality sensibilities. But with current demographic trends, that's increasingly unnecessary--even if it were possible. Ideally, the Democratic missions of securing the safety net, increasing the minimum wage and safekeeping middle-class jobs should appeal to less educated whites. But it won't. A more strident progressive message would do a good deal to bring these voters back and convince them that Democrats best serve their interests, but it's still mostly a lost cause. The right-wing propaganda machine has been very effective in creating a tribal mentality with these voters that will be nearly impossible to break.

For those most concerned with social issues, this development will represent a step forward: Dems will feel increasingly emboldened to openly support women's rights, gay rights and the like without feeling the need to seek cover. Yes, minority groups tend to be more socially conservative on these issues, but they're also not the defining issues on which minority groups are voting. Few Latinos will vote for a party of anti-Latino racists just because that party happens to agree more with them on the subject of abortion--not even if that party is led by the likes of Marc Rubio.

On the other hand, the new coalition of upscale (mostly white) liberals plus minority groups has big problems. For one, the interests of each group are fairly divergent, and educated whites tend to vary significantly internally as well, split largely between angry progressives, and comfortable neoliberals who enjoy reading Thomas Friedman and prize civil tone over progressive legislation. The anger against President Obama is mostly an upscale educated white phenomenon: a vanishingly small percentage of the electorate has even heard of Al-Awlaki; Guantanamo Bay is a nearly irrelevant issue in this election; very few voters have any idea what a credit default swap is, or what Glass Steagall was. Minority groups, meanwhile, still have very high approvals of the President.

The abandonment of less-educated whites also poses a big problem in terms of labor unions, which are a crucial part of the Dem base. Not to mention the Occupy Movement, which is based on uniting the interests of the 99% against the 1%, and breaking down the tribal barriers that have kept the middle classes from uniting against the economic predations of the top 1/10 of 1 percent.

So the problems with this coalition are many.

But all in all, it's conservatives who should be most worried. They have doubled down on appealing to less affluent whties with a calumnious message of lies and pure hate, targeted to a disappearing demographic. And they're counting on a magic hail mary pass to win back Latino voters with Latino figureheads after they have wrung every last drop they can out of white resentment. That's not a sound strategy, and it won't work for them over the long haul, no matter how much money they have to spend on it.

Meg Whitman's disastrous campaign for California Governor proved as much. Money can buy a lot of things, but it can't buy love from people you've spent decades kicking into the dirt.


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thereisnospoon 11/28/2011 07:30:00 AM |

Sunday, November 27, 2011

 
Just a few billion among friends

by digby

Blockbuster story from Bloomberg tonight:

The Federal Reserve and the big banks fought for more than two years to keep details of the largest bailout in U.S. history a secret. Now, the rest of the world can see what it was missing.

The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day. Bankers didn’t mention that they took tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans at the same time they were assuring investors their firms were healthy. And no one calculated until now that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue.

It's huge. Read it all.

The good news is that the government refused to compound the problems by helping out average Americans with their foreclosures, thus avoiding moral hazard.


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digby 11/27/2011 06:50:00 PM |

 

Occupational Hazards

by digby

This week-end there has been a flurry of discussion about this article by Naomi Wolf in The Guardian in which she made a series of outlandish assertions with little evidence about congressional and presidential involvement and motivations along with direct accusations of Federal involvement in the raids. Joshua Holland dispatched them all in this article.

But to those now oddly demanding an apology from me for speculating about federal involvement in two posts two weeks ago, I'm not sure what I'm supposed to apologize for. I wrote them on the day that Oakland's Mayor Quan announced that she'd been coordinating her Occupy response on the phone.My first post merely asked the question about coordination, in light of the Mayor's statement.

I suppose it makes sense that they [the mayors] might want to share tips and insights. But if they are coordinating, we're dealing with something else entirely. It would be very interesting to know if any government entity is coordinating this. It makes a big difference if it's the National Conference of Mayors or Homeland Security.

I can certainly see why the authorities might think that it would be great to have this whole thing just end with one big national sweep. But if they think that could actually happen they are too stupid to hold their jobs.

Later that day I wrote an update, quoting the notorious Rick Ellis piece, (whose later updates are now oddly being touted by his earlier critics) in which I clearly state that the information is "obviously unconfirmed." Beyond that, I issued disclaimers all through the piece about how this information wasn't verified and basically used it as a jumping off point to speculate about the various dangers of the expanded police state, linking once again to my Al Jazeera op-ed about the militarization of the police of the day before. Later, I linked to pictures of Federal Homeland security police arresting protesters in Oregon (since explained as a unique situation) in the same news cycle and linked to a post about a Homeland Security threat assessment for Pittsburgh. (This is a state DHS, not a federal DHS, but if there is one state office that is known to coordinate with the feds, it's this one. Pittsburgh hosted the 2008 G-8, where all kinds of interesting modern military equipment was deployed and DHS was very much involved.)

Nowhere did I suggest in any of that that the president was personally involved. Neither did I implicate the congress or suggest some sort of high level conspiracy to take down Occupy Wall Street as Wolf did. My concern, as it has been for more than 25 years, is that the police state apparatus we have developed lends itself to the suppression of political dissent. And this sort of suppression is rarely specifically directed by the highest levels of the agencies. It's usually an actual outgrowth of the bureaucracy itself, as a sort of self-perpetuating coordination that actually excludes "interference" from the political branches. That's the problem.

I understand why there was so much sturm und drang over the Wolf article which was fact-free assertion, but nothing I wrote contained any of that. If people want me to apologize for writing about the dangers of our humongous policing apparatus they are going to wait a long time. If they are unable to understand that when I write "obviously unconfirmed" and "if this turns out to be true" that I'm not reporting something as fact, that's not my problem. So no apologies. I'm not going to stop writing about this, speculating about it and worrying about it. This police state we've built is dangerous to our freedom and a whole bunch of raids on the Occupations at the same time, many using the same tactics, was something any thinking person should wonder about. As Holland writes in his piece:

Among the “advice” reportedly disseminated by DHS was that cities should demonize their occupations by highlighting health and safety violations, and evict them without warning in the dead of night. As a supporter of the Occupy Movement and a civil libertarian, I find that offensive and inappropriate – DHS should be worried about terrorism, not political dissent.

Yes it should. In fact, its mission as stated by Michael Chertoff is:

This Department of Homeland Security’s overriding and urgent mission is to lead the unified national effort to secure the country and preserve our freedoms. While the Department was created to secure our country against those who seek to disrupt the American way of life, our charter also includes preparation for and response to all hazards and disasters.

