Month: March 2009

Saturday Night At The Movies

It started in Naples

By Dennis Hartley

Gomorrah: Beach blanket fungoo.

OK, here’s the paradox. Gomorrah is one of the most mundane films ever made about organized crime; yet it may be the most truthful onscreen portrayal you will ever see. Eschewing the romanticized glamour of the Warner Brothers’ gangsters, the operatic pulp of Coppola’s mob scene, or the “wise guy” poetry of Scorcese’s mean streets, director Matteo Garonne opts for a neo-realist portrait of opportunism and brutality at its basest level. Modern Naples is the setting; so if you’re looking for the Sopranos…fuhgetaboutit.

The episodic, leisurely paced storyline (such as it is) tangentially links several Neapolitan characters who all become involved (to varying degrees of success) with the insidious criminal network known as the Camorra (not to be confused with the Sicilian Mafia). There’s a young boy who is recruited as a drug runner. In one of the more jarring sequences, he lines up outside of an abandoned building along with other young candidates, who each await their “turn” to audition for a job by donning a Kevlar vest and then taking a bullet in the chest at point blank range. Those who are quickest to jump up and dust themselves off are congratulated for “becoming a man” and then hired. (I think I’ve actually had a few job interviews that went like that). Another storyline follows a tailor who works both sides against the middle, designing for a mob-controlled clothing factory by day and moonlighting as a consultant for a Chinese sweat shop that specializes in black-market designer knock-offs. We follow a typical work week in the life of a mob-backed contractor who makes backroom cut-rate deals with manufacturing companies to help dispose of their toxic waste (illegally, of course). And in what is perhaps the film’s closest brush with something resembling a tragic cautionary tale, we follow the exploits of a pair of cocky, wet-behind-the-ears teenaged pals who worship the Al Pacino version of Scarface , and fancy themselves to be a pair of up-and-comers in the local underworld.

If you are expecting traditional expository narrative, seek elsewhere. Six writers are credited on the screenplay (including director Garonne and journalist Roberto Saviano, author of the source book) which suggests the possibility of too many cooks peppering the ragu. I have to admit, I had to re-watch the first half of the film almost immediately, because I was having some difficulty differentiating between some of the characters; I also found it a little murky most of the time as to who was “warring” with who, and why.

But perhaps that is the point of the film-that there is no point to the violence; no one ever really “wins” (an eye for an eye eventually makes the whole world blind, and all that). I got the feeling that the matter-of-fact depiction of violence and avarice that pervades Naples was being posited by the filmmakers as a systemic issue, which has been enabled for far too long by the relative complacency of the local populace. The director post-scripts the film with a sobering list of statistics which enumerates the body count left in the wake of Camorra’s activities over the years (not just from bombings and shootings, but “collateral damage”- like public health hazards from the illegal toxic waste disposal).

Many are comparing this film with City of God, the popular 2002 Brazilian film about the modern crime-ridden slums of Rio de Janeiro. While it does share a similar milieu, I found it to be a much closer cousin to The Wire(the criminal cultures of the port cities of Baltimore and Naples have a lot of surprising parallels). Like the (excellent and much-missed) HBO crime drama, Gomorrah doesn’t prescribe any antidotes to the societal ills that it observes, nor does it try to cloak its narrative in a morality play. It simply presents us with The Way Things Are-the generally quiet desperation of everyday drudgery, punctuated by the occasional moments of adrenaline-pumping excitement and/or heart-stopping fear (mobsters take their pants off the same way as anyone else). If you prefer tidy endings, be forewarned; for unblinking realists, this may be an offer you can’t refuse.

Note: Gomorrah has opened in select cities; but is also currently on PPV in some markets. There is also a Region 2 DVD in release; street date for Region 1 is October 10.

Previous posts with related themes:

Eastern Promises/This is England

Slumdog Millionaire

.

