Hullabaloo

Thursday, May 03, 2012

 
Americans are un-American

by digby

Politico reports:

On Thursday, Obama’s campaign released a slideshow showing how the president’s policies would aid a hypothetical woman named “Julia” over her lifetime, and how presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney’s policies would disadvantage her.

Conservatives were quick to lampoon the meme, criticizing the Obama campaign for viewing the life of a woman only in terms of her relationship with the government, and soon #Julia was trending on Twitter, across the United States.

“What we are left with is a celebration of a how a woman can live her entire life by leaning on government intervention, dependency and other people’s money rather than their own initiative or hard work. It is, I’d say, brazenly un-American, in the sense that it celebrates a mindset we have — outwardly, at least — shunned,” writes David Harsanyi on Human Events. “It is also a mindset that women should find offensively patronizing.”

“Creepy,” was the verdict from National Review’s Charles C.W. Cooke. “[A] perfect example of the man’s cradle-to-grave welfare mentality.”

“Is it just me or is there something fundamentally inconsistent with the concept of Strong, Independent Women and paternalism?” adds Ace of Spades.

At age 68, the Death Panels finally catch up with #Julia. — jimgeraghty (@jimgeraghty) May 3, 2012



Age 32: #Julia, weary of being treated as a client by her government, joins her local Tea Party. — Lachlan Markay (@LachlanMarkay) May 3, 2012

By age 40 #Julia has written 2 autobiographies even thought she’s accomplished nothing. Wait, that was Obama. Julia is still unemployed. #p2 — Derek Hunter (@derekahunter) May 3, 2012

Hi @BarackObama. I will read Life of #Julia to my kids to show them how NOT to live their lives — tethered to Nanny State. — Michelle Malkin (@michellemalkin) May 3, 2012

This #Julia don’t need no stinkin’ nanny state. — Julie Borowski (@JulieBorowski) May 3, 2012

Hey, where’s the part where Obama fixes Julia’s broken soul?— Jonah Goldberg (@JonahNRO) May 3, 2012

In case you were wondering, here are all "nanny state" atrocities that have made these people spit nails:

Head Start

Public Education

College Loans

Access to affordable health care, including birth control

Equal Pay for equal work

The Small Business Administration

Medicare and Social Security

That's it. Those programs are evil and make Americans the "dependent" and lazy good for nothing losers they apparently are. After all, those are nearly universally accessed to some degree by every single one of us.

Does it seem reasonable that 99% of Americans are un-American? Or is it more likely that the people who hold all Americans in such contempt are the un-American ones?

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digby 5/03/2012 01:30:00 PM |

 
It's all the Republicans' fault. Or is it?

by digby

I wrote about my reservations about the Ornstein Mann proclamation that it's all the Republicans' fault earlier in the week. I'm glad to see a few others have also seen the problem with their thesis.

Here's Kevin Drum:

Matt Steinglass catches even Ornstein and Mann not quite having the courage of their convictions. In the op-ed, they use a football metaphor to describe how the two parties have evolved since the end of the Reagan era: "While the Democrats may have moved from their 40-yard line to their 25, the Republicans have gone from their 40 to somewhere behind their goal post." But that's really not true:

The Democrats, as far as I can see, have moved from their 40-yard-line to midfield, or their opponents' 45. As recently as the Clinton presidency, Democrats actively pushed for gun control, defence budgets under 3% of GDP, banning oil exploration off America's Atlantic and Pacific coasts, a public option or single-payer solution to universal health insurance, and...well, Clinton-era progressive income-tax rates. Today these positions have all been abandoned. And we're talking about positions held under Bill Clinton, a "third way" leader who himself moved Democratic ideology dramatically to the right, the guy responsible for "ending welfare as we know it". Since then, Democrats have moved much further yet to the right, in the fruitless search for a compromise with a Republican Party that sees compromise itself as fundamentally evil. The obvious example is that the Democrats in 2010 literally passed the universal health-insurance reform that had been proposed by the GOP opposition in the Clinton administration, only to find today's GOP vilifying it as a form of Leninist socialist totalitarianism.

And Matt doesn't even mention education policy, civil liberties, or crime, all areas where Democrats have also moved to the right since the end of the 80s.

Exactly. And so my point was that if Democrats are as Ornstein and Mann says, "protectors of the status quo" they are protecting the right wing gains. The status quo is already conservative and gets more conservative every day.

This piece by Sandi Behrns wonders whether the Democrats' insistence on moving right may have actually pushed the Republicans:

If you’re going to represent the extreme right of the party, where do you go when the mainstream of the party has moved into what used to be the fringe? The bulk of the Republican Party now denies climate change (something they acknowledged a few short years ago.) Heck, for that matter, the norm in the party is now to deny science of any kind. And it’s not just science. Not too many years ago, the patron saint of the GOP, Ronald Reagan, implemented things like amnesty for undocumented immigrants, and tax increases — even engagement with Europe! Today, these positions are anathema to Republicans.

What went so terribly wrong? Did the Republican Party move further and further right? Or were they pushed? The thing is, at the same time the GOP moved inexorably to the right, so did the Democratic Party. The center-right, which used to be populated by semi-reasonable Republicans is now the exclusive domain of “moderate” Democrats.

The author points out that it's probably not a conspiracy because Democrat could never be that disciplined, which is true. But this chicken or the egg proposition is interesting.

If one accepts that the two party system represents two warring tribes whose disagreements have as much to do with culture and identity as policies, the fact that the Democrats have consciously sought to appropriate the right wing's assumptions and rhetoric could have had the effect of making them more extreme. That's not an uncommon reaction in human nature and I suspect it's less uncommon among right wingers than others. Being "different" from liberals is fundamental to their worldview.

If this is true, I think it probably wasn't the desire to "moderate" the party that pushed the Republicans further right as much as it was the decision to sideline and demean their own left flank. When you're dealing with a Party that has an extremist fringe, you need your fractious faction to provide ballast. When the Democrats completely abandoned their relationship with the populist left and working feverishly to find "common ground" on the so-called culture war issues, they left the conservatives nowhere to run. These are not people who will ever "moderate." It's not in their nature. Trying to split the difference with people who never meet you halfway always ends up advancing their agenda.

This is not new. William Hazlitt wrote about this problem in his 1820 called "On the Spirit of Partisanship." I wrote about this a long time ago:

Conservatives and liberals play the game of politics differently, Hazlitt wrote, because they have different motivations. Liberals are motivated by principles and tend to believe that personal honor can be spared in political combat. They may, in fact, become vain about their highmindedness. Hazlitt condemns the mildness as a mistake, both in moral reasoning and in political strategy. "They betray the cause by not defending it as it is attacked, tooth and nail, might and main, without exception and without remorse."

The conservatives, on the other hand, start with a personal interest in the conflict. Not wishing to lose their hold on power, they are fiercer. "We"---i.e., the liberals, or the "popular cause," in Hazlitt's terminology---"stand in awe of their threats, because in the absence of passion we are tender of our persons.

They beat us in courage and in intellect, because we have nothing but the common good to sharpen our faculties or goad our will; they have no less an alternative in view than to be uncontrolled masters of mankind or to be hurled from high---

"To grinning scorn a sacrifice,
And endless infamy!"

They do not celebrate the triumphs of their enemies as their own: it is with them a more feeling disputation. They never give an inch of ground that they can keep; they keep all that they can get; they make no concessions that can redound to their own discredit; they assume all that makes for them; if they pause it is to gain time; if they offer terms it is to break them: they keep no faith with enemies: if you relax in your exertions, they persevere the more: if you make new efforts, they redouble theirs.

While they give no quarter, you stand upon mere ceremony. While they are cutting your throat, or putting the gag in your mouth, you talk of nothing but liberality, freedom of inquiry, and douce humanité.

Their object is to destroy you, your object is to spare them---to treat them according to your own fancied dignity. They have sense and spirit enough to take all advantages that will further their cause: you have pedantry and pusillanimity enough to undertake the defence of yours, in order to defeat it.

It is the difference between the efficient and the inefficient; and this again resolves itself into the difference between a speculative proposition and a practical interest.

Today, many Democrats are simply conservative/centrist trojan horses, doing the bidding of the moneyed elite from within the Democratic Party. That is why, if you think it's important that liberals hold some state power, it's important to wage the battle within the Democratic Party as well.