Advising local authorities on demonization and evictions techniques for peaceful protests doesn't strike me a "preserving our freedoms" or "securing our country against those who would disrupt the American way of life." Considering our history, from the Palmer raids, to Hoover's reign to the Church Committee revelations and most recently the surveillance of Iraq War protesters and the expansive new definition of "terrorism" I would think any liberal would be extremely skeptical about these agencies assurances that they aren't using any of their new powers and technology against the Occupy Movement.

And again, I'm not saying that Barack Obama is personally directing this. Indeed, I can't imagine why he would --- the politics of that don't make a lot of sense to me. But the bureaucracy has been built and we have every reason to wonder if they will use it in this circumstance. They have before.

Update: It should be noted once again that on November 21st, the National Lawyers Guild, which represents members of the Occupy Movement filed Freedom of Information Act requests with the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the National Park Service (NPS)based upon their suspicions of coordination. The FOIA results should reveal more details.
Should they should apologize too?

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digby 11/27/2011 04:30:00 PM |

 
Both of these things cannot be true

by David Atkins

It's almost beating a dead horse at this point, but another salient point comes to mind in critique of this Jonathan Chait column that I took on earlier today.

Recall this paragraph by Chait, with which I agree on its merits:

What, by contrast, are we to make of third-party activists like Thomas L. Friedman or Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz? They have a president who supports virtually everything they want—short-term stimulus, long-term deficit reduction through a mix of taxes and entitlement cuts, clean energy, education reform, and social liberalism. Yet they are agitating for a third party in order to carry out an agenda that is virtually identical to Obama’s. In a column touting the third-party Americans Elect, the closest Friedman comes to explaining why we should have a third party, rather than reelect the politician who already represents their values, is to say that such a party “would have offered a grand bargain on the deficit two years ago, not on the eve of a Treasury default.” He agrees with Obama’s plan, in other words, but proposes to form a new party because he disagrees with his legislative sequencing.

And yet Chait's lengthy disquisition is meant not to attack the centrist Third Way crowd, but the progressive base for supposedly being so unreasonable.

Sure, progressives have never really been happy with Dem presidents. Point taken. But did it not occur to Mr. Chait that if Obama has done pretty much everything that Thomas Friedman wants, anyone to the left of Thomas Friedman--which would be at least 40% of the country or significantly more, depending on which issues you focus on and how you slice the electorate--might have serious complaints?

Especially since Mr. Obama actually campaigned as a Democrat, on the Democratic Party platform and "change we can believe in," not as a third party candidate on the Americans Elect platform for neoliberal technocracy? Either Obama is Thomas Friedman's best choice for President--in which case progressive Democrats have every reason to be furious--or he isn't, in which case Chait owes Thomas Friedman an apology.

Chait can't have it both ways.


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thereisnospoon 11/27/2011 03:00:00 PM |

 
Newtie's empire

by digby

"... a soft spot for its has-beens, even those who gave up power in defeat or disgrace."

Former House speaker Newt Gingrich transfigured himself from a political flameout into a thriving business conglomerate. The power of the Gingrich brand fueled a for-profit collection of enterprises that generated close to $100 million in revenue over the past decade, said his longtime attorney Randy Evans.

Among Gingrich’s moneymaking ventures: a health-care think tank financed by six-figure dues from corporations; a consulting business; a communications firm that handled his speeches of up to $60,000 a pop, media appearances and books; a historical documentary production company; a separate operation to administer the royalties for the historical fiction that Gingrich writes with two co-authors; even an in-house literary agency that has counted among its clients a presidential campaign rival, former senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.).

Separate from all of that was his nonprofit political operation, American Solutions for Winning the Future. Before it disintegrated this summer in Gingrich’s absence, American Solutions generated another $52 million and provided some of the money that allowed the former speaker to travel by private jet and hired limousine.

Along the way, Gingrich has become a wealthy man, earning $2.5 million in personal income last year, according to his financial disclosure form.

As unforgiving as Washington can be, it has long had a soft spot for its has-beens, even those who gave up power in defeat or disgrace.

There is a well-trodden path from Capitol Hill to downtown law and lobbying firms, where former members of Congress can earn a far better living than they did when they were on the taxpayer’s dime — and still have afternoons free for golf.

But that would be a narrow and confining existence for a man who has always considered himself a transformational figure, and even a historic one.

“He just had a vision for being a great citizen,” said Evans, who set up Gingrich’s business operation and served as its chairman. “He looked for ways to participate in the dialogue that was going on.”

Read it all. Unless you don't want to be sick.


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digby 11/27/2011 02:00:00 PM |

 
Fairnbalanced boilerplate

by digby

Oh dear God, do they have a machine that cranks this stuff out?

[Republican presidential candidates'] specific contortions and distortions are no more worrisome than the backdrop against which this campaign unfolds, one of toxic partisanship and breathless hyperbole.
[...]
IS all of this hot air part of a broader climate of unprincipled hucksterism? As a country we’ve shifted emphasis from goods to services, manufacturing to marketing, and everyone natters on about the importance of brand rather than the quality of product — about the sell rather than the substance.

I think politics has followed suit, and politicians, stuck in a sclerotic system that renders real accomplishment difficult, lavish more energy on words than on elusive deeds. What matters is what they can convince voters of and how voters are left feeling about them — and their foes — as a result.

Look at the deficit-reduction supercommittee. As it sputtered to the finish line, how did its members spend the final days? Not with a last-ditch stab at compromise, according to many news reports, but with separate discussions among Republicans and Democrats about how to emerge from the debacle looking better than the other side. The endgame wasn’t about outcomes. It was about positioning.
[...]
Many Democrats say privately that the Republican nominee will need to be savaged for the president to prevail. And the Web site Politico asserted in an article last summer that Obama’s allies were prepared, should Romney be the nominee, to stress his weirdness, which sounds an awful lot like a proxy putdown for his being Mormon. The White House denied any such strategy.

Whatever the case, candidates clearly don’t envision much of a penalty on Election Day for having slung mud and tortured the truth in attacking opponents. I bet Romney’s aides expected — and saw an upside to — the charges of foul play prompted by their ad. The coverage of it reached many more voters than the ad itself did, and that attention ultimately underscored Romney’s overarching assertion that Obama should be ashamed of his economic performance. If Romney came across as shifty in the process, well, that was apparently a small price to pay.

But there’s a larger cost, borne not just by the candidates but, sadly, by the rest of us, too. Campaigns waged with lies presage governments racked by distrust. The sclerosis starts there. And I don’t think this country can endure much more of it without profound, lasting damage.