What Else Is Out There?by digby
Dahlia Lithwick is not a crazy DFH blogger or an Obama antagonist. She’s a legal analyst and she’s as confused as the rest of us as to just what the administration is up to with these positions on the torture regime:

Having inherited an undifferentiated mass of legal “war on terror” doctrine from the Bush administration’s constitutional chop shop, President Obama finds himself in the position of being Bush’s Secret-Keeper. Picking its way warily through a minefield of secrecy and privacy claims, the Obama administration this week released nine formerly classified legal opinions produced in the Office of Legal Counsel (while holding back others that are being sought) and brokered a deal whereby Karl Rove and Harriet Miers will finally testify about the U.S. attorney firings (but not publicly). Meanwhile, the administration clings to its bizarre decision to hold fast to the Bush administration’s all-encompassing view of the “state secrets” privilege, and the Nixonian view of executive power deployed to justify it. The Obama administration has also been quick to embrace the Bush view of secrecy in cases involving the disclosure of Bush era e-mails and has dragged its feet in various other cases seeking Bush-era records. If there is a coherent disclosure principle at work here, I have yet to discern it. Trying to tease out a unifying theme here is probably not possible; there are not, as yet, enough data points. I have argued before that one of the reasons Obama will want to keep Bush’s secrets is that he wants to protect his own. What’s good for the goose and all. But it seems to me that along with good (or at least plausible) reasons for shielding Bush-era misconduct from public scrutiny, President Obama may also have some wrongheaded ideas about protecting Americans from knowing the truth.

Read on for the rest of her speculation, which she admits is unsatisfying. I had always assumed they would punt on investigations but still hoped they would at least argue in good faith in court and allow the judiciary to do the dirty work. They could chalk it all up to the rule ‘o law and not have to take any personal responsibility for “criminalizing politics.” But they have actively supported these Bush era positions and the fact that there seems to be no obvious rhyme or reason to these decisions implies that they are either doing what Lithwick surmised and saving the power for their own use or are hiding some things that are so bad they fear the repercussions if it’s revealed. After all, we know an awful lot about what happened, already, and it’s truly terrible stuff. What in God’s name don’t we know about?
If it’s really that bad then they need to lance the boil and get it over with. It will come out eventually and they will be implicated in covering it up when it does.
On a related, and equally confusing note, Greenwald dissects the administration’s confounding Al Marri decision. The concept of due process just gets more and more absurd every day.
.

You Go Logo

by digby

The administration rolled out a new logo last week and it looks like this:

And apparently, it’s controversial. (What isn’t?)

From CNN:

BLITZER: Supporters of President Obama helped make his campaign famous with logos like these. Now, the administration is rolling out more graphic designs to help his causes. But not everyone is giving them rave reviews.

Let’s bring in CNN’s Samantha Hayes.

She’s taking a closer look at this story.

What are you finding — Samantha?

SAMANTHA HAYES, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Wolf, you know, some are more effective than others. And, you know, companies do this all the time. They use a logo or an emblem to identify a product, to send a message — even sometimes try to elicit some kind of emotion.

Well, now the Obama administration is using that one to identify projects associated with the recent $787 billion stimulus package.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

HAYES (voice-over): President Barack Obama wants you to associate this logo with one thing.

OBAMA: Let it be a reminder that our government, your government, is doing its part to put the economy back on the road of — of recovery.

HAYES: The White House tells CNN the O-shaped American Recovery and Reinvestment Act emblem speaks to investments in green energy, infrastructure and health care.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I like that he just actually took the time out and broke — broke it into three categories, instead of just having one logo, to show everybody that he cares about more than one issue.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He’s trying to get people back to work.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I can see other people saying, well, why are you spending so much time on creating the logos, you know?

I mean, it might have created jobs.

HAYES: Rob Frankel has written a book on branding. He says the emblem is missing something.

ROB FRANKEL, BRANDING EXPERT: Unfortunately, it lacks any type of inspiration. And in these types of economic times, inspiration is almost all you’ve got.

HAYES: He compares it to FDR’s Works Progress Administration logo and this one from President Gerald’s Ford’s Whip Inflation Now campaign.

FRANKEL: I think an important aspect here is that this logo comes across as simply just another government service. And that sets up the expectation of, again, here’s what the government is going to do, as opposed to here’s how you can get involved.

