The American Dream Co-Opted By Pesky Foreigners

Today marks my re-entry into blogging after a several month long hiatus for a number of personal reasons. Didn't feel like doing it, so I didn't. I figured if my heart wasn't in it, then there was really no point. That being said, I'm glad to be back on (off?) the wagon. It's a new year - an election year no less - and there is bound to be an innumerate amount of issues to write about and discuss.

Issues like this one:

But many researchers have reached a conclusion that turns conventional wisdom on its head: Americans enjoy less economic mobility than their peers in Canada and much of Western Europe. The mobility gap has been widely discussed in academic circles, but a sour season of mass unemployment and street protests has moved the discussion toward center stage.
[...]
At least five large studies in recent years have found the United States to be less mobile than comparable nations. A project led by Markus Jantti, an economist at a Swedish university, found that 42 percent of American men raised in the bottom fifth of incomes stay there as adults. That shows a level of persistent disadvantage much higher than in Denmark (25 percent) and Britain (30 percent) — a country famous for its class constraints.
[...]
While liberals often complain that the United States has unusually large income gaps, many conservatives have argued that the system is fair because mobility is especially high, too: everyone can climb the ladder. Now the evidence suggests that America is not only less equal, but also less mobile.
[...]
In 2006 Professor Corak reviewed more than 50 studies of nine countries. He ranked Canada, Norway, Finland and Denmark as the most mobile, with the United States and Britain roughly tied at the other extreme. Sweden, Germany, and France were scattered across the middle.

Read the whole thing. As the article says, the issue isn't that people don't have money or decent paying jobs (although that is obviously a separate issue) but rather that the American Dream is under assault. That is, it is increasingly statistically difficult, if not impossible, to be born in one economic strata and be able to move to a higher one through sheer force of will and hard work. That was the essence of the American Dream - that anyone that played by the rules and had an exceptional work ethic could become upper middle class, or at least significantly better themselves. Not so anymore, at least in most cases. That fairy tale has been left behind in our collective rear view mirror in the 1950s. And don't be fooled by the financial crisis/recession - this has been decades in the making. 

This is what happens when the de facto economic policy of the US is wildly tilted towards the highest echelons of the economic ladder in hopes that magical fairies and wildly generous and wealthy benefactors will trickle down their gains and table scraps to the rest of us. You'll note that the common denominator here is that the countries in the article with superior economic mobility do not subscribe to such fantasies. They have higher taxes on the high earners/wealth (sorry - the job creators) and don't believe in the infantile fallacy that if you give the wealthy shit for free, they give it away to the rest of us and make it rain because they are just that generous.

Occupy Wall Street is a start, and a good one at that. And people outside the movement are even starting to catch on - despite the abject failure of Washington and both political parties (with heavier blame on the GOP), public opinion wildly favors progressive economic policies. And I would venture to guess that a solid majority of the country would be very pleased with the results of a true progressive tax code and higher taxation on those who have done well if they would simply remove their heads from their collective asses and realize that they themselves are a part of the very statistics that this article details. This is what the 2012 election should be about (but probably won't be). Hopefully this dialog will continue into the future. Our political overlords would be incredibly stupid to ignore the dialog that OWS has started.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

It's the Weak Demand, Stupid

Paul Krugman debunks the conservative/teabagger red herring that CRUSHING REGULATIONS, "uncertainty," highest taxes ever, and President Obama's perpetual bruising of bankster and executive fee-fees are to blame for our faltering economy:

Listen to just about any speech by a Republican presidential hopeful, and you’ll hear assertions that the Obama administration is responsible for weak job growth. How so? The answer, repeated again and again, is that businesses are afraid to expand and create jobs because they fear costly regulations and higher taxes. Nor are politicians the only people saying this. Conservative economists repeat the claim in op-ed articles, and Federal Reserve officials repeat it to justify their opposition to even modest efforts to aid the economy. 

The first thing you need to know, then, is that there’s no evidence supporting this claim and a lot of evidence showing that it’s false. 

[...] 

