The traditional media keeps telling us that America is headed over the fiscal cliff if Democrats and Republicans can't work out a budget deal. The truth is much more complex than that -- and the American economy isn't going to be destroyed. But when you drill down to the heart of the fight, it leads right back to the Republicans' pledge to keep taxes low for millionaires and billionaires. And the biggest push for tax cuts is coming from GOP operative Grover Norquist. But Norquist's days might be numbered, as Republicans are beginning to turn their back on him, and Mike Papantonio spoke with John Amato from Crooks and Liars recently about Norquist's last stand to preserve the costly tax breaks for the wealthy.
We love Bonnie Raitt here at C&L, for lots of reasons. First, we love how she plays the slide guitar. We also love how she sings. (And incidentally, so do the people who make up the "100 Greatest" lists at Rolling Stone: She's No. 89 in their list of greatest guitarists, and No. 50 on their list of greatest singers.)
We also love that our friend Mike Finnigan -- one of C&L's original cofounders, and originator of Mike's Blog Roundup, and also one of the greatest living Hammond organ players -- plays in her band and is featured prominently.
This week, after a grueling 85-date tour in support of Bonnie's awesome new album, Slipstream, the band flew out to New York and did the teevee thang. First they appeared on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon last night; then they were on The View this morning.
Here's Bonnie's interview on The View, which was surprisingly touching:
I know 11,000 people who aren’t too excited about these “transformations.” Citigroup announced that it will absorb a tax charge of $1 billion for the quarter and eliminate about 11,000 jobs. The third-biggest U.S. banks CEO said that the move was a “logical” step in the bank’s “transformation.” The plan of restructuring also includes branch closings:
The latest eliminations amount to about 4.2 percent of Citigroup’s workforce of 262,000 people at the end of September. The largest share of reductions, about 6,200 jobs, will come from the global consumer-banking business, Citigroup said. The lender expects to sell or scale back consumer operations in Pakistan, Paraguay, Romania, Turkey and Uruguay.
An additional 2,600 jobs will be cut in the operations and technology group and global functions. Citi Holdings, the unit disposing of unwanted assets, will eliminate about 350 positions.
The plan will save about $900 million in 2013, and projected annual savings will exceed $1.1 billion beginning in 2014, the company said. Annual revenue will drop about $300 million, according to the forecast. The $1 billion charge this quarter is before taxes. An additional $100 million of related charges will come in the first half of next year.
Those of you bankers who didn't have your jobs slashed, not to worry about your annual bonus. While it will be cut by 10%, you'll still receive it. What's that, you're crying over the 10%? Oh, good grief!
The hosts of a Fox News morning show that created and aired a four-minute, attack ad-style video filled with falsehoods about President Barack Obama during his re-election campaign are wondering why they did not get invited to the White House with other media personalities on Tuesday.
Several reports confirmed on Tuesday that MSNBC hosts Ed Schultz, Lawrence O'Donnell, Rachel Maddow and Al Sharpton had joined other "progressive media" personalities at the White House to meet with the president.
"I'm shocked by that!" Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade exclaimed the next morning. "Invite five talk show hosts in? All from the same channel? That's outrageous!"
"It might be outrageous, but what I'm saying is I'm not surprised by it," co-host Gretchen Carlson remarked. "I mean, that station is delivering the message of this administration. So, it makes sense."
"Yeah, but that particular channel, that's all they're going to do anyway," co-host Steve Doocy opined. "It would be nice to see somebody from CBS, somebody from NBC... Fox News Channel invited as well."
"Think about it, the president said he's not talking to Republicans unless they agree to raise the rates," Kilmeade insisted. "He hasn't talked to Majority Leader [Eric] Cantor in over a year, but, yet, it's time to meet the talk show hosts on another channel. That's incredible."
"Maybe it was a thank you of sorts for the re-election," Carlson concluded.
I love this clip from The Simpsons. It perfectly describes why Republicans and their attendant Villagers are pushing so hard and loudly to 'do a deal' before December 31st. Here's the money quote from Mr. Burns:
Think of the economy as a car, and the rich man as the driver.