So candidates viciously attack one another in campaigns with lies. Shocking news.

Interestingly, he fails to note that we have an institution designed for the purpose of sorting this all out for the people. It's called the press. Unfortunately, it's overly populated by reporters who are so excited at being given affectionate nicknames by the candidates that they lose all ability to report accurately.


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digby 11/27/2011 11:30:00 AM |

 
Just one more modest concession

by digby

This is a powerful post by Frances Kissling discussing the debate among Catholics on the issue of reproductive health and freedom. It raises a very interesting question: by acceding to the conservative, overtly pro-Republican Bishops, is the administration taking sides in an internal religious dispute? I confess that I hadn't thought of it that way, but if I were a Catholic I certainly might.

If course, in typical Village fashion, the goalposts are so skewed that acceding to what is a blatant power grab on the part of the highly political Bishop patriarchs is seen as a small concession that women should be grateful wasn't worse than it is. Here's the usually sensible E.J. Dionne:

But the question of what a fair and principled compromise would look like on contraception and the health-care law should not be lost in the political maelstrom. Even an expanded exemption covering Catholic hospitals and universities would still go far beyond what the bishops have called for, as Cardinal Daniel N. DiNardo, chairman of their Committee on Pro-Life Activities, made clear in a September statement opposing mandated contraception coverage altogether.

Far from constituting a “cave-in” to the bishops, in other words, a broader exemption would be a modest concession, honoring the rights of religious institutions that liberals and Obama have long respected. And as Sister Carol noted in an interview, “we’re not talking about taking away from women anything they have,” since Catholic institutions that don’t cover contraception now wouldn’t cover it in any event.

Catholic bishops need to lower the rhetorical temperature — as the head of the conference, Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York, seems to be trying to do. Advocates of reproductive rights need to do the same.

If the administration is pressured into refusing any accommodation on the contraception rules, the people who will be undercut most are progressive Catholics who went out on a limb to support the health-care law and those bishops holding the line against the Catholic right by standing up for the church’s commitment to social justice. This will only strengthen the most conservative forces inside the Catholic Church. That can’t be what advocates of reproductive rights really want.

So the progressives need to give in once again because it could make the other side mad if they don't and then all hell will break loose? That's exactly what abused wives tell themselves.

And I guess we're supposed to believe that the Catholic Right will be strengthened by losing this battle but not by winning it. That's a nice little bit of sophistry I hear every time social conservatives hold the line and get their way.


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digby 11/27/2011 09:30:00 AM |

 
We Have Examples, Mr. Chait

by David Atkins

The insightful David Frum piece that Digby highlighted earlier was complemented in New York Magazine by a companion piece by regular concern troll Jonathan Chait attacking the liberal/progressive base.

One shouldn't dismiss Chait out of hand. He deserves a fair hearing, and much of what he has to say is food for thought, if only because he brings some uncomfortable facts to the table that need grappling with. Unlike the usual neoliberal claptrap, Chait's essay is lengthy, packed with evidence and detail, and in some ways persuasively argued while lacking in others.

Chait examines the presidencies of every Democratic President since FDR and notes that the Left has always seen as them as too compromising, too ineffective, and too beholden to right-wing economic interests. Obama and Clinton, obviously, have been seen by many on the left as little more than affable fronts for socially liberal but economically and militarily conservative policies. History tends to look back at Carter as more progressive than he actually was as president, a point that Hacker and Pierson also note at length. LBJ was despised for the Vietnam War. Kennedy was constantly stymied by conservatives, and had a fairly aggressive foreign policy. Truman had his problems with the left.

And Chait is right that even FDR was pilloried frequently from the Left, and would have been more so today. FDR came into office railing against Hoover for allowing deficits, and in 1937 lengthened the Great Depression by making big cuts to curb deficits. He made big compromises on his social programs to secure business support and especially the support of racist Southern Dixiecrats, which meant that African-Americans were largely excluded from some of the most important programs:

An exception to this trend, but only a partial exception, is Franklin Roosevelt, the most esteemed of the historical Democratic president-saints. Roosevelt is hard to compare to anybody, because his achievements were so enormous, and his failures so large as well (court-packing, interning Japanese-Americans). But even his triumphs, gleaming monuments to liberalism when viewed from the historical distance, appear, at closer inspection, to be riddled with the same tribulations, reversals, compromises, dysfunctions, and failures as any other. Roosevelt did not run for office promising to boost deficit spending in order to stimulate the economy. He ran castigating Herbert Hoover for permitting high deficits, then immediately passed an austerity budget in his first year. Roosevelt did come around to Keynesian stimulus, but he never seemed to understand it, and in 1937 he reversed himself again by cutting spending, helping plunge the economy into a second depression eventually mitigated only by war spending.

Liberals frustrated with Obama’s failure to assail Wall Street have quoted FDR’s 1936 speech denouncing “economic royalists,” but that represented just a brief period of Roosevelt’s presidency. Mostly he tried to placate business. When he refused to empower a government panel charged with enforcing labor rights, a liberal senator complained, “The New Deal is being strangled in the house of its friends.” Roosevelt constantly feared his work-relief programs would create a permanent class of dependents, so he made them stingy. He kept the least able workers out of federal programs, and thus “placed them at the mercy of state governments, badly equipped to handle them and often indifferent to their plight,” recalled historian William Leuchtenburg. Even his greatest triumphs were shot through with compromise. Social Security offered meager benefits (which were expanded under subsequent administrations), was financed by a regressive tax, and, to placate southern Democrats, was carefully tailored to exclude domestic workers and other black-dominated professions.

Compared with other Democratic presidents, Roosevelt enjoyed relatively friendly relations with liberals, but there nonetheless existed a left opposition during his time, mostly of socialists and communists, who criticized him relentlessly. Progressive senator Burton Wheeler complained that FDR, “for all his fine talk, really preferred conservatives to progressives.” And actually, the Roosevelt era had the same pattern we see today, of liberals angry with the administration’s compromises, and the administration angry in turn at the liberals. In 1935, Roosevelt adviser Rex Tugwell groused of the liberals, “They complain incessantly that the administration is moving into the conservative camp, but do nothing to keep it from going there.”

All of this is unassailably accurate. One can only imagine what a 1930s era Glenn Greenwald would have said about FDR's multiple terms, his attempts to pack the Supreme Court, the Korematsu decision on Japanese-American internment camps, etc.

