Month: September 2011

MOR Mitt

by digby

Here’s the temperate, middle of the road statesman, Mitt Romney:

I haven’t seen anything quite like that in a presidential primary since Pat Buchanan memorably shouted “Jose, we ain’t gonna let you in again!”

I’ll be looking forward to the Frito Bandito ad series. Should be good.

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Privates and Property
by David Atkins (“thereisnospoon”)

What Glenn Reynolds says about Elizabeth Warren is ultimately unimportant in the grand scheme of things. So it’s almost painful to waste more pixels talking about the Right’s latest sexist outrage. On its face, it merits little more than a dismissive sneer of disgust at the sort of mind that would create such tripe, and even more revulsion at the sort of person that would find it funny.

So why write about it? Because beyond the disturbing psychology behind the sort of mind that finds humor in government-sponsored rape, what passes for an intellectual argument here is even more troubling.

What the rightwing is essentially saying here is that paying taxes is equivalent to rape. That a person’s money and private property are, in essence, just as inviolable as their actual privates, and that any attempt by the government to ensure equality of opportunity and shared prosperity for its citizens is equivalent to forced sexual slavery.

It’s hard to overstate how foreign to normal American sensibilities that sort of Objectivist ethic is, yet it is central to the modern conservative spirit.

Normal Americans understand that if Sally’s rich mommy gives her 1,000 pieces of candy to take to school with her, it would be appropriate for the teacher to strongly suggest that Sally share some of her candies with the rest of the class. Only a psychotic parent would come to a PTA meeting and scream that Sally’s teacher might as well have told her to lift her skirt for the class. But that’s who Glenn Reynolds and his band of jackals are: psychos who think there’s no difference between sharing a small part of one’s private property for the general welfare, and sharing one’s privates.

The ultimate irony here, too, is that most of these same conservatives are the very ones who are most adamantly against decriminalizing prostitution, and in favor of banning pornography in as many places as possible. In the conservative mind, asking Warren Buffett to pay the same tax rate on financial transactions as his secretary is equivalent to forcing his secretary to have sex with Warren Buffett. But stopping people from having sex as an economic transaction is an appropriate use of government power. The Constitution’s provision for “general welfare” doesn’t exist for them in terms of enforcing an economic social contract, but it does exist in terms of enforcing a paternalistic moral social contract.

It takes a really warped mind to be this sort of conservative. No matter how hard I try, as a small business owner I just can’t see an increased percentage of end-of-year profit going to help pay for the roads we all drive on and an undocumented immigrant’s vaccinations to be as personally violating as forcible rape.

Seeing balance sheets and private property as socially equivalent to private parts is not a normal American perspective. It’s a psychosexual hangup, and it’s more than repulsive. It’s deviant, weird and unAmerican.

But these are the sorts of people who are acting as standardbearers for the American Right. These are not normal times, and this is not politics as usual.

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“The commander in chief as covert operator”

by digby

On this day of national celebration for assassinating an American citizen without a trial, I was reminded of this David Ignatius column in the Washington Post from a couple of weeks ago:

It’s an interesting anomaly of Barack Obama’s presidency that this liberal Democrat, known before the 2008 election for his antiwar views, has been so comfortable running America’s secret wars.

Obama’s leadership style — and the continuity of his national security policies with those of his predecessor, George W. Bush — has left friends and foes scratching their heads. What has become of the “change we can believe in” style he showed as a candidate? The answer may be that he has disappeared into the secret world of the post-Sept. 11 presidency.
[…]
Obama is the commander in chief as covert operator. The flag-waving “mission accomplished” speeches of his predecessor aren’t Obama’s thing; even his public reaction to the death of bin Laden was relatively subdued. Watching Obama, the reticent, elusive man whose dual identity is chronicled in “Dreams From My Father,” you can’t help wondering if he has an affinity for the secret world. He is opaque, sometimes maddeningly so, in the way of an intelligence agent.

Intelligence is certainly an area where the president appears confident and bold. James Clapper, the director of national intelligence who has been running spy agencies for more than 20 years, regards Obama as “a phenomenal user and understander of intelligence.” When Clapper briefs the president each morning, he brings along extra material to feed the president’s hunger for information.

