New Rule

I officially have the best wife, because we are going out to dinner tonight and then to see Bill Maher at the for our two-year wedding anniversary. Real Time is one of the sole reasons that I maintain my HBO subscription, so needless to say I am very excited to see his standup tonight.

And I'm similarly excited about two years of marriage with an incredible woman. Happy anniversary, baby.

Thirty Five Percent

Highest corporate tax rate in the world! It's a favorite Republican/teabagger talking point:

Bachmann also said there’s a business bubble because the U.S. has the “highest corporate income tax rate in the world.”

It is the tax code she blames for the “business bubble.” She said, “We need to get rid of the blood-sucking tax code. It’s got to go, just scrap the current tax code,” adding that it is “a weapon of mass destruction.”

Only that it's a complete red herring:

BANK OF AMERICA: In 2009, Bank of America didn’t pay a single penny in federal income taxes, exploiting the tax code so as to avoid paying its fair share. The same year, the mega-bank’s top executives received pay “ranging from $6 million to nearly $30 million.” 

BOEING: Despite receiving billions of dollars from the federal government every single year in taxpayer subsidies from the U.S. government, Boeing didn’t “pay a dime of U.S. federal corporate income taxes” between 2008 and 2010. 

CITIGROUP: Citigroup’s deferred income taxes for the third quarter of 2010 amounted to a grand total of $0.00. At the same time, Citigroup has continued to pay its staff lavishly. “John Havens, the head of Citigroup’s investment bank, is expected to be the bank’s highest paid executive for the second year in a row, with a compensation package worth $9.5 million.” 

EXXON-MOBIL: The oil giant uses offshore subsidiaries in the Caribbean to avoid paying taxes in the United States. Although Exxon-Mobil paid $15 billion in taxes in 2009, not a penny of those taxes went to the American Treasury. Meanwhile the total compensation of Exxon-Mobil’s CEO the same year was over $29,000,000 

GENERAL ELECTRIC: In 2009, General Electric — the world’s largest corporation — filed more than 7,000 tax returns and still paid nothing to U.S. government. They managed to do this by a tax code that essentially subsidizes companies for losing profits and allows them to set up tax havens overseas.  

WELLS FARGO: Despite being the fourth largest bank in the country, Wells Fargo was able to escape paying federal taxes by writing all of its losses off after its acquisition of Wachovia. Yet in 2009 the chief executive of Wells Fargo also saw his compensation “more than double” as he earned “a salary of $5.6 million paid in cash and stock and stock awards of more than $13 million.”

Ironically, get this - I agree with Bachmann to some extent. The US corporate tax code does need to be scrapped/reformed, because it's precisely the cause of this insanity. Except in Bachmann's batshit insanity happy fun time land, she thinks the corporate tax code needs to be abolished because it is too punitive, whereas back in the reality-based world, it needs to be reformed so that it actually compels corporations to pay taxes.

Remember this from the Mother Jones story?

Individuals have been shouldering the brunt of US tax revenue for years, and in the current economic recession, Republicans are calling for corporate tax cuts and 'shared sacrifice' (translation: fucking over the middle class and poor people so businesses and the super rich can maintain their homes in the Hamptons). And American businesses are doing just fine:

The nation’s workers may be struggling, but American companies just had their best quarter ever.

American businesses earned profits at an annual rate of $1.659 trillion in the third quarter, according to a Commerce Department report released Tuesday. That is the highest figure recorded since the government began keeping track over 60 years ago, at least in nominal or noninflation-adjusted terms

[...]

Corporate profits have been doing extremely well for a while. Since their cyclical low in the fourth quarter of 2008, profits have grown for seven consecutive quarters, at some of the fastest rates in history. As a share of gross domestic product, corporate profits also have been increasing, and they now represent 11.2 percent of total output. That is the highest share since the fourth quarter of 2006, when they accounted for 11.7 percent of output.

I know this makes me a Crazy and Unserious Person and a socialist, but it's long overdue that they start paying their fair share.

As American as a Preventable Heart Attack

Our new objectively pro-pollution Republican controlled House:

The Southern California lawmaker will endorse a draft bill to stymie climate rules from Energy and Commerce Chairman Fred Upton (R-MI) “due to her long-standing concerns regarding the role of the EPA and the overly burdensome California standards,” her office told Politico. Upton and Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) on Wednesday unveiled the draft bill, which would repeal the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act and hamstring California’s authority to issue stricter vehicle emission standards than the federal government.

