Month: June 2010

Baby Steps In The Dead of Night

by digby

For those of you who were unable to procure enough caffeine or diet pills to stay up all night watching the riveting coverage on C-SPAN, Dday put together a nice rundown of the the whimper-not-a-bang of the Fin-reg compromises:

Lawmakers worked into the night and came up with an oddly unsatisfying compromise on the two most contentious issues left in financial reform, with the final package voted upon at 5:30 this morning (ET). But hey, that was on C-SPAN, so eight people did probably get to see it. Transparency!

This bill has officially been renamed Dodd-Frank. So let’s see what they’ve done

Click over for details. The upshot is a hodgepodge of compromises watering down the integrity of the reforms. Probably better than absolutely nothing but inadequate to the task at hand. In other words, typical Washington “reform”.

Conflation Fail

by digby

FAIR does an overview of the polls which show that the beltway obsession with the deficit is not, in fact, shared by the country.

But I did want to highlight this one piece of evidence supporting my contention that to the extent people do care about — they just don’t understand it:

And with all the media hysteria over federal spending and the deficit, the public seems to have a somewhat muddled view of why it’s even an issue. A recent Pew/National Journal survey (6/17-20/10) that found 74 percent of respondents believed that–contrary to what most economists would tell you–“budget cuts to reduce the federal deficit” would help create jobs. The same poll found similarly wide majorities seeing job creation from additional spending on public works programs, more aid to state and local governments, and cutting business and income taxes–all policies that would increase the deficit. Surveys in which the public ranks these conflicting priorities consistently give the deficit little emphasis.

I have thought from the beginning of the crisis that this was a problem. I could tell from some conversations I was having that people were under the misapprehension that the deficit caused the recession and that ending the deficit is the only way to fix the economy. Many wingnuts are making that explicit claim.

This is one of the reasons why I have been so frantic that the administration was feeding into the deficit hysteria. They don’t seem to get that people don’t actually care about “the deficit,” they care about “the economy” and they fail to make a distinction between the two, especially since we have right wing wrecking crew that makes a point of conflating the two.

It’s a problem.

.

TOTD

by digby

My favorite tweet of the day was “A kitten has taken over Salon magazine.” Here’s proof.

(I’m getting very depressed and frustrated about the state of the world. Only cute animals can pull me out of it. I’m sorry, you’ll just have to bear with me.)

.

We Were All Better Then

by digby

Ta-Nehesi Coates discusses a fascinating remembrance of a freed slave for her slave days and discusses what he calls “the argument” something of which I was completely unaware: it was once a serious matter of scholarly dispute as to whether or not slaves preferred being slaves. Like Coates I think it’s akin to believing in creationism to even consider that slaves enjoyed their enslavement, so this is a strange concept to me. But now that he brought it up, I can certainly see the socio-political reasons for such an argument existing and am similarly relieved that it no longer seems to be necessary.

But I’m not sure the memory of Clara the former slave is actually about slavery at all, at least as I read it. She does wax nostalgic for slave days and that might very well seem to be a very strange thing to do — if you’re a young person. What I think Coates may not realize (and certainly his daughter (?) to whom he says he read the passage and was greeted with horror) is that when people get older the world of the past always looks sweeter and lovelier, not because it was — but because they were. That poetic lady was remembering a time in which, despite her slave status, she was young and healthy and full of energy, finding all sorts of things to love about life. In her old age, she was no longer looking forward to life but looking backward at what life had been. Any past seems beautiful when you don’t have much future left. So, I don’t think it was the former slave speaking there. It was the former young woman.

Anyway, it’s a fascinating piece as all Coates’ work is. I never fail to learn something new when I read his blog.

.

Winning The War Against the American Dream

by digby

Everybody’s talking about Senator Debbie Stabenow’s aggressive words today accusing the Republicans of tanking the economy and throwing millions out of work for political gain. I don’t see why this is even slightly controversial. The GOP is a party whose mouthpieces said from the very beginning that they wanted the president to fail and that they were planning his “Waterloo.” And anyone who understood how our government works (or even understands simple logic) knew that saying that in the midst of an economic crisis translates to making people suffer. There was no other way to interpret that so it makes sense.