HAYES: It’s been hit or miss with Mr. Obama’s logos. The O logo during the campaign was seen everywhere. But he came under fire last June for this one, displayed during a meeting of Democratic governors. Critics said it looked an awful lot like the presidential seal — a presumptive move by then candidate Obama.

But as president, he continues to push his brand and right now, that’s job creation, green energy and health care.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

HAYES: Well, the same Chicago firm that did that O logo for the campaign also did this one, the stimulus logo. And the White House told me that the firm did the work for the stimulus logo it pro bono and that the administration paid the production costs. It was about $3,000.

BLITZER: Thanks very much.

I’ll leave the marketing and artistic critique to others. But I will say that I think it’s absolutely fantastic that they are doing this at all.

I was involved in a discussion some time back with some friends who were tossing around thoughts about the new liberal era in the wake of an Obama victory. And one of the smartest, I thought, was the idea of labeling government work as government work. The taxpayers have always funded massive amounts of good and services, but it seemed to me that the public literally didn’t know what they were and were therefore always vulnerable to the right wing propaganda that the government only sucked the lifeblood from the people and never gave them back anything in return.

This was before the full extent of this meltdown was known, so the idea of a New, New Deal was only percolating. But everyone thought that it was important to figure out some sort of symbol or sign and slap it on government projects. And so it has come to pass.

I personally don’t care if it inspires people to get involved or if it is artistically exciting. I just think it’s smart to have some kind of label to stick all over this country on everything the government is doing on the people’s behalf. It’s a subliminal identification that is part of an overall strategy to change people’s relationship to the government and that’s, as Martha Stewart says, a good thing.

.

Loudmouths And Demagogues

by digby

I wrote a post yesterday about self-dealing Carville and Begala stepping on a useful strategy by blowing their own horns and was of the opinion that they screwed the pooch. I may have been wrong about that in one respect. When I wrote that I didn’t know that Obama campaign chief David Plouffe had written an op-ed on the subject, which does bring the whole thing further into the white house inner circle and indicates that they had decided to publicly engage beyond some simple sparring with the press secretary. It makes it a bit ridiculous to argue that Carville and Begala taking credit for their handiwork is a bad thing when the administration is obviously not attempting to keep its own fingerprints off of it either.

Anyway, perhaps I’m wrong about this, but I think the point still stands. I think it’s a bad idea for Democratic strategists to go around taking public credit for partisan schemes. Sincerity (even if it’s kabuki) is what makes these things play. The only one on the right I can think of who ever makes that mistake is the nutcase Roger Stone. And there is a long history of Democratic insiders spilling their guts to favored reporters to make themselves look good at the expense of their clients and the party.

For a thorough rundown of the week’s events in the Limbaugh story, see the NY Times’ Weekend Opinionator. There’s a lot of very interesting material there, especially from writers on the right, showing just how much dissonance and disagreement there is about the future of the party. The debate provides a pretty stark demarcation among the elites between those who think the future lies with Limbaugh thuggishness and those who (finally) see the destructiveness of his message.

But I think the most interesting passage is an interview with culture critic Neal Gabler, who wrote a book about Walter Winchell:

To get the longer view, however, the Opinionator had a chat with Neal Gabler, the biographer of Limbaugh’s closest historical analogue, Walter Winchell. “Limbaugh is a rabble-rouser, more like Father Charles Coughlin than Winchell,” said Gabler. “His job is to appeal to his section of the audience and, because it is reasonably large and vocal, he has the same kind of political leverage that Coughlin had.” Gabler continued:

Winchell, however, was tightly connected to the Roosevelt administration, which used him to batter opponents. He was a battering ram on which they wouldn’t have their fingerprints — they would feed him and use him to do dirty work they wouldn’t touch themselves. Limbaugh could have had a similar situation during the George W. Bush administration. Steele was right: his power is not based on politics, it’s based on entertainment. Great entertainers like Winchell and Limbaugh manage to simplify politics, to find ways of making it “us against them,” to find ways to dramatize, to demonize, to villainize, to narrativize. Eventually Winchell became a crank, but in an interesting way. He thought he was still a populist, but the political sands had shifted. The intellectual/liberal faction of the Democratic Party, with which he was once aligned, he began to see as elitist rather than populist. He didn’t think he had moved to the right, rather that these people left him behind as they moved “up.” And why did they leave him? Because he was an entertainer, he simplified things, and they thought it was seamy and degrading to be associated with him.

