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.

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.

Or We Could Just Ban It

Once upon a time, the modern derivative/future/forward contract was born, and incredibly useful financial instrument that helps anyone from ordinary farmers protecting themselves against the risk of falling prices at harvest, to airline giants seeking to limit their exposure to ever-rising fuel prices. The forward was a prudent tool, whereby two parties entered into an financial exchange - one party essentially betting that the price of the commodity would rise, while the counterparty expecting that same price to fall. Historically, these contracts actually involved the physical transfer and delivery of the underlying asset. So when that farmer bought a forward contract to sell bushels of wheat at some specified price, the counterparty would actually buy those bushels of wheat from the farmer at the specified date, at the specified price.

But like everything in American and global finance, this has been turned into a giant fucking casino whereby it primarily serves the purpose of funneling around huge sums of money in search of short-term profits while doing very little to actually serve its original purpose. The farmers and Southwest Airlines of the world now make up a very small percentage of these forwards. This makes some people enormously wealthy, while passing on the costs of rampant speculation to the rest of us in the form of rising commodity prices, especially oil.

So here's an idea - how about an outright ban on speculative hedging? It's not like there aren't a million other ways for banksters and "job creators" to slosh around their casino funds. There is some work being done on this now both by the Dodd-Frank act and Sen. Ben Nelson, of all people, but you can guarantee that it won't go far enough or even make it out of the gate with the kind of money this makes. When up to 25% of the cost of a barrel of oil is estimated to be due to this excessive speculation, you would think that it would be a common sense policy to rein it in for the sake of the American economy. Rising oil prices are overwhelmingly detrimental to our consumption based economy. But it's big business for the banksters, so don't expect to see any common sense policy any time soon.

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.

First the American Jobs Act, Then the Buffett Rule

And now Campaign Obama fires another salvo with this:

Mr. Obama will call for $1.5 trillion in tax increases, primarily on the wealthy, through a combination of letting the Bush-era tax cuts expire, closing loopholes and limiting the amount that high earners can deduct. The proposal also includes $580 billion in adjustments to health and entitlement programs, including $248 billion to Medicare and $72 billion to Medicaid. Administration officials said that the Medicare cuts would not come from an increase in the Medicare eligibility age. 

Senior administration officials who briefed reporters on some of the details of Mr. Obama’s proposal said that the plan also counts a savings of $1.1 trillion from the ending of the American combat mission in Iraq and the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan. 

In laying out his proposal, aides said, Mr. Obama will expressly promise to veto any legislation that seeks to cut the deficit through spending cuts alone and does not include revenue increases in the form of tax increases on the wealthy. 

That veto threat will put the president on a direct collision course with the House speaker, John A. Boehner, who said last week that he would not support any legislation that included revenue increases in the form of higher taxes.

I must say, I much prefer this new found Obama persona. Let's hope he can sustain this not only through the election, but also into a potential second term. If he keeps this up, he will garner the support of independents and rally an extremely pissed off and exasperated base. 

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt: Evil Socialist

You can now add Eric Schmidt to the Right's growing list of wildly successful capitalists Unserious evil dirty socialist scum: 

But the current strategy is ludicrous. You have a situtation where the private sector sees essentially no growth in demand. The classic solution is to have the government step in, and with short-term initiatives help stimulate that demand. If they do it right, they'll invest in income and growth producing things, like highways and bridges and schools. 

[...] 

Business can create enormous numbers of new jobs in America. All we need to see is more demand. What's happening right now is: Businesses are very well-run, they have a lot of cash. They're waiting for more demand. At the moment, business efficiency allows them to grow at 1 or 2 percent, which is what we're seeing today. They don't have to hire more people. And until we solve the problem, people are going to sit idle. And it's a real tragedy.

Other recent and prominent additions to this list include Warren Buffet, for his audacity to point out the fact that the mega rich pay absurdly low, regressive levels of taxes.

Occupy Wall Street

More of this please.

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. 

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.

Our Economic Broken Record - Republicans Oppose Everything

This wasn't totally predictable or anything:

In a Friday memo to all House Republicans, GOP leaders came out against nearly all the major proposals in Obama's $447 billion job-creation plan, including his middle-class tax cuts and his approach to federal spending on transportation and school construction. 