On a more prosaic political level, they, like the administration, have been studying the Reagan playbook. And they know that they must do everything in their power to prevent Morning in America. Since they are nihilists who actually care nothing for the suffering of human beings, they have no compunction about simultaneously throwing ever more people out of work while blaming the Democrats for coddling the lazy unemployed. They are simply building a sense of ongoing panic leading up to the elections. It’s a very calculated move and not one that wasn’t anticipated. Indeed, this turn of events was foreshadowed by the fight over the original stimulus bill:

As we watch this legislative sausage slowly crumble, I would hope that President Obama will take his economic agenda to the American people… The country needs to be instructed about the logic and necessity of this stimulus plan because they clearly don’t fully understand it. And because of that, the Republicans are making headway with their rhetoric of “fiscal responsibility,” conflating stimulus with bailouts and the rest of their destructive obstructionism.

Despite his huge personal approval, Obama didn’t start off with a lot of public support for the plan and support is inching down. He is asking for a huge amount of money and the promise of bipartisanship is not working out. I think it would be helpful if he explained what a stimulus is and why this plan will succeed.

People want him to succeed and they will back him if he makes the explicit case and give the plan some time to work if he asks them for it. Not having congressional Republicans on the team won’t matter if the American people stay behind him. But if he continues to make bipartisanship the test of the plan’s success or failure, it really could fail whether it passes or not. One of the main components of the success of the plan is its ability to inspire confidence and the Republicans, the Blue Dogs and their friends in the media are doing everything they can to ensure that Americans believe it won’t work.

Big Tent Democrat reminds us that today is FDRs birthday and he excerpts one of his famous speeches to rally the country in 1932. This is the kind of thing that may be what Americans need to hear from their new president today as well:

It is well within the inventive capacity of man, who has built up this great social and economic machine capable of satisfying the wants of all, to insure that all who are willing and able to work receive from it at least the necessities of life. In such a system, the reward for a day’s work will have to be greater, on the average, than it has been, and the reward to capital, especially capital which is speculative, will have to be less. But I believe that after the experience of the last three years, the average citizen would rather receive a smaller return upon his savings in return for greater security for the principal, than experience for a moment the thrill or the prospect of being a millionaire only to find the next moment that his fortune, actual or expected, has withered in his hand because the economic machine has again broken down.

It is toward that objective that we must move if we are to profit by our recent experiences. Probably few will disagree that the goal is desirable. Yet many, of faint heart, fearful of change, sitting tightly on the roof-tops in the flood, will sternly resist striking out for it, lest they fail to attain it. Even among those who are ready to attempt the journey there will be violent differences of opinion as to how it should be made. So complex, so widely distributed over our whole society are the problems which confront us that men and women of common aim do not agree upon the method of attacking them. Such disagreement leads to doing nothing, to drifting. Agreement may come too late.

Let us not confuse objectives with methods. Too many so-called leaders of the Nation fail to see the forest because of the trees. Too many of them fail to recognize the vital necessity of planning for definite objectives. True leadership calls for the setting forth of the objectives and the rallying of public opinion in support of these objectives.

Do not confuse objectives with methods. When the Nation becomes substantially united in favor of planning the broad objectives of civilization, then true leadership must unite thought behind definite methods.

The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something. The millions who are in want will not stand by silently forever while the things to satisfy their needs are within easy reach.

We need enthusiasm, imagination and the ability to face facts, even unpleasant ones, bravely. We need to correct, by drastic means if necessary, the faults in our economic system from which we now suffer. We need the courage of the young. Yours is not the task of making your way in the world, but the task of remaking the world which you will find before you. May every one of us be granted the courage, the faith and the vision to give the best that is in us to that remaking!

If Obama could make a speech like that then the Democrats (if they could rouse themselves to do it) could go out and say that the tired program of tax cuts for everything is one of those things that has “failed and we should admit it.”

Right now, I’m seeing the conservatives win the rhetorical war, at least among the elites… On MSNBC this morning we had a segment with Mort Zuckerman arguing that the stimulus bill needs to have more tax cuts, Governor Mark Sanford (R) arguing for less spending and Jeffrey Sachs from Columbia University worrying about deficits.