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digby 5/03/2012 12:00:00 PM |

 
For your entertainment pleasure

by digby

Blue America PAC

PRESS RELEASE For Immediate Release (Wednesday, May 2, 2012)



Blue America was pleased to see the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee put up this billboard in Paul Ryan's Wisconsin district. He is the architect of the Republican plan to destroy Medicare and Social Security and his constituents deserve to know this before they vote in November.



Unfortunately, they seem to have inadvertently left something off that billboard. They forgot to add the name of the Democrat who is running a very vigorous race to unseat Paul Ryan, Kenosha County Supervisor Rob Zerban. We knew this had to be a mistake because the Democratic Party surely wouldn't purposefully spend money to educate voters about their GOP congressman without also telling them that there is an excellent Democrat running against him. That wouldn't make any sense at all.

Blue America treasurer Howie Klein said, "We felt it was our duty to step in and help the DCCC out by fixing their billboard for them. And we thought it would be especially fitting to put it up at the "Ryan Road Exit" on the area's major thoroughfare, I-94. There's no need for the DCCC to thank us. We're all in this together ."

If you like the sort of work we do,you can send a couple of dollars Blue America's way by clicking here.


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digby 5/03/2012 10:00:00 AM |

 
Kid Shock

by digby

In the words of George W. Bush and Barack Obama: the United States doesn't torture. Except, of course, when it does:

The 17-year-old boy was arrested for fighting on April 24, charged with disorderly conduct and placed in a holding cell, according to sources. The officer allegedly Tasered the boy up to nine times, sources said, for reasons that are still unclear. The juvenile was allegedly Tasered once in the head and may have been handcuffed, sources said.

Officials declined to confirm the identity of the officer who is under investigation. Deputy Chief Wendell Reed said that there is "somewhat of an investigation going on" and he's "been working on it for a minute."

"The investigation involves an officer involved with a juvenile, yes," Reed said. "The juvenile is fine, there is no issues, no problems. It's just more of a matter of procedure than it is the incident itself."

Colwyn Mayor Daniel Rutland seemed far more concerned about the matter.

"I can tell you right now suspensions are going to be coming," he said. "More than one will be coming."

He declined to say why more than one officer may be suspended for the incident, but he did say that he is looking into allegations of a coverup or, at the very least, that the proper protocols were not followed.

Rutland said that he was not informed of the incident until four days after it occurred, and that was only after he began receiving anonymous calls about it and started asking questions on his own.

But tasering is just a joke right? It's featured in movies and on TV shows as a big punch line. What's the problem?

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digby 5/03/2012 09:00:00 AM |

 
Thoughts on people power and freedom

by David Atkins

News out of Tunisia:

Nabil Karoui owns the HBO of Tunisia, a satellite TV channel called Nessma (“Breeze”) that shows Hollywood movies and TV series.

A week before Tunisians voted in the fall for their first freely elected government since 1956, Nessma aired the French-language animated movie “Persepolis,” based on an Iranian exile’s graphic novel about a girl who comes of age during Iran’s 1979 revolution. In the weeks after the broadcast, Karoui’s house was destroyed by a mob of vandals and Nessma’s offices were repeatedly attacked — all because of a short scene in which the girl imagines herself talking to God, who appears as an old man with a long, white beard.

Now, Karoui’s on trial, and so is Tunisia’s year-old revolution and the young democracy it has wrought. For hundreds of years, Tunisia has boasted a complex blend of Islamic and Western values, and now, having ousted their autocratic leader, Tunisians are struggling to find the right balance. No part of that wrenching, sometimes violent debate has been more divisive than the issue of freedom of speech.

Last month, on this capital city’s main boulevard, Islamist activists attacked actors who were celebrating World Theater Day; Islamists smashed musical instruments and hurled eggs. A hard-line preacher stood in front of Tunis’s Grand Synagogue and called for the murder of Tunisian Jews. And a Tunisian philosopher who showed up at a TV station for a debate on Islam was shouted down by extremists, who said he was no scholar of the faith because he has no beard.

In each case, calls for a state crackdown on offensive speech banged up against cries for the government to defend even unpopular expression. Karoui’s day in court became a nonstop, seven-hour shoutfest that will determine whether he is fined, imprisoned, or worse. A verdict is expected Thursday.

In Tunisia, defendants hire a lawyer, but any lawyer in the land may join the prosecution or defense, and those lawyers have the same right to argue in court as hired attorneys. The result: a pulsating black mass of robed men (and a handful of women) surging to the front of Courtroom 10, each with his own view of what should be done to Karoui.

Shouldn’t the death penalty be considered, asks lawyer Nasser Saidi: “Anything related to God is absolute. This was a test of the Tunisian people’s ability to defend God, and they have passed the test.”

Just another reminder that all the people power, revolutionary springs and toppled dictators in the world can never grant a people true freedom. That comes from liberal values, a respect for freedom of speech and religious tolerance, and intervention by protectors of those values against the powerful private and sectarian interests that would quash them.

People can protest night and day as successfully or unsuccessfully as they wish. But unless secular liberals are willing to organize and seize the reins of power, it won't matter. A society organized by conservatives will remain unjust forever, whether it be dominated by plutocrats, theocrats or both.


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thereisnospoon 5/03/2012 03:27:00 AM |

Wednesday, May 02, 2012

 
Precious Bodily Fluids

by digby

It's all about life:

Sen. Paul Gazelka (R), the bill’s sponsor, said Viagra is a “wonderful drug” that “helps create life.” RH Reality Check’s Robin Marty asked Gazelka to clarify his comments about Viagra, and he said in response:

comparing Viagra to RU-486 was comparing apples and oranges or more like comparing life and death. Viagra is a wonderful medical advancement in that can help couples with sexual disfunction issues…it can even help in producing life. RU486 always destroys life by taking the life of the unborn child.

The silly vessel will get over it if her future and health is irrevocably compromised by forced childbirth, but no man should ever have to do without sexual pleasure. These precious bodily fluids are life, even for the unlucky men of a certain age who use it with vessels who are no longer able to conceive. It's "wonderful." We should celebrate!

I wonder how this fellow feels about birth control, which last I heard was a ridiculously frivolous expense and employers should not be required to provide insurance that pays for it --- even though insurance companies would absorb the cost. I'm guessing he's against it. He did endorse Rick Santorum, after all. But then Viagra helps men and we can't rob them of their "wonderful" pleasure. The sluts? Not so much.

Update: Georgia just passed a law outlawing abortions after 20 weeks with no exception in the case the vessel got pregnant as a result of rape or incest.


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digby 5/02/2012 06:23:00 PM |

 
Stunning income inequality data of the day

by digby

Sure, this is healthy:

Between 1979 and 2005 (the latest data available with these breakdowns), the share of total income held by the top 1.0 percent more than doubled, from 9.7 percent to 21.0 percent, with most of the increase occurring since 1993. The top 0.1 percent led the way by more than tripling its income share, from 3.3 percent to 10.3 percent. This 7.0 percentage-point gain in income share for the top 0.1 percent accounted for more than 60 percent of the overall 11.2 percentage-point rise in the income share of the entire top 1.0 percent.

The increases in income at the top were largely driven by households headed by someone who was either an executive or in the financial sector as an executive or other worker. Households headed by a non-finance executive were associated with 44 percent of the growth of the top 0.1 percent’s income share and 36 percent in the growth among the top 1.0 percent. Those in the financial sector were associated with nearly a fourth (23 percent) of the expansion of the income shares of both the top 1.0 and top 0.1 percent. Together, finance and executives accounted for 58 percent of the expansion of income for the top 1.0 percent of households and an even greater two-thirds share (67 percent) of the income growth of the top 0.1 percent of households.

The paper also presents new analysis of CEO compensation based on our tabulations of Compustat data. From 1978–2011, CEO compensation grew more than 725 percent, substantially more than the stock market and remarkably more than the annual compensation of a typical private-sector worker, which grew a meager 5.7 percent over this time period.

And to think think that these very same people are whining and sniveling like little babies at the smallest suggestion that we might want to even this out just a tiny bit. They really are like the French nobility.


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digby 5/02/2012 04:45:00 PM |

 
The clueless Wall Street elite

by David Atkins

Greg Sargent highlighted today this remarkable excerpt from an upcoming New York Times Magazine story on the Obama administration's fundraising troubles with Wall Street:

One day in late October, Jim Messina, Obama’s campaign manager, slipped into the Regency Hotel in New York and walked up to a second-floor meeting room reserved by his aides. More than 20 of Obama’s top donors and fund-raisers, many of them from the financial industry, sat in leather chairs around a granite conference table.