Latest studies (h/t Yglesias):

Air pollution triggers more heart attacks than using cocaine and poses as high a risk of sparking a heart attack as alcohol, coffee and physical exertion, scientists said on Thursday. Sex, anger, marijuana use and chest or respiratory infections and can also trigger heart attacks to different extents, the researchers said, but air pollution, particularly in heavy traffic, is the major culprit. The findings, published in The Lancet journal, suggest population-wide factors like polluted air should be taken more seriously when looking at heart risks, and should be put into context beside higher but relatively rarer risks like drug use. Tim Nawrot of Hasselt University in Belgium, who led the study, said he hoped his findings would also encourage doctors to think more often about population level risks.

But man does not create pollution, only Jesus can do that, there is unrest in the Middle East and oil prices are rising, so we need to abolish the EPA and expand offshore drilling and double down on fossil fuels. And on a related note, DougJ:

You know the drill: global warming isn’t happening, if it is happening then it’s not caused by human behavior, if it is caused by human behavior then we can’t do anything about it, if it is caused by human behavior and we can do something about it, then that something is too expensive, if it is caused by human behavior and we can do something about it that is not too expensive, then that something is not what Democrats are proposing. And Al Gore is fat, he flies too much, look at his electricity bill, and sometimes when he goes somewhere it snows there, which is very ironic.

And I will also add that Amurikans should have the freedom to have heart attacks from ingesting excessive if they so choose. We don't need the federal gubmint gettin' in our way and tellin' us what ta' breathe and what not ter breathe, dadgummit.

When The Banks Hate Something

It means you should love it:

The nation's largest banks haven't yet seen a proposal that is designed to help resolve mortgage-servicing errors that affected troubled borrowers. But industry executives are bristling at the administration's new approach, disagreeing that principal reductions will help borrowers and, in turn, the broader housing market.

Though a unified settlement is uncertain and would have to appease regulators, banks and state attorneys general, some officials are pushing for banks to pay more than $20 billion in civil fines or to fund a comparable amount of loan modifications for distressed borrowers.

[...]

Any settlement that includes loan write-downs would require banks such as Bank of America Corp., Wells Fargo & Co. and J.P. Morgan Chase Co. to complete modifications within one year from the settlement's date, said people familiar with the matter. Banks could face additional fines if they don't comply with the terms of the settlement, and they would have to hire independent auditors to provide monthly updates on their progress and compliance with the terms.

And when bank executives say that principal reductions won't help borrowers or the broader housing market, it means that principal reductions will immensely benefit both borrowers and the broader housing market. Principal values are one of the primary functions of a monthly mortgage payment, and one of the significant reasons that the housing market is so distressed is that principal values remain at housing-bubble levels, while actual housing values have plummeted. So these unnamed executives are just lying and covering their own asses. In my slightly uninformed opinion, mass principal reductions across the board (without any regard for whether or not borrowers were unscrupulous or irresponsible) would have the single greatest economic benefit on the housing market. Distressed homeowners would be able to afford their payments again, folks could actually sell their damned homes and be free to move about the country (which is a net benefit for the labor force), and we would actually be doing something proactive about the broken housing market, rather than taking the inexplicable current policy of "wait and see." 


These poor banksters are just getting their fee-fees in a bind because principal reductions would require some sort of adverse financial impact on the bank itself, and none of these delicate flowers wants to be called a 'zero' in the bank cafeteria as a result. $20 billion is also a drop in the bucket and a laughable figure compared to the magnitude of the overall mortgage/foreclosure problem ($744 billion as quoted by the bankster in the article). There is also this:

Given the banks' track record in reworking loans, some attorneys who represent borrowers in foreclosure question whether the administration's proposal could work. "Requiring banks to eat the loss, and at the same time allowing them to administer the program, is a recipe for a program that will not do anything except raise people's expectations and frustrate them," said Gloria Einstein, an attorney at Jacksonville Legal Aid Inc. She said an independent third party should administer the program.

The administration is just colossally inept and stupid if they honestly allow the banks to administer this program. It would signify that they have learned absolutely nothing from the disaster that is HAMP. But given the nature of how any change in the American political system is always incremental and arduously slow, this is a heartening step in the right direction. Nothing will be accomplished until the banks are forced to have a stake in unwinding the mortgage/foreclosure disaster, and until then, the economic recovery will continue to be stifled. 

