I couldn't seem to bring myself to blog over the weekend. It's the austerity, dammit. It's just an unending litany of ways that western leaders all over the world seem to be obsessed with wrecking their nations' economies and western democracy entire. All of it mercilessly capped with Marcy Wheeler telling Culture of Truth on Virtually Speaking Sundays that it seems clear the oligarchs have decided they don't get any value from labor anymore so they are chucking the whole enterprise.
Just going to Eschaton was enough to make me want to run away screaming:
"This Isn't Necessary" - Spain is destroying itself, and Angela Merely shows no mercy.
"Even More Beatings - Like Krgthulu I'm not especially optimistic that the powers that be will own up to being wrong or change their policies. They've convinced themselves that the only thing that matters is "low government borrowing costs" because this means that the people who have all the money have "confidence" in them. Of course low government borrowing costs don't just reflect market confidence by the bond vigilantes, they reflect the fact that their economies are crap and there aren't any productive investments anywhere. But, hey, as long as interest rates are low, nothing else matters. I might actually prefer evil. This is mostly just stupid."
"In Defense Of Child Labor" - Claire McCaskill exuberantly tweeted, "Great news,our work to stop dumb rule on children working on farms succeeded! Rs & Ds from farm states came together and common sense won." And then the White House decided to forget about those protections against children doing hazardous work "on farms owned by anyone other than their parents." AP claims the rule was "unpopular" - but doesn't say who it was unpopular with.
"Deja Vu All Over Again" - The discourse on Austerity is sounding an awful lot like the one on the Iraq War. Someday we will all be known as "premature anti-austerians".
"Perhaps They Should Be Restive" - With the news that Spain's population is "restless" while the government proceeds to destroy its economy, Atrios says: "When your unemployment rate is 25%, that is your problem. Nothing else. You should not be thinking about any other problems. There is no mechanism such that "cutting government spending" will lead to an improved fiscal outlook. There is, however, a mechanism such that "more jobs" will lead to an improved fiscal outlook. Fix the recession, fix the economy, fix any fiscal issues. There is no way to fix the fiscal issues in isolation."
"You Hope It's Just Elaborate Security Theatre" - Charlie Stross has A Bruce Schneier Moment on the discovery that "The Ministry of Defence is considering placing surface-to-air missiles on residential flats during the Olympics. An east London estate, where 700 people live, has received leaflets saying a 'Higher Velocity Missile system' could be placed on a water tower. But estate resident Brian Whelan said firing the missiles 'would shower debris across the east end of London'." Have I mentioned lately how much I hate it that we're having the Olympics in my backyard?
"74" - Apparently the age that George Will thinks we should retire at.
"Operation Blame Yurp: Our great and glorious leaders were setting the stage to use that excuse here if there weren't signs of the economy improving, but they're running with it now in the UK." People do know that the downward slope started well before Cameron and Obama, but the public is also beginning to realize that they've both made it clear that they are deliberately accelerating the process and making sure that nothing stops it.
"Getting It The Wrong Way Round: Unsurprisingly, Spain is officially in recession. Governments everywhere have decided that austerity and deficit cutting - or at least the appearance of trying to cut the deficit - are ends in themselves. But they never are. Even if you believe it's the most important thing, the way to cut government borrowing is to have more people have jobs so there's more tax revenue being collected. Firing everyone and destroying your economy does not solve your borrowing problem. There's evil here, perceived opportunities to gut the welfare state and labor protections, but there's also a whole lot of stupid."
And also via Atrios, E.L. Doctorow with "Unexceptionalism: A Primer: TO achieve unexceptionalism, the political ideal that would render the United States indistinguishable from the impoverished, traditionally undemocratic, brutal or catatonic countries of the world, do the following: [...] With this ruling, the reduction of America to unexceptionalism is complete."
If I ever needed proof that the serious right-wingers know that the Democratic leadership is the party that is fulfilling the right-wing agenda, this might be it. When the guys from AEI and Brookings say the Republicans are the problem, you know they are just abandoning the GOP to the whack-jobs, they don't need them anymore.
And speaking of voting, even the Obama campaign has figured out that Republicans are deliberately making it harder.
The Forgotten Front In The War On Voting: "Nationwide, the approximately 5.3 million Americans with felonies (and, in several states, those with misdemeanor convictions) are kept away from the polls, according to the American Civil Liberties Unions (ACLU). The organization is sponsoring the Democracy Restoration Act, a bill introduced by Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD), which would create a federal standard for restoring the voting rights of felons."
Enemy combatants or paranoid fantasy? I don't think we're in Kansas anymore. (And, having read the first few Baum books, I have to say this is a lot less like Oz than Kafka.)
Stuart Zechman and Jay Ackroyd were talking about "life in wartime" on Virtually Speaking A-Z, and I think it makes a good companion piece to Jay's Glenn Carle interview, as both concern themselves with the essential fact that, by responding to Al Qaeda's attack on the Twin Towers exactly the way Al Qaeda wanted us to, America's leaders are bringing down the United States. Which, apparently, was the "pragmatic" thing to do in the Third Way War.
Speaking of which, I wonder what Obama promised Elizabeth Warren to get her to move off her beat and come out as a war hawk.
A couple of days ago, EFF wrote that the House was debating CISPA, and then yesterday TechDirt posted, "Insanity: CISPA Just Got Way Worse, And Then Passed On Rushed Vote [...] Basically this means CISPA can no longer be called a cybersecurity bill at all. The government would be able to search information it collects under CISPA for the purposes of investigating American citizens with complete immunity from all privacy protections as long as they can claim someone committed a "cybersecurity crime". Basically it says the 4th Amendment does not apply online, at all. Moreover, the government could do whatever it wants with the data as long as it can claim that someone was in danger of bodily harm, or that children were somehow threatened - again, notwithstanding absolutely any other law that would normally limit the government's power. Somehow, incredibly, this was described as limiting CISPA, but it accomplishes the exact opposite. This is very, very bad."
Matt Taibbi reports on the death spiral of America's biggest welfare teat-suckers: the Big Banksters.
Right-Wing Watch has an article up on how the wingers are co-opting MLK, but I think they missed a bet. One of the things the left had that the right was losing during the '60s was morality - especially Christianity.
Digby says that the Confidence Fairies and Bond Vigilantes are dropping like flies - but all around us, western leaders continue to double down on the destruction of their own countries. And yes, when the White House gets rid of civil service jobs and talks about cutting spending and the importance of reducing deficits, they, too, are practicing "austerity".
The Rude One wonders why the Arizona Attorney General went in front of the Supreme Court without any ammunition.
At last, Charles Pierce addresses What's Wrong with the Ross Douthat Creed. I think the jury is in, and Douthat's Bad Religion is both bad history and, well, bad religion.
Charlie Savage and The New York Times are suing the DOJ for failing to respond to a request for memoranda supposedly justifying the president's power to make recess appointments when there are pro forma sessions ongoing. It's funny how a president who couldn't make recess appointments during normal recesses has been making them in other circumstances.
I didn't post about Wales' grand slam in the Rugby, despite jubilation in the Welsh side of the family, because, well, I don't really care. However, that was before I learned that whenever Wales wins the grand slam, a pope dies.
Well, what would The 10 Grumpiest Living Writers be without Harlan Ellison?
It looks like kangaroo courts will now be the norm, and Bradley Manning is no exception.
Christians really don't seem to like Douthat's book, which indulges many fantasies about how well the various denominations have gotten along with each other through history, but also seems to be trying to accommodate right-wing economic views into an orthodoxy that has never shared them - even while deploring the "accommodations" of liberal Christians. "This demonstrates the extent to which traditional - orthodox - Catholic social teaching is at odds with that of contemporary American Catholic neo-cons, intent on finding ways to baptize Hayek and von Mises. But as I say, for Douthat not all accommodations are bad." Via Atrios, who knows the '50s were no utopia of Christian agreement.
At at Making Light, I see that Avram and the commenters have also been talking about the meager differences between the two parties, and how to influence them, and Teresa seconds an observation about comment order. Over on the sidebar, I was directed to two links under the title "Libertarianism: Free reign for private tyrannies", complete with interesting quotations within the tags. The first was to "The liberty of local bullies" at Noahpinion: "Not surprisingly, this gigantic loophole has made modern American libertarianism the favorite philosophy of a vast array of local bullies, who want to keep the big bully (government) off their backs so they can bully to their hearts' content. The curtailment of government legitimacy, in the name of "liberty," allows abusive bosses to abuse workers, racists to curtail opportunities for minorities, polluters to pollute without cost, religious groups to make religious minorities feel excluded, etc. In theory, libertarianism is about the freedom of the individual, but in practice it is often about the freedom of local bullies to bully. It's a "don't tattle to the teacher" ideology." The second went to "Biff Shrugged" by Jonathan Chait: "Gillespie concludes his piece by insisting that trying to stamp out the problem somehow makes it worse: 'Our problem isn't a world where bullies are allowed to run rampant; it's a world where kids like Aaron are convinced that they are powerless victims.' The victims should just take care of it themselves. 'Fight your own battles, don't tell the teacher' also happens to be the position of bullies everywhere. The bully is in favor of what he and a libertarian like Gillespie would define as 'liberty.'" Also, two links in "The Freedom, The Freedom", "More century-old color photographs", and "The full version of China Miéville's "London's Overthrow," previously seen in The New York Times Magazine." Oh, yeah, and you know how I feel about having the Olympics in my back yard, complete with "aggressive" security. (After having the Underground largely unavailable on most weekends for over a year in east London, I'm now seeing signs in the local station saying that trains will run differently during the Olympics, and have no idea what that will mean. Bleh. More reasons to stay home.) Oh, and now I understand what Susie Bright was talking about when she mentioned "Shades of Grey" to me. Blimey, I thought everyone already knew that kinky fantasies don't tell you what people "really" want in the outside world.
You know, I can't remember the last time I felt I could believe anything the police said. It's not a new thing.
I'm going to disagree with both Susie and Krugman on this one. Obama had the power to do a lot of things that would have improved the economy, starting with putting the bankster criminals in jail and using the money Congress gave him to help drowning homeowners. Passing TARP - something Obama can take personal responsibility for ensuring - actually hurt the economy and reduced the likelihood that those banksters would pay for their crimes. Obama's recent deal to let the banksters off the hook for a token "settlement" is only encouraging more of the same. Oh, and since he was right when he talked about how important changing our health insurance system is to the economy, it would have been good if he'd used his manifest powers to get a good health care deal instead of the bad one he committed to early on. And he's still trying to wreck Social Security, which will only make the economy worse. The fact that Republicans like these policies when Republicans do them makes no difference; Obama was elected precisely because people expected him to fight against such policies, not to solidify them. The continuing destruction of the economy is a policy decision that is being made at the top. It really doesn't matter what after-the-fact claims the Republicans make. Some of those claims happen to be true, even if they are coming from people who have precisely the same kinds of policies. Even Monsanto employees don't want GM foods. Republican deadbeats
Tonight on Virtually Speaking A-Z, Jay and Stuart will continue to examine the state of liberalism and the political discourse in America. For my money, listening to Stuart talk is like seeing the Beatles at The Cavern - the rest of the world doesn't know it, yet, but this is a talent everyone should be listening to. Virtually Speaking Sundays featured Jay Ackroyd and Cliff Schecter. For those who lost their patience trying to listen through all the tech problems during the Virtually Speaking interview with Glenn Carle, the recording has been mostly cleaned-up and is listenable now - and still worth it for the story of his growing recognition that a small number of people had completely undermined our democracy. (So has the Virtually Speaking Tuesdays episode last week in which VastLeft and I discussed (with help from The Z-Files) whether the Democratic leadership is conservative or something else.)
The Obama administration's war on whistleblowers, journalists, and other ordinary Americans who want to speak up for American freedoms and justice is just what Frank Church warned against. (Don't miss the Democracy Now! segment Glenn includes in the post.)
It would be good news if I really believed the LibDems and back-bench would resist mass surveillance plans, but if they actually believed in democracy or freedom or privacy or any of that fancy stuff, they'd have stopped "austerity" in its tracks a long time ago.
I see Lord Saletan is still proving he deserved to be on Atrios' top wanker list, but it looks like Doug and his Lordship are fighting on that ground that Stuart identifies as "centrist" - not liberal, not conservative, but something else. The fact that Saletan thinks he can identify himself as a "liberal" just because he is a covert rather than overt woman-hater doesn't exactly not make him conservative, though. The fact that Saletan responds to Doug's rejection of Saletan's self-description as a "liberal" by remarking on his "illness" does, however, make Saletan a mighty big wanker.
The return of debtors' prison - the courts work for the collection agencies: "How did breast cancer survivor Lisa Lindsay end up behind bars? She didn't pay a medical bill -- one the Herrin, Ill., teaching assistant was told she didn't owe. 'She got a $280 medical bill in error and was told she didn't have to pay it," The Associated Press reports. "But the bill was turned over to a collection agency, and eventually state troopers showed up at her home and took her to jail in handcuffs.'"
Unsurprising news: "So, Congress finally begins to realize what a staggering problem student loans have become and decides to at least talk about it. It lands in Rep. Foxx's committee and suddenly ... only the sound of crickets. The 'for-profit' colleges moved in quickly and Rep. Foxx was one of the recipients of their largess. And then Ms. Foxx has the audacity to diss those students who have that student debt, many because of the scamming done by those for-profit schools."
I'm not sure joining their group will do any good, but I wish there was a way to force creeps like David Gregory to watch this video every time they went out to a restaurant.
The "Mommygate" Ann Romney dust-up actually inspired Democrats to propose to do something for moms. The Republicans admit they don't want to, but then, the Democrats strangely didn't think of doing this when they actually could have passed some legislation.
ALEC and it's friends: "What's in a name? How about the Progressive Choices PAC? Sounds awesome, right? But when I started digging around and looking for what they did with the money they collected I found thousands and thousands of dollars in contributions to the most horribly anti-Choice, anti-gay, anti-working family, pro-Republican members of the Democratic Caucus."
On Virtually Speaking, 23-year vet of Clandestine Services of the Central Intelligence Agency Glenn Carle, author of The Interrogator, told Jay Ackroyd his story of a CIA interrogation, and how he learned that he was being told to break US law without any legitimate reason. Stream or podcast at this link. I found this talk scary in a number of ways, but it gives you a good idea of why even Ashcroft balked.
Sam Seder is in Vegas at the Mass Torts conference, and he's been talking on The Majority Report to Ari Berman about the "Federal Judiciary; political leaning of SCOTUS; impact of next Presidential election and Obama indifference toward record Federal Bench vacancies," and also to James Kaufman (from Mike Papantonio's firm) about the JOBS bill.
William Greider thinks the Federal Reserve is (finally) turning left.
BD Blue in comments: "Listening to Jay and Stuart's VS regarding Hilary Rosen - when Jay was talking about how what was happening on CNN was basically what the parties pay for in commercials only more subtle, the phrase that occurred to me was 'product placement'."
Something Stuart said in chat keeps coming back to me: That's why changing the Democratic Party is more important than keeping the Republicans out of office, which we can't stop anyway when New Democrats are in charge (look at 2010)." I've said this before, I know, but Republicans are going to win, eventually, and the plan of voting for any nominal Democrat in opposition is not working to prevent Republican policies from being put in place. Democrats controlled the White House, the Senate, and the House, and what did we get? Even on the "social issues" where the Republicans by and large diverge from the Democratic leadership, the Republicans have been forging ahead. Under Obama's leadership, the Democrats got Bush's TARP passed when the Republicans couldn't, and refused to question the appointment of Roberts to the Supreme Court. There is almost no issue on which the Democratic leadership is prepared to offer more than a token gesture in defense of our rights and our future. Obama actually pushed us backward on contraception. If we keep letting these people give the store away, soon everyone will be asking, "What's the point of voting for Democrats?" And the answer will be, "There isn't one." But that doesn't mean people will vote for a third party. What usually happens is that people don't vote at all. Three quarters of the country didn't vote for Reagan and he won in "a landslide". Yes, GOP levels of misogyny are alarming, but GOP levels of misogyny are becoming and will continue to become the law of the land as long as we don't do anything to fix the Democratic Party.
Did you know Julian Assange has a new television show on RT? I hear that so far he's a better interviewer than anyone on cable. But, of course, that's not saying much. And I bet he's not nearly as funny as Craig Fergusen.
I get irritated when I see articles and documentaries about bullying that just tell you sad stories but then leave it there without even an acknowledgement that we can do more than throw up our hands. Bonnie Schupp has the same reaction.
Tonight on Virtually Speaking Tuesdays, I will be speaking with VastLeft, whose cartoon in the post below seems to have inspired a previously unseen "Guest" to start weird arguments in the comment thread. See more of VastLeft's cartoons here.
On Virtually Speaking A-Z, Stuart and Jay discussed the non-stop campaign talking points advertising that the latest gaff-fest (starring the hated Hilary Rosen) generated in the establishment media. (Have a little background reading from - no relation - Jay Rosen.)
Some people do accidentally register in the wrong district or forget they are still registered at an old address and vote in the new one without notifying the old district, and that's where most cases of "voter fraud" come from - but here's a genuine case of intentional voter fraud intended to swing the outcome of an election - to the right wing, of course.
The Florida Family Association's outraged letters about a computer game that offers gamers the option of a bit of personal choice and cooperation sets Charlie Brooker off to some of his musings about games and homophobia.
There do seem to be people for whom there is no distinction between "immigrants" and "illegal immigrants".
WANKER OF THE DECADE - 2nd Runner Up: Andrew Sullivan - well, it's undeniable that he's a mighty big wanker, but I still think Joe Klein outranks him. 1st Runner Up: Fred Hiatt - Along with his own odious wanking, he is responsible for exposing us to the interminable wanking of some of the worst wankers in our lifetimes. And, as I had suspected, THE ONE TRUE WANKER OF THE DECADE: Tom Friedman.
Tonight's panelists on Virtually Speaking Sundays will be Digby and McJoan. The rest of the week's VS schedule can be found here. And here's the video for Stuart Zechman on Extremists.
"Taxed by the boss: Across the United States more than 2,700 companies are collecting state income taxes from hundreds of thousands of workers - and are keeping the money with the states' approval, says an eye-opening report published on Thursday."
Matt Taibbi says, "Yes, Virginia, this is Obama's JOBS Act" - because not only did Obama's people shepherd the damn thing through with all its ugliness intact, but they couldn't have done it without the approval of Obama himself. Don't be fooled: The Republicans may have crafted it, but the White House wanted this poison.
During the depression, many localities survived by creating their own currency to keep economic activity moving. In Greece, they are doing it again.
Alyssa Rosenberg's response to Greenwald's piece on government harassment of Laura Poitras has a video of the NYT interview with the filmmaker who our government seems to be stalking.
WANKER OF THE DECADE - Runner Up #4: Mark Halperin - and indeed, he is pretty wanky, but Atrios might have made Runner up #3: Joe Klein his winner without getting an argument from me. Lazy, mendacious, stupid - none of these words are strong enough to convey the sheer destructive negligence and creepiness of his work. Atrios has a lot of painful reminders of just how much sleaze Klein has pumped into the atmosphere in the last decade. What Atrios doesn't say is that Klein is the bastard who fell in love with Bill Clinton early in the primaries and then changed his mind upon discovering that his man wasn't pure and wrote - under pseudonym - a book called Primary Colors in which he conveyed a picture of a couple who were clearly meant to be the Clintons that would have been demonstrably libelous if he had used their names, but he might as well have done so since everybody knew it was supposedly based on them and the terrible things Klein saw during his coverage of the campaign.
Jay and Stuart had a fascinating, scary talk about the seizure of your electronic devices, and about "Intellectual Property" law as weapons with which our oh-so-democratic Democratic leaders are terrorizing us, on Virtually Speaking A-Z. We know what they plan because they told us in the 2011 US Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator Annual Report on Intellectual Property Enforcement (.pdf) - this thing is a nightmare. It's Obama's policy. They aren't being forced to do it - it's what they want to do. If you think the fight against SOPA and similar monstrosities is over, think again. These Democrats are as crazy as the Bush administration ever was.
Dave Johnson of Seeing the Forest and Joshua Holland of Alternet were guests on Virtually Speaking Tuesdays. They're good on a lot of things, but they are still trapped in partisan world, where we have to be scared of Republicans, but not of Democrats. Yes, there's a crazy right-wing fringe out in the hinterlands who will be voting Republican and who also want to shoot you, but they are a fringe, and it's not ordinary rank-and-file registered Republican voters who are putting Social Security on the table and trying to wreck Medicare (programs that at least half of them whole-heartedly support), it's the Democratic leadership. The same Democratic leadership who, by the way, do not seem to want to treat right-wing gynecologist-murdering terrorists like the terrorists they are.
David Dayen says the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has released a description of the rules they will consider: "With the theme of putting the 'service' back in mortgage servicing, CFPB released a factsheet of the rules they will consider. They fall into two buckets: transparency and accountability." (He also has a news round-up.)
Dean Baker does a nice job of taking down Robert Samuelson's lies about Social Security in the newspaper known as "Fox on 15th Street": "Social Security and Medicare are hugely important for the security of the non-rich population of the United States. For this reason, Robert Samuelson and the Washington Post hate them."
