Month: September 2011

Elizabeth Warren the Magnificent
by David Atkins (“thereisnospoon”)

This should be enough to put a smile on the face of even the grouchiest, most cynical progressive sourpuss out there. Ladies and gentlemen, meet the next senator from Massachusetts, Elizabeth Warren:

We got into this whole…we got in this hole one billion dollars, uh, one trillion dollars on tax cuts for the rich under George Bush. We got into this hole 2 trillion dollars on two wars we put on a credit card for our children and grandchildren to pay off. And we got into this hole one trillion dollars on a Medicare drug program that A) was not paid for, and B) was 40% more expensive than it needs to be because it was a giveaway to the drug companies. Which is four trillion right there! Applause. So part of the way you fix this problem is, like, don’t do those things! Laughter, applause.

…

I hear all this, you know, “Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever.” No! There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there—good for you! But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that maurauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea—God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

Changing the system won’t come from dropping out and voting third party, nor will it come from blindly defending the Administration and hoping a Republican never holds the White House again in our lifetime. Changing the system will come from voting people like Elizabeth Warren into office all across the country, proving that they can win using this sort of rhetoric, and then holding them accountable to their campaign promises.

And here’s the little secret the Democratic consultant class either doesn’t understand or willfully refuses to understand: this sort of rhetoric won’t just win in Massachusetts. It will win in Omaha, too. It will win the day from Annapolis to Anchorage, from Kalamazoo to Kailua-Kona.

Will there be places this message won’t win, and voters whose heartstrings it won’t touch? Yes, of course. Most of those places will be heavily rural or bastions of the Bible Belt and the Deep South. But those places were unwinnable and those people unreachable anyway without destroying everything the Democratic Party is supposed to stand for.

The amount of contortion necessary for Democrats to win in places Warren’s message won’t work means those places aren’t worth winning in the first place.

The Democratic Party would be far, far better off maximizing voter turnout in places where this message does work, than in weakening its message so much that its support becomes a mile wide but an inch deep.

Most importantly, if the Democratic Party were to elect a bevy of candidates who talked this talk and then walked the walk while in office, the Party would actually succeed in moving economic policy significantly to the left while in power, and in stopping the Rightist juggernaut when eventually forced into the minority. It would actually do the job not just of getting elected, but of actually doing the things they were elected to do, which is the whole point of politics. Yes, it might lose some Wall St. cash in the process. But if that’s the overriding concern, it’s only a matter of time before violent revolution or totalitarian takeover anyway. So there’s not much to lose, anyway.

And the good news? Warren is up by two points over Scott Brown in the latest poll.

Help Elizabeth Warren win in 2012 by donating and/or volunteering. From there, 2016 is right around the corner. Ms. Warren would be a formidable candidate.

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War on pleasure

by digby

Think Progress:

“This is not a war against women,” said Republican founder of WomanTrend Kellyanne Conway.

Texas Rep. Wayne Christian (R), however, begs to differ. With Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) at the helm, Texas Republicans have passed an “emergency” law forcing women to view a sonogram before an abortion, threatened a poor women’s health care program over Planned Parenthood funding, are seeking to restrict hospitals and physicians over abortion procedures, and has cut funding for family planning clinics by two-thirds.
When asked whether Texas’s anti-family planning efforts were “a war on birth control,” Christian replied, “Well of course this is a war on birth control and abortions and everything”:

The goal is to get government money out of the abortion process and if contraceptive services have to suffer a bit of collateral damage in the process, so be it. When The Texas Tribune asked state Rep. Wayne Christian (R-Nacogdoches), a supporter of the family planning cuts, if this was a war on birth control, he said “yes.”

“Well of course this is a war on birth control and abortions and everything, that’s what family planning is supposed to be about,” Christian said.

That’s actually not quite true. It’s a war on pleasure. Anything that promotes human happiness other than the ecstasy of counting money and prayer must be stopped.

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Jonathan Alter is on television today, predictably flogging his boring book that nobody read as being superior to Suskind’s, particularly taking issue with the claims that the White House wasn’t exactly friendly to women:

Alter: there was concern that there was a boys club and the president reacted to that concern. This dinner which Ron Suskind has been talking about, and I named all the women at the dinner in my book, and they had their gripes.

But there’s a big difference between it being a boy’s club and it being a hostile work environment even if one of the women is on tape sort of saying that, who now says she didn’t mean it that way.

Bashir: you’re referring to Anita Dunn who is now saying to Ron Suskind it was a hostile work environment.

Alter: The question so far has been, “did Anita Dunn say it, did she not say it” that’s not the issue. The issue is, was that a hostile work environment and the answer to that is no.