So, how does Limbaugh compare with Winchell. “He doesn’t,” said Gabler. “He doesn’t have Winchell or even Coughlin numbers of listeners, not close. And he’s not in the same league with Winchell as a broadcaster. Winchell was able to blend gossip, news and opinion in a seamless, surreal weave. If he had just sat there and bloviated, the audience would have gotten tired. Winchell could move popular opinion, whereas Limbaugh can only move party opinion.”

I would say, however, that his influence on the major media over the years has never been fully understood. Tim Russert had him on to do election coverage in 2002 and only disinvited him in 2004 because of protests. Howie Kurtz defended him as a mainstram guy in the face of Tom Daschle’s compaint that his commentary about him during the days after 9/11 was causing people to make death threats against him. This is not surprising in a media that openly admits that Drudge — a right wing smear artist — rules their world. Because of that, and the fact that there are literally dozens and dozens of “little Limbaughs” on the radio and on Fox TV, his reach is actually far bigger. He may not be able to directly move popular opinion but his influence over the past two decades is far beyond the numbers that listen to him every day.

.

Media-Financial Complex

by dday

CNBC decided to respond to the righteous Jon Stewart rant against them on a Friday so he couldn’t talk about it on that night’s show. Their claim is that Stewart is “bizarrely obsessed” with their network, and Stewart was repeatedly calling Rick Santelli to come on the show. That’s, um, called BOOKING A GUEST. Maybe CNBC doesn’t do much of that, they just have a “CEO room” in Manhattan and just put the camera on whoever shows up there. It’s not like they ask much of a variance of questions: “How great is your company doing? Is it awesome to be rich?”

Meanwhile, the network and other right-wing market populists continue to push the idea that Obama is responsible for the Dow’s fall since Inauguration Day. I guess the business climate and the job loss has nothing to do with it.

The argument that Obama is somehow responsible for the collapse of Wall Street is absurd. First, every major policy that led to this collapse occurred under George W.’s watch (or, more accurately, his failure to watch). The housing and financial bubbles were created under Bush and exploded under Bush. The stock market began to collapse under Bush.

Second, it’s inevitable that stocks, led by the bloated financial sector, would lose their remaining hot air as the new administration begins “stress-testing” the big banks, many of which are technically insolvent. After all, their share prices were built on a tissue of lies and dreams. Other sectors whose values were similarly distorted and distended by years of financial deception and regulatory disregard, such as housing and insurance, will also have to return to the real world before they can recover. Which could mean more stock losses.

Finally, none of the financial wizards who are now charging Obama with leading America into the abyss have offered an alternative plan for getting us out of the mess that, not incidentally, many of these same wizards happily led us into. For years, the Wall Street Journal editorial page and the financial gurus of cable news cheered as Wall Street leveraged its way into oblivion.

Obviously, Wall Street rage is aimed at getting the biggest banks paid off and the shareholders made whole so that only taxpayers will bear the burden of the collapse. There may be a very good reason, however, for outlets like CNBC, in particular Jim Cramer, to claim that Obama is responsible for the fall of the market. It deflects the blame from themselves. The story of Deep Capture is epic and needs to be read in full by the investigators who followed it for years to really understand. But TocqueDeville at Daily Kos does a pretty decent summarizing job.

This rabbit hole involves the thugs surrounding Jim Cramer and some of the top financial “journalists” from the New York Times, WSJ, Fortune magazine and BusinessWeek, top hedge funds, the Mafia, and the DTCC. It also includes “blackmail, smear campaigns, espionage, fraud, harassment, extortion, bribery, rumor-mongering, sabotage, off-shore money laundering, political cronyism, frivolous lawsuits, witness tampering, biased financial research, false identities, bogus credit ratings, bribery, libelous blogs, bad science, forgery, wiretapping, counterfeiting, collusion, lying, cheating, threats and theft.”