Whistling Dixie

Via Digby, I officially know everything I need to know about South Carolina:

ROCK HILL, S.C. — As Sarah Palin wonders whether to run for president, she might want to talk to people in places such as South Carolina.

At a recent gathering in South Carolina, the site of a crucial early presidential primary next year, party activists said the former Alaska governor didn't have the experience, the knowledge of issues or the ability to get beyond folksy slang and bumper-sticker generalities that they think is needed to win and govern.

Many are shopping for someone else. They're looking at Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., for example, and seeing what they call a smarter, more experienced candidate who's equally as conservative.

"Sarah Palin with a brain," said Gail Moore, a Republican from Columbia.

Never underestimate the importance of the Stupid demographic/vote. 2012 sure is going to be an interesting year.

Credit Where Credit Is Due

MTP is booking the AFL-CIO president this Sunday:

NBC’s Meet the Press today booked AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka for Sunday. We applaud NBC’s decision and encourage the other networks (ABC, CBS, Fox News, and CNN) to also give a voice to working people.

And from the comments at ThinkProgress, I think this is especially poignant:

We can only hope that the corporate media shows as much enthusiasm for the union protesters and their supporters as they did for the teabaggers.

That's almost an apt comparison, at least on the surface. I guarantee that the Wisconsin protestors won't receive nearly as deferent or constant coverage as the teabaggers did, but what's worth noting here is the difference in the substance of their protests. The teabaggers are a group of educated, wealthy, old educated white males that rail and vomit demonstrably false screeds about the tyranny of record levels of federal taxation and free healthcare and are clearly manipulated as ignorant pawns by their corporate handlers since many of Obama's policies would immensely benefit them directly.

The Wisconsin protesters, on the other hand, are fighting against what is an obvious assault on their rights. Despite having offered up economic concessions that Gov. Walker supposedly seeks to help aid the state budget deficit, he is unrelenting and continues to demand that they relinquish their right to collectively bargain:

But Mr. Walker isn’t interested in making a deal. Partly that’s because he doesn’t want to share the sacrifice: even as he proclaims that Wisconsin faces a terrible fiscal crisis, he has been pushing through tax cuts that make the deficit worse. Mainly, however, he has made it clear that rather than bargaining with workers, he wants to end workers’ ability to bargain.

Why bust the unions? As I said, it has nothing to do with helping Wisconsin deal with its current fiscal crisis. Nor is it likely to help the state’s budget prospects even in the long run: contrary to what you may have heard, public-sector workers in Wisconsin and elsewhere are paid somewhat less than private-sector workers with comparable qualifications, so there’s not much room for further pay squeezes.

So it’s not about the budget; it’s about the power.

I will let you be the judge if you think the media will actually report on these differences, or give the Wisconsin workers even the modicum of coverage of the fap job that they gave the teabaggers week after week.

So to summarize: I started this post with the intent of giving NBC and the media-at-large credit for booking a union leader on Meet the Press, and then spent the rest of the post deriding the media anyway. 

Both Sides Do It - Revisited

I am sure that this outburst has nothing to do with the fact that the GOP and Fox News have spent the last two years painting Obama as the Great Black Satan coming to burn America to the ground and establish the Fourth Reich:

An audience member at a town hall hosted by Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) on Tuesday asked the Tea Party congressman who was going to shoot President Barack Obama.

The unidentified town hall attendee's question got a big laugh from the audience, reports Blake Aued of the Athens Banner-Herald.

But Broun didn't exactly condemn the remark, according to the newspaper report.

"The thing is, I know there's a lot of frustration with this president. We're going to have an election next year," Broun said in response to the question. "Hopefully, we'll elect somebody that's going to be a conservative, limited-government president that will take a smaller, who will sign a bill to repeal and replace Obamacare."

I guess it's time to stop using the term 'job-killing' again and hold hands during the State of the Union.


In an update since TPM's original post, it's now been reported that Rep. Broun joined in on the laughter from the audience when the question was first posed:

Mark Farmer of Winterville, Georgia went to the meeting on Tuesday to ask a question about Social Security reform, and said in an e-mail to TPM he was "shocked by the first question and disgusted by the audience response."

"I was gravely disappointed in the response of a U.S. Congressman who also laughed and then made no effort to correct the questioner on what constitutes proper behavior or to in any way distance himself from such hate filled language," Farmer wrote.

But Kos wrote a book comparing right-wing extremists to the Taliban and says fuck a lot, so it all balances out.

When They Say Jump

Dems say 'how high?'