I’ve talkied to a lot of women about this. It was a hostile work environment for both men and women because they thought that Larry Summers and Rahm Emmanuel were very tough to work for.

And that’s what they agreed to at this dinner with the President. It was a gripe session about Larry and Rahm.

Bashir: So it wasn’t the president setting this tone and environment it was Larry Summers

Alter: no not at all. And in fact if you read Suskind’s book you can see that it’s not the president. But the shorthand and the way it’s come across in the media it’s conveyed an impression …

I had some very tough things to say about the WH in my book but it needs to be accurate. In other words, the impression people are getting now that this was an anti-woman White House is just not so.

Right, And the privileged white guy would know that better than anyone, right?

Alter basically said that it’s very hard to work in the White House for everyone and these women who banded together to confront the president with their “gripes” aren’t as tough as the boys and can’t handle the pressure. Why else wouldn’t it have been representatives of both genders in this meeting? He made this point more than once.

Lord knows it’s not the first time I’ve heard this either. If a man doesn’t recognize sexism it didn’t actually happen. (Witness Howard Dean having his consciousness raised.) This is the most common (and infuriating) reaction women, particularly executives, in the workplace get from men when the subject is brought up. “Toughen up, sweetie. It’s not personal. If you can’t stand the heat ….”

In my experience this stuff just doesn’t come out of nowhere. This passage that Delong relates about Romer does not let the President off the hook in any way. (Click on each image to read them)

There’s a reason why she talked with Dunn and Jarrett about this incident and it isn’t because Rahm and Larry were so hard to work for.

I don’t know if the White House boys club is sexist. But I do know that listening to people like Jonathan Alter “explain” why it isn’t doesn’t reassure me. I’ve heard that fatuous crap for decades and I can’t believe these guys will actually go on television and spout it as if it isn’t insulting as hell. Even today. In 2011. We haven’t come that far, baby.

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Killing Credibility
by David Atkins (“thereisnospoon”)

The IMF has moved to downgrade growth prospects in the U.S. and Europe. The Times has the details:

The International Monetary Fund sharply downgraded its outlook for the United States economy through 2012 because of weak growth and concern that Europe won’t be able to solve its debt crisis, the organization said in its economic outlook Tuesday.

The fund said it expected the American economy to grow just 1.5 percent this year and 1.8 percent in 2012. That’s down from its June forecast of 2.5 percent in 2011 and 2.7 percent next year.

The International Monetary Fund also lowered its outlook for the 17 European Union countries that use the euro. It predicted 1.6 percent growth this year and 1.1 percent next year, down from its June projections of 2 percent and 1.7 percent, respectively.

The gloomier forecast for Europe was based on worries that Greece would default on its debt and destabilize the region.

“Fear of the unknown is high,” said Olivier Blanchard, the organization’s chief economist. “Strong policies are urgently needed to improve the outlook and reduce the risks.”

Not a surprise. The move to austerity has been an utter disaster since the economic collapse, with most governments attempting to bail out their banks at the expense of their citizens, leading to a growth-killing decrease in demand. So logically the IMF has seen the error its ways and is pushing pro-growth policies. Or maybe not:

American and European policy makers need to act more decisively to cut budget deficits, the report said, and European officials need to ensure that the region’s banks have enough capital to withstand the debt crisis…

Budget cuts “cannot be too fast or it will kill growth,” Mr. Blanchard said in a statement. “It cannot be too slow or it will kill credibility.”

Kill credibility with whom, exactly? With the bankers and finance wizards who caused the crisis? With hedge fund managers? The Chinese, whose sharp undervaluation of their own currency is the the least credibility-inducing policy on the world economic stage? Just who are these masters of the universe before whose nervous moods entire nations must tremble, discarding their sick, elderly and poor to the whims of fate? Are they willing to go on the record? Do they have a street address? Who are these parole officers of world finance who determine if the world’s economy gets to leave jail pending adequate repentance for nonexistent sins? Who are these gods to whom the middle classes of the world must be sacrificed at the altar?

Whoever they are, conservatives here in the U.S. have found a new way to placate them: bashing Dodd-Frank, that wholly inadequate piece of legislation, most of which has not gone into effect or even been written, but which is designed to put even the smallest of curbs of the sorts of excesses that caused the crisis. In the conservative world, Dodd-Frank is the cause of the continued crisis:

Republicans say Dodd-Frank is the root of some of today’s economic problems. It has stopped banks from lending to “job creators,” they contend, and is a direct cause of high unemployment. “It created such uncertainty that the bankers, instead of making loans, pulled back,” said Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, speaking at a South Carolina rally over Labor Day weekend where he again called for the law’s repeal.

