Month: December 2010

Beck’s Blueshirts And Celebrity Noblesse Oblige

by digby

Be sure to check out the second installment of the BagNews photo essay about the Glenn Beck tour of the economically devastated:

Glenn Beck’s entourage of young assistants deploy off his bus in Wilmington, Ohio, uniformed in blue shirts emblazoned with his name and the title of his book “Broke”.

Beck says he’s “stimulating” the economy. But as the photographers note:

There is something disconcerting about a book called “Broke” being aggressively sold to people who are, by a writer who isn’t.

Click over and see all the photos…

Update: Hopefully they’ll just read the back cover and not the inside.
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Different Than You And Me

by digby

Following up on my post yesterday about the wealthy celebrity Villagers’ misapprehension of their Real American bona fides, here are a couple of very interesting maps, courtesy of the NYT census/google map project (via The Big Picture)

Click on the two maps and you will see that average Americans are living very differently than the beltway celebrity millionaires and realistically are as likely to just “go out and get some of that wealth” (as Roger Simon says they should do) as they are to become an Olympic swimmer or a ballerina. Sure, it’s possible, but unless you are a really, really great athlete, constructing your future around it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

Many of the wealthy in this country continue to see themselves as extra hard-working Joes and Janes who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps. (And in fairness some did, although I’ve noticed that an awful lot of them tend to discount the connections that helped them.) But none are more convinced than the political class, especially the elite punditocracy, which refuses to even acknowledge that they aren’t average today and covers itself in the mantle of the great American middle class as it prescribes the need for the “shared sacrifice” of cutting government programs and the social safety net.

It occurs to me that it’s one of those potent fantasies, like the fantasies provided by the Hollywood studios in the 1930s featuring characters with odd transatlantic accents wearing designer clothes and living in Penthouses. In that case, it was mere escapist fare, designed to help people get away from the drudgery of the day to day. In this case, the creators of the fantasy truly believe that average Americans live as they do. And the problem is that these particular reality TV stars have a real world effect on policy.

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A Small Important Change

by digby

Here’s a good idea from Darcy Burner:

Dear Member of Congress,

On behalf of the Progressive Congress Action Fund, I strongly urge you to
support Rep. Brad Sherman’s amendment to the President’s tax agreement with
Republican leaders, H.R. 4853. This amendment would replace the proposed
payroll tax “holiday” with refund checks to every employee that pays Social
Security. The check would be equivalent to the 2% payroll tax cut that would
take place under the President’s plan without undermining the integrity and fiscal
security of Social Security. It is important that Congress preserve a program that
provides security to millions of retired workers, veterans, widows, and children.

Under its current revenue stream, Social Security will be able to pay out full
benefits through 2037. Eliminating $120 billion over the next year in FICA
revenues will double the program’s long term projected shortfall, taking a far off
minor shortfall and turning it into a more immediate crisis. Altering Social
Security’s projected fiscal health puts the program in a politically precarious
position in which it must compete for funding in the general budget in order to
maintain its long-term stability. President Franklin Roosevelt designed the
program with a separate revenue stream in order to avoid this very situation. If
the payroll tax “holiday” is allowed to pass, the nature and political security of the nation’s most successful government program would be permanently
transformed.

There are alternative measures that can avoid damaging Social Security and
punishing American families. Replacing the payroll tax “holiday” with refund
checks for the same amount side-steps the negative effects of the tax “holiday”,
while creating the exact same economic stimulus. There is no reason that the
future health of Social Security should be uncertain when an equally effective
economic measure is available.

Please support Social Security by urging the Rules Committee to adopt Rep.
Sherman’s amendment. The American people are overwhelmingly in support of
keeping Social Security separate from the general fund, the People’s House
should reflect that sentiment.

Most Sincerely,
Darcy Burner, President
Progressive Congress Action Fund

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CutGo Project

by digby

I’ve been tracking the Republicans’ strategic decoupling of the deficit and taxes recently and here’s the latest tactic:

NEW REIGN, NEW RULES: CUT/GO: No surprise here, but the new House Republican rules package for the 112th Congress will include a feature called Cut/Go, modeled on PAY/GO, which requires that new spending be offset with cuts elsewhere in the budget or tax increases, according to CQ’s Sam Goldfarb. “It is similar to the pay-as-you-go rule … except that it does not allow spending increases to be offset with new taxes or fees. Also, tax cuts would not have to be offset with spending reductions,” Goldfarb writes. “Republicans already adopted the same provision in their conference rules, but incorporating it into House rules would extend its reach.”

This is very smart. They have realized that all this deficit hysteria inevitably leads to niggling thoughts that a wealthy person might have to kick in a little bit more to close the gap and they can’t have that. So they are very systematically indoctrinating people with the idea that “the government doesn’t have a revenue problem it has a spending problem.” And once they seize upon a project like this, they don’t just repeat the mantra like a flock of mindless parrots (which they do) they also institutionalize their ideas with rules and procedures to make it seem as if there’s just no other way to think about it.