This is a president, too, who prizes his authority to conduct covert action. Clapper’s predecessor, Adm. Dennis Blair, lost favor in part because he sought to interpose himself in the chain of covert action. That encroached on Obama, who aides say sees it as a unique partnership with the CIA…

Perhaps Obama’s comfort level with his intelligence role helps explain why he has done other parts of the job less well. He likes making decisions in private, where he has the undiluted authority of the commander in chief. He likes information, as raw and pertinent as possible, and he gets impatient listening to windy political debates. He likes action, especially when he doesn’t leave fingerprints.

He did stoutly assert in his campaign that he wasn’t a “70’s love in” anti military type, and he was always pretty firmly in the “whatever works” school of foreign policy, but I think people can be forgiven for seeing this as a serious departure for a Nobel Peace Prize winner who was seen (perhaps too idealistically) as someone who valued the soft power of diplomacy far more than this spooky, high tech “world of action.” Perhaps he should have been content to become Director of the CIA instead of president which requires an entirely different set of skills — and ideally, principles.

If that portrait is correct (and I obviously have no idea if it is) we are dealing with a hard core security state president. As hard core as Dick Cheney in most respects and right up there with Reagan and Nixon. Assassinating suspected terrorists who happen to be US citizens would hardly be seen as beyond the pale. Indeed, I’m guessing that if this is true there’s a whole lot of black ops stuff that we don’t know about.

Aside from finding of this deeply and inherently undemocratic, on a purely practical level, I have to wonder if the president has developed better judgment in finding the right advisors in this realm than he has in the economic sector. Since most of it is clandestine, I suppose we’ll never know. At least not until the inevitable blow back sometime down the road.

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Sexist performance art

by digby

Via Thers over at Eschaton, here’s Glenn Reynolds being totally incoherent:

FROM FACEBOOK, BEST ELIZABETH WARREN PARODY/RESPONSE YET: This was posted by Ashtad Bin Sayyif, but I’m not sure if he’s the original author or just reposting. Anyway, it goes to the core problem. Are you the state’s property, or not?

That goes to the core problem, but I don’t think it’s the one Glenn Reynolds think it is.

Maybe today’s a good day to contribute to Elizabeth Warren’s campaign. You can do so at Blue America’s Senate 2012 page.

God I’m tired of this crap. Every time a woman runs for office a thousand sexist little jerks get their rocks off performing this pathetic little dance for one another.

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Richie Rich and the Buffet Rule

by digby

Apparently Rich Lowry makes more than a quarter of a million dollars every year. And like so many of his poor, working class neighbors, he’s just barely scraping by. Via Harold Pollack here’s Lowry on a recent blogginheads:

He [Buffett] should give all his wealth away. . . . come move to Westchester County. Move to McLean, Virginia. Move to the suburbs of San Francisco with his wife. Adopt a couple of young kids, so he has a young family again. Make arrangements so that he only makes $250,000 every year. And then let’s see how he likes being lumped in with millionaires and billionaires, as the President does.

And see how he feels about seeing his taxes increased, when he actually has to worry about expenses!

Brad DeLong explains why Richie Rich is dumb:

If you increase the marginal tax rate on incomes above $250,000 by five percentage point, then you would increase Warren Buffett’s taxes in this scenario by… wait for it… wait for it… zero.

People I have surveyed so far have voted 12 for the proposition that Rich Lowry does not know how tax brackets work and 2 for the proposition that he does know but is trying to mislead and confuse his audience.

National Review: embarrassing thoughtful conservatives for 56 years…

(Count me with the 12. The innumeracy among the wealthy on this topic is mind boggling.)

Now I will explain why Richie Rich is a putz:

Indeed, he’s such a putz that Richie Rich doesn’t even know he’s rich. In fact,he thinks he just regular middle class guy trying to make expenses. And having trouble doing it! Indeed, he is the very embodiment of the average American. Well except for the fact that he has a whole lot more money.

This is the primary Village conceit, my friends. Recall:

This is the permanent DC ruling class who have managed to convince themselves that they are simple, puritanical, bourgeois burghers and farmers, even though they are actually celebrity millionaires influencing the most powerful government on earth.

