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Month: October 2011

The ratings grabber

The ratings grabber

by digby

The best political team on television talks about the Perry hunting camp story:

ERICKSON: I don’t think it’s very significant. I think the Media Research Center today pointed out that the Washington Post in just the last couple of days has written more words on this story than they ever wrote on the Jeremiah Wright story, for its entire existence, with his connection to Barack Obama.

100% lies.

But I’m sure all those people who care about Jeremiah Wright who also watch CNN will return tomorrow to see more of this kind of commentary. All three of them.

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Is that a pitchfork or are you just happy to see me?

by digby

The royals commission an anthropological expedition:

I had gone down to Zuccotti Park to see the activist movement firsthand after getting a call from the chief executive of a major bank last week, before nearly 700 people were arrested over the weekend during a demonstration on the Brooklyn Bridge.

“Is this Occupy Wall Street thing a big deal?” the C.E.O. asked me. I didn’t have an answer. “We’re trying to figure out how much we should be worried about all of this,” he continued, clearly concerned. “Is this going to turn into a personal safety problem?”

As I wandered around the park, it was clear to me that most bankers probably don’t have to worry about being in imminent personal danger. This didn’t seem like a brutal group — at least not yet.

But the underlying message of Occupy Wall Street — which spread to Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles on Monday — is something the big banks and corporate America may finally have to grapple with before it actually does become dangerous.

What’s the message?

At times it can be hard to discern, but, at least to me, the message was clear: the demonstrators are seeking accountability for Wall Street and corporate America for the financial crisis and the growing economic inequality gap.

And that message is a warning shot about the kind of civil unrest that may emerge — as we’ve seen in some European countries — if our economy continues to struggle.

I love how these Masters of the Universe are shocked that there is growing unrest over their antics. It’s as if they thought they could continue to profit at the expense of the rest of the country even as they whined and blubbered like little babies at the mere suggestion that they might want to cool it a little bit.

This behavior has not gone unnoticed. From the beginning, I have been astonished by the inability of these supposedly smart people to see that they needed to rein in their worst impulses, if only to preserve their golden goose, (I did personally scare one by using the pitchfork metaphor.) But they couldn’t shut up, couldn’t stop publicly justifying their excesses couldn’t refrain from strutting around like a bunch of entitled aristocrats even in the face of widespread suffering.

A backlash was inevitable. They should be glad that it’s a bunch of peaceful protesters. They have acted with such arrogant impunity it could have been much worse.

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Cutting the Important Stuff by David Atkins

Cutting the Important Stuff
by David Atkins (“thereisnospoon”)

Given the austerity measures being enacted domestically, it only makes sense that our government is taking a look at the massive and pointless expenditures being made abroad. Of course, if you think that refers to military adventures overseas, think again. Our fine stewards are instead looking to cut things like aid to starving children in Africa and help for tsunami victims. The New York Times has the details:

America’s budget crisis at home is forcing the first significant cuts in overseas aid in nearly two decades, a retrenchment that officials and advocates say reflects the country’s diminishing ability to influence the world. As lawmakers scramble to trim the swelling national debt, both the Republican-controlled House and the Democrat-controlled Senate have proposed slashing financing for the State Department and its related aid agencies at a time of desperate humanitarian crises and uncertain political developments. The proposals have raised the specter of deep cuts in food and medicine for Africa, in relief for disaster-affected places like Pakistan and Japan, in political and economic assistance for the new democracies of the Middle East, and even for the Peace Corps.

The financial crunch threatens to undermine a foreign policy described as “smart power” by President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, one that emphasizes diplomacy and development as a complement to American military power. It also would begin to reverse the increase in foreign aid that President George W. Bush supported after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, as part of an effort to combat the roots of extremism and anti-American sentiment, especially in the most troubled countries.

Given the relatively small foreign aid budget — it accounts for 1 percent of federal spending over all — the effect of the cuts could be disproportional.