“I think part of that flows from the fact that the people who were putting that together, Dodd and Frank,” he continued, referring to Democratic lawmakers former Senator Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut and Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, “as much as anyone I know in this country were responsible for the meltdown that we had…”

Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, has also called for the repeal of Dodd-Frank. “We have to end it right now,” he said, on the same weekend in the same state as Mr. Romney. Newt Gingrich said it is “a devastatingly bad bill” that is “killing small banks, killing small business, killing the housing industry.” Representative Michele Bachmann regularly reminds voters that she introduced the first Dodd-Frank repeal bill this year.

Former Gov. Jon Huntsman of Utah agrees, but he wouldn’t stop there. He would also eliminate the Sarbanes-Oxley law passed in 2002, which set standards for corporate accountability in the wake of the Enron scandal.

But of course, the problem–as always–is lack of demand, not lending restrictions on bloated banks:

Community bankers worry about Dodd-Frank rules setting limits on how much banks can charge for debit-card transactions. Those rules have yet to go into effect. In the meantime, the bankers say, they have plenty of money to lend, but small-business owners are not asking for loans.

“There are a lot of qualified borrowers who don’t want to borrow, because they are not sure what is going to happen with the economy,” said R. Todd Price, president of the First State Bank of Mesquite, Tex. “I don’t know if that can be directly associated with Dodd-Frank,” he added. While the law “will put a whole lot more regulations especially on community bankers,” he said, “I think they’re yet to come.”

It’s easy to see why so many in this country on the left and the right tend toward conspiracy theories. In the absence of any sort of political and economic reporting that actually makes sense, voters are left to trust pre-defined political narratives. Political leadership from the Democratic Party has been far too reluctant to finger Wall St. as the villain it is, but the biggest problem with the narratives on both sides is that economics is treated as a religion in which hidden priests serving as economic doctors must be placated by appropriate policies to “gain confidence” and “heal” the economy. There is a massive air of mystery and clandestine actors at whose mercy sovereign nations tremble.

Reality is far simpler: 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.

One might think that even the global captains of finance would realize that killing the middle classes in America and Europe would be bad for them long-term. But the golden key to all of this is contained in one little sentence in the IMF article:

Over all, the International Monetary Fund predicted global growth of 4 percent for both years. Stronger growth in China, India, Brazil and other developing countries should offset weaker output in the United States and Europe, it said.

Ultimately, global financiers would love nothing better than to destroy the middle classes in Europe and America while using labor arbitrage to maximize corporate profits through hiring and selling to the developing world. The BRIC countries are the future of investment, and to them, lazy middle class fatcats with nice unemployment, maternity leave and other social welfare benefits are just dragging down worldwide economic progress. All the money that’s tied up in Social Security and European pensions could be much better invested in companies maximizing shareholder profits by destroying Brazilian rainforests at $2/hour.

This is the reality of the class war today. Since attempting to pursue economic credibility with these villains is a fool’s errand, the only way the Left will achieve credibility with the voters is to expose the reality of what’s going on and run on a desperately needed populist message.

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True believer

by digby

I have just received the new Suskind book and so haven’t read it. But Brad Delong is excerpting the economic passages for everyone to read and they are fascinating.

There’s a lot to say, not the least of which is the fact that the president seems to have been remarkably hostile to any discussion of trying to do another stimulus when it was obvious the first wasn’t doing what was needed. (And evidently he particularly didn’t want to hear any more about it from someone who didn’t have a penis in her pocket.)

In the excerpt about the “jobless recovery” Suskind reports that when the administration was informed of the potential for unemployment at 9.8% in 2010, Obama was pensive, knowing that the midterms could be a bloodbath and he asked for some input. (Apparently he prefers “pro and con” lists rather than detailed analysis or charts, which seems oddly Bushian.) In any case, he was apparently unmoved by the various scenarios, passively saying he hoped the rosier scenarios came to pass and that was that.

It certainly does clear up any thought we might have had about whether or not the president is a real fiscal conservative or whether he was just flogging this deficit obsession for political effect. He’s a true believer. And we know this because of his reliance on other deficit hawks and because when the political bloodbath the jobless recovery had predicted came true, his first move was to validate the Republicans’ manufactured narrative about what had motivated their voters and launch his program of budget cuts and deficit reduction.