It’s about their phoniness, their pretense of speaking for “average Americans” when it’s clear they haven’t the vaguest clue even about the average Americans who work in their local Starbucks or drive their cabs. (Think Tim Russert, good old boy from Buffalo, lately of Nantucket.)It’s about their intolerable sanctimony and hypocritical provincialism, pretending to be shocked about things they all do, creating social rules for others which they themselves ignore.

The village is really “the village” an ersatz small town like something you’d see in Disneyland. And to those who argue that Versailles is the far better metaphor, I would just say that it is Versailles — a very particular part:

A Picturesque Little Village

Part of the grounds near the Trianon were chosen by Marie-Antoinette as the site of a lakeside village, a crucial feature of picturesque landscape gardens then so fashionable among Europe’s aristocracy. In 1783, Richard Mique built this amusement village where the queen played at being a shepherdess.

In 1784, Marie-Antoinette had a farm built, where she installed a farming couple from the Touraine region, along with their two children. They were charged with supplying the queen with eggs, butter, cream and cheese, for which they disposed of cows, goats, farmyard animals.

The Village is a metaphor for the faux “middle class values” the wealthy, insular, privileged, hypocritical political celebrities (and their hangers-on and wannabes) present to the nation

Now evidence that this delusion exists in the upper 3% all across the nation. But “journalists” are the only ones charged specifically with disseminating the facts, so this misconception of their economic status is particularly problematic in a democracy. If anyone in society needs to have some grasp of economic reality it should be journalists — and politicians.

Pollack has a good idea about how Rich Lowry could fix this problem:

Rich Lowry should give his money away, move beyond the Washington beltway. He should make arrangements so that he is a laid-off teacher with a young family trying to make his mortgage payments, or he is a factory worker whose COBRA benefits have just run out. Maybe he should make arrangements so that he’s one of the many, many sick and uninsured Americans who rely upon safety-net providers and public hospitals. Maybe he should arrange to be a disabled person whose Medicaid benefits, because of the recession, no longer cover dental fillings or hospice care. Maybe he should arrange to be a working-class parent whose local school cut back on enrichment programs and shrank the school year.

And see how he feels about having to watch painful cuts to public employment, social services, and education when he actually has to worry about expenses!

Like that could ever happen to someone like Lowry …

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Labor to join the protest fray
by David Atkins (“thereisnospoon”)

Last Sunday I said that the only way the Occupy Wall Street protests would gain traction is if the organizational left in and around New York City decided to stiffen their spines and get involved.

Well buckle up, folks. We’re going for a ride:

The “Occupy Wall Street” protests, now entering their third week, are poised to get a whole lot bigger than its core of 200 to 300 people, potentially even exceeding the protesters original goals of 20,000 demonstrators, thanks to recent pledges of support from some of New York City’s largest labor unions and community groups.

On Tuesday, over 700 uniformed pilots, members of the Air Line Pilots Association, took to the streets outside of Wall Street demanding better pay.

On Wednesday night, the executive board of the New York Transit Workers Union (TWU Local 100), which represents the city’s all-important train and bus workers, voted unanimously to support Occupy Wall Street. TWU Local 100 counts 38,000 active members and covers 26,000 retirees, according to its website.

The Union on Thursday used Twitter to urge members to take part in a massive march and rally on Wednesday, Oct. 5. That effort is being co-sponsored by another eight labor and community outreach organizations…

The other eight organizations expected to join in the October 5 rally, based on its Facebook page, are United NY, Strong Economy for All Coalition, Working Families Party, VOCAL-NY, Community Voices Heard, Alliance for Quality Education, New York Communities for Change, Coalition for the Homeless, which have a collective membership of over 1 million.

As Jon Kest, the executive director of New York Communities for Change, told Crain’s New York Business: “It’s a responsibility for the progressive organizations in town to show their support and connect Occupy Wall Street to some of the struggles that are real in the city today. They’re speaking about issues we’re trying to speak about.”