A question at Down With Tyranny!: "Does DC Corrupt Congressman Tim Holden Really Have Any Information About Music Industry Mafia Ties?" Probably not, since he seems to be a bit confused about where those ties were and who benefited from them: "Anyway, I asked mutual acquaintance why Holden went after me in such a personal way in a press release and why he used the term "Hollywood record executive" as though it was supposed to convey I was operating on a level of someone running a brothel, a hedge fund or a lobbying firm (or all three-- like Goldman Sachs)."
"'Koch Brothers Exposed' Part 1: Think tanks attacking Social Security: Filmmaker Robert Greenwald joins Cenk for the first of three segments on 'Koch Brothers Exposed,' a new documentary from the Brave New Foundation. Koch Industries' support of think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute create a layer of support for the echo chamber's right-wing talking points."
I'd like to watch, and be able to recommend, the video of Matt Taibbi talking about the JOBS Act, but "This uploader has not made this video available in your country." :(
Quotes from Atrios: * "But I Thought They Were Proof Of The Awesomess Of Austerity: I don't know how the Galtian Overlords expect economies to recover when people don't have any money. Our system of producing elites is clearly broken. We are now producing horribly incompetent elites. People of the too incompetent to know they're incompetent variety. There's evil in there too, but I think the real problem is stupidity and incompetence." * "They Hates It: Our Galtian Overlords really do want to destroy Social Security. They have no interest in "reforming it" or "preserving it" or whatever. Some of them are haunted by the visions of someone else's grandmother not living in utter destitution, and others just want to steal the money or make sure rich people never have to pay any taxes again. Some grand bargain of revenue increases and benefit cuts to put it in actuarial balance until time infinity will not stop them from trying to impoverish old people and steal the money. " * "Is There Some Basic Biological Growth Process I Missed Out On? Sometimes when reading discussions on the internets I wonder if there's something that happens on the 18th birthday for most people such that all memory of being a teenager is wiped from their brains." (Atrios seems to be one of the few people left who is brave enough to point out that the way we deal with kids these days is crazy - even crazier, I would say, than in the 1950s. It's getting so that you can pretty much assume that when people start talking about doing things and passing laws "for the sake of the children", they are bent on doing serious harm - to the children, and to the adults they might someday become. It's about time we stopped pretending that teenagers are children and stop pretending they are adults. It might just be wise to stop treating them like they are either infants or hardened criminals and can't be anything in between.) * "Give People Free Money: We give a lot of free money to rich people in this country. Much of the money we give to not rich people in this country we do so because they've paid for the insurance policy (unemployment, social security). Food stamps are a not so terrible substitute to free money, but they aren't quite as good as just giving people the money. That only crazy bloggers are willing to suggest "give money to people who aren't rich" as a pretty good solution both for poverty amelioration and boosting the economy generally tells us that our political system is basically not capable of responding to the country's problems and needs." * "Isn't Anybody Paying Attention: I'm not sure how anyone expects "the housing market" to "recover" when buying a house now involves handing a bunch of money over to a bank which will then proceed to steal your house from you. This behavior will continue until lots of people go to jail. And that, apparently, is off the table." Have I mentioned lately how glad I am that Atrios still has the energy to repeat these things over and over? Well, I am. He's a great economist and these things need to be pounded out over and over until somebody can finally hear them.
I was busy over the weekend so I didn't get around to posting a warning of the impending Easter edition of Virtually Speaking Sundays with Jay Ackroyd and Avedon Carol (with some help from Culture of Truth), who discussed the mad Easter message that came to us from the Sunday talk shows (MTP, TW), the Pope whining about nobody obeying him enough, Rick Warren expressing his Christianity by saying he doesn't agree with Jesus, and the escalating attacks by the United States government on free speech, a free press, your privacy and property rights, and, well, just about everything, particularly as Glenn Greenwald highlights in his article about an especially egregious example to be found in their harassment of award-winning filmmaker Laura Poitras.
I see via Onyx Lynx that Sara Robinson is working my old beat, explaining that, hard as they once fought against them, businesses came to wanting to stick to those old union gains because, ultimately, they were good business. Overworking people results in some very expensive mistakes. "Unions started fighting for the short week in both the UK and US in the early 19th century. By the latter part of the century, it was becoming the norm in an increasing number of industries. And a weird thing happened: over and over -- across many business sectors in many countries -- business owners discovered that when they gave into the union and cut the hours, their businesses became significantly more productive and profitable."
Someone needs to explain why Wells Fargo hasn't been charged under RICO: "Wells Fargo has taken the position that every debtor in the district should be made to challenge, by separate suit, the proofs of claim or motions for relief from the automatic stay it files. It has steadfastly refused to audit its pleadings or proofs of claim for errors and has refused to voluntarily correct any errors that come to light except through threat of litigation. Although its own representatives have admitted that it routinely misapplied payments on loans and improperly charged fees, they have refused to correct past errors. They stubbornly insist on limiting any change in their conduct prospectively, even as they seek to collect on loans in other cases for amounts owed in error." Atrios quite rightly called them thieves.
"Stephen Colbert, Scientific Pioneer" - Chris Mooney says Colbert was doing something rather important when he came up with the idea of "truthiness".
Down in comments, Hobson expresses such disgust with the Democratic leadership that, he says, "I have pretty much decided not to vote this year." That is, I think, a mistake. I fully understand why someone could not bring themselves to vote for Obama - I don't think I can, either, and I sincerely doubt he will do anything between now and November that would make me change my mind (while, in the meantime, he seems to do something just about every day that makes me even less willing to vote for him.) But if Rocky Anderson or Cynthia McKinney or anyone else who is not a murdering, war-mongering, torturing, economy-wrecking jackass is on the ballot, I will vote for them. (Also in comments, Jcapan says he got his absentee primary ballot and found he had the choice of voting for Obama or "write in", so he wrote in "Stuart Zechman". I liked that.) The thing is, you should vote. You should vote all the way down-ticket and, if you can, vote for someone who doesn't appear to be bent on a campaign of destroying the New Deal and plunging the nation into poverty and expanding wars and torture and the security state. Voting does matter, in numerous ways, and sometimes those down-ticket races are far more important than the presidency. Right now, we don't even have a farm team to fight the right-wing, and we need to find a way to build one. And, you know, if enough people write-in "Stuart Zechman," they may think it's a movement....
It probably can't be stressed often enough that without economic security for the masses, other social justice issues can pretty much be written off. You're not going to have reproductive freedom, voting rights, or anything else, if you don't give We The People the economic power to fight back. And it was FDR who bought us that power, with SEC regulations (since unwound by a succession of legislators from both parties), with various programs that gave honest jobs to ordinary people who took paychecks from the government to do the People's real business, and with, very importantly, Social Security and ultimately Medicare. If there is one thing to be angry at liberals for - and I mean real liberals, not the fakes we see running the Democratic Party and appearing on TV and radio playing like the Washington Generals and soft-selling Republican policies, but real liberals - it's that too many of us were distracted by social issues ("culture war") to keep our eye on that particular prize while "our" politicians were selling us out. So, Stuart Zechman asks a question:
Z-Files Episode 12, 04/03/2012 "The Line"
I'm Stuart Zechman, and I've got a serious question for my fellow liberal Democrats out there:
What would it take for you to not vote for the Democratic candidate in an election?
Seriously, what's the threshold?
Where exactly is that line that can't be crossed, otherwise you'll withhold your vote?
Do you know? Have you thought about it at all?
You know, the conservative Republicans have.
The movement conservatives, way back in the 1980s, drew a line in the policy sand, across which no politician of theirs could step, lest ordinary Republicans vote against their own candidates.
And it wasn't a fundamentalists' issue like abortion, or one of their pet industry lobbyist issues, like "tort reform."
It wasn't the bloated war machine budget against which old Dick Cheney argued for downsizing and outsourcing, and it wasn't increasing the size of the federal government --they elected big government conservative George W Bush twice!
No, it was something else: taxes.
The line near which no Republican politician could safely tread was the issue of raising taxes.
And, if you think about it, that's a pretty intelligent choice, as far as thresholds go. A clear majority of Americans, almost 70 percent of them ten years ago, but still in clear majority territory today, have repeatedly told Gallup polling that they consider the amount of federal income tax that they pay --not that the very rich or corporations, mind you, but what they pay-- too high.
If you were going to draw a line on a policy, that would probably be the one you'd choose. It's too bad that national Democrats at the time didn't think of putting "we will not raise middle class people's taxes except in a time of war" in their platform, but, back then, they had something else in their arsenal that we'll get to later. [Link]
So, back to the Republicans: so it was that George W's father, George H. W. Bush ran in 1988 on this solemn pledge "Read my lips: no new taxes!"
As a matter of fact, by this time, a young activist named Grover Norquist had founded an organization called "Americans for Tax Reform," which came up with this interesting new political device called "The Pledge," which meant that candidates were offered a written, public contract to sign, which stated that the politician in question would never raise taxes, ever. And, despite some hesitating and delaying, in 1987, George H. W. signed that pledge, and sealed it with his "read my lips" nomination speech at the Republican convention.
But once he was in office, he faced a Democratic majority who would only support raising taxes as a means to cut the big deficits that Ronald Reagan had left on Bush Senior's doorstep.
So, in 1990, George H.W. Bush did what he thought he had to do: he compromised with centrist Democrats --liberal Democrats actually voted against the Bush Senior budget because they felt it taxed the poor-- and raised taxes on Americans.
And this compromise was fatal to his 1992 re-election chances.
Republicans voted for Pat Buchanan in the New Hampshire primary that year, which he won by an amazing 40 percent.
Buchanan proclaimed "...we Republicans, can no longer say it is all the liberals' fault. It was not some liberal Democrat who said 'Read my lips: no new taxes,' then broke his word to cut a seedy backroom budget deal with the big spenders on Capitol Hill." Wow, that's pretty intense!
Let's just repeat that clearly, so it doesn't get lost: movement conservatives organized around the country to primary a sitting Republican president.
And when that effort ultimately failed, when the national Republican machine eventually crushed the popular conservative insurgency, you know what Republicans did, then?
Huge numbers of them voted for an Independent candidate, Ross Perot.
They withheld their votes, rather than re-elect their own President, because their line had been crossed.
And their guy lost. And they dealt with it...well, if by "deal with," one means "take advantage of the other Party's centrist faction" and (then) "impeach the other Party's duly elected President over a blow job."
The point is that, somehow, ordinary movement conservatives --whose agenda at that pre-Fox News and talk radio time was largely shut out of the centrist national media-- were able to organize themselves, take the long view, to see upcoming elections in terms of a political and media war for hearts and minds to be won over the long run, and, most importantly, to follow through on their promises.
And, whatever else you want to say about the creation scientists, tent-revivalists, costume survivalists, antebellum nostalgists and latter day Know Nothings who make up the Republican base, that was pretty darn smart of them.
In fact, it was the smartest thing that they could have done. And it was the right thing to do. Promises by high elected officials in America should be kept.
And what has the result been for Republican voters, the millions of ordinary people who want to see liberalism gone from America, who want to see centrism gone from America, and who want, above all, their rightist version of reality becoming normalized in American culture and politics?
Are they worse off politically than they were in 1992?
I don't think so. I don't think liberal Democrats would even be having conversations like this one, if that were true.
The thing is, though, that Democrats used to have a line they'd never cross, too.
Remember what that was?
That universally popular policy, that wonderful thing that justified the federal bureaucracy's existence in so many Americans' minds, that program that helped so many, that check --but not at tax refund check-- from the government that everyone knew somebody who got one, the program that couldn't be touched, called "the third rail of electoral politics" because it would kill the politician who went near it?
Remember Social Security? Remember the New Deal?
From what I can gather looking at recent political history, Social Security didn't even need a "Pledge," and Democrats successfully ran on praising it, not messing with it, and certainly not "reforming" one of the best things to ever happen to ordinary people in this country.
What ever happened to that line, after liberal Democrats decided to elect Third Way centrists like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama to office?
Because I remember reading in the Washington Post last year, now listen to this, quote:
In debt talks, Obama offers Social Security cuts
President Obama is pressing congressional leaders to consider a far-reaching debt-reduction plan that would force Democrats to accept major changes to Social Security and Medicare in exchange for Republican support for fresh tax revenue.
At a meeting with top House and Senate leaders set for Thursday morning, Obama plans to argue that a rare consensus has emerged about the size and scope of the nation s budget problems and that policymakers should seize the moment to take dramatic action.
As part of his pitch, Obama is proposing significant reductions in Medicare spending and for the first time is offering to tackle the rising cost of Social Security...
Rather than roughly $2 trillion in savings, the White House is now seeking a plan that would slash more than $4 trillion from annual budget deficits over the next decade... [Link]
,unquote.
Something has changed in the national Democratic Party, for sure.
So, let me ask you again, what would it take for you not to vote for a centrist Democrat?
Is there anything Obama or any Third Way Democrat could propose while in office that would cross that line?
Anything at all?
If you can't think of anything that would prevent you from voting for Obama in November, shouldn't we consider the possibility that we liberal Democrats are part of the thing that has changed?
Maybe there are some things we intelligent, educated, science-based, reality-based movement liberals could learn from movement conservatives.
Maybe one of those things is how to draw a line in front of what really matters to us, and then stand on it.
I'm Stuart Zechman, and this as been the Z-Files.
* * * * *
Kristof discovered that Goldman Sachs and friends were behind a sex trafficking site. Well, a prostitution site of some sort, anyway: "This emporium for girls and women - some under age or forced into prostitution..." Lower in the piece, you learn that it's just supposed to be a regular escort site, but they have trouble screening out those ads that may not have been placed by consenting adults. Ironically, the banksters are rushing to divest from their interest in escorts, but no one has asked the escorts how they feel about having their comparatively honorable profession associated with a pack of liars and thieves in the financial industry.
Cartoon on the Supreme Court's view of freedom. (Actually, this cartoon would carry more weight if Obamacare didn't include commercial health insurers as middlemen. At least you don't get a bill from military contractors and prison industry offices every month in addition to paying for it all first in taxes.)
It's interesting when you see a guy who runs a private equity firm and who writes columns in the Financial Times about how we should "Stop demonising the wealth creators" suddenly tells us that "Lunatics have taken over the boardroom." Of course, he doesn't really talk about the kind of lunacy that's really going on, and how it's these people, and not the workers they kvetch about, who are really wrecking the companies they run.
I guess if cops already have a licence to murder, it was only a matter of time before the Supremes announced that they have a licence to humiliate every single person they have no reason to suspect of having anything hidden on their persons with a strip search. Oh, and it looks like Rush Limbaugh was right - Obama really does want you to bend over and grab your ankles.
Tonight's panelists on Virtually Speaking Sundays will be Joan McCarter and Culture of Truth. The last episode of Virtually Speaking Science featured Tom Levinson talking to Scary Disease Girl.
Sam Seder went to Washington to cover the oral arguments at the Supreme Court on Obamacare (or "Obamadon'tcare", as I think of it) for The Majority Report, where he did interviews with people who had been inside. Guests included Amanda Frost (and a separate interview with Richard Eskow on the horrible Jobs Act), Tom Harkin, and Adam Serwer.
I often used to read that serial-killers seemed to be a largely American (as in USAian) phenomenon, much rarer in other parts of the world. I'm not sure how true this was, but I once remarked that people who wanted to run around killing people got to join the police and be in death squads in a lot of other countries, which could make the difference. When I see things like this, I'm not sure even that distinction holds anymore: "On the morning of November 19th, a 68-year-old former marine named Kenneth Chamberlain with a heart condition accidentally pressed the button on his medical alert system while sleeping. Responding to the alert, police officers from the city of White Plains, New York, arrived at Chamberlain's apartment in a public housing complex shortly after 5 a.m. By the time the police left the apartment, Kenneth Chamberlain was dead, shot twice in the chest by a police officer inside his home. Police gained entry to Chamberlain's apartment only after they took his front door off its hinges. Officers first shot him with a taser, then a beanbag shotgun, and then with live ammunition." In the previous post, I said the police should feel an obligation of restraint "especially in situations where they are breaking into the homes of someone who is 'suspected' of committing a non-violent crime," but you'd think "when responding to a medical alert call" would be even higher on the list - and go without saying. Guess not.
"Generation workless: And experts see little hope for near future : I've never seen the world so bad for young people. The only way I can describe it is as a Great Depression,' said Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Boston's Northeastern University, who has studied young-adult unemployment in depth." Via Atrios, who said: "We could give more free money to rich banksters, or maybe figure out how to help the young unemployed. I don't know how they're supposed to pay their student loans, save for a down payment, buy a house, KEEP THIS ECONOMY GOING, when they're, you know, broke. As are their parents."
"Debunking Canadian health care myths" - not a bad article from The Denver Post. Quite a few of the comments that follow are from the idiots who believe those myths and aren't going to stop just because someone gives them some facts. (A fact not mentioned in the article, by the way, is that one of the procedures most notorious for "long waits" is delayed not so much because of costs or lack of facilities, but for medical prudence: hip replacement surgery. There is no good reason to rush the surgery and sometimes waiting means improved health conditions overall for the patient. Cataract surgery is also notorious for long waits - 180 days on the NHS - but cataracts develop very slowly, and in most cases the worst thing that can happen from a delay is that you might have to get new glasses, pretty much in the same time period you would have needed a new prescription even if you didn't have cataracts.)
"We Grew Apart [...] The Gini index tells us we're falling off the rails. For not only does the data suggest that income inequality is growing faster in America than almost anywhere else in the world, but that the gap as it stands now already places us near the bottom of the global community" (via)
In comments, Secondharmonic responds to the malaria defense by musing, "What's weird to me is: Mazar-e-Sharif is the same latitude as Moab Utah, and pretty close in altitude and climate. Kabul about the same as Albuquerque, and Kandahar about the same as Phoenix. Was it because the USians drained a lot of swamps in the desert Southwest in the 19th-20th centuries that we no longer have Anopheles mosquitos? I think not. I think Afghanistan has NEVER been a hotbed of malaria, and someone is messing around here. Afghanistan is not India, and even at its closest, say Kashmir - Kashmir is pretty well known for being malaria free (pretty much) compared with the rest of India. Cooler and dryer dontcha know."
So, Rupert Murdoch is a pirate. It's really rich watching him complain on Twitter about libel, untrustworthy media, and "old toffs and right wingers who still want last century's status quo with their monoplies." Well, yes, they are - but so is he.
LarryE observes that Dahlia Lithwick's musings about the Supreme Court's version of "freedom" tie in with a rant he did a year ago on this same subject, when he said, "What we are seeing every day is sometimes done consciously and sometimes unconsciously (in the sense of being useful idiots), but still what we are seeing is a conspiracy against every notion of equality under the law. Against every notion of community responsibility. Against every notion of justice. Against every notion of decency and fairness. What we are seeing, that is, is an unfolding pattern of betrayal of - no, that's not strong enough - we are seeing an unfolding pattern of treason against every decent part of our heritage as Americans."
Dahlia Lithwick: "This morning in America's highest court, freedom seems to be less about the absence of constraint than about the absence of shared responsibility, community, or real concern for those who don't want anything so much as healthy children, or to be cared for when they are old. Until today, I couldn't really understand why this case was framed as a discussion of 'liberty.' This case isn't so much about freedom from government-mandated broccoli or gyms. It's about freedom from our obligations to one another, freedom from the modern world in which we live. It's about the freedom to ignore the injured, walk away from those in peril, to never pick up the phone or eat food that's been inspected. It's about the freedom to be left alone. And now we know the court is worried about freedom: the freedom to live like it's 1804."
This is the actual Stand Your Ground law in Florida. As you can see, it in no way covers Zimmerman's position, contrary to claims that he is protected against charges of stalking and murdering Trayvon Martin. "Stand Your Ground" addresses the degree of force you are allowed to use if someone invades your home or directly assaults you. The alternative, as Stuart discussed when we talked on Virtually Speaking Sundays, is Duty to Retreat, which is the law by which women who have been brutalized in their own homes can be convicted as murderers for failing to take every conceivable means to avoid killing their abusers even though it is clear that there is no real possibility of escape from their own eventual deaths if this guy is allowed to keep coming after them. It's interesting that people are attacking the Stand Your Ground laws, which have nothing to do with Trayvon's death, rather than discussing the myriad other issues involved. One of them, it should be noted, is that a real problem that applies here is the assumption that the police are exempt from any restriction on force or obligation to try to preserve life (or establish probable cause!) before stopping, arresting, assaulting or even killing someone. The police certainly should feel a duty to restrain themselves from using force, especially in situations where they are breaking into the homes of someone who is "suspected" of committing a non-violent crime (e.g., drugs). Stand Your Ground laws say people can defend themselves against home invaders, but for some reason if you do so and the invaders are cops (who seem to have the wrong address with remarkable frequency), you're the bad guy. And, even in the extreme situation where the police, with the wrong address, invade your home, if you try to defend yourself by shooting the people who've broken down your door in the middle of the night, you're not just guilty of manslaughter or some lesser charge, you're guilty of murder. Of murdering a cop. Of a capital crime. So someone like Zimmerman who sees himself in the role of a cop is thinking he shares this exemption with cops, this right to shoot people without taking any care against killing innocent people. "I'm a good guy so it's okay for me to shoot people I merely suspect of being bad."
