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.

More Tea Bagger/Christian Stupidity

Morans:

"The end of Don't Ask, Don't Tell is the signature achievement of our time," Ferguson told Obama and the crowd. 

At that point, a bearded man standing in the front row closest to the stage began shouting: "Christian God is the one and only true living God, the creator of Heaven and the Universe," according to White House pool coverage of the event. 

Someone then threw a jacket toward the stage. 

"Is that his jacket?" Obama quipped. 

The guy was still ranting while being carried out by Secret Service: "I love Jesus. Jesus Christ is God. Jesus Christ is the son of God." 

Obama stopped speaking briefly, smiling uncomfortably as the crowd booed loudly to drown him out. Eventually, police and Secret Service dragged the man through the crowd and out of the theater. 

[...] 

The man was still on his way out yelled one final epithet: "Jesus Christ is god, Barack Obama is the antichrist!"

I have no words. These people are just fucking stupid. And insane.

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. 

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!

It Was a Ruse, You Big Dumb Idiot!

No one could have predicted that the faux controversy over the opening of a mosque in lower Manhattan was just a clever ruse to rile up the GOP's most reliable voting constituents in advance of the 2010 elections: the old, the uninformed, the white, and the racist. 

Never hear much about it any more do we? Funny how that works.

Stay Classy, GOP Voters

Ahh, GOP presidential debates: the gift that keeps on giving. First we had the audience cheering Gov. Rick Perry's record of executions - the most of any state in the nation. Even more than Dubya. Next came another audience cheering for an uninsured man to die. And now we have them booing a gay soldier:

These people are sociopaths. And what ever happened to the military being the best goddamn real murkins ever? I thought you couldn't say anything bad about the military otherwise Jesus killed a kitten, and if you question their infallibility and awesomeness, you are a terrorist and are going to hell. I guess that doesn't apply when it comes to homosexuals. Because you know, the GOP and its ignorant mouth breathing constituency hates them some gay.

Contrast their reaction with this recent clip from the Daily Show, the operative clip coming at 2:32:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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I don't know how you can watch that and not be moved deeply on some level, but again, they are sociopaths. Fuck them. 

Troy Davis Executed

I have not really been writing about Troy Davis at any length simply because I have been more consumed with the number of economic and tax related news lately. There are number of other good writers who have covered this: see Digby and TNC to name a few.

Before I get to my point, Davis was executed by the state of Georgia this evening despite numerous recantations by corroborating witnesses from his original trial. Davis maintained his innocence up until the moment of his untimely execution. In the days leading up to his execution, there was a veritable torch-and-pitchfork crowd within the right wing media overtly cheering for his execution.

I have never really waded into the social politics of capital punishment, but viewing this unfortunate spectacle has changed that for me. The mere thought of rotting for years on death row, facing down execution for a crime I did not commit is enough to make me want to vomit, let alone imagining any of my friends or family in a similar situation. And that is not to say that I am convinced either way of Davis' innocence or guilt. But as I mentioned before, when several witnesses basically say their original testimony was garbage, it probably bears some serious thought as to whether or not we ought to put this man to death. That was tried in various forms all the way up to the Supreme Court, but being the death-loving, ever macho, dick swinging, executions-are-awesome culture that we are, was ultimately denied. Apparently "beyond a reasonable doubt" is just a flimsy term that we don't let impede the assuaging of our bloodlust. 

I think this shows that in some ways, humanity really hasn't come very far from the days of the Roman Empire. When faced with a man's questionable guilt, instead of taking every precaution to ensure we don't execute an innocent man, we rally the most depraved aspects of our national psyche, cheering for his demise like a bunch of drunken Romans watching  a couple of gladiators swinging axes at each other in the Coliseum. On a similar note, this was also on display at recent Republican debates when audiences cheered enthusiastically at Gov. Rick Perry's record on executions (the most of any governor) and Wolf Blitzer's question as whether a thirty year old, coma stricken, uninsured man should be left to die. This sort of display is disgusting, craven, and has no place in a civilized democracy. You might also say this is why the GOP came unglued at the mention of "empathy" during the Justice Sotomayor confirmation hearings. It's because they have none, and the very idea of it is repellent to them.

But as for the politics of the death penalty, I assume its proponents (especially on the right) use their favored "if you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear" sham of a moral argument. This was popularized during the rise of the Patriot act and the War on Terror as Americans rightly expressed their objections and reservations to the government's ever expanding powers of surveillance over its own citizens. But tragedies like Troy Davis' executions are precisely why we should fear the government having this sort of power. Humans, and by extension their institutions, are inherently fallible. This isn't the first case of a potentially innocent man being put to death, and it won't be the last either.

On Defense Spending

Every time you hear a politician talk about cutting our ridiculously bloated, bigger-than-the-rest-of-the-world-combined defense budget, think of these words by Matthew Yglesias:

If you think about, say, Denmark there’s probably some level of concern there that al-Shabab will take over Somalia and create a congenial atmosphere for Islamist radicalism. Then there’s some secondary concern that some of this radicalism might lead to efforts to infiltrate Denmark and launch terrorist attacks in Copenhagen. The proposed remedies for this, however, are going to be general considerations about physical security in Denmark. The country needs effective policing and border security agencies, and it needs to be resilient in the face of the possibility that a bomb may go off somewhere someday without wrecking the country. 

[...] 

The reporters say the “rapid expansion” of these military efforts “is a reflection of the growing alarm with which U.S. officials view the activities of al-Qaeda affiliates in Yemen and Somalia.” No doubt it is that. But it’s also a reflection of a very grandiose conception of the appropriate role of the American military in the world. After all, a radical who’s in Yemen or Somalia is, by definition, not in the United States. It would be cheaper and easier to focus on making sure people can’t get from Yemen to Yuma or from Somalia to Sacramento than for us to go halfway around to try to kill them. But America’s strategic concept is basically that if there’s a problem anywhere in the world that could potentially be ameliorated by dropping American bombs, then we ought to drop the bombs. That strategy requires an extremely high level of defense expenditures. Bombs, planes, bases, “secret” airstrips, etc. are all expensive. To reduce military spending, we would need to adopt a more restrained view of the role of the American military. That hasn’t happened.

Defense spending is going no where, at least not in any meaningful capacity. Not until we discontinue our fetish for Endless Wars and piss pants reactions to anything that goes bump in the night and smells like a terrorist. And unfortunately for us, I don't see either of those things ever happening. 

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.