Props to the Times for mentioning the salient point: that cutting these programs will make almost zero difference to the national budget. One could wish that point had been made somewhere north of the 4th paragraph, but late is better than never. Meanwhile, America’s loudly proclaimed commitment to democracy around the world is starting to become a joke:

The State Department already has scaled back plans to open more consulates in Iraq, for example. The spending trend has also constrained support for Tunisia and Egypt, where autocratic leaders were overthrown in popular uprisings. While many have called for giving aid to these countries on the scale of the Marshall Plan that helped rebuild European democracies after World War II, the administration has been able to propose only relatively modest investments and loans, and even those have stalled in Congress.

“There is a democratic awakening in places that have never dreamed of democracy,” Mrs. Clinton said on Friday. “And it is unfortunate that it’s happening at a historic time when our own government is facing so many serious economic challenges, because there’s no way to have a Marshall Plan for the Middle East and North Africa.”

One could say that this move is simply about putting the priorities of the American People first. After all, polling shows that the public overwhelmingly wants to cut foreign aid. There is a massive gulf in the difference between what Americans think should be cut, and what America actually spends its money on, per a 2010 poll conducted on behalf of the The Economist:

The red bars indicate actual federal expenditures. The blue bars indicate the percentage of those polled preferring cuts to that particular budget item.

A quick glance at the chart shows the obvious: everyone wants to cut foreign aid, despite the fact that it represents an insignificant outlay in the federal budget.

And yet, the graph shows other curious things, too: the fact that very few people want cuts to Medicare, Social Security and aid to the poor, either. And yet, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have spent much of the past year arguing for just that, despite much greater support for cuts to other budget items that already received insignificant funding. If cutting foreign aid spending is a bipartisan move to please the American voter, then one would expect that bipartisan consensus would coalesce around similarly popular moves. But, of course, it doesn’t.

The fact is when the United States spends $2 billion a week in Afghanistan and thinks nothing of lobbing hundreds of cruise missiles at $1.41 million a pop to kill people, cutting a few billion dollars a year from the budget for caring for the sick, starving and dispossessed is more than just cruel. It’s plain stupid. The money spent on foreign aid buys a lot of goodwill around the world, despite widespread anger at American foreign policy in other regards. Cutting that funding is penny-wise and pound-foolish.

As the New York Times concludes:

Jeremy Konyndyk, the director of policy and advocacy for the international aid group Mercy Corps, said that a retrenchment in aid could gravely erode not only America’s influence but also its moral standing as a generous nation in times of crises.

“The amount of money the U.S. has or doesn’t have doesn’t really rise or fall on the foreign aid budget,” he said in a telephone interview from Nairobi, Kenya, where he was overseeing relief to the famine in the Horn of Africa. “The budget impact is negligible. The impact around the world is enormous.”

Our government is run by a band of short-sighted lunatics.

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Everybody wins?

Everybody wins?

by digby

I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked:

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) on Monday declared President Obama’s $447 billion jobs package is dead, flatly rejecting Obama’s plea for passage by the end of the month.

Cantor said the House would not bring up the president’s American Jobs Act for a vote as a whole, but by the end of the month would move forward with elements supported by GOP leaders, including three pending trade agreements and a reduction in the withholding tax for businesses.

That is what Republicans call compromise. Remember this?

A RANDOM CONSERVATIVE COMMENTER:

You don’t have to compromise if both parties want the same thing. The Dems represented that they wanted, or at least were willing to accept budget cuts. Great, our team wanted budget cuts too.

Double Dipping by David Atkins

Double Dipping
by David Atkins (“thereisnospoon”)

Some bad news on this first Monday of October (or as Wall Streeters call it, the first day of Q4 2011):

It’s a new quarter on Wall Street, but not a new mindset: Nervous investors worldwide kicked off the final three months of the year Monday by dumping stocks and fleeing once again for the classic haven of Treasury bonds, as fears over the global economy resurged.

That totally makes sense. To hear conservatives tell it, the world economy is paralyzed by debt, which makes bond traders nervous that nation states won’t be able to make good on their currency-backed obligations. So it’s only natural that all the Very Serious People have been pushing for austerity and belt-tightening to reinvigorate the confidence fairy and please the big bond traders. It also makes sense, then, that all of these nervous bond trading Masters of the Universe who are so worried about the United States’ long-term solvency and the health of the dollar are fleeing the stock market to buy Treasuries.

