Month: November 2011

Moving Right

by David Atkins

Ezra Klein has a good piece about the ill-fated Supercommittee. Upshot? The entire Overton Window was shifted rightward, with the Dems moving right and the GOP moving even further right:

If by “at fault” we mean “unwilling to compromise,” we can do better than listen to the self-serving remarks of the players. We can look hard at the movement in the actual plans. Before the supercommittee, there were the Obama-Boehner negotiations. And we have a pretty good idea of the plan that almost — but didn’t quite — clear those discussions. We also have the deals on the plans that were offered in the supercommittee. And if you look at the numbers, it’s pretty easy to see which party moved further towards a compromise.

Hint: It’s the one that named Sen. Max Baucus as one of its six key negotiators.

The final Boehner plan envisioned tax reform that would generate $800 billion in new revenues and bring the top rate down to 35 percent. In the supercommittee, the highest Republicans ever got on taxes was the Toomey plan’s $300 billion, with envisioned a top rate of 28 percent. So on taxes, it’s fairly clear: The supercommittee Republicans were far to the right of Boehner.

On the Democratic side, Obama eventually insisted on somewhere near $1.2 trillion in tax reform or, if the revenues were to move lower, on much less in entitlement cuts. In the supercommittee, the Democrats offered a plan (pdf) with less than a trillion dollars in tax reform — and more entitlement reforms than Obama was willing to agree to.

Boehner had about $150 billion in Medicare beneficiary cuts in his opening bid in the negotiations with the president, and he went down from there. In the supercommittee, Baucus offered $200 billion in Medicare beneficiary cuts. Supercommittee Republicans were far beyond that, however. If you read Hensarling’s op-ed today explaining why the committee failed, he complains that Democrats were too focused on tax increases but also that they refused to gut the Affordable Care Act or embrace “architectural changes” like turning Medicare into a premium-support system. You can support those policies or oppose them. They’re not exactly compromise plans, however.

Frankly, it’s hard to find even one area in which supercommittee Republicans offered a substantially new compromise — or even matched what Boehner offered Obama.

Not that the media will cover it as a broad, bipartisan capitulation to the right-wing. In fact, they will fight to do anything but. Via DougJ at Balloon Juice, this bit from Paul Kane from a Kaplan reporter forum is really something:

Reader: Paul, I’m guessing you won’t be sympathetic to the following point, but I’ll put it out there anyway. Most reporting on the supercommittee—like most reporting on the deficit—reflects an acceptance of a basic fallacy. Whenever there is an impasse, there seems to be a desire to blame both sides equally, on the theory that if only Democrats would concede more, Republicans would reciprocate (all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding). Yes, Democrats have drawn lines in the sand, but as Greg Sargent and other commentators have documented, when you compare the specifics, there is no factual basis for blaming both parties equally. So my question is, why does the Post’s coverage do so anyway, either explicitly or implicitly?

Paul Kane: Yeah, you’re right. I think this point is just absurd and ridiculous. This is a big thing among folks calling it “moral equivalence” (Fallows, Ornstein) and others calling it the “cult of balance” (Krugman).

It’s just stupid. If you want someone to tell you that Republicans stink, read opinion pages. Read blogs. Also, the underlying sentiment on the left is that this is the real reason why things went wrong in 2010: That the mainstream media is to blame. Sorry, I think that’s the sorta head-in-sand outlook that leads to longer term problems for a movement.

Greg is a fine writer. He’s an opinion writer, in the opinion section of the web site. I encourage you to keep reading him. And I encourage you to keep reading the news coverage, which should always strive to present both sides of the story. If you really don’t want to hear anything about the other side of the story, I really do encourage you to stop reading the news section.

The country keeps moving farther and farther right, even as the traditional media painstakingly characterizes the problem as hyperpartisanship on both sides.

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Casual dehumanizing fun

by digby

From the dehumanization files, here’s Ann Coulter:

WINGLESS, BLOODSUCKING AND PARASITIC: MEET THE FLEA PARTY!

This is going around as well:

I’m sure it’s all just harmless fun and far be it from me to ever, ever suggest that fine, upstanding Americans could ever do anything even remotely as ugly to one another on the scale discussed here. Still, it should at least be of some abstract academic interest, I think, to note that conservatives are calling Occupy protesters parasites and vermin.

Update: How about this?

Newtie’s immodest proposal

by digby

I’m so looking forward to this GOP primary with Newt Gingrich as the front runner. He’s been around for so long, has said so many incredibly idiotic things and continues to do so, that for a political blogger it’s the mother lode for material.

Here’s one of my favorites from Mr Family Values back in the 90s:

In 1994, during the early days of the public debate on welfare reform, Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich ignited a media firestorm by suggesting that orphanages are better for poor children than life with a mother on Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). Responding to blistering criticism, he first defended the proposal by invoking the idyllic orphanage life of the 1938 film “Boys Town,” finally retreating, at least rhetorically, from the entire controversy. Orphanages became just another blip on the nation’s radar screen, or so it seemed.