Messina told them he had a problem: New York City and its suburbs, Obama’s top source of money in 2008, were behind quota. He needed their help bringing the financial community back on board.

For the next hour, the donors relayed to Messina what their friends had been saying. They felt unfairly demonized for being wealthy. They felt scapegoated for the recession. It was a few weeks into the Occupy Wall Street movement, with mass protests against the 1 percent springing up all around the country, and they blamed the president and his party for the public’s nasty mood. The administration, some suggested, had created a hostile environment for job creators.

Messina politely pushed back. It’s not the president’s fault that Americans are still upset with Wall Street, he told them, and given the public’s mood, the administration’s rhetoric had been notably restrained.

One of the guests raised his hand; he knew how to solve the problem. The president had won plaudits for his speech on race during the last campaign, the guest noted. It was a soaring address that acknowledged white resentment and urged national unity. What if Obama gave a similarly healing speech about class and inequality? What if he urged an end to attacks on the rich? Around the table, some people shook their heads in disbelief.

“Most people in the financial world,” a top Obama donor later told me, “do not understand how most of America feels about them.” But they think they understand how the president’s inner circle feels about them. “This administration has a more contemptuous view of big money and of Wall Street than any administration in 40 years,” the donor said. “And it shows.”

It's hard to overstate the degree to which the top 0.1% in this country is completely disconnected from the experience of the broader public, to the extent that it's difficult to tell the difference between cloistered cluelessness and rank sociopathy. One doesn't really get a grasp of how profound the problem is unless one sees the statistics. They really have no clue. I did focus groups a while back with left-leaning independent voters; when asked about Wall Street, their rhetoric became violent and even murderous at times. And it's not surprising: when men like Edward Conard open their mouths, it's difficult to maintain restraint. One never knows if one is dealing with a purely evil sociopath, or with someone who has been so sheltered by their wealth as to not really understand the human experience anymore.

So they also don't understand that a Democratic president who has been infuriating his base by putting himself squarely between the bankers and pitchforks is a valuable asset to them. As Greg Sargent says:

Wall Street excess helped lead to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, inflicting untold economic suffering on millions and millions of Americans. In both rhetorical and substantive terms, the Obama administration’s response was by any reasonable measure moderate and restrained. Indeed, Obama clearly viewed himself as a buffer between Wall Street and rising populist passion, telling a group of bankers in April of 2009: “My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.”

Despite all the wailing, Obama’s subsequent Wall Street reform bill simply was not a threat to the established order of things in any meaningful sense. His call for a Buffett Rule and the expiration of the Bush tax cuts would do nothing to halt growing inequality, which has been exacerbated by trends that have been underway for decades. His push for higher taxes on the wealthy has only been about spreading the sacrifice necessary to close the deficit, and about funding measures to create jobs for working and middle class Americans who continue to suffer, even as Wall Street is now reaping huge profits. In speech after speech after speech, Obama affirms that there’s no begrudging the wealthy their success.

Yet despite all this, many Wall Streeters have responded with an extraordinary outburst of resentment, grievance, and self pity. They’ve shoveled enormous sums of money in the direction of the party whose main driving objective is to roll back everything in the way of new oversight Obama and Dems have put into place in response to the worst meltdown in decades.

One wonders if there is anything Obama could say to make these people happy, short of declaring that rampant inequality is a good thing,

No, there's nothing the President can say to make them happy. There are only three choices here:
1) accept the system as is and give in to complete plutocratic rule;
2) try to win elections with the full measure of their spending against us and see what happens; or
3) Fight like hell to change the campaign finance system.

The fact that these people can buy elections is one of the few things saving them from the pitchforks. Otherwise, Jim Messina wouldn't bother to be in the same room with these self-important unelected bubble-inflating buffoons. The best thing to do is to limit their access to cornering the political marketplace.


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thereisnospoon 5/02/2012 03:00:00 PM |

 
Omaha beefs

by digby

According to Charlie Pierce, Nebraska is likely to replace Ben Nelson with a young, certified Tea Partier who will probably end up calling Jim DeMint a liberal. Not that it matters to me, really. Nelson was captive of the same people who are going to elect this extremist and I doubt it will alter the outcome of much Democratic legislation. (Recall, even after all the sturm und drang over the healthcare bill, he voted against it in the end.)

But this race in Nebraska is a real barn-burner. Pierce's piece is all good, but this gets to the heart of the issue:

The second question, and the last of the night, was about income inequality.

Don Stenberg said the greatest thing about America was that everybody has a chance to "rise up."

Jon Bruning said he hoped your kid will have a chance "to be the next Mark Zuckerberg and invent the next Facebook, or to be the next Bill Gates.... That's the special thing about America."

Deb Fischer said she was opposed to "class warfare" and that we should be discussing "the real issues, like the mounting national deficit."

And that was pretty much it. In case you didn't notice, none of them actually acknowledged that people might be having a hard time of it out there, except for Stenberg's kids who are spending too damn much of their money on beer and video games. The other night kindly Doc Maddow mentioned that she doesn't believe that Republicans actually think there are women who have trouble getting paid what their work is worth. Here, it is plain that none of these three people actually believe that there are enough uninsured Americans, or underpaid Americans, for them to care about.

That's the Republican party: You can believe us or believe your lying eyes. The only Americans who aren't doing just fine are lazy parasites.

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digby 5/02/2012 01:30:00 PM |

 
Forward Ho! The conspiracy theory of our time

by digby

Fox's Lou Dobbs: "I'm Not Saying Anybody Is A Communist," But Obama 2012 Slogan, "Forward," Is Tied To Communists, Fascists

How could he forget the Jews? (Why, it's infiltrated Israeli politics too!) Or, for that matter, basketball and soccer players? The Japanese are involved. Entire towns are in on it.

In fact, if you stop and think about it, isn't the word "progress" a synonym for the word "forward"? Progress--- progressive --- forward --- communist. You just have to connect the dots.

This is one hell of a conspiracy. I think someone needs to call Glenn Beck.


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digby 5/02/2012 12:30:00 PM |

 

Retirement Blues

Guest post by Jay Ackroyd

I never thought highly of Joe Nocera in his role as a columnist for the NYTimes Business section. Far too much of the Times’ content consists of reporting from the point of view of the article’s subject, friendly expositions rather than adversarial explorations, and Nocera mostly fell into the former class. No Gretchen Morgenson he. So when Abramson added him to the stable of Op-Ed columnists, my expectations were low.

But he has exceeded those expectations. For instance, his coverage of the mistreatment of NCAA athletes has been both well done and is long overdue. Just this past weekend he wrote a column that displayed courage, humility and a willingness to state some unpleasant truths about retirement planning in the United States as he approaches his 60th birthday:

I can’t retire. My 401(k) plan, which was supposed to take care of my retirement, is in tatters.....

The bull market ended with the bursting of that bubble in 2000. My tech-laden portfolio was cut in half. A half-dozen years later, I got divorced, cutting my 401(k) in half again. A few years after that, I bought a house that needed some costly renovations. Since my retirement account was now hopelessly inadequate for actual retirement, I reasoned that I might as well get some use out of the money while I could. So I threw another chunk of my 401(k) at the renovation. That’s where I stand today.

As the column notes, he is not alone. Many Americans find themselves with much less saved than they’ll need to carry their lifestyles into retirement. A major reason for this is the gradual replacement of pensions plans with 401(k) plans.

A pension is a fixed payment that an employee receives for the rest of her life upon retirement depending upon time of service, retirement age and income earned. This payment is known in advance--that is, it’s a guaranteed amount, and stays in place until retirement. If you worked for two companies for long enough, you would qualify for a pension from each, an amount fixed at your termination. So retirement planning is easy and certain--you know how much you’ll get from your pensions, and from Social Security. You can then figure out whether you need to sell the McMansion and move into a condo to make ends meet--and you can also make supplemental savings with known values.

Pension plans are funded and managed by employers or unions, like CalPERS--there is one huge pot of money that funds current and future pension payments. They are regulated under ERISA and backed by the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation.

Defined contribution plans, like the 401(k), are funded and managed by the employee. The contributions come from the employee’s salary, before tax, and are generally partially or fully matched by the employer, although (remember Enron!) the match is frequently in the form of company stock. The employer provides employees with a menu of investment options, usually different kinds of mutual funds--growth stocks, bonds etc.--to allocate their savings to. The value of a 401(k) fluctuates as the value of its securities fluctuates. Retirement planning is complicated by the attendant uncertainty of its value at and during retirement, and, of course, by the uncertainty of when you’re gonna die.