If you don’t give the driver all the money, he’ll drive you over a cliff.
That's exactly what Republicans are threatening. I know there have been a lot of posts about this so-called cliff, but I think it's worth listing what happens on January 1st if Democrats do absolutely nothing:
The top tax rate for individuals goes up by about 4 percentage points.
Capital gains rates increase to 20 percent.
Dividends are taxed as ordinary income, rather than at the Bush-era 15 percent capital gain rate.
Estate tax rates return to 2001 levels, and the taxable cap returns to $2 million instead of $10 million.
Payroll tax holiday expires
Some of these consequences aren't great for the middle class, which is why House Democrats are pushing so hard to force a vote on the Senate bill extending those tax cuts while allowing the upper-income tax cuts to expire.
Still, the White House is signaling that they're comfortable with waiting until January, and rightly so. Anything they can do in December, they can do in January, retroactive to January 1st. But by waiting until January, Democrats will be dealing from a position of pure strength then, because any vote in January will be a vote to cut taxes, not increase them.
The real sticking point, by the way, is the estate tax, which no one is talking about. It's not just a problem with Republicans, but also Blue Dog Democrats. Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA) is one of those who refuses to vote on any package that doesn't preserve estate tax levels at a $5 million cap and 35 percent tax rate. Evidently Senator Landrieu is fine with establishing a permanent plutocracy in this country, because nothing is more helpful for that than the current ridiculously low estate tax rates and high estate exemption of $10 million.
We've already seen rumbles that Republicans intend to hold the debt ceiling hostage yet again. This practice has to be stopped and it has to be stopped now. As long as they think they have some leverage, Republicans will continue to try and cut Medicare, Medicaid and Obamacare while holding the debt ceiling hostage to do it. Democrats have to be pushed to stand firm, and if the tea party is pushing Republicans to jump into the abyss, so be it.
As for sequestration, it will certainly be better to look at the budget in light of more guaranteed revenue right now than it will to start playing trade-off games with it. Sequestration was a Republican idea, and they should own it outright.
When the new Congress convenes in January, the tea party will have less leverage and Democrats will have all of the messaging on their side. There is no upside for Republicans. They need to learn this early on.
It is not 2009. There is no reason to continue to put up with their nonsensical Lucy and Charlie Brown football-snatching game. They need to learn that the voters, not the billionaires, will decide this debate.
If you want to push Congress to extend the middle class tax rates, you can join the action here.
If anyone needed further proof that Sean Hannity's show on Fox "news" is a complete clown show, here you go. After complaining about House Speaker John Boehner stripping some of these "tea partiers" from their committee assignments and even the possibility of him negotiating with President Obama over this so-called "fiscal cliff," guest Mark Steyn called Rep. Louie Gohmert "one of the few serious people in Congress."
Update: The Huffington Post noted on Wednesday that Gohmert was the only member of Congress to vote against a bill that would have removed the term "lunatic" from all federal laws.
Even while Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio attempt to distance themselves from the 47%/Makers-Takers stuff right-wingers really believe but forgot not to say out loud, the reliably stupid John Hawkins tweets this beauty.
Julia Whitty writes for Mother Jones on the environment and she's written about the dramatic decline in microscopic life on Gulf beaches and also about how using dispersant allowed oil to penetrate much more deeply into beaches, possibly extending lifespan of its toxicity. Now she highlights a new study that finds the addition of Corexit to the Gulf oil explosion made the whole mess much more toxic:
A new study finds that adding Corexit 9500A to Macondo oil—as BP did in the course of trying to disperse its 2010 oilspill disaster—made the mixture 52 times more toxic than oil alone. The results are from toxicology tests in the lab and appear in the scientific journal Environmental Pollution.