In fact, the plan to revive orphanages is embedded in the Personal Responsibility Act, the Republican plan for welfare reform, and is a major piece of the Republican Contract With America. The Republicans’ pledge promised to balance the budget, protect defense spending, and cut taxes, targeting programs for the poor–cash assistance, food, housing, medical, and child care–as the big areas for major budget savings.

He explained that what “liberals” really believed was “put your baby in a dumpster, that’s Okay.” He claimed that 800 babies were thrown in dumpsters in Washington DC every year, which was, needless to say, absurd.

The Boys Town thing came in response to Hillary Clinton criticizing GOP calls for removal of poor children from their parents. He tartly responded:

“I’d ask her to go to Blockbuster and rent the Mickey Rooney movie about Boys Town. I don’t understand liberals who live in enclaves of safety who say, ‘Oh, this would be a terrible thing.'”

Apparently Newtie believes everything he sees in the movies. It explains a lot. (I wonder if the revelations about the Irish orphanage abuses have altered his opinion on the wonderful advantages of orphanages? Maybe someone should ask him.)

His comment provoked a firestorm back in 1994 and he slithered back a bit on his stand, as he usually does when he says something outrageous like this. But he never really changes his mind. Look what he said just last week:

“It is tragic what we do in the poorest neighborhoods, entrapping children in, first of all, child laws, which are truly stupid,” said the former House speaker, according to CNN. “Most of these schools ought to get rid of the unionized janitors, have one master janitor and pay local students to take care of the school. The kids would actually do work, they would have cash, they would have pride in the schools, they’d begin the process of rising.”

“You’re going to see from me extraordinarily radical proposals to fundamentally change the culture of poverty in America,” he added.

Generally, the Fair Labor Standards Act allows minors over 14 to work in most jobs, with several exceptions for minors under that age. Hours are limited for minors under the age of 16. Some states have higher age standards.

By the way, his “extraordinarily radical proposals to fundamentally change the culture of poverty” are the same as they ever were:

The Republicans’ pledge promised to balance the budget, protect defense spending, and cut taxes, targeting programs for the poor–cash assistance, food, housing, medical, and child care–as the big areas for major budget savings.

Add to that orphanages and his bold new proposal to get rid of child labor laws and you have a patented “radical” Gingrich proposal. I’m sure it will be quite popular with the GOP base. This could be his moment.

California Solidarity

by digby

If you are as revolted by the recent police brutality at California Universities as I am, you might want to show solidarity with the faculty and students by signing on to this petition as a “citizen signer”

This week, we have seen excessive force used against non-violent protesters at UC Berkeley, UCLA, CSU Long Beach, and UC Davis…We demand that the Chancellors of the University of California cease using police violence to repress non-violent political protests…

We call for greater attention to the substantive issues that motivate the protests regarding the privatization of education. With massive cuts in state funding and rising tuition costs…public education is undergoing a severe divestment. Student debt has reached unprecedented levels as bank profits swell.

Signed,
The Board of the Council of UC Faculty Associations

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RIP Supercommittee

by digby

My new post at Al Jazeera is about the late, departed Super Committee. May it rest in peace:

So we reach the end of yet another lengthy deficit reduction negotiation, and all signs at this writing point to failure.

This is actually very good news, although to hear the pundits tell it, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse will be trampling down the doors of the New York Stock Exchange and everyone in the US will soon be force-fed poisoned baklava at gunpoint. Indeed, if you followed the financial and political press over the past couple of weeks, you would have thought the world would literally come to an end if this arbitrary deadline to cut an arbitrary percentage of the deficit isn’t met.

And yet, no deal means “sequestration” (also known as “the triggers”) will kick in, which will mean brutal cuts to discretionary spending and defence starting in 2013. If the goal is to cut $1.2tn in order to set the country’s fiscal house in order, why should all these deficit hawks care how the government gets there? Well, it turns out that this isn’t really about deficit reduction at all. The entire exercise is about gutting the social safety net, thus giving the markets “confidence” in the United States’ ability to govern itself.

Ironically, this was considered to be so important that our democratic government had to convene a secretive committee to meet behind closed doors and enact policies that go against the explicit desires of a vast majority of American citizens. read on

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Lord of the Flies

by David Atkins

Via ABL at Balloon Juice, this story makes me want to hurl large objects out a skyscraper window:

Victim One, the first known alleged victim of abuse by former Penn State coach Jerry Sandusky, had to leave his school in the middle of his senior year because of bullying, his counselor said Sunday.

Officials at Central Mountain High School in Clinton County weren’t providing guidance for