Culture Project: Blueprint for Accountability "Former Gov. Eliot Spitzer, Rolling Stone Contributor Matt Taibbi, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind, Rebuild the Dream president Van Jones, Occupier Jesse LaGreca and Demos Washington Director Heather McGhee discuss corporate powers in the political and democratic life of the United States." It's not often you get to see a lengthy, in-depth discussion like this.
Bruce Schneier: "I was supposed to testify today about the TSA in front of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. [...] On Friday, at the request of the TSA, I was removed from the witness list. The excuse was that I am involved in a lawsuit against the TSA, trying to get them to suspend their full-body scanner program. But it's pretty clear that the TSA is afraid of public testimony on the topic, and especially of being challenged in front of Congress. They want to control the story, and it's easier for them to do that if I'm not sitting next to them pointing out all the holes in their position. Unfortunately, the committee went along with them." Damn, wouldn't it have been good if Congress had been deluged with calls about that? (via) (Also, more curious "security" in protecting the Wall Street Bull.)
If our Founding Fathers didn't believe in government services to the public, why did Ben Franklin found the US Post Office? Jim Hightower says it was a good idea - and it still is, in spite of everything. (via)
Atrios is working on his Wanker of the Decade list. I assume he means the decade he's been blogging, and, as he says, his inclination is to go after media types rather than politicians, although they might get his vote, too. For me, the candidates are too numerous to fit. The leading "liberal" voices of The Washington Post and The New York Times all belong on the list, but so do Tim Russert, Chris Matthews, and the unbearable David Gregory. Then again, I admit that my first thought when I saw the phrase "Wanker of the Decade" was, "Barack Obama."
An honorable profession speaks up: "Madrid escorts declare sex war against bankers: Spanish banks have come under fire recently for many reasons, including foreclosures on thousands of homes. Madrid's high-class escorts are getting revenge. The ladies have taken it on themselves to regulate the Spanish banking sector by withholding sexual favours from bank employees." (Thanks to Danp for the tip.)
It's probably easier to use the malaria defense than admit that our military fish is rotting from the top.
Cash for Cameron - Well, graft and corruption stopped being a surprise some time ago.
Crime Lord: "The witnesses allege a software company NDS, owned by News Corp, cracked the smart card codes of rival company ONdigital. ONdigital, owned by the ITV companies Granada and Carlton, eventually went under amid a welter of counterfeiting by pirates, leaving the immensely lucrative pay-TV field clear for Sky. The allegations, if proved, cast further doubt on whether News Corp meets the "fit and proper" test required to run a broadcaster in Britain. It emerged earlier this month that broadcasting regulator Ofcom has set up a unit called Project Apple to establish whether BSkyB, 39.1% owned by News Corp, meets the test." It's pretty clear by now that hacking has been an essential part of Murdoch's business model. This goes well beyond raising questions about whether his company meets the "fit and proper" test; it raises questions about why he isn't in jail. (via)
"What Connects Cellphones and Toilets?" (via) It's not "culture", it's the simple fact that, all over the world, it's cheaper and easier to get a cell phone than to build a toilet - and you don't even need a place of your own to put it on.
My vote for silliest criticism of John Carter of Mars is the dismissal that it's "derivative" - obviously, coming from people who don't realize that everything they think it's derivative of is in fact derivative of John Carter of Mars - but "a flop of legendary proportions" is a close second.
"Chocolate 'may help keep people slim': It found those who ate chocolate a few times a week were, on average, slimmer than those who ate it occasionally."
Long-time Sideshow reader JHB put together some graphs showing the changes in the various tax brackets over the last century. This is actually more shocking than I thought: "In 1932 and 1933 there were over 50 brackets, and only 4 of them dealt with incomes below the equivalent of $200K. [...] Note how many brackets affected incomes above $200K before the Reagan era. Also note how there were more at lower levels below that level too. Also note how it collapsed after Reagan: both at the high end (though inflation took its toll earlier) and by hollowing out gradations at the low end. From 1988-1990 there were only two rates: 15% up to ~$34,000, and 28% on everything above that. Very nearly a flat tax, and the one which George Bush paid for that 'read my lips' line when it proved unsustainable. Even when higher brackets were implemented under Clinton, you can still see the fruits of the conservative's assault on the very idea of progressive taxation."
Obama isn't finished with trying to kill Social Security. David Dayen says the lame-duck Congress looks like it's headed for another Grand Bargain before January 20th. They will probably be able to pull this off because, as Bruce Dixon notes, "The second thing that happens when corporate Democrats steal the policies of Republicans is that, since they nominally represent the have-nots, who now have nowhere else to go, they are often more effective at imposing Republican policies upon the polity." (via)
Sam Seder talked to Matt Taibbi about the "corrupt culture of Bank of America; how CEO rivalry and government regulation created the banking behemoth that conned the American people into bankruptcy," on Thursdays Majority Report.
Bill Black and other financial criminologists want you to know: "The JOBS Act is so Criminogenic that it Guarantees Full-Time Jobs for Criminologists [...] "Our system worked brilliantly. America prospered. American businesses and investors prospered. Unfortunately, economists decided to destroy what worked and to replace it with a fraud-friendly, deregulated world. Among the many fraud-friendly policies that led to the deregulation that prompts our recurrent, intensifying financial crises, the undisputed most destructive aspect is the recurrent, intensifying embrace of the 'regulatory race to the bottom.' The 'logic' of the argument in the securities law context is that (1) dishonest issuers like bad regulation because it allows them to defraud with impunity, (2) our 'competitor' nations (typically described as the City of London) offer weaker regulation to induce the fraudulent issuers to locate abroad, and (3) we must not allow this to happen; we must make sure that fraudulent issuers are based in America. Of course, they never phrase honestly their 'logic' about dishonesty. Four national commissions investigated the causes of financial crises - the S&L; debacle, the ongoing U.S. crisis, the Irish crisis, and the Icelandic crisis. Each of the commissions has decried the idiocy of the 'race to the bottom' dynamic and warned that it must end. The arguments advanced by industry in support of the JOBS Act reflect and worship at the altar of 'the race to the bottom.'"
Robert Reich on The Social Darwinist Budget Plan - and, of course, he's right, except that the contrast isn't between Democrats and Republicans, who don't actually vary that much in their policies, but between the political leadership of both parties (and their courtiers in the media), and pretty much everyone else.
I do not know why Paul Krugman imagines that the Very Serious People will ever admit that "fiscally responsible" people are not fiscally responsible at all and that destroying our economy is a bad idea. Pay attention, Paul: The "reasons" for doing it change, but the program never does. It's not like anyone ever learns anything.
Froomkin is worried about how Post-Citizens United Money May Swamp Congressional Candidates. I'm worried about how the entire establishment media has silenced intelligent discussion of policies for the last 30-odd years, long before the Citizens United decision made people actually start Viewing With Alarm. Look, you are not going to have an informed citizenry when the liberal end of the spectrum is a Rachel Maddow who has been turned into little more than a partisan mouthpiece who acts like the problem is just Republicans.
From or via Suburban Guerrilla: Did you know that you can't sue a drug company that gave you gangrene if you bought the generic? ALEC killed Treyvon Martin with a law to give paranoid minority-hating gun nuts a 'get out of jail free' card. The banks are out to get Maxine Waters. Hell freezes over: "Tea Party activists, Unions and Occupy Atlanta are in agreement to oppose Georgia Senate Bill 469 proposing to make protesting on private property an aggravated misdemeanor, carrying steep fines and prison time." Misdirected outrage: "I'm talking about the scum who rise to the level of the Koch Brothers, and the scum who float on ponds that are slightly less exclusive. For example, Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam, whose compensation was recently tripled - from $7.2 million to $23.1 million a year - at the same time the company was trying to cut health care and other benefits for workers. Why is Limbaugh in the news rather than McAdam?" The most important parts of strong national security are these: A free and honest press; economic freedom for the masses (not just the rich); a good educational system free to all; and clean energy: "Some of the most powerful voices in support of clean energy come not from starry-eyed entrepreneurs of solar start-ups or environmental advocacy groups - but from the U.S. military. Often at odds with the political conservatives who claim to have their interests at heart, the Army, the Air Force, and the Navy have all taken major steps to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels and to expand the application of cleaner technologies."
I cannot affect to be surprised to learn that "The NYPD didn't just spy on entire Muslim communities -- a new report by The Associated Press reveals that cops also surveilled liberal political groups," Via Atrios.
Also from Atrios, "Wanted: Meddling Kids: I seem to be the only one focused on the likely consequences of everyone at MF Global getting away with it. There's now a blueprint for how steal billions of dollars without any consequences. That's a plan everyone can follow." Further, "Mattresses Will Work Just Fine: One reason to have a well-regulated financial system where stealing all the money is at least slightly difficult is so that you actually have a functioning financial system. If they can all steal with impunity then some of us might decide to put our money elsewhere. The point is that while individually I'd be better off if I could steal with impunity, I'm not better off if everybody can."
Over-funded, over-tolerated, and over here: The lies of the American right are making inroads on this side of the water and the liars themselves are permitted to use video for the purpose of lying to British schoolchildren about abortion. Naturally, the Torygraph ran a little sting operation against counselors that would have made Breitbart proud.
Due to sudden interest around my household, I was forced to find the link to this newsroom oddity.
I am amazed to learn that Robert Crumb likes Tommy James and the Shondells.
Tonight on Virtually Speaking Tuesdays, I'm going to try to make Lambert talk about how an important conference on economics was put together by one small corner of the blogosphere, where real economists talked about the real economic issues we are dealing with, and what they said, and related issues. We should also have an always-fascinating Z-Files from Stuart to start off with.
This is a highly-recommended rerun of Stuart Zechman's discussion of what "a Senior Democrat" in the White House had to say about why they have to get rid of liberalism and the New Deal. I really think people should listen and absorb it, and understand just what we're dealing with.
Review of Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times: "Historical Account of Class, Race Wars Relevant for Organizers Today: [...] Racism could not be overcome by ignoring white communities any more than capitalism could be overcome by ignoring the poor."
If it's always just one lone individual who happens to be "deranged" who kills all the innocent civilians for no apparent reason, why did a general feel he had to warn the troops not to become murderers?
How did our understanding of poverty shift so radically? It started off innocently enough, but it created a horror. "Fifty years later, a new discovery of poverty is long overdue. This time, we'll have to take account not only of stereotypical Skid Row residents and Appalachians, but of foreclosed-upon suburbanites, laid-off tech workers, and America's ever-growing army of the 'working poor.' And if we look closely enough, we'll have to conclude that poverty is not, after all, a cultural aberration or a character flaw. Poverty is a shortage of money."
Atrios on The Other Grand Bargain: "As stupid liberal bloggers have tried to explain for years, the anti-choice movement (not all anti-choicers, but the movement) is anti-female autonomy, anti-unapproved by them sex, and, yes, anti-sex without consequences, otherwise known as anti-contraception. Boy us stupid liberal bloggers were sure crazy for suggesting that! Almost as dumb as when we said the Iraq war was a dumb idea! Stupid liberal bloggers. So stupid."
Green Party candidate Jill Stein says Obama is betraying American workers by signing the FAA Reauthorization bill: "What has this legislation set in motion? It erases long time protections of THOUSANDS of railroad and airline workers. The Democrats claim they 'compromised' on the bill. Isn't that rich once again? Taking care of the one percenters for the nth time. For one thing, the percentage of workers who must sign cards authorizing a union representation election is raised from 35% to 50%. It also helps employers delay union elections and collective bargaining, removes PRIVACY protections for union authorization cards so companies can identify and INTIMIDATE workers who might vote to unionize. Stein sees this as a 180-degree flip-flop of Obama's promise last March to veto any FAA Reauthorization Bill that contained anti-union provisions."
"A South Carolina Teacher's Been Suspended for Reading 'Ender's Game' to His Class: A middle school teacher who read to his students from Ender's Game is on 'administrative leave' because a parent complained to the school that Orson Scott Card's classic novel is 'pornographic.' The parent also went to the local police, who have not yet pressed criminal charges against the teacher, according to the Aiken, SC Standard." (To me, the oddest thing about this story is that the teacher was reading to 14-year-olds. That's well past the age when teachers started making students read aloud in class or read on their own. I don't think I had a teacher read fiction to the class after about the 1st grade.)
This kind of thing was disgusting when the Bushistas did it, and it still is. Digby reports.
Ira Glass is one of the better journalists still allowed on our airwaves, and he's done some great stuff. But for some reason, he freaked out when he discovered that a theatrical work was a work of fiction. And then he overreacted.
I had fun trying to guess what this is an ad for before it got to the end.
Until it was hijacked by crooks, the term "free-market capitalism" meant the very opposite of monopoly/duopoly capitalism - regulations were there to prevent giant corporations from squeezing out innovation and competition. Funny how our "free-market" advocates only want the freedom to eliminate those real, productive, free markets:
Municipal wifi networks in states across the nation are under attack as they try to move forward. A new bill in Minnesota would limit the ability of cities in the state to move forward on their own broadband networks. A Georgia bill with similar restrictions, however, has been shelved despite support from Republicans in the state senate. There are some bright spots however, a new initiative in San Jose, California may be changing how municipal wifi is managed.
CivSource has been following a bill championed by Republican Senate Majority Leader Chip Rogers, that would seek to limit municipalities in rural Georgia from creating their own municipal wifi networks, despite open admissions from AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson that they have no intention to continue building in those areas. On a conference call discussing the company's earnings, Stephenson said "We've all been trying to find a broadband solution that was economically viable to get out to rural America, and we're not finding one to be quite candid. The best opportunity we have is LTE."
[...]
Similar bills are still on the move in Minnesota and South Carolina. Following a playbook initially established by incumbent telecom providers in North Carolina. The Minnesota bill explicitly bans communities from creating their own networks to meet their needs. A surprising move, considering the state is already pushing forward on a large broadband expansion.
In South Carolina, the story is roughly the same. Although no movement is happening on the bill right now, the language suggests that telecom providers are seeking to keep municipalities from creating their own networks even when private providers have indicated that they will not bring services to the area.
Private providers are arguing that municipal networks create unfair competition, forcing them to lower their rates because municipalities have the ability to offer rates below cost. Even if true, we are left to wonder why this is a concern in areas where the providers themselves have said they do not plan to do business. According to a post on Ars Technica yesterday, Charter Communications in Minnesota has done this and apparently so quickly that they put hand written fliers in residents mailboxes. (See the image here.)
It's worth clicking through to that last link, by the way, for more details on that particular story.
But look at all the phrases above that tell us that legislators believe it is their business to protect the ability of private interests to overcharge customers for internet service and prevent service where commercial interests can't be bothered to provide it. That corporations are coming up with these ludicrous arguments is bad enough, but why do elective officials think they should help them scalp some customers and prevent service in areas that are not covered by commercial providers?
* * * * *
What are contracts worth? Not a lot to big companies like, say, AT&T, who offer unlimited service and then limit it. Everything else in the story is a side issue - the fact is, they lie about what they are providing. They shouldn't just be paying $800, they should be paying punitive damages for putting people in a position where they have to go to court to get redress, and they should be paying hefty fines for making it SOP to lie about what they provide. Can't help but be curious about how they found out he was tethering, though. Could it be like this?
Employers demanding the keys to your house. OK, not yet, but if they can demand your Facebook password, what's next? And how soon will they insist on casting your online vote in elections for you?
Campaign finance law will continue to be a joke as long as Rupert Murdoch can sell his favored candidates free advertising.
How sick is it that we're sentencing children to life in prison for decisions they made when our same revolting society says they are too young to make an intelligent decision to have sex?
"Yes, they knew: The HUD Inspector General report appended to the mortgage foreclosure fraud settlement filed Monday shows that yes, managers were actively directing fraud. What you may not know? The robosigning continues. [...] They got away with it, all of it."
I highly recommend last Thursday's Virtually Speaking discussion with William K. Black, author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One. Bill Black was a central figure in the prosecution of the S&L scandal, and is also the person who explained that "Liars Loans" was an industry term for mortgages that the banks fraudulently pushed to help create the current crisis.
Some of you may be amused to know that the subject on Virtually Speaking Science was "Who is John Carter and what have we learned about Mars in the past century?"
Ooh, look who was in the Independentcrossword puzzle! (The puzzle gets big enough to read if you keep clicking it. The answers are here.)
People are always confusing me by having the same names as people who aren't horrible. I hear "Steven Landsburg" and think, "What? But he was so much fun in Barney Miller!"
I just totally had a giggling fit reading the post about The Bloggess trying to get Nathan Fillion to send her a picture of himself holding twine - and thought Nathan has failed in this regard, damn, but I finally know what Brian Boitano would do!
Apparently, Rush Limbaugh set the liberal agenda for the last day or so. Digby talked to Sam Seder about the War on Women on The Majority Report, and Spocko and Mike Stark discussed the reaction to Limbaugh's overt misogyny, and the successful boycott effort against him, on Virtually Speaking Tuesdays. Stuart Zechman says Rush didn't lose as much as we might think:
I'm Stuart Zechman, and I just can't believe how successful Rush Limbaugh has been lately.
Man, that guy is good.
I mean, I know he's lost, like 20 sponsors already, that's true, but it has been totally worth it.
Sure, he's had to apologize twice in one week for calling a Democrat a "slut" and a "prostitute," but boy, has his apparent political mission been fulfilled.
In fact, I can't think of another week in which Rush has been as successful at what I imagine to be the political goal of his program, not even counting his financial goals.
What do I mean by "political goals"?
Well, I mean the effect that Limbaugh and other shows like his are designed to have on mass audiences of Americans.
Now, you might think that the effect I'm talking about is to shock people, or to disgust them, or to raise controversy, or to, you know, give voice to some of the things some guys in our country would really like to say, if they weren't constrained by manners, or workplace rules, or having to go home and eat with their families every night.
But even that's not the effect I'm talking about, this major thing that Rush was so successful at creating this week.
What Rush is really going for, what his political goal truly is, what he's really so very good at, is distracting people...and, while they're distracted, spreading misinformation as far as it can go in American news culture.
He's helping to distract and misinform millions of people right now, which is what his show is about, from a political perspective. And, in this respect, he's not just an entertainer, he's a master.
So let's review how this misinformation spreads:
1) the Obama Administration announces that they're drafting HHS regulations in a way that somehow mandates the state-based insurance oligopolies to pay for prescription birth control "at no extra cost" for those expensive pharmaceuticals.
2) Rush says he's really unhappy about the Obama/Romney health care law, because he says it somehow mandates free birth control, and so he called somebody on the Democratic side a "slut" and a "prostitute."
3) liberals and Democrats jump up and down about Rush's language, Rush apologizes for his language, the Republican presidential candidates disavow Rush's language, Obama gets asked in a press conference about Rush's language.
4) movement conservatives still believe that they're somehow paying for someone else's free birth control, movement liberals also still believe that they're getting free birth control, and the political media get to focus on sensationalizing bad, sexy-time language, instead of explaining how health care policy works to the American people.
See how that works?
We stopped asking a basic question: if the Obama/Romney health care law mandates birth control coverage at no out of pocket cost, meaning no copay or co-insurance, then...who's going to end up paying for it?
And there's nothing in the law or regulations whatsoever, that prevents premiums from being raised however much the private insurance companies feel like increasing them. The Obama Administration just says that premiums should stay about the same. And that's just not how these health insurers work, at least not in practice. Do we really believe that health insurers will just pick up the tab for birth control now without raising prices for other care, and just wait around for the savings from slowed-down maternity costs to materialize over the long run? Is that how it really works with health insurers in the real world?
And what about the price of that prescription birth control itself. Already, Americans pay twice and even three times as much as any citizen in any country in the healthy, wealthy world for prescription drugs. Remember when the Republicans passed Medicare Part D, that specifically prevented Canadian-style negotiations with Big Pharma over drug prices for Medicare? Remember when the Obama Administration supported a filibuster of the Dorgan Amendment that would have allowed drug re-importation during the health care fight?
So what about the Romney/Obama-care law makes that problem --the price problem-- go away?
Are we really getting free birth control out of this? Or is something else happening to US health care here, something that's hidden far, far away from the debate over who called somebody else a "prostitute?"
And that's what I mean, folks.
Rush's contribution is to help everybody forget that citizens of the United States are being charged almost 8 thousand dollars per person per year, while Canadians paying $4300 or German people paying $4200 for the same doctor's visits and hospital stays and lab tests and birth control pills. Rush's contribution here is to help us forget to be angry about being ripped off, and, instead, get some people angry about supposedly "free" birth control being handed out, and some people angry about calling a woman a "slut." [.pdf]
And that's why he's a master. Journalists will note the controversy, and move on, and we are no better informed for this episode than before Rush said a word.
Well, ask yourself: Is Rush telling the truth when he says that people will somehow get free birth control paid for by somebody else? Is the Obama Administration telling the truth whey they say that people will somehow get free birth control paid for by somebody else?
Are they both telling the truth? Or are they both not-quite-telling-the-real-truth about health care policy? And how do you know, one way or the other?
So my advice to my fellow movement liberals is this: don't let Rush be this successful. Because, if you find yourself getting mad at Rush Limbaugh, instead of getting mad at the price of health care in America...well, then Rush Limbaugh has succeeded at his most important political goal: distraction and misinformation. It's how everybody who isn't actually affected by these policies one way or the other wins, instead of you.