I have thought that his fetish for a Grand Bargain was mostly born of a delusional belief that he was someone who could bridge unbridgeable differences and be remembered as the man who brought cats and dogs together. But it looks as though he was just as motivated by the fact that he’s a true blue, Concord Coalition, Pete Peterson deficit hawk.

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What’s the matter with Teabags?

by digby

Has there ever been a bigger group of suckers than the far right of the Republican Party?

Rick Perry minces no words in declaring what he thinks of the 2008 TARP bailout of big banks, saying in his book that such programs “turn America upside down, totally undermining the idea of limited government, free markets and federalism.”

But on Tuesday, Mr. Perry will be the guest of honor at a high-dollar, New York fund-raiser thrown by Maurice R. Greenberg, also known as Hank, the former chief executive of the American International Group, a company whose spectacular collapse helped set the stage for the bailouts that Mr. Perry dislikes.

Mr. Greenberg led A.I.G. for decades and was accused of fraud by the New York State attorney general before leaving his post in 2005. The company ended up taking more than $180 billion in federal aid, including more than $40 billion from the TARP program.

The bailout is not, of course, mentioned on the invitation to Tuesday evening’s reception, which is billed as part of Mr. Perry’s “Big Apple Kickoff.” The reception will be at The Lotus Club and is listed as requiring a contribution of $2,500 per person.

If the Tea Partiers wren’t so mean I’d almost feel sorry for them.

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It’s the only plan they’ve got

by digby

The privatization zombie never dies:

Three years ago, if Bush had succeeded in creating private accounts, an American worker would have lost $26,000 on the market. As ThinkProgress’ Travis Waldron notes, millions of Americans who did have a private account like a 401(k) lost nearly everything in the crisis, and Social Security is the only source of retirement funds they have left. Thevolatility of market behavior in large industrialized economies like ours “illustrates the real potential for decades-long declines that could erode the value of a private retirement account invested in stocks.”

People invest retirement savings in the stock market because they need their money to grow over time to make up for inflation and provide a little return. And while I realize that the new vogue in capitalism is absolute certainty in all things, the reality is that such growth entails risk and there is always a chance that you’re going to lose money in the markets. That’s why government backed Social Security is such an important part of everyone’s retirement, not just those who are too poor to save any money. It’s the backstop against bad luck and risks gone wrong.

These people want to take away that secure part of everyone’s retirement and put them at risk of losing everything when assholes on Wall Street decide they’ve got a great new way to scam people out of their money. Hopefully, the stock market crash and ensuing volatility are recent enough to make even these nutcase Republicans leery of trying to do this, but I wouldn’t bet on it. It’s the only plan they’ve got.

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Bill O’Reilly Is A Moron

by digby

Via Steve Benen:

That’s the best reason I’ve yet heard for raising taxes on these creeps. What’s funny is that O’Reilly is under the illusion that he’s one of the big job creators in our culture who can’t be asked to give up even one penny of his massive income lest he lose all reason to wake up in the morning. Well sorry — he’s one of the entertainers, not one of the producers. He may be irreplaceable to curmudgeonly old FOX News, but it won’t make a bit of difference to the economy. So, buh bye.

But that’s not why I say he’s a moron. He’s a moron because he doesn’t know how marginal tax rates work and when you make the ridiculous sums of money he makes, you really ought to. On the other hand, if he’s so dumb that he thinks Obama is actually proposing a 50% tax rate and then whines publicly to a country full of poor people about it, then maybe we should just take his money.

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Wasting Away
by David Atkins (“thereisnospoon”)

Gallup brings news that Americans now believe that over half of all dollars spent by the federal government are “wasted”:

Americans estimate that the federal government wastes 51 cents of every dollar it spends, a new high in a Gallup trend question first asked in 1979.

The current estimate of 51 cents wasted on the dollar is similar to what Gallup measured in 2009, but marks the first time Americans believe more than half of federal spending is wasted. The low point in the trend is 38 cents wasted on the dollar, in 1986.

Americans are less likely to believe state and local governments waste money they spend than they are to believe this about the federal government, with the state estimate at 42 cents on the dollar and the local at 38 cents.

Americans have viewed the federal government as being the most wasteful of tax dollars — and local government the least — each time Gallup has asked these questions. That pattern is consistent with Americans’ greater trust in state and local government than in the federal government.

Over time, though, Americans have become increasingly likely to see all levels of government as being wasteful of tax dollars. Americans now believe all levels of government waste at least 11 cents more on the dollar compared with 1979.