Clearly, inflation and government spending are a major concern for the market. After all, the very wise people on the teevee never stop saying so.

In a potentially ominous sign, the Standard & Poor’s 500 index closed below the 1,120 mark, which is where it had bounced three times since early August. The S&P sank 32.19 points, or 2.8%, to end at 1,099.23, a new 52-week low.

The Dow industrials slumped 258.08 points, or 2.4%, to 10,655.30, also a 52-week low, after diving 12% in the third quarter.

Despite data Monday showing an uptick in U.S. manufacturing activity in September and strong car sales for the month, those reports were good only for a modest rally at the beginning of trading, before sellers took control.

“Everything has a negative bias now,” said Andy Brooks, a veteran stock trader at T. Rowe Price Group in Baltimore. “Where’s the glass-half-full crowd?”

The glass half-full crowd? I think I’ve found them:

Yeah, those folks aren’t too worried. They’ll be fine no matter what. They can make money off bear markets as well as bull markets. The rest of us? Not so much.

But then again, the rest of us haven’t been making any more money than we were 30 years ago. Those bull markets basically served to employ a lot of people in a useless financial industry, and in short-lived real estate and construction industries. Now that the house of smoke and mirrors has collapsed, it’s fairly clear that neither bull nor bear market has much impact on the rest of us, either. Record profits and high stock prices didn’t lead “job creators” in America to actually create jobs (outside of the criminal and overinflated housing and financial sectors), so it’s hard to know why we should cheering bull markets and fearing bear markets, exactly.

Someone will have to explain why the valuation of the Dow actually matters save to those nearing retirement, nervously tracking 401Ks that were foolishly put in place of guaranteed pensions in order to feed Wall Street’s gaping maw.

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Don’t let anyone see them talking

Don’t let anyone see them talking

by digby

I wrote a post the other day about Bill O’Reilly’s smarmy little “interviews” with the protesters at OccupyWallStreet. As I wrote at the time, it’s not entirely unfair for the rightwingers to make fun of protesters — we do the same thing on our side. The difference is that we do tend to let them speak for themselves at length, while the Fox interviews are clipped to such an extent you can’t possibly know what these people are really saying.

Here’s an example they’re cutting — and when you see it, you’ll understand why they do it:

It looks to me as if the silly hippies have something to say after all. And they’re quite adept at saying it.

That OWS protester’s name is Jesse LaGreca and apparently he’s quite willing to speak to anyone who asks. Perhaps the mainstream media could look him up next time they go on one of their sociological forays into the wilds of Liberty Park.

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Cain gets carded

Cain gets carded

by digby

Well who could have ever predicted this one? Adam Serwer:

You might have anticipated that Perry would face a firestorm for being associated with the property, but it’s Cain whose remarks are drawing the most criticism from the Right. At RedState, Erick Erickson concludes: “It also seems to be a slander Herman Cain is picking up and running with as a way to get into second place.” Glenn Reynolds remarks that until now Cain’s “big appeal is that he’s not just another black race-card-playing politician.” Over at the Daily Caller, Matt Lewis calls Cain’s remarks “a cheap shot, and, perhaps a signal that Cain is willing to play the race card against a fellow Republican when it benefits him.”

I realize that it’s absolutely wrong to ever even suggest that the right wing might have a little problem with race (and this is enforced with an iron hand by pointing out that Republicans all love Herman Cain/Clarence Thomas/Alan West etc so it can’t possibly have anything to do with race) but I think this is telling nonetheless. They have no problem with race as long as black Republicans never, ever suggest that anyone on their own team might have a problem with race.

As Adam points out:

The key phrase here is “fellow Republican.” Because, you see, no one thought Cain was “playing the race card” when he said in the same program that black people are “brainwashed” into voting for Democrats and suggested that black people who vote Republican are “thinking for themselves.” Cain wasn’t rebuked by conservatives when he previously suggested President Barack Obama was not “a strong black man,” implied liberals were out to commit genocide against blacks through support for abortion rights, and said he wouldn’t appoint a Muslim to his cabinet.