I'm Stuart Zechman, and this has been the Z-Files.
* * * * *
On last Thursday's Virtually Speaking, Jay talked to filmmakers Frances Causey and Don Goldmacher about Heist: Who Stole the American Dream?, following Jay and Stuart's Virtually Speaking A-Z (with What Digby Said).
So we ended up with Kucinich vs. Kaptur in the primary, which emphatically bites. Kaptur won, and will face Joe the Plumber in the general election.
Glennzilla in the NYT dismissing the idea that the Republican Party is doomed. He's mostly right as far as he goes, but I think he misses the important point that no one has done more to revive the Republican Party than Barack Obama, who not only refuses to condemn (or prosecute) their outrageous conduct and promote a better policy regime, but actually pursues an even uglier course.
Glennzilla back at his own place: "UN top torture official denounces Bradley Manning's detention [...] Yesterday, the U.N. official overseeing the investigation pronounced that 'Bradley Manning was subjected to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in the excessive and prolonged isolation' to which he was subjected at Quantico. [...] Over the past year, the U.N. torture investigator repeatedly complained - including in official reprimands - that his investigation was being obstructed by the Obama administration, which refused to provide unmonitored access to interview Manning"
Strangely, there is some good reporting at Politico by Josh Gerstein on Obama's crummy version of "transparency": "'Obama is the sixth administration that's been in office since I've been doing Freedom of Information Act work. ... It's kind of shocking to me to say this, but of the six, this administration is the worst on FOIA issues. The worst. There's just no question about it,' said Katherine Meyer, a Washington lawyer who's been filing FOIA cases since 1978. 'This administration is raising one barrier after another. ... It's gotten to the point where I'm stunned - I'm really stunned.'"
Atrios on Great Evil: "We can debate forever the stupid or evil question, but whatever the intentions of the various governments and powerful non-governmental actors, their actions are incredibly destructive. I'd lean a bit more toward stupid for many of them, as opposed to evil, if ever many of them could demonstrate a credible "feel your pain" moment. They don't seem to care." He links to Mehdi Hasan, who points out that Unemployment matters more than GDP or inflation.
"I have an entirely well-deserved tax deduction. You are a lazy welfare bum. [...] Design matters. Design, as it happens, currently makes it extraordinarily easy for better-off Americans to not notice that most of them are as much beneficiaries of 'government handouts' as anyone else.* It's hard to think this is entirely accidental."
I'll be talking to Culture of Truth on Virtually Speaking Sundays at 9:00 PM GMT. The rest of the this week's VS schedule is here, and includes the video for Stuart's "Extremists" Z-Files. (I'm still amazed that after what the Republicans did with Clinton, anyone can claim the Republicans are crazier and more extreme than they've ever been. They're more partisan than the Democratic leadership, but they're both pretty extreme and crazy.)
There's a good exchange about "merit" hiring and advancement in the thread attached to this post, illustrating the ridiculousness of the whole "merit" mirage. Commenter ks alerted me to a quote from this chilling Democracy Now! a segment on the assault on education in our country, led not by Republican movement conservatives, but by our "Centrist" leaders, whose lust for that idealized "public-private partnership" seems to be about installing a giant kick-back scheme run by people whose mission has nothing to do with education. Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union: "Yes. When I first met [Rahm Emanuel], we had dinner together, and he said, 'Well, you know, 25 percent of these kids [in schools slated for closure] are never going to be anything. They're never going to amount to anything. And I'm not throwing money at it.'" So Rahm wants to write them all off, I guess. (Hey, have you ever heard of self-fulfilling prophecy, Rahm?)
Comments to that post also yielded these interesting links on another subject:
Ta-Nehisi Coates probably wrote the kindest reflection on Breitbart that a decent human being can make upon the demise of a man whose public life was one of lies and destruction.
Virtually Speaking Tuesdays featured Dave Johnson and Natasha Chart, something I'd been looking forward to, but I'm not sure they took the full meaning of Stuart Zechman's point in his most recent Z-Files:
Z-Files, 02/28/2012 "Extremists"
I'm Stuart Zechman, and I've heard something that really disturbs me.
I've heard that the Republican Party is now populated with wild extremists, right-wing lunatics who are completely divorced from reality, and so, like never before in American history, the GOP is now totally unreasonable and insane, and, if they get into power in Washington, the will enact the most dreadful, terrible, awful policy...ever.
Have you been hearing this, lately, too?
See, I thought that the Republican Party has always advocated the worst kind of policies and agenda.
Since, like, as far back as the 1990s, I remember Republicans being in favor of all kinds of anti-Bill of Rights, pro-endless war, anti-New Deal and pro-big corporate monopoly proposals, and performing all of these crazy political hostage-taking maneuvers to try to get that horrifying agenda through the government.
I vaguely --really vaguely-- remember way back when that Christian fundamentalist and televangelist fraud Pat Robertson actually ran for President as a Republican, I think that was in the 1980s, actually.
I remember, in the late 90s, when Congressman Dan Burton, a Republican from Indiana, was so freaking nuts that he actually staged a supposed "re-enactment" of how Hillary Clinton murdered a White House staffer named Vince Foster, by shooting a pumpkin in his back yard, and telling reporters to imagine that this was Foster's head. I remember when he said things like "If I could prove 10 percent of what I believe happened, he'd [Clinton] be gone. This guy's a scumbag. That's why I'm after him."
Just to give you some idea of what I'm talking about, Dan Burton, I swear to you, once proclaimed in a 1995 House hearing on the War on Some Drugs, that
"the US military "should place an aircraft carrier off the coast of Bolivia and crop dust the coca fields." It was later pointed out to him that a) Bolivia is landlocked and has no coast (Burton was chairman of the Western Hemisphere Subcommittee); b) the Bolivian coca fields (in the yungas and Amazon lowlands) are beyond the reach of any carrier-borne crop-duster, being separated from the nearest coastline (the Pacific coast of Peru and Chile) by the 20,000+ feet high peaks of the Andes; and c) F-18s cannot crop-dust." [Link]
I'm telling you, this is well-documented. The Republicans from the 1990s were like this. If you listened to talk radio, like I did, or had enough time on your hands to watch the Christian conservative religious broadcasters, like I did, you were more than likely to hear Hillary Clinton referred to as a secret lesbian murderess. I'm not kidding. They literally told people that Clinton was Satan. These guys made today's "War on Religious Freedom" hucksters look like college Democrats. It makes Romney's references to Obama as a "European-style socialist" look like an endorsement.
And then they were so suicide-bomber insane, that they actually impeached a sitting president over a blow-job. Bob Livingston, the Speaker of the House to be actually resigned when he was caught having an affair, so that they could more easily go after Clinton, they were that kamikazi. (His successor was a straight-shooter from Louisiana named David Vitter.) I'm not making this up. You think that the debt-ceiling debate was Republicans at their craziest? I'm telling you, back in the 1990s they stopped the whole government, held a trial in which the now Very Serious Lindsey Graham got up on the House floor to carefully consider the nature of semen stains. This was the Republican Party of the 1990s...totally f-ing crazy. [Link]
And in the policy realm, it was unbelievable...their policy agenda, the policy proposals that came out of conservative think tanks like Heritage Foundation and American Enterprise Institute, was even worse for America than all the phony investigations, and fake scandals and even the blow-job impeachment.
These guys, these Republicans, actually proposed things like turning Medicare into a "premium support" system kind of like the Medicare Part D prescription drug coverage we got that exploded drug prices when the crazy GOP controlled all three branches of government, and proposed --get this-- creating this vast, privatized health insurance scheme where, state-by-state, the private health insurance monopolies would sell people junk insurance who were forced by law to buy their crappy coverage. It would all be means-tested and funded through HHS, so the federal government would end up actually paying insurance companies to stay in business, and only the deserving poor would get any help. And this regime would somehow make health care "affordable care." Yeah, I know. Crazy, isn't it? [.pdf]
Or, talk about nuts, they proposed repealing the New Deal laws that stopped savings banks from becoming investment banks and even financial insurance companies. They basically said that the government needed to get out of the way of the giant banks gambling with all of our money, and should essentially let these geniuses create whatever debt they felt like making and selling, and then insuring themselves against default. [Link]
Now that's insane.
You really can't get more out of touch with reality than this, folks.
And they were just as crazy in the 2000s, too. You had best-seller books, like Ann Coulter's "Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism" or Michelle Malkin's "In Defense of Internment: The Case for Racial Profiling in World War II and the War on Terror."
I mean, how do you reason with people like this, people who want to, say, institute a massive program to infiltrate Muslim mosques with law enforcement agents, and put grade schools for African-American Muslim kids under constant state surveillance? [Link]
Remember when they said that the President had the power to do virtually anything to "keep us safe," and we just had to basically trust that he wasn't going to abuse that virtually unlimited power?
What kind of lunatics believe that this sort of due-process-less regime is somehow compatible with small-d democratic government? It's obviously the path to oligarchy and tyranny, right?
It's like we might all have to pack up and move to Canada, if extremists like that ever got into power.
So, when I was reading the New York Times the other day --you know, they're so much more reality-based than Fox News, despite the whole Judy Miller/Iraq war thing-- anyway, and I saw Paul Krugman say that the party of American conservatism is divorced from reality, quote:
How did American conservatism end up so detached from, indeed at odds with, facts and rationality? For it was not always thus. After all, that health reform Mr. Romney wants us to forget followed a blueprint originally laid out at the Heritage Foundation!
"The truth, of course, is that he was not a "severely conservative" governor. His signature achievement was a health reform identical in all important respects to the national reform signed into law by President Obama four years later. And in a rational political world, his campaign would be centered on that achievement." [Link]
And I thought: wait a second...Krugman is openly declaring that Heritage Foundation health care policy, the policy that flowed from those same insane, pumpkin-shooting Republicans in the 1990s, is an "achievement."
The argument in elite, big-D Democratic circles seems to be that the scary Republicans are scarier than ever before, so scary, with their Tea Party and their conservative media, that they make the Republicans of the late 1990s look reasonable.
So reasonable, in fact, that conservative Republican policies from the late 1990s, policies that are completely at odds with the philosophy of the New Deal, a functioning government, a federal state that doesn't spy on anybody it feels like, and a free and fair market for everybody, policies that reject everything that movement liberals stand for are now considered to be "achievements" when enacted into law by today's centrist Democrats.
Now, if you think about it, that is, itself, quite detached from, indeed at odds with, facts and rationality. And, it was not always thus.
But it does seem to be the argument that national Democrats are using to win over people like Dr. Krugman.
How could it be that the passage of policy identical in all important respects to conservative think-tank Heritage Foundation's, policy we movement liberals would have recognized in 1998 as an obviously, deeply unpopular non-solution, the product of bankrupt ideological premises regarding the superiority of "markets", certain to bring tragic consequences to the people of our country, and discredit to the party which promoted it, how could this ever be rationally called an "achievement?"
It can't be. Not unless one jumps through extraordinary intellectual hoops to rationalize voting for a Democratic politician whose own "signature achievement" is Mitt Romney's health care policy.
And that's what this line is about, folks. We movement liberals are being told from on high that the reason why centrist Democrats' failures are actually achievements...is because the Republicans of today are super-scary.
And that's just not true. The movement conservatives are just as frighteningly wrong today as when Ann Coulter became a millionaire writing a book entitled "Godless" about liberals, and when Ramesh Ponnuru wrote "The Party of Death" about Democrats a few years ago. Quote-unquote "market-oriented" policies from the 1990s and 2000s are just as bad for America today as they were back when the majority of Democrats actually opposed them, instead of arm-twisting "progressive caucus" members into shilling for them.
So when you hear this line, that Republicans of today are like Congressional Ahmadinejads because they won't vote for Newt Gingrich's old agenda when it's proposed by Democrats, just remember: it's pretty likely that you're going to read Dem-leaning pundits in the Washington Post consider how reasonable Newt Gingrich's old agenda actually is, compared to the new Newt Gingrich's agenda.
And then ask yourself: is the political price that you're being asked to pay to protect yourself from these terrifying new Tea Party-style Republicans that you now have to vote for old, Dan Burton-style Republicans' agenda, and...
...what did FDR say about "fear itself"?
I'm Stuart Zechman, and this has been the Z-Files.
* * * * *
There are all kinds of evil things that this administration was against before they decided they were okay after all. Here's an expensive example from 2009 that Stuart recently brought to our attention:
[T]oday the President announced the administration's strong support for repealing the antitrust exemption currently enjoyed by health insurers. At its core, health reform is all about ensuring that American families and businesses have more choices, benefit from more competition, and have greater control over their own health care. Repealing this exemption is an important part of that effort.
Today there are no rules outlawing bid rigging, price fixing, and other insurance company practices that will drive up health care costs, and often drive up their own profits as well.
Julian Assange interview on Newshour - if Iran's nuclear program was already destroyed by Israel, what's the real reason behind the war drums?
I think the cold was slightly less horrible today than it was yesterday, but I'm not exactly feeling like a bright spark right now. But the weather is warmer, and I actually felt up to paying attention to the garden, so that can't be bad.
Michael Hudson tells a fascinating story: "2,181 Italians Pack a Sports Arena to Learn Modern Monetary Theory - The Economy Doesn't Need to Suffer Neoliberal Austerity [...] Stephanie Kelton (incoming UMKC Economics Dept. chair and editor of its economic blog, New Economic Perspectives), criminologist and law professor Bill Black, investment banker Marshall Auerback and me (along with a French economist, Alain Parquez) stepped into the basketball auditorium on Friday night. We walked down, and down, and further down the central aisle, past a packed audience reported as over 2,100. It was like entering the Oscars as People called out our first names. Some told us they had read all of our economics blogs. Stephanie joked that now she knew how The Beatles felt. There was prolonged applause - all for an intellectual rather than a physical sporting event."
David Dayen on The Broken Regulatory State: "If anything, the foreclosure fraud settlement has shown a breakdown in the ability of regulatory agencies to deal with the aftermath of fraudulent conduct. They simply have no ability to offer a regulatory response that's commensurate with the behavior." Maybe it should be addressed in criminal law, then.
One reason I dismiss arguments for paying teachers by "merit" is that it's almost impossible to assess actual merit that finely. You occasionally find teachers of manifest brilliance, and you occasionally find teachers whose performance is so bad - or egregious - that you really need to fire them, but by and large you basically just have people trying to convey stuff to a bunch of students and performing as well as can be expected in the circumstances. You can't have a universal standard for them because all classrooms are not equal, all communities are not equal, all schools are not equal. And, in addition, there's always a lot of politics in any workplace, in any district, in any state, that can adversely affect not just individual teachers, but whole schools and even entire educational systems. And that's just one little thing. Of course, this applies to more than just teachers and schools, and it goes well beyond that. What do people mean by "achievement"? What's "productive"? Even the decisions over what is "good performance" and what isn't start with certain assumptions that can be, essentially, political. But people like to believe in meritocracy, as Yves Smith notes: "When it comes to bias, it seems that the desire to believe in a meritocracy is so powerful that until a person has experienced sufficient career-harming bias themselves they simply do not believe it exists." (And, I submit that people who play the lottery can do the math just fine. If you are in no position to get rich by bright ideas and hard work, even if you are bright, able, and very hard-working, as so many people are, the math is simple: Your only chance at getting rich is to play the lottery. End of story.)
Paul Abrams says Wall Street is now supporting tax hikes on the wealthy, with even Jamie Dimon saying, ""I would tax dividends and interest income higher and capital gains. "Have a higher tax rate. If you said there'd be a certain percent rate for people making over a million dollars and a higher percent rate for people making over $10 million, no problem with me. I don't think people should be able to pass unlimited amounts on to their kids." David Waldman @KagroX tweets: "Because the tax rate at the end of a pitchfork is 100%."
Warren Buffett says high corporate taxes are a myth, and that we did fine when we had much higher taxes on corporations. And even though he's no great public speaker, he's able to articulate this simple thing that, y'know, we don't even hear most of the time, even though it's true.
I suppose you could say Ezra Klein is manfully trying to debunk a silly idea that's floating in the NYT, but he's using all the misleading language and bizarro rationales of the blitherati in Washington. Here we find him getting it wrong on Simpson-Bowles, which he forgets many important things about. Like the fact that nobody wanted a "deficit commission" in the first place because it was a stupid idea, and that it never issued a report at all because no one could agree on it, and that Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles wrote their own "report" that didn't propose anything that would genuinely reduce deficits because reducing deficits isn't what they actually care about. They care about convincing the world to kill Social Security, which you'd never do if you really wanted to be fiscally responsible. Jan Schakowsky, a member of the commission who, unlike Bowles, was actually elected, also produced her own report - one that completely disagreed with Simpson and Bowles and was, of course, more to the point. Yet no one in Washington is talking about why Obama has ignored that plan, even though it's Schakowsky, and not Simpson and Bowles, that Obama has actually been rejecting. Oh, yeah, that's the other thing that's entirely wrong with Ezra's piece - it starts with the false assumption that Obama has failed to embrace the non-existent Simpson-Bowles "commission report" that isn't a commission report, and that just isn't true. Obama has been trying to embrace Simpson and Bowles' plan to wreck Social Security since before he was even elected, and that's the very reason he forced this stupid commission on a public and Congress that had already rejected it. Ezra does note that Obama has actually moved to the right of Simpson and Bowles' recommendations, but he still doesn't seem to know that they were not "the commission report" and that this isn't 11-dimensional chess, it's just Obama pursuing right-wing programs. Dean Baker caught the NYT selling the same misleading take, and debunks one of the main lies in the scam: "The piece also misled readers when it asserted that, 'benefits for an aging population soon would increase deficits to unsustainable levels.' In fact, the main problem is rising private sector health care costs that were projected to make Medicare and Medicaid unaffordable. The increased costs due to aging alone are quite gradual and affordable." What's making them unaffordable, as Schakowsky suggested in her report, is that the government refuses to negotiate them down, despite the fact that doing so would save us $270bn. (PS. Why does Ezra hate democracy?)
Jake Tapper actually pressed the White House spokesbeing Jay Carney about the contradiction in the White House's alleged support for tough reporting and it's war on whistleblowers, Glenn Greenwald notes in one of his Various Matters posts, quoting Tapper: "How does that square with the fact that this administration has been so aggressively trying to stop aggressive journalism in the United States by using the Espionage Act to take whistleblowers to court? You're - currently I think that you've invoked it the sixth time, and before the Obama administration, it had only been used three times in history. You're - this is the sixth time - you're suing a CIA officer for allegedly providing information in 2009 about CIA torture. Certainly that's something that's in the public interest of the United States. The administration is taking this person to court. There just seems to be disconnect here. You want aggressive journalism abroad; you just don't want it in the United States." Also from Glennzilla: "Both Scott Lemieux and Jeralyn Merritt have good commentaries on Elena Kagan's joining with the five right-wing Supreme Court Justices to dilute the protections of Miranda. One thing I found fascinating is to read how many commenters to this Daily Kos post about the ruling are actually defending the Alito/Thomas/Roberts/Scalia rationale (though the majority are criticizing Kagan). How many of them would be defending the Court conservatives this way had Kagan not joined them in their opinion diluting Miranda? My guess - on which I'd place a fair amount of money - is: zero. Had it been only the five right-wing Justices voting this way, I strongly believe that not a single one of those commenters would be uttering a peep of support for it." Glenn's original response to the decision is here, and you can read what Bmaz had to see here. The verdict seems clear: Obama's replacement for Justice Stevens (who was, you recall, a Republican appointee), moves the court further to the right.
Here's this fairly decent article about ALEC pushing voter-ID laws, but you know things have gone beyond stupid when you see a paragraph like this:
With little proof of cheating many Democrats say it's really all about Presdient Barack Obama. They believe that voter ID rules will probably keep a lot of the young and the poor from voting, both groups were big Obama backers last round. Opponents say that's where this secretive group of powerful conservatives comes in.
It's all about Obama. A project the right-wing has pursued for my entire lifetime is all about Obama. ALEC has been around since 1973 pushing this same agenda and it's all about Obama.
I was sufficiently out of it Tuesday that I forgot to mention that Lambert and I were doing Virtually Speaking Tuesdays, and a bit traumatized by the resulting failure of my communication skills, but you can go ahead and listen to it if you want to. At the very least, listen to Stuart's Z-Files, which is at the top, and certainly and worth your time.
Nice post from Jay Ackroyd about Tort, and making the system work, and Hot Coffee: "The way the civil lawsuit thing is supposed to work is that people hurt by negligent actions get compensated for what it cost them, and then also receive punitive damages--money intended to discourage the defendant from doing the same thing to other people."
Watching Buddy Roemer talking about the corruption in both parties - and, not incidentally, defending unions and pointing out that it's management that's damaging the companies - almost made me want to vote for him.
Officials try to claim that they are meeting the needs of the very poor, but of course, that's a lie: "He said, 'Oh, I'm not eating dinner because it's my brother's turn tonight. Tomorrow is my night."
A losing strategy: "A searing new report says the environmental movement is not winning and lays the blame squarely on the failed policies of environmental funders. The movement hasn't won any 'significant policy changes at the federal level in the United States since the 1980s' because funders have favored top-down elite strategies and have neglected to support a robust grassroots infrastructure. Environmental funders spent a whopping $10 billion between 2000 and 2009 but achieved relatively little because they failed to underwrite grassroots groups that are essential for any large-scale change, the report says." Not just environmental groups, of course.