Isn’t there something odd about the fact that businesses are making large profits and sitting on a lot of cash but aren’t spending that cash to expand capacity and employment? No. 

After all, why should businesses expand when they’re not using the capacity they already have? The bursting of the housing bubble and the overhang of household debt have left consumer spending depressed and many businesses with more capacity than they need and no reason to add more. Business investment always responds strongly to the state of the economy, and given how weak our economy remains you shouldn’t be surprised if investment remains low. If anything, business spending has been stronger than one might have predicted given slow growth and high unemployment. 

But aren’t business people complaining about the burden of taxes and regulations? Yes, but no more than usual. Mr. Mishel points out that the National Federation of Independent Business has been surveying small businesses for almost 40 years, asking them to name their most important problem. Taxes and regulations always rank high on the list, but what stands out now is a surge in the number of businesses citing poor sales — which strongly suggests that lack of demand, not fear of government, is holding business back.

Republicans and Very Serious People do not want to listen to this reality, but prefer to live in their own contrived Randian fantasy land, because subscribing to facts and reality would mean embracing a demand-side, Keynesian view of economic policy, which is inherently at odds with the snake oil that they traffic on a daily basis. And we all know that what really ails America is that corporations and banksters and plutocrats don't have enough free money.

Seriously, That's the Best You've Got?

Wanker in the NYT says that the Buffett Rule will adversely impact...municipal bonds. Really.

And of course he also pays homage to the threat of our plutocrat overlords going Galt if Obama is too mean to them. You know, because they might just pout and sit on the sidelines if they aren't allowed to have free money from their investments any longer while the rest of us soak up their tax liability. 

It's actually quite amusing to watch these idiots flailing to come up with a coherent argument against raising taxes on the wealthy. They look like a bunch of damned fools in the process. 

The Cuts Will Continue Until Markets Improve

The answer to all of this, of course, is more austerity. The Free Market Jebus is punishing us for insufficient fealty to his whims. We're going to shrink our way out of this recession!

The Fox News / GOP "Class Warfare" Canard

The political right is absolutely apoplectic right now with Obama's newly found populist stance on taxes and economic. It has been kind of fun watching them implode into a swirling morass of wails of class warfare. I've already written about how incredibly pathetic this talking point is, but I don't doubt that it won't be effective with the low information morons that watch the not-at-all-biased Fox News Channel to begin with. Nevertheless, Obama is not letting it go unanswered:

"This is not class warfare -- it's math," Mr. Obama said from the White House Rose Garden, addressing GOP critiques of his plan head on. 

"The money has to come from some place," he continued. "If we're not willing to ask those who've done extraordinarily well to help America close the deficit... the math says everybody else has to do a whole lot more, we've got to put the entire burden on the middle class and the poor." 

[...] 

"I reject the idea that asking a hedge fund manager to pay the same tax rate as a plumber or teacher is class warfare. I think it's just the right thing to do."

Yup. It's not class warfare, it's common fucking sense. At least it is in every other Western modern democracy, but we are a little behind the times with our social contract here in America. Newly minted Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren also did an excellent job today of taking down this wildly assbackwards falsehood:

“I hear all this, you know, ‘Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever,’” she said. “No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. 

“You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did. 

“Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. 

But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

Expecting rich people to contribute back to the societies that have rewarded their success so richly? What a commie. 

More of this please. More of all of it. This is the grounds on which I want the 2012 election to be fought. It's a clash of ideals that overwhelmingly favor the Democrats.

And the Misinformation Begins

Paul Ryan is on the Sunday shows today, vomiting up the entirely predictable GOP tax cut talking point dreck that I alluded to yesterday:

RYAN: It adds further instability to our system — more uncertainty — and it punishes job creation and those people who create jobs. Class warfare, Chris, may make for really good politics but it makes for rotten economics. We don’t need to divide people and prey on people’s fear and envy and anxiety. We need to remove the barriers so entrepreneurs can hire people. These tax increases don’t work.  

[...] 

