Month: July 2011

This blockbuster article by Sam Stein is a must read. It would appear that all these tea party freshmen are lobbying hard to bring home the pork for their constituents all the while voting against government spending in general. Sometimes they brag about it. Sometimes, they just do it in secret. But they are doing it. Shocker, I know.

I don’t know about you, but several times in the past few years, the city of Santa Monica has changed my voting location. I went to the usual place and was directed to a different one. Once they completely shut down my usual voting place and they assigned someone to be there to redirect people to different precincts. In fact, nearly every time I’ve voted there has been someone who voted with a provisional ballot because their precinct had changed or someone asking for directions to the proper location.

If any of that happens in Ohio in the future you’re just shit out of luck:

Under the new language, a poll worker need not direct a voter to where they are eligible, adding that “it is the duty of the individual casting the ballot to ensure that the individual is casting that ballot in the correct precinct.”
Allowing poll workers to refuse to help those who are legitimately confused about where they should vote opens the door for increased voter suppression. As state Sen. Nina Turner (D) pointed out, “Voting in the wrong precinct led to over 14,000 registered voters statewide to lose their vote in 2008.”

I realize it’s our responsibility to know where to vote. But it’s very easy to make a mistake and there’s not much you can do about it if nobody will tell you where you should go.

Big Things

by digby

The President gave us the latest on the debt talks:

Over the July Fourth weekend, my team and I had a series of discussions with congressional leaders in both parties. We’ve made progress, and I believe that greater progress is within sight, but I don’t want to fool anybody — we still have to work through some real differences.

Now, I’ve heard reports that there may be some in Congress who want to do just enough to make sure that America avoids defaulting on our debt in the short term, but then wants to kick the can down the road when it comes to solving the larger problem of our deficit. I don’t share that view. I don’t think the American people sent us here to avoid tough problems. That’s, in fact, what drives them nuts about Washington, when both parties simply take the path of least resistance. And I don’t want to do that here.

I believe that right now we’ve got a unique opportunity to do something big — to tackle our deficit in a way that forces our government to live within its means, that puts our economy on a stronger footing for the future, and still allows us to invest in that future.

Keep in mind that even if one agrees that the most important thing you must do at a time of 10% unemployment, a dead housing sector and anemic growth is tackle “the deficit”, there is absolutely nothing anywhere that says it has to be done under a threat to not raise the debt ceiling. That is an artificial deadline, completely made up with absolutely no authority whatsoever. He is fundamentally misleading the American people about this at this point. Raising the debt limit is a pro-forma vote that if passed simply allows the government to keep paying its bills, it’s not “kicking the can down the road.”

Most of us already agree that to truly solve our deficit problem, we need to find trillions in savings over the next decade, and significantly more in the decades that follow. That’s what the bipartisan fiscal commission said, that’s the amount that I put forward in the framework I announced a few months ago, and that’s around the same amount that Republicans have put forward in their own plans. And that’s the kind of substantial progress that we should be aiming for here.

To get there, I believe we need a balanced approach. We need to take on spending in domestic programs, in defense programs, in entitlement programs, and we need to take on spending in the tax code — spending on certain tax breaks and deductions for the wealthiest of Americans. This will require both parties to get out of our comfort zones, and both parties to agree on real compromise.

I’m ready to do that. I believe there are enough people in each party that are willing to do that. What I know is that we need to come together over the next two weeks to reach a deal that reduces the deficit and upholds the full faith and credit of the United States government and the credit of the American people.

The “bipartisan fiscal commission” agreed on nothing and issued no report. If they couldn’t get a consensus among that small group, it should have been a clue that there is no consensus about doing this at all. It would appear that the lesson they did learn was that they needed to attach doing what they wanted to a catastrophic event so as to foreclose any real debate and just “git ‘er done.”

Moreover, the much touted “balanced approach” at the moment is 83% spending cuts to 17% phony loophole closings and subsidy eliminations. But hey, if people want to believe that’s a fair deal, who am I to argue? You’ll have to pardon me if I skip the celebration on this one.