The Republican leaders said cutting payroll taxes through 2012 would lead to a tax increase in 2013 -- an argument that didn't deter Republicans from a much bigger, 10-year tax cut in 2001 that was extended last December but is set to expire on Dec. 31, 2012. 

"There may be significant unforeseen downsides to large temporary tax cuts immediately followed by large tax increases," they wrote in their memo. "We are creating significant new uncertainty in an already uncertain economy."

This is just fucking crazy. They are now actually arguing that we can't cut taxes now, because when they return to their original level at a later date, that would be a tax increase. Am I the only one that sees the abject lunacy and idiocy in this argument? This is really what one of our major political parties now uses to justify its infantile bull shit?  And as many people have already noted - Republicans have finally found a tax cut that they don't like. Why? Because the payroll tax overwhelmingly benefits the wrong kind of people - poor and middle class citizens. If we were proposing a 200% tax increase on the working poor while abolishing capital gains and the top marginal tax rate, you know they'd be on board. They did vote for the Ryan plan after all. 

Anyone that has paid even one ounce of attention to politics for the last two and a half years know that the Republicans will never support anything the President proposes. So I will admit that while the American Jobs Act is long overdue and a much needed economic stimulus, I have never really seen its path through Congress. Sure the President wants us to call our congressmen and women, even the asshole Republican ones, but does anyone honestly believe that Democratic constituents calling Republican representatives and senators is going to make them shift from them their putrid ideological entrenchment? 

I think really the most likely scenario is that the economy is going to continue to suck tremendously well into the 2012 election season, thereby endangering Obama's re-election. We will get some sort of movement on economic stimulus between now and then, but it will be purposefully hamstrung by the Republicans who will ensure that it is a series of half measures or contains a bunch of their bull shit ideological sacred cows that will do nothing to stimulate the economy. The President's only chance between now and then will to be continue to bring Campaign Obama both to the American public and to his style of governance. If you can't get anything through Congress, then the one thing you can do is present an unmistakably stark contrast between the two parties values and ideas on how to rebuild a broken America. That started with the roll out of the American Jobs Act, and it continues with this:

President Obama on Monday will call for a new minimum tax rate for individuals making more than $1 million a year to ensure that they pay at least the same percentage of their earnings as middle-income taxpayers, according to administration officials. 

With a special joint Congressional committee starting work to reach a bipartisan budget deal by late November, the proposal adds a new and populist feature to Mr. Obama’s effort to raise the political pressure on Republicans to agree to higher revenues from the wealthy in return for Democrats’ support of future cuts from Medicare and Medicaid. 

Mr. Obama, in a bit of political salesmanship, will call his proposal the “Buffett Rule,” in a reference to Warren E. Buffett, the billionaire investor who has complained repeatedly that the richest Americans generally pay a smaller share of their income in federal taxes than do middle-income workers, because investment gains are taxed at a lower rate than wages. 

Mr. Obama will not specify a rate or other details, and it is unclear how much revenue his plan would raise. But his idea of a millionaires’ minimum tax will be prominent in the broad plan for long-term deficit reduction that he will outline at the White House on Monday.

Republicans will never in a million years support a tax increase of any kind, especially not one on millionaires, or the "job  creators" as they are known among the mouth breathers. The problem that faces the Republicans is that a millionaire's tax is overwhelmingly popular with the public. They can spew all the bull shit they want, but the fact of the matter is that the public intuitively understands that there is a infinitesimally small slice of the population that controls pretty much all the wealth in this country, and they pay an absolute pittance in income taxes. As the NYT piece says, this tax would hit about three-tenths of one percent of tax payers. It doesn't matter how the GOP and Fox News try to spin it, with all the caterwauling about job killing tax increases or the delicate fee-fees of our job creating plutocrat overlords, the public is just not going to care when you're talking about hitting such a small portion of the tax base with this increase. It's good policy, and even better politics. 