This is a double tax… If we tax investment and tax more you will get less of it. It looks like to me not a very good sign. It looks like the President wants to move down the class warfare path. Class warfare will simply divide this country more, will attack job creators, divide people, and it doesn’t grow the economy.

He hits them all - the dreaded uncertainty canard, the delicate sensibilities and fee-fees of our "job creators," the reverse class warfare, and suppressing the investment that hasn't materialized despite more than a decade of record low taxes on the rich. Also, where are the jobs we were promised from the Bush tax cuts, Mr. Ryan?

As ThinkProgress notes, Ryan is also in favor of letting the current payroll tax cut expire. Ryan and his cronies in the GOP love this idea because it is overwhelmingly punitive to the poor and middle class. The payroll tax is only levied against the first $100K or so of gross incomes. In other words, it is levied against pretty much the entirety of poor or middle class incomes, while affecting a very small portion of the incomes of the affluent. But this is a feature, not a bug, of the Republican platform. Remember, the problem with America is that the poor don't have any skin in the game, or in most cases, still have some skin left at all. 

The way the GOP wields the 'class warfare' cudgel as a talking point is so inept and bereft of any facts or merit that it really behooves the Democrats to seize on this and use it to their advantage. Sure, pitting one economic strata against the other is by definition class warfare, but that is why context is everything. If we were talking a 50/50 split or even a 60/40 split, then Ryan's vapid statements might make some sense. But we are literally talking against the top 2-10% versus the lower 90-98% of the country. When Democratic politicians and the lower 90-98% ask that a fraction of the country as small as 2-10% (the very same group, mind you, that claims to love America and its freedoms more than anything, except when it comes to actually giving back to the nation that has afforded them such lavish wealth) pay more in taxes during a period of the lowest taxation since the 1950s, its laughably stupid to term that as class warfare. It's simply economic and social justice, both of which are abhorrent and repellent to the modern GOP.

And The Clean Water Act Is Killing Exxon Mobil

It's not exactly a stretch to note ad nauseum that Michelle Bachmann is big dumb idiot, but in cases like these, it's more important to remember that a large number of people (almost half of the country if you go by party split in presidential elections) accept her statements at face value and in some cases, actually believe them.

America's Lost Decade

Not good:

Another 2.6 million people slipped into poverty in the United States last year, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday, and the number of Americans living below the official poverty line, 46.2 million people, was the highest number in the 52 years the bureau has been publishing figures on it.And in new signs of distress among the middle class, median household incomes fell last year to levels last seen in 1997.Economists pointed to a telling statistic: It was the first time since the Great Depression that median household income, adjusted for inflation, had not risen over such a long period, said Lawrence Katz, an economics professor at Harvard.“This is truly a lost decade,” Mr. Katz said. “We think of America as a place where every generation is doing better, but we’re looking at a period when the median family is in worse shape than it was in the late 1990s.”The bureau’s findings were worse than many economists expected, and brought into sharp relief the toll the past decade — including the painful declines of the financial crisis and recession —had taken on Americans at the middle and lower parts of the income ladder. It is also fresh evidence that the disappointing economic recovery has done nothing for the country’s poorest citizens.

And this while congressional Republicans continues to plot how best to fuck over the economy in order to wound President Obama, while continuing their slobbery fealty to their corporate and wealthy masters. In any normal, moral, or sane democracy, these numbers would be treated as gravely as their substance dictates. Elected officials and those in a position of power to do something about it would be rightfully concerned. But not in America. We have an entire political party and their not-at-all-biased corporate propaganda mouthpiece wholly devoted to marginalizing grim reports like this and trying to entrench the perverse idea that the poor are a bunch of whiny, freeloading, lazy fucks who aren't really poor because they have Xbox 360s. I wish I were kidding. And graphs like these are just the best:

Who the fuck cares that they can't afford healthcare, education? They have coffee makers goddammit, and in some cases, more than one DVD player. And Obama wages class warfare because he doesn't think that corporate jet owners should get a tax break.