It is “big.” That much is true.

By the way, I was informed via twitter that Wikipedia says this:

Keynes’s influence waned in the 1970s, partly as a result of problems that began to afflict the Anglo-American economies from the start of the decade, and partly because of critiques from Milton Friedman and other economists who were pessimistic about the ability of governments to regulate the business cycle with fiscal policy.[1] However, the advent of the global financial crisis in 2007 has caused a resurgence in Keynesian thought. Keynesian economics has provided the theoretical underpinning for economic policies undertaken in response to the crisis by Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama of the United States, Prime Minister Gordon Brown of the United Kingdom, and other global leaders.

I’m fairly sure that if cutting spending and raising taxes is the “big thing” that the American government seeks to do to end this economic crisis, the Japanese earthquake was actually Keynes rolling over in his grave.

Update: David Frum makes an interesting observation:

And now President Obama has summoned Republicans to another round of negotiations over the debt ceiling.

Perhaps he will there deploy some previously invisible form of leverage.

To the uninstructed eye, however, it looks like Obama has set up yet another lopsided bargaining table: He needs the Republicans to give him something, anything, that he can claim as a victory. This need, however, perversely puts the Republicans in the situation where if they give him something, anything, it will be represented as a defeat. The president’s own weakness has had this perverse effect on his political opponents: it has reduced the value of his own concessions (no matter how big) and hugely exaggerated the significance of any offset he achieves (no matter how small).

I’ve written before that I think Boehner wants to let his Tea Partiers run free, so I suspect everyone will play this out until the very end and then Obama will get his symbolic face saving concession. The majority that votes through these massive, painful spending cuts in the House will likely be composed of far more Democrats than Republicans. It may take all of them. Isn’t that special?

Foreshadowing the next “deal”

by digby

So Paul Ryan spouted some gibberish today about why the GOP can’t entertain even the tiniest change to the tax code in these debt ceiling negotiations. And while it sounds like he’s speaking in tongues, there is a logic to what he’s saying:

RYAN: What happens if you do what he’s saying, is then you can’t lower tax rates. So it does affect marginal tax rates. In order to lower marginal tax rates, you have to take away those loopholes so you can lower those tax rates. If you want to do what we call being revenue neutral … If you take a deal like that, you’re necessarily requiring tax rates to be higher for everybody. You need lower tax rates by going after tax loopholes. If you take away the tax loopholes without lowering tax rates, then you deny Congress the ability to lower everybody’s tax rates and you keep people’s tax rates high.

If you think Ryan is somehow signing on to the idea that “closing loopholes” on corporations will bring in more revenue, you need to re-read Atlas Shrugged. The only “loopholes” they want closed are those that benefit working people — like the Earned Income Tax Credit. They want to lower taxes and they can’t do that in the context of deficit reduction. And their ruse to get that done is to pretend they are “reforming” the tax code. If they start “reforming” it as a way to raise revenue in the debt talks, it will defeat their purpose.

And they have every reason to believe it will go their way in the next round. The administration has long signaled that they are eager to “close loopholes and lower tax rates” just as Ryan wants:

That was last April folks. Does it sound to you as if the administration has been forced into anything it didn’t want to do in these Biden talks — which didn’t exist at the time that statement was made?

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Radical Justices

by digby

I remember some smart people warning that liberals shouldn’t simply worry about the new Roberts Court overturning Roe vs Wade, but rather should be very concerned about its pro-business tilt. That turns out to be an understatement. This court isn’t just pro-business or anti-regulation. It’s radically anti-consumer and anti-worker — far worse than anyone anticipated, I think.