Cultural referents: "There are schools within a bike ride of here that have kids whose lives make yours look like goddamn paradise. There are people lining up at food pantries whose kids you walk by the in hall every day. Our politics is about to criminalize being girls, we're still at war even though we're pretending we're not anymore, and in an hour's drive you can be in a neighborhood that looks like something out of Blade Runner. You want to talk about morality? Let's talk about the morality of having a full metal freakout over kids touching each other to songs about 'booty' while all of THAT is going on. What on earth are we teaching teenagers when we teach them that?"
Item 1: I still have the thing that's going around and makes me feel all limp and full of aches and befogged. Item 2: It seems that I somehow accidentally saved the archive page differently from how I usually do it. The extra code didn't work, but recreating the page did, so at least that issue is solved.
This week, Virtually Speaking Sundays will feature Marcy Wheeler and David Dayen - at a much earlier time because of the Oscars - so check the post to find your time zone and listen live or later (stream or podcast). These two together should be red-hot and hugely informative.
On Virtually Speaking A-Z, Jay started off with a proposition I still completely disagree with, and Stuart didn't seem to be accepting it, either: That the corporate income tax isn't useful. But the first thing on their references page for the show is this: "U.S. Federal Tax Receipts - Fiscal Year 2011: The increase in taxes needed to support the war effort in the 1940s saw total (corporate and individual) income taxes rise to prominence as a source of Federal receipts, reaching nearly 80 percent of total receipts in 1944. After the war, the total income tax share of receipts fell from a postwar high of 74 percent in 1952 to an average of 64 percent in the late 1960s. The growth in social insurance taxes (such as Social Security and Medicare) more than offset a postwar secular decline in excise and other non-income tax shares. The combination of substantial reductions in income taxes enacted in the early 1980s and the continued growth in social insurance taxes resulted in a continued decline in the total income tax share of receipts. By 1983 the total income tax share had dropped to 54 percent of receipts, and it remained in the 53 to 56 percent range until the mid-1990s. Since 1994, the total income tax share of receipts has increased, reaching 60 percent in 2000, before dropping back to 52 percent by 2003 and then increasing to 58 percent in 2006 and 60 percent in 2007. As a result of the recession and tax reductions enacted as part of the stimulus packages in February 2008 and again in the spring of 2009, the total income tax share dropped to 57 percent in 2008 and dropped even further, to 50 percent in 2009. In 2010 the income tax share of receipts rose slightly to 50.4 percent." (I think Jay hasn't shaken loose from a lot of right-wing politicized "economics" theory. It's not a unique infection; even Krugman suffers from it. But you don't get this idea of untaxed corporations from people who can see how things work and have worked throughout history. Economic models are all "Look at the math!" But math doesn't explain how people really behave. If it did, the people would already have risen up and killed their elite masters in their beds before they sucked us dry.)
Below that, on the same page, Stuart's own hot topic is the fact that Rick Santorum is beating Romney with a message that sounds like it should be coming from someone else: "Ann Romney and her husband grew up here, but Santorum is now tied or leading him in recent polls in the state. Mitt Romney is touting his hometown roots while Santorum is pushing his blue collar background and a populist message." In fact, Republicans are doing well by talking about families and jobs and attacking elites. And the Democratic leadership and their handmaidens all act like they have more important things to talk about. So the right-wingers are winning with the rhetoric of liberalism, and the best the Democrats can do is keep the culture wars up front and offer people like this? Please, please, make it stop!
"Voting Rights Act under siege: An intensifying conservative legal assault on the Voting Rights Act could precipitate what many civil rights advocates regard as the nuclear option: a court ruling striking down one of the core elements of the landmark 1965 law guaranteeing African Americans and other minorities access to the ballot box."
In case you're wondering, Shaun Donovan is the Secretary of HUD who was originally appointed precisely because he opposes the mission of HUD, and as a result he has done a strategically awful job. He should have been replaced a long time ago but no one seems interested in doing it. And David Dayen notes that the story of how he scammed Schneiderman is right there in The New York Times. "Wow. This is on the record, with Miller saying that the release only looks like it was tailored to Schneiderman's specifications. Miller, by the way, was announced today as one of President Obama's re-election campaign co-chairs."
Atrios seems grumpier and grumpier, a feeling I certainly understand as we watch our giant intellects continue on the path to doing everything completely wrong. "Light Some More Money On Fire" (and help re-institute slavery under a modern guise). "Extraction" (when the skimmers reach the peak of laziness). And so on.
Juan Cole, "How the FCC Can Take the Money Out of Politics [...] The Federal Communications Commission should forbid television broadcasters from charging for campaign ads, and we, the public, should peacefully demonstrate outside the FCC offices at 445 12th Street SW, in Washington, D.C., until it does so." That'd be a nice start, but what about the non-stop campaign that is run on behalf of right-wing ideology all over the airwaves in the not-campaign-ads material?
Chomsky, "Anniversaries From 'Unhistory'" - We are not observing the 50th anniversary of a disastrous decision our leaders made, and you have to wonder if we will even celebrate the 900th anniversary of Magna Carta in a few years' time.
One reason I'm so sick of the attempts to drum up the daily Ten Minute Hate against Republicans or self-identified conservatives is that I'm pretty sure that at least half of the Republican electorate is - and, indeed, feels - entirely unrepresented by their party leadership, and not because that leadership is "too liberal". But the other reason is that I'm pretty sure that if we can just get rid of all the damned tribalism, there are plenty of registered Republicans who would get on board with a push to restore the Constitution and the project of promoting the general welfare. The trouble is that for 30 years the GOP leadership and, more importantly, it's rich funders and savvy operatives, have pushed the party membership to see liberals as people who hate them, and liberals have obligingly complied by hating on them non-stop. It's a waste of time. And I can't help thinking back to that little political map Stirling Newberry presented us with a couple of years ago that was actually much more meaningful than the ones everyone else always comes up with.
Meanwhile... I'm pretty sure the entire purpose of the Phelps family is to get people so annoyed that they do something stupid that can end up in a lawsuit that gets your money to them. For the record, I'd consider it a badge of honor to have them show up at my funeral, and I think the thing to do if they show up at your own event is to cheer, take pictures, and just generally behave like you won the lottery. Alas, there is the possibility that they won't show up at your event, but you can use this handy green-screen photo to paste them in! (Of course, if you're high-profile enough, they might do it for you and save you the trouble. Seems having them there is becoming indistinguishable from not having them there.)
That's what I already had before I started to notice that all of my efforts to avoid anyone who has whatever's going around failed. So, I feel like crap and don't really want to think.
Also, I'm experimentally adding a piece of code to the archive page, but I have no reason to think it will work. For all I know, it could make things worse! Please report soonest.
This week on Virtually Speaking Sundays, the panelists are Stuart Zechman and Joan McCarter. The rest of the week's VS schedule can be found here, and also contains the video for the Z-files episode quoted in the previous post.
In my continuing series of ways to get other people to write my posts for me, there's this item I found over in comments somewhere at Eschaton (but I seem to have mislaid the correct link) from regular commenter DWD:
Last night I posted this: my own political agenda.
Off the top of my head, ten changes that would make life better for mostly everyone (probably not the richest of the rich but who cares?)
1. Nationalize our communication systems. Telephony, cable TV, and data transmission need to become the people's. If we stopped sending a great deal of our money into the coffers of a few corporations that have so much cash that they continue to expand their control, we would have more money for other things like education. If France can offer the big three communication needs (phone, internet, and television) for a fee roughly 1/3 of what we are paying, we should follow their example.
2. Immediately institute regulations on the amount of interest that can be charged on credit accounts. Make it the prime rate plus 10-20% - enough to make them money but not so much as to continue to fleece the population.
3. Regulate severely or nationalize the use of debit cards and force businesses to discount for cash commensurate with the fees that they are paying for using these electronic transfers.
4. Separate the banks from speculation and traditional banking. By allowing our banks to become addicted to gambling they are no longer serving the public's interest but theirs.
5. Immediately institute a transaction tax of less than 1% on each transaction. The only effect that people would ever see is when they sell a stock and have to pay this fee out of their proceeds. What this would do is stop the manipulation that major players in the market can perform to bleed money out of the system.
6. Immediately cease the speculative trading of commodities. As I have often stated if you want to buy oil or grains then you must have the facilities to actually accept delivery of such commodities. If you cannot then you have no business in this market.
7. Immediately treat all income the same whether from salaries or capital gains: treat everyone the same as far as the taxes in our society are concern. Let them contribute to the social security and medicare systems as well pay their fair share of the burdens we all should share for living in a modern society.
8. Break up the media conglomerates. There is no reason that all of our news should be filtered through corporations like Disney or Rupert Murdoch's Media Empire.
9. Treat our trading partners in exactly the way we are treated. Japan can export as many automobiles as we can sell in Japan. China the same. As is stands now all this type of trade is doing is stealing bread off our tables.
10 Stop the damned revolving door that spins riches to those who worked in government service regulating the same industries that enrich them. Forbid anyone working in a senior position in government from working for a private firm in the same area for a period of time no less than five years and have this same restriction apply to family members.
Do these things and the world could change.
Discuss.
* * * * *
Isn't it puzzling that legislators are supposed to be improved by being paid more money, but teachers aren't?
Forget everything else Santorum said - let's talk about his attack on mainline Protestants. I think it's time they stood up and attacked back, m'self. Santorum and his fringe Prots have been promoting an attack on the teachings of Jesus for decades and someone needs to say so. Meanwhile, Catholic bigshots once again miss the point of that whole Good Samaritan thing. Who is my neighbor?
Bruce Springsteen: 'What was done to my country was un-American': "At a Paris press conference on Thursday night, Bruce Springsteen was asked whether he was advocating an armed uprising in America. He laughed at the idea, but that the question was even posed at all gives you some idea of the fury of his new album Wrecking Ball."
No, I haven't changed any of my code, but something seems to have changed somewhere, and I don't know how to fix it. I have not updated the page since I originally loaded the last post, and yet in the days between then and now, people who could click the permalinks and see the archive page can no longer see it. But there was at least one person who was having the problem before I uploaded that post, while no one else complained about it. And it's not everyone - some people click the permalink and see the page fine, and some see a bunch of code instead. And some people have reported they had the problem but then it went away. This may have been something to do with an update of Webkit (for Chrome and Safari), but I don't know.
Panelists on Virtually Speaking Tuesdays,Susie Madrak and David Dayen, with Stuart Zechman (who informs me that it was Jay, not him, who did the graphics for the last Z-Files). Stuart has been asking why we needed the Robo-Settlement - or, rather, why the White House wanted it so urgently. It's possible that he has found the answer:
I'm Stuart Zechman, and I've got three questions for you:
First question: What's not to love about the robo-settlement?
You know, the just-announced immunity settlement that grants the five biggest banks in America immunity from prosecution and investigation in 49 states for the mass-forgery they committed in their haste to foreclose on as many American families' homes as possible? The "robo-signing" deal?
If you're a liberal Democrat, aren't you pretty darn happy about the whole thing?
You're not?
Well, I was just reading the Washington Post the other day, and the decidedly Democratic-voting Ezra Klein had this to say about the robo-settlement:
"The agreement won't end our housing troubles and it won't end the banks' legal troubles. But it will help a bit on housing -- it should lead to principal reductions, refinancings, and even checks for millions of homeowners -- and help a lot in protecting banks from lawsuits. Given that many in the market are already turning bullish on housing, this could be the push many need to begin reinvesting in the sector." [Link]
Now when Ezra says "checks for millions of homeowners" in the midst of a catastrophic 8 percent national unemployment rate, and "the push many need to begin reinvesting," this whole deal started to sound like something else...
Hmm..."checks for millions of homeowners," "push many need to begin reinvesting"...sounds kind of like...a tiny economic STIMULUS plan, doesn't it?
Sounds like the Administration basically wants economic stimulus, and they're using the bank settlement to get it.
Now, obviously this would be --at least according to economists that correctly predicted the housing collapse-- a totally inadequate stimulus that also dubiously depends in large part on inspiring "confidence" and reducing "uncertainty" in the beautiful minds of our cash-hoarding corporate giants...but that pretty much sounds like every economic measure proposed by this Administration, right?
So now their awesome recovery program this election year includes the seemingly indefinite, Social Security-ruining payroll tax holiday, AND a check for up to $2,000 cut at some point over the next three years to over 700,000 people out of 4 million families potentially illegally foreclosed upon between 2008 and 2011. Yep, sure sounds like this Administration's idea of "stimulus."
The genius of it is that they don't even have to spend a single cent of that $30 billion dollars of Home Affordable Modification Program money that Treasury still won't make directly available to homeowners --they can use that to pay down the deficit. Isn't it fantastic?
Why, just yesterday, Reuters reported that the cash poor Federal Housing Administration will be likely to receive a billion dollars from the settlement, instead of having to borrow from Treasury. Imagine that! These five giant, money center banks that took 9 trillion dollars in near no-interest, no-recourse loans from the Federal Reserve are now basically giving their money to the FHA, the federal insurer and guarantor of mortgages, so that the Obama Administration can claim some deficit reduction in an election year. (Come to think of it, why not just cut out the middleman, and replace the FHA with some enormous, federally-guaranteed, private insurance corporation, and have them insure the money center banks' mortgages against default, like AIG...oh, wait. Never mind.) [Link]
And how about the news that at least three states, Maine, Wisconsin and Missouri, are already planning on using large portions of their settlement dollars to patch those states' general funds, for budget-balancing. Hey, when the Administration signed off on those automatic cuts from their debt-ceiling deal, they had to plan on something to offset the disastrous effect on the states, right? Why not send down a little cash without doing so in a way in which Republicans and Meet The Press' David Gregory can possibly blame the Administration for spending job-creators' money? [Link]
It's perfect. In an election season following 4 years of an economic policy that has produced 4 million foreclosures, 13 million unemployed people and record profits for money center banks, the Administration can still blame Congress, some people get $2,000 checks to hold up in front of news cameras, JPMorgan's CEO can reconsider contributing to the Obama 2012 campaign, the establishment press will talk about investor confidence...if you want Obama to have a shot at winning in November, what's not to love?
[.pdf]
Can you see why the Administration wanted this settlement so badly?
Along with the payroll tax cut and unemployment benefits, it's their 2012 "stimulus package."
So, second question:
If this settlement will maybe be the difference between an economic number ticking up or a number ticking down before November, isn't immunity for banks that have stolen people's homes and wrecked the economy a small price to pay to make sure that Obama gets elected to a second term in office?
Which is more important to you: a working system of elite accountability in America, or Obama's reelection?
Because, inevitably, whether I'm right about immunity being traded for minuscule private-sector stimulus or not, this settlement will be described by the Obama campaign to liberal Democrats as something that Obama simply had to do, in order to have the best chance of reelection.
Well, don't you want Obama to do whatever he has to in order to get reelected...whatever it takes?
Or --and here's the final question-- are there some things that are more important than the reelection of a Democratic president, some things without which our country can't be successful, and our people can't have the nation that we deserve after these long years of failure and stupidity and avarice and corruption on the part of our government, banks, giant industries, institutions...our elites?
Are there some things that simply can't be sacrificed on the altar of Barack Obama's reelection campaign?
If things keep going the way they're going, we're going to have to choose one way or the other. Movement liberals are either going to be a movement primarily about accountability for everyone in America, or we're going to remain pawns on an 11-dimensional chess board for the foreseeable future.
If you find that there's not much to love about robo-settlement, then ask yourself 1) what does it say about what's wrong with our country at this moment in our history, 2) what won't you tolerate to see Obama in the White House for another four years, and 3) isn't long-overdue accountability what America needs most right now to put us on the path to a just and sustainable future? Or just ask yourself one thing: What are you willing to lose...to win?
I'm Stuart Zechman, and this has been...the Z-Files.
Plergb. (I had just gotten off of a phone call with Stuart in which we argued, again, about the meaning of "conservatism" when I read this, so it seemed to be particularly, um, apropos.) (And this Irish sf series looks kinda neat.)
I wonder if anyone will be reading this today from the Bed-in in Washington Square. Yep, it's time to Occupy Valentine's Day.
Making you pay: The canard is that "forcing" organizations to provide contraceptive health coverage means forcing them to pay extra for it. Of course, the reverse is true - policies that omit contraceptive coverage cost more than policies that provide it, because pregnancies cost more than contraception. And that means that what the no-contraceptive-coverage crowd really wants is to force people to pay extra for an exception that nobody needs. There's a similar canard related to the whole idea of forbidding funds for abortions for welfare recipients - it's cheaper for the state to fund it than not to fund it, so the rest of us are having to pay the costs of not funding it. This is, of course, a consistent theme with right-wing policy. Fully-funded, WIC programs used to save us $45,000 for every $100 spent, but they kept cutting down until it saved not nearly that much, and yet it still saves us money, though every cut means it saves less again. And so on. (And my thanks to The Raw Story for providing a clip from The Daily Show that I can actually watch.)
"30,000 drones in American skies, civil liberties in jeopardy: Washington- A bill passed last week allocating more than $63 billion to the Federal Aviation Administration would increase the existence of drones in civilian airspace across America and is expected to be signed into law by President Barack Obama." (via)
I'm assuming Stuart is responsible for putting the graphics together for the useful video of the Z-Files I quoted below.
"Where is Kropotkin When We Really Need Him? [...] Kropotkin honored Darwin's insights about natural selection but believed the governing principle of natural selection was cooperation, not competition. The fittest were those who cooperated. [...] He spent the rest of his life promoting that concept and the theory of social structure known as anarchism. To Americans anarchism is synonymous with a lack of order. But to Kropotkin anarchist societies don't lack order but the order emerges from rules designed by those who feel their impact, rules that encourage humanly scaled production systems and maximize individual freedom and social cohesion." (via) (Also, Fred Clark on rewriting the Bible to suit sexist politics.)
"Should Israel be classified as a state sponsor of terrorism?: That question is being debated in the wake of a story that NBC News broke late last week. Citing unnamed US officials, NBC reported that Israel has used an Iranian opposition group to carry out those much-publicized assassinations of Iranian scientists. The group in question is the M.E.K. (Mojahedin-e Khalq, or People's Mujahedin of Iran), which since 1997 has been designated a terrorist group by the United States because of its alleged assassinations of US citizens."
David Swanson says, "27 of 35 Bush Articles of Impeachment Apply to Obama. When Congressman Dennis Kucinich introduced 35 articles of impeachment against President George W. Bush on June 9, 2008, the 35 had been selected from drafts of nearly twice that many articles. President Obama has accumulated his own massive list of high crimes and misdemeanors that were unavailable for Bush's list (thing's like openly murdering U.S. citizens, launching massive drone wars, selectively and abusively prosecuting numerous whistleblowers as spies, holding Bradley Manning naked in isolation, attacking Libya without so much as bothering to lie to Congress, etc.). Nonetheless, it is instructive to review the 35 Bush articles in the Obama age. It quickly becomes apparent that Obama has either exactly duplicated or closely paralleled most of the 35."
It's turkeys all the way down - I don't usually quote science like this because I can't for the life of me figure out how it can be true when liberals keep falling for the same old crap. (Am I the only one who finds it worrying that Chris Hayes has gone all happy talk, by the way? It's even got John Sarbanes rhapsodizing about public-private partnerships, ffs!) Meanwhile, Digby and Corey Robin talked about The Reactionary Mind and all that stuff on Virtually Speaking Sundays.
But then it seemed it was more like this: "49-State Foreclosure Fraud Settlement Will Be Finalized Thursday." (And Jesus Christ, Ezra, why on earth is it good news that this deal will "help a lot in protecting banks from lawsuits"? These people stole people's homes, and you think a check for a couple of grand is some kind of compensation? If you get caught selling a lid of grass they confiscate every damn thing you have, but if you steal someone's house you just pay pocket change in compensation out of billions you made from cheating people? That's really nice for you - if you're a banker. But, you know, we don't need bankers like that! And we need to put those banksters in jail so they won't do it again - and doing more of it seems to be just what they have in mind, thanks to this deal.)
1) Create a hostage population dependent on the outcome of successful negotiations between the government and a giant industry
2) Negotiate with the industry on the basis of a shared agreement that all parties are best served if the issue were to be put behind them
3) Negotiate with external actors to defuse risks to the consensus outcome, by offering prominent, careerist roles inside the Administration
4) Declare victory, sell the outcome to interest groups
The Counter-factual:
Imagine if this pattern had been applied to
Trust-busting
The Emergency Banking Act of 1933
The Premises:
1) Look forward, not backward
2) The system must be preserved
3) Trust the institutions involved
4) The enemies of progress are partisan and political, not economic and structural
5) We know what we're doing better than you
The Path to Progress:
1) Accountability must become our movement
2) Stop negotiating with hostage-takers
3) Demand the truth, above all
4) Be smarter than them, without the hubris
Synopsis: This latest settlement with the giant money center banks can be viewed by movement liberals as part of a broader malignancy within the government and big-D Democratic national politics, which we might refer to as "Robo-settlement" (a play on the fraudulent practice for which the settlement grants effective immunity) which is the tendency we've seen (in examples like the SEC's proposed settlement with Citigroup) to follow a pattern of political dishonesty and manipulation in pursuit of the reconciliation of structural issues to industry satisfaction.
