Hullabaloo

Friday, January 11, 2013

 
Yet another city seeks to allow police to use torture devices

by digby

San Francisco:

No-taser advocates’ struggle to defeat SFPD’s push for tasers was audible throughout 14 2012 Police Commission meetings, a Nov. 14 Mental Health Board hearing, and the Dec. 6 Board of Supervisors Public Safety Committee hearing, where ACLU attorney Micaela Davis presented the letter to Supervisors Eric Mar, Christina Olague, David Campos and John Avalos.

Unanimous citizen comment at the Dec. 6 Public Safety Committee hearing aligned perfectly with ACLU’s stance.

“San Francisco doesn’t want tasers! San Francisco doesn’t need tasers!” said first presenter, Lisa Marie Alatorre. Instead of setting “a national precedent,” Suhr promotes “a new, shiny, lethal weapon to use on people in mental health crisis.”

Alatorre introduced well-coordinated public commenters highlighting national and state “lawsuits and respected studies” exposing the “harms of trigger-happy police officers who rely on excessive force instead of decent, culturally-competent de-escalation tactics that could have saved lives.”

Public commenters proceeded one by one to address the five central issues raised in the letter: costs, injury and death risks, disproportionate impacts on mentally ill people and people of color, and police misuse and abuse.

There is good evidence on all those issues that tasers are counterproductive.

Nobody ever makes the argument that shooting citizens full of electricity is a form of torture. The fact that it doesn't usually take more than a few seconds of its extreme pain to get compliance doesn't alter the fact that it is torture. It proves it.

h/t to GP



digby 1/11/2013 08:59:00 AM

 
The wages of austerity

by David Atkins

The social chaos and extremist rightwing backlash in Greece is getting worse:

Greek police have stepped up efforts to catch illegal immigrants in recent months, launching a new operation to check the papers of people who look foreign. But tourists have also been picked up in the sweeps - and at least two have been badly beaten.

When Korean backpacker Hyun Young Jung was stopped by a tall scruffy looking man speaking Greek on the street in central Athens he thought it might be some kind of scam, so he dismissed the man politely and continued on his way.

A few moments later he was stopped again, this time by a man in uniform who asked for his documents. But as a hardened traveller he was cautious.

Greece was the 16th stop in his two-year-long round-the-world trip and he'd often been warned about people dressing in fake uniforms to extract money from backpackers, so while he handed over his passport he also asked the man to show him his police ID.

Instead, Jung says, he received a punch in the face...

Jung says that outside the station the uniformed officer, without any kind of warning, turned on him again, hitting him in the face.

"There were members of the public who saw what happened, like the man who works in the shop opposite the police station, but they were too afraid to help me," he says.

Inside the police station, Jung says he was attacked a third time in the stairwell where there were no people or cameras.

"I can understand them asking me for ID and I even understand that there may have been a case to justify them hitting me in the first instance. But why did they continue beating me after I was handcuffed?" he asks...

And some visitors to Greece have been detained despite having shown police their passports.

Last summer, a Nigerian-born American, Christian Ukwuorji, visited Greece on a family holiday with his wife and three children.

When police stopped him in central Athens he showed them his US passport, but they handcuffed him anyway and took him to the central police station.

They gave no reason for holding him, but after a few hours in custody Ukwuorji says he was so badly beaten that he passed out. He woke up in hospital...

In May last year a visiting academic from India, Dr Shailendra Kumar Rai was arrested outside the Athens University of Economics and Business, where he was working as a visiting lecturer.

He had popped out for lunch, and forgotten to take his passport with him.

"The police thought I was Pakistani and since they didn't speak English they couldn't understand me when I tried to explain that I am from India," he says.

When passing students saw their lecturer being held by police and lined up against a wall with a group of immigrants they were horrified and rushed inside to tell his colleagues.

Despite protests from university staff who insisted they could vouch for him, the police handcuffed him and marched him down to the police station.

The police are now mostly in league with the fascist Golden Dawn party, and conspire to terrorize and intimidate anyone who doesn't look "Greek."

While we can tut tut and shake our heads, it's crucial to note that this isn't happening in a vacuum. These are the wages of austerity little different from the fate of immiserated Germany after World War I. When a proud and previously prosperous people are suddenly thrown into extreme poverty and their safety net destroyed, nationalist, anti-immigrant, anti-"other" sentiment is the inevitable result. One would think the Germans of all people would recognize this pattern.

The austerity crowd isn't just temporarily destroying economies. They're toying with entire cultures, failing to learn lessons that should have been permanently etched into the world's memory over 70 years ago.


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thereisnospoon 1/11/2013 07:30:00 AM

Thursday, January 10, 2013

 
Feeling persecuted even before it happens

by digby

Fergawdsakes. Think Progress reported yesterday that one of the pastors slated to speak at the inaugural had made some homophobic comments back in the 90s. There was a little chatter, but there was not even a real kerfuffle, much less a major scandal. But a mere 24 hours after the little piece a Think Progress went up, the past pre-emptively withdrew saying:

I am honored to be invited by the President to give the benediction at the upcoming inaugural on January 21. Though the President and I do not agree on every issue, we have fashioned a friendship around common goals and ideals, most notably, ending slavery in all its forms.

Due to a message of mine that has surfaced from 15-20 years ago, it is likely that my participation, and the prayer I would offer, will be dwarfed by those seeking to make their agenda the focal point of the inauguration. Clearly, speaking on this issue has not been in the range of my priorities in the past fifteen years. Instead, my aim has been to call people to ultimate significance as we make much of Jesus Christ.

Neither I, nor our team, feel it best serves the core message and goals we are seeking to accomplish to be in a fight on an issue not of our choosing, thus I respectfully withdraw my acceptance of the President’s invitation. I will continue to pray regularly for the President, and urge the nation to do so. I will most certainly pray for him on Inauguration Day.

So, he withdrew voluntarily once the information about his older comments came to light. He crawls up on his cross and whines a little bit but as far as I know there were no petitions, no protests, no nothing. He assumed there would be and decided he didn't want to deal with it so he took his ball and went home.

So far, it all makes sense. He's probably not the right guy to be speaking at a big Democratic event and he knows it. So what in the hell is this all about?

A chorus of right-wing leaders Thursday decried the withdrawal of Pastor Louie Giglio from President Obama’s second inauguration ceremony, suggesting a left-wing conspiracy to force him off of the program.

There are a bunch of idiotic quotes,including some from such luminaries as Eric Erickson and Kristen Powers, all of whom apparently believe this poor man was forced out of the celebration despite the fact that he clearly says he quit in order to avoid a fight.

But this one takes the cake:

“The bully bigots at Big Gay win huge victory for fascistic intolerance.” [Bryan Fischer, American Family Association radio host]

That's this Bryan Fischer:

American Family Association spokesman Bryan Fischer yesterday on Focal Point defended his close ally Scott Lively, downplaying his work shaping Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill and advocating for the imprisonment of gay people as simply giving “talks supporting natural marriage.” But Fischer, who shares Lively’s views on criminalizing LGBT status and blaming gays for the Holocaust, asserted that Lively “did the same kind of stuff over there that we do every day on Focal Point.” Fischer said the left seeks to “exterminate pro-family voices” and “want us to be destroyed,” which is interesting because the bill in Uganda makes the “promotion homosexuality” a crime.

No hobgoblins in that little mind.


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digby 1/10/2013 06:00:00 PM

 
QOTD: Dana Perino

by digby

On the debt ceiling:

PERINO: This is the analogy that I like. If you were to go home and found that there had been a sewage blockage in your basement, you don't raise the ceiling of the basement, you pump out the sewage. [Fox News, Hannity, 1/8/2013]

I'm sure she's a very nice person.


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digby 1/10/2013 04:30:00 PM

 
Military wannabe fools who don't know we have an Air Force

by David Atkins

Stephen Colbert highlighted a group of militant "Patriots" creating a walled, armed and fortified "utopia" in Idaho last night:

Here it is direct from their website:

The Citadel is evolving as a planned community where residents are bound together by:

Patriotism
Pride in American Exceptionalism
Our proud history of Liberty as defined by our Founding Fathers, and
Physical preparedness to survive and prevail in the face of natural catastrophes — such as Hurricanes Sandy or Katrina — or man-made catastrophes such as a power grid failure or economic collapse.

The Citadel is not your typical planned community where the developer's objective is selling cookie-cutter homes at the highest possible profit-margin.