And if that wasn’t fun enough, it may be the underlying story of what collapsed the entire, global banking system or at least served as the catalyst for the collapse.

We’re talking about financial journalists using the power of their megaphone to trash a stock, or even tout it at the last minute, and then, through naked short-selling, earn millions while destroying public companies. And Jim Cramer is perhaps the greatest offender.

I have analyzed well over a thousand stories written by this clique of journalists. The vast majority of them were sourced from a small group of short-sellers who are also friends of Cramer. Other popular sources for this group of journalists include convicted felons, mobsters, dubious private investigators, crooked lawyers, hired stock bashers, and gun-toting goons – most of whom are tied to the Cramer constellation of short-sellers.

Some of the stories written by these reporters are accurate enough. But many are not. The journalists misconstrue data with seemingly purposeful intent. They exaggerate and obfuscate. They publish innuendo or merely repeat, Deus Optimus Maximus, the words of their hedge fund and criminal friends. A single negative story by one of these reporter-thugs can send a company’s stock tumbling by more than 50% — pure profit for their hedge fund sources, who of course sell the company short (often right before the articles are published). Meanwhile, an overwhelming majority of the companies targeted by these journalists will also be the victims of phantom stock selling and other shenanigans. The journalists do not mention this in their stories, and in fact go out of their way to deny that phantom stock exists.

Anyone who says otherwise is subjected to a vicious media smear.

It doesn’t take much these days to persuade you that anyone on Wall Street is a crook. But Mark Mitchell had the goods. Cramer understood the value of information, like any inside trader. Then he got the power, through his own TV show, to control that information. And the method that Cramer and his cronies apparently preferred, naked short-selling, has been brought up as a possible culprit in the fall of Bear Stearns. Sen. Jon Tester even brought it up in a hearing with then-SEC chair Christopher Cox in April 2008.

This financial meltdown isn’t entirely due to the people who made money on the way down. But the corroded relationship between the Masters of the Universe and the subjects who cover them – the Media-Financial Complex – is absolutely a part of this tale. And the phantom stock – invented wealth that can appear and disappear – is just another of the exotic financial instruments created by people who push paper and add zeroes to their balance sheets and call it work, paper and securities that are then leveraged and bet upon and sliced and diced until nobody understands them and just doesn’t want to get left holding them when the organ stops playing and the big dance ends.

Read Mark Mitchell’s story of Deep Capture. It’s a through-the-looking-glass experience. Anyway, I can think of a guest for Stewart’s next show. I leave you with some quotes from Jim Cramer:

“I really have no use for theoreticians of the market. They make you no money. We are in a casino-like market and I want to game the casino. The absurdity of a Jeremy Siegel from Wharton coming out with some statement about valuation and how he thinks it’s wrong is just poppycock. Valuation is what it is. If you could sell only thousands of dollars worth of stock at these prices, then I would be wrong. But you can sell trillions of dollars worth. So what does it matter if an academic says the prices are wrong. They are the prices. That is the hand you are dealt, so figure it out or get lost.” (Cramer Rewrites ‘How an Old Dow Learned New Tricks’,” TheStreet.com, March 18, 2000.)

Jim Cramer: But what’s important when you’re in that hedge fund mode is to not do a thing remotely truthful, because the truth is so against your view that it’s important to create a new truth to develop a fiction. The fiction is developed by almost anybody who’s down 2 percent, up 6 percent a year. You can’t take any chances. You can’t have the market up any more than it is if you’re up six, because starting Jan 2 you’ll have all your money come out. (link)

.

Three Things

by tristero

Here, courtesy of the New York Times is a slightly clearer, but still visually obtuse, version of the scariest chart ever:

You can find the original chart Atrios linked to here. Seriously, with approximately 8% of all males in the world suffering from red/green color-blindness, it takes a special kind of moron to lay out a chart of this urgency with thin red and green lines that make it nearly impossible for people like me to grok. And to choose (what I think is) green, not red, for the alarming line? WTF? Sure, you can draw a big ugly (green?) arrow but that kind of undermines the whole point of the graphic, which is that the contrast with past recessions is so starkly apparent. Sheesh!