These people are sick, and it's well past time that their low information base wakes up and tosses them out of office. And while we're talking about sane, moral, normal democracies, I might add that we would  also have a party beating this point to a bloody pulp on a daily basis, unafraid of being labeled as fighting class warfare, and unafraid of being outspent (or not receiving any) in an election by corporate money, and unafraid if fighting these bastards cost them their job. The facts are there, and they are indisputable. Our pathetic center right policies are not advancing the American Dream, but are in fact destroying it. It's well past time that somebody puts up a real fight to reverse this disgusting trend. 

Your Modern GOP: Rooting for America's Failure Since 2008

A few days ago, I said the following in response to to Obama's laughably naive presumption that there might be any, even a single Republican that might put their country before electoral politics:

With all due respect: Wake the fuck up, Mr. President.

It doesn't take a political scientist to predict these things:

House Republicans may pass bits and pieces of President Barack Obama’s jobs plan, but behind the scenes, some Republicans are becoming worried about giving Obama any victories — even on issues the GOP has supported in the past.
And despite public declarations about finding common ground with Obama, some Republicans are privately grumbling that their leaders are being too accommodating with the president.
“Obama is on the ropes; why do we appear ready to hand him a win?” said one senior House Republican aide who requested anonymity to discuss the matter freely. “I just don’t want to co-own the economy by having to tout that we passed a jobs bill that won’t work or at least won’t do enough.”

This should be the top story on every major newspaper, cable network, and radio broadcast. These assholes would much rather just let the country suffer and wallow through the Lesser Depression than do anything to improve our economic malaise because...it might help Obama. 

The President and Congressional Dems need to disavow themselves of any further bull shit ideals of bipartisanship and compromise. The GOP doesn't want it. They want nothing to do with any policy that would actually help the economy or unemployment, because they view these things as mutually exclusive to their electoral success. 

It doesn't get much more fucked up and cynical than this. These people can not be allowed to make any sort of significant gains in 2012. Ezra Klein has a piece up today that basically posits that the American public is so stupid and ill informed that they will believe that any potential future Republican acts of government that have nothing to do with the economy or unemployment, such as repealing the Affordable Care Act or rolling back EPA regulations, will be credited for any recovery beyond 2012.

And sadly, he’s right. Which makes it imperative that a Republican does not sit in the White House come January 2013. The last thing this country needs, the last thing this country can afford is to have the failed militant conservative ideology validated by a GOP huckster taking credit for a recovery they wanted nothing to do with and actively sought to prevent.

(via Steve Benen)

Don't Tackle Me Bro

So now we're tackling and arresting senior citizens for their audacity to speak their minds at their congressman's town halls. 

So much for our representative democracy. Congressman Ryan (and many others) are not interested in what the peasants have to say.

(via Digby)

The Problem With America In One Graph

Click here for the full size image. I don't know how anyone can look at that and still vote Republican. Democrats are certainly not the stalwart protectors of the poor and middle class that they once were, especially as they continue to rely more and more on corporate dollars for reelection, and corporatist policies because they fear being labeled as "anti-business." But the GOP is just crazy, and anyone who argues against the indisputable fact that they are the party of plutocrats and corporations is stupid, lying, or both. This is the reality they have created; this is the reality they want. But it's not enough. It's never enough. And they want to make it worse. It's like Jon Stewart said the other day - the problem, from the GOP perspective, is that the poor don't have any 'skin in the game.' In other words, the problem is that the poor still have skin. 

Noted dirty commie socialist and former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich notes the following in the op-ed accompanying this image:

Pump-priming works only when a well contains enough water.Look back over the last hundred years and you’ll see the pattern. During periods when the very rich took home a much smaller proportion of total income — as in the Great Prosperity between 1947 and 1977 — the nation as a whole grew faster and median wages surged. We created a virtuous cycle in which an ever growing middle class had the ability to consume more goods and services, which created more and better jobs, thereby stoking demand. The rising tide did in fact lift all boats. 