401(k) plans are also regulated under ERISA.

If you’ve been following along, you can see that pensions are pretty good.You get them in addition to your salary. They’re managed by professionals who can use the sheer size of the funds to minimize trading costs. They generate a certain monthly value, for life. And you can’t get stupid and spend the funds on a mistress and a red convertible when you hit your midlife crisis.

401(k)s,on the other hand, basically suck. They come out of your salary; that is, the contribution reduces your take home pay, which means you will almost certainly underfund it.

Nocera again:

According to the Employee Benefit Research Institute, for instance, only 22 percent of workers 55 or older have more than $250,000 put away for retirement. Stunningly, 60 percent of workers in that same age bracket have less than $100,000 in a retirement account. [Behavorial economist Theresa] Ghilarducci told me that the average savings for someone near retirement in America right now is $100,000. Even buttressed by Social Security, that’s not going to last very long.

A 401(k) forces you to manage it yourself, or to pay someone to manage it for you. You’re locked into a menu of mutual funds with significantly larger management costs than the pension funds pay--you’re paying retail while the pension fund manager pays wholesale. The amount you can pull out per month is uncertain at retirement, and the value of your holdings will fluctuate throughout your retirement. Worse, you have a nearly unlimited opportunity to do something stupid and screw the pooch:

“People tend to be overconfident about their own abilities,” said Ghilarducci. “They tend to focus on the short term rather than thinking about long-term consequences. And they tend to think that whatever the current trend is will always be the trend. That is why people buy high and sell low.” Financial advisers — at least the good ones — are forever telling their clients to be disciplined, to create a diversified portfolio and to avoid trying to time the market. Sound as that advice is, it’s just not how most humans behave.

So why would companies replace a pretty good pension system with a 401(k) system that sucks? One reason is they stopped caring about employee retention. Pensions are great mechanisms for keeping people on board--you’ve gotta stay for a period of years before you’re fully vested in the plan, and the pension grows as your term of service and salary grows. There was a time when it was the goal of management to retain workers, to hold onto their institutional memory, and reward them at retirement. But that time has passed.

In an environment where workers are viewed by management as easily replaced, there’s no reason to consider employee retention as an important criterion, so getting rid of pensions meant a reduction in labor costs--remember, 401Ks come out of your paycheck, not corporate earnings.

But I think the elimination of pensions has more to do with the reduction in Federal tax rates for high income earners. Under a progressive federal income tax with high marginal rates at the top, pensions allowed big suits to reduce their tax burden by moving income to the time after they’d left the executive suite. ERISA requires that companies offer pensions to everyone if they were offered to senior management, so if senior executives wanted to use them to defer taxes, they had to extend them to everyone. The reductions in tax rates for top earners that began with the Reagan administration and continued through the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations made it no longer worthwhile for CEOs to provide a decent retirement to their loyal, long term employees.

Jay Aykroyd contributes to Eschaton and runs the progressive online radio network Virtually Speaking. He also spent time on Wall Street, but don't tell anyone.




digby 5/02/2012 11:00:00 AM |

 
Worst ad of the season

by digby

Wow. Americans For Prosperity are just going for it:

Here's the story:

Although it still enjoys support from a broad coalition, legislation to turn some foreclosed homes into affordable housing now also faces deep-pockets opposition.

Americans for Prosperity, an economic policy group launched by coal billionaire David Koch, is mounting an advertising campaign on radio and television trying to rally public opinion against the proposal -- Senate Bill S-1022.

"A lot of people don't even know this is happening, or the significant negative impacts this bill will have on our neighborhoods," said Steve Lonegan, the former Bogota mayor and gubernatorial candidate who is the state director of Americans For Prosperity.

He echoed the TV spot, which suggests the effect would be to "move in drug addicts, ex-cons, sex offenders, and homeless people."

"Any local official would have to be crazy to support this," Lonegan said of the legislation, whose primary sponsors are state Sens. Raymond Lesniak (D-Union) and Barbara Buono (D-Middlesex) and Assemblyman Jerry Green (D-Union).

The proposals' backers include the state League of Municipalities, the New Jersey Builders Association, the Housing and Community Development Network of New Jersey, the New Jersey Bankers Association, and other groups not often found lined up together.

Supporters said the criticisms reflect a misreading or misunderstanding of key provisions of the bill. At least, those who responded politely said that.

"There's a special place in hell reserved for Steve Lonegan," Lesniak said, repeating it with the admonition, "that's on the record."

To be honest, I don't even understand the financial motivation behind this. In fact, there isn't any. It's simply that these rich pricks hate poor and middle class people and don't want anyone to help them ever.

They are calling it a "bailout" which is just hilarious coming from these people, but since they are shameless it's unsurprising that they would appropriate the word for their own benefit:

Lonegan said attempts to deal with the fallout from the most recent crisis have amounted to an expansion of government while putting taxpayers on the hook for private interests. The new legislation is "another bailout for the banks," he said.

"Every special interest in the state with something to gain is lined up behind this," he said. "But thank God the bankers association, the builders association, the realtors association don't run the State of New Jersey."

Right. American for Prosperity are brave warriors for the little guy.

Here's what it actually is:

The bills would establish a temporary agency, the New Jersey Foreclosure Relief Corp. Working through the state Housing and Mortgage Finance Authority for five years, the corporation would acquire houses in foreclosure and make them available to towns, non-profit groups, or private investors as low- and moderate-income housing.

In a time when New Jersey faces an estimated backlog of 50,000 to 100,000 foreclosure cases, as well as new ones, Lesniak portrayed the initiative as "a way to support property values and reduce crime by getting people into vacant homes, provide municipal tax revenues while stabilizing the housing market."

"It's based on the very successful model of the Resolution Trust Corp., which cleaned up the housing mess left by failed Savings and Loans during the 1980s by taking over and selling off their portfolios," he said.

The RTC, which was in operation from 1989-95, closed or otherwise resolved almost 750 troubled financial institutions in the wake of a previous housing bubble. This time, the economic problems have been compounded by related securities frauds, spreading the current downturn beyond the borrowers and lenders whose transactions were not adequately secured.

Like I said, they just hate anyone who isn't rich. There's no other rational explanation for this. It's based on a highly successful program that should have been instigated much earlier. It would help business, help property values, help municipalities and help people. But it might also be perceived as a useful government program which means it must be stopped.

And to do it with this message is just evil:

The TV spot zeroes in on an amendment to allow state agencies to acquire foreclosed properties for use as halfway houses, assisted living centers and other facilities for "special needs" populations.

In the language of the bills, that "means individuals with mental illness, physical or developmental disabilities, victims of domestic violence, ex-offenders, youth aging out of foster care, disabled and homeless veterans, individuals and households who are homeless, individuals with AIDS/HIV, and individuals in other emerging special-needs groups identified by state agencies. Individuals shall be at least 18 years of age if not part of a household."

That confers power to "take these problems to places across the state, to suburbs across the state," Lonegan said. "This is COAH on steroids."

That's reference to COAH is another hideous conservative e initiative to abolish low income housing.

I really hope that Democrats understand that when someone like Paul Ryan blathers on about "using conservative means to save the safety net" this is what he's talking about. These people don't just not care about the poor and the vulnerable. They want them punished for being the parasites, moochers and looters they think they are.


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digby 5/02/2012 09:30:00 AM |

 
The awful logic of Edward Conard

by David Atkins

Yesterday Digby highlighted the atrocious moral ethic of financier and Romney backer Edward Conard. There are many simple and empathy-based emotional arguments to be made against Conard's worldview, but this rational argument is perhaps the most important. Conard argues:

A central problem with the U.S. economy, he told me, is finding a way to get more people to look for solutions despite these terrible odds of success. Conard’s solution is simple. Society benefits if the successful risk takers get a lot of money. For proof, he looks to the market. At a nearby table we saw three young people with plaid shirts and floppy hair. For all we know, they may have been plotting the next generation’s Twitter, but Conard felt sure they were merely lounging on the sidelines. “What are they doing, sitting here, having a coffee at 2:30?” he asked. “I’m sure those guys are college-educated.” Conard, who occasionally flashed a mean streak during our talks, started calling the group “art-history majors,” his derisive term for pretty much anyone who was lucky enough to be born with the talent and opportunity to join the risk-taking, innovation-hunting mechanism but who chose instead a less competitive life. In Conard’s mind, this includes, surprisingly, people like lawyers, who opt for stable professions that don’t maximize their wealth-creating potential. He said the only way to persuade these “art-history majors” to join the fiercely competitive economic mechanism is to tempt them with extraordinary payoffs.