It is also telling to note that while this article appears on the front page of the printed Times this morning, as of this posting, it is still buried deep within the Times website.

******

Speaking of the Times, there is a bizarre “bloggingheads.tv” with the subject “Is President Obama to blame for the deepening economic crisis?” This is, of course, a completely reasonable question. As I’m sure everyone recalls, there was a nationwide debate right after 9/11 on whether George W. Bush was to blame for neglecting bin Laden’s threats during the months before the attack. You don’t remember that? You clearly remember Bush being given a clean pass while Clinton was blamed for the neglect and failure instead? Liberals.

******

Recently, I’ve become interested in the topic of food, something I know very little about. It is an extremely complex subject, more so than I could have imagined. But this Mother Jones article is fascinating for reasons that go far beyond the topic of food.

The argument is between two different kinds of reform of the present food manufacturing and delivery system. Roughly speaking, there is the organic/local foods movement and a newer trend, which the article clearly supports, that believes that a sustainable food culture is not possible or desirable using the current assumptions of the organic foodies. Both positions agree that the practices of the current food industry has become increasingly untenable to the point of imminent catastrophe.

Here’s what make this interesting for me. While I’m sure many commentators will beg to differ, the two sides seem to be having a serious argument. One side – say, “the organics” – are clearly advocating a profound restructuring and reimagining of food in the 21st century. The other side – call them “the scalars” for now – are much more conservative, taking some ideas from the organics but also incorporating some apparently useful techniques from the failing status quo.

In short the three positions can be characterized like this:

The current, utterly dildo food industry, maximizing profits for the few while degrading life for everyone else, embodies positions held by modern conservatism. It has no basis in reality, it’s financially rapacious, and is extremely dangerous.

The organics/local food movement is a well-articulated liberal, even left, movement. It is transformative, perhaps radically so, but is based on an outlook on the realities of food production/consumption held within a large context regarding the quality of life. Many of its assumptions are admirable, some seem arguable based on where one places emphasis.

The “scalar” movement is also well-articulated, but it is a genuinely conservative movement. To me, a moderate liberal (and vegetarian) who is just beginning to learn about this issue, many of its assumptions seem arguable upon first encounter, but some seem reasonable. I don’t think they can be dismissed out of hand, as arguments for perpetuating the assumptions of the current food industry can be, for the most part.

The battle over food seems analogous to battles we’re having to fight in many areas. Reasonable people can, and do, strongly disagree about how to confront the multiple disasters left behind by George W. Bush. Unfortunately, the public debate is not between them but with lunatics and extremists like Perle, Gingrich, and their ilk. The sooner these nuts are marginalized, i.e., the sooner it becomes unthinkable for the New York Times to host a debate on whether Obama is to blame for the recession, the sooner we can start to have a serious, and necessary, conversation between liberals and real conservatives. Until then, we’re just dealing with dangerous, malicious, and literally murderous clowns.

Unbelievable

by digby

Check out dday’s blog to see what that universally loathed Schwarzenneger is doing now.

There is a part of me, I admit, that thinks Californians deserve what they get for putting this ridiculous piece of work in office. But there are a whole bunch of us who didin’t vote for him and kids, sadly, have to rely on their dipshit parents to look after their interest and they were all so star struck by this multimillion dollar robot that they just couldn’t wait wait to vote for him.

What a terrible, terrible mess.

The Problem

by digby

I know it’s annoying that people like me are constantly harrassing the elite media, but it’s terribly important that somebody do it, especially during these times. These wealthy celebrities are living in another universe from most of the rest of us and never is it more obvious than when they talk about money, which is the main topic of discussion these days and arguably the most confusing.