"Why Obama should be worried" - Yeah, it's Politico, but Obama's policies sure aren't charming the pants off of the electorate, are they? Maybe that's because he doesn't even seem to know what they are.
Alan Moore has an article over at Auntie Beeb's place, "V for Vendetta and the rise of Anonymous" [...] "At the time, we both remarked upon how interesting it was that we should have taken up the image right at the point where it was apparently being purged from the annals of English iconography. It seemed that you couldn't keep a good symbol down. [...] Our present financial ethos no longer even resembles conventional capitalism, which at least implies a brutal Darwinian free-for-all, however one-sided and unfair. Instead, we have a situation where the banks seem to be an untouchable monarchy beyond the reach of governmental restraint, much like the profligate court of Charles I. [...] Today's response to similar oppressions seems to be one that is intelligent, constantly evolving and considerably more humane, and yet our character's borrowed Catholic revolutionary visage and his incongruously Puritan apparel are perhaps a reminder that unjust institutions may always be haunted by volatile 17th century spectres, even if today's uprisings are fuelled more by social networks than by gunpowder. "
I'm Stuart Zechman, and I'm about to say something about a big 2012 campaign issue-to-come that may sound confusing to some folks.
Ready?
OK, here goes: Medicare is NOT primarily a "social safety net" program.
Got that?
Here's another one: Social Security is NOT primarily a "social safety net" program.
Now I know what you're saying, you're saying "Hold on just a minute there, Stuart Zechman, I've heard my entire life that these are safety net programs, which is why liberal Democrats have to support them!"
But bear with me, and I'll try to make what I mean clear, OK?
Alright.
So, when we say "social safety net," we mean a program that acts like a net, that catches people plummeting to their deaths...well, that prevents individuals from falling into total financial ruin, right?
It means that sometimes life doesn't go as planned, or we make the wrong choices, or end up in unexpected --or expected-- financial hardship. Or, we started out in hardship, and just never had the opportunity to get ahead in life to the point where we could live without some kind of net to hold us up at the end of the day.
Have you heard this before?
A "social safety net" means that some people can make mistakes, or be unlucky, or (frankly) make bad choices, and the rest of us will gladly --or not so gladly, depending on who you are-- step right in with our charitable contributions in the form of taxes, to help save these poor unfortunate people from being destitute at the end of their lives. If you didn't manage to put away a nickel your entire life for your old age, we'll help you --there's Social Security for that. If you weren't able to get a job that guaranteed private medical insurance in your retirement, we'll help you --there's Medicare for that. It's about helping those who can't help themselves.
So when we say "social safety net," what we mean is: welfare for people who are poor enough to depend solely on these programs as a last resort, once their meager savings are all gone, if they ever had any savings to begin with.
And --back to the confusing part-- I'm saying that Social Security and Medicare are NOT primarily social safety nets. I'm saying all that stuff I just said involving "helping those who can't help themselves" is NOT what Social Security and Medicare are primarily about.
Somehow, over the course of many decades, the significance of these brilliant, New Deal-era policies got changed in people's --even many liberal Democrats'-- minds, but they're NOT primarily social safety nets, they're something else.
Social Security and Medicare are primarily PUBLIC INSURANCE. Not "safety net," but "public insurance."
Let me explain:
In March, 1933, as FDR took the oath of office, state governors had closed every single bank in the nation; nobody could cash a check or get at their savings.
Now imagine that for a second.
You've worked your whole life, you've diligently saved your whole life, you've done everything as you should have, you were responsible, you put off today's pleasures for tomorrow's security, and you've done the most routine and non-risky things possible with your money: you've put your life savings into a savings account at a bank...but suddenly you can't get to your money.
You can't draw upon your savings, because it's effectively gone: your bank has gambled your money away. It lent its money to the bigger banks, which lent their money to even bigger banks, and the masters of high finance lost big at the casinos one day, so you're out of luck.
Due to no fault of your own, you, like tens upon tens of millions of Americans, are now as broke as the big banks.
Your fortunes rise and fall with their fortunes at the back-room investment tables. You're dependent on the 1% and the success of their schemes in order to get by in your old age.
Unless...you have insurance. But not just any insurance, not private insurance which probably invested all your premiums in the big banks' gambling schemes, no no --you need to have PUBLIC INSURANCE.
And that's what these programs are: public insurance against the geniuses in high finance gambling with your money.
It means independence. It means freedom for ordinary people. It means that, when the guys with top hats and monocles come to your democratically elected federal government for their social safety net in the form of federally guaranteed recapitalization loans, they come to the People's House with their hats--instead of a gun and hostage demands-- in their hands. Social security is a public option; a piece of security and freedom that can't be taken away from us by complex credit card contracts or shady "reverse" mortgages sold by former Senator (and actor) Fred Thompson on FOX News Channel.
When the banks lost all our money (the first time) in the Great Depression, this country learned one of the biggest lessons about advancing freedom since the 13th Amendment: that we the people can't truly be free, unless we use the federal government to establish independence from big, powerful, private interests like money center banks, who tend to hold us and the entire American economy hostage when things go badly for them.
So when you're 65, and you can't pull your money out of your "Health Savings Accounts" insured against default by AIG, and your HMO invested everyone's premiums into Bear Stearns recommended stocks, you've got something that those geniuses can't touch: Medicare. You've got independence from the captains of finance and industry. You've got freedom. You've got pubic insurance.
And it's not just you, it's every ordinary American. Economic crashes don't just happen to poor people, they happen to everybody. And that's why everybody needs Social Security and Medicare, whether we're low income or middle income or even above average income. These programs are NOT primarily safety nets for "the most vulnerable," they're what keep all of us from being vulnerable to the 1%. Instead of depending on them, we can depend on ourselves, knowing our life's savings are safe. Along with the guarantees in the Bill of Rights, New Deal-era public insurance is what keeps we the people free.
So how did we ever, after all of that New Deal success keeping our nation safe, independent, and free for all of these years, end up in a situation where our cherished public insurance options are routinely described on MSNBC as "social safety nets"? How did this happen? Who benefits from wide acceptance of this odd notion that our public pension insurance and public medical insurance are somehow welfare for some of us, and not independence for all of us? Whose idea was this "social safety net" thing, anyway?
Hmm...
I think that movement liberals like us need to ask ourselves these things, especially as we start to hear more and more of the big Parties' plans for "shared sacrifice" and "entitlement reform" this election cycle.
When you hear that Romney's concerned about "the 90-95 percent of us" and not "the very poor" who "have a safety net" he says he's going to fix...what exactly is he talking about?
When you hear the President say that he "will veto any bill that changes benefits for those who rely on Medicare but does not raise serious revenues by asking the wealthiest Americans or biggest corporations to pay their fair share. We are not going to have a one-sided deal that hurts the folks who are most vulnerable," what exactly is he talking about? He will "only" change Medicare, our successful public insurance program, if...if he also gets taxes restored slightly on millionaires?
What are these guys talking about? It sounds like they're talking about welfare reform, kind of, except...they're talking about all of us, this time. They're talking about "reforming" our independence, our freedom...our public insurance.
So, if you're a movement liberal like me, but you've gotten really used to hearing our New Deal public insurance programs --the ones you've been paying premiums into your whole working life-- as "entitlements" or "social safety nets" by politicians in either party, I think it's time to declare our independence from any candidate who is willing to negotiate away our hard-won freedoms in business-as-usual capital deal-making over budgets. That means Republicans and that means Democrats, and that means making our voices clear on the difference between "safety nets" and our independence --before this election is over, and they're back to lame-duck Grand Bargains on how to pay for the 1%'s "social safety net," once again.
I'm Stuart Zechman, and this has been the Z-Files.
* * * * *
Billy Moyers interviewed Jonathan Haidt, and the discussion of moral thinking, demonization, and language, was pretty interesting and a bit scary. Here's some background in Language: A Key Mechanism of Control - Newt Gingrich's 1996 GOPAC memo - but it's about much more than that. Oh, and just who was Saul Alinsky?
"David Graeber's Debt: My First 5,000 Words" - Because Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years is a big book, Aaron Bady wrote a big review. Via PNH, who called it "magesterial". (And Patrick's band also finally put out an album, too.)
I'm a day late to this (snow always gets me so excited!), but this week we commemorate the Day of Shame, or perhaps that should be Days of Shame, as there have been so many. (And, hell, they haven't even bothered to gin up any good theater about Iran - we just seem to be having the war without the traditional warm-up hate-fest and fake "evidence".)
Finally! For years, I've been griping about the fact that all those rich liberals keep giving their money to things like MoveOn.org and other relatively trivial (yes, relatively trivial) projects instead of putting it where it could do some real good, which would be in broadcast media. Even when Air America was launched, it sounded from the very beginning like it wasn't actually motivated to be a real liberal station. And, as it turned out, it was really run by crooks who just wanted to exploit the clear desire of liberals to have broadcast media of our own - crooks who had no intention of actually making it work, but just of getting in, sucking up some cash, and getting out. In the radio business, this has tended to mean you take an underperforming station, turn it liberal long enough to start picking up some serious listening figures, and then get an offer of a buy from some right-wing money so they can turn it into a Christian station. That's always been part of the plan, you know - buy out media that doesn't echo the right-wing machine so that there is nothing out there that contradicts the right-wing megaphone. They have done this so successfully that even in Washington, DC, there has been nothing but right-wing radio speaking to a public that is largely repelled by it. But now that's changing, right in Washington, DC.
Finally, a high-profile voice takes the liberal stand against austerity - and it's Newt Gingrich.
Ian Welsh on The Blindingly Obvious About Obama, 2013, Europe, Iran and so on: "If Obama wins he will stop pandering to progressives and liberals. Since he never has to be reelected again, he will be even worse than he was 2009-2011. If you want anything from Obama, anything, get it before the election, do not believe promises, do not accept promises, accept cash only. If Romney or Gingrich wins, well, it's not going to be any better. SOPA and PIPA will be back in 2013 in some form, so will the pipeline enviros think they've killed." And more.
"Catholic bishops fight to deny health care to the 98 percent: The 98 percent, that is, of American Catholic women who use contraception. [...] Catholics are not opposed to contraception. Catholics are not morally opposed to contraception. Catholics are not theologically opposed to contraception. Contraception does not trouble the conscience of Catholics. Nor should it. All of which means that it is simply not accurate in any meaningful sense to say that opposition to contraception is a 'Catholic' position." (via)
Mitt Romney is a good example of what inheritance taxes are meant to prevent. I flag this post from Brilliant Jill for David Cay Johnson's explanation of how these people can game the system so that hundreds of millions of dollars can be transferred to children to prevent any semblance of meritocracy in America.
"Anonymous ready to dump 2.6GB of Haditha docs: A group of Anons are about to dump a torrent 2.6GB of email containing "detailed records, transcripts, testimony, trial evidence, and legal defense donation records" about the Haditha massacre, in which 24 unarmed Iraqi men, women and children were killed by the USMC."
Did I miss an announcement that malt has become too rare to waste on Malteasers? And what happened to the malt in Shreddies? And why can't you get a malted at Ed's Easy Diner? I don't get it.
Stuart Zechman flagged a post from a Republican talking about how Mitt Romney's "gaffe" wasn't a gaffe and Democrats only hurt themselves by treating it as one. That was introductory to a point he was making on Virtually Speaking A-Z in which he developed his theme that we need to be smarter about how we react to the political theater we are watching. But that show is most worth listening to for a little story Stuart told about watching wrestling, and I heartily recommend it to you. It tells you something that a lot of people really need to learn.
I had some problems with some of the things Richard Wolff said in his speech, but if you start here, it's a reminder that Americans - yes! even Republicans! - have a lot of agreement with movement liberals on some crucial issues. Instead of railing against Republicans, it's time to learn to talk to our countrymen.
There are so many interesting discussions going on in the comments, and you should read them, but I wanted to pull a bit of one (to the previous post) from BDBlue: "...New Deal was largely ideas being pushed by those hated, useless third parties (in this case the Socialists, Communists, etc.). What a waste it was to support those parties since they never won the presidency! But, yeah, someone who can't seem to recall history that occurred during her lifetime (e.g., MLK did not march for "more and better Democrats"), sure isn't going to "remember" stuff that occurred in late 1800s and early 1900s. She's more than happy to spread the dreaded tale of Nader, however. Oh and if our future depends on winning the trench warfare in the hallowed halls of Congress then we are royally screwed. All you have to do is read that Yves Smith post to know that. And that, of course, assumes there actually is any "warfare" going on other than a concerted effort by Congress against the rest of us and, no, electing Darcy Burner isn't going to change that. Not that electing Darcy Burner is a terrible thing, but it's kind of like cheering on the Lilly Ledbetter law while Obama bails out Wall Street." I do find it worrying that some otherwise smart people tend to operate as if it's still all about Democrats vs. Republicans. It's a losing game. It's not that we shouldn't vote, but we now have a continuous election cycle in which the only thing that changes is that for a few months right before the election, candidates try to sound a little more liberal (yes, liberal!) than they normally do, as if they don't actually plan to keep destroying our country. And it's simply stupid to pretend that "We have to beat the Republicans" is a sufficient strategy. What if we don't? What if a Republican wins the election? If you're only answer is, "It doesn't bear thinking about," or maybe, "That will be a disaster!" - well, I've got news for you, because the disaster is here and now, not later. Unless you can elect a Congress that will impeach at least a couple of Supreme Court justices and any president who fails to serve the people, partisan electoral politics is just one big distraction. Obama should be afraid to do the horrible right-wing things he is doing. What have you done to make him afraid?
And, gosh, the NYT actually had a story the other day on how the S.E.C. Is Avoiding Tough Sanctions for Large Banks. (But these stories always cut two ways - is it a story of corruption that needs to be cleaned up, or is it just another element in the "government is bad" arsenal? Who you are may determine how you read that headline. But the SEC used to work. If you remember that, all those "libertarian" arguments just sound like so much gibberish.)
Yes, one bad Apple can spoil the whole bunch, and evil practices - anti-employee control fraud, some might call it - are part of the poison that is killing our country. (It's a relief that lately no one says, "You could have bought a Mac," to me anymore. I think that's partly because none of them can afford a Mac anymore, but, whatever. To me, there is little that could be more uncool than someone trying to convince me that having a Mac is somehow cooler than having a PC. You might as well be arguing over the virtues of the Electrolux versus the Hoover.)
I suppose a counselor could specialize in areas that have nothing to do with sexuality - say, agoraphobia, and maybe even anorexia - but if you can't deal with clients who are gay or don't share your religious beliefs about reproductive rights, maybe you shouldn't have that job.
Since I didn't see this dashing picture of dashing Tesla in time for his birthday last month, I thought it'd be better than a picture of a groundhog.
I keep forgetting to mention Virtually Speaking Science, but Alan Boyle is actually pretty good not just on science, but the issues around it, and the politicization of science. Tonight's Virtually Speaking line-up will feature Stirling Newberry following Stuart and Jay on the week in liberalism.
From Naked Capitalism: Yves Smith on "Yet More Mortgage Settlement Lies: Release Looks Broad, Not Narrow; Other States Screwed to Bribe California to Join [...] "It is hard to fathom how any responsible attorney general can agree to this deal not knowing what they are getting for their constituents. It is particularly bizarre that Pam Bondi of Florida has been pushing so hard for California to join the deal rather than do her best to secure terms at least as good as those offered to California for Florida homeowners. And the same question can be asked of Schneiderman. Why has he gone from pushing for a better deal or no deal to sitting on the sidelines? This brave talk of investigations is all well and good, but this settlement agreement is being finalized now, and all the PR related to his new Federal role seems to have taken him off his day job responsibilities at a critical time. Yves again, on how Gingrich created the Pay-to-Play Congress: "Our Polarized and Money-Driven Congress: Created Over 25 Years By Republicans (and Quickly Imitated by Democrats) [...] The extent of corruption may surprise even jaundiced readers. Both houses have price lists for committees and sub-committees. Ferguson delineates some of the many mechanisms for influencing political outcomes; they extend well beyond campaign donations and formal lobbying. Even though many are by nature hard to quantify in any hard or fast way, he does categorize them and has developed some estimates (see The Spectrum of Political Money, starting on p. 23, and see also his summary on p. 42). Finally, Ferguson goes through conventional explanations of why politics has become so polarized (such as changing cultural attitudes) and shows why they don't stand up. (More on Gringrich's crimes against the US government at The Nation.)
In the wake of the tenth birthday of Guantanamo Bay a few weeks back, The Talking Dog has gone back to doing interviews about this continuing outrage with those most familiar with it, this time Kristine Huskey, Director of the Anti-Torture Program of Physicians for Human Rights, and an adjunct faculty member in national security law at the Georgetown University Law Center and counsel to a number of current and former detainees at Gitmo, and Col. Morris Davis (USAF, Ret.), the Chief Prosecutor for the Guantanamo Bay military commissions who resigned from that post in 2007 in protest of political interference in prosecutorial functions.
I have been trying to point out for a long time that the scam about Social Security is based on the fallacious notion that the former largest generation in history, the post-war Baby Boomers, represents a bulge in the population that was followed by a fall-off in the number of offspring available to pay for the retirement of their elders. (We'll leave aside for the moment the fact that this is irrelevant anyway, since the Boomers actually paid not just for their parents' retirement, but for their own, in advance.) This story about how the Boomer generation is too big to pay for is a lie. The Boomers had kids, who had kids (and some of those kids have already had kids). As the Boomers have begun to approach retirement, an even larger generation has already entered the workforce. This isn't even a secret - look, for example, at the first paragraph of this article.
At Eschaton: Isn't it about time someone admitted that there's a word for what MF Global has been up to? No, I don't just mean theft, I mean a very specific kind. If one guy did this and just put the money in his own pocket, he'd be arrested for embezzlement. Make it company policy and suddenly they want to pretend it's something else, but, you know, it really isn't. This is what it means when people talk about only using various social safety net programs to help "the truly needy" - pit the poor against the poorest. But the issue should never be whether "the truly needy" should get aid from the government; rather, it means giving everyone the resources to make sure they never have to be poor.
As the fourth year of the Obama presidency begins, Bruce Dixon at Black Agenda Report says, "Black America Paralyzed, Powerless, Irrelevant [...] If the black misleadership class has its way, the only political role for black America is to be the solid black wall around the president, the wall that does not insulate him from Wall Street or the energy companies or the warmongers. They're inside the wall. Our job once again will be to protect Barack Obama from any semblance of accountability to his supposed base. To us. Afraid of weakening him before the Republicans, we weaken ourselves instead."
What Bill Clinton told Charlie Pierce and Mark Warren: "I had a fascinating meeting with Bob Inglis the other day. Bob Inglis was an extremely conservative Republican congressman from South Carolina. He was a three-term-pledge guy in the nineties.... So he came to me and he said, 'I just want you to know, when you got elected, I hated you. And I asked to be on the Judiciary Committee in 1993, because a bunch of us had already made up our minds that no matter what you did or didn't do, we were going to find some way to impeach you. We hated you. You had no right to be president.'"
The inappropriately named Americans United for Life has pressured a right-wing Congressman to investigate Planned Parenthood, and suddenly the Susan G. Komen Foundation, which contributes funds to PP's mammogram operation, has invented a whole new rule that requires them to withdraw any association with the organization that gives mammograms to millions of women who otherwise couldn't get them. Take off your pink ribbon and give to Planned Parenthood instead. I have to rely on TBogg for useful news on this front, since The Washington Post is in the habit of getting it wrong Meanwhile, Charles Pierce reports on Oklahoma's continuing war on women.
Echidne really went to town on the crap science behind the phony abortion=breast cancer story as well as the latest from Charles Murray, who rears his ugly head every now and then to try to put a new shine on racist science. This time his science is still bad, but he has one thing right: The elites are now so far away from everyone else that they don't have a clue. Marcy Wheeler was on Virtually Speaking Tuesdays talking about that bubble.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this the first time E.J. Dionne has earned Atrios' Wanker of the Day award? I had no idea he was an idiot on birth control. Hey, E.J., it's not like it's Canon Law or anything, you know...
We usually drink at the Rugby Tavern these days (Larger image).
Tonight's panelists on Virtually Speaking Sundays will be Digby and Stuart Zechman. Thursday on Virtually Speaking A-Z, Stuart Zechman and Jay Ackroyd discussed a fascinating new emission from the Disney Studios, a song by Joy Division, and the horrors of SOPA and our entire disgusting, authoritarian, tyrannical "intellectual property protection" regime - well worth a listen. They were joined in the second hour by Olivier Knox of Agence France Press.