“It’s not like the current payoff is motivating everybody to take risks,” he said. “We need twice as many people. When I look around, I see a world of unrealized opportunities for improvements, an abundance of talented people able to take the risks necessary to make improvements but a shortage of people and investors willing to take those risks. That doesn’t indicate to me that risk takers, as a whole, are overpaid. Quite the opposite.” The wealth concentrated at the top should be twice as large, he said. That way, the art-history majors would feel compelled to try to join them.

One could say many things here. One could say that not everyone wants to live a hyper-competitive life, and that they shouldn't be forced to. Or one could point out that while the financiers usually take home most of the loot, the actual dreamers and inventors rarely get rich (if they're employed by a corporation, they don't get the bonanza from their ideas except in the form of a paycheck that will never make them wealthy.) One could demonstrate that corporate patent laws and legal fees are the chief obstacle standing in the way of bright people with inventive ideas. One could note that there are a great many individuals whose moral compasses are intact enough that no amount of money on this green earth would convince us to profane our values enough to work for Goldman Sachs (some of us would prefer to go into prostitution instead, as it's less harmful to society.) Or one could point out that simply getting in the way of Mr. Conard's sociopathic agenda is more valuable to society than all his collective investments in minor changes to aluminum cans.

But perhaps the most important point to make would be this: it takes a remarkably materialistic and delusional mind to believe that a person not enticed by the prospect of earning tens of millions of dollars, would somehow be more enticed by the prospect of hundreds of millions (to say nothing of the fact that when it comes to Mr. Conard's kind of wealth, we're really talking about hundreds of millions versus billions.) Mr. Conard simply can't understand why more intelligent younger and middle-aged people don't take entrepreneurial risks. He assumes it must be because the rewards aren't big enough, despite record income inequality that has mostly gone to the new rich.

I can speak from personal experience on this one. I consider myself something of a risk-taker. I've never held a "normal" 9-5 job, I've radically switched industries and life plans a few times, and I've spent most of my life running my own business. I'm a type A personality and consider myself modestly creative. Obscene wealth doesn't interest me, as I'm much more interested in my legacy after I'm gone from this world than in my comfort while I'm here, and passive income makes me uncomfortable as I believe a person should actually work to earn their daily bread. But I'm not averse to the idea of creating a innovative product and being rewarded for it in such a way that I could afford to live comfortably while funding progressive infrastructure (for one, I'd love to give a bunch of great part-time progressive bloggers the ability to do their thing full-time, in coordination, without worrying about where the next meal was going to come from.)

And I've had a couple of ideas that I think might be million dollar ideas, given enough time and investment. So what prevents me from pursuing them? It's not insufficient reward. It's the fact that I would have to abandon my current business, my blogging and my volunteer life to pursue them, knowing full well that success would be a longshot, with any number of trip-ups possible along the way. And it's the knowledge that if I failed, there would be no one there to pick me up. If I got hurt, I couldn't afford to cover the expense. I couldn't afford to have kids. I couldn't even afford to stay in my apartment.

In other words, the reason even creative, inventive Type A personalities with potential ideas don't do what Mr. Conard suggests they should isn't about the lack of rewards for success. It's not even about our ideals.

It's about the risk. Risk that puts us in danger of losing everything should we fail. Risk that could, in theory, be mitigated by a society that doesn't let people go bankrupt for getting sick. Or punish them extravagantly in the wallet for daring to have children. Or pay a pittance in wages for more and more soul-crushing jobs with longer and longer hours and less and less job security. Or force people to live in ridiculously high-cost-of-living areas just to have decent schools for their kids.

Risks that a decent social welfare state would help reduce so that people without rich parents could afford to fail and still live to tell the tale.

Even Mr. Conard's own dystopian view of a world without liberal arts and public service, a horrific society driven purely by corporate growth and consumerist greed, would be better served by a decent social welfare state. But he has dedicated himself to destroying what vestiges are left of it.

And that is why I devote my life to stopping men like him, and putting much their wealth to more productive public use if possible. That would be a far greater gift to this world than any million-dollar consumer product idea I might invent, regardless of its success or ability to furnish me a yacht I don't want or need.


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thereisnospoon 5/02/2012 07:30:00 AM |

Tuesday, May 01, 2012

 
Randroids on parade

by digby

From Paul Ryan's 2009 Ayn Rand speech:

RYAN: You know, it doesn't surprise me that sales of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged have surged lately with the Obama administration coming in, because it's that kind of thinking, that kind of writing, that is sorely needed right now. And I think a lot of people would observe that we are living right in an Ayn Rand novel, metaphorically speaking.

But more to the point is this: The issue that is under assault, the attack on democratic capitalism, on individualism and freedom in America, is an attack on the moral foundation of America. And Ayn Rand, more than anyone else, did a fantastic job of explaining the morality of capitalism, the morality of individualism, and this to me is what matters most. It is not enough to say that President Obama's taxes are too big, the health-care plan doesn't work for this or that policy reason, it is the morality of what is occurring right now and how it offends the morality of individuals working toward their own free will, to produce, to achieve, to succeed, that is under attack. And it is that what I think Ayn Rand would be commenting on, and we need that kind of comment more and more than ever.

And if you think he's alone, read this profile of the hideous man who's written what's sure to become the new Randroid manifesto. Here's a little taste:

A central problem with the U.S. economy, he told me, is finding a way to get more people to look for solutions despite these terrible odds of success. Conard’s solution is simple. Society benefits if the successful risk takers get a lot of money. For proof, he looks to the market. At a nearby table we saw three young people with plaid shirts and floppy hair. For all we know, they may have been plotting the next generation’s Twitter, but Conard felt sure they were merely lounging on the sidelines. “What are they doing, sitting here, having a coffee at 2:30?” he asked. “I’m sure those guys are college-educated.”

Conard, who occasionally flashed a mean streak during our talks, started calling the group “art-history majors,” his derisive term for pretty much anyone who was lucky enough to be born with the talent and opportunity to join the risk-taking, innovation-hunting mechanism but who chose instead a less competitive life. In Conard’s mind, this includes, surprisingly, people like lawyers, who opt for stable professions that don’t maximize their wealth-creating potential. He said the only way to persuade these “art-history majors” to join the fiercely competitive economic mechanism is to tempt them with extraordinary payoffs.

And if you don't happen to be one of those "risk-takers?" Well, fuck you, you useless art-history parasite.

Read the whole thing, but only if you're trying to cut down on calories. You'll lose your appetite.

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digby 5/01/2012 05:51:00 PM |

 
Shocking taser news

by digby

I'm fairly sure nobody will pay the least bit of attention to this:

The electrical shock delivered to the chest by a Taser can lead to cardiac arrest and sudden death, according to a new study, although it is unknown how frequently such deaths occur.

The study, which analyzed detailed records from the cases of eight people who went into cardiac arrest after receiving shocks from a Taser X26 fired at a distance, is likely to add to the debate about the safety of the weapons. Seven of the people in the study died; one survived.

Advocacy groups like Amnesty International have argued that Tasers, the most widely used of a class of weapons known as electrical control devices, are potentially lethal and that stricter rules should govern their use.

But proponents maintain that the devices — which are used by more than 16,700 law enforcement agencies in 107 countries, said Steve Tuttle, a spokesman for Taser — pose less risk to civilians than firearms and are safer for police officers than physically tackling a suspect. The results of studies of the devices’ safety in humans have been mixed.

Medical experts said on Monday that the new report, published online on Monday in the journal Circulation, makes clear that electrical shocks from Tasers, which shoot barbs into the clothes and skin, can in some cases set off irregular heart rhythms, leading to cardiac arrest.

“This is no longer arguable,” said Dr. Byron Lee, a cardiologist and director of the electrophysiology laboratory at the University of California, San Francisco. “This is a scientific fact. The national debate should now center on whether the risk of sudden death with Tasers is low enough to warrant widespread use by law enforcement.”

The rest of the experts interviewed (aside from the Taser international representative, of course) suggested that the use of tasers be limited in light of these findings. As I have said many times before, if tasers were a drug that killed this many people they would have been banned long ago.