“Playing the race card” has a very specific meaning. It means mentioning Republican racism.

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Tearing down the foundation

Tearing down the foundation

by digby

I realize that it’s fashionable at the moment to not care who wins elections because there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between any of them, but I suspect it still will matter quite a bit on the margins (which translates to the lives of millions of everyday Americans) if the Republicans win the presidency and both houses of congress at this peak moment of lunacy. Therefore, this is a problem:

Restrictive voting laws in states across the country could affect up to five million voters from traditionally Democratic demographics in 2012, according to a new report by the Brennan Center. That’s a number larger than the margin of victory in two of the last three presidential elections.

The new restrictions, the study found, “fall most heavily on young, minority, and low-income voters, as well as on voters with disabilities. This wave of changes may sharply tilt the political terrain for the 2012 election.”

The study found that:

These new laws could make it significantly harder for more than five million eligible voters to cast ballots in 2012.

The states that have already cut back on voting rights will provide 171 electoral votes in 2012 – 63 percent of the 270 needed to win the presidency.

Of the 12 likely battleground states, as assessed by an August Los Angeles Times analysis of Gallup polling, five have already cut back on voting rights (and may pass additional restrictive legislation), and two more are currently considering new restrictions.

These voting law changes are radical and completely unnecessary,” Wendy. R. Weiser, a co-author of the report, said in a statement. “They especially hurt those who have been historically locked out of our electoral system, like minorities, poor people, and students. Often they seem precisely targeted to exclude certain voters.”

I suppose if we are giving up entirely on democracy then this isn’t of interest. But just in case we decide someday that the old, creaky process might be useful, it would probably be good to still have it in place.

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Democrats: A necessary but insufficient condition for change by David Atkins

Democrats: A necessary but insufficient condition
by David Atkins (“thereisnospoon”)

The Occupy Wall Street protests are doing more than just galvanizing anger against the predatory practices of the financial sector. They are also providing the latest excuse for the left to self-immolate in the most recent version of the same argument that has been tearing natural allies apart since at least the turn of the millennium. Most of the players in this conflict position themselves along the same battle lines as the combatants in the so-called “Obama Wars” that have been all the rage on the left for the last two years.

In one camp are the more institutional lefties who tend see the protesters in New York as misguided idealists who don’t understand that banging drums and shouting slogans in a public park will do nothing to create real change. According to followers of this line of thinking, the protests will be useless until and unless the energy behind the protests is at least partially redirected toward electoral activism to elect more (and hopefully better) Democrats.

On the other side are a combination of old-school issue activists and new progressive movement types who insist that electoral politics are useless, and that only a mass popular movement to raise global class-based consciousness will accomplish needed goals. According to subscribers to this line of thought, Democrats and Republicans alike are equally guilty of subservience to Wall Street, and change will come about entirely outside the realm of electoral politics, which has failed utterly to create needed changes.

Just as in the tired “Obama wars,” both sides are right. And both are wrong.

The institutionalists are wrong for a wide variety of reasons, not least of which is the obvious reality that the last 30 years of adherence to neoliberal ideology, anti-government fetishism and kowtowing to the financial sector has occurred under Democratic and Republican administrations alike in an unending continuum from Reagan to Bush to Clinton to Bush to Obama. It has occurred under divided government and single-party-majority governments alike, on both Republican and Democratic watches. Bill Clinton signed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley act and declared the era of big government to be over. Wall Street bailouts occurred in a bipartisan fashion, and in fact garnered more support from Democrats than from Republicans. And then President Obama, rather than try to pursue the sort of change his supporters believed in, proceeded to put the likes of Tim Geithner and Larry Summers in charge of his economic policy, rather than the likes of Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Volcker and Paul Krugman.