That’s the state of the debate at this moment and nowhere in it does anyone make the case that stimulus simply means that the government needs to spend a lot of money to put people to work and that those jobs should be in places where the taxpayers would get their money’s worth by either fixing long neglected infrastructure and education needs, create new (green) jobs for the future, or to provide services for people who are suffering during this recession. Stimulating demand is part of that, but since, as the Republicans themselves admit, the tax rebates and tax cuts of the past few years haven’t worked — we need to go to the mattresses and inject money directly into the economy. A huge government spending program is a blunt instrument, but it’s the only one we we have left.

That was a year and a half ago. The economy is still a mess. And today, just as then, the Republicans are obstructing government efforts to stimulate it by helping the states or even extending unemployment benefits. And I still don’t think the people of this country have the vaguest idea of what’s really gone wrong or even know what “obstruction” means. As Krugman pointed out this morning, the non-intuitive nature of Keynesianism has not been countered by the professionals, both economic and political, and so there is no public understanding of what’s required to fix this.

What they do know is that the government is dysfunctional. Republicans FTW.

The bill failed 57-41. The Democrats (except Ben Nelson) were all there, with Republicans all against. And if you want to know specifically just how fucking nuts the Republicans are today on this, get a load of this bizarroworld gibberish from the allegedly sane and moderate Senator Collins earlier today on the floor:

You will not see the kind of start-ups because of the state of the economy, because of the policies that are coming out of the more taxes and more spending, which get to the Tax Extenders Package that’s before us today. And that is my concern with the detachment that we have between what is happening in America on Main Street and what’s happening here in Washington DC and the Us Senate. Madam president there isn’t that reality check and that’s obviously exemplified by by the kind of legislation that we’re trying to ram through the congress once again. That means more taxes and more spending that’s going to cost more jobs. It’s going to provide more risk in the economy and therefore we’re not going to see the kind of economic growth the American people deserve. And somehow we think that is not a cause and effect or a correlation between what we do here and what happens across America.O know that in talking to my constituents and to small business owners I hear it day in and day out. I go home and I talk to them and I listen more importantly and I hear what they’re saying and they are uniformly saying the same thing: that the policies coming out of Washington causes them great pause, it causes them alarm.

Somehow, I don’t think their concern and alarm is what she thinks it is. Not that she cares.

Today I receive my last unemployment check. I’ve used up all available extensions. My position was eliminated on Feb. 1, 2009. Since then I’ve diligently searched for work. I have a MA and 23 years experience. I’ve had three interviews and no offers. My savings, including retirement, is gone. I had to sell my house. I’ve moved from Michigan to Massachusetts into the home of my parents, who at 81 and 71 live on their investments (which have been dwindling in this economy.) At a time when I should be getting ready for my retirement and taking care of my parents, I’m back at square one.

This is certainly not where I had planned to be. This is certainly not the American dream I was raised to believe in, one whose premise is that if you work hard, get a good education, you will succeed.

Ezra has the particulars on the bill.
.

Ritual Sacrifice Failure

by digby

Greg Sargent made a fascinating observation this morning regarding the GOP’s refusal to to the easy thing and ritually sacrifice Joe Barton:

The question is, Why haven’t Republicans removed him? As best as I can determine, Republicans believe there’s no political percentage in doing so because Dems will continue attacking them as stooges for Big Oil no matter what they do. Republicans don’t appear to think the Barton attack is as effective as, say, attacking them for taking Big Oil’s campaign contributions. They think attacks featuring the unknown Barton will sound like so much Beltway white noise.

Republicans appear to think that any discussion of oil has a downside for Dems, because it allows Republicans to keep pointing out that Obama has failed to stop the spill.

Republicans are always much less likely to do this sort of thing (unlike Democrats who seem to relish it) but in this case it truly does seem to be an obvious move with little substantial downside. It’s not like they don’t have a huge number of substitute oil whores to replace him with.