I don’t know why it took so long, but better late than never. Still, it’s going to take a lot more than one massive day of protest. The old “let’s stage a big rally and then go home” right afterwards model of activism is pretty much dead. The new model is Wisconsin and Tahrir. There is nothing the champagne-sipping financiers would love better than to head home to the Hamptons on October 5th and come back on the 6th to find everything had returned to normal.

These organizations are going to have to be determined and help grow the occupation of Wall Street with a long-term presence. It’s also going to be incumbent on them to plan out some sort of end game and clear goals, even if the original protesters themselves don’t see a reason to do so. It will be tough to ask people to stay out in the New York City winter without some sort of strategy in mind, and some way of credibly declaring victory at some point.

As for the protesters currently on the ground?

Most of those in Zuccotti Park, though, don’t see the need for a change in tactics. At least not yet.

“There isn’t a consolidated message, and I don’t think there needs to be,” said Andrew Lynn, 34, who drove the three hours from his home in Troy, N.Y., to help the demonstrators’ media team.

On Wednesday, he hunched over a laptop sheltered from the clammy air by an umbrella. A generator rumbled beside him, ensuring the group’s activities continued to stream live to audiences.

Added Kobi Skolnick, a young Israeli American who by Wednesday was in his ninth day of participating in the protest: “I think the main thing we’re doing is knocking on the walls of ignorance in this country so people wake up.”

Funny thing is, though, the people are aware of how badly they’re getting screwed by Wall St. I just conducted an array of pro bono focus groups with independent voters on behalf of a progressive organization; when the subject of Wall Street came up, there was near universal fury, with respondent answers ranging from aggrieved to downright violent.

The problem doesn’t lie with the American people, ironically enough. The problem is that the American people don’t know what to do about it, and neither the Democratic Party nor many left-aligned groups are offering a lot of answers. Merely increasingly the marginal tax rates on the wealthy, already treated as an apocalyptic battle in Washington, is only the beginning of the work that needs to be done to remove the economy from the clutches of the financial vampire squid.

Contra the spirit of the current protests, goals and strategy are necessary, even if it’s as simple as a single unified demand. It doesn’t have to be complicated, but there has to be something central for people to cling onto. In Wisconsin it was opposition to Governor Walker’s legislation. In the Arab Spring, it’s getting rid of the national dictator.

But even so, if it weren’t for the brave ragtag folks in the park leading the way, we wouldn’t even have the opportunity to talk about a long-term protest strategy. Now is the time for Democrats in New York and across the nation to prove that they’re worth their salt and help these people come up with a coherent plan to truly defend the middle class, rather than simply pay it lip service.

In the meantime, if you’re not in New York or can’t make it there, you help out the protesters with food and donations here.

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Marie Antoinette and the Masters of the Universe

by digby

It’s hard to believe it’s real, but here is video evidence of Wall Streeters drinking champagne from a balcony as they watch the protesters walk by:

You cannot make this stuff up.

Wall Street has been like this from the very beginning of the financial crisis, going out of their way to scoff at average people in trouble in this economy. (“We’re doing God’s work!”)I guess they just don’t see any need to keep a low profile and ride this out without inflaming the polloi. These “winners” want to rub their noses in it.

They just keep proving over and over again, in so many different ways, that they aren’t as smart as they think they are.

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“Smell Test” Scandals 101

by digby

I was watching that Daily Show clip with Bill O’Reilly and realized that it was probably important to remind everyone about how these things work. Clearly the wingnuts think they have something and if things go according to their plan, they might be right.

I think the character of this one is broader than a character attack against President Obama. People like him personally and there isn’t a lot to work with there. What to do with this scandal is advance the idea that government spending is inherently corrupt. It’s a neat trick after their years of cronyism but they understand the press very well and know this is exactly the kind of “fleecing of America” story they can pull off the shelf and run with without having to think too much. Before long it will just be a shorthand for “Obama scandal” and they’ll be off.

And it fits in quite well with this newer tactic:

No government shutdown. No workers forced to take unpaid furlough. No additional blow to our struggling economy. Another crisis averted. Right?
Not quite.