The notion that electing more Democrats alone will solve any of the grievances enumerated by the protesters is comical. So when institutionalists argue that protesters should channel their activism into electoral politics, they come off as 1) clueless about what is actually motivating the protesters; 2) in the dark about the bipartisan nature of the subversion of democracy beneath the iron fist of deregulatory ideology; and at worst 3) self-serving hacks attempt to co-opt legitimate frustration in the service of their own careerist ends. The institutionalists bring these sorts of accusations on themselves, despite the fact that most of them volunteer their time for institutional activism with little or no hope of personal return, and the fact that many of the Democrats in Congress actually agree with most of the protesters’ platform.

On the other hand, those who completely reject electoral politics are almost equally misguided. They either vastly overestimate the power of popular protest to effectuate change, or vastly underestimate the utter determination of conservatives in power to stop any changes from taking place. They fail to account for the fact that politicians in the United States have never acted out of fear of mass popular revolt alone, and that year after year after year of gigantic protests against the Vietnam War did little to stop the needless bloodshed in Southeast Asia.

They also do themselves no favors by deeply maligning the many activists who agree 100% with their platform, but have taken a more institutional approach to resolving their grievances. This includes a large number of Democrats toiling in Congress and statehouses nationwide who are attempting to do their best to resolve these problems within the framework the U.S. Constitution allows, and receive nothing but scorn from these activists in return.

It is especially important for anti-institutional progressives to take into account that there are a large number of politicians in this country who are accountable to an electoral base that is, as matter of cultural identity, directly opposed to the protesters’ beliefs and deaf to their concerns. They will not be persuaded, they will not be moved and they cannot be reached. The latest GOP presidential debates are not being showcased on behalf of big money donors, but on behalf of a large swath of Americans who actually agree with the insanity being peddled on stage.

So for the anti-institutionalists, realizing one simple point is crucial: as long as Republicans are in power, no amount of protest will affect the American government. Over a million people could camp out on the National Mall for months at a time, and nothing would change. Speaker Boehner and his caucus of Tea Party nutcases simply will not be moved except by one action and one alone: booting them out of office. The chances of their addressing the grievances of the majority of the American People are less than nil, regardless of the public pressure placed upon them.

And yet, for the institutionalists, it’s also critical to recognize just how damaging the last 30 years of Democratic acquiescence to conservative ideology has been for not only the Democratic brand, but for the nation’s belief in the power of electoral politics to create change.

It is quite literally impossible to say with a straight face that working to elect more or even better Democrats will actually create the change necessary to address the grievances being expressed in Zuccotti Park. It’s laughable. That ship has been sailing away for decades, and disappeared completely over the horizon with the disappointment of January 2009 through November 2010 and beyond. It is painfully obvious that electoral politics alone are utterly inadequate to deal with the nation’s problems.

The reality is that putting Democrats in power is a necessary but insufficient condition for creating real change in this country.

Republicans are ideologically opposed to creating the necessary changes, and are more afraid of being primaried by an even more crazy conservative, than of even the biggest protest movements from the left. Democrats, meanwhile, are ideologically compatible with most of the changes, but are variously stymied by the system, blinkered by a desire for “compromise,” fearful of conservative anger, or corrupted by the influence of big money.

In order for change to take place, good Democrats do need to be in power. But only an angry and motivated populace angry with both Parties and strongly intent on holding Democrats accountable will scare and motivate Democrats enough to do what they were elected to do.

LBJ wouldn’t have been pushed to do the right thing for civil rights without MLK. But neither would MLK have brought his dream to fruition without a president in power with the courage to enforce desegregation.

Ultimately, the institutionalists need to allow the Occupy Wall Street protests to develop organically without attempting to convert them into electoral activism in any form. Supporting the protests is perhaps the most important thing progressives can be doing right now. As Robert Cruickshank tweeted:

We need to focus on generating the waves, not recruiting people to surf them.

But on the other hand, it would behoove movement progressives not to dismiss the arena of electoral politics and those who engage in it. If Mitt Romney becomes president or John Boehner remains the House Speaker, it won’t matter how big or successful the protests become. For things to really work, Democrats will have to be in power and a powerful progressive protest movement with a healthy distrust of institutional Democrats will need to be in place to hold them accountable.

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