A Decade of War

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

Neat. Here's to ten more.

Stay Classy, Wingnuts

Apparently the Hitler meme was getting a little banal:

Fuck these people.

Let It Burn

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

I Got Your Death Panel Right Here

With liberty and justice for all:

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

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

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

Breaking: People Having Money = Economic Growth

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

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

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

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

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

RIP Steve Jobs

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

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

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

[...] 

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

Very inspirational. 

We Are the 99%

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Move Your Money

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anatomy of a Failed Media - Solyndra Edition

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

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

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

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

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

Evil Kenyan Socialist First Lady Watch

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