Both Sides Do It - Senate Obstructionism Edition

James Fallows has a very useful piece up that showcases the Republicans' unprecedented, cynical, and childish abuse of the filibuster ever since the election of the black Kenyan socialist Usurper. He links to several recent articles from prominent media outlets that fault either Obama's failure or both parties for the intransigence of the US Senate. 

It doesn't take an especially astute observer to notice the way in which the GOP has effectively transformed the Senate into a 60-votes-required-to-do-anything deliberative body, but most Americans are also not hyper political junkies like myself, or the sort of people that might follow Fallows' blog. And that precisely highlights the problem - you have one party refusing to let the Senate consider any manner of legislation, and then our high-minded, objective observers in the media scoff at these petty squabbles and bemoan that both sides are at fault for the Senate being able to function in the tradition of the modern democracy which it represents. Most people have no idea what the fuck cloture even means. They just know that every bill goes to die in the Senate, that nothing ever happens, they hear from the media that both sides are to blame, and they conclude that both parties in the US Senate are a bunch of assholes.

And let's be clear: filing for cloture requires that the Senate muster up 60 affirmative votes to even proceed to debate and an up/down vote on the legislation begin considered. Again, I doubt most Americans know this distinction, but the GOP minority effectively prevents legislation not from being passed (although that is a byproduct) but from even coming up for a vote that would allow it to be passed or rejected. It's immature, infantile, and deplorable. They have essentially made the use of a nuclear option a routine way of doing business as the minority party. It would be a very different scenario if the GOP had the numbers in the upper chamber and they were bypassing cloture filings, but whipping their members or getting a few Democrats to cross over to block the legislation from passing in an up/down vote. But they are a caucus of cynical cravens that won't even let legislation get that far. 

Fallows links to this graph to illustrate this point:

Let us not forget that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said that his number one goal is making Barack Obama a one term president. The abuse of the filibuster is just another means to that end, a cleverly devised ploy to make voters lose faith in their government, and conveniently aided and abetted by the empty suits in the media who give McConnell's strategy political cover by means of being too timid to report the facts. Because as we all know, facts have a well established liberal bias.

We're Putting New Cover Sheets On All the TPS Reports Now

Mother Jones does a great job with some of the visual pieces it runs with various data illustrating our economic stratification. I frequently link to this one about income inequality, because it is simply indispensable for illustrating just how far down the plutocracy rabbit hole we have ventured. But they have another great illustrated feature up called Overworked America that is well worth your time. 

I think one of the most shocking and saddest chart is the one where it shows that most of the African continent requires paid maternity leave. The US still has no such requirement. Parents must take time off through short-term disability and the Family Medical Leave of Absence Act. Short-term disability is an insurance benefit (and not 100% of your salary in most cases), and FMLA is unpaid. It just prevents your employer from firing you while you are out on FMLA approved leave.

So yeah. We are behind Africa in the benefits we afford to new mothers. Africa. You know, that giant chunk of land south of Europe and Asia that doesn't exactly boast a reputation of modern, civilized democracies but more often than not brings to mind images of genocide, famine, sectarian violence, and civil war. That's the continent that affords mandatory paid maternity leave. Not ours.

Your Liberal Media - OWS Edition

This chart from Nate Silver over at Five Thirty Eight/NYT illustrates nicely what I wrote the other day about the widely disparate media treatment afforded to the tea baggers and OWS:

Granted buried in that data you have an entire cable network devoted to flogging and propping up right wing loonies and the conservative agenda, but it's telling nonetheless. Read the blog post that goes with the graphic. The media basically collectively decided that OWS was OMGBORING until the police started pepper spraying people in lower Manhattan for no good reason. 

Say What You Mean, Mean What You Say

I have always thought that the 'flip-flop' label, when applied to politicians, is a little banal and childish. People should be allowed to change their opinions, based on facts of course, and not for political expediency. That being said, this statement from Mitt Romney makes me want to puke and slap him all at the same time:

ROMNEY: I don’t worry about the top one percent. I don’t stay up nights worrying about ‘gee we need to help them.’ I don’t worry about that. They’re doing just fine by themselves. I worry about the 99 percent in America. I want America, once again, to be the best place in the world to be middle-class. I want to have a strong and vibrant and prosperous middle-class. And so I look at what’s happening on Wall Street and my own view is, boy I understand how those people feel…The people in this country are upset.