Dahlia Lithwick has written a typically interesting piece about the corporate friendly ruling this last term and what she finds is not just that the Court is favorable toward business but that it is writing a veritable instruction manual for firms to screw their workers and customers without any repercussions. It’s fairly amazing:

Depending on how you count “big cases,” the Supreme Court has just finished off either agreat (according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce) or spectacularly great (according to a new study by the Constitutional Accountability Center) term for big business. The measure of success here isn’t just the win-loss record of the Chamber of Commerce, although that’s certainly part of the story. Nor is it news that—in keeping with a recent trend—the court is systematically closing the courthouse doors to everyday litigants, though that’s a tale that always bears retelling. The reason the Roberts Court has proven to be Christmas in July for big business is this: Slowly but surely, the Supreme Court is giving corporate America a handbook on how to engage in misconduct. In case after case, it seems big companies are being given the playbook on how to win even bigger the next time.

It’s going to be very hard to put this particular genie back in the bottle. And it doesn’t bode well for whatever reforms rational people may want to put in place in the near term. This court is proving to be extremely radical on these questions and it’s unlikely they will uphold anything that limits the rights of the wealthy and the corporations.

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If you build it they will use it

by digby

Where at least I know I’m free …

A Miami photographer was escorted off a US Airways plane and deemed a “security risk” after she snapped a photo of an employee’s nametag at Philadelphia International Airport Friday.

Sandy DeWitt said the employee, whose name was Tonialla G., was being rude to several passengers in the boarding area of the flight to Miami.

So DeWitt snapped a photo of her nametag with her iPhone because she planned to complain about her in a letter to US Airways. But the photo didn’t come out because it was too dark.

However, once DeWitt was settled in her seat, preparing for take-off, Tonialla G. entered the plane and confronted her.

“She told me to delete the photo,” DeWitt said in an interview with Photography is Not a Crime Saturday morning.

DeWitt, who already had her phone turned off in preparation for take-off, turned the phone back on to show her that it didn’t come out, but deleted the photo anyway.

“I complied with her wishes but it’s not something I would normally do,” she said. “It just wasn’t usable.”

But Tonialla G. wouldn’t let the issue go. She then walked into the cockpit to inform the pilot that DeWitt was a “security risk.”

Next thing DeWitt knew, she was being escorted off the plane by two flight attendants.

If you give people the ability to abuse their power in the name of “security” they are going to do it. It’s absurd that people can be kicked off planes simply because somebody — anybody, apparently — feels that something is “hinky.” In this case it’s simply a matter of an employee covering her ass and yet this zero tolerance for hinkiness makes it possible for her to treat a customer this way. Common sense should have prevented it, but this security theatre actually prevents common sense from being exercised.

Oh and, by the way, there’s nothing illegal about taking pictures. And yet all over the country people in uniforms are behaving as if there is and treating people like criminals if they do it. This is perhaps the most obvious example of a police state mentality being accepted by the citizenry. There is no good reason for public officials in a free country to stop the people from documenting their public behavior.

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“Profoundly uneconomic”

by digby

It isn’t just the dirty hippies blathering on anymore. Here’s Ryan Avent in The Economist pointing out that even the most deficit hawkish of all the original economic advisors who’ve left the White House are arguing against fetishizing the deficit — and expressing a lot of worry that the president has inexplicably boxed himself into a corner in which further stimulus is nearly impossible. He writes:

What’s their former boss saying?

Government has to start living within its means, just like families do. We have to cut the spending we can’t afford so we can put the economy on sounder footing, and give our businesses the confidence they need to grow and create jobs.

That’s a wow statement. It’s profoundly uneconomic. Government doesn’t face the same borrowing constraints as a household. It seems clear that the government can afford current levels of spending. It wasn’t that long ago that government revenues were far higher than they currently are. And there is precious little evidence that the confidence-creating impact of deficit reduction, if there’s one at all, will compensate for the contractionary impact of budget cuts. It seems quite clear that cutting government will be a net negative for the current economy.

I don’t know why Barack Obama is making these claims. The most straightforward explanation is that he believes it. At this point, it hardly matters. The president has adopted this framing of the current economic situation, and his policy choices will be constrained by it going forth; whether the choice was made out of heartfelt belief or a sense of political necessity is irrelevant.