Chait also takes on the myopia of the Thomas Friedman and "Americans Elect" crew in a smart way, declaring them even more irrational than the progressive base he assails previously:

What, by contrast, are we to make of third-party activists like Thomas L. Friedman or Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz? They have a president who supports virtually everything they want—short-term stimulus, long-term deficit reduction through a mix of taxes and entitlement cuts, clean energy, education reform, and social liberalism. Yet they are agitating for a third party in order to carry out an agenda that is virtually identical to Obama’s. In a column touting the third-party Americans Elect, the closest Friedman comes to explaining why we should have a third party, rather than reelect the politician who already represents their values, is to say that such a party “would have offered a grand bargain on the deficit two years ago, not on the eve of a Treasury default.” He agrees with Obama’s plan, in other words, but proposes to form a new party because he disagrees with his legislative sequencing.

As political analysis, this is pure derangement. It’s the Judean People’s Front for the Aspen Institute crowd. But these sorts of anti-political fantasies arise whenever liberals are forced to confront the crushing ordinariness of governing. (Matthew Miller, a fervent promoter of Americans Elect, likewise pined for a third party in 1996, on the curious grounds that President Clinton wasn’t doing enough to balance the budget.) Liberal disaffection helped Republicans win elections in 2000, 1968, and very nearly in 1948. All those elections came after Democrats had held the White House for at least two terms, and liberal disgust with politics had built up to toxic levels.

There is a catchphrase, which you’ve probably seen on bumper stickers or T-shirts, that captures the reason liberals have trouble maintaining political power: “Stop bitching, start a revolution.” At first blush it sounds constructive. If you consider it for a moment, though, the line assumes that there are two modes of political behavior, bitching and revolution. Since the glorious triumph of revolution never really pans out, eventually you’ll return to the alternative, bitching. But there is a third option that lies between the two—the ceaseless grind of politics.

Chait's critique has some merit. Progressives have never been happy with Democratic presidents. But he also misses the mark in two very big ways. Both have to do with a failure to learn from example:

1) It's undeniable that while liberals have groused forever about our own presidents, the last 30 years have given us something to actually be very upset about, particularly on the economic front. The knock on FDR and Truman was that they didn't go far enough; the biggest knocks on JFK and LBJ had to do with foreign policy, rather than domestic policy.

It's with Jimmy Carter that the move to supply-side economics and asset-oriented policy truly begins, and it has continued mostly unabated ever since with little in the way of push back. Progressives have every right to be upset about that--and to be more and more upset with each succeeding Democratic president. FDR can be forgiven for his 1937 attempt to balance the budget during a Depression; he had few examples to go on. Carter could be forgiven for responding to 1970s economic shocks with then-untested conservative approaches. Clinton was less forgivable because two decades had shown the weaknesses of conservative approaches; even if he had to move considerably to the right to survive politically after 1994, co-operating with the elimination of Glass Steagall and other deregulatory moves was unnecessary.

One of the biggest problems with Obama is not so much that he is so different from his Democratic predecessors--though none of them have been so quick to compromise as he has been, and none until now have offered to put Medicare and Social Security on the bargaining table--as that the failures of conservative economics are so patently obvious at this point there is no excuse for perpetuating them or giving credence to them at all. We have at least 70 years of history to prove fairly conclusively that we're right and they're wrong.

Moreover, the devastating financial crisis of 2008 had given us a unique opportunity to make needed core changes to the economic system. The voters were ready for change. They voted for change. The biggest disappointment with President Obama isn't so much what he has done, or that there he is somehow different from his recent Democratic predecessors, than about the missed opportunities he didn't take, and the fact that he should by all rights have taken a markedly different approach than Clinton or Carter, who did not have the benefit of Obama's hindsight.

This time could and should have been different.

2) Progressives have the object examples of social democracies abroad to which we can compare the American system and find it wanting. As I have pointed out in the past, conservatives have no such examples to look to:

This is one of the reasons that conservatives are so desperate to hold onto the notion of American exceptionalism: liberals have a wide of range of models from Japan to Scandinavia to prove the efficacy of various progressive solutions to America's problems. No country is perfect, of course, and solutions that work elsewhere may not work here. But as a general rule, progressives have effective examples worldwide to prove the value of our approach, whether it be in medicine, criminal justice, labor or otherwise.

Conservative approaches by contrast are a failure wherever and whenever they are tried. Theocracy inevitably leads to tyranny and despotism, whether it be the Christian theocracies of the Middle Ages or the modern theocracies of the Islamic world. Weapons-happy libertarianism ultimately ends in the sort of anarchic despotism we see in Somalia. Conservative approaches to finance, taxation and regulation lead inevitably to economic collapse, as seen in the history of basically every single country that ever even temporarily earned the "tiger" moniker from Austrian economists seeking to validate their theories.

So if progressives are upset that Obama's Affordable Care Act doesn't go far enough, it's not our grousing opinion. It's because we know it doesn't--and all we have to do is look north of the border at Canada, or to most any country in Europe, or to the social democracies of Asia to prove it. If progressives are upset that campaign finance laws are woefully ineffective, it's because we have examples overseas of less corrupt electoral processes to prove it. Europe's financial system has also been remarkably stable for decades until the Anglo-American-caused economic crash combined with the misguided adoption of the Euro. We know that our transportation and broadband infrastructure are inadequate: all it takes is a trip to Seoul or Munich to prove it. We have examples of what actually works all around us, which makes our lack of progress infuriating to those who actually travel outside the borders of the U.S.

Conservatives, despite their moniker, have few examples to look toward for policy prescriptions short of the pre-1930s Gilded Age. They're engaged in a utopian hyperlibertarian agenda, and every piece of "progress" they make toward that agenda is just gravy. Liberals in the United States are constantly frustrated by the fact that we can look at examples from history, as well as contemporary examples just to the north or just across either ocean, to demonstrate the worthiness of our ideas. And yet little is done in the realm to public policy to acknowledge the difference between liberal fact-based arguments, and plainly wrong-headed conservative utopian speculation.

So yes, Mr Chait. Liberals are always--and increasingly of late--frustrated with our Presidents. That's because we have every reason to be.


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thereisnospoon 11/27/2011 07:30:00 AM |

Saturday, November 26, 2011

 

Saturday Night At The Movies

The Haole and the IV

By Dennis Hartley

Archipelago of angst: The Descendants

In the course of (what passes for) my “career” as a movie critic, I have avowed to avoid the trite phrase “heartwarming family film” as a descriptive. Well, so much for principles. The Descendants is a heartwarming family film. There, I said it. Now, let me qualify that. Since it is directed by Alexander Payne (Citizen Ruth, Election, About Schmidt, Sideways ) it is not a typical heartwarming family film. It is a heartwarming family film riddled with dysfunction and middle-aged angst (which is how I prefer my heartwarming family films, thank you very much). Think of it as Terms of Endearment goes Hawaiian.