WASHINGTON - Democratic leadership and Appropriations Committee staffers are meeting Thursday afternoon to find ways to cut social spending from the remainder of the fiscal year 2011 budget, a Senate Democratic aide told HuffPost. The object of the gathering is to identify cuts that will satisfy House Republicans' demands for drastic spending reductions despite the flagging economy.

[...]

That the two parties are now arguing merely over how quickly to make cuts indicates that their positions may be drawing close enough to avoid a government shutdown - without the GOP giving much up yet.

[...]

Senate Democrats are hoping that by offering the first concession, House GOPers will either respond in kind or take the blame for a shutdown. Yet each Democratic negotiating tactic has led to additional cuts. As the talks drag on, Republicans get closer and closer to their full goal. 

Here's a hint for the Democrats, since apparently they really have spent the last 2 years with their heads firmly implanted up their asses: when you make the first concession (or any concession for that matter) to Republicans, they do not respond 'in kind' or take the blame for anything. They tell you to go fuck yourselves, that your concessions are not enough, that you are the source of all that is soulless and wrong with this world and this country, and that it is your goddamn fault for not being flexible enough and meeting their every demand and then some. You can't even call this negotiating anymore, because negotiating assumes that both parties end up with something. At this point, the Dems are just giving up everything and getting nothing in return. And you can very well bet that they will be the scapegoats for the resulting government shutdown in the media and elsewhere for not sufficiently bending to the GOP's draconian cuts, rather than the other way around.

This Week In Media Failures

Me, about a week ago:

It is much more sexy and interesting and flashy to cover the BIG POLITICAL STORY of the latest from Sarah Palin's Facebook or Twittertwat account, midwest/northeast snow storms, and falling over themselves to book Republicans on Sunday news shows, because never in our lives has hearing weekly from theloser of a presidential election been so important or popular.

Today:

The Wisconsin standoff is the most important domestic political story in the country right now, and as many commentators at those same networks have pointed out, both sides view this battle as ground zero in a national war that may determine the fate of organized labor in America.

But labor officials are beginning to fear that none of them will be invited on this weekend to give voice to the labor point of view. This, even as tough-talking anti-union governor Chris Christie is set to do a major appearance on CBS on Sunday.

One AFL-CIO official tells me that reps for the AFL-CIO and other unions reached out to all the big three network shows -- ABC's This Week, NBC's Meet the Press, and CBS' Face the Nation -- to ask if they would invite on any labor officials. Thus far the answer has been cool to indifferent, the official says.

No labor officials have yet been booked to appear. Carin Pratt, the executive producer of CBS's Face the Nation -- which is hosing Christie -- seemed to suggest as much in an email. "We are doing Gov. Christie for part of the show, with probably a segment on Libya," she said. "We're not only talking about labor."

[...]

Not only is he appearing on Face the Nation, but a huge, 6600-word profile of Christie is set to appear in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine describing him as a "Republican superstar." 

Weird. The very future of organized labor is being waged in a high-profile battle in Wisconsin, with solidarity rallies planned nationwide, and the big line-up on the major media shows this Sunday are...anti-union Republican governors. And even the liberal New York Times is lining up to fellate him in their Sunday pages too. It sure is good we have such a hardcore, objective, watchdog press.

And next up, the Affordable Care Act:

Ezra Klein explains why this is significant (other than the obvious):

I'm sympathetic to the argument that pro-ACA rulings simply ratify the status quo and are thus not newsworthy. But we also have to be mindful of the fact that most Americans don't follow this stuff closely, and if all they see are news stories about the minority of judges who have ruled against the individual mandate, they're quite likely to think that the mandate has actually been ruled unconstitutional. I think that's part of why we're seeing polls showing 22 percent of Americans think the ACA has already been repealed.

And there is your media that is so damned liberal that we need to have a specialty right-wing batshit channel free of socialist conspiracy theories and coverage that is vastly unfair to the right.

The Budget 'Debate'

These charts have been flying around the internets today.

What these charts clearly show is that we can not afford to raise taxes on the rich under any circumstances, because our wealthy oligarchs are Taxed Enough Already, and our delicate corporations pay among the highest marginal tax rate in the developed world (thirty-five percent! Except that it isn't) that they struggle to compete internationally. If we raise taxes on even the top 1% of income earners or corporations, it will destroy our economic growth and shackle the arms of our plutocrat overlords and inhibit their ability  to trickle down all over us and lift us out of the depths of our third world status.