Here’s a perfect example from one of last week’s Hardballs:

SIMON: I mean, they don‘t have a plan. The response is, This is no time to be raising taxes because we‘re in a recession, and also that soaking the rich is class warfare. But the Obama White House, as you saw by reading Summers‘s comment there, is not selling this as soaking the rich. Actually, we don‘t want class warfare in America. We want fairness. And we‘re saying people should pay their fair share.And now it‘s time, as David‘s article pointed out, where the fair (ph) have been getting a break for decades now, now it‘s time for them to step up and pay their fair share. The difficulty comes really in defining the rich.
People today—if you make—if you‘re a family making $250,000 or more, you‘re going to pay more in taxes. A two-income-earner family making $250,000 today, with maybe a couple of kids in college, paying off their mortgage, who have seen their life savings cut in half, if not more, by a falling stock market, probably don‘t consider themselves rich. They probably consider themselves the middle class. I‘m sure the White House would rather have said, millionaires only get taxed more. The trouble is, if you tax just people making $1 million a year, you wouldn‘t raise enough money. You have to reach into the middle class to get the real wealth of America. And that‘s why it‘s being defined pretty low, at $250,000.

I’m sure that everyone on that panel thinks that’s true. But it isn’t. In Los Angeles County, where I live, the median income in 2007 was $53,494. Even in Beverly Hills the median income was only $70,945, at the height of the tech bubble. Yet Roger Simon believes there is a large constituency of “middle class” people who make $250,000 a year. And that’s because he and his friends all make at least that much and they think they are middle class.
They aren’t. Those reporting adjusted gross income of more than $250,000 to the IRS are projected to make up 2 percent of households (in 2008.) There is no way that can possibly be considered “middle” class. It’s ridiculous.
These are wealthy people who can easily afford to pay a little bit more in taxes on anything they make above 250K per year. A quarter of a million dollars is objectively a lot of money and anyone can live very well on it anywhere in the country unless they think they are somehow suffering because they can’t afford a Park Avenue penthouse or feel put upon because they can’t vacation at St Barts this spring. Roger Simon isn’t a horrible person, but he is part of the problem. They all sound like little Marie Antoinettes when they say this stuff. Perhaps Rush can persuade his pathetic little Galt worshippers that it’s in their best interest to support wealthy people like him through these tough economic times, but I really doubt that the majority of people in this country are finding a lot of sympathy for anyone who is whining about taxes on their quarter million dollar annual income.
Update: Jamison Foser takes the media downtown on whole tax cut debate. It’s much worse than I thought.
.

Stifle, You Dingbats

by digby

I wrote a post the other day in which I mentioned in passing that Democratic strategists have a problem with diarrhea of the mouth and should keep their plans to themselves. I was specifically referring to Carville and Begala obviously running around taking “credit” for the Limbaugh controversy. As usual, the big mouthed Dems have stepped on their own story and screwed the whole thing up.

I don’t give a damn what Carville and Begala say about seeing in a poll months ago that Limbaugh was unpopular, this thing was perpetrated by the leadership vacuum in the Republican party, Limbaugh’s moronic statement that he wanted Obama to fail in a time of crisis and his outrageous speech a CPAC. Carville and Begala may be going around patting themselves on the back for cooking all that up, but they didn’t. The only thing they may have done was get Rahm to jump on board, which was also stupid It happened purely because Rush Limbaugh is and always has been a big, fat, idiot. The White House should have left this to the media and bottom feeders like us to run with, espcially after Rush made a twenty layer cake of himself at that gathering on Saturday. (Rahm is not nearly as sharp as he thinks he is.)

Now we have the whole chattering class worrying themselves into the vapors over whether Obama is ruining his post-partisan mantle and whether or not he’s becoming “Clintonian” by demonizing the right like those devils Bill and Hillary Clinton used to do. It’s pathetic.

It’s not important in the long run. This really is a sideshow. But until Carville and Begala started tooting their own horns, Rush was on the losing end of this among the cognoscenti, which was a good wedge between the villagers and within the Republican party. It’s not the be all and end all, but it’s useful to have an embarrassing gasbag being kowtowed to by Republican leaders. It made them look like complete wimps, which they are, but really don’t know it. Now it’s all just “partisanship,” everybody’s comfortable, and we’re back where we started.