The Citadel is not profit-driven. The Citadel is Liberty-driven: specifically Thomas Jefferson's Rightful Liberty.

Marxists, Socialists, Liberals and Establishment Republicans will likely find that life in our community is incompatible with their existing ideology and preferred lifestyles.

DESCRIPTION: The Citadel Community will house between 3,500 and 7,000 patriotic American families who agree that being prepared for the emergencies of life and being proficient with the American icon of Liberty — the Rifle — are prudent measures. There will be no HOA. There will be no recycling police and no local ordinance enforcers from City Hall.

Now, there are only two reasons to engage in this lifestyle: prepping for apocalyptic doomsday, and prepping for military invasion.

For the doomsday scenario, living together in a planned community with well over 5,000 other armed John Galt wannabes is not a great survival strategy unless there is ample farming and animal husbandry available, and nearly everyone engages in food production. If there ever were a "power grid failure," nuclear holocaust or some such dramatic event, help would certainly go to areas of high population first. That's how it worked during Katrina, Sandy and nearly every other natural disaster of significance. If there are disruptions in the supply chain, Denver will get help before Boise, Boise will get help before Coeur D'Alene, and Coeur D'Alene will get help long before any far-off area these people pick out. And yes, no matter how self-reliant they thought they were, they would need help within months if not weeks.

Moreover, geography alone would likely prevent them from needing to use their assault rifles. No teeming hordes of scary people of color are going to use precious fuel to drive up to their Nowhereville enclave in Idaho in any case. Assault rifles aren't useful for hunting, which actually would be a useful skill.

The other scenario, of course, involves armed resistance against a tyrannical government or force of invasion. The same scenario hypothesized by my local Ventura Republican city councilman Neal Andrews in opposition to a resolution advocating better gun control measures after I specifically mocked both of these reasons for assault rifle ownership in public comment:

Andrews said he couldn't support anything that removed power from people to protect themselves against a "rogue government or invading army." In the past, Andrews has seen "evil under a veil of authority," he said.

Andrews and the fools planning "The Citadel" have evidently never heard of the United States Air Force and its bomb-dropping capacity. I'm sure neither the Chinese military nor a hypothetical tyrannical U.S. military cares a whit whether the citizens of The Citadel can hit a man-sized target at 100 meters. That's what unmanned aircraft are for.

If a military force bothered at all with a few thousand nutcases in the middle of nowhere (as unlikely a proposition as an invading Communist army caring about whether it controls some rural high school in Colorado), it would simply drop a few bombs on the "planned community", reduce it to rubble, torch the farms and livestock, block the roads, and simply allow whoever remained to starve and freeze to death in the woods clutching their arsenal of inedible assault weapons.

Freedom!


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thereisnospoon 1/10/2013 03:00:00 PM

 
"I'm not letting anybody take my guns! If it goes one inch further, I'm going to start killing people."

by digby

If only the left wasn't trying to bring down the state:

David at C&L reports:

In a video posted to YouTube and Facebook on Wednesday, Tactical Response CEO James Yeager went ballistic over reports that the president could take executive action with minor gun control measures after the mass shooting of 20 school children in Connecticut last month. After the Drudge Report likened Obama to Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin on Wednesday, pro-gun conservatives expressed outrage over the idea that the White House could act without Congress. "Vice President [Joe] Biden is asking the president to bypass Congress and use executive privilege, executive order to ban assault rifles and to impose stricter gun control," Yeager explained in his video message. "Fuck that." "I'm telling you that if that happens, it's going to spark a civil war, and I'll be glad to fire the first shot. I'm not putting up with it. You shouldn't put up with it. And I need all you patriots to start thinking about what you're going to do, load your damn mags, make sure your rifle's clean, pack a backpack with some food in it and get ready to fight." The CEO concluded: "I'm not fucking putting up with this. I'm not letting my country be ruled by a dictator. I'm not letting anybody take my guns! If it goes one inch further, I'm going to start killing people."

Right winger: check Gun nut: check CEO: check It's not quite as unhinged as Alex Jones on Piers Morgan the other night, but close... *And there's some interesting internet gossip about this fellow as well.

But please, let's make sure that guys like him have easy access to guns. it can only make us safer.

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digby 1/10/2013 01:30:00 PM

 
Progressive Talk

by digby

If you're tired of the stale fare served up by fake progressives on TV take a look at this interview with Adam Green, head of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee and Netroots activist extraordinaire:

Adam Green talked about the work of his Progressive Change Campaign Committee, and the organization’s agenda for the 113th Congress.*He also outlined what progressives would like to see from President Obama in his second term, and he responded to telephone calls and electronic communications.*Topics included tax rates, Social Security and Medicare, jobs in the oil and gas industry, AIG’s potential lawsuit against the U.S. government, and President Obama’s negotiation skills.

And then read this piece about Bob Borosage who runs Campaign for America's Future, who the right wing portrays as the left's Grover Norquist. (I'm sure Bob would be thrilled to have that kind of clout among the unruly Democrats, but I'm afraid we just don't operate that way.)

There are a lot of ideas and a ton of energy out here on the left side of the dial. It's not batshit insane so it doesn't get the quite the attention that the right does. (And many of the Villagers are still living in the 70s, running from hippies instead of right wingnuts who want to overthrow the government.) But it's out there, organizing and slowly but surely making some progress. I've always thought that ne of the most important keys to success is perseverance, and Borosage and Green are good examples of people who have it.

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digby 1/10/2013 12:00:00 PM

 
In order to be free we must become a totalitarian police state

by digby

That's basically the message of the gun nuts. And sadly, people are listening:

It wasn’t just students who returned to school this week after their holiday break. In school districts around the country, extra police officers are being deployed to provide a sense of security while policymakers weigh legislation in response to the massacre in Newtown, Conn.—proposals that could make police in schools an increased and permanent fixture in kids’ lives.

Politicians’ response to the deadly attack unleashed on Sandy Hook Elementary in December has been swift. This week, Vice President Joe Biden convened meetings for a White House task force to address gun access and mental health issues, and has promised to deliver a legislative proposal to the president by month’s end.

But several proposals swirling in the mix would double down on a trend of militarizing public schools. The National Rifle Association suggested putting armed guards in “every single school,” and more than one lawmaker has voiced support for such a plan. Days after the shooting, California Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer introduced the Save Our Schools Act, which would authorize governors to use federal funds to call on the National Guard to secure school campuses. Boxer has also called for a $20 million increase from the $30 million already spent annually on school security measures like metal detectors and security cameras.

These proposals have been met with alarm by school communities in places like Los Angeles, where students are already too familiar with police. “We need a dramatic shift in how our schools operate,” said Manuel Criollo, the director of organizing at the Los Angeles-based Labor Community Strategy Center. “But safety is not equated with having more police in our schools or police as the primary response [to violence.]”

But this is how we defend ourselves against tyranny, right? Wait ... what?

One of the true flaws of the surveillance/police state apparatus so far is that it didn't properly indoctrinate the citizens early enough to submit unquestioningly. This will be very helpful. That it's done in the name of liberty and the Bill of Rights makes it all the more deliciously ironic.


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digby 1/10/2013 10:30:00 AM

 
The one economic problem nobody seems to give a damn about

by digby

It remains one of the strangest and saddest aspects of our current economic debates that nobody seems to care all that much about our still painfully high unemployment. And it's probably a lot higher than we know:

In December, the Bureau of Labor Statistics counted just 1.5 million "99ers," the smallest number in any month since 2010. The fourth quarter of last year also saw the lowest average number of 99ers in two years. But it's not clear that more of the very long-term unemployed are finding jobs.

"That decline is likely not due to an improving labor market, because it just hasn't improved much over the last two years," Heidi Shierholz of the labor-backed Economic Policy Institute said in an interview. "A lot of the decline in the unemployment rate we've seen is just due to people dropping out of the labor market."

The people counted as unemployed for 99 weeks or more have been actively looking for work, or they wouldn't be considered part of the workforce at all. One thing that may have kept so many people searching for so long is federal unemployment insurance, which from late 2009 through 2011 combined with state benefits to provide as many as 99 weeks of compensation. People are required to search for work -- in other words, to remain attached to the workforce -- as a condition of receiving benefits.

But the duration of benefits is shorter than before. In February 2012, Congress set in motion a gradual reduction of the maximum duration to 79 weeks in June, then to 73 weeks by September. As of December, the jobless in only nine states qualified for the full complement of benefits.