Despite the lush and verdant tropical setting for his tale, Payne wastes no time clueing us in that there is trouble in Paradise. People who live in Hawaii get cancer, feel pain and generally encounter their own fair share of potholes as they caterwaul down the road of life, just like anyone else. That is the gist of an internal monologue that opens the film, delivered by its protagonist, Matt King (George Clooney), as he holds vigil in an ICU, where his wife (Patricia Hastie) lies in a coma, gravely injured from a water-skiing mishap off Waikiki. As he contemplates the maze of IV tubes and other apparatus keeping his wife alive, Matt, like anyone confronting the Abyss, begins taking inventory.

After all, what family doesn’t have its ups and downs? On the “up” side, Matt is financially set for life, as an heir to and executor for a sizable chunk of prime, undeveloped land on Kauai, held in a family trust (thanks to genuine Hawaiian royalty buried in the woodpile a ways back). On the “down” side, his workaholic tendencies have precipitated an emotional distance from his wife and two daughters in recent years. His 17-year old, the sullen and combative Alexandra (Shailene Woodley) is away at boarding school; and precocious 10-year old Scottie (Amara Miller) is in hot water for antics like bringing photos of her comatose mother to school, and for cyber-bullying a classmate.

In the past, Matt’s wife has served as the buffer between him and this type of day-to-day daughterly drama, but now that she is indefinitely incapacitated, it’s all landed in his lap. He may be a respected pillar of the community and more than capable of running his own law office, but now finds himself akin to the proverbial deer in the headlights. After awkwardly putting out Scottie’s fires, Matt decides that he will need to enlist the assistance of her older sister for riot control. Besides, he figures it would be best to keep both of his girls close by, should the worst happen. As if this weren’t enough on his plate, Matt is also up against a pending deadline to sell the family’s land to a real estate developer. He is being egged on by a sizable coterie of cousins who (a couple anti-development dissenters aside) are eager to milk this potential cash cow for all its worth.

Then, the real bombshell gets dropped on Matt’s head. The bombardiers are his daughters, who let it slip that, completely unbeknownst to Dad, Mom has been getting a little action on the side as of late, with a younger man (Matthew Lillard). And he’s a real estate agent, no less (shades of American Beauty ). Poor Matt. He’s no sooner steeled himself for the looming possibility of becoming a grieving widower who must stay strong for his kids, than he instead finds himself suffering the confounded humiliation of a blindsided cuckold…as they look on. Flummoxed, Matt demands confirmation from his wife’s friends, who fess up. Although he has no real idea what he wants to say (or do) to him, Matt nonetheless decides that he must track down his wife’s lover (it’s a guy thing). With Scottie, Alexandra and her boyfriend (Nick Krause) in tow, he embarks on the Alexander Payne Road Trip, which in this case involves taking a puddle jumper to Kauai.

While the setup may feel somewhat familiar (like the aforementioned American Beauty meets Little Miss Sunshine ), or even rote, in Payne’s hands it is anything but. Yes, on one level it’s another soaper about a middle-aged male heading for a meltdown, but every time you think you’ve got it sussed, Payne keeps pitching curve balls. His script (which he co-adapted with Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, from the novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings) consistently hits the sweet spot between comedy and drama, giving us characters who, in spite of (or perhaps, due to) their contradictions and flaws, are people to whom we can all easily relate to. The film also showcases Clooney’s best work in years; it’s the closest he has come thus far to proving that he may indeed be this generation’s Cary Grant, after all.

This is one of the first true knockouts on the autumn release calendar, and one of the best films I’ve seen this year. There are many reasons to recommend it, not the least of which is a bevy of fine performances from the entire cast. Lillard shows surprising depth, and it’s a hoot to watch veteran character actors like Robert Forster and Beau Bridges doing that voodoo that they do so well. I also like the way Payne subtly utilizes the Hawaiian landscapes like another character in the story, much in the same manner he employed the California wine country milieu in Sideways. After all, it is only when human beings are set against the simple perfection of an orchid or a grape that we are truly exposed as the silly, needlessly self-absorbed and ultimately inconsequential creatures that we really are.

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Dennis Hartley 11/26/2011 05:00:00 PM |

 
California Leading the Way

by David Atkins

Some good news for today:

cross the country, the era of ambitious public works projects seems to be over. Governments are shelving or rejecting plans for highways, railroads and big buildings under the weight of collapsing revenues and voters’ resistance.

But not California.

With a brashness and ambition that evoke a California of a generation ago, state leaders — starting with Gov. Jerry Brown — have rallied around a plan to build a 520-mile high-speed rail line from Los Angeles to San Francisco, cutting the trip from a six-hour drive to a train ride of two hours and 38 minutes. And they are doing it in the face of what might seem like insurmountable political and fiscal obstacles.

The pro-train constituency has not been derailed by a state report this month that found the cost of the bullet train tripling to $98 billion for a project that would not be finished until 2033, by news that Republicans in Congress are close to eliminating federal high-speed rail financing this year, by opposition from California farmers and landowners upset about tracks tearing through their communities or by questions about how much the state or private businesses will be able to contribute.

Adam Nagourney's article paints the whole project in a negative light, but that's just Nagourney being the concern troll he is.

California bucked the Republican wave in 2010. It has bucked the trend of rejection of public works projects. And it's only the ridiculous 2/3 requirement for passing tax increases that prevents California from becoming a progressive utopia in a sea of conservative economic policy.

One of the biggest reasons I'm involved in local Democratic politics is to help elect Democrats to the State Senate and Assembly, which are both held my Republicans in my neck of the woods despite being in competitive districts. Just a handful more across the state and California will have 2/3 supermajorities in both houses--enough to overcome the Republican tyranny of the minority here on budgetary issues.

Conservatives should be worried: demographically speaking, the rest of the country is going to look more and more like California over the coming years. Cultural trends begun in California tend to sweep the nation. For conservatives, that's a very scary future.

And that's a good thing.


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thereisnospoon 11/26/2011 03:00:00 PM |

 
Walking with the Egyptians

by digby

If you are trying to figure out what's happening in Egypt right now (it's not good) and wonder how it got there, this fascinating segment from Up with Chris Hayes will fill you in.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

When I hear how this whole thing has evolved and transformed, I can't help but worry about where this is all leading there --- and here.