This is an ongoing problem among beltway Democrats who can’t seem to stop themselves from running to the press every time they have a neat political idea (or want to take credit for something after the fact) and they end up making themselves look unprincipled and manipulative. I’ve got nothing against playing hardball politics and certgainly nothing against a little bit of Machiavellian manipulation. But please, if you’re going to do it, just STFU. At least save it for your memoirs.

Update: Here’s Howie Kurtz, fluffing Rush as he’s been doing for years. The Villagers just worship anyone who makes that kind of money bloviating about politics and garnering plaudits from all the big important rich Republicans. He’s a God in their eyes — the savviest of media players. A rotund John Galt for the couch potato set.

.

Meltdown Record

by digby

The other day I wrote a little post about the front page of the NY Times wondering if it would be one of those things that future scholars would study.

Today, I looked at Eschaton and had a similar reaction. Being an economist by training, Atrios has been following Big Shitpile far longer than most of us and has been sounding warnings about it for years. But these days I read his blog and just get a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. Here’s just a sampling of his posts as of noon PST today. (I copied them in full because I wanted to make a record, kind of like that NYT front page.)

The Scariest Chart Ever

It is scary. And next month will be scarier.

How about some new ideas, Timmeh?

-Atrios 15:50

Dr. Doom Gets Gloomier

Kinda scary.
March 6 (Bloomberg) — The global recession may continue until the end of 2010 as the response by governments to rectify it is “too little, too late,” said Nouriel Roubini, the New York University professor who predicted the financial crisis.

…

The situation can be improved by appropriate policies, including governments taking over insolvent banks, cleaning them up and re-selling them to private investors, he said. The Group of Seven and the Group of Twenty economies “must act together to get out of this mess,” Roubini said.
History will not be kind to Geithner. Or his boss, unless he changes directions quickly.

-Atrios 15:15

Jobs

Well, I just barely won the under bet. -651K. And unemployment hits 8.1%

The broader measure of unemployment, U6, jumps from 13.9 to 14.8%.

-Atrios 13:15

Lighting A Pile Of Money On Fire

I don’t know if these people are corrupt or fools, but they’re just shoveling money out the door as fast they can.

-Atrios 10:22

They Fucked Everything Up, So Obviously They Can Fix Things

Anyone else see a small problem with this idea?

The government is seeking to resuscitate the nation’s crippled financial system by forging an alliance with the very outfits that most benefited from the bonanza preceding the collapse of the credit markets: hedge funds and private-equity firms.

The initiative to revive the consumer lending business, outlined by officials this week, offers these wealthy investors a new chance to make sizable profits — but, thanks to the government, without the risk of massive losses.

They made bad bets when they at least theoretically thought they could incur losses. Now the cunning plan is to hope they make good bets even though…no chance of losses!

This is all going to end really badly.

-Atrios 09:45

Shitpile: Actually Really Shitty

As Krugman explains, someone really needs to sit Geithner down and explain to him that all those pieces of shitpile are indeed really shitty. This fantasy of undervalued assets is just a fantasy.
Here’s how the pattern works: first, administration officials, usually speaking off the record, float a plan for rescuing the banks in the press. This trial balloon is quickly shot down by informed commentators.

Then, a few weeks later, the administration floats a new plan. This plan is, however, just a thinly disguised version of the previous plan, a fact quickly realized by all concerned. And the cycle starts again.

Why do officials keep offering plans that nobody else finds credible? Because somehow, top officials in the Obama administration and at the Federal Reserve have convinced themselves that troubled assets, often referred to these days as “toxic waste,” are really worth much more than anyone is actually willing to pay for them — and that if these assets were properly priced, all our troubles would go away.

-Atrios 08:34

Inquiry

It’s hard to know exactly how to read these stories as there’s this kind of pass the buck game going on between BoA and Merrill.
CHARLOTTE, N.C. — One Merrill Lynch trader apparently gambled away more than $120 million in the currency markets. Others seemingly lost hundreds of millions on tricky credit derivatives.

But somehow all this red ink did not spill into plain view until after Merrill earmarked billions for bonuses and staggered into the arms of Bank of America.

-Atrios 07:30

And in case you hadn’t heard, the Dow dipped below 6500 today. Oy.

.