The High Cost of Overreacting

I've said it before, but there is never any cost/benefit analysis to Absolute Safety. Ever. Why? Because freedom isn't free. And because shut up, that's why! And you don't want to get snuffed out in your bed at 3:00 am by a terrorist do you?!

I think someone once said something about all of this, years ago:

"We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. Allah willing, and nothing is too great for Allah," bin Laden said in the transcript.
He said the mujahedeen fighters did the same thing to the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s, "using guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers."
"We, alongside the mujahedeen, bled Russia for 10 years until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat," bin Laden said.
He also said al Qaeda has found it "easy for us to provoke and bait this administration."
"All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al Qaeda, in order to make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses without their achieving anything of note other than some benefits for their private corporations," bin Laden said.

We may have had Navy SEALs swoop in and shoot him in the face, but you can't argue that he didn't ultimately accomplish his goal. I know I'm not the first freedom hating, anti-American liberal to point this out, but it bears repeating as the ten year anniversary of September 11th nears tomorrow. We allowed two terrorists armed with box cutters and a plot that cost $500,000 to fundamentally alter the fabric of America and by extension, the world. We essentially reacted like Gotham City did in The Dark Knight at the hands of the Joker: "Look at what I did to this city with a few drums of gas and a couple of bullets." We played right into their hands, launching two endless wars, one of which was completely unrelated to the attack on our soil, and spent billions and trillions of dollars in the pursuit of the laughable ideal of Absolute Safety. We circumvented civil liberties long enshrined by our Founding Fathers in the Constitution, to the extent that many who have grown up during the time of 9/11 now view this as normal. Even when bin Laden came out and publicly stated that this was his end game, we kept right at it anyway. And we continue to do so, and these same policies will continue into perpetuity. He got in our heads, altered our psyche, altered who we are as a people, even going so far as to justify torture as a means to an end, and gave birth to the insanity of the national security apparatus that has its tentacles firmly wrapped about America, ever wooing citizens to forego their civil liberties and basic governmental services commonly offered by other Western democracies so that we can plow billions into defense and security spending in pursuit of the specious goal of wholly preventing all future and potential terror attacks. All of this despite the overwhelming volumes of evidence that show that more Americans die in car accidents than they do as a result of terror attacks. Maybe it is time for no-drive lists and screening shoes and liquids before people get behind the wheel!

Contrast this with how Norway's prime minister reacted when recently confronted with a violent attack on his nation by an unhinged extremist:

Earlier Mr. Stoltenberg said the attacks were directed at Norway's "fundamental values" - democracy and openness - and that the response would be "more democracy, more openness." He said he expected people to participate more broadly in politics.
He added it was too early to consider new security laws.
"Now is the time for comfort for those who have lost family members [and] friends, and to help those who are still wounded," he said.
"Then afterwards, and especially after the investigation is finished, there will be a time for going through all the experiences, learning from what happened and then draw the conclusions regarding, for instance, security measures."
But the prime minister said the time would come when it was necessary to move on.
"We have to, at some stage, move back to some kind of normality, and also to convey the message of sadness with a message of something positive - and that is that we have seen a very united Norwegian people."

Any American politician uttering these words would be labeled a dirty hippie, pussy-ass coward and Unserious.

I'm not even going to go into the opportunity cost of $3 trillion dollars and what we could have done with that money. Just remember during all the flag waving and high-minded, freedom loving, America #1 speechifying that will take place tomorrow, it didn't have to be this way. We voluntarily embarked on a lifelong, national policy of absolute insanity in the wake of the death of 3,000 of our fellow citizens, co-opting their deaths and memories to subvert the rest of the nation into accepting endless wars and the perpetual empowerment of the security state. Their lives and legacies deserve better than this. 

UPDATE: ThinkProgress gives the thrust of my post a leg up, noting that in the ten years since 9/11, only 33 Americans have been killed as a result of terror attacks, while 150,000 Americans have been slain in murders.

Belated Obama Speech Reaction

I didn't get to watch Obama's American Jobs Act (AJA) until long after it aired, since it went on at 7:00 EST/4:00 PST to appease all the mouth breathers that had to watch the NFL season opener over trivial things like the President addressing a joint session of Congress during the Lesser Depression. Here's a few thoughts:

1. Obama's speech offered the most full throated defense of liberalism and government's role in a modern society that we have heard him utter in quite some time. That was heartening for me, since the last several months have been completely played on the GOP's turf, both strategically and rhetorically. Just a matter of weeks ago, our political overlords were arguing over not if we were going to slash government spending, but by how much, with the President even trying to one-up the GOP at their own pathetic game. Now we have Obama decrying the GOP's insistence that America race to the bottom when it should be racing to the top, and repudiating the notion that we will use harsh economic times to dismantle the basic protections that Americans have counted on for decades. This is the kind of shit I have been yelling about for months on this blog. This view of government is exactly what Democrats and independents believe in, and what sets the tea bagger and GOP types into orbit. In other words, this is the drum Obama should have been beating all along.
2. It was sufficiently combative. Obama dropped the Conciliator in Chief canard for once and urged our modern Do Nothing Congress into action. And while the GOP will find any reason to oppose and obstruct this seemingly uncontroversial piece of legislation regardless, the President sought to strip them of their previously favorite cudgels: the deficit, and Obama's ideas as extreme socialist out-of-touch-with-middle-America liberalism. He repeatedly beat home the point that this bill contains ideas previously proposed and popular with both parties (indeed, tax cuts comprise almost half of the $450 billion bill), essentially daring the GOP to oppose this and tie themselves in knots in the process of doing so. He further challenged the Super Congressional Justice League Committee to pay for the bill in its entirety through finding the cuts/revenues to do so in their study due this November. Again, the Republicans will find some pathetic, infantile reason to oppose this anyway (the sky is blue, Obama is black, today is Saturday, because Obama said 'pass this bill now' and is mean and hurt our fee-fees), but he has made it incumbent upon them to find a new reason to do so.
3. More importantly beyond appeasing cantankerous bloggers like myself, the speech, and the bill itself, has already won critical acclaim. Mark Zandi of Moody's Analytics, a darling of both parties for economic analysis, estimates that the AJA would shave 1% off of the unemployment rate, adding as many as 1.9 million jobs. Other non-partisan estimates have that number even higher. Now moving unemployment down to 8% is clearly not enough. But this is a step in the right direction and much more effective than the GOP worldview of slashing government spending when no other entity, consumer or corporation, is currently spending either. And arguably, this could be used as a prototype to woo Americans away from the GOP's fire breathing ideology of government-is-always-bad-and-can't-help-create-jobs and enact further stimulus legislation down the road. Beyond Zandi, the speech seems to have placated Paul Krugman to an extent, who has long been the most strident critic of Obama's pathetically inept fiscal policies up until this point.

All of this is great, but the linchpin of this legislation will be the extent to which Obama follows through and hammers this home daily to the American public. That is not his strong suit. We've seen it before in the stimulus bill and the Affordable Care Act - two pieces of legislation which should ostensibly be popular with the public were they properly informed of the content and the benefits for average Americans. The administration completely conceded the message on both of these, allowing the GOP to paint the stimulus as a failure and the ACA as a socialist government takeover of their Medicare. If Obama wants the AJA to succeed, he is going to have to do a much better job of selling it and repeatedly touting its benefits. I am cautiously optimistic that he will. This is now campaign trail Obama, who is arguably much more effective at messaging and agenda-setting than governance Obama (sadly enough). 

All that being said, this is a start. I'm hoping that we will see more of this fight in Obama and congressional Democrats as a whole going forward. They are going to need to sustain this aggressive stance and momentum if they want to have any hope of succeeding in 2012. The next election needs to be a referendum on two extremely different set of ideals, not bat shit Republicanism and slightly saner, less bat shitty centrism. It's a winning message, and one that the Democrats must sustain and hammer relentlessly for the next 14 months.

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.

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.

Hmmm, He Seems Like A Nice Guy!

I'm with Kevin Drum on this one:

"We’re going to see if we’ve got some straight shooters in Congress. We’re going to see if congressional Republicans will put country before party."

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

That Didn't Take Long

Remember what I said the other day?

In the meantime, we will be stuck with Fox News and the Rush Limbaughs and Glenn Becks of this world completely losing their shit, spewing hate speech as they watch their precious grip on America continue to unravel as a new generation rises up and rejects their ignorant worldview.

Well, that was fast. Good ol' GB just couldn't help himself:

On his radio show today, Glenn Beck tackled a particularly sticky issue when it comes to race. How does it make any sort of sense, he wanted to know, to refer to all black persons as "African American," particularly when so many black individuals don't live in the U.S.? 

[...] 

So is the term "colored," Beck and co. wondered, really such a "bad thing" as we're lead to believe? "Only here," he lamented, referring to the U.S. "Why are we made to feel bad?"

Yeah, it's so tough being a white man in America, because we are guilted into not calling people "colored" anymore. I mean, why is the n-word such a bad thing either? Black people say it right? Why can't we? Why are we made to feel so bad?

Don't worry, it gets better:

"African American" was not made to do anything except try to create a super man. "Oh don't you dare feel bad about yourself! You're African American!" No. You're an American. Instead of building the country up and saying, "Lookit. We all have the right, here in this country... Look at what happened with Martin Luther King. That makes you an American. 'Judge not by the color of your skin.'" And you weren't over in Africa! Your great-great-great grandfather was, your great-great-great-great grandfather may have been, but you weren't!And sure this country sucked for blacks. Sucked. Beyond sucked, for a long time. But it doesn't now. It doesn't now. Be proud to be an American.I am sure that Glenn Beck knows firsthand just how bad the country "sucked" for African Americans. He emphasized it twice, just to show how empathetic and understanding he is. And it doesn't anymore! Racism is over because of Obama's election! Just be proud and wave the flag!