This is simple common sense. And not just because they quite obviously are deadly to some people, although that should put any further debate to rest. The fundamental reason they should be limited is because in a free society the police should not be allowed to inflict terrible pain on citizens for any reason they choose, no matter how petty or inconsequential. If police are to be allowed to carry tasers they must be strictly controlled. At the moment, this is far more common than not:

"I'm placing you under arrest because you did not follow my instructions."

He "refused to comply, made incoherent statements." Of course, he had a broken back.

Those were just random Youtubes I found with a cursory search. There are many, many more.

And those are just events that happened to be videotaped.


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digby 5/01/2012 04:26:00 PM |

 
A well-paid idiot

by David Atkins

Sometimes I think the best punishment for "centrist" political pundits would be to force them to ply their trade as campaign managers in the real world, without the ability to outspend their opponents. Force them to actually connect with real voters as they exist in the real world, with their salaries dependent on their electoral outcomes.

Consider this brilliance from David Brooks:

The campaign-as-warfare metaphor may seem sensible to those inside the hothouse. It may make sense if you think today’s swing voters hunger for more combat, more harshness and more attack.

But it’s probably bad sociology and terrible psychology, given the general disgust with conventional politics. If I were in the campaigns, I’d want to detach from the current rules of engagement and change the nature of the campaign. If I were Obama, I’d play to his personal popularity and run an “American Idol” campaign — likability, balance, safety and talent. If I were Romney, saddled with his personal diffidence, I’d run a plumber campaign — you may not love me, but here’s four things I can do for you.

These would be very different campaigns than the ones we are seeing so far: more positive psychology, less negative psychology. A few big messages about fundamental change, less obsession with the daily news cycle. More attention devoted to those turned off by politics, less to the hard-core denizens who are obsessed by it.

Please, please, please let me be lucky enough to someday run a campaign against this guy. Unfortunately, that won't happen. Brooks will continue to live a comfortable life well paid by the New York Times to dispense totally disconnected anodyne fantasies about voters without any danger of accountability or verification.

It shouldn't need saying, but the reason the negative campaigning works (beyond basic human nature that responds more actively to threats than to rewards) is that voters are angry. Most people both liberal and conservative feel in turmoil and realize that something is seriously out of joint with this new world order our betters have established for us. Racists, misogynists and the less educated will be easily led to believe that it's all the fault of gays, minorities and liberal professors taking what should be "theirs" and giving it to the "other." People with empathy, education and sense understand that the new global economy has shifted power dramatically into the hands of the ultra-wealthy, financial markets, and multinational corporations.

But voters on both sides of the aisle know that someone is to blame. The political battle of this generation is to properly identify who it is. That's why the partisan divide is going to get stronger, not weaker, and why the politics-as-war metaphor is going to be increasingly relevant over time, not less so.

The only sort of people comfortable enough with their lives not to need someone to blame for this awful mess are the likes of David Brooks. People like him just don't understand all the anger. After all, they're sitting pretty. Shouldn't everyone else feel the same way?


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thereisnospoon 5/01/2012 03:10:00 PM |

 
Who's his daddy?

by digby

Everyone supposedly wonders how Mitt would deal with the religious right. Well, here you go:

Mitt Romney hired Richard Grenell to work on foreign policy, not social issues, but Christian activists freaked out over his hiring in April because Grenell is gay. Well, Grenell has quit Romney's campaign, The Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin reported Tuesday. Rubin reports Grenell decided to quit "after being kept under wraps during a time when national security issues, including the president’s ad concerning Osama bin Laden, had emerged front and center in the campaign." Grenell told Rubin that his "ability to speak clearly and forcefully on the issues has been greatly diminished by the hyper-partisan discussion of personal issues that sometimes comes from a presidential campaign." But the discussion of personal issues was an intra-party fight, not one with Democrats or their supporters.

Actually Democrats were plenty angry at Grenell for his creepy sexist tweeting, but nobody in the Romney camp cared about that. They decided to muzzle him because the Christian Right was having a fit.

If you want a glimpse of the dynamic that would govern a Romney administration, I think you just got one. The guy worked for John Bolton. It's not like they couldn't have made a case for him.


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digby 5/01/2012 02:00:00 PM |

 
Polar Freeze

by digby

If it's Tuesday, there must be more handwringing over "polarization":

“I think what we have seen in recent years — it’s really been playing out over decades — is that we’ve seen an alignment of the two major parties with the ideological base at the heart of those parties,” said Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.). “In the past, we have had a big segment of Southern Democrats who were more conservative than most Republicans. We had Northeastern Republicans who were more liberal than many Democrats. And now, we simply have more alignment of ideology and party.”

Consider the plight of GOP Sen. Orrin Hatch, who read the writing on the wall last year and promised a conservative conference that he “was prepared to be the most hated man in this godforsaken city in order to save this country.” What he basically meant was he was ready to do everything in his power to please the right.
[...]
But in a political environment where all the current incentives — such as super PAC money, cable news appearances, direct mail and Internet fundraising — are geared toward the extremes, the ideological middle is a political no man’s land.

This dynamic is hardly unique to Republicans, as much as President Barack Obama and Democrats want voters to think otherwise.

Centrist Democrats got that memo in 2010 — they saw how labor almost took down Sen. Blanche Lincoln, who ended up getting crushed in November anyway.

That’s just the Senate.

In the House, where the conservative Democrats known as the Blue Dogs saw their numbers cut in half in 2010, the climate isn’t much different. Five of the remaining Blue Dogs have already announced their intention to retire; two more lost reelection bids last Tuesday in Pennsylvania.

Among their sins: Departing from the party line to vote against the president’s health care plan.

“The lower the number of people who are from the center means the worse the environment is going to be,” said Rep. Jason Altmire, one of two conservative Pennsylvania Democratic incumbents who lost their reelection bids last week. “It’s certainly fair to assume that there will be more partisanship. There will be a wider divide than we have ever seen before in Congress.”

I think it's fairly clear that the Republicans have led the way in this sort of hyperpartisanship. We can look to Newt Gingrich's illustrious career for how it was done:

Often we search hard for words to define our opponents. Sometimes we are hesitant to use contrast. Remember that creating a difference helps you. These are powerful words that can create a clear and easily understood contrast. Apply these to the opponent, their record, proposals and their party:

abuse of power
anti- (issue): flag, family, child, jobs
betray
bizarre
bosses
bureaucracy
cheat
coercion
"compassion" is not enough
collapse(ing)
consequences
corrupt
corruption
criminal rights
crisis
cynicism
decay
deeper
destroy
destructive
devour
disgrace
endanger
excuses
failure (fail)
greed
hypocrisy
ideological
impose
incompetent
insecure
insensitive
intolerant
liberal
lie
limit(s)
machine
mandate(s)
obsolete
pathetic
patronage
permissive attitude
pessimistic
punish (poor ...)
radical
red tape
self-serving
selfish
sensationalists
shallow
shame
sick
spend(ing)
stagnation
status quo
steal
taxes
they/them
threaten
traitors
unionized
urgent (cy)
waste
welfare

That method of demonization, among hundreds of others, was extremely successful I'd say. The Democrats responded to such tactics by creating the Blue Dog caucus and the DLC. That dynamic is something you'll notice as you read the rest of the article:

Twenty years ago, moderates constituted 40 percent of Senate Republicans, and a third of the House GOP. Today, Republican moderates number 1-in-10 in the Senate and have all but disappeared from the House.

The Democratic Party exhibits a similar, if less pronounced pattern: Moderate Democrats make up 12 percent of the party’s House ranks in the current Congress, down from 35 percent in 1989. In the Senate, moderate Democrats make up 15 percent — down from 27 percent 20 years ago, all of this according to Poole and Rosenthal.

“In light of what happened in Pennsylvania — you see a guy like Tim Holden lose a primary, who was very middle of the road, reasonable, worked with both sides. You see him losing a primary to someone who’s a good bit more liberal — I think we’re seeing this loss of the middle,” said former Rep. Michael Arcuri, a Blue Dog Democrat.

“It just leads me to believe that it’s going to be harder and harder to get things done. It’s not that you don’t have good people there that want to work together, it’s just that their views are so far apart.”

It’s not just the parties that are the problem. The interest groups aligned with them are also helping to eliminate the center by serving as enforcers of ideological orthodoxy.