Perhaps most interesting about Gallup’s graph is this: from 1979 to 1981, the percentage the number of cents on the dollar that Americans figured was wasted by the federal government rose from 40 cents to 45 cents. That’s a big jump considering the trendline, and fairly clearly reflects the power of Ronald Reagan’s rhetoric to change public opinion about government spending. Even those who lately claim that the Presidential and campaign speeches accomplish nothing in the realm of public opinion would be hard-pressed to deny it in this case. But also problematic for progressives is that from around 1981 to 1986, the waste figure shrinks to just 38 cents on the dollar by 1986. Assuming that this isn’t all statistical noise, these numbers suggest that Americans figured that the Reagan Administration really was cutting “wasteful” spending, or at least that Reagan was providing a better bang for the public’s buck.

But then something curious happens starting in 1986: the number of cents on the dollar Americans perceive as wasted starts a slow, gradual ascent trending all the way to the present day. The slow upward climb transcends Democratic and Republican administrations alike.

The likeliest culprit? Increased partisanship and gridlock. After all, perceptions of wasteful spending have trended upward even as the ideological makeup of those who believe the spending is wasted shifts based on which political party is in power:

The ideological differences observed this year were not apparent in 2001, when Republican George W. Bush was president. At that time, liberals estimated a larger share of federal spending was wasted than conservatives did, 48 cents to 44. Thus, one’s perceptions of how much federal spending is wasted depend partly on the match between a person’s ideological preferences and the prevailing power structure in Washington.

Which means that as each side blames the other for waste even as the plight of the middle class increases, a growing number on both sides are apt to say that Washington is wasting their tax dollars.

Ironically but predictably, the slice of voters likeliest to see waste is elderly conservatives (most of whom are likely to be on wasteful federal Medicare money):

Senior citizens’ estimate of wasted federal dollars ranks with conservatives’ as one of the highest, and is significantly greater than that of Americans aged 18 to 29.

Additionally, those with more formal education estimate proportionately less federal government waste than do Americans with less education.

What does it all add up to? Well, it’s fairly clear that as the Democratic Party shifted away from middle-class concerns in the 1990s and the Republicans ballooned the deficit on pointless war and tax cuts for the rich while making it impossible for Democrats to accomplish much of anything, the public’s trust in government has eroded gradually and significantly. Meanwhile, older conservatives have become increasingly radicalized.

That works out very nicely for conservatives in the short term. Destroying the public’s faith in the power of government to do good is their calling card.

If Democrats want to reverse the trend, they would do well to communicate their commitment to addressing middle-class concerns, and to giving the public the best possible bang for their tax dollar in the form of jobs and highly visible infrastructure building. Overseas commitments should be scaled back, as should tax cuts for the wealthy and unpopular conservative boondoggles like No Child Left Behind.

The Obama Administration’s new plan is hitting on most of these themes, which is a welcome change. But to convince the public, those promises would have to be backed up by action. Time will tell if Democrats can restore the public’s faith, should they be fortunate enough to hold onto the White House and win back the Speaker’s gavel.

One thing is for sure, though: the Obama Administration’s second term would need to look, act and feel significantly more aggressive on all these fronts than its first term has been heretofore. President Obama still has the power to use the rhetorical command of the Presidency to be a progressive Ronald Reagan and restore America’s confidence in its government. If everyone plays their cards right, Democrats should be able to make a dent in Gallup’s rising trendline on waste.

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Watching the detectives

by digby

Oh fergawdsakes:

Judge Richard A. Posner isn’t known for his genteel treatment of parties whose arguments he doesn’t agree with. When an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union began to make his opening statement at a Tuesday oral argument, Posner cut him off after 14 words. “Yeah, I know,” he said dismissively. “But I’m not interested, really, in what you want to do with these recordings of peoples’ encounters with the police.”

The topic was the constitutionality of the unusually strict Illinois wiretapping law, which makes it illegal to record someone without his consent even if the recording is done openly and in a public place. The ACLU was asking a panel of three judges from the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit to strike down the law on First Amendment grounds.

But Judge Posner wasn’t having it. “Once all this stuff can be recorded, there’s going to be a lot more of this snooping around by reporters and bloggers,” he said.

He was particularly worried that allowing recording would impact police work. “I’m always suspicious when the civil liberties people start telling the police how to do their business,” he said. He speculated that gangs would love the ACLU’s argument because recordings would make it easier to discover and retaliate against informants.

Do you ever get the feeling that conservatives aren’t even trying to make a cogent argument anymore?

The article goes on to say that the other judges on the panel were a little less hostile to the idea that the police should not be afraid to have their public behavior on the job recorded.

But this is an ongoing argument that doesn’t even seem to phase most people: apparently it’s too much to ask that the police follow the law because it makes their jobs so much harder.

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