We are such a stupid fucking country. We have income disparity rivaling that of a banana republic, and all the dipshits in DC and their BFFs in the media focus their sole attention on spending cuts on a sliver of the federal budget and generally refusing to raise revenues from the few people in this country who could actually afford to pay more or do a goddamn thing to solve the problem. It's way easier to fuck the poor and the middle class, because they don't have lobbyists or bottomless corporate coffers that service your re-election campaign year after year. And there's a reason for that - our political and media class all have a vested interest in protecting the status quo, because they benefit immensely from it. This is not a representative democracy. John Cole touched on this issue today:

You would never know it given the standards of debate set by our media shills, third way corporate sell-out blue-dog Democrats, and Republicans, but amazingly, over 60% of the public doesn’t want weaker unions. Close to 60% of the public doesn’t want the EPA gutted and doesn’t want to drink and breathe toxic water and air. Over 60% of the public thinks we should raise taxes on the rich. Large percentages favored regulating Wall Street. Huge majorities supported allowing gays and lesbians to serve in the military, 75% of the public is pro-choice to some extent, and over 65% of the country supported a public option.

And you can go on and on and on with this stuff. Consistently, when asked, right wing positions on issues are summarily rejected by large percentages of the population. Yet we are constantly only given choices that range from center right to far right, and anyone who suggests any of the things the public actually want is declared a crazy lefty.

The entire country was howling over Wall Street's excess and complicity in the financial crisis, but it took over two years to get any sort of financial regulation/reform in place, and it was meager and watered down and did absolutely nothing to prevent another crisis from occurring (it did not end Too Big to Fail). An enormous majority thinks the rich ought to pay more in taxes, and Congress literally shelves all other legislation in order to pass tax cuts for the rich. The nation supports repealing Don't Ask Don't Tell, and it takes over two years and a ridiculous amount of hand-wringing to get it passed.


There's a very well written story that goes along with these graphs that focuses on how the decline of unions over the last three decades have contributed to the current fucked up-edness of our income disparity. Here's the money quote:

This didn't all happen thanks to a sinister 30-year plan hatched in a smoke-filled room, and it can't be reined in merely by exposing it to the light. It's a story about power. It's about the loss of a countervailing power robust enough to stand up to the influence of business interests and the rich on equal terms. With that gone, the response to every new crisis and every new change in the economic landscape has inevitably pointed in the same direction. And after three decades, the cumulative effect of all those individual responses is an economy focused almost exclusively on the demands of business and finance. In theory, that's supposed to produce rapid economic growth that serves us all, and 30 years of free-market evangelism have convinced nearly everyone—even middle-class voters who keep getting the short end of the economic stick—that the policy preferences of the business community are good for everyone. But in practice, the benefits have gone almost entirely to the very wealthy.

That's right middle America - corporate power and the super rich are fucking you at every turn and laughing all the way to the bank. But keep working hard and voting Republican and maybe in another 30 years, the free market will grant you the privilege to be one of them. And speaking of 30 years...if it took this long for things to get this bad, just think of how long it will take to even begin to make necessary repairs.

In Times of Conflict, All For-Profit Media Repeats the Ruling Party's Information

Therefore all for-profit media becomes state run:

On January 27, Raymond Davis, a former U.S. Special Forces soldier, shot and killed two Pakistani citizens in that nation's second-largest city, Lahore, using a semi-automatic Glock pistol.  Davis claims he acted in self-defense when they attacked his car to rob him -- both of the dead were armed and had lengthy records of petty crimes -- but each was shot five times, and one was killed after Davis was safely back in his car and the victim was fleeing.  After shooting the two dead, Davis calmly photographed their bodies and then called other Americans stationed in Pakistan (likely CIA officers) for assistance; one of the Americans' Land Rovers dispatched to help Davis struck and killed a Pakistani motorcyclist while speeding to the scene.  The Pakistani wife of one of Davis' victims then committed suicide by swallowing rat poison, saying on her deathbed that she had serious doubts that Davis would be held accountable.

That's just the background. The crux of the issue comes from the Guardian piece within Greenwald's post:

The American who shot dead two men in Lahore, triggering a diplomatic crisis between Pakistan and the US, is a CIA agent who was on assignment at the time. . . . Based on interviews in the US and Pakistan, the Guardian can confirm that the 36-year-old former special forces soldier is employed by the CIA. "It's beyond a shadow of a doubt," said a senior Pakistani intelligence official. . . . He served in the US special forces for 10 years before leaving in 2003 to become a security contractor. A senior Pakistani official said he believed Davis had worked with Xe, the firm formerly known as Blackwater.