Again, the Buffett Rule faces an even steeper uphill climb in Congress than does the American Jobs Act. But these are the sort of populist positions that Obama should have been taking long ago, since January 2009 on his first day in office. The public saw far too much of Obama as the most reasonable guy in the room. Maybe it's finally catching on that when you're in a room full of unhinged lunatics that want to savage the founding principles of this country and hand it over to rule by corporations and plutocrats, being the most reasonable guy doesn't count for much. Americans want someone on their side, and Obama appears to be finally understanding that.

This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things

Heckuva job, Democrats:

“I think the American people are very skeptical of big pieces of legislation,” Senator Bob Casey, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, said in an interview Wednesday, joining a growing chorus of Democrats who prefer an à la carte version of the bill despite White House resistance to that approach. “For that reason alone I think we should break it up.”
[...]
But Democrats, as is their wont, are divided over their objections, which stem from Mr. Obama’s sinking popularity in polls, parochial concerns and the party’s chronic inability to unite around a legislative initiative, even in the face of Republican opposition.
Some are unhappy about the specific types of companies, particularly the oil industry, that would lose tax benefits. “I have said for months that I am not supporting a repeal of tax cuts for the oil industry unless there are other industries that contribute,” said Senator Mary L. Landrieu of Louisiana.
A small but vocal group dislikes the payroll tax cuts for employees and small businesses. “I have been very unequivocal,” said Representative Peter A. DeFazio, a Democrat from Oregon. “No more tax cuts.”

I suppose it would be too much to ask for these prima donnas to just shut up and support the President's agenda for a change. That is what political parties do when they want to get something done. Just look at what the Republicans did with the Paul Ryan plan. They mainstreamed making Medicare into a voucher program while cutting trillions in taxes for the uber wealthy and whipped their entire caucus behind it in both houses of Congress despite it being terrible politics, policy, and overwhelmingly unpopular with the public. And the President can't even get his own party to shut up and unify behind a much needed economic plan in the middle of a flagging economy and 9% unemployment. In an election year.

Ostensibly, a number of the Democrats cited in the NYT piece oppose the American Jobs Act as a paltry attempt to burnish their conservative bona fides. I'm not quite sure what it will take these people to realize that having a 'D' next to their name ensures they will get pasted in any election in a conservative district or state. Just look at 2010 - the largest swath of Democrats that got ousted from the House were Blue Dogs. It's not terribly difficult to comprehend when the Right spends all of its time reading Ann Coulter books and listening to people on Fox News breathing fire about how Democrats are evil and treasonous and hate America and want to kill your children in their sleep. They hate you because you are a Democrat. It's very simple. 

In other words - shut the fuck up and support the President's long overdue jobs agenda already. The opposition party just introduced an identically titled bill that seeks to eliminate corporate taxation in its entirety. As a "jobs" bill. These are the people you're dealing with. These are the people you are implicitly supporting by whining about how Obama is mean or how his bill isn't what you'd like it to be. And they will be coming after your seat in 2012 regardless of how you act or vote. So despite whatever ill founded and delicate political misgivings you may have, Mr. & Mrs. Conservative Democrat, it's time to get on the right side of this issue. 

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. 

Nation Building

It only applies after you have invaded and dropped freedom bombs on brown people:

“We can’t keep spending money we don’t have,” said Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, where deadly wildfires have charred tens of thousands of acres and destroyed more than 1,000 homes. [...]“I think we’ve got to offset everything; anything that’s not allocated has got to be offset these days. It shouldn’t delay it,” Burr told POLITICO. “There’s hundreds of billions of dollars of waste, fraud and abuse that could be accessed like that.” 

This purist principle did not stop both Cornyn and Burr for voting to fund rebuilding efforts in Iraq without a single offset. Indeed, Cornyn voted against delaying $20.3 billion in Iraq infrastructure funds even though the late Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) noted that such a payment would increase the budget deficit. Overall, the U.S. has spent $44.6 billion in taxpayer funds on rebuilding Iraq through emergency supplemental bills — and not a penny was cut from elsewhere in the budget.

Clearly the solution here is that we need to bomb ourselves, and then the GOP will be interested in finding money to invest in our crumbling infrastructure.

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.