“The well-financed ideological advocacy groups also compound the problem, so that when you have someone from a safe seat, they have to spend their time making certain they’re extreme enough to avoid a primary challenge,” said Earl Pomeroy, a former North Dakota Democratic congressman who lost in 2010. “Basically, in the political marketplace, the elevation of the value of inflexibility over getting things done has been a big negative. And it’s largely fueled by well-financed interest groups that can take someone out.”

In interviews with numerous public officials, they all concede it’s going to get worse — and their only hope is that this is cyclical and that voters will eventually demand a functional government.

“We are not going to take back the majority if we don’t win moderate districts,” said House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.). “They’re the ones that are in contention. They’re the ones that are in play.”

It's interesting that they couldn't seem to find even one Republican to do on the record complaining about this situation, don't you think? Look at Toomey's quote at the beginning. They don't see it as a problem. They simply see it as an ideological realignment of the two parties. Apparently, these corporate Democrats do see that as a problem, despite their two huge wins in 2006 and 2008. I wonder why that is?

After all this garment rending over polarization, you have to love the final paragraph:

This isn’t political posing. The Republicans and Democrats the modern system produces literally come from different worlds and see no middle ground on the biggest issues of the day. They see elections — not the legislative process — as the place to settle their differences. Hence, the congressional elections unfolding before the country.

Bring the smellin' salts Miss Mellie! There's democracy bustin' out in America.

Here's the thing. The people haven't changed. All that happened was that the Southern Democrats switched parties with Northern liberals. The country didn't suddenly polarize, it was always polarized. Now it's sorted itself into two more or less ideologically consistent parties which means that elections have more meaning. I realize that this makes Washington social life a little bit less congenial but that's not really the concern of average Americans.

Our current system doesn't work all that well under these circumstances because it gives voters the impression that they have the ability to enact an agenda on their own behalf through the party of their choice and many of them get frustrated when it turns out the country is actually run by a bunch of wealthy aristocrats and corporations who don't give a damn what they say about anything. But that's not the voters' fault.

Perhaps the clarity this polarization brings will have the ironic consequence of eventually making people confront this common problem together. We live in hope.


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digby 5/01/2012 12:19:00 PM |

 
Facts are stupid things

by digby

Following up on my post yesterday about Paul Ryan's "genuineness" despite his ability to lie with virtually every other breath, Krugman discusses another "Austerian", the European editor of The Economist, who said this in an interview:

And of the countries that were in trouble, I would say Ireland looks as if it’s the best at the moment because Ireland has implemented very heavy austerity programs, but is now beginning to grow again.

Krugman posts this and quips, "see the return to growth, there at the end? Me neither."

He writes:

To be fair, Peet isn’t alone. The legend of Irish recovery has somehow set in, and nobody on the pro-austerity side seems to feel any need to look at the data, even for a minute, to check whether the legend is true.

Since virtually every VSP is on the pro-austerity side, why bother? As St Ronnie said, "facts are stupid things." They can say anything they want.


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digby 5/01/2012 11:00:00 AM |

 
It's Codpiece day!

by digby


As I do every year on this day, here's a reminder of one of our nation's most memorable moments, and how the Villagers celebrated it:

It seems like only yesterday that the country was enthralled with the president in his sexy flightsuit. Women were swooning, manly GOP men were commenting enviously on his package. But there were none so awestruck by the sheer, testosterone glory of Bush's codpiece as Tweety:

MATTHEWS: Let's go to this sub--what happened to this week, which was to me was astounding as a student of politics, like all of us. Lights, camera, action. This week the president landed the best photo op in a very long time. Other great visuals: Ronald Reagan at the D-Day cemetery in Normandy, Bill Clinton on horseback in Wyoming. Nothing compared to this, I've got to say.

Katty, for visual, the president of the United States arriving in an F-18, looking like he flew it in himself. The GIs, the women on--onboard that ship loved this guy.

Ms. KAY: He looked great. Look, I'm not a Bush man. I mean, he doesn't do it for me personally, especially not when he's in a suit, but he arrived there...

MATTHEWS: No one would call you a Bush man, by the way.

Ms. KAY: ...he arrived there in his flight suit, in a jumpsuit. He should wear that all the time. Why doesn't he do all his campaign speeches in that jumpsuit? He just looks so great.

MATTHEWS: I want him to wa--I want to see him debate somebody like John Kerry or Lieberman or somebody wearing that jumpsuit.

Mr. DOBBS: Well, it was just--I can't think of any, any stunt by the White House--and I'll call it a stunt--that has come close. I mean, this is not only a home run; the ball is still flying out beyond the park.

MATTHEWS: Well, you know what, it was like throwing that strike in Yankee Stadium a while back after 9/11. It's not a stunt if it works and it's real. And I felt the faces of those guys--I thought most of our guys were looking up like they were looking at Bob Hope and John Wayne combined on that ship.

Mr. GIGOT: The reason it works is because of--the reason it works is because Bush looks authentic and he felt that he--you could feel the connection with the troops. He looked like he was sincere. People trust him. That's what he has going for him.

MATTHEWS: Fareed, you're watching that from--say you were over in the Middle East watching the president of the United States on this humongous aircraft carrier. It looks like it could take down Syria just one boat, right, and the president of the United States is pointing a finger and saying, `You people with the weapons of mass destruction, you people backing terrorism, look out. We're coming.' Do you think that picture mattered over there?

Mr. ZAKARIA: Oh yeah. Look, this is a part of the war where we have not--we've allowed a lot of states to do some very nasty stuff, traffic with nasty people and nasty material, and I think it's time to tell them, you know what, `You're going to be help accountable for this.'

MATTHEWS: Well, it was a powerful statement and picture as well.

A Cod-piece can fool them all
Make them think you're large
Even if you're small
Just be sure you don't fool yourself
For it's still just imagination
And to be sure it works like a lure
And will raise a wench's expectations
But have a care you have something there
Or the night will end in frustration

Exceptionalism R Us!

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digby 5/01/2012 09:29:00 AM |

 
Preventing a one-world corporatocracy

by David Atkins

One of the many zombie lies told by conservatives is that if a municipality, state or government tries to raise taxes (or close loopholes) on corporations residing within their borders, then those corporations will take their offices, factories and the jobs that come with them to lower-tax havens. Similarly, we are told that low-tax incentives must be offered to companies to recruit them to locate in our neighborhoods.

Greg LeRoy's under-celebrated book The Great American Jobs Scam does a good job of disproving these lies. Companies tend to locate their factories and offices based on considerations far more important to their bottom lines and quality of living than minor differences between tax rates. Wage costs, education, cost of living, customer base (for retail) and myriad other factors tend (especially for non-finance businesses) the real drivers of where a company chooses to set down roots.

Still, it's true that taxes do have some influence on where many companies do some things. Things like put up inconsequential "offices" to avoid paying the taxes they should really owe. For instance, Apple corporation knows that California offers better talent, education and quality of life than Reno, Nevada. So most of their offices are stationed there. But Apple doesn't pay California taxes. Apple cheats. Here's what Apple corporation actually does:

Apple, the world’s most profitable technology company, doesn’t design iPhones here. It doesn’t run AppleCare customer service from this city. And it doesn’t manufacture MacBooks or iPads anywhere nearby.

Yet, with a handful of employees in a small office here in Reno, Apple has done something central to its corporate strategy: it has avoided millions of dollars in taxes in California and 20 other states.

Apple’s headquarters are in Cupertino, Calif. By putting an office in Reno, just 200 miles away, to collect and invest the company’s profits, Apple sidesteps state income taxes on some of those gains.

California’s corporate tax rate is 8.84 percent. Nevada’s? Zero.

Setting up an office in Reno is just one of many legal methods Apple uses to reduce its worldwide tax bill by billions of dollars each year. As it has in Nevada, Apple has created subsidiaries in low-tax places like Ireland, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and the British Virgin Islands — some little more than a letterbox or an anonymous office — that help cut the taxes it pays around the world.

Almost every major corporation tries to minimize its taxes, of course. For Apple, the savings are especially alluring because the company’s profits are so high. Wall Street analysts predict Apple could earn up to $45.6 billion in its current fiscal year — which would be a record for any American business.

Conservatives would argue that California should bring its corporate tax rate to zero in order to keep the jobs of the handful of employees in Reno--even if it means losing the education, infrastructure and quality of life that makes California the place where Apple actually wants to locate its real corporate operations. Conservatives voters are too beset with loathing and ignorance to see how this stuff works in practice. But the big money boys know the game very well.