[...]

A number of US media outlets learned about Davis's CIA role but have kept it under wraps at the request of the Obama administration.

The New York Times laughably explained their sycophantic deference to the Obama administration under their favorite, specious "lives would be lost" strawman. In case you haven't been paying attention, that is the line that the Obama administration faithfully trots out any time their foreign policy is challenged in even the most innocuous ways. This was on display as top ranking administration official after official collectively lost their shit over Wikileaks' exposure of just how fucked up and useless our endless wars in the Middle East have become. Greenwald notes further in a related post that this isn't the first time that the New York Times has played 'Mother May I?' with the US Government before publishing a newsworthy story:

In his lengthy recent article on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, NYT Executive Editor Bill Keller tried to show how independent his newspaper is by boasting that they published their story of the Bush NSA program even though he has "vivid memories of sitting in the Oval Office as President George W. Bush tried to persuade [him] and the paper's publisher to withhold the eavesdropping story"; Keller neglected to mention that the paper learned about the illegal program in mid-2004, but followed Bush's orders to conceal it from the public for over a year -- until after Bush was safely re-elected.

This issue cuts far deeper than the normal line of how the media pisses its pants over appearing liberally biased and goes out of its way to plug Republican talking points, how they routinely ignore the real issues facing America in favor of Sarah Palin's Twittertwats or the latest warmed over DC conventional wisdom bull shit. 

The latest example of all of these things being the way the DC media falls all over itself to cover deficits, reducing federal spending, and promoting austerity as the solution to all of our fiscal problems. Meanwhile, unemployment continues to hover at 9%, economic growth is anemic, and the reams of historical and empirical data and sound economic theory on how government should run deficits during a recession and should spend more are summarily ignored and given no voice. Because Republicans disagree with economics because it is as elitist as arugula and dijon mustard, and deficits only matter when a Democrat is in the White House. We sure as hell didn't hear anything about deficits as they were exploded under the Bush administration through trillions of dollars in tax cuts for the wealthy, two open-ended wars that were among the first in American history to be funded by borrowing, and an unfunded Medicare prescription giveaway to seniors. But now that a Democrat is elected and something must be done about the anemic, regressive economic situation following eight years of Republican policies, the middle class and the poor must tighten their belts because we can not afford Social Security or Medicare and we must reduce federal spending at all costs because deficits threaten our very existence. 

The bottom line is that we do not have a functioning media, but rather a pathetic facade of what has now become an effectively state-run establishment that exists for its own ego, profits, and endless quest to retain its stature among the American elite. I think that's the most telling part of the Bill Keller quote above. He clearly gets a giant chubby remembering his 'vivid memories' of sitting in the Oval Office and having President Bush beg and implore him not to run a piece that would damage his administration. The leader of the free world! Begging me! Me! Bill Keller! IN THE OVAL OFFICE OMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGTHISISSOTOTALLYAWESOME! But try telling someone that the American media is state-run, and you will be labeled a Crazy and Unserious Person and told that this is the Greatest Country on Earth and that our First Amendment rights grant us freedom of the press. But what other conclusion can you feasibly draw when we have prominent media outlets that seek permission before running stories from the very elected officials whom they are supposed to hold accountable? It kind of makes you wonder what other important information our Free Press is withholding at the behest of our elected officials.

(Post title and lede lifted from Anti-Flag's Anatomy of Your Enemy)

The Financial Crisis and Middle Class Retirement

It's ironic to read a piece like this in the Wall Street Journal, since their editorial page routinely fluffs the myopic free market obsession that helped create this mess:

The median household headed by a person aged 60 to 62 with a 401(k) account has less than one-quarter of what is needed in that account to maintain its standard of living in retirement, according to data compiled by the Federal Reserve and analyzed by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College for The Wall Street Journal. Even counting Social Security and any pensions or other savings, most 401(k) participants appear to have insufficient savings. Data from other sources also show big gaps between savings and what people need, and the financial crisis has made things worse.

[...]

"Inevitably, we find that, for the average person, there is not enough there," says financial adviser Paul Merritt of NTrust Wealth Management in Virginia Beach, Va., who has found himself advising many retirement-age people with too little savings. "The discussion turns out to be: What kind of part-time work do you want to do after you retire?" He has clients contemplating part-time work into their 70s, he says.