Not one week ago, when asked of the Occupy Wall Street protests, he said:

“I think it’s dangerous, this class warfare."

So which is it, Mittens?

"Pitting of Americans Against Americans"

In his column from Friday, Paul Krugman discusses what I mentioned previously regarding the establishment media's reaction to Occupy Wall Street:

Nonetheless, Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, has denounced “mobs” and “the pitting of Americans against Americans.” The G.O.P. presidential candidates have weighed in, with Mitt Romney accusing the protesters of waging “class warfare,” while Herman Cain calls them “anti-American.” My favorite, however, is Senator Rand Paul, who for some reason worries that the protesters will start seizing iPads, because they believe rich people don’t deserve to have them. 

Michael Bloomberg, New York’s mayor and a financial-industry titan in his own right, was a bit more moderate, but still accused the protesters of trying to “take the jobs away from people working in this city,” a statement that bears no resemblance to the movement’s actual goals. 

And if you were listening to talking heads on CNBC, you learned that the protesters “let their freak flags fly,” and are “aligned with Lenin.”

I highly recommend this article by Kos for a definitive look at just how hypocritical and odious is Cantor's statement. The GOP makes its electoral living off of pitting Americans against Americans and obfuscating their common ties and values. But Krugman's takedown wouldn't be complete without an explanation of why everyone with a heavy pocketbook is rushing to do their best to marginalize this movement before it continues to spread:

What’s going on here? The answer, surely, is that Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe realize, deep down, how morally indefensible their position is. They’re not John Galt; they’re not even Steve Jobs. They’re people who got rich by peddling complex financial schemes that, far from delivering clear benefits to the American people, helped push us into a crisis whose aftereffects continue to blight the lives of tens of millions of their fellow citizens. 

[...] 

This special treatment can’t bear close scrutiny — and therefore, as they see it, there must be no close scrutiny. Anyone who points out the obvious, no matter how calmly and moderately, must be demonized and driven from the stage. In fact, the more reasonable and moderate a critic sounds, the more urgently he or she must be demonized, hence the frantic sliming of Elizabeth Warren. 

So who’s really being un-American here? Not the protesters, who are simply trying to get their voices heard. No, the real extremists here are America’s oligarchs, who want to suppress any criticism of the sources of their wealth.

The sad thing is that I suspect some of these assholes actually believe that the protesters are the problem here.

Banksters Bounce Back

Remember all the talk of a V-shaped recovery around in the summer of 2010? Some amongst us have had it. Spoiler alert - it wasn't the US economy at large:

The idiot talking heads on Fox and CNN and the other assholes that sneer at Occupy Wall Street are being purposefully obtuse. There is no other way to justify their stupidity other than willful ignorance. That and the fact that they have zero empathy whatsoever and are largely insulated from what the rest of the economy is experiencing. The banksters crashed the economy, they were bailed out with taxpayer money with no strings attached, they roared back to profitability and paid themselves billions of bonuses (some of whom continued to do so while still paying back TARP funds), and they have paid no price for their crimes whatsoever. But somehow all of this makes OWS a bunch of ill informed dirty hippies. 

You tell me who is ill informed and misguided - people finally waking up to the way in which Wall Street has ruined the US economy while paying no price and simultaneously maintaining its stranglehold on the halls of power, or the fuckwits in the media sneering and acting like nothing happened.

A Decade of War

Apparently today marks the tenth anniversary of our huge embarrassing failed war in Afghanistan.

Neat. Here's to ten more.

Stay Classy, Wingnuts

Apparently the Hitler meme was getting a little banal:

Fuck these people.

Let It Burn

No, the Republicans do not have a jobs or economic platform, and the media and everyone else would do well to wake up to this reality. Their platform is to let people suffer and prolong our economic quagmire as long as possible. Deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy are not an economic plan - they are rote, stale, and failed GOP dogma.