At some point, the states in the U.S. and nations around the world are going to have to decide whether it's better to play brinksmanship on taxes and wages with one another, driving to the bottom of the barrel at the behest of corporate overlords playing them all for fools, or if it's better to cooperate with one another to create a unified, cohesive tax and regulatory code so that corporations have to play by the same rules everywhere.

If nation-states don't band together to defend themselves from these corporate predators, then multinational corporations will dominate nation-states lock, stock and barrel. In which case the nation-state as an institution deserves its demise as the major organizing principle for the world's people. The corporation cannot be allowed to take its place as the mightiest organization on this planet. Many young people like me who would not lightly give our lives for the cause of a nation-state, would be more than willing to do so to prevent a world corporatocracy. The fact that the world has sustained a dominant organizational paradigm for 500 years or so, does not mean it must continue indefinitely.


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thereisnospoon 5/01/2012 07:30:00 AM |

Monday, April 30, 2012

 
20 years ago today LA went crazy


by digby

I took my husband to the airport in the morning and we were told that airplanes were having trouble with visibility because of the smoke from the fires all over the city. It was my first clue that things were much worse than I'd thought. I went to work and my office had a bird's eye view of South LA and I watched the number of smoke plumes double, then triple that morning.

I went ahead with a scheduled lunch with our legal team for a planned celebration of the end of a big deal we'd all been working on because it was in West Hollywood and we all figured that the riots were far away. In the middle of our meal the manager came over and told us that they were shutting the restaurant since there were reports of looting in the nearby mall. This turned out to be a rumor but rumors like that were flying fast and furious that afternoon. The city had somehow turned crazy just during the time we were inside the restaurant.

People were driving on the medians and generally acting like fools on the road. I saw someone with a shotgun just casually walking down the street. In Beverly Hills. The mayor came on the radio as I was heading back to the office and told people to go home and stay home, so that's what I did. My normal 30 minute commute was two and half hours that afternoon.

Here's what we saw on the news:

There's a lot to be said about the underlying causes for this conflagration. LA policing has always been problematic, going all the way back to the beginning. I have to say, however, that this article by Dave Zirin in The Nation puts the whole thing in a completely different perspective. He says this particular bomb was armed during the 1984 Olympics. It's a very interesting thesis and one I hadn't heard before.

That night it was helicopters overhead all night long. The National Guard had arrived and was camping out at the Federal Building which wasn't far from where I lived. We could see that there was still major burning and looting all over south LA on television. But the army was there to guard the north and the west --- where all the important (white) people lived.


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digby 4/30/2012 06:13:00 PM |

 
"He doesn't seem cunning. He seems very genuine."

by digby

This article by Jonathan Chait about Paul Ryan is well worth reading even though most people who frequently read this blog are already familiar with much of it. Since Ryan seems to be the "it boy" this week, it's nice to see it all in one place.

He does explode the myth that Ryan has been the nice "bipartisan" compromiser and responsible fiscal steward everyone in the Village seems desperate to believe he is. His record during the Bush years is astonishing. He was right with him on everything horrible except that he believed that tax cuts were tilted far too much toward the middle class rather than the job-creators and his social security destruction plan was so extreme that even the Bushies had to denounce it.

Chait takes Whitewater stenographer James Stewart apart for his fact-free, credulous Ryan reporting. (This would be in keeping with his entire career. The man has always been a sucker for a sweet talking wingnut.) Chait writes:

It is certainly true, as Stewart argues, that one could reduce tax rates to the levels advocated by Ryan without shifting the burden onto the poor and middle class if you eliminated the lower rate enjoyed by capital-gains income. But Ryan has been crystal clear throughout his career in his opposition to raising capital-gains taxes. An earlier, more explicit version of his tax plan eliminated any tax at all on capital gains. The current version, while refraining from specifics, insists, “Raising taxes on capital is another idea that purports to affect the wealthy but actually hurts all participants in the economy.” I asked Stewart why he believed so strongly that Ryan actually supported such a reform, despite the explicit opposition of his budget. “Maybe he’s being boxed in” by right-wing colleagues, Stewart suggested.

After Obama assailed Ryan’s budget, Stewart wrote a second column insisting that Ryan’s plans were just the sort of goals liberals shared. He quoted Ryan as writing, in his manifesto, “The social safety net is failing society’s most vulnerable citizens.” Stewart is flabbergasted that Democrats could be so partisan as to attack a figure who believes something so uncontroversial. “Does anyone,” Stewart wrote in his follow-up, “Democrat or Republican, seriously disagree?”

The disagreement, I suggested to Stewart, is that Ryan believes the social safety net is failing society’s most vulnerable citizens by spending too much money on them. As Ryan has said, “We don’t want to turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency”—which is to say, plying the poor with such inducements as food stamps and health insurance for their children has sapped their desire to achieve, a problem Ryan proposes to solve by targeting them for the lion’s share of deficit reduction. Stewart waves away the distinction. “I was pointing out that, at least rhetorically, you can find some common ground,” he says. Stewart, explaining his evaluation of Ryan to me, repeatedly cited the missing details in his plan as a hopeful sign of Ryan’s accommodating aims. “He seems very straightforward,” he tells me. “He doesn’t seem cunning. He seems very genuine.”

Oy vey.

Meanwhile, via the Atlantic's, Elspeth Reeve we find out that Ryan's famous speech is available at the Atlas Society website. You'll recall that just last week Ryan explained that it was just an "urban legend" that he is a fan of Rand's "atheist philosophy". Why he's not for it at all.

And I suppose that could be true. Just because he's spent his entire career legislating a Randian agenda, speaking about it at every turn and forcing his staff to read her entire turgid ouvre that is no reason to assume that believes any of it. Besides it was way back in 2005 that he made the speech featuring the following quotes:

I just want to speak to you a little bit about Ayn Rand and what she meant to me in my life and [in] the fight we’re engaged here in Congress. I grew up on Ayn Rand, that’s what I tell people...you know everybody does their soul-searching, and trying to find out who they are and what they believe, and you learn about yourself.

I grew up reading Ayn Rand and it taught me quite a bit about who I am and what my value systems are, and what my beliefs are. It’s inspired me so much that it’s required reading in my office for all my interns and my staff. We start with Atlas Shrugged. People tell me I need to start with The Fountainhead then go to Atlas Shrugged [laughter]. There’s a big debate about that. We go to Fountainhead, but then we move on, and we require Mises and Hayek as well.

"I always go back to... Francisco d’Anconia’s speech [in Atlas Shrugged] on money when I think about monetary policy."

But the reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand. And the fight we are in here, make no mistake about it, is a fight of individualism versus collectivism.

In almost every fight we are involved in here, on Capitol Hill, whether it’s an amendment vote that I’ll take later on this afternoon, or a big piece of policy we’re putting through our Ways and Means Committee, it is a fight that usually comes down to one conflict: individualism vs. collectivism.

And so when you take a look at where we are today, ah, some would say we’re on offense, some would say we’re on defense, I’d say it’s a little bit of both. And when you look at the twentieth-century experiment with collectivism—that Ayn Rand, more than anybody else, did such a good job of articulating the pitfalls of statism and collectivism—you can’t find another thinker or writer who did a better job of describing and laying out the moral case for capitalism than Ayn Rand.

It’s so important that we go back to our roots to look at Ayn Rand’s vision, her writings, to see what our girding, under-grounding [sic] principles are. I always go back to, you know, Francisco d’Anconia’s speech (at Bill Taggart’s wedding) on money when I think about monetary policy. And then I go to the 64-page John Galt speech, you know, on the radio at the end, and go back to a lot of other things that she did, to try and make sure that I can check my premises so that I know that what I’m believing and doing and advancing are square with the key principles of individualism…

Is this an easy fight? Absolutely not…But if we’re going to actually win this we need to make sure that we’re solid on premises, that our principles are well-defended, and if want to go and articulately defend these principles and what they mean to our society, what they mean for the trends that we set internationally, we have to go back to Ayn Rand. Because there is no better place to find the moral case for capitalism and individualism than through Ayn Rand’s writings and works.

Yeah, he's just a casual reader of her hideously overwrought, puerile novels. Which he uses to "check his premises" so that he knows that what he's "believing and doing and advancing are square with the key principles of individualism." Somebody is a major Randroid fanboy and there's no escaping it.

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digby 4/30/2012 04:30:00 PM |