During periods when the very rich took home a larger proportion — as between 1918 and 1933, and in the Great Regression from 1981 to the present day — growth slowed, median wages stagnated and we suffered giant downturns. It’s no mere coincidence that over the last century the top earners’ share of the nation’s total income peaked in 1928 and 2007 — the two years just preceding the biggest downturns. 

[...] 

But starting in the late 1970s, and with increasing fervor over the next three decades, government did just the opposite. It deregulated and privatized. It cut spending on infrastructure as a percentage of the national economy and shifted more of the costs of public higher education to families. It shredded safety nets. (Only 27 percent of the unemployed are covered by unemployment insurance.) And it allowed companies to bust unions and threaten employees who tried to organize. Fewer than 8 percent of private-sector workers are unionized. 

More generally, it stood by as big American companies became global companies with no more loyalty to the United States than a GPS satellite. Meanwhile, the top income tax rate was halved to 35 percent and many of the nation’s richest were allowed to treat their income as capital gains subject to no more than 15 percent tax. Inheritance taxes that affected only the topmost 1.5 percent of earners were sliced. Yet at the same time sales and payroll taxes — both taking a bigger chunk out of modest paychecks — were increased.

We are living in a reality wrought by a thirty year march to the beat of the drum of the extreme conservative orthodoxy. Sure, there have been Democratic administrations in between, but the mantra of deregulate/cut taxes for the "job creators" survives and remains at the forefront of any economic debate. Meanwhile, current Democrats don't understand the importance of agenda setting or proper messaging, so these abject lies continue to pass as good ideas. It's very depressing.

(h/t Balloon Juice)

Polls from ObviousTown

Via Ezra Klein, NBC/WSJ has a new poll showing that Obama's post-partisanship fetish is not going so well with all those people that are out of work and otherwise have a shitty standard of living while Washington continues to do nothing to help them:

On the deficit, which was at the heart of the pitched battle over the debt ceiling earlier this summer, Obama has reaped no dividends for trying to produce a compromise agreement with Republicans. Six in 10 disapprove of Obama’s work on the federal budget deficit, a percentage that is relatively unmoved in recent surveys and basically where it was a year ago.

No shit. You don't need a poll for these things. It has long been glaringly obvious that no one gives a fuck about Obama's post-partisan brand/strategy (if you can even call it a strategy anymore) except for the Obama political team. People are hurting and they want substantive results that improve their bleak standard of living, even if that means hurting the Republican's fee-fees, getting a little aggressive, or rightfully and repeatedly calling them on their bull shit. People want Obama to be a fighter. Being Conciliator in Chief during the Lesser Depression and against unprecedented, childish Republican obstruction is not going to win him any favors. The Republicans want Obama to fail and do nothing, and he is handing that to them on a silver platter while simultaneously hamstringing his own re-election prospects. 

If Obama loses in 2012, he really has nobody to blame but himself. He has doubled down on this 'above-the-fray' strategy time and again, and it has long since been apparent that no one cares for it. There's a time and a place for such high-mindedness, and the midst of the Lesser Depression is not one of them.

 

"But Obama promised to bring hope and change and be different and change the tone of Washington and end partisanship during his campaign," you say. Yeah, well he also promised a ton of other shit in the campaign that on which he did not and will not deliver. I would have rather seen him uphold even a fraction of the other campaign promises at the price of ditching this 'turn the other cheek' dreck.

Economic Reality Check

Yes, things are really, really bad:

In other words, the ship has since collided headlong into the iceberg, is taking on water, and instead of deciding how quickly we should be bailing out water or what size buckets to hand out, policymakers are either suggesting we open up the hull to take on additional water, or that we just wait to see if the water will find its own way out of the boat. We are years away from recovering from the financial crisis, but all the supply side fuckwads in Washington are still convinced that we are just a few months, maybe a year away from the Invisible Hand pulling us all up by our bootstraps. 

Spoiler alert: we are not going to get out of this by traditional means. Desperate times call for desperate measures (and no, not desperate austerity measures). The private sector can't do it on its own, government can't do it on its own, and funneling free money to corporations, plutocrats, and banksters has not and will not work. 