Sargent’s take on the GOP rationale sounds right to me. And I would guess they are also calculating that they need to appease Limbaugh and the rest of the gasbags to some degree since some Republicans very mildly rebuked them for defending Barton’s comments. But is their calculation that “any discussion of oil has a downside for Dems because it allows the Republicans to point out that Obama has failed to stop the spill” even rational? I agree that they might believe it, but I think they’re cracked. People may be frustrated with the government’s response to the spill but nobody thinks Obama has the singular power to stop it. It’s like a man made volcano or tsunami.

What they want is for him to make sure the government is doing everything it can to deal with the fallout and more importantly to hold BP accountable for causing this catastrophe. And that’s where Barton comes in. He apologized to BP — and Republican gasbags everywhere are holding him up as a hero for doing it while Republican politicians are acting as if it’s no big deal.

It’s true that Barton as an individual is unknown and that whether or not he keeps his committee ranking can be seen as an inside the beltway phenomenon. But his comments play into the deepest, most embedded negative stereotypes about Republicans and big business. It’s not just what he said — it’s the accumulation of decades adulation of CEOs and subservience to the cult of the corporation that the Republicans represent. (It’s not say that Democrats aren’t just as subservient, but they don’t have the reputation, largely due to the conservatives’ insistence that they are socialist lackeys of the Bolshevik unions and hippie communes.)

The fact is that Barton’s comments sound perfectly predictable coming from the mouth of any Republican. And that is what should worry the GOP about them and why they should have just made the ritual sacrifice. Of course, what Cantor’s unable to admit is that he’s completely hamstrung in doing so both by his corporate masters and his insane rank and file who are laboring under the illusion that they are typical of the great majority of Americans even in the face of surveys which show that the country very much approved of Obama’s “shakedown” of BP. The congressional Republican leadership simply can’t do anything more than try to split the difference.

As Sargent points out, even Joe Scarborough can see what a problem this presents for them:

“This hurts the Republican Party. This hurts the Republican brand. Joe Barton is the most powerful Republican on the Hill when it comes to energy policy, and that shows his mindset. Does it not?”

Yes it does, but short of changing their policy and philosophy — and convincing the American people they mean it — there’s nothing they can do about it. They happily made their bed with big business many moons ago and now that big business has poured oil all over it they have to lie in the greasy mess right along with them.

.

The Bestest Healthcare In The Whole Wide World

by digby

Thank Gawd we don’t have that socialized crap they have over in Yurp:

While the U.S. healthcare system was shown to be the most expensive when compared with six other industrialized nations—Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom—it failed to achieve better health outcomes when compared to those countries, according to a new Commonwealth Fund updated report, Mirror Mirror On The Wall: How the Performance of the U.S. Health Care System Compares Internationally. Overall, the U.S. stood out for not getting good value for its healthcare dollars—ranking last despite spending $7,290 per capita on healthcare in 2007 compared to the $3,837 spent per capita in the Netherlands, which ranked first. The U.S. had ranked last in value as well in the previous three Commonwealth Fund studies that compared it with the other countries. “These findings are clearly disappointing for U.S. patients and their families. We’re simply not getting commensurate return for a much higher investment in healthcare,” said Commonwealth Fund President Karen Davis, PhD, in a telebriefing. However, the new healthcare reform legislation may hold “substantial promise” for changing some of these results, Davis said. The Fund’s analysis shows that investments in improved coverage, expanded health information technology, a stronger primary care foundation, and expanded quality and safety initiatives “could bear fruit in the upcoming decade,” she said.

I’m fairly sure I’m going to be long dead by the time they iron out the wrinkles, but I hope that does turn out to be true in the long run.

Meanwhile, insurance premiums for people like me are going through the roof. The president asked the insurance companies not to do that though, so I’m sure they’ll stop.

Oh, and by the way, we’re going to need to destroy social security in order to appease some phantom future bond holders but we can’t do anything about the single biggest cause of the deficit — health care costs — beyond some vague rube-goldberg mechanisms that we hope will start working in a few decades. That’s because it’s unamerican socialism to even think about doing anything those backward countries like England and New Zealand do.

This country is far too stupid to be allowed to have the world’s biggest nuclear arsenal. It’s a miracle we haven’t accidentally blown up the world by now.