Jesse Rothstein, an associate professor of public policy and economics at the University of California, Berkeley, found in a 2011 research paper that the recent regimen of extended benefits did indeed keep people from giving up their job search as quickly as they otherwise might have. Rothstein and Shierholz said the dwindling long-term benefits might help explain why there were fewer 99ers at the end of last year, though it's hard to be sure.

"I've been surprised at how little anybody's paying attention -- not just to the 99ers, but also the 79ers in the past year," Rothstein said. (The term "99ers" has most commonly been a nickname for people who used up 99 weeks of unemployment benefits, though the estimate of how many people out of work for 99 weeks is not based on the insurance rolls.)


"There are still a lot of people who haven't found work, and it's reasonable to guess it's not because they're shirking, but because the labor market is still pretty terrible," Rothstein said. "I wonder how they're getting along."

Yeah. I do too. But apparently nobody else does. Hey, I'm old enough to remember when 7.8% unemployment was considered catastrophic and the whole government lurched into gear to bring it down. I guess it's the new normal now. Oh, 7.8% plus all those who've just dropped out of the labor force.

Meanwhile, we're still on the austerity train determined to "fix" our problems by making them worse. I'm sure that's going to end well.

I should note that the extension of UI under the "fiscal cliff" deal was the one true accomplishment. (The tax hikes would have happened anyway.) I'm not sure what it would have done to the economy to cut millions off of all cash support, but the scale of human misery certainly would have been large.

On the other hand, I'm fairly sure that both Democrats and Republicans have bought into the notion that this group of long term unemployed are just lazy slackers who refuse to look for work so they think cutting them off is a good way to motivate them. Unfortunately, the opposite is true. According to the article, people keep looking for work as long as they get benefits. It's when they get cut off that they stop.(Also too: 7.8 percent unemployment!)

So, once again, our leaders are attempting to solve a problem by doing the thing that actually makes it worse.


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digby 1/10/2013 09:00:00 AM

 
No, America is not a conservative country. But we do have a racism problem.

by David Atkins

In case you haven't heard, France is embroiled in a big battle over gay marriage right now, with the fate of the law uncertain. Yes, many states in America are now to the left of largely secular, "socialist" France on this issue.

What is there to make of this? Simply the following: most of the U.S. is actually mostly on a par with Europe and Japan on most major social issues. We complain about some of our civil liberties protections being eroded, which is true--but the protections we are upset about are largely nonexistent in Europe, where the surveillance state is largely the norm. The U.S. is nearly alone in allowing direct birthright citizenship. Homeschooling and certain religions are banned in Germany. The hijab is banned in France.

Instead, what we see in the U.S. is three things: first, the lack of direct experience of domestic warfare that allows for an unchecked militarism untempered by the sobering experiences of Europe and Asia.

Second, the moneyed corruption of a winner-take-all system without publicly funded elections that creates economically conservative laws in spite of a fundamentally progressive populous. Americans want a stronger safety net and higher taxes on the wealthy. That we don't get them is more a product of the corruption of government than of our relative conservatism as a people.

But the biggest problem is the most controversial one, and I'm sure I'll get a lot of flack for saying it. We have a racism problem in this country, mostly localized to the South, but also prevalent in other rural, sparsely populated areas as well.

The United States has a unique relationship to race because of our history of slavery. After World War II, the nation was well on track to create social democracies and safety nets on par with other civilized nations. The one dirty secret, however, was the fact that minorities were not allowed in on the game.

When the Civil Rights era of the late 60s finally began to put an end to the de facto segregation and benefit differences, a huge segment of white America society began to freak out at government using their tax money to help people of color (and, to a lesser extent, women who wouldn't be dominated by men.) We're still living through--and barely crawling out of--the repercussions of that.

But that doesn't mean that America is a conservative country. If you took resentment of racial minorities off the table, Americans would be mostly as progressive as other nations. But racial resentments complexify and skew every political debate.

Most important, though, is the fact that there is no "conservative" or "liberal" America. There is rural/exurban white America, and then there's everyone else. If it were up to non-urban whites, Mitt Romney would have won nearly every state in the union.

On the other hand, if you had simply removed every state from the Old Confederacy and Mormon Triangle from the union beginning in 1930, American public policy would look pretty much on par with the rest of the civilized world.

I suppose one could say that this means that our struggle is deeply American, has always been with us and will always be with us. That's true in one sense. But in another very real sense, it also means that there is not and has never really been one America. There has been an uneasy peace between two Americas since the nation's founding, a peace in which one side and then the other has alternately found itself more in power.

Nixonland was very successful in returning the Lost Cause to glory, and allowing that other America to hold sway with a drawl, a twang and a cowboy swagger for some 50 years. But now the tide is turning--perhaps permanently--in the other direction. That's a good thing.

But under no circumstances has it ever been fair to say that America is a "conservative" country. Certain parts of it are, in certain very ugly ways for very ugly reasons. And those parts have been allowed to have undue sway for far too long, aided and abetted by a political system that is all too easily bought and corrupted by the interests of the militant and the wealthy.


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thereisnospoon 1/10/2013 07:30:00 AM

Wednesday, January 09, 2013

 
Your Daily Grayson

by digby


It's good to have him back:

digby 1/09/2013 07:30:00 PM

 
Makers and Takers Redux

by digby

Just because they lost, doesn't mean they don't believe it. From our friends at CNBC:

Income inequality has been on the rise for three decades in the United States, according to the Congressional Budget Office, with the gap between the "haves" and "have-nots" currently at its widest point since 1967.

But as Democrats and Republicans wrangle over fiscal "fairness" and taxation, some experts argue that income inequality is not such a bad thing. They even go as far as saying that America's economy functions on the basis of it.

The debate on income inequality has featured heavily in U.S. politics. Prominent Republican and former runner for the GOP's presidential nomination, Rick Santorum said last February that income inequality was part of the fabric of American society, and long should it be so.

"There is income inequality in America. There always has been and hopefully, and I do say that, there always will be," Santorum said during a speech to the Detroit Economic Club. "Why? Because people rise to different levels of success based on what they contribute to society and to the marketplace, and that's as it should be," he added.

"We should celebrate like we do in the small towns all across America. You celebrate success. Why? Because in their greatness and innovation, yes - they created wealth, but they created wealth for everybody else. And that's a good thing, not something to be condemned in America," he said...

Thomas Garrett, assistant vice president at the St. Louis Federal Reserve, wrote in 2010 that income inequality in the U.S. was "not so bad."

"Although many people consider income inequality a social ill, it is important to understand that income inequality has many economic benefits and is the result of - and not a detriment to – a well-functioning economy," Garrett wrote, insisting that U.S. Census statistics "exaggerate the degree of income inequality."

One problem, in particular, he said, was that the "statistics do not include the non-cash resources received by lower-income households [such as the tens of billions of dollars in subsidies for housing, food and medical care] and the tax payments made by wealthier households to fund these transfers."

Income inequality, he adds, is "a by-product of a functioning capitalist society" and the wealthiest had more, because they were more productive, Garrett affirmed.

He is not alone. Edward Conard, a former partner at asset management firm Bain Capital argued that inequality was actually good for economic growth. In his book,"Unintended Consequences: Everything You've Been Told about the Economy is Wrong," Conard said that concentrating wealth in a skilled investor class helps fuel U.S. innovation, a tenet of the "American Dream".

Well, I'm sure it's pretty to think so. If you're a vulture capitalist.


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digby 1/09/2013 06:00:00 PM

 
QOTD: Honest Abe

by digby

He's talking about the power of persuasion:

Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed. Consequently he who molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions. He makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to be executed.

I don't think anyone believes this anymore --- we are told that our government structure means that it doesn't matter much what any statesman or leader believes or says and that a president has very little power to persuade.

But I still disagree. I think the real power of any leader lies in his ability to mold public sentiment and that it's obvious that presidents do this all the time, for better or worse. But unless you actually look at what they're saying and judge public sentiment by criteria that go beyond the latest polling numbers, you'll never see it. And you wind up with a view of how the world works based solely on transactional politics --- which is an extremely one-dimensional way to see it.


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digby 1/09/2013 04:30:00 PM

 
Equating deficits and climate is stupid

by David Atkins

Tom Friedman has a column today equating progressive resistance to deficit reduction to conservative resistance to carbon reduction. It's a tempting parallel for a climate-aware centrist pundit to make. I myself even brought up a certain parallelism between the two issues a couple of days ago in the sense that American democracy is ill-equipped to handle long-term problems.