I Got Your Death Panel Right Here

With liberty and justice for all:

American militants like Anwar al-Awlaki are placed on a kill or capture list by a secretive panel of senior government officials, which then informs the president of its decisions . . . . There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel, which is a subset of the White House’s National Security Council . . . . Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rulesby which it is supposed to operate. . . . The role of the president in ordering or ratifying a decision to target a citizen is fuzzy. White House spokesman Tommy Vietor declined to discuss anything about the process. . . . 

Representative Dutch Ruppersberger, was asked by reporters about the killing. The process involves “going through the National Security Council, then it eventually goes to the president” . . . .Other officials said the role of the president in the process was murkier than what Ruppersberger described. They said targeting recommendations are drawn up by a committee of mid-level National Security Council and agency officials. Their recommendations are then sent to the panel of NSC “principals,” meaning Cabinet secretaries and intelligence unit chiefs, for approval . . . But one official said Obama would be notified of the principals’ decision. If he objected, the decision would be nullified, the official said.

Read the whole thing. Due process of the law is the latest casualty of our democracy in our frenetic obsession with the War on Terror and Absolute Safety.

Breaking: People Having Money = Economic Growth

No one could have predicted that income inequality stifles economic growth:

"Countries where income was more equally distributed tended to have longer growth spells," says economist Andrew Berg, whose study appears in the current issue of Finance & Development, the quarterly magazine of the International Monetary Fund. Comparing six major economic variables across the world's economies, Berg found that equality of incomes was the most important factor in preventing a major downturn. 

In their study, Berg and coauthor Jonathan Ostry were less interested in looking at how to spark economic growth than how to sustain it. "Getting growth going is not that difficult; it's keeping it going that is hard," Berg explains. For example, the bailouts and stimulus pulled the US economy out of recession but haven't been enough to fuel a steady recovery. Berg's research suggests that sky-high income inequality in the United States could be partly to blame. 

So how important is equality? According to the study, making an economy's income distribution 10 percent more equitable prolongs its typical growth spell by 50 percent.

Clearly what this study misses is that it has not taken a long enough view or a large enough sample set to account for the trickle down from the plutocrats. You just need to wait longer, you impatient anti-American, capitalist hating asshole.

RIP Steve Jobs

Despite his constant struggle with pancreatic cancer, it is still hard to believe that technology giant, founder of Apple Computer, and one of the most brilliant innovators of the modern age has passed away at the age of 56. 

I keep seeing links to YouTube videos of his commencement address at Stanford a few years back, and truer words have never been spoken:

Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love, and that is as true for work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking, and don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it, and like any great relationship it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking. Don’t settle. 

[...] 

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Very inspirational. 

We Are the 99%

Almost a month ago, I wrote the following regarding the nascent protests on Wall Street:

There is a shortage of true populist protests and activism over what this country has endured at the hands of Wall Street and the way in which government has aided and abetted the banksters in shielding them from any accountability. Obama famously told top bankster CEOs that "I'm the only one standing in between you and the pitchforks." Well, we need to see more pitchforks. Sure people are pissed, but really only in rhetoric and not in action. 

At the time, I assumed (but certainly hope I would be wrong) that the protests would eventually become more than a fringe movement, and a much needed one at that. Needless to say I have been encouraged and elated to see that this has erupted into a nationwide protest over the grotesque income inequality and the economic and social injustice of both the financial crisis and the last three to four decades. 

There's a couple of general notes that I want to make about OWS. First off, it should come as no surprise that those among us with legitimate grievances against moneyed elites would be met with widespread derision and sneering by the very people (the media included) that benefit richly from the status quo. See this Glenn Greenwald piece for a definitive takedown of all the media outlets heaping contempt upon the unwashed masses. Or this one, where he covers the NYT's financial columnist's fealty to an anonymous "top bankster CEO," courageously investigating the OWS protests at his behest. I am sure the Fox News fair and balanced approach to these protests will surprise you very little. When the media isn't busy openly shitting on these folks for having the audacity to be pissed off about having their livelihoods vanquished by the financial crisis while the crooks that caused the same crisis got their asses saved by trillions in tax payer funded bailouts, they are waxing breathless about what is it exactly that OWS wants? They are a bunch of dirty hippies with an incoherent message! What are their demands?! They are irrelevant until they settle on a unified message! And when that isn't the prevailing themes, you have assholes like Mitt Romney calling the "class warfare" being waged by these protesters, "dangerous."