I think the clear solution here would be to slash Social Security benefits that threaten the very fiscal stability of our fragile democracy plutocracy, and cut marginal tax rates on the top 2% of income earners while simultaneously repealing the capital gains tax altogether. Only with the socialistic, autocratic federal government out of the way can the invisible hand and free market Jesus allow the benefits of the reduced tax revenues of our wealthy lords and masters to trickle down and solve the looming retirement crisis through new jobs with double the previous salaries/benefits.

Bitter sarcasm aside, it might be funny if so many in our government weren't seeking to do exactly that. We've already extended tax cuts for the richest 2% of income earners, and now Congress (and President Obama, in some cases) seeks to reduce the deficit by seeking draconian austerity measures and otherwise generally exempting our single largest source of federal discretionary spending: defense. Twenty percent of federal spending is wasted on our bloated, obsolete defense budget that seeks to re-fight the World and Cold wars, but our Very Serious political class seeks token cuts that will have no viable fiscal impact, but will fuck the poor instead. It's utter bull shit. This fits right into what I wrote previously about how Republicans (and some Democrats) would never run a business the way that they run government. If your business is over leveraged to the hilt and you're seeking for ways to free up cash and reduce your debt, you don't go looking for savings in cutting coffee service to rank and file employees while ignoring the millions that you spend annually on private jets and other shit you don't need.


But back to the matter at hand of how the free market has blessed our ability to not work until we all look like the Crypt Keeper:

The difficulties have been worsened by the 2007-2009 financial crisis. Since the housing and financial markets began to collapse, about 39% of all Americans have been foreclosed upon, unemployed, underwater on a mortgage or behind more than two months on a mortgage, says Michael Hurd, director of the Rand Corporation's Center for the Study of Aging.

In 2008, when he was 59, John Mastej figured he was on track to retire in his early 60s. He and his wife both were working, with 401(k) plans. Counting all their savings, they had close to $200,000. Mr. Mastej was putting 20% of his salary into his 401(k).

The financial collapse cut their savings in half and left Mr. Mastej out of work for two years, with no 401(k) contributions. He had to dip into other savings and use up an inheritance to pay the mortgage. He found a new job in a specialty food store, but it paid much less than his old one in a plastics factory.

If you read the entire article, it's full of other similar tales of woe where basically none of the individuals interviewed can afford to retire any longer and are now looking at an additional 5 - 15 years in the workforce to compensate (and if history is any guide, 5-15 years is plenty of time for another crisis/bubble to foment itself). This has real implications: limiting the upward mobility or ability to retire of those in the twilight of their careers has a cascading effect on those below them in the labor force. If workers aren't able to retire, then logic suggests that those below them are unable to get promoted or succeed their vacancies.


So now with 123 million either foreclosed upon, out of work, underwater/behind on their mortgage, where are the prosecutions? This is a crazy idea, I know, but I think that if those individuals found to be criminally liable for their roles in the financial crisis were indicted, convicted, and thrown in federal prison, banksters might be a lot less likely to pull this shit again in the future. 


Update - John Cole notes the following about the same story:

It’s important to keep in mind that this is the model for the future foisted upon us by our Galtian overlords (who fight any attempts to regulate the looting on Wall Street), and the austerity mobs are busy making sure that the pension you were promised is hatcheted and your social security is whittled away because we can’t afford it after lavishing all the social security proceeds on the rich in the form of the Bush and Obama tax cuts. But don’t worry, you will also have your collective bargaining rights stripped away, removing the last upward pressure on wages, and with Medicare rate increases you’ll have the peace of mind to know that you are contributing more to your health care.

How does it feel being fisted by the Invisible Hand, America?

Confirmation of What We Already Know

Fox is a propaganda machine and de facto PR mouthpiece for the Republican party:

A former Fox News employee who recently agreed to talk with Media Matters confirmed what critics have been saying for years about Murdoch’s cable channel. Namely, that Fox News is run as a purely partisan operation, virtually every news story is actively spun by the staff, its primary goal is to prop up Republicans and knock down Democrats, and that staffers at Fox News routinely operate without the slightest regard for fairness or fact checking.   

“It is their M.O. to undermine the administration and to undermine Democrats,” says the source. “They’re a propaganda outfit but they call themselves news.”

[...]

The source continues: “I don’t think people understand that it’s an organization that’s built and functions by intimidation and bullying, and its goal is to prop up and support Republicans and the GOP and to knock down Democrats. People tend think that stuff that’s on TV is real, especially under the guise of news. You’d think that people would wise up, but they don’t.”