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digby 11/26/2011 01:30:00 PM |

 
Attention LA Locals

by digby

If you can't occupy or get arrested, you can do this:

[Yesterday] at 4:30pm, Mayor Villaraigosa announced the eviction of Occupy LA from the grounds of City Hall. He has offered the West Steps as a meeting area for General Assemblies, but this space is not sufficient for hundreds of people who attend Occupy LA daily. He has set aside 50 beds for homeless occupiers and will send down various social service organizations to inform people of their options before Sunday’s eviction.

However, occupiers are resolved to stay. We need your help. If you are at an occupation, plan a Sunday night action in solidarity with our cause. We must remain occupied.

We have generated a petition to stop the eviction. Take the time to sign it, tweet it, and pass it along to your friends:

Stop the eviction of Occupy LA

Call and email the Mayor and Council Members too!

Antonio Villaraigosa: mayor@lacity.org (213) 978-0600 or (213) 978-0721
District 1: Ed Reyes: councilmember.reyes@lacity.org (213)-473-7001
District 2: Paul Krekorian: councilmember.Krekorian@lacity.org (213)-473-7002
District 3: Dennis Zine: councilmember.zine@lacity.org (213)-473-7003
District 4: Tom LaBonge: councilmember.Labonge@lacity.org (213)-473-7004
District 5: Paul Koretz: paul.koretz@lacity.org (213)-473-7005
District 6: Tony Cardenas: councilmember.cardenas@lacity.org (213) -473-7006
District 7: Richard Alacorn: councilmember.alarcon@lacity.org (213)-473-7007
District 8: Bernard Parks: councilmember.parks@lacity.org (213)-473-7008
District 9: Jan Perry: Jan.Perry@lacity.org (213)-473-7009
District 10: Herb Wesson Jr.: councilmember.wesson@lacity.org (213)-473-7010
District 11: Bill Rosendahl: councilman.rosendahl@lacity.org (213)-473-7011
District 12: Mitchell Englander: councilmember.englander@lacity.org (213)-473-7012
District 13: Eric Garcetti: councilmember.garcetti@lacity.org (213)-473-7013
District 14: Jose Huizar: councilmember.huizar@lacity.org (213)-473-7014

Here's a block of email addresses to send one email message:

mayor@lacity.org; councilmember.reyes@lacity.org; councilmember.Krekorian@lacity.org; councilmember.zine@lacity.org; councilmember.Labonge@lacity.org; paul.koretz@lacity.org; councilmember.cardenas@lacity.org; councilmember.alarcon@lacity.org; councilmember.parks@lacity.org; Jan.Perry@lacity.org; councilmember.wesson@lacity.org; councilman.rosendahl@lacity.org; councilmember.englander@lacity.org; councilmember.garcetti@lacity.org; councilmember.huizar@lacity.org


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digby 11/26/2011 12:30:00 PM |

 
Wingnut Pie

by digby

Apparently the right wingers are all up in arms that Planned Parenthood offered some advice to pro-choice adherents on how to have a conversation with relatives who don't agree on the subject. It's undoubtedly the work of the devil (and Michelle Obama) and certainly cause for immediate defunding of birth control services everywhere.

Tbogg explains:

You see, trying to find common ground and pointing that abortion is a very personal and private decision that should be made by the woman and her doctor and the deity of her choice is actually an act that is the moral equivalent of feeding newborns into a woodchipper, so you and Planned Parenthood should be ashamed of yourselves because, as Steve says, you’re “promoting abortion”. In fact, failure to completely agree with Steve that all abortion should be banned and doctors who perform them should be hunted down like animals and immediately dispatched to hell with a bullet between their eyes means that you probably don’t love God as much as you think you do.

If that is the case, and since you are going to go to Hell anyway, you might as well as go all in by dispensing with the Planned Parenthood ‘diplomacy’ and telling the Steve Ertelts in your family, to, oh I don’t know… “Why don’t you mind your own fucking business you panty-sniffing twatwaffle” or the ever popular, “What? Aren’t there already enough kids in the world for you to molest?.” Not only will the subsequent uproar change the direction of the conversation, but the dinner may come to a premature ending meaning more pie for you.

And who doesn’t like more pie?

MMMM. Pie.

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digby 11/26/2011 11:00:00 AM |

 

Political Entrepreneurs and Lunatics

by digby

If you haven't read this David Frum analysis of the Republican Party in New York magazine, you are missing out.

The Bush years cannot be repudiated, but the memory of them can be discarded to make way for a new and more radical ideology, assembled from bits of the old GOP platform that were once sublimated by the party elites but now roam the land freely: ultralibertarianism, crank monetary theories, populist fury, and paranoid visions of a Democratic Party controlled by ACORN and the New Black Panthers. For the past three years, the media have praised the enthusiasm and energy the tea party has brought to the GOP. Yet it’s telling that that movement has failed time and again to produce even a remotely credible candidate for president. Sarah Palin, Donald Trump, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich: The list of tea-party candidates reads like the early history of the U.S. space program, a series of humiliating fizzles and explosions that never achieved liftoff. A political movement that never took governing seriously was exploited by a succession of political entrepreneurs uninterested in governing—but all too interested in merchandising. Much as viewers tune in to American Idol to laugh at the inept, borderline dysfunctional early auditions, these tea-party champions provide a ghoulish type of news entertainment each time they reveal that they know nothing about public affairs and have never attempted to learn. But Cain’s gaffe on Libya or Perry’s brain freeze on the Department of Energy are not only indicators of bad leadership. They are indicators of a crisis of followership. The tea party never demanded knowledge or concern for governance, and so of course it never got them.

And the really great thing about them is the fact that they have gained prominence at the worst possible time. I know it's fashionable to call people like me whores and hacks for pointing out that the Republicans are certifiably nuts when the Democrats are also so feckless, but it's true. (Over this week-end if you feel like reading about something that may or may not be relevant to that question, read about this again.)

In any case, at least read Frum's long essay if you have the time. I still disagree with him philosophically on virtually everything, but I think he is at least living in the same dimension. That can't be said of the looney tunes who are running his party. What he doesn't seem to grasp is that the Democratic Party is already playing the role he wants to assign to the Republicans --- defending the status quo. He really should just join the Party. At this point he'd be to the left of at least half the Senate Democratic caucus.

On the other hand, the right's insane intransigence has saved us so far from a Grand Bargain, so from my perspective they are at the moment behaving as useful idiots, for which I'm grateful. In the age of austerity anything that stops the economic quacks from bleeding the patient is a good thing. But it's important to keep in mind that these people are only stopping the bleeding because they want to cut the patients arms and legs off. Lord help us if they ever get what they really want.