At this point, my money’s on them successfully taking tax hikes permanently off the table. The owners know that deficits don’t matter — and they think feudalism is their due.

By the way, the Democrats could do things like this too — like requiring that there be a “cost/benefit” analysis on the effect on the average American every time they want to cut spending. But they don’t.

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Wikileaks Blows The Whistle on BP

by digby

Coincidence?

The Justice Department sued BP and several other companies involved in the Gulf oil spill Wednesday, an opening salvo in the government’s effort to get billions of dollars for untold economic and environmental damage. The government accuses the companies of disregarding federal safety regulations in drilling the well that blew out April 20 and triggered a deadly explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig. The lawsuit is separate from a Justice Department criminal probe that has not resulted in any charges.

The Guardian released these Wikileaks cables today:

Striking resemblances between BP‘s Gulf of Mexico disaster and a little-reported giant gas leak in Azerbaijan experienced by the UK firm only 18 months before have emerged from leaked US embassy cables.

The cables reveal that some of BP’s partners in the gas field were upset that the company was so secretive about the incident that it even allegedly withheld information from them. They also say that BP was lucky that it was able to evacuate its 212 workers safely after the incident, which resulted in two fields being shut and output being cut by at least 500,000 barrels a day with production disrupted for months.

I suppose one might ask if the government ever connected the dots on this before now, but that would endanger national security so best we don’t go there.

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Saving President Obama

by digby

Arm-twisting for tax cuts:

In urging lawmakers to vote for his tax deal, President Obama is using one of his go-to lines from the healthcare debate, according to a Democratic lawmaker.
Obama is telling members of Congress that failure to pass the tax-cut legislation could result in the end of his presidency, Rep. Peter DeFazio (Ore.) said.
“The White House is putting on tremendous pressure, making phone calls, the president is making phone calls saying this is the end of his presidency if he doesn’t get this bad deal,” he told CNN’s Eliot Spitzer. But the White House shot back late on Wednesday, as a senior administration official said that the president hadn’t actually called or spoken to DeFazio.
Obama’s push shows that the president is going to the mat in order to push through Congress the compromise brokered with Republicans.
During the end of the healthcare debate, Obama reportedly told Democrats upset that the bill did not contain a public healthcare option that not passing it could put his presidency on the line and stall the liberal agenda for decades.

You’ll recall this comment from the president when Democrats tried to tell him that things weren’t looking good in their districts:

“They just kept telling us how good it was going to be. The president himself, when that was brought up in one group, said, ‘Well, the big difference here and in ’94 was you’ve got me.’

How’d that work out?Maybe all presidents do this, I don’t know. I suppose when all is said and done, in their minds it really is all about them. But I would think they’d lose credibility if they use the appeal as an all-purpose pitch. It’s one thing to argue that you need to pass the health care bill or the liberal agenda will be stalled for decades. (That was a common argument at the time.) But it’s quite another to argue that your presidency is on the line every time you want a some half-baked pile of junk passed, particularly when it’s a Republican tax cut and time bomb bill with a small concession to keep the unemployed out of the gutters at Christmas time. If you can’t pass that with wingnuts and Blue Dogs then something has gone terribly wrong.Whatever. It will pass. The Democrats made sure of that when they decided not to act on the tax cuts when they had the clout and momentum to do it. Now it’s pretty much kabuki.
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What Good For CEOs …

by digby

“I want to dispel any notion we want to inhibit your success,” President Obama told 20 CEOs this morning, according to a source in the room. “We want to be boosters because when you do well, America does well.”

Really?

Wall Street banks are on pace to pay out some $143 billion in compensation for 2010, just shy of their record year of 2007. But given the widespread layoffs of mid-level employees as a result of the financial crisis, average compensation set a record. At the top six banks, compensation rose 10 percent over 2007.

That’s just the banks of course. Here’s the data for CEOs generally:

Chief executives at the nation’s largest corporations received $9.25 million in average total compensation in 2009, according to the AFL-CIO’s analysis of available pay data from 292 companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index. Although average total compensation for these CEOs declined 9 percent from the previous year, executive retirement benefits increased 23 percent.

Not that anyone cares, but here’s how it’s been going for the rest of us:

¶The typical American household made less money last year than the typical household made a full decade ago.

¶To me, that’s the big news from the Census Bureau’s annual report on income, poverty and health insurance, which was released this morning. Median household fell to $50,303 last year, from $52,163 in 2007. In 1998, median income was $51,295. All these numbers are adjusted for inflation.