.

Smacking Around The Unemployed

by digby

Evidently the Austerity Pimps are getting their way. It’s almost impossible to believe they are actually telling us with a straight face that with 10% unemployment, the unemployed are just lazy bastards who refuse to work, but that’s what they’re telling us. Ok. I won’t even get into the insanity of telling the states that they need to pull in their belts when their belts are wrapped around their necks and tightening.

Here’s McJoan:

Harry Reid is going to try one more stab at passing the tax extenders/unemployment/aid to states bill. He filed for cloture last night and the vote will be Friday. A Democratic Senate aide tells me that “the outlook is grim” for achieving cloture, even on this drastically curtailed proposal.

The latest compromise raises the current oil spill liability fund tax to 49 cents per barrel from 8 cents. It also includes some spending cuts and pares down proposed Medicaid aid to states struggling to balance their budgets in the face of a slow economy. States are pushing Congress to extend beyond the December expiration date the extra funds for Medicaid that were included in the stimulus plan passed last year. The extension will “help states avoid further layoffs and service cuts that could otherwise slow recovery” from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, the National Governors Association said in a letter on Tuesday to leaders in the Senate…. Last year’s economic stimulus plan raised federal payments to states by 6.2 percent, with extra money for those with especially high unemployment. States had asked for a six-month extension of the aid, at a cost of about $24 billion. The Senate proposal would continue the aid through June 2011 but gradually lower the amount. Under language proposed on Wednesday, the increase would decline to 3.2 percent in the first three months of 2011 and to 1.2 percent through June. A draft floated on Tuesday had a phase-down to 5.3 percent and then 3.2 percent.

Governors and state legislatures in some 30 states have already budgeted for this funding, a huge portion of most states’ budgets. A KFF report [pdf] last year found that “Medicaid is the second largest line item in state budgets following elementary and secondary education. Presently, 17 percent of state funds are allocated to Medicaid on average and it is the largest source of revenue in the form of federal grant support to each state.”

I’m thinking this is right up there with pulling the inspectors out when they didn’t find any evidence of WMD and then saying we had to invade to find the WMD for sheer “I know you are but what am I” governance.

.

Trusting Galt

by digby

From Kentucky blog Barefoot and Progressive:

The House of Representatives just voted 420-1 to give subpoena power to a presidential commission investigating the BP catastrophe.

Who was that one vote?

Oh come on, who do you think? Ron Paul.

Oh, and here’s what Father Liberty had to say about the BP escrow account last night:

BP’s $20 billion escrow fund is a “PR stunt” that came about through a “suspicious” process, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) said Tuesday night.

*****

“They have agreed to this and this is sort of a PR stunt as far as I’m concerned,” Paul told Fox News. “BP had already been making a lot of payments to people who had been injured.”

Paul emphasized that he wants BP to pay for all the damage they’ve caused, but said he was wary of government pressure on the corporation.

Of course we can trust these guys to do the right thing. What have they ever done to make us suspect they wouldn’t? And if they don’t, you can always hire a cheap lawyer and sue (at least until Paul and his fellows enact tort reform.) Meanwhile, it will only take 15 or 20 years to find out that you aren’t getting any money. By that time BP will have spun off its liabilities to an entity that no longer exists anyway, so your legal fees will be all you have to show for it. But hey, the market worked and that means the Gods have been appeased.

I’m sure Rand Paul’s wig agrees with this, btw. After all, he thinks even trash talking BP is un-American. Forcing them to pay for their mistake is tantamount to treason.

.

Urban Mountain Lions

by digby

The Santa Monica Mountains welcomed a litter of three mountain lions, officials announced today.

According to the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, the kittens were discovered on May 26 near Peter Strauss Ranch. Two are female and one is male, according to a news release.

“Each mountain lion kitten has been implanted with a tracking device that will allow researchers to follow the kittens’ movement,” according to the recreation area. “This is the first urban mountain lion study that has had the opportunity to track mountain lion kittens from such a young age. National Park Service researchers will study the new litter to see if the male mountain lion kitten will attempt to disperse to more expansive habitat when he matures, and if the females will have litters of their own in the future.”