Economically speaking, however, I think Mr Summers line is one that ought to inspire a lot of reflection:

It was my judgment as an economist that there was no danger of doing too much stimulus and one should achieve as much stimulus as possible.
I’ve been trying to think of a situation in which a country like America—rich, with good institutions and able to borrow in its own currency—has dangerously overstimulated its economy. When has a country like America and in America’s position opted to do too much fiscally or monetarily, such that it found itself in a dangerous and irreversibly inflationary situation?

There aren’t that many data points, but I don’t believe there’s been such a case. Mr Summers is right; the risk to doing too much was minimal, while the risk to doing too little was significant. There was a strong case for policymakers to say, look, we’ll continue to act until we’ve solved the problem or markets demand that we stop. Would there be the potential for waste and inefficiency in this approach? Absolutely. There is no question that more government involvement in the economy would have generated some misallocation of resources. At the same time, America has come nowhere close to making all of the positive return public investments available. And the real economic cost of the presdent sustained, long-term employment is frightfully high. Stimulus sceptics have not demonstrated, haven’t come close really, that stimulus can’t raise employment or that increased employment wouldn’t be preferable to the status quo.

It goes on. Summers says that the policy people believed that there couldn’t have been “too much stimulus” but that the political shop insisted on keeping it to a minimum. I don’t know the truth of that — it’s pretty self-serving. But it’s irrelevant. When you are dealing with a crisis, the only thing that matters is that you get the policy right — or sheer luck bails you out. In this case, the policy has clearly been a failure. But the president has apparently decided that he’s going to try to ride the GOP deficit zeitgeist to victory and just hope to God the confidence fairy does its magic on the economy.

Avent concludes:

There’s a lot that economists can’t say with great certainty where stimulus is concerned. The profession will be wrestling with questions about macroeconomic stability policy for years to come. But I hope some academics will also focus their attention on the institutional shortcomings that contributed to such incautious timidity in America’s government and elsewhere. All throughout this crisis, American officials played it safe, and in doing so they almost certainly made the economic situation more painful than it needed to be. Four years since the recession began and two years into recovery, they still haven’t learned their lessons.

I think that characterizing this as cautious is wrong. This is heedless, bordering on reckless. The president will likely win re-election — after all, it’s not as if the Republicans are offering anything more rational or appealing. But the consequences of these “profoundly uneconomic” policies are inestimable.

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Giving Away the Argument

by digby

The latest pas de deux:

Obama administration officials are offering to cut tens of billions of dollars from Medicare and Medicaid in negotiations to reduce the federal budget deficit, but the depth of the cuts depends on whether Republicans are willing to accept any increases in tax revenues.

Before the talks led by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. broke off 12 days ago, negotiators said, they had reached substantial agreement on many cuts in the growth of Medicare, which provides care to people 65 and older, and Medicaid, which covers lower-income people. Those proposals are still on the table when Congress reconvenes this week, aides said, and are serious options that Democrats could accept in exchange for Republican concessions that raise revenues.

“Congress smells blood,” said William L. Minnix Jr., the chief lobbyist for nonprofit nursing homes.

I’ll bet they do. Wow, that is some negotiating. We’ve already agreed to deeply cut programs for the poor and elderly, but we simply won’t cut any more unless you agree to some nominal “reform” of the arcane tax code or ending some subsidies from hugely profitable oil companies. Or something. Seriously, we mean it. Not one more old, sick person on the chopping block until you pony up with something.

This is the most amazing “negotiation” I’ve ever seen. The Democrats just keep giving the Republicans everything they could possibly want and the Republicans just keep telling them to take a hike. It may be kabuki, but it’s become a total farce. And the truly hilarious thing about it is that the Republicans are going to destroy the Democrats in 2012 for being the ones to propose cuts to programs that people rely on and then holding the Republicans hostage with further demands for taxes. (You think they won’t? Or that a number of people aren’t confused enough to believe them?)