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digby 11/26/2011 09:30:00 AM |

 
Lego John Pike

by David Atkins

This was emailed by a friend who said she got it off twitter but couldn't remember where. I haven't been able to find it online otherwise, so if anyone knows whom to attribute to, let me know in the comments.



You can see more John Pike meme goodness here.


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thereisnospoon 11/26/2011 07:30:00 AM |

Friday, November 25, 2011

 
Friday cat blogging

by digby

A happy ending:



Thanks officers.

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digby 11/25/2011 06:30:00 PM |

 
Eurotrashed

by digby

Oh, come on Kevin. This is nothing that a big shot of austerity won't cure:

Worried about Europe? You should be! Via Stuart Staniford, here's the latest bad news from the eurozone: In September, as the chart below shows, industrial orders plunged 6.4% in the euro area (pink line) and 2.3% in the broader EU (black line). Here's Stuart:

There have been indicators suggesting mild contraction for a while — eg retail trade. But this is the first indicator I've seen that looks like the kind of sharp non-linear contraction characteristic of an out-and-out recession. I guess there's always the possibility that October will be better. However, given the financial news flow in the last six weeks, it's hard to imagine too many European executives getting all giddy and excited in approving new projects.

The good news is that Germany's Angela Merkel has her priorities straight:

Ms Merkel instead used a three-way summit with France and Italy in Strasbourg to insist that new treaty powers to intervene and punish sinner states remained the key focus of Europe's rescue efforts. She said: "The countries who don't keep to the stability pact have to be punished – those who contravene it need to be penalised. We need to make sure this doesn't happen again."

Oy vey. Read Krugman. And Martin Wolf.


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digby 11/25/2011 05:00:00 PM |

 
Pepper Spray Friday Revisited

by David Atkins

A few days ago I wrote sarcastically that Black Friday shoppers should be pepper sprayed instead of Occupy protesters, since Black Friday chaos has caused death, paralysis and other serious injuries, while the same can't be said of OWS.

Well, perhaps I spoke too soon:

Matthew Lopez went to the Wal-Mart in Porter Ranch on Thursday night for the Black Friday sale but instead was caught in a pepper-spray attack by a woman who authorities said was "competitive shopping."

Lopez described a chaotic scene in the San Fernando Valley store among shoppers looking for video games soon after the sale began.

"I heard screaming and I heard yelling," said Lopez, 18. "Moments later, my throat stung. I was coughing really bad and watering up."

Lopez said customers were already in the store when a whistle signaled the start of Black Friday at 10 p.m., sending shoppers hurtling in search of deeply discounted items.

By the time Lopez arrived at the video games, the display had been torn down. Employees attempted to hold back the scrum of shoppers and pick up merchandise even as customers trampled the video games and DVDs strewn on the floor...

"People started screaming, pulling and pushing each other, and then the whole area filled up with pepper spray," the Selmar resident said. "I guess what triggered it was people started pulling the plastic off the pallets and then shoving and bombarding the display of games. It started with people pushing and screaming because they were getting shoved onto the boxes."

The pepper spray wafted through the air, Seminario said, and she breathed some in and started coughing. Her face also started itching....

Wal-Mart employees were taking statements from about eight customers who had been pepper sprayed near the front of the store, Seminario said. "After we paid, we saw five that were in really bad shape," she said. "They had been sprayed in the face, it looked like, and they had swelling of the face, really extreme swelling of face, redness, coughing."

Nakeasha Contreras, 20, of North Hollywood, arrived at midnight and hadn't heard what happened. Even if she had, she said, she wouldn't have been bothered: "I don't care. I'm still getting my TV. I've never seen Wal-Mart so crazy, but I guess it could have been worse."

You can't say the average American consumer doesn't have their priorities down pat. As long as there are more people willing to brave pepper spray and overnight camping in the cold in order to pay a big corporation for a gadget, than there are people who will do the same to save the safety net and demand economic justice, something tells me our economic overlords won't be too scared of us.

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thereisnospoon 11/25/2011 03:30:00 PM |

 
Econ4

by tristero

Now, we're talking, a genuine attempt to operationalize and expand upon OWS, by focusing expert attention on one of its most compelling and apt observations: the extraordinary concentration of wealth in the hands of a few contemporary America:

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For more info on Econ4, a group of economists who are committed to changing the way economics are understood and taught, go here for a mission statement, more information, and other information.
tristero 11/25/2011 02:00:00 PM |

 
Your Daily Grayson marathon

by digby

Howie has posted a fabulous Thanksgiving series over on Down With Tyranny called "Today we are thankful for Alan Grayson" in five parts.

Today We're Thankful For... Alan Grayson

Today We're Thankful For... Alan Grayson, Part 2

Today We're Thankful For... Alan Grayson, Part 3

Today We're Thankful For... Alan Grayson, Part 4

Today We're Thankful For... Alan Grayson, Part 5

Today We're Thankful For... Alan Grayson, Part 6

I urge you to watch all the videos. I am particularly fond of this one from Part 3:

Howie sez:

Alan's the kind of political leader we need in Washington, ably representing the interests of ordinary working families. He has his own unique style, which never fails to get the attention of the media-- and of the 1%. Last time they poured more money into his campaign than they deployed against any other Democrat running for the House anywhere! There's no reason to think they won't do the same thing this year. In fact, they have a conservative Democrat already lined up-- backed by the untrustworthy corporate shills at the DCCC and Emily's List-- to try to defeat Alan in the Florida primary. He deserves our help. If you can, please consider making a contribution to his campaign today.

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digby 11/25/2011 12:30:00 PM |

 
Premium Randroids

by digby

Gosh, for some reason every time some group of political elites get together to deal with the devil deficit the consensus position moves farther and farther to the right:

Though it reached no agreement, the special Congressional committee on deficit reduction built a case for major structural changes in Medicare that would limit the government’s open-ended financial commitment to the program, lawmakers and health policy experts say.

Members of both parties told the panel that Medicare should offer a fixed amount of money to each beneficiary to buy coverage from competing private plans, whose costs and benefits would be tightly regulated by the government.

Republicans have long been enamored of that idea. In the last few weeks, two of the Republican candidates for president, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, have endorsed variations of it.

The idea faces opposition from many Democrats, who say it would shift costs to beneficiaries and eliminate the guarantee of affordable health insurance for older Americans. But some Democrats say that — if carefully designed, with enough protections for beneficiaries — it might work.

The idea is sometimes known as premium support, because Medicare would subsidize premiums charged by private insurers that care for beneficiaries under contract with the government...

John C. Rother, president of the National Coalition on Health Care, which represents consumers, employers and providers, said, “The supercommittee may have laid the groundwork for future reductions in the growth of Medicare.”