Does anyone recall the tea baggers being subjected to this sort of derision and scrutiny? Certainly they were widely mocked by people like myself and other progressive bloggers, but they were the absolute darlings of the establishment media. There was no chastising of the tea baggers for having a rambling or incoherent message. At its core, the very crux of the tea bagger message was inherently rambling and incoherent, but the establishment media got the vapors over these Very Serious real murkins WANTING THEIR COUNTRY BACK. Here you had a group of mostly educated, older, white dipshits caterwauling about the tyranny of the lowest federal tax burden since the Eisenhower era, a socialistic takeover of government healthcare that was laughably divorced from socialized healthcare or single payer systems, and their collective aversion to government fiscal profligacy despite eight years in which trillions of dollars were spent on tax cuts and foreign wars by the Bush administration, all of this newly and conveniently discovered after the election of a black Democrat. This is the group of people that the media venerated, treated Very Seriously, never questioning their message, their methods, or integrity despite an abiding number of reasons to do so. After all, they were just concerned citizens! A "wholly organic" grassroots movement that were sick of their government making them pay really low taxes and barring insurance companies from discriminating against pre-existing conditions, and trying to spend much needed tax dollars to pull the economy out of an immensely deep crater. They lavished praise and adulation on the group that hoisted grotesquely racist signs bearing all manner of epithets against our President, comparing him to Hitler, proclaiming that they came unarmed (this time), wearing tri-pointed hats adorned with tea bags, and packing pistols and AR-15s at their rallies. They even went so far as to gleefully use their brand to co-sponsor Republican presidential debates. I will let you tell me when you think you will see a CNN/MoveOn debate, a CNN/Daily Kos, or a CNN/Occupy Wall Street debate.

The Occupy Wall Street protests on the other hand? I've already detailed how they have been treated by the media and most of those otherwise unencumbered by petty things like foreclosed homes, unemployment, or the complete economic collapse of their household in general, so consider for a moment the difference between the claims of the tea baggers and those of OWS. Occupy Wall Street seeks to capture the long dormant populist outrage stirred up by decades of tax cuts for the wealthy and financial deregulation being sold to the masses as the panacea for economic prosperity for all, when in fact they have lead to income inequality the likes of which makes third world nations and banana republics blush, a financial crisis that has devastated the already embattled middle class while simultaneously adding millions to the rolls of foreclosures, unemployed, savaged retirement savings, flatlining and stagnant wages, and otherwise economically destitute or unstable. And none of this is conjecture, ideology, or exaggeration. These are facts. The supply side, plutocrat and bankster coddling, wealthy fellating policies of the last three decades have been absolutely devastating for the poor and middle classes, and the financial crisis, catalyzed by rampant fraud and speculation and money whoring on Wall Street, has only exacerbated and compounded the issue. These policies have been an absolute failure for this country. That is, unless you're in the top 1% that controls 40% of the nation's wealth. 

It will be very interesting to see where these protests go from here. I am hoping that they can avoid the same fate as the tea baggers by avoiding being co-opted into the larger party establishment that serves little other than the party's electoral interests. They need to maintain their populist autonomy and independence to truly thrive and have an impact. And they must continue to grow. I'll say it again: it's long overdue, and this is possibly the first opportunity in a long time for much needed progressive change, and a much needed national conversation about the values and policies that we have espoused in this country for so long, and what those policies have wrought for 99% of us.