I would suggest that perhaps we give some free money to households, you know, since they have none and the Fed found it within itself to be able to dole out $1.2 trillion to the banksters, but then we would need to clutch our pearls about moral hazard and not rewarding unscrupulous folks. Also too, socialism, and that's now how we've done it before here in the freedom loving real American United States, and it would never work.

Learning From Our Mistakes

Nah just kidding, we wouldn't ever do that here in the good ol' US of A:

Standard & Poor’s is giving a higher rating to securities backed by subprime home loans, the same type of investments that led to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, than it assigns the U.S. government.
S&P is poised to provide AAA grades to 59 percent of Springleaf Mortgage Loan Trust 2011-1, a set of bonds tied to $497 million lent to homeowners with below-average credit scores and almost no equity in their properties. New York-based S&P stripped the U.S. of its top rank on Aug. 5, saying Washington politics were making the country less creditworthy.
[...]
Bank of America Corp. and Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc sold $242.7 million of the Springleaf mortgage bonds today that are set to get S&P’s top ratings, according to people familiar with the matter, who declined to be identified because the terms haven’t been set.
[...]
The underlying mortgages represent 96.6 percent of the current value of the homes, the issuer estimates. Borrowers may have an incentive to walk away from the debt and leave investors with sizable foreclosure losses should the economy slow further and house prices continue to decline.
The securities were created by Springleaf Finance Corp., a lender to borrowers with risky credit that’s majority owned by private-equity firm Fortress Investment Group LLC and partly by former parent American International Group Inc., according to the people familiar with the offering.
[...]
Underlying loans for the bonds are on average five years old, according to a document sent to investors. Credit scores of the borrowers, none of whom has missed a payment over the past two years, average 651. The U.S. median is 711, according to Fair Isaac Corp., which creates the formulas behind FICO scores.
[...]
Of the $12.8 billion of loans made by the firm over the past decade that are still outstanding, 11.5 percent are 60 days or more delinquent, the term sheet shows. That’s a better track record than rivals, with the rate on subprime mortgages packaged into bonds averaging almost 37 percent, Bloomberg data show.
Ed Sweeney, an S&P spokesman, declined to comment on the Springleaf transaction. “We believe our ultimate success will be driven by the value investors derive from our ratings and analysis,” he said.

You can't make this shit up. Three years ago, the economy was brought to the brink of total meltdown (if you want to argue that the current state is anything dissimilar) in large part because Wall Street turned itself into a giant casino, pimping subprime loans to fuel their cocaine-addled binge on securitizing mortgage backed securities. Their accomplices were the rating agencies, who were (and as the article shows, still are) paid by the banks to issue ratings on these investments in a not-at-all conflict of interest riddled transaction. S&P's parent company, McGraw-Hill, depends on these payments for "27% of its $6.19 billion of 2010 revenues." S&P needs the banksters' business, the banksters need S&P to slap AAA ratings on their shit sandwich securities so they can make giant rips selling these scams to unsuspecting investors as solid investments. 

I would go on to discuss how this scenario from the financial crisis differs from current practice, but as the article shows, there is very little daylight between the two. Oh, well Dodd-Frank "tries" to make the banks and ratings agencies less reliant on one another, but an army of bankster lobbyists is presently ensuring that never happens since the law was weak at best and most of its rules have yet to be written or enacted. 

So there you have it. To summarize: the ratings agencies and banksters are still up to the same shit that fueled the global financial crisis, there have been no indictments of high-level banksters to date despite the widespread evidence of massive fraud and consumer and investor abuse, and the Obama administration presently wants to settle with the banksters and shield them from all future claims, litigation, and liability. 

I think I've ended a number of Wall Street related posts before with a similar tag line, but it bears repeating ad nauseum. The criminals from the biggest organized crime ring of the last 20 years savaged the global economy, caused trillions in losses  to households and investors alike, and they walked away scot free. And now they're back to those very same corrupt practices. If you ever needed a prime example of how justice is selectively applied in this country, look no further.