¶In the four decades that the Census Bureau has been tracking household income, there has never before been a full decade in which median income failed to rise. (The previous record was seven years, ending in 1985.) Other Census data suggest that it also never happened between the late 1940s and the late 1960s. So it doesn’t seem to have happened since at least the 1930s.

That was from 2009. The median wage actually went down again this year.

Like the rest of the political establishment the President thinks that the health of the economy must be left in the hands of these “savvy businessmen” and that they are so all powerful that they cannot even have their feelings hurt lest they decide to destroy the country in a fit of pique.

But he is wrong when he says that what’s good for CEOs is good for the USA. (It is, however, good for politicians.)

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Scanning The Day Care Scammers

by digby

Madison, WI:

The Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee unanimously approved spending $1 million to install fingerprint scanners in child care facilities as a means of stemming fraud in the Wisconsin Shares subsidy program.

Children or their guardians would need to scan their fingers when they arrive at and leave child care facilities, a move that is meant to give the state assurance that it is paying only for children who actually attend day care.

Isn’t it time that we talked about just bar-coding people? Seriously, the police state will not function properly if everyone’s buying different equipment. It would just be a little bar-code on your wrist (like a cool tattoo!) that could be scanned to find out if you are a terrorist or have a medical problem or forgot to pay your phone bill back in 2007. A nice centralized computer could track your preferences and even handle your money so that you could finally get rid of all those cards.

Most importantly it would keep those undeserving, unqualified kiddies out of day care and put them back in the streets where they belong.

h/t to pastordan

In The Trenches of the Class War

by digby

Roger Simon, Politico:

Don’t like the way wealth is distributed? Then you can join congressional Democrats and grump about it, or you can get some wealth for yourself.

I’ve been waiting for some real push back on this “inequality” stuff from the well-off Villagers. Remember that their main conceit is that they see themselves as representatives of Real Americans, reg’lar folks, just working for a living and trying to get along when in fact, they are successful, wealthy elites living at the very top of the pyramid. Most Americans have never been in a limousine or a green room and have never had a conversation with a famous person. And 98% of them are making far less than 250k a year, most of them far, far less.

Wealthy celebrities lecturing others about being “grumpy” over the tax deal and telling them that they should just get some of that wealth for themselves is very revealing. After all, they haven’t been materially affected by this economic downturn.

Here’s Pierson and Hacker on this disconnect:

If an economic catastrophe befalls Americans and no one in power hears it, did it happen?

That was the question raised by a new Yale/Rockefeller Foundation report released yesterday that looks at the economic experiences of Americans during the Great Recession. Since one of us (Hacker) was a coauthor, we obviously gave it extra attention. Yet the picture it painted — based on a two-wave survey between March 2008 and September 2009 — was only confirmation of what most Americans know: there’s a lot of economic pain out there.

According to the report, more than 90 percent of Americans experienced at least one major economic “shock” during these 18 months: a substantial drop in wealth or income, a large increase in nondiscretionary spending (such as medical costs), or similar dislocation. Even if you ignore big wealth losses — ubiquitous because of the fall in the housing and the stock markets — roughly 7 in 10 Americans saw their earnings substantially decline or their nondiscretionary expenses substantially rise. Nearly a quarter saw their income fall by 25 percent or more.

Even more worrisome, those who experienced these shocks were much more likely to report serious economic deprivation (going without food, housing, or medical care because of the cost). And this was true for middle-income families as well as the least advantaged. Indeed, more than half of families with incomes between $60,000 and $100,000 that experienced employment or medical disruptions reported being unable to meet at least one basic economic need.

Against this backdrop, the tax-cut deal brokered by President Obama looks like very weak tea. Extended unemployment benefits are a vital lifeline that will encourage spending to revive the economy, and the temporary cut in payroll taxes will provide an important, albeit modest and short-lived, boost. But a huge chunk of the bipartisan deal is tax cuts that the Congressional Budget Office has judged singularly ineffective as economic tonic, including massive cuts for the richest of Americans and their heirs that will pile on future debt, exacerbate inequality, and crowd out other, more effective measures — all for little or no short-term economic gain…

That the tax-cut deal may well be the best that Obama could have gotten only makes the joke crueler. What’s wrong with our politics that so much hardship evokes so little response?

They go on to describe an event at which a number of expert panelists seemed stumped as to why there isn’t more pressure to fix things for the people considering all the suffering out there. They discussed the dysfunctional political system and the filibuster and any number of systemic problems. But my money’s on the this one:

There was second hypothesis: Maybe a good chunk of the political class is just so insulated from the realities in the report that they don’t feel the same sense of urgency that most Americans do. Things are terrible on Main Street, but on Wall Street, Pennsylvania Avenue, and K Street, they don’t look so gloomy. How else can we explain why everyone in Washington was talking about deficit reduction (at least until they decided to blow another hole in the budget), even while polls show that Americans ranked it way, way below fixing the economy?