Another linky post at Pruning Shears, which also has some good stuff on SOPA and our existing draconian "intellectual property" laws, along with the traditional quoting from Econned, alerts us to these stories: Oakland: "This is an attempt to keep people from participating non-violently. It's instilling fear." Unsurprisingly, MSNBC gets the story wrong. David Dayen sees hopeful signs from Schneiderman's appearance on the Maddow show, including the possibility that the IRS will be involved in helping to go after the banks for tax fraud. Even Matt Taibbi is sounding hopeful after Schneiderman discussed his focus on origination/securitization: "The securitization offenses were massive criminal conspiracies, identically undertaken by all of the big banks, to defraud investors in mortgage-backed securities. If you're looking for an appropriate target for a massive federal investigation, one that would get right to the heart of the corruption of the crisis era... well, they picked the right target here." But: "The question is, how real of an investigation will we get? The fact that Schneiderman's co-chairs are Lanny Breuer and Robert Khuzami make me extremely skeptical. I'm actually not sure that both men, in an ideal world, wouldn't be targets of their own committee's investigation." (And based on Yves Smith's assessment, I'm sticking with my initial judgement: This is just more typical Obama campaign kabuki. It's probably working - there was a lot of bad PR when Schneiderman was suddenly removed from the settlement committee with what I imagine was more public notice than was expected, and this has the smell of damage control, giving a high public profile to the appearance of the administration giving Schneiderman a better position to work from, but leaving him hamstrung by having to depend on two criminals to do the right thing, which they won't.)
Dean Baker wrote an interesting piece on "Loser Liberalism" and why the whole argument about "redistribution of wealth" is BS: "Anyone trying to understand the role of the government in the economy should know that whatever it does or does not do by way of redistribution is trivial compared with the actions it takes to determine the initial distribution. Rich people don't get rich exclusively by virtue of their talents and hard work; they get rich because the government made rules to allow them to get rich. To take an obvious example, according to the Centres for Medicare and Medicaid Services, we spend close to $300bn a year on prescription drugs. If drugs were sold in a free market, without government granted patent monopolies, we would spend around $30bn a year. The difference of $270bn a year is more than five times as much money as is at stake with extending the Bush tax cuts to the wealthy." And then there are the laws that create a huge imbalance in the power of corporations over unions. And then there are things like valuation of the dollar... Baker points out that as matters of pure policy, these are huge compared to tax policy. But, it has to be said, tax policy is still important, because the very fact that the rich can now keep all their money and pass it on to the next generation of their dynasties, and corporations don't have to invest back into their companies because there is no strong tax incentive to do it, is why they have the power to buy our government and make sure that all of the other laws and policies unfairly weight the game in their favor. Sam Seder talked about all this last week on The Majority Report.
Darcy Burner points out that we could make a lot of useful changes by just getting rid of the new rules Gingrich imposed when he took control of the House in 1995.
Really? None of these Smart, Successful Business Leaders and Politicians were bright enough to see this coming? They made a huge deal to trade American jobs for cheap Chinese goods and didn't know what the price tag would be? Or did they know all along what would happen?
Oh, this is good. I was working in the swaps department of an international bank in the late '80s, it was all the rage - but Larry Summers apparently didn't hear about all those swaps going on until after Clinton left office. How mysterious that he did not notice all this serious money being burned.
@downwithtyranny says, "We've been looking for a progressive to run vs Blue Dog Jim Cooper. What about his neighbor Nanci Griffith? And she's got a new song to add to my extremely restricted list in the countrified section: "Hell No, I'm Not Alright."
Yeah, the "Affordable Care Act" isn't really all that affordable. When it turned out Susie was eligible for the program, she was really relieved, but it still put her into debt, and then she still has that premium to keep on paying. So, yeah, give if you can. (And check out that video included in the latter post, which is really what liberalism is supposed to be about, not just taking care of "the truly needy" or whatever it is Obama seems to think makes him more virtuous than the Republican delegation. It's not virtuous to make people poor and then pat yourself on the back because you threw them a few crumbs. You keep them from becoming poor so they can take care of themselves.) Also from or via Susie: The United States of unemployment Pierce on Obama's SOTU campaign speech "Citigroup Replaces JPMorgan as White House Chief of Staff." Mortgage settlement kabuki - it looks like Schneiderman may have been bought off or otherwise sidelined. "Schneiderman isn't chairing anything. He's Co-Chairing. That's a huge difference. If he's Chair he's in charge. If he's Co-Chair he needs consensus. And who is he Co-Chairing with? Lanny Breuer. That's unacceptable." It's not just New York - the LAPD has been coordinating with the CIA on "terrorism" as well. Slave labor is good for business.
Sam Seder talked to David Dayen about Obama's SOTU and what it means that Schneiderman is suddenly taking a gig that appears to neutralize his strength, on Wednesday's Majority Report.
War on Whistleblowers - This administration is so opposed to prosecuting serious crimes that they treat honest citizens who report crimes as if they were committing the worst crime of all.
My thanks to Edinburgh Eye, whose complaints about Labour are so, so much like the ones I have about the D-crats, led to the provision of this fine quote from my hero, Aneurin Bevan: "Referring to Mr. Churchill's 'set-the-people-free' speech, Mr. Bevan said that the result of the free-for-all preferred by Churchill would have been cinemas, mansions, hotels, and theatres going up, but no houses for the poor. 'in 1945 and 1946,' he said, 'we were attacked on our housing policy by every spiv in the country - for what is Toryism, except organized spivery? They wanted to let the spivs loose.' As a result of controls, the well-to-do had not been able to build houses, but ordinary men and women were moving into their own homes. Progress could not be made without pain, and the important thing was to make the right people suffer the pain." Always remembering that the "pain" of the rich was more of an inconvenience than the very real pain the rich would prefer to inflict on the rest of us.
Man, it sure doesn't take much to be a class traitor to the rich these days. I mean, what Soros is saying here isn't special, it's just a matter of not wanting to kill the golden goose. Except that Soros still believes in democracy, and if Soros is worried about deflation and depression, he's worried about democracy, and, yeah, that makes him a class traitor. (More on this from Digby.)
No-brainer: "The results are clear: high marginal rates correlate with broad-based economic prosperity and an expanding middle class. Low marginal rates correlate with extreme income inequality, reduced prosperity overall, and ultimately, economic catastrophe."
Jay Ackroyd and McJoan mostly talked about Republicans on Virtually Speaking Sundays, and Digby did the same on The Majority Report with Sam Seder. It was entertaining, but I think people spend too much time talking about the Republicans, and I'm a bit annoyed by the effort involved in, say, unpacking Ron Paul, worthy effort though it may be, when there is the much larger issue of restoring liberalism at stake. Talking about Ron Paul's connections to the Koch brothers is all very well, but if you're ignoring the Democratic Party's own ties to some of the most right-wing funders in America, you are missing the larger point, which is that our entire political apparatus has been hijacked by these people. Electing Democrats no longer means building and promoting liberal policies, it just means we don't fight as hard to do it because we're supposed to be protecting and defending Democrats - even Democrats whose "strategy", apparently, is to sabotage their own party. But if the Democratic leadership is manifestly unliberal, as it certainly is, why would we want to defend them? What is the point of electing Democrats whose sole purpose is to help the Republicans slip their own hideously right-wing policies by us without our fighting back?
Remember, George W. Bush tried to privatize Social Security, but he failed, and he failed because people - with liberals leading the charge - fought back, to the point where even registered Republicans realized what was going on and called their GOP Congresscreeps and let them know they'd never get another vote from them if they signed on to this outrage. Now Obama is trying to wreck Social Security, and where are those people? Well, they're not telling people to call their Congressmen, because they are still too busy telling us how awful the Republicans are, as if only the Republicans were doing anything outrageous. (The rest of the Virtually Speaking schedule for this week can be found here.)
And, meanwhile, "conservative" thinkers are starting to notice that their Pollyannaish euphoria over the fall of the Soviet Union might have been premature, as William Greider observes: "Just as candidate Newt condemns 'crony capitalism' and Perry denounces 'vultures,' historian Francis Fukuyama has abruptly rescinded the happy talk that made him famous twenty years ago. At the end of the cold war, Fukuyama's book The End of History and the Last Man declared that left-right ideological conflicts were over. Liberal democracy had won. It would henceforth prevail around the world. Hold that prophecy. The professor has issued a sort of retraction (he might say 'correction'). His essay in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, explained that 'some very troubling economic and social trends, if they continue, will both threaten the stability of contemporary liberal democracies and dethrone democratic ideology as it is now understood.' Yikes. What trends are those? Global capitalism, he said. Free-trade doctrine and new technology, along with the steady offloading of American jobs, are destroying the middle class - the necessary foundation for democracy in advanced economies. [...] His alarming observations were picked up by other conservative commentators and treated respectfully, a sign that these anxieties are widely shared. Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, longstanding advocate of globalization, embraced Fukuyama's argument. New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote with sympathy for the struggling white working class. It votes Republican and gets hammered by corporate capitalists in return." Greider also notes that Fukuyama doesn't recognize his as the liberal critique laid out long before by people like Robert Kuttner and himself, but then, Fukuyama probably doesn't see it that way. What he might imagine is that he is still a bright young conservative thinker who is seeing past the errors of his elders - exactly the way Obama appears to see himself in comparison with "out-dated" liberal New Deal thinking. In which case, Fukuyama is a lot closer to the truth.
Right on the heels of the news that the Attorney General of the United States, Eric Holder, is one of the big culprits in the mortgage mess (gee, no wonder he doesn't want to prosecute anyone!), we see a seasoned union-buster promoted to White House Chief of Staff. As Pruning Shears suggests, we're seeing a pattern. Pruning Shears also has another good quote from Econned talking about just how our overlords protectors made the whole financial crises worse. Whose idea was that, anyway?
If you wanted to read some well-written unpacking of SOPA/PIPA, you couldn't do better than what Patrick Nielsen Hayden put up at Making Light over the last week. from the first announcement that ML would go dark - and why, and a short post later reminding everyone that this isn't going away, and one a couple of days later going into more about what the issues are and who is lying ("The MPAA and RIAA would love to see everybody frame these issues as nothing more than a spat between 'industries.' But the tens of thousands of writers, artists, musicians, and filmmakers who spoke out yesterday against SOPA and PIPA aren't the 'tech industry.' They're creators - actual content creators - who know perfectly well that censorship is a greater threat to their livelihood than piracy, and that a world with a crippled internet and a no-appeals, guilty-until-proven-innocent copyright-enforcement regime would be a world in which they would be unable to do their work and survive."). (And, while you're there, Abi Sutherland has a good post about the way rape is used in fiction - to get a particular rating in films, to create motivations for female characters, to tell you the rapists are scumbags - and what lessons are unfortunately taught as a result, "Can't you hear beyond the croaking?.")
So, the evil censorship was defeated? Not really, says Glenn Greenwald: "Critics insisted that these bills were dangerous because they empowered the U.S. Government, based on mere accusations of piracy and copyright infringement, to shut down websites without any real due process. But just as the celebrations began over the saving of Internet Freedom, something else happened: the U.S. Justice Department not only indicted the owners of one of the world's largest websites, the file-sharing site Megaupload, but also seized and shut down that site, and also seized or froze millions of dollars of its assets - all based on the unproved accusations, set forth in an indictment, that the site deliberately aided copyright infringement. In other words, many SOPA opponents were confused and even shocked when they learned that the very power they feared the most in that bill - the power of the U.S. Government to seize and shut down websites based solely on accusations, with no trial - is a power the U.S. Government already possesses and, obviously, is willing and able to exercise even against the world's largest sites..." In other words, once again, we see that the game is to further codify powers that the government already claims to hold. That's something Obama has been making a practice of: They are already doing bad things, then they propose new laws to try to nail down what they are doing, and "progressives" get to "win" a fight when they occasionally manage to "beat" those new laws back, even though it may be only for a month or two or the administration finds some new way to do it through a backdoor (e.g., the "Deficit Commission" Obama couldn't get Congress to give him so he made one himself and treats it as if it is every bit as legalistically solid.) This is pretty much what Dahlia Lithwick has been saying about Obama's tendency to make sure George W. Bush's excesses are given a more solid legal framework.
"Obama to use pension funds of ordinary Americans to pay for bank mortgage 'settlement': Obama's latest housing market chicanery should come as no surprise. As we discuss below, he will use the State of the Union address to announce a mortgage 'settlement' by Federal regulators, and at least some state attorneys general. It's yet another gambit designed to generate a campaign talking point while making the underlying problem worse."
The other night on Virtually Speaking A-Z, Jay and Stuart discussed the idea that the dog-whistles coming out of the mouths of people like Newt Gingrich aren't aimed at the general voter or even at unreconstructed racists, they're aimed at us, and "progressives" keep falling for it. Atrios keeps pointing out that they do and say things "just to piss liberals off," and I suspect he's more right than he knows, and I think a lot of prog bloggers really need to give this some thought, because I believe Stuart is absolutely right - they say things that get liberals to react and that works for them in ways "the left" seems to be entirely unaware of. I don't just mean that it's a distraction; I mean that we're doing their PR for them. People are worried about their jobs. Gingrich talks about jobs, and instead of talking about jobs, progressives react with partisan defenses and accuse him of dog-whistle racism. But ordinary people don't hear racism when Gingrich says he wants to give people paychecks rather than welfare checks, because ordinary people are worried that maybe a welfare check is all they can hope for anymore if things keep going the way they're going. Obama himself has been telling people that we can't have good jobs anymore, we can't have 4% unemployment and a healthy economy anymore, but we'll try to protect "the most needy" - which means the only way you'll get any help from the government is after they have made you too poor to help yourself - and you'll never be able to help yourself again. It doesn't matter that Gingrich is lying about his intentions to create jobs, since no one is actually offering jobs. What matters is that instead of acknowledging that the jobs situation keeps getting worse, liberals sit around crying racism. And racism really isn't the issue.
And in the second half of the Thursday line-up on Virtually Speaking, Matt Stoller came in to discuss his point in the article I was remiss in not linking directly at the time, "Why Ron Paul Challenges Liberals" - an article that caused rather a large fuss. This is not about presidential politics, but about the real intellectual knot that is created by the relationship between war policy and domestic socioeconomic policy - and the fact that these mechanisms that were being used to create liberal domestic policies aren't working anymore, and they aren't working anymore because our government has been thoroughly hollowed out and corrupted. We have reached the point where crucial areas of government don't even contain people who know how to do what is supposed to be their job. For example, Tim Geithner, unlike anyone who was walking down their street looking at local housing prices and realizing they were too expensive for people to pay for, did not notice - even laughed at the idea - that we were in a housing bubble. Apparently, it wasn't so much that he was trying to cause another Depression as that he simply didn't recognize what was as plain as the nose on my face. Even more frightening is the kind of lawyering that's now on display at Justice, where those who actually know how to prosecute criminals have been pushed aside in favor of people who think their job is to rubber-stamp whatever criminal conduct big corporations engage in, and wouldn't know how to run a prosecution even if they thought they should do that. And, for some reason, there don't seem to be any real liberals left in government who actually know how to write legislation. So, it looks like the arch-conservative project of turning good government into bad government has succeeded pretty well, and we have more than a simple course-correction on our hands; we will need to rebuild from the ground up. (But, should we wonder why someone who is a professional political operative is saying this now?)
Stuart Zechman alludes from time to time to a scam that's being run in collusion between our government and the health care industry that could be described as "price-fixing". It's something that not many people are really aware of, and Stuart is one of the few who've actually done the work of researching it, so I asked him if he had anything he could post that helps explain it. The gist is that, though Medicare itself keeps costs down, it is also a vehicle for setting prices for medical treatment - and sets them higher than they need to be. He dug up one of his comments to a post at Swampland that delved into just this question. Have a look at "PPACA: The Third Way To Lowering Health Care Prices?" and incorporate that into your thinking on the subject.
Sam Seder's interviews this week including one with Cory Robin, author of The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin, Garlin Gilchrist of MoveOn about SOPA and the blackout, and Rick Pearlstein (about his his Rolling Stone article, among other things). He also had his usual live coverage of the Occupy movement, this time focused on Occupy DC.
So, after the big fat blackout by major sites, Obama claims he won't support SOPA, which I suppose means he wants to wait until no one's looking to sign it. The lobbyist with "the best job on K Street", doing what the entertainment industry wants, shook his head. Cenk presents Chris Dodd, former pretend protector of Constitutional rights.
David Dayen doesn't appear to have faith in the "more aggressive" stance Obama claims he'll be taking after his prior wimpy performance on the foreclosure crisis. Nor, for that matter, in the recovery.
I haven't thought about this in a long time, but I stumbled on the introduction to David Loftus' book while looking for something else and thought I'd share. A long, long time ago I responded to claims about what men were really thinking when they looked at pornography by pointing out that no one had done any research on the subject and what we had seen so far was projection by some women of what they feared men were thinking about sex. Eventually, thanks to the internet, I stumbled on Loftus, who had decided it was time to at least make a start at that kind of research. Lacking the resources for a full study, he interviewed as many guys as he could (as he acknowledges, a self-selecting group), to find out what men were able to say about their own experience looking at pornography. If that piques your interest, look here.
My friend Yves just posted his sonata at YouTube, and it's lovely.
Dan at Pruning Shears has another quote from Yves' Econned and says: "This model highlights a tradeoff ignored (at least until recently) by most economists. All the arguments for deregulation were those of greater efficiency, that less government intervention would lower costs and spur innovation. We'll put aside the question of whether any gains would in fact be shared or would simply accrue to the financier class. Regardless, risks to stability never entered into these recommendations. But if we put on our systems engineering hat, stability is always a first order design requirement and efficiency is secondary." I guess that depends on the question of: "Efficency of what?" If markets are seen as a means to extract resources for the few at the top, they did a fine job. As the system destabilizes, the only thing they have to worry about is whether their private armies and gated communities can keep the rabble out until after their own deaths.
Most of us have heard by now that someone is murdering Iranian scientists, and pretty much everyone figures it's Mossad, probably with the approval and possibly in concert with the United States. I don't know anyone who approves of it, but I hang out in that kind of crowd. And yes, it was a bit shocking, a few years ago, when Glenn Reynolds advocated doing this very thing. But the problem, you see, is that it's not shocking anymore. By now, so much is so wrong that this is just one little item on a long list of horrific things being undertaken under, most shockingly of all, a president who was clearly elected by people who believed he would put a stop to the United States government's outrageous behavior toward both other countries and its own people. Now, Glenn Greenwald may be right that there's something suspicious about the silence about this coming from the left blogosphere, even among people who condemned Reynolds on the subject of assassinating civilians. And sure, maybe there is an element of people not wanting to go after someone whose side they are on, but I'm no Obamapologist and I haven't written about it, either. That's mainly for the usual reason I haven't posted something yet, which is that I haven't gotten around to it. But there's also the fact that this administration just decided to run around assassinating American citizens, and after that, well, having them connive in the murder of Iranian scientists seems like pretty small beans, and not even a little surprising. Sure, it's outrageous, it's indefensible - but, you know, almost everything is, these days. I don't know why anyone else hasn't written long screeds about it, but for me, I'm tending to narrow my view to things that are closer to home, these days, because until we can figure out what to do about these people, it's almost pointless to rail against one more outrage abroad. We don't have to use the models we're using. We could have a better country - and a better world - if we had made different policy decisions. Stupid, short-sighted, or nasty people have worked hard to close off other avenues, but if there is anything to be done, it won't start merely with saying we shouldn't assassinate Iranian scientists.
Thanks to Atrios for posting this Will Rogers clip. Oh, and this certainly sums up the Labour Leadership. As opposed to America, where it's, "Same policies, but just not foaming at the mouth."
Culture of Truth and Digby are tonight's panelists on Virtually Speaking Sundays. On Virtually Speaking Tuesdays, Susie Madrak talked to Mike Patterson and Stuart Zechman about #J17, Congress, Election 2012, Occupy Congress, being an undecided voter - and the potential for a bloody revolution if certain individuals do not pull themselves together and start behaving sensibly. On the last Virtually Speaking A-Z, Jay and Stuart tried their hand at explaining why socialists, libertarians and what Lambert describes as "benevolent Democrats" are not different forms of "liberals." (God, I'm sick of people who think this is just about taking care of the poor. The point is to keep people from having to be poor in the first place!) Here's the schedule for the next week of Virtually Speaking.
The big news of the week was that the NYT public editor asked readers if reporters should verify facts. No, I'm not making that up. Greenwald: "The New York Times' Public Editor Arthur Brisbane unwittingly sparked an intense and likely enduring controversy yesterday when he pondered - as though it were some agonizing, complex dilemma - whether news reporters 'should challenge 'facts' that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.' That's basically the equivalent of pondering in a medical journal whether doctors should treat diseases, or asking in a law review article whether lawyers should defend the legal interests of their clients, etc.: reporting facts that conflict with public claims (what Brisbane tellingly demeaned as being 'truth vigilantes') is one of the defining functions of journalism, at least in theory." Indeed. It's why the press even has a first amendment right - to cut through the bull. In a day when you can read the Congressional Record, the White House press gaggle, and impending legislation on the web, as well as watch the idiots talk out of their own faces in online videos, newspapers become utterly irrelevant if they are just going to repeat their lies uncritically. There's a reason why people who do things like reading The New York Times turned out to be more misinformed than people who do not follow the news at all.
Listening to Sam Seder interviewing Rocky Anderson the other day, I figured he still sounds much better than the other guys and if he's on my ballot, I might just vote for him. It's not as if Maryland isn't likely to go for Obama, in any case, so there's no guilt, there. I just want to be able to register a vote for someone who isn't any of these other bastards.