This of course, is patently obvious to anyone with a pulse or anyone that doesn't live in a conservative fabrication of reality that seeks to find scandal and conspiracy around every corner, and deems innocuous things like Michelle Obama's push to get American kids off of their fat asses for an hour a day as a Stalinistic government overreach of the most egregious sort. 

It doesn't take much effort to reveal the extent to which how vitriolic and ideological is Fox's programming. One only need to watch Jon Stewart for less than a week, perhaps even a single episode, to witness a multitude of incidents in which Fox routinely and deliberately ignores facts, creates controversy out of the most benign occurrences, shills for Republican policies and Republican candidates, and roils their viewers into a perpetually paranoid, angry froth through exaggeratively stark and eliminationist rhetoric and increasingly banal invocations of Democratic manifestations of Hitler, Stalin, Marxism, socialism, and the otherwise End-Of-America-As-You-Know-It.

Again, this is nothing new. But the most frustrating and dangerous aspect of Fox's existence is the public's widespread acceptance of the network and the treatment of Fox as a serious and legitimate news network. As the insider stated in the Media Matters piece, "You'd think that people would wise up, but they don't." This is exacerbated by the DC media's legitimization of Fox and their defense of Fox as one of their own:

The former insider admits to being perplexed in late 2009 when the Obama White House called out Murdoch’s operation as not being a legitimate new source, only to have major Beltway media players rush to the aid of Fox News and admonish the White House for daring to criticize the cable channel.

“That blew me away,” says the source, who stresses the White House’s critique of Fox News “happens to be true.” 

There is a reason why the other media outlets rushed to Fox's defense: because like the other media outlets, Fox is a Serious Network, and an attack on one of them is an attack on all of them. It's the groupthink mentality of protecting the holy fraternity of Beltway journalists, and the other DC media giants would never align themselves with or investigate the claims of a Democratic administration, because that would be biased. And major media outlets collectively shit themselves at the very thought of being labeled as liberally biased. That and investigating or running stories against the objectivity of Fox News would require actual investigative journalism and the presentation of facts, and it is much more sexy and interesting and flashy to cover the BIG POLITICAL STORY of the latest from Sarah Palin's Facebook or Twittertwat account, midwest/northeast snow storms, and falling over themselves to book Republicans on Sunday news shows, because never in our lives has hearing weekly from the loser of a presidential election been so important or popular.

To wit, the White House is doing itself (and the nation) no favors either. Shortly after leveling claims of Fox's illegitimacy, the White House backed down amidst the outrage and criticism from the media and among other things, began once again granting interviews to Fox. Like this one:

Obama said that he thought all the news media needed to "give people the facts" in a more unvarnished way, and to give less attention to sensational or conflict-driven stories. O'Reilly then asked if Obama thought Fox News was fair to him.

"I would say that the news guys try to do a good job," he said. "Fox News has a point of view. There's nothing wrong with that."

"Do you respect it?" O'Reilly asked.

"Absolutely," Obama said.

There are, in fact, plenty of things wrong with it, and they are never going to do Obama any favors or anything other than undermine him and spit in his face at every opportunity, so it's a little irritating to see such a sycophantic response to that question. 

Since the Beltway media fraternity will never take issue with Fox, Matt Taibbi had a good piece a while back that included a paragraph about how one might begin to unwind Fox's influence:

I'm beginning to wonder why effective boycotts against these hate-media channels, and particularly Fox, haven't been organized yet. Why not just pick out one Fox advertiser at random and make an example out of it? How about Subaru and their unintentionally comic "Love" slogan? I actually like their cars, but what the fuck? How about Pep Boys and that annoying logo of theirs? Just to prove that it can be done, I'd like to see at least one firm get blown out of business as a consequence of financially supporting the network that is telling America that its black president wants to kill white babies. Isn't that at least the first move here? It's beginning to strike me that sitting by and doing nothing about this madness is not a terribly responsible way to behave.

I would tend to agree that doing nothing is increasingly becoming an untenable option, but Americans can hardly be bothered to get off of their fat asses to vote, let alone take up a boycott against Fox's advertisers. And it's not difficult; there is good precedent for this. In Beck's case, most advertisers simply grew uncomfortable and pulled their support of their own accord in response to his baseless and incredibly batshit stupid rhetoric. Toppling Beck's show would be just the start (since he is the "opinion" portion of the network and not "news"), but it has to start somewhere.