Move Your Money

The Move Your Money Project had a lot of high-level support in the wake of the financial crisis from progressives like Arianna Huffington and Bill Maher, but I have not heard it promoted very much ever since. But it bears mentioning once more, in light of the fact that Bank of America (along with other national banks) are planning on instituting monthly fees for use of your debit card:

Bank of America, the nation’s biggest bank, said on Thursday that it planned to start charging customers a $5 monthly fee when they used their debit cards for purchases. It was just one of several new charges expected to hit consumers as new regulations crimp banks’ profits. 

Wells Fargo and Chase are testing $3 monthly debit card fees. Regions Financial, based in Birmingham, Ala., plans to start charging a $4 fee next month, while SunTrust, another regional powerhouse, is charging a $5 fee. 

The round of new charges stems from a rule, which takes effect on Saturday, that limits the fees that banks can levy on merchants every time a consumer uses a debit card to make a purchase. The rule, known as the Durbin amendment, after its sponsor Senator Richard J. Durbin, is a crucial part of the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul law. 

Until now, the fees have been 44 cents a transaction, on average. The Federal Reserve in June agreed to cut the fees to a maximum of about 24 cents. While the fee amounts to pennies per swipe, it rapidly adds up across millions of transactions. The new limit is expected to cost the banks about $6.6 billion in revenue a year, beginning in 2012, according to Javelin Strategy and Research. That comes on top of another loss, of $5.6 billion, from new rules restricting overdraft fees, which went into effect in July 2010.

In other words, the banksters can never accept a lower profit margin on shuffling their money around in their giant casino and they want to continue paying themselves billions of dollars in bonuses to retain top talent to fuel their hooker and blow addictions and to make sure they have a bigger estate in the Hamptons than the assholes next door. So if you want to access your money, pay up, bitches.

I mean, if they accepted this egregious, socialistic government overreach that costs the industry $6 billion a year, little Bobby Bankster might only be able to get a Ferrari for his 16th birthday instead of that Aston Martin he had his eye on. These are the life-or-death issues at stake here.

So let's get going America - move your money today.

Anatomy of a Failed Media - Solyndra Edition

In case you haven't yet heard of Solyndra, the short version is that the wingnuts and the GOP have been nursing a collective giant boner over what is largely a contrived, overblown scandal filled with their favorite liberal boogeymen - government waste, government excess, and evil liberal non-petroleum based energy. Check out this LA Times article, linked to by Kevin Drum, for a muted but thorough background on the facts of the matter.

But on to more pressing matters. Just like any time the GOP trumps up some purely fanatical, bull shit "controversy" or "scandal," the stenographers in the evil liberal media rush to give it a leg up to avoid the appearance of bias. You know, the monkeys flinging poop at one another are talking about it, so we need to be doing the same:

And I won't include the cable news graph, because you don't need to look at that to know that Fox News has spent an inordinate amount of time flogging this scandal. While Media Matters compares this disproportionate coverage to the corruption at the Minerals Management Service (former name of the failed regulator that allowed awesome things like the BP Gulf oil spill to happen) and war contracting, it is worth mentioning that there are any number of exponentially more egregious crimes and abuses that have received very little outrage and even less coverage. What about the financial crisis? We had a group of asshole Republicans on the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission who refused to even include the terms "Wall Street" or "deregulation" in their final report. You know, because poor people and minorities are what caused the biggest financial meltdown since the Great Depression.

I'll let you decide which is a more prominent case of the wholesale fucking of the American tax payer - trillions of dollars in tax payer funded bailouts to banksters (foreign and domestic) with no strings attached, who immediately returned to the same excess and same practices that lead to global economic armageddon, or a $528 million Department of Energy loan guarantee to a company that ended up getting undercut by a heavily subsidized Chinese market and subsequently went bankrupt. Neither are acceptable nor desirable, but again, which of these are worthy of our national media's golden retriever-like attention span (SQUIRREL!)?

And I'll reiterate for the millionth time - to date there have still been no high level indictments or convictions of high level banksters of financial sector executives despite reams of evidence of endemic fraud and consumer abuse.

Evil Kenyan Socialist First Lady Watch

Her latest transgressions include shopping at Target. I wish I were kidding.