But there are a few enormous differences between the two. Pundits like Friedman claim that progressives don't want to do anything about the deficit because interest rates are low at the moment, so the deficit "problem" won't rear its head for quite a while. In this way we are compared to conservatives who refuse to act on climate change.

But that's not the actual reason most progressives oppose short-term austerity. The big differences between the two issues are:

1) Unlike runaway greenhouse effects, deficits will mostly decline naturally with economic growth. The biggest cause of the major debt-to-GDP ratio increase since 2007 is not surprisingly the Great Recession. Most of that problem will disappear with a robust, demand-driven recovery. Yes, there are certain problems to solve as the population ages, but those are almost entirely due to rising healthcare costs that are best controlled with a universal single-payer system. In the case of deficits, the "problem" really will mostly resolve itself by doing nothing. Not so with climate, which will spin out of control if nothing is done.

2) From a political point of view, progressives don't deny the deficit exists. We simply contend it's not the crisis others are claiming, and that the "solutions" of the conservative crowd aren't solutions at all. Conservatives who refuse to act on climate change don't admit the problem but refuse to act because it's a long-term problem: they are science deniers who refuse to acknowledge the existence of the problem in the first place. Further, the dire projections of Chicago-school economists are simply not as reliable as the dire projections of climate scientists.

3) Unlike the climate crisis, the deficit isn't a force of nature but a political balance sheet issue can never be "solved." As the experience of the Clinton presidency demonstrated, deficit problems solved by Democrats can easily be recreated by Republicans who pass tax cuts for the wealthy and conduct illegal foreign wars. Weaning the nation off of carbon is a far more permanent thing.

4) The proposed "solutions" to cutting the deficit won't work. Cutting Medicare, Social Security and other programs important to the poor and middle class will simply increase economic insecurity and drive down demand, leading to double dip recessions and increased deficits. As Europe's austerity-mad failures have shown, the touted "solution" to the deficit "problem" only makes it worse. Eliminating carbon emissions, on the other hand, is the straightforward solution to the climate crisis.

Attempting to equate deficit reduction and climate change mitigation is yet another attempt by centrist pundits to place the stock market and governmental balance sheet juggling on a par with the forces of nature. They aren't. Markets and government investments are man-made, with malleable sets of rules. Nature isn't so forgiving.


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thereisnospoon 1/09/2013 03:29:00 PM

 
Cutting hours to make a point

by digby


This is a shame:

A Taco Bell employee in Guthrie, Okla., is speaking out after the fast-food franchise cut her hours to avoid costs associated with Obamacare, reports News9.

For Johnna Davis, a single mother of three who saw her hours fall in December to 28 hours a week, the change not only means a smaller paycheck. It also strips her of the right to receive health benefits from Taco Bell, a right that would have kicked in under Obamacare in 2014 had the franchise continued to give Davis a full-time schedule of hours.

Owners of fast-food franchises across the nation are blind-siding hourly employees by cutting their weekly hours -- and, in turn, their paychecks -- to dodge Obamacare costs.

In fairness, she might be eligible for subsidies and (if she lived in a state with something other than cretins running it) she might very well qualify for Medicaid. She should be able to get health insurance on her own if everything worked right.

But none of that will make up for the fact that she just lost a third of her income. And since they obviously don't know yet how much their insurance costs will end up being, they using human beings to make a political point. Her bosses are clearly conservatives.

It's going to take a while before all this is sorted out. It's going to be a very tumultuous period in the workplace and the health care business.

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digby 1/09/2013 02:00:00 PM

 
Negotiating do-si-doh

by digby

Here's a good piece by Noam Scheiber on the ramifications of the "fiscal cliff" negotiations:

The problem is what happens when, having crafted a favorable backdrop to the negotiation, it comes time for him to close the deal. And this is where the just-completed "cliff" episode is still disconcerting. Because it turns out Obama made a critical if underappreciated mistake in the final hours of the back and forth: sending Joe Biden to haggle with Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell once McConnell's talks with his Democratic counterpart, Harry Reid, had broken down.

From my after-the-fact discussions with Democratic aides in the House and Senate leadership, it’s clear that Reid had a plan for resolving the cliff and considered the breakdown of his talks with McConnell very much a part of it. By involving Biden, Obama undercut Reid and signaled that he wanted a deal so badly he was unwilling to leave anything to chance, even when the odds overwhelmingly favored him. It suggested that even if Obama plays his cards exceedingly well in the run-up to the debt-limit showdown, he could still come away with a worse deal than he deserves because of his willingness to make concessions in the closing moments.

Here’s what happened near the end of the cliff talks, as I understand it.

Read on for the details.

I have to suspect at this point that this is not entirely a function of "bad negotiating." It looks an awful lot like a subtle way to achieve desired policy outcomes which may be opposed by the president's own party. The need to make a deal at all costs has become the negotiating strategy. And it conveniently means that all the demagogueing about the consequences of not making a deal will get more and more shrill as the negotiations go on and the Republicans will always take it to the very edge --- at which point it becomes "necessary" to make a less than optimal deal than what might have been possible without all the hand wringing and rending of garments. And I hate to say it, but after several of these so-called hostage situations, it's looking to me as if the Republican leaders are partners in a little square dance, not adversaries.

In other words, it serves both parties' technocratic goal of austerity in the guise of "reform" to milk every contrived fiscal crisis to its last drop and then be "forced" to make a "compromise" that didn't have to be made. Perhaps that's cynical, but we've seen this dance enough times now to at least be skeptical.


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digby 1/09/2013 12:00:00 PM

 
Happy birthday tricky Dick

by digby

It's the 100th birthday of the most notorious modern Republican of them all. Kathy Geier reminded me of this memorable tribute from none other than Hunter S Thompson:

It was Richard Nixon who got me into politics, and now that he's gone, I feel lonely. He was a giant in his way. As long as Nixon was politically alive -- and he was, all the way to the end -- we could always be sure of finding the enemy on the Low Road. There was no need to look anywhere else for the evil bastard. He had the fighting instincts of a badger trapped by hounds. The badger will roll over on its back and emit a smell of death, which confuses the dogs and lures them in for the traditional ripping and tearing action. But it is usually the badger who does the ripping and tearing. It is a beast that fights best on its back: rolling under the throat of the enemy and seizing it by the head with all four claws.

That was Nixon's style -- and if you forgot, he would kill you as a lesson to the others. Badgers don't fight fair, bubba. That's why God made dachshunds.

And his legacy lives on today. This piece from 2005 called "Nixon's babies" explains why the modern GOP, for all its hard core conservatism in contrast to Nixon's more liberal (by today's standards) agenda is still far more Nixon's creation than Ronald Reagan's:

The modern Republicans, from their earliest incarnation in the 60's, starting with still active operatives like Morton Blackwell and Karl Rove to the next generation of Abramoff, Norquist and Reed, have always operated as dirty tricksters, and corrupt power brokers. The modern Republican Party is not, and never has been, the party of Ronald Reagan, not really. It's the party of Richard Nixon.

Jack Abramoff, Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist came together as a power in the College Republicans during the Reagan years. Blackwell, Rove, Atwater, and many others powerful operatives and strategists had cut their teeth there, as well, but these guys came in at the beginning of the heady Reagan years and they were fueled by the belief that they were on the permanent winning side of history. The triumverate of Norquist, Abramoff and Reed is legendary --- and they are all implicated in the burgeoning Jack Abramoff/Tom DeLay scandal.

They have come to represent the three most important wings of the modern conservative movement --- the Christian Right (Reed), the movement ideologues (Norquist) and the big money boys (Abramoff.) They are the Republican party. And they are all corrupt.

Reed is a total phony. I had long assumed, as most people probably did, that he came up through the Christian Right, a conservative Christian who got into politics through religion. He sure does look the part, doesn't he? This, of course, is not true. He wasn't "born again" until 1983, long after he had committed himself to Republican politics and proved himself to be a ruthless, unprincipled operative. He helped to create the Christian Coalition, it didn't create him. In fact, the Christian Right doesn't really exist independently of the Party, it is a wholly owned subsidiary, consciously created and nurtured as a Republican voting block.
(Morton Blackwell famously gave the Moral Majority its name.) Ralph Reed is now entering electoral politics himself, making the big move. He's probably the most dangerous Republican in America.