Fuck that guy. I don't really know what else to say. It's appalling that he has a national audience of millions of people.

Also too, meanwhile:

Minorities accounted for 98 percent of the population growth in the nation’s largest metropolitan areas over the past decade, according to a new report, as the country’s white population continued to stagnate, and in many places, decline.
Hispanics and Asians led population growth in the country’s 100 largest metropolitan areas over the past decade, growing by 41 percent and 43 percent respectively. The population of blacks grew by 12 percent, and the aging white population was largely flat, increasing by less than 1 percent.
William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution and the author of the report, also said the United States had reached a demographic milestone: About half of all recent births were to minority parents, a shift that will have broad policy implications in the years to come.
The country’s largest cities are changing the fastest, Dr. Frey said, and provide a snapshot of what the country might look like in the future. 

[...] 

“Where these large metro areas are now is where the rest of America is headed,” he said. “The old image of the white and black American population is obsolete.”

You could say maybe this is why the redneck tea bagger white fringe of the Republican party is so unhinged and why they want their country back. They are losing it to an increasingly tolerant, multi-cultural, and diverse America. They could welcome it, but they choose not to because they are scary, other, not like them, not white, and not real murkins.

Reducing Unemployment Through Increasing Pollution

This is a neat trick, albeit one that we have seen before:

House Republicans are planning votes for almost every week this fall in an effort to repeal environmental and labor requirements on business that they say have hampered job growth.With everyone from President Obama to his Republican challengers in the 2012 campaign focusing on ways to spur economic growth, House Republicans will roll out plans Monday to fight regulations from the National Labor Relations Board, pollution rules handed down by the Environmental Protection Agency and regulations that affect health plans for small businesses. In addition, the lawmakers plan to urge a 20 percent tax deduction for small businesses.“It is essential that the House continue our focus on the jobs crisis,” House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (Va.) wrote in a memo to be sent to GOP lawmakers Monday. 

[...] 

The next month or so will focus on EPA regulations. House Republicans would pull back an effort to regulate coal ash in mining-heavy states that they say would hinder concrete production and cost more than 100,000 jobs. Through the fall and winter, Cantor said, the caucus will vote on at least 10 regulations that committee chairmen have identified as “costly bureaucratic handcuffs that Washington has imposed upon business.”The result of these votes is likely to mirror failed efforts this year to repeal landmark legislation that was approved during Obama’s first two years in office — his health-care law and the Dodd-Frank consumer protection bill — but it will provide a framework for Republicans to highlight a jobs agenda. Also, leaders have pushed several of their freshman lawmakers to advance the anti-regulation bills, providing the newcomers with a chance to tout proposals that could resonate with voters in their districts.

I am seeing a formula here - pick a policy or boogieman completely unrelated to current economic conditions but that resonates with your failed ideology and mouth breathing base, relentlessly hammer at this policy in the House even though it has zero chance of ever passing the Senate and even less of a chance of making it past the President's veto pen, all the while taking to Fox News and the Sunday shows and spew lies, misinformation, and propaganda about how the Democrats are killing the nation with their support of the boogieman and how it's their fault that we're in the mess that we are, and oh if they would just compromise a little bit on this very reasonable and "pro-growth" GOP position, we would all be rolling in the Benjamins. 

We saw it the last two years with the deficit as a political cudgel. The deficit has absolutely nothing to do with unemployment or flagging GDP - not a fucking thing. But that was the Republican meme. And the Democrats went along like the bunch of groupthink fraught morons that they are. But I have a feeling that the GOP has gone a bit far on this one and I don't think they will get very far with a "screw labor unions/pollute more" agenda for jobs. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that anything the President reveals in his speech next week will be much more palatable to the American public, but I could also be placing far too much faith in our incredibly stupid and uninformed electorate. 

Finally, this latest stunt from the GOP circus is just further proof that they don't care fuck all for the country or the economy. Focusing on labor unions and environmental regulations at a time of 9.1% unemployment and GDP growth nearing recession is laughable and stupid. It's just an attempt to enact an extreme, ideological agenda under the cloak of jobs. After all, two pillars of the modern Republican party is gutting worker rights and polluting as much as possible because pollution creates jobs and climate change is a farce and only Jebus can harm or end this world. But they are Very Serious People because they hold elected office, and their buddies in the media will treat them as such with kid gloves. Expect this to get a similar treatment to Paul Ryan's 'courageous' abolition of Medicare. The media won't care that the GOP is a bunch of clowns and these policies are cynical and ideologically driven and will do nothing to improve the economy or create jobs. What matters is that they're trying! They're putting something on the table!

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.