You know, I'd almost forgotten Santorum's attempt to get taxpayers to pay a private company if they want to read the weather info online that they'd already paid to collect with their taxes - a service that is currently provided free by the US government, because you pay for it already. Interestingly, listening to the news spot on the Hartmann show when Sam Seder sat in, I noticed that Darrell Issa is trying to pull the same crap with medical information collected thanks to NIH, in a similar kick-back scheme - with the help of a Democratic New York Congresswoman, of course.
Dean Baker notes that the guys who were and are running the Fed were and are utterly incompetent: "btw, as noted in the article, many of the people at these Fed meetings are still in top policy making positions. This shows that the U.S. economy still produces good-paying jobs for people without skills." (via)
Today's Voice of Socialism is, of course, Newt Gingrich, filmmaker. Well, his PAC, anyway, and he seems to be distancing himself a bit from alleged errors or overstatements in King of Bain. But the half-hour video about Mitt Romney's company points the finger at Mitt Romney and Bain in terms that might have been expected to come from the left, a critique of modern capitalism (the version of capitalism Newt once championed) that condemns Gordon Gekko's impact on America's economy - and, especially, on its workers and families. Of course, Romney didn't make this happen all by himself, and there's no one running things who would stand up and say, "This is wrong," and make it stop. Robert Reich addressed this point the other day, and Sam Seder, sitting in for Thom Hartmann Friday, talked to Reich on this subject in the first hour. (Sammy also talked to Dahlia Lithwick later in the show, about Citizens United and the Montana court that decided to ignore that decision to protect its own elections - as discussed in here piece here.) But Romney's Bain Capital has been a profound source for evil in our country, and still is. These welfare cheats also own the airwaves.
Marion in Savannah has an episode of Bobo versus Krugman, discussing the entire "job creation" myth. I'm not sure it's really accurate, however, to say that shutting down companies doesn't actually destroy jobs and only means the new jobs available aren't as good as the old jobs. My experience is that the number of jobs available also contracts as employers feel free to load their employees up with longer hours and harsher conditions, overworking them in lieu of simply hiring an adequate workforce.
Looks like Colbert is running on the RepubliDem platform: "At least some establishment figures are worried that Colbert might cause an upset in the Romney coronation. CNN has a blistering anti-Colbert opinion piece pointing out that Colbert's platform is a travesty, calling for more unemployment, more wars, more inequality. In other words what George W. Bush wanted to do and did and what George W. Romney and George W. Santorum and George W. Gingrich want and plan to do." And Obama, don't forget.
Angelides to lead distressed mortgage firm: "The company, Mortgage Resolution Partners, claims its strategy of using "legal and political leverage" to acquire the loans could generate a 20 percent annual return for investors. The company intends to purchase mortgages at a steep discount and re-work them to enable the homeowners to continue making payments, with the firm collecting the proceeds." I have no idea what to make of this.
Today, Sam Seder is commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Bread & Roses strike on Majority Report, with Robert Forrant.
I guess now we have to put all our energy into protecting programs for the extremely poor, since the plan is to make sure we are all in that category. I look at it, however, as a reason to take your money out of banks and hide it all in a box in the ground so they won't know you've got it.
Bruce Schneier has a round-up of the TSA's top ten good catches of 2011. But my favorite is the butter knife confiscated from the pilot of the plane - you know, in case he wanted to hold himself hostage and hijack the plane. Although a teenage girl's purse with an embroidered handgun design was another great one, since we all know how much damage you can do with embroidery. He also features expert predictions of terrorist attacks, most of which were wrong. Of course, they were all wrong, since the attack on the WTC was so successful that no other attack was necessary. Bush made sure that the terrorists won. Bruce also has some links from himself and EFF on protecting your security at the borders. I'm lately coming to the conclusion that carrying your laptop with you may be more trouble than it's worth if you are crossing the US border. I'll probably just take my (dumb) cell phone with me if I go home for a visit - and a back-up of the piece of paper with vital phone numbers on it that I always carry when I fly.
'Wild Old Women' Close San Francisco Bank Of America Branch - You know, there's a reason why they want to kill older people off as fast as they can. One big one is that these people remember what life used to be like before the "Serious" people took over. (So do the older Boomers, which is why they hate them even more, since they aren't dying fast enough.)
Charlie Pierce, in "Pain: The David Gregory Solution", doesn't mention how often it is that we hear White House policy from Gregory's lips (don't we all remember him, just after this administration took office, insisting, in his "balanced", non-opinionated way, that something has to be done about entitlements?), but I enjoy watching his target practice on the man who won Atrios' The Worst Person In The World award Monday.
Well, thank goodness the Democrats have protected your reproductive rights, yeah?
Are you sure? "'We must leave the Holocaust and its symbols outside the arguments in Israeli society,' said Moshe Zanbar, chairman of the main umbrella group for Holocaust survivors in Israel. 'This harms the memory of the Holocaust." Yeah, let's freeze it in amber and not think about what it means.
In almost every case, the definitive version of a Beatles song is by the Beatles. However, when I heard this, I immediately felt that it was the way it was intended to be performed. And this is just lovely.
Listening to Culture of Truth on Santorum, I caught myself thinking, "Sometimes ya gotta admire their chutzpah," and then I realized, no, actually, you don't.
Thursday's Majority Report covered Obama's recess appointments and the Occupy action in Grand Central Station on the NDAA.
Whenever I see the latest news on how the Occupy movement is being suppressed, I remember all those people who kept insisting that we were lucky America was a free country, because we'd be arrested if we tried to protest in a real dictatorship. Well, Americans are getting arrested for trying to protest. Are we a real dictatorship, yet?
By now it's clear that there is no shortage of people with advanced technical education, skill, and experience in the United States (and Britain) - home-grown geeks of every kind who could easily be employed by the very companies that are moaning about the lack of availability of such people. A considerable number of those people are among the growing numbers of the unemployed. They aren't unemployed because the work doesn't exist or the money isn't there to pay for them - it does, and it is - but because the companies they can no longer find work with are hell-bent on driving down wages and working conditions for employees, and it's easier to do that to foreigners. For example, it's illegal for foreigners on work visas to go on strike in the United States. Employers who want to be able to treat their employees with contempt enjoy that sort of thing. I really wish we could hope that candidates would be pressed to answer questions on their views on giving away Americans' jobs to foreigners. Not that I'd trust anything any of them - especially Obama - said, but Romney would have his work cut out for him. Oh, wait, I forgot - reversing positions is something of a signature for Romney. Um, and for Obama.
This is being described as "new", but "benefit corporation" is just a new name for what used to be perfectly normal - corporations that were not allowed to put share earnings above all other considerations. And when I say "normal", I don't mean there used to always be companies like that, I mean it used to be that companies had to be like that.
Robert A. Gattis is not denying that he murdered a woman. But are we any better if we kill him on January 20th?
Pro editors and journalists finally figure out that SOPA is bad. Sort of. (via)
Gary Johnson, dropped out of the Republican Party and running as a Libertarian, is for reproductive rights, which makes him more libertarian than Ron Paul, but is he a better anti-war candidate? (But is he better than guys who do this?)
Yes, as we have all pointed out, Ron Paul's position on the drug war isn't that these drugs should be decriminalized, it's that there should be no federal laws against those drugs, and the states should be able to make their own indefensible laws about them. Be that as it may, it would still mean that the endless supply of money and clout of the federal government would not be available to states that want to be draconian about drugs. We'd actually be in much better shape now if that had been the case for the last 30 years, because we would have had nowhere near the coast-to-coat militarization of the police that we've had during that time. And, in the meantime, states that want to legalize medical marijuana would not have to worry that the licenses they grant would not protect doctors and providers from being arrested (and robbed and murdered) by the Feds. States that wanted to decriminalize drugs, or reschedule them, could do so. That's still better than what we have now. (Ian Welsh has thoughts on why there seems to be Ron Paul Hysteria.)
I guess I need to clarify that when I say that Ron Paul is the only one who seems to have any sensible policies on anything at all, I mean "gives the appearance of" rather than "seems to me". The fact that Paul can give the appearance of someone who understands that military aggression against foreign countries and the War On (Some People Who Use Some) Drugs are stupid policies that should be stopped is what people hear. Whether I, personally, trust that his policy statements on those issues are (a) genuine or (b) coming from the same place as mine is another, and irrelevant, matter. Because it actually takes some attention to get a grip on where Ron Paul or any other public voice is coming from, and right now almost no one is allowed to suggest anything sensible on television. And yet, Ron Paul is running around saying we should withdraw from stupid wars, including the incredibly destructive and wasteful drug war. Those are, by themselves, excellent ideas.
Withdrawing ground action from foreign countries just so we can simply drop nukes on them, of course, would not be consistent with what most people who want to stop the stupid wars abroad want from such withdrawals, and is not a good idea, but it could be what Paul is really thinking - which is beside the point, because it is not, as yet, what he is saying. Stopping the federal war on drugs only to allow states to impose their own drug wars individually is also not quite what Paul sounds like he means most of the time, even thought it actually is what he means.
But we're dealing with an age in which people who watch the news on TV and read the papers think they aren't low-information voters, even though they are actually being wildly misinformed. Those people don't spend a lot of time doing further research on who the misinformers are, where the money is coming from, what the connections are between, say, Ron Paul and the Koch brothers and the John Birch Society, or the funders of the Heritage Foundation and the funders of the Democratic Leadership Council/Third Way bunch that is allegedly to their left in the fantasy "center". It's been a long time since most of those people have even heard a real liberal argument on TV, either from pundit/operatives or from elective officials themselves. Most of them have no clue that virtually everything they are seeing and hearing is a right-wing argument for right-wing goals. In fact, if we are to believe Jay Ackroyd, it is quite possible that the President of the United States himself does not realize that the stuff that comes out of his own mouth is just a pack of right-wing lies made up to serve right-wing goals - and I'm sure Obama doesn't think of himself as a low-information voter.
Nevertheless, we have a situation in which it is fair to say that:
The Republicans and the Democrats want to reduce or eliminate your ability to get redress in court against corporations or employers who sell you poison, wreck your environment, or treat you like slaves, under the guise of "tort reform".
The Republicans and the Democrats want to bust unions so that wages can be driven down and workers rights can be a forgotten relic of a quaintly sentimental age that is no more than a nostalgic dream.
The Republicans and the Democrats want to reduce the number of ordinary employees of the federal government who try to make things work and then go out and spend their paychecks in the real economy.
The Republicans and the Democrats want to privatize our public health and unemployment insurance programs that will cease to be useful to the public but still cost us even more money while killing even more people from lack of affordability.
The Republicans and the Democrats want to essentially privatize the school system, again reducing the educational capabilities of the schools while costing taxpayers more money.
The Republicans and the Democrats want to restrict (or eliminate) the public's access to the internet as a multi-directional communication tool.
And the only discernable distinctions between the two parties seem to be that:
The Republicans want to eliminate reproductive choice for women, while the Democrats aver that they sympathize with the (alleged) feelings of anti-choice campaigners but don't actually care about the issue except where they think it will win or lose them votes, and maybe not even then, but they are certainly willing to bargain reproductive choice away as fast as they can if it will buy them some illusory victory on the political playing field as defined by Big Media pundits.
The Democrats think overt racism and homophobia are unseemly and the Republicans don't, but the Democrats will sell out their "minority" constituencies if they can do so covertly in order to buy them some illusory victory on the political playing field as defined by Big Media pundits.
The Republicans and the Democrats want to continue our wars abroad and our ruinous Israel-right-or-wrong policies - except for Ron Paul.
The Republicans and the Democrats want to continue a federal war on drugs which not only imposes its laws against the individual states against the wills of both the voters and the leaders in those states, but also against other countries who try to weaken or reconsider their own part in the drug war - except for Ron Paul, who, remarkably, seems to be the only major political figure who has even noticed its racist enforcement and ruinous effect on the black community.
The Republicans and the Democrats are happy with treating whistleblowers like terrorists while letting the criminals the whistle is blown on carry on their crimes, except for Ron Paul, who says Bradley Manning is a true patriot.
The Republicans and the Democrats are happy to have the president simply decide to assassinate American citizens and the elimination of due process - except for Ron Paul.
(Here's Matt Taibbi writing about the meaningless sideshow of the electoral process as it currently stands, and he talked to Sam Seder about it, and what Ron Paul's real positions are, Wednesday on The Majority Report. Note that Sammy has no illusions about Paul being genuinely libertarian on any personal freedom issues.)
Jay and Stuart talked about this, and the fuss it's created in the blogosphere, last night on Virtually Speaking A-Z, and covered a lot of ground, but I'd say there's more to cover.
My beef is that it's unforgivable that Ron Paul, of all people, is the only person on the national stage who is making any case for what should be liberal positions, and indefensible that people who call themselves liberals or progressives persist in making excuses for the lack of such a case coming from Obama, and even the fact that he most often makes the case for the opposing positions.
And until we get some national voices making the case for the genuinely liberal approach to those issues - and being heard - we will be in big trouble, because the only person who even makes something that, on the surface, sounds a bit liberal, is a crazy and dangerous right-wing crackpot named Ron Paul.
* * * * *
Yves wants us all to read Amar Bhide's article in the NYT about a need to return to boring - and responsible - banking: "To prevent the next panic, it's not enough to rely on emergency actions by the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank. Instead, governments should fully guarantee all bank deposits - and impose much tighter restrictions on risk-taking by banks. Banks should be forced to shed activities like derivatives trading that regulators cannot easily examine." Ah, the way it used to be.
Krugman: "Look, economic policy matters. It matters for real people who suffer real consequences when we get it wrong. If I believe that the doctrine of expansionary austerity is all wrong, or that the Ryan plan for Medicare would have disastrous effects, or whatever, then my duty, as I see it, is to make my case as best I honestly can - not put on a decorous show of civilized discussion that pretends that there aren't hired guns posing as analysts, and spares the feelings of people who are not in danger of losing their jobs or their health care."
At Suburban Guerrilla: - So ICE doesn't even bother to determine the citizenship of people who are obviously American teenagers before they deport them to Columbia. - Russ Baker, "Obama: 'Yes, I'm in a Can' [...] The essence of Obama is to make gestures that will please everyone, but to do it without genuine enthusiasm or pleasure - and therefore please no one. Ordinary people feel he cares not a whit about them, and the moneyed class resents his occasional populist-firebrand rhetoric. It is a mark of cynicism to operate like this. It is also not necessarily a winning formula for a politician. And for a country, it is a disaster." (Orwell called it.) - Occupy broadcaster evicted: "Earlier this morning, Global Revolution Studios was ordered to vacate from their building by the NYPD in conjunction with the building department. It took three separate departments visiting 13 Thames to finally come up with a reason to remove the Global Revolution team with a posted notice despite having all applicable paperwork for the department of buildings in order." - Mole - I just can't believe that Obama has never lifted a finger to put Spakovsky in jail where he has belonged for years, rather than leave him to continue to damage our country from within the United States government. - Jay Rosen on the Iowa caucus coverage. - The real reason they are called Liar's Loans. It wasn't the home-buyers who were the liars. - I can only agree with Susie's Deep Thought.
RIP Ronald Searle, who returned from captivity by the Japanese to create the St. Trinian's cartoon series (which became a series of movies), and become the most famous cartoonist in Britain. (And, of course, we know who Flash Harry grew up to be...)
And once I got on that theme, I found this, which is fun.
It's that time of year again (actually, it was that time of year last month, and the people who got theirs done on time have their posts listed here) when tradition calls for a round-up of the best of my own blog posts of the year we've just survived. Dan nominated this post, which I must admit is a pretty good post, but it's sad to think I haven't written anything else up to that standard for a year. He could be right.
And I guess looking back at that post, we're looking at what has increasingly become a major theme here, which could roughly be summed up as, "Globalization is not new, just metastasized by corporatist government policies." It is precisely what our Founding Fathers saw as an intolerable threat to freedom and caused them to foment and fight a revolution against the Crown.
Which makes me go back again to the conversation Jay and Stuart had last week in which Jay made the case that the Centrist Democrats actually believe the crazy, wrong, inconsistent ideology and factoids they keep spouting about the economy.
Which means that they think the speed of the internet is so significant that it can change the fact that everything else - all the real, physical stuff that in the end is what matters - hasn't suddenly been changed. You may be able to move certain "intellectual property" like books and music at rapid speed, but you still can't send a pair of socks or a car or a basket of fruit itself by electronic means, despite the fact that you can order one that way.
Ships don't travel that much faster than they used to when I was a kid, and neither do planes. The turnaround time on an exchange of physical letters across the Atlantic is about two weeks, same as when I was born - when, by the way, we already had phones. We're not talking about putting products on a transmat and sending them instantaneously, we're talking about sending documents faster. The possibility of reducing all of the world's labor to subsistence level was always there and often the reality for a considerable proportion of the world's workers (hence Ricardo's Iron Law), it's just that we chose not to do it. We made that choice in 1776, and we made it again with the New Deal. We could do that again, because Keynes was right. And yet the Democratic leadership honestly seems to believe that there is nothing we can do. And that's not just a local phenomenon. (Jay posted some background material for his discussion with Stuart here.)
Pierce: "And, of course, we must never make the perfect the enemy of the good. But you know what else is the enemy of good? Timidity is the enemy of the good. Cruelty is the enemy of the good, and so are selfishness, bigotry, and ignorance. Why perfection is the only enemy of the good that ever seems worth fighting is a good question with which to launch the new year."
It's now almost permanent election season, which means that we always have to be in partisan mode and never discuss actual issues. We can never acknowledge that maybe a guy on Our Side is promoting bad positions because to do so would give aid and comfort to the Bad Guys on The Other Side. Almost from the moment he got into office, we've been told we can't criticize Obama because it would help the Republicans. We also can't ever admit that someone who isn't a Democrat might actually have a better position on some issue than Obama does. We can't be honest about what's really going on because it might help the Republicans. But it's true that, no matter how wrong and repugnant (and dishonest or stupid) he is on many other important issues, Ron Paul is the only one who seems to have sensible positions about the war and secrecy regime. "Whatever else one wants to say, it is indisputably true that Ron Paul is the only political figure with any sort of a national platform - certainly the only major presidential candidate in either party - who advocates policy views on issues that liberals and progressives have long flamboyantly claimed are both compelling and crucial. The converse is equally true: the candidate supported by liberals and progressives and for whom most will vote - Barack Obama - advocates views on these issues (indeed, has taken action on these issues) that liberals and progressives have long claimed to find repellent, even evil." Sure, his "libertarianism" seems to be limited to a "states rights" fallacy (it's okay for individual states to destroy your freedom, it's just not okay for the federal government to do it) and then only on certain issues (obviously, not reproductive freedom, a fairly crucial one), but then, I haven't seen any evidence that Obama and his cadre of money-grubbing warmongers care about those freedoms at any level. And while Paul advocates ghastly economic policies, so do the people who currently occupy the White House. And yet, while Obama's supporters would draw the line at raping a nun on live TV (sorry, Glenn, but that's in the "dead girl/live boy" category), they are still happy to support him despite the fact that he is deliberately dismantling the American economy and every feature that might have saved you and yours from various kinds of slavery and unnecessary death. (And, you know, though I can tell you from experience that being raped is seriously unpleasant, it really isn't the worst thing that can happen. I mean, be honest: Given the choice between watching your children die because Obama managed to derail the creation of a decent health care system or seeing Obama rape a nun on live TV, which would you rather have him do?) But, you know, what really burns is that the only person saying these perfectly sane things about stupid wars is a right-wing crackpot, because there is no one in the allegedly liberal leadership saying it. And for that alone, those people deserve to be locked up someplace where they will feel forced to scream about their civil liberties and rights as Americans.
"TransCanada Inspector: Keystone Pipelines Not Safe: Writing an opinion piece for the Lincoln (NE) Journal-Star, civil engineer Mike Klink calls TransCanada's predecessor Keystone XL pipeline, for which he was a construction quality inspector, a 'lemon' and a 'proven loser.' Klink was fired from his job and is seeking Department of Labor whistleblower protection. His entire plea is worth reading."
On the bright side, it's nice to have anti-choicers like Retaliban Rick actually saying what they mean so people like me don't get called crazy when we point out that it's what they really mean.
Occupy: It's really hard work, but it's the work worth doing.
In honor of the 75th anniversary of the first science fiction convention, a report on the 1937 Leeds convention, complete with unseen photographs of attendees like a very young Arthur C. Clarke.
One reason I'm so sick of the attempts to drum up the daily Ten Minute Hate against Republicans or self-identified conservatives is that I'm pretty sure that at least half of the Republican electorate is - and, indeed, feels - entirely unrepresented by their party leadership, and not because that leadership is "too liberal". But the other reason is that I'm pretty sure that if we can just get rid of all the damned tribalism, there are plenty of registered Republicans who would get on board with a push to restore the Constitution and the project of promoting the general welfare. The trouble is that for 30 years the GOP leadership and, more importantly, it's rich funders and savvy operatives, have pushed the party membership to see liberals as people who hate them, and liberals have obligingly complied by hating on them non-stop. It's a waste of time. And I can't help thinking back to that little political map Stirling Newberry presented us with 
I wonder if anyone will be reading this today from the 
Since I didn't see this dashing picture of dashing Tesla in time for his birthday last month, I thought it'd be better than a picture of a groundhog.