I don't know who these Democrats are and perhaps they are just speculating that there's bipartisan support. But considering how far to the right we've moved on everything else, I'm guessing a few Dems at least have opened the door on this one too. After all, "premium support" was originally a New Democrat idea back in the 90s.

Today, however, "premium support" will add up to Paul Ryan's vouchers. That's all. It's not complicated. It adds up to elderly people with less money buying sub-standard health care policies (like I have now) that basically force you to wait until you are dying before you get medical care. I'm sure it will save money. After all, many people are going to die much earlier than they otherwise would. Silver lining, I guess.

One of the New Dem experts who originally devised the term "premium support" disavowed the idea earlier this year.

Here's the conclusion:

In brief, current proposals are not premium support as Reischauer and I used the term.In addition, I now believe that even with the protections we set forth, vouchers have serious shortcomings. Only systemic health care reform holds out real promise of slowing the growth of Medicare spending. Predicted savings from vouchers or premium support are speculative. Cost shifting to the elderly, disabled, and poor and to states is not. Medicare's size confers power, so far largely untapped, that no private plan can match to promote the systemic change that can improve quality and reduce cost. The advantages of choice in health care relate less to choice of insurance plan than to choice of provider, which traditional Medicare now provides and which many private plans restrict as a management tool. Finally, the success of premium support depends on sustained and rigorous regulation of plan offerings and marketing that the current Congress shows no disposition to establish and maintain.

I think that last goes without saying.

"Premium support" as we know it is an obvious step to the dismantling of Medicare. There's a reason why Paul Randroid Ryan took up the phrase and doubled down on its premises. And it has the added benefit of making the health care reforms (which need Medicare to be a government cost leverager) unworkable too. A twofer!

I think one of the major lessons from all of this is that, as predicted, the Rube Goldberg contraption of the health care reform is going to be subject to a whole lot of malicious tinkering, any piece of which could bring the whole thing down. That's always been a weakness of such a uselessly complicated, politically restrained program run by special interests. In the grand scheme of things it may turn out to be better than nothing over the long run, but as everyone knows, in the long run we'll all be dead. If this current wrecking crew has its way, we'll be dead a lot sooner than we need to be.


Update:

Also too:

In their initial analysis of the Ryan Medicare plan, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office determined, “Under the proposal, most elderly people would pay more for their health care than they would pay under the current Medicare system… Under the proposal, the gradually increasing number of Medicare beneficiaries participating in the new premium support program would bear a much larger share of their health care costs than they would under the traditional program…That greater burden would require them to reduce their use of health care services, spend less on other goods and services, or save more in advance of retirement than they would under current law.” [CBO, 4/5/11]

digby 11/25/2011 11:00:00 AM |

 
666 alarm pepper spray

by digby


Uhm:

A woman who pepper-sprayed other shoppers Thursday night at the Wal-Mart in Porter Ranch had armed herself with the caustic spray to gain an advantage in the fight for merchandise at the Black Friday sale, a fire captain said.

The woman, who is still being sought, used the spray in more than one area of the Wal-Mart "to gain preferred access to a variety of locations in the store," said Los Angeles Fire Capt. James Carson.

"She was competitive shopping," he said.

Twenty customers, including children, were hurt in the 10:10 p.m. incident. Shoppers complained of minor skin and eye irritation and sore throats, he said.

So much for the idea that Americans are losing their religion (consumerism.)

I wonder if she'll be charged with assault?

Speaking of Black Friday, the economist Robert Frank had a terrific piece in the New York Times yesterday about how to end this Black Friday nonsense: the 6-6-6 plan.


Update: It's a trend!

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digby 11/25/2011 09:30:00 AM |

 
99.9%

by David Atkins

Paul Krugman has a great op-ed today with a reminder that it's not just the 1% that is the problem, but the upper one tenth of one percent of Americans who constitute the biggest problem. It's an issue that Hacker and Pierson have covered at some length, as has Matt Taibbi. The rewards of our skewed economy increase exponentially as you approach the top of the income chart.

“We are the 99 percent” is a great slogan. It correctly defines the issue as being the middle class versus the elite (as opposed to the middle class versus the poor). And it also gets past the common but wrong establishment notion that rising inequality is mainly about the well educated doing better than the less educated; the big winners in this new Gilded Age have been a handful of very wealthy people, not college graduates in general.

If anything, however, the 99 percent slogan aims too low. A large fraction of the top 1 percent’s gains have actually gone to an even smaller group, the top 0.1 percent — the richest one-thousandth of the population.

And while Democrats, by and large, want that super-elite to make at least some contribution to long-term deficit reduction, Republicans want to cut the super-elite’s taxes even as they slash Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in the name of fiscal discipline.

All of the goodies have gone to the top one tenth of one percent:

The recent Congressional Budget Office report on inequality didn’t look inside the top 1 percent, but an earlier report, which only went up to 2005, did. According to that report, between 1979 and 2005 the inflation-adjusted, after-tax income of Americans in the middle of the income distribution rose 21 percent. The equivalent number for the richest 0.1 percent rose 400 percent.

For the most part, these huge gains reflected a dramatic rise in the super-elite’s share of pretax income. But there were also large tax cuts favoring the wealthy. In particular, taxes on capital gains are much lower than they were in 1979 — and the richest one-thousandth of Americans account for half of all income from capital gains.

And they're not really contributing much to the economy:

Still, don’t some of the very rich get that way by producing innovations that are worth far more to the world than the income they receive? Sure, but if you look at who really makes up the 0.1 percent, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that, by and large, the members of the super-elite are overpaid, not underpaid, for what they do.

For who are the 0.1 percent? Very few of them are Steve Jobs-type innovators; most of them are corporate bigwigs and financial wheeler-dealers. One recent analysis found that 43 percent of the super-elite are executives at nonfinancial companies, 18 percent are in finance and another 12 percent are lawyers or in real estate. And these are not, to put it mildly, professions in which there is a clear relationship between someone’s income and his economic contribution.

Executive pay, which has skyrocketed over the past generation, is famously set by boards of directors appointed by the very people whose pay they determine; poorly performing C.E.O.’s still get lavish paychecks, and even failed and fired executives often receive millions as they go out the door.

Bottom line?

So should the 99.9 percent hate the 0.1 percent? No, not at all. But they should ignore all the propaganda about “job creators” and demand that the super-elite pay substantially more in taxes.

It's pretty obvious, and conservatives don't really have a good answer for these facts and figures. If we had a decent media in this country, this stuff would be all over the airwaves.


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thereisnospoon 11/25/2011 07:30:00 AM |