Norquist, as most people know is a great admirer of Stalin's tactics. He's quoted as saying to Reed back in the College Republican days:

[Stalin] was running the personnel department while Trotsky was fighting the White Army. When push came to shove for control of the Soviet Union, Stalin won. Trotsky got an ice ax through his skull, while Stalin became head of the Soviet Union. He understood that personnel is policy.

To that end, Norquist more than anyone else has ensured through carefully constructed alliances that movement ideologues like himself peppered the Republican power structure to the extent that over time, they have come to define it. This is why people like John Bolton, who has no more business being a diplomat than does the Rude Pundit, have become mainstream Republicans, even though they are clearly radical. He has made sure that Republicans are interdependent on each other through money and influence and that the money and influence flow through him and his allies.

Norquist is the truest of true believers, but he understands the importance of certain other inducements to keep people in line. Tom DeLay and Norquist created the K Street project and it's been a rousing success. Abramoff and DeLay were the guys who offered those needed inducements when true belief and solidarity weren't enough. Delay wielded the hammer and Abramoff (among others) offered the goodies. This is how they hold the GOP majority together. Ask Nick Smith how that works.

It's not surprising that Abramoff is the weak link in this. He was the front man back in the college republican days, but he doesn't seem to have been a real strategist in the way that Reed, with his ruthless single mindedness was or Norquist with his long term Soviet style political vision. In fact, the strangest thing about Abramoff is his almost decade long movie producing career that resulted in only two movies being made --- Dolph Lundgren's "Red Scorpion" and "Red Scorpion II" --- both of which were co-produced by his brother, a successful show business attorney. This is an odd chapter in Abramoff's life. It's hard to know why he was unable to parlay himself a real career in Hollywood, except to wonder if maybe Hollywood, for all its faults, just isn't as easily bought off as his pals in the conservative movement. After all, these kind of perks are just standard in the Entertainment industry and can't buy you much of anything at all (from Foer's article in TNR):

Over time, Abramoff's media management grew more sophisticated, and he dispensed largesse across conservative journalism. His junkets didn't just comprise meetings and site visits, they also included plenty of recreation time. Trips to the Choctaw Reservation, for instance, featured gambling at the Silver Star resort and rounds on a lush new golf course. Clint Bolick recalls, "I left the trip early, because it seemed to be so much about golf and gambling, activities I'm not much into." As an artful Washington schmoozer, Abramoff would go even further that. One former Washington Times staffer told me that Abramoff's practice invited his family to watch the circus and a Bruce Springsteen concert from its box at the MCI Center. (By my count, six Washington Times editors and writers attended Abramoff trips.)


Abramoff came back to Washington when his pals came to power in 1994. They suddenly had it all; their triumphant public leader, Newt Gingrich, was even considering a run for the presidency in 1996. (The ever humble Newt was quoted as saying, "Am I going to have to get into this thing?") This was the time to put into place their plans for a permanent Republican establishment ("personnel is policy"), with the power of big money behind them. The problem is that Abramoff got greedy, and so did his little college republican friends. Both Norquist and Reed have been named in the various scandals, right along with Delay. Everybody seems to be hold their breath waiting to see if this thing takes down The Hammer, but the undercurrent of excitement is really whether it will render Norquist, Reed and others impotent over time as the scandal unfolds. It's possible. These guys have always had the problem of hubris and premature triumpalism. They operate on a very emotional level that is a weakness. And they are, of course, incredibly greedy.

He left his mark in so many ways. Happy birthday tricky Dick. Your legacy is alive and well.





digby 1/09/2013 10:30:00 AM

 
Gunning for Mitch

by digby

Well, just a shot across the bow, so far:

A conservative advocacy group is targeting Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell with a series of online ads in his home state for helping to negotiate the fiscal cliff deal.

“It’s a statement we’re making and I suspect there will be more statements that are going to be coming out,” said Brent Bozell, president of ForAmerica, which is pushing the ads. “It is a statement to make it emphatically clear that what the minority leader did was 100 percent unacceptable. Conservatives are going to hold him responsible for this.”

The ads read, “Mitch McConnell: Whose side are you on?” with the image of a morose McConnell wedged between pictures of a smiling Vice President Joe Biden and smirking President Barack Obama.
[...]
McConnell is up for reelection in 2014 and is hoping to fend off a conservative primary challenger.
[...]
“When Republicans agree to do what they did agree to do, then they are just as much tax-and-spend Democrats as Democrats are,” Bozell said.

“Do I have any confidence that Republicans will stand by [McConnell’s] statements a couple of days ago that the talk about tax increases are over? None,” Bozell said. “It is a fluid situation. There are some serious battles coming up. I’m not writing off anything. If Republicans find their mojo and rediscovered their soul and try to do the right thing, we’ll support them, but they just can’t count on us anymore.”

Who knows if this is serious? But McConnell could very well end up with a Tea Party challenger. Remember now Senator Rand Paul's primary election night speech?

I have a message. A message from the Tea Party. A message that is loud and clear and does not mince words: We've come to take our government back.

Everyone says the Tea Party is dying. But it was never really alive. It was the wingnut zombie reanimated after the ignominious failure of their Dear Leader George W. Bush. They never really go away. And Kentucky is a place where they might just be able to get the job done. Rand Paul won his primary against McConnell's handpicked candidate.


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digby 1/09/2013 09:00:00 AM

 
Chait takes on the centrist debt fetishists

by David Atkins

I admit to having a love/hate relationship with Jonathan Chait. His points of view can be infuriatingly obtuse concern trolling one week, and then brilliantly clarion the next. Here he gets it right:

Gerald Seib has a column in today’s Wall Street Journal about how sad and disappointing it is that the two parties cannot come together and solve problems. (“What's lacking is an attitude among the capital's politicians that, while acknowledging they have different views, they must agree that they need to solve problems despite differences.”) That is the same point of a recent column by the Washington Post’s David Ignatius, an editorial in The Economist, and vast swaths of commentary by the most respectable members of the mainstream media. It all runs together, day after day, an endless repetitive drone of elite sentiment.

The drone of right-thinking sentiment has certain distinct qualities. One is that it is, in almost the purest sense of the term, a meme — a way of looking at the world that individuals pass one to one another without a great deal of conscious thought, even though thoughtfulness, or the appearance of thoughtfulness, is one of the qualities the opinion imbues upon its proponents. They don’t engage with alternative analyses. They seem to have no idea that their own ideas even could be contested. They are merely performing the opinion journalism equivalent of wishing passersby a Merry Christmas.

All the analytic work lies instead in the unstated background assumptions — the most important of which is the premise that reducing the long-term budget deficit is the most urgent problem in American politics. Indeed, if you look closely at these columns, they uses phrases like “solve problems” and “reduce the deficit” almost interchangeably.

I consider the long-term deficit a problem worth solving, though I would argue that mass unemployment and, especially, climate change are more urgent problems. I would like to know the case to the contrary, but if there is an argument for elevating the deficit above those priorities, I am not aware of it. Overt argument is not the preferred style of respectable centrist pundits. It is too rude.

And so, when figures like Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson are invited on to programs like Meet the Press, they are treated as disinterested wise men rather than political advocates. The host, David Gregory, asks them to hand down rulings on politicians. He does not question their own ideas. (Notably, the Sunday talk shows, a haven of right-thinking, deficit-obsessed centrism, have given over little attention to climate change in the last four years and have not quoted a single climate scientist during the entire span.)

After noting that the Democratic Party has essentially become the deficit-cutting centrist Party while Republicans show little real concern for it, Chait concludes:

Why, then, don’t they say this? Part of the answer is careerist. The elite centrist drone is emitted by people who deem non-partisanship an essential part of their job description. If they concede that one party is advocating their agenda, then you could flip the sentiment around and correctly conclude that they are advocating the agenda of a party; therefore, they would be partisan and have thus forfeited the entire basis of their claim to respectability.

I don’t believe that the centrist drones are so consciously cynical. This is where the dynamic of the meme usefully replaces overt thought. That the two parties must meet in the center and agree on a deficit plan is something that respectable people repeat to each other so often it becomes obviously, uncontroversially true. There is just so much partisanship these days. Whatever happened to the center? The two parties should come together and reduce the deficit. Merry Christmas.

Indeed. Greg Sargent has more:

Self-styled “centrist” columnists have a perennial problem on their hands. They have built reputations by calling for middle-of-the-road solutions to our problems. Yet they can’t acknowledge that Obama and Democrats are the ones who are offering solutions that are genuinely centrist, because that would constitute “taking sides.” This would imperil their “brand,” which rests heavily on transcending partisanship, and on their ongoing insistence that the future depends on following a middle ground between the parties.