At this point, no matter what happens the deal is a disaster. Democrats have offered up cuts in health care programs to raise the debt limit — a previously pro-forma vote that the Republicans already said they would raise. Who knows what else they’re going to give up before it’s all said and done? In return? Well, I suppose the Republicans will have to agree to some phony accounting gimmicks that looks like a tax hike and then stage a vote so the Tea Partiers can all vote against it in principle and then “hold out” for something more. (Indeed, I expect they are completely gobsmacked that they’ve gotten cuts beyond anything they dreamed of when this whole thing started and rightfully see no margin in wrapping this thing up before they have to.) Even David Brooks is impressed at how deeply the Democrats have agreed to cut — but I think he needn’t worry about his GOP brethren failing to come around. Boehner and Cantor have things well in hand. Indeed, they’ve already won, no matter what kind of symbolic tax hike they end up agreeing to.

It makes you wonder just what they all have on tap for the really big negotiations in a few months: the FY 2012 budget. I assume the administration has gotten assurances that any more cuts are “off the table” until after the election right? Right?

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Dark patriotism

by digby

So I just heard on NPR that they surveyed their members and found that the song they consider to be the most patriotic is “Born in the USA.” Now, either people have a much more nuanced and ironic view of what constitutes patriotism or they have no clue what the song’s about.

Born down in a dead man’s town
The first kick I took was when I hit the ground
You end up like a dog that’s been beat too much
‘Til you spend half your life just covering up

[chorus:]
Born in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.

I got in a little hometown jam
And so they put a rifle in my hands
Sent me off to Vietnam
To go and kill the yellow man

[chorus]

Come back home to the refinery
Hiring man says “Son if it was up to me”
I go down to see the V.A. man
He said “Son don’t you understand”

[chorus]

I had a buddy at Khe Sahn
Fighting off the Viet Cong
They’re still there, he’s all gone
He had a little girl in Saigon
I got a picture of him in her arms

Down in the shadow of the penitentiary
Out by the gas fires of the refinery
I’m ten years down the road
Nowhere to run, ain’t got nowhere to go

I’m a long gone Daddy in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.
I’m a cool rocking Daddy in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.

It isn’t John Philip Sousa.

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Good Reads

by digby

If you’re full of charred meat and ready to veg out in front of one of your screens I highly recommend these two long essays to keep you awake for a few more minutes:

R.J.Eskow on The New War of Independence — Against Corporate Politics. An excerpt:

We resisted Britain’s state-sanctioned monopolies in 1776. Today’s government-sanctioned corporations hang out on Wall Street, not by the chartered Thames. The spirit of the East India Company lives in the five banks which now control nearly 96% of the derivatives market in this country. Our financial oligarchs receive Treasury Department money, Federal Reserve giveaways, and get-out-of-jail-free cards for a corporate crime wave that would make Al Capone blush.

Some of our ancestors came to this country as slaves or indentured servants. The slaves were freed in body but their descendants’ economic freedom is not yet fully won. Unemployment’s much worse for African Americans. Infant mortality rates are 2.5 times higher than they are for whites and life expectancy is years shorter. Indentured servitude’s making a comeback, too. In colonial days people signed away years of freedom for the “loan” of ship’s passage to America, where they were sold to bidders for a period of bondage. If only Wall Street had existed then! Imagine the money Goldman Sachs could have made on selling “IBS’s” — “indenture-backed securities.”

And then shorting them, of course.

And Frank Rich in NY magazine on Obama’s Original Sin:

What haunts the Obama administration is what still haunts the country: the stunning lack of accountability for the greed and misdeeds that brought America to its gravest financial crisis since the Great Depression. There has been no legal, moral, or financial reckoning for the most powerful wrongdoers. Nor have there been meaningful reforms that might prevent a repeat catastrophe. Time may heal most wounds, but not these. Chronic unemployment remains a constant, painful reminder of the havoc inflicted on the bust’s innocent victims. As the ghost of Hamlet’s father might have it, America will be stalked by its foul and unresolved crimes until they “are burnt and purged away.”

These are things we political junkies know. But in the hands of good writers, it makes for a good story too. And that’s how the people will come to understand it.

*link fixed
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