Congressional Republicans may not be replicating the disastrous shutdown strategy of their Newt Gingrich-led predecessors from two decades ago, but they are slyly executing the next worst thing: forcing our government to lurch from one near-crisis to the next.

The summer debt limit deal only kept our government open until the end of this month. Today’s deal only keeps the doors open until November.

The only thing uncertain about what will happen in November is what penny-ante excuse will Republicans come up with to make the next compromise take as long as possible and rattle as many nerves as possible.

Why do congressional Republicans bother with this charade?

Because instead of getting blamed for brazenly provoking completely dysfunctional government, the GOP is betting that subtly creating barely functioning government will frustrate the public while deflecting the blame towards the President.
Congressional Republicans know that taking the government to the brink of shutdown every few months will do nothing for the people but keep the lights on, at a time when the public is demanding bold action to solve the jobs crisis.

Making government look impotent and silly serves the anti-government agenda of the modern Republican quite nicely.

These are the same Republicans that cried “Uncertainty!” every time that the last Democratic Congress tried to solve a tough problem that weighed down our economy, like rising health care costs or reckless banker behavior.

Yet now they actively try to sow uncertainty whether our government will be able to pay its debt obligations or keep its doors open.

The more they make the government look like a hopeless, corrupt clown show, the better off they are. I’m not sure how you fight that. I expect it would be a bit easier if the Village media weren’t so anxious to jump on every manufactured tid-bit from the right wing noise machine, but I’ve pretty much given up on them. They are addicted to phony corruption scandals. (The real ones, not so much.)

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Financial institutions: anachronistic parasites
by David Atkins

It’s easy for those who obsess over daily news cycles to lose perspective about our place in history. As much as we believe that the economic institutions and modes of governance we’ve established are the result of centuries of fine tuning, the reality is that our modern world is a very new creation. Modern democracy is only a couple of centuries old, and only very recently has it been applied to all citizens in most democracies worldwide. The modern social welfare state is only about 60-70 years old. The industrialized world only abandoned the gold standard a mere 40 years ago. The rise and fall of communism as a serious challenge to capitalism only occurred in the last century, and the battle was only truly decided 20 years ago. Humanity is still very much in its infancy stages, experiencing rapid growth and evolution not only in terms of technological advancement, but the advancement of social and economic systems as well.

So inasmuch as the modern world takes massive private banks and credit card companies for granted as part of the established order of things, the reality is that these are new phenomena. Lenders and lending institutions have been around for millennia, of course, but most societies throughout history have held tight controls, either through religious or secular lawmaking, on usury. Moreover, governments and societies have seen fit to control the predations of financial institutions by simply seizing assets, or declaring jubilees. The inordinate power of lending institutions over governments and consumers that we are seeing today is a very recent phenomenon in span of human civilization. It is not the norm, it is not necessary, and it is hard to imagine that it will continue for long as humanity gropes its way forward in search of a better future.

It’s important to remind ourselves of this fact when we see stories like this:

Starting Saturday, big banks must comply with a new regulation that caps the fees they can charge merchants for processing debit card purchases. But some consumers are already seeing the impact of the change, in the form of higher fees charged on their checking accounts, as banks seek to recoup lost revenue.

Bank of America is the latest bank to say it will begin charging a monthly fee for checking accounts that use debit cards. Starting early next year, the bank will charge $5 a month, in any month that the customer uses a debit card to make a purchase. (If customers have a debit card, but don’t use it, they won’t incur the fee.) The fee won’t apply to A.T.M. transactions, and it won’t be charged to customers with certain premium accounts, a bank spokeswoman, Betty Riess, said. “The economics of offering a debit card have changed with recent regulations,” she said.

Bank of America joins banks including SunTrust and Regions in charging the fees. Other institutions, like Wells Fargo and Chase, are testing them, too. And over all, bank fees have crept up to record levels, a recent survey found.

The added fees have come even though the limit on the merchant fees wasn’t as low as banks initially had feared. (The Federal Reserve originally considered a cap of 12 cents, or half of what it finally set.)