These commentators have found several routes around this problem. One is to continually call for a third party without admitting that the solutions they themselves envision any third party advancing have a good deal in common with what Dems are offering. Another is to simply pretend that Obama and Dems have not offered the solutions they have, in fact, offered.

Insofar as deficit-obsessed centrism is a calculated political stance by Democrats to curry Beltway and voter favor, it's a failure. The Very Serious People they're trying to please refuse to call out the wildly irresponsible Republican Party, either because they themselves are in on the safety net shredding con or because maintaining a non-partisan facade is an intrinsic part of their oh-so-serious credibility.

And insofar as it is based on real policy concerns, that too is a fool's errand. Even if one ignores the obvious reality that austerity during a recession and weak recovery is a very bad idea that will actually increase the deficit (particularly when the cost of borrowing is cheap), any Grand Bargain that does manage to reduce the long-term deficit would be undone by the next Republican President who decides that with the "crisis" averted, the rich should be eligible to keep more of their money with another tax break.

The best thing Democrats can do is to ignore all the Sunday shows and all the Very Serious People. The poobahs will never be pleased because their entire shtick depends on calling out both sides as unreasonable. Far better to simply determine the best policy approach and stand tall in defense of it--especially when it widely outperforms the opposite side in the polls.


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thereisnospoon 1/09/2013 07:30:00 AM

Tuesday, January 08, 2013

 
QOTD: Glenn Beck

by digby

On Alex Jones' appearance on CNN last night:

Want to know who the media wants to make the face of the pro-gun argument in America? Look no further than conspiratorial radio host Alex Jones, best known for his 9/11 Truther theories and his love of Charlie Sheen's hernia. Jones is the man behind the petition to deport CNN host Piers Morgan for his views on gun control. Morgan invited Jones onto his show to debate the gun issue yesterday, and not surprisingly, Jones made a fool of himself, giving the left the perfect poster boy for their attempts to paint every logical conservative as an extremist nut job.

Yes, that's the very same person as this one:

"The Archduke Ferdinand moment"

When it comes to making of fool of yourself, I'd say this guy knows what he's talking about.


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digby 1/08/2013 06:00:00 PM

 
What you've been missing: Stewart and Colbert

by digby

This one's personal for Stewart:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

From the time I started writing this blog I've been talking about the fact that Republicans have simply retired the very concept of hypocrisy. But sometimes they demonstrate it in such glorious obviousness that you just have to laugh.

And then ... Colbert:

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

I don't think we can allow them to take time off anymore at times like these. We need them.

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digby 1/08/2013 04:30:00 PM

 
Another sign of a broken system

by David Atkins

I mentioned earlier today that AIG's suing the federal government, while offensive on many levels, is actually just the modern capitalism system working as intended, with AIG "innovating" products to meet quarterly expectations, the government stepping in to stabilize a crisis, and then AIG doing corporate duty to maximize shareholder return. If that system is offensive, then perhaps it's time to change the system.

Here's another example of a broken system:

It’s official: 2012 was the warmest year on record for the contiguous United States and the second most extreme in terms of weather events, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) annual “State of the Climate” report released Tuesday.

The average temperature for the entire year was 55.3 degrees Fahrenheit, a full degree warmer than the previous record warmest year, 1998, and 3.2 degrees above the entire 20th century average.

While one degree may not sound like very much in terms of temperature as humans experience on a day-to-day basis, it is actually an enormous increase in the country’s climate history, as NOAA scientists explained in a press conference on their results Tuesday afternoon.

“The difference between the record coldest year and previous record warmest year was four degrees,” said Jake Crouch, a climate scientist at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, during the press conference. “So there’s 117 years of data that were encompassed by four degrees of an average temperature, and now the 2012 value is one degree outside of that envelope. So we’re taking quite a large step above what the period of record has shown for the contiguous U.S.”

So why don't we have the political will to do anything about it? Well, because climate change doesn't really impact immediate corporate profits, so neither industry nor Wall St. seems much inclined to step in. It should theoretically be government's job to step in with far-sighted regulations, but American democracy is specifically designed for politicians to respond to issues that immediately impact citizens within the timeframe leading up to the politicians' re-election. Nothing in American corporate or state governance is designed to resolve problems today that will show up in 50 years. This is also a conservative complaint when it comes to much more easily manageable issue of deficits as well (insofar as deficit hysteria isn't just an excuse to cut discretionary spending), which is why legislators set up ridiculous sequesters to force their own hands. In the case of deficits it's an ephemeral non-problem. Climate change by contrast is a very real problem. But in both cases no one is interested in solving problems that won't show up for decades.

Whether it's AIG suing the American People who saved them, or Congress unable to deal with climate change, the systems are actually working as intended. So maybe it's time to change the systems.


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thereisnospoon 1/08/2013 03:00:00 PM

 
No good deed: the chutzpah files

by digby

They're baaaack:

Fresh from paying back a $182 billion bailout, the American International Group Inc. has been running a nationwide advertising campaign with the tagline "Thank you America."

Behind the scenes, the restored insurance company is weighing whether to tell the government agencies that rescued it during the financial crisis: thanks, but you cheated our shareholders.

The board of A.I.G. will meet on Wednesday to consider joining a $25 billion shareholder lawsuit against the government, court records show. The lawsuit does not argue that government help was not needed. It contends that the onerous nature of the rescue - the taking of what became a 92 percent stake in the company, the deal's high interest rates and the funneling of billions to the insurer's Wall Street clients - deprived shareholders of tens of billions of dollars and violated the Fifth Amendment, which prohibits the taking of private property for "public use, without just compensation."

Maurice R. Greenberg, A.I.G.'s former chief executive, who remains a major investor in the company, filed the lawsuit in 2011 on behalf of fellow shareholders. He has since urged A.I.G. to join the case, a move that could nudge the government into settlement talks.

You know what? To hell with the shareholders. They're lucky they still own a piece of a company that by all rights wouldn't even exist if it weren't for the US taxpayers.

But it's typical. AIG has been whining and sniveling from the very beginning of the crisis they helped create. Remember this?

As saintly AIG executive Jake DeSantis plaintively wailed detailed in the NY Times:

After 12 months of hard work dismantling the company — during which A.I.G. reassured us many times we would be rewarded in March 2009 — we in the financial products unit have been betrayed by A.I.G. and are being unfairly persecuted by elected officials. In response to this, I will now leave the company and donate my entire post-tax retention payment to those suffering from the global economic downturn. My intent is to keep none of the money myself.

The profitability of the businesses with which I was associated clearly supported my compensation. I never received any pay resulting from the credit default swaps that are now losing so much money. I did, however, like many others here, lose a significant portion of my life savings in the form of deferred compensation invested in the capital of A.I.G.-F.P. because of those losses. In this way I have personally suffered from this controversial activity — directly as well as indirectly with the rest of the taxpayers.

Breaks your heart, doesn't it? How could anyone have asked such victims to suffer even more by asking them not to take their hard earned bonuses?

As most of us have done nothing wrong, guilt is not a motivation to surrender our earnings. We have worked 12 long months under these contracts and now deserve to be paid as promised. None of us should be cheated of our payments any more than a plumber should be cheated after he has fixed the pipes but a careless electrician causes a fire that burns down the house.

Well ... they were actually like employees of a housing contractor that burned down the whole town because they cut corners who then held up the residents for big bucks to clean up all the toxic waste. But whatever, there was no denying just how unfair it was to complain about these bonuses when these guys were such hard workers who had made such sacrifices:

So what am I to do? There’s no easy answer. I know that because of hard work I have benefited more than most during the economic boom and have saved enough that my family is unlikely to suffer devastating losses during the current bust. Some might argue that members of my profession have been overpaid, and I wouldn’t disagree.

Right:

On March 16 I received a payment from A.I.G. amounting to $742,006.40, after taxes

He said he was going to donate that full amount to charity as a political protest --- yet another high-minded sacrifice.

The least the lazy unemployed can do is follow this noble person's example and give up their 300 dollars a week in benefits. We all have to pitch in.

And that has been the operative argument ever since. If the big boys have to pay, then so do the rest of us. Except our fair share is to live in terrible financial insecurity, debt and joblessness while their's is to suffer the indignity of being forced to donate their $750,000 bonus to charity in protest. (Or pay slightly higher tax rates as part of a balanced approach.)