Using oil from the Deepwater Horizon blowout and Corexit the researchers tested the toxicity of oil, dispersant, and a mixture of oil and dispersant on five strains of rotifers—the lab rats of marine toxicology testing. Among the results:
The oil-dispersant mixture killed adult rotifers
As little as 2.6 percent of the mixture inhibited egg hatching by 50 percent
The inhibition of egg hatching in bottom sediments is particularly ominous because rotifer eggs hatch each spring to live as adults in the water column where they are important food sources for larval and juvenile fish, for shrimp, crabs and other marine life in estuarine and shoreline ecosystems—including fisheries humans depend on.
"Dispersants are preapproved to help clean up oil spills and are widely used during disasters," said lead author Roberto-Rico Martinez currently at the Universidad Autonoma de Aguascalientes, Mexico. "But we have a poor understanding of their toxicity. Our study indicates the increase in toxicity may have been greatly underestimated following the Macondo well explosion."
It seems Paul Krugman is about as tired as I am of these talking heads and politicians who seem to be obsessed with inflicting pain on the working class. Republicans aren't going to be happy until they undo every New Deal program, destroy our social safety nets and destroy what's left of the dwindling middle class in America.
The PBS Newshour had Paul Krugman on this Tuesday evening to counter some of Erskine Bowles deficit fetishism from the previous night and all I can say is I hope the Democrats are listening to him. We don't have a deficit crisis. We've got a jobs crisis and what Republicans are proposing will just make that worse: Paul Krugman: Hasty Fiscal Fix to the Deficit Would Cause 'Austerity Bomb':
GWEN IFILL: Erskine Bowles may be one of the people you have written about in the past who you called deficit scolds who were touting a phantom menace known as the fiscal cliff.
PAUL KRUGMAN,PrincetonUniversity: Yes.
GWEN IFILL: Am I right about that?
PAUL KRUGMAN: Fiscal cliff is not a phantom menace. The deficit right now is, the notion that something terrible will happen if we don't deal with the deficit right away.
The fiscal cliff is a very different story. That's about reducing the deficit too fast.
GWEN IFILL: In fact, you call it an austerity bomb. Describe that, what you mean by that.
PAUL KRUGMAN: Yes.
Well, what's happening is that we are scheduled, unless something is done, basically to do to ourselves gratuitously what has been happening to some of the European economies.
We're going to have substantial spending cuts, substantial tax increases at a time when the economy is still very weak. And, of course, that's a recipe for sliding back into recession.
So, we set ourselves up with the land mine in the road in front of our economy, which is not based on anything real. It's just based on our political mess.
My goodness, Republicans sure do have a fixation on inflicting pain -- on everyone except the wealthy, that is. That's why they're fighting so hard to protect the one percent, without any regard as to how their policies will harm the rest of us. They don't even care if it helps the economy; they just want to be the hand cracking that whip:
On Tuesday morning, during an appearance on SiriusXM’s POTUS Politics, Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) argued that raising marginal rates on the very rich would slow-down job creation but insisted that the nation’s debt problem requires the government to allow the payroll tax holiday to expire. Price said that individuals — presumably those who benefit most from the holiday — must feel “more pain” to help set the country on a sound fiscal footing:
TIM FARLEY (HOST): The payroll tax holiday is likely going away. People will likely get that increase in the deduction from your pay as of January 15, you’ll see your first paycheck, 2 percent will be gone. And I wonder if, even if you come to a solution... people are going to look at their paychecks and say, ‘I thought we solved this and look at all this money being taken out of my paycheck.'
PRICE: Well, remember, step back and recognize that we’ve had four straight years of trillion dollar plus deficits, we’re $16 trillion plus dollars in debt. This doesn’t get fixed without some pain for everybody…The remarkable challenge that we have requires more work and more diligence and more pain for more individuals.
Recent nonpartisan studies have shown that the Bush tax cuts for the rich — those on income above $250,000 — don’t boost the economy, while providing relief to lower and middle class Americans could significantly speed up the recovery. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), for instance, “Extending both the current 2 percentage-point cut in the payroll tax and emergency unemployment benefits…would boost real GDP by about three-quarters of a percent by the end of 2013.”