It’s not clear which is scarier — that our leaders don’t think they can lead, or that they don’t want to.

Either way, the middle-class economy keeps falling, and no one is there to hear it.

They don’t even think about it because they are laboring under the narcissistic illusion that they are the middle class. And so, if their 401ks are doing well and their portfolios have recovered — and everyone they know is doing well — then clearly these people who are complaining about wealth inequality and tax cuts for millionaires are cranks. They should just go out and do what these salt ‘o the earth Real Americans did and get them some ‘o that money! There’s plenty!

Update: Meanwhile, you’ve got Bernie Goldberg saying that we should be building monuments to the rich and accusing Jesus Christ of being a stinking hippie.

Sadly, far too many tribal wingnuts think Bernie Goldberg knows what he’s talking about.

Update: It should be noted that in the the panel discussion I mention above, Ezra Klein did observe that the economic conditions of DC have skewed the perceptions. I would just add that social/cultural conditions are part of this as well.

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PoMo Politics Part 789

by digby

I’m sure the Village will find a way to blame both sides for this, but the fact is that the Republicans on this panel are simply doing the work of their corporate owners, GOP strategists and Wall Street. There is no other way to look at it in the real world:

The four Republicans appointed to the commission investigating the root causes of the financial crisis plan to bypass the bipartisan panel and release their own report Wednesday, according to people familiar with the commission’s work.

The Republicans, led by the commission’s vice chairman, former congressman and chair of the House Ways and Means Committee Bill Thomas, will likely focus their report on the explosive growth of subprime mortgages and the heavy role played by the federal government in pushing mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to purchase and insure them. They’ll also likely focus on the Community Reinvestment Act, a 1977 law that encourages banks to lend to underserved communities, these people said.

The Republicans’ report is expected to conclude that government policy helped inflate the housing bubble and that prices weren’t expected to crash because the government pushed homeownership so aggressively. They say that the report will note that once the bubble burst, a financial panic followed because firms weren’t adequately prepared.

Frustrated in part by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission’s chairman, Phil Angelides, and the tenor of the panel’s preliminary findings, the Republicans are choosing to ignore the five Democrats and lone independent and issue their document ahead of the commission’s Jan. 15 release. Angelides is described as a demanding boss who’s said to be difficult to work for. Both Thomas and Angelides pledged in January that they’d strive to reach bipartisan consensus.

The Republicans’ move indicates that the highly-partisan nature of Washington has infiltrated the commission’s work and threatens to derail it. With four commissioners now essentially going around the panel to describe their thoughts on the roots of the financial crisis, the public may not get the full picture when it comes to understanding how the actions of a few led to the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.

Instead, the public will receive a report that could be discredited as being partisan, and another that is expected to largely conform with a Wall Street-friendly view that blames government for the crisis.

During a private commission meeting last week, all four Republicans voted in favor of banning the phrases “Wall Street” and “shadow banking” and the words “interconnection” and “deregulation” from the panel’s final report, according to a person familiar with the matter and confirmed by Brooksley E. Born, one of the six commissioners who voted against the proposal.

“I think a number of us had really pulled for” bipartisan consensus, said Born, a Democratic commissioner who famously tried to regulate certain derivatives as head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. “But this action by the Republicans indicates they have decided to go their own way.”

Born said the Republicans had not informed the commission of their plans, nor had they shared their report. She said she was “disappointed” because the views of her Republican colleagues would have been “useful.”

The other Republicans on the panel are Peter Wallison, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative Washington research organization, who once served as general counsel at the Treasury Department; Keith Hennessey, who formerly served as George W. Bush’s senior economic adviser while heading the National Economic Council and now works as a fellow at the Hoover Institution, another conservative research organization; and Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who formerly led the Congressional Budget Office and now heads the American Action Forum, a policy institute in Washington.

This follows the recent deficit hawk commission leaders’ premature release of their own findings as well as the habit of the Republicans on various congressional committees over the last few years to release their own self-serving version of reports. Where they can’t get consensus or tailor the conclusions to their liking it’s now common for them to preempt the official findings to shape the news coverage or offer a competing report to muddy the waters and give their partisan warriors something to use in the ongoing battle over what constitutes reality.

I think this sort of thing is the natural outgrowth of the corporate media’s “he said/she said” abdication of their duties to uncover the facts and lay out the truth. The Post Modern “dueling narrative” style they’ve adopted tracks quite nicely with the conservatives’ propaganda needs, and it’s now become so sophisticated that we have large swathes of people who no longer agree on even the most basic facts, much less the proper interpretation.

This one is particularly interesting because it so perfectly serves the oligarchs, but there are examples of it happening everywhere. It’s getting to the point where sorting out reality from fiction is going to become harder and harder even for those who are paying attention.

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