Now go read this amazing new piece by Taibbi about the bailout. If you weren't mad already you will be when you finish reading it:

It has been four long winters since the federal government, in the hulking, shaven-skulled, Alien Nation-esque form of then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, committed $700 billion in taxpayer money to rescue Wall Street from its own chicanery and greed. To listen to the bankers and their allies in Washington tell it, you'd think the bailout was the best thing to hit the American economy since the invention of the assembly line. Not only did it prevent another Great Depression, we've been told, but the money has all been paid back, and the government even made a profit. No harm, no foul – right?

Wrong.

It was all a lie – one of the biggest and most elaborate falsehoods ever sold to the American people. We were told that the taxpayer was stepping in – only temporarily, mind you – to prop up the economy and save the world from financial catastrophe. What we actually ended up doing was the exact opposite: committing American taxpayers to permanent, blind support of an ungovernable, unregulatable, hyperconcentrated new financial system that exacerbates the greed and inequality that caused the crash, and forces Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup to increase risk rather than reduce it. The result is one of those deals where one wrong decision early on blossoms into a lush nightmare of unintended consequences. We thought we were just letting a friend crash at the house for a few days; we ended up with a family of hillbillies who moved in forever, sleeping nine to a bed and building a meth lab on the front lawn.

I think this AIG move illustrates that point perfectly.

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digby 1/08/2013 02:00:00 PM

 
Austerity R Us

by digby

The good news is that the US hasn't been pursuing an austerity program.

Well, sort of:

The really good news is that we've had such a robust recovery that it's all good.

Well, except for this:

And hey, even that looks good if you don't notice what the unemployment rate was in 2008...


digby 1/08/2013 01:02:00 PM

 
I gotcher disaster capitalism for ya richeeyah

by digby

The only answer is privatization:

The Long Island Power Authority should be converted into an investor-owned utility to end poor management practices that exacerbated slow and halting repairs of blackouts from October’s Hurricane Sandy, a New York state investigative panel said today.

Privatization would make management of the state-owned electrical system answerable to the New York Public Service Commission, which should be empowered by the legislature with stronger sanctions including the ability to revoke a utility franchise, the panel told Governor Andrew Cuomo today in a preliminary briefing.

Cuomo, a Democrat, convened the so-called Moreland Commission in November with the power to subpoena witnesses, after more than two million homes and businesses lost electricity from the storm, some for as long as 21 days. Some of the panel’s recommendations will need legislation and Cuomo said he’s waiting for its final report. No date was given for its release.

“The key to problems at LIPA was a fundamentally dysfunctional management structure,” Benjamin Lawsky, the commission co-chairman and superintendent of the New York Department of Financial Services, said at a meeting in Albany that was broadcast on the Internet. “The commission found that the only solution is for fundamental change at LIPA and how power is delivered on Long Island.”

Yeah, we went down that road in California a decade ago. Privatization of electricity was going to solve every problem from high energy costs to male pattern baldness. It was so exciting. Especially for Grandma Millie:

This is Bob Badeer (a trader at Enron's West Power desk in Portland, CA, where all these tapes were recorded) and Kevin McGowan (in Enron's central office in Houston,TX, as he mentions in the transcript):

KEVIN: So,

BOB: (laughing)

KEVIN: So the rumor’s true? They’re fuckin’ takin’ all the money back from you guys? All those money you guys stole from those poor grandmothers in California?

BOB: Yeah, Grandma Millie, man. But she’s the one who couldn’t figure out how to fuckin’ vote on the butterfly ballot.

KEVIN: Yeah, now she wants her fuckin’ money back for all the power you’ve charged right up – jammed right up her ass for fuckin’ 250 dollars a megawatt hour.

BOB: You know – you know – you know, grandma Millie, she’s the one that Al Gore’s fightin’ for, you know? You’re not going to –

BOB: Grandma Millie –

That worked out great for us. I can certainly see why New York would want to privatize as well.

(Obviously, this is not exactly the same sort of privatization, but the concept is the same: privatization as the panacea. It's not. In fact, most of the time it makes things worse. For Grandma Millie anyway.)


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digby 1/08/2013 11:00:00 AM

 
Blue America Chat 11pst/2est: Candidate Debra Cooper!

by digby




When the Netroots first appeared in the middle of the last decade, there were a few people who instantly joined up as supporters, benefactors and activists who "got it." But no one got it more clearly than our good friend Debra Cooper, a long time champion of women's rights, New York NARAL board member and Democratic Party activist. From the very beginning Debra understood the power of this new force in American politics and embraced our work and enthusiastically participated in our activities, often to the befuddlement of other experienced organizers who failed to see the potential of our new medium. Debra has been a stalwart supporter of Blue America since its inception and we are thrilled to return the favor by making her our first endorsee of 2013.

Blue America doesn't normally get involved in local races, but a New York City Council seat is not the usual local race ... and Debra is not the usual candidate. As she says:

I have been an unabashed progressive my entire life. And I have been around long enough to see that it matters is we move forward as progressives and not react backward. If we aren't pushing forward on our agenda, the right wing is pushing us backward. And it goes from everything from women's reproductive rights to social security to the safety net to the issue of gun control. Those issues all matter. We have to push forward, we have to enlarge the conversation to include our solutions and not just react to their solutions. 

I have been asked about my lines in the sand. Actually I have lines in quick drying cement. And those lines are about principles --- progressive and democratic principles. Lines in the sand are for tactics and for strategy. They are moveable and they are erasable. Principles are not. They are firm and they are clear. You use lines in the sand to negotiate. And over the long term, as a progressive , if we want to move the conversation in the right direction, we want to make the lines in the sand the same as our lines in cement.

A couple of years back Debra wrote a piece that I've often quoted because it's so important. She talked about abortion in the language of freedom, which is frankly something I'd never heard anyone do before, at least in a way that was persuasive:

For women ALL Roads to freedom and equality - economic equality and most particularly the ability to avoid poverty START with control of their bodies. If they can't control how they get pregnant and when they will have a child then poverty is the result. 

There is theory about something called the Prime Mover - the first action or the first cause. Well for women it IS reproductive rights. It precedes everything. It really is simple. Without the abilty to control your own body then you are a slave to everything else. 

Frankly sexism, the need to control women's lives by controlling their bodies and the things that arise from it, are endemic to any social structure. It is ever enduring and even when it seems to be quashed it returns in another form. That is the story in the modern era of women's rights. One step forward after a long struggle - suffrage and then a step back. (And no way do I say that women are not complicit in their own subjugation. We are.) 

I am reading The Reactionary Mind by Corey Robin. In the epilogue he makes a point of saying that the loss of power and control is what the elite and the reactionary fear the most. More than a specific loss itself the fear the rising volcano of submerged anger and power. And for them it is most acutely felt compulsion for control in the "intimate" arena. That is the most vexing and disturbing of all. 

It is why they want to control women. 

And controlling their reproductive lives is the surefire way to control them. It is why abortion rights are absolutely central to every other kind of freedom.

Wouldn't it be great to have someone who thinks like this in elective office? She is one of us, a stalwart progressive who has been inspired and motivated by our work --- and your commitment --- to throw her hat into the ring and represent our shared values in elective office. John, Howie and I are proud to support her and we hope you will too.

Hopefully everyone had a chance to rest up during the holidays and take a breather. But the reactionaries never sleep. As Debra says, if we aren't pushing our agenda, the right wing is pushing us backwards. It's time to start pushing.

Please join Debra for our first Blue America chat of the year chat at 11pst/2est over at Crooks and Liars.

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digby 1/08/2013 10:00:00 AM

 
GOP signaling weakness

by digby

I hope Greg Sargent is right about this:

It’s true that Boehner insists above that Republicans won’t back down from the demand that spending get cut by the same amount as the debt ceiling rises. But all that really means is that they will use the size of the debt ceiling hike as a metric to set the amount of their spending cut demand — not that the threat of default will be used to extract those cuts. Remember, GOP leaders well know that if they do that, the entire business community will join with Obama and Democrats to tell them to back off or take the blame for cratering the economy, leaving Republicans further isolated. So Boehner is letting it be known that Republicans don’t see the debt ceiling as their primary leverage point in the battle to come.

Boehner does this by threatening to only agree to “monthly” debt ceiling hikes. But this should be read, if anything, as a sign of weakness. It’s essentially a concession that the debt limit has to be raised; Boehner is merely threatening to drag his feet as he allows the inevitable to happen. But it’s just nonsense. The business community is not going to go for such a course of action, to put it mildly. And it risks dragging the country through monthly threats of default, a terrible thing to inflict on the American people.