While consumers are seeing the impact of the change in their bank accounts, any potential savings benefit at stores is likely to be muted. “I don’t expect there to be any visible effects at the cash register,” said Aaron McPherson, practice director for payments at IDC Financial Insights. When similar caps were put in place in Australia, he said, merchants there didn’t pass along savings, so it’s unlikely that will happen here either.

That’s because, retail groups say, stores aren’t going to benefit as much as they had originally hoped under the new cap, and some merchants may actually pay higher fees.

Essentially, what happened here is that banks have been gouging retailers big and small for the convenience of allowing a customer to use a debit card. They and the credit card companies have also been gouging retailers for allowing them to use credit cards, too, for no good reason. But that’s another story.

The Federal Reserve, in a long overdue move, told the banks that they couldn’t gouge retailers so much anymore. So now the banks are going to charge consumers for using their own debit cards. Meanwhile, the retailers are predictably not passing along the savings from fees to consumers–first, because the notion that retailers ever really pass on savings to consumers is something of a joke, and second because the fees themselves really didn’t come very much, especially on the sorts of small transactions for which the debit card swipe would be most useful.

Now let’s be clear about what this means. When you put money in a bank, it’s your money. The bank uses that money to lend out to others, and make more money itself off interest. The bank hands you a little card that allows you to pull out your own money. The bank isn’t lending you the money; it’s simply allowing you to use the money in your account. The card simply facilitates the process, and costs the bank nothing. No need to use a bank’s ATM or visit a teller to pull out cash. The cost to the bank in using this system is minimal. The bank makes its money off debit card users in the form of overdraft charges and other fees. Charging a fee for using the bank’s debit card to access your own money is an amazing insult–especially when considering how many banks offer “free” checking accounts on condition that consumers–you guessed it–use their debit cards at least once a month.

When you go to your local coffee shop and use a debit or credit card, the retailer is getting gouged by the bank/credit card company for allowing you to use that card. And if the consumer carries interest on the credit card or happen to overdraft on the debit card, the bank/credit card company gouges the consumer for using the card as well. And now the banks are tripling the gouge: in order to “make up” the lost revenue on fees that have actually increased for the most useful small debit transactions, they are gouging consumers for even daring to use a debit card.

Does the world need to perpetuate this system? No, it does not. Mobile payment systems are increasingly taking hold in the marketplace, allowing for customers and retailers to carry their own tabs with the retailer directly, essentially bypassing the lending institution and their debit/credit cards. Starbucks already has an app to do just that, which has the banks and the credit card companies running scared, and for good reason.

And, of course, the debit card situation is merely analogous to the parasitic behavior the lending institutions have been perpetuating on governments around the world for decades.

There will come a day when these institutions are brought to heel. Credit is important to keeping the engine of the world economy humming, but not at the cost the lending institutions are demanding. As I’ve said before:

the economy is like a engine. Demand fuels it. A strong middle class is the best way to ensure that the fuel level stays high. Credit via lending is a lubricant, sort of like motor oil. In exchange for providing that lubricant, financiers are allowed to skim off the top and make out like bandits even in times of relative equality. Lately, however, the financiers have been playing radical games to suck economy-killing amounts out of the tank, while the economy sputters to a stop due to lack of demand. In this situation, it would seem that government would be best suited to shunt the vampire financiers off to the side, provide a fuel injection of demand and oil up the engine itself on behalf of the people. The only problem is that the vampire financiers have too tight a control on government policy through corruption, and aren’t about to be pushed aside. It really isn’t much more complicated than that.

But pushed aside they must be, and pushed aside they will be, one way or another. If it is not allowed to happen peacefully under the rubric of political and legal reform, the revolution will take a decidedly more unseemly turn. Humanity has always found a way to remove tyrannies that limit its potential one way or another.

The financial sector currently represents the greatest threat to human happiness and freedom. Corralling the financial sector, bypassing it when possible and shrinking it down to manageable size are simply the next logical steps in the evolution of human society.

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Something’s happening here

by digby

I wonder if the white shirts are going to spray these guys in the face with pepper spray?

photo by Dan Nguyen @ New York City

Evidently 500 of these guys showed up to protest on Wall Street today earlier this week. They’ve been getting screwed on their pensions for years and these mergers are killing them.