Ultimately, what this highlights is the utter incoherence of the GOP position on the debt ceiling. Republican leaders know they have to raise the debt limit — they know the threat not to do this isn’t credible, and they need to signal to the business community that they don’t view this option seriously — yet they want to continue to use it as leverage to get what they want, anyway. Hence Boehner’s above dance. And Boehner isn’t the only one: On Face the Nation yesterday, when Mitch McConnell was asked directly whether Republicans would really withhold support for a debt ceiling hike if it weren’t paid for by spending cuts of equivalent size, he repeatedly refused to answer.

Boehner’s and McConnell’s equivocations will only embolden the White House and Democrats to stick with their strategy of refusing to negotiate over the debt ceiling, and treating the Republicans’ refusal to commit to raising it up front as their problem, and their problem only.

It sure sounds like Boehner and McConnell are hedging to me. If they are,then that means any more "offers" from the Democrats to make a "big deal" are offers the Democrats want to make, not ones they have to make.

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digby 1/08/2013 09:30:00 AM

 
Biting the hand that feeds

by David Atkins

When the history books are all written, this may turn out to be most darkly comedic episode of our new Gilded Age.

Fresh from paying back a $182 billion bailout, the American International Group Inc. has been running a nationwide advertising campaign with the tagline “Thank you America.”

Behind the scenes, the restored insurance company is weighing whether to tell the government agencies that rescued it during the financial crisis: thanks, but you cheated our shareholders.

The board of A.I.G. will meet on Wednesday to consider joining a $25 billion shareholder lawsuit against the government, court records show. The lawsuit does not argue that government help was not needed. It contends that the onerous nature of the rescue — the taking of what became a 92 percent stake in the company, the deal’s high interest rates and the funneling of billions to the insurer’s Wall Street clients — deprived shareholders of tens of billions of dollars and violated the Fifth Amendment, which prohibits the taking of private property for “public use, without just compensation.”

...

Some government officials are already upset with the company for even seriously entertaining the lawsuit, people briefed on the matter said. The people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, noted that without the bailout, A.I.G. shareholders would have fared far worse in bankruptcy.

“On the one hand, from a corporate governance perspective, it appears they’re being extra cautious and careful,” said Frank Partnoy, a former banker who is now a professor of law and finance at the University of San Diego School of Law. “On the other hand, it’s a slap in the face to the taxpayer and the government.”

Most of AIG's executives, particularly Joe Cassano and everyone in his division, are extremely fortunate not to be languishing in prison right now. That AIG's creditors are receiving even a dime is also fortuitous.

What's most appalling about all of this is the fact that everyone is behaving as modern capitalism demands. AIG "innovated" financial products to meet shareholder expectations of quarterly profits as the market demanded. When those products went belly up, the government couldn't let AIG go bankrupt without destroying the entire economy. With AIG back on its feet due entirely to government largesse, the faceless, soulless corporation is once again doing its job in attempting to maximize value to its shareholders.

Everything is working exactly as the system is designed to, actually. And it will keep working this way until we overthrow it in favor of a new system that doesn't prioritize short-term profit over long-term stability, corporate persons over real persons, and shareholder return over wage growth.


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thereisnospoon 1/08/2013 07:30:00 AM

Monday, January 07, 2013

 
If only everyone were armed

by digby

This wouldn't happen. Oh, wait:

A gun went off inside a Kitsap County store after a man dropped it, but no one was injured.

The Kitsap Sun reports that a 58-year-old Poulsbo man told deputies he had removed the .38-caliber, two-shot Derringer pistol from a holster on his belt before he entered the Cost Plus World Market in Silverdale on Saturday afternoon.

He put the gun in a coat pocket, but when he was in the middle of the store, he bent over — and the pistol fell out and discharged.

Sheriff's spokesman Scott Wilson says there were about 35 customers and workers inside, and staff used the public address system to tell everyone to evacuate.

I can't figure out why somebody wasn't quick enough to pull out his own gun and drill the guy on the spot. Isn't that how it's supposed to work?


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digby 1/07/2013 06:00:00 PM

 
It's not just the Republicans we have to worry about

by digby

Elias Isquith has a good piece up today about how alone liberals are in this fight for reality. Even among other self-identified members of the left side of political spectrum:

Greg Sargent has a report on the White House’s “no negotiation” mantra when it comes to the debt ceiling that I think is supposed to be reassuring to liberals; but it only reminds me how very, very alone we* really are:

Fortunately, it’s becoming clearer that the White House and Democrats really don’t intend to play along. Chuck Schumer reiterated today that Dems will not negotiate around the debt ceiling. Harry Reid has privately told Obama that he will support it if the president utilizes a way to get around the debt ceiling that doesn’t involve Congress. While the President is unlikely to opt for that route, the support for it among Dems suggests they are in no mood to see any concessions made in response to GOP debt ceiling hostage taking.

Isquith goes on to kindly hat tip my absurdly obsessive attention to this subject over the past year and a half, showing just how unbelievable these claims are in light of the history everyone seems to ignore:

It bears repeating that, in 2011, Barack Obama chose to embroil his country in a debt-ceiling showdown. Here’s the smoking gun of a report, seemingly little-remembered by much of the pro-Obama Left (a group among which I’d ultimately count myself) and yet utterly essential toward understanding how we got here:

“I’m the President of the United States,” Obama told Boehner [in 2011]. “You’re the Speaker of the House. We’re the two most responsible leaders right now.” And so they began to talk about the truly epic possibility of using the threat, the genuine danger of default, to freeze out their respective extremists and make the kind of historic deal that no one really thought possible anymore — bigger than when Reagan and Tip O’Neill overhauled the tax code in 1986 or when Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich passed welfare reform a decade later. It would include deeper cuts in spending, the elimination of all kinds of tax loopholes and lower income tax rates for all. “Come on, you and I,” Boehner admitted telling Obama. “Let’s lock arms, and we’ll jump out of the boat together.”

My point is not to re-litigate the summer of 2011 — easily the nadir of the Obama Presidency — but rather to emphasize that this atmosphere of fear and anxiety that’s currently permeating through the liberal sphere is unnecessary. There never was a situation in which Obama had to negotiate over the debt ceiling; and there won’t be one now. He only negotiated before because he wanted to.

Read the whole thing, please. Unless people recognize this simple fact, the next round of negotiations are not going to work. It's up to the progressive coalition of unions, liberal activists and progressive politicians to understand that they are being triangulated against or we're going to hit a wall and this deal will happen.

Roger Hickey at campaign for America's Future wrote a good cris de coeur today that should get your blood pumping. We're all tired of this nonsense, I know. But both parties are hoping they can wear us down so they can pass some awful package of cuts to vital programs (and possibly some phony "tax reform")under the guise of yet another "crisis." It's important that we don't give up. After all, we've been winning. So far.


Update: Krugman. Cutting is counter-productive. But you knew that.

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digby 1/07/2013 04:30:00 PM

 
QOTD: James Dobson

by David Atkins

Focus on the Family leader and hatemonger James Dobson:

Now let me share my heart with you. I'm sure many of you are discouraged in the aftermath of the National Elections, especially in view of the moral and spiritual issues that took such a beating on November 6th. Nearly everything I have stood for these past 35 years went down to defeat.

And good riddance. Progressives may feel under constant assault on the economic and civil liberties fronts, and rightly so. But on social issues we're winning hands down and overwhelmingly, relegating the archaic and hateful views of the James Dobsons of the world to the dustbin of history where they belong. It's hard to see why anyone would dedicate their life to standing athwart history yelling "stop!" and trying to keep persecuted minorities in their place. But hey, if they want to do that to the eternal shame of their descendants, so be it. The most fitting fate for James Dobson is to die irrelevant and despised by history insofar as he is remembered at all.

Of course, those victories are easier won: two gay people getting married threatens a lot of bigots and powerful religious organizations, but the real big money boys don't care much so long as they keep getting their tax cuts. Still, it's important to celebrate where celebrations are due.

Not that regression isn't possible. It certainly is. For all its faults, the Roman Empire was a far more socially progressive place than the Dark Ages that followed. An appreciation for the history of social regression in the wake of the collapse of empires and civilizations is part of why I don't buy into devolutionary, local-control anti-state progressivism. It never ends well.


h/tSteveningen



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thereisnospoon 1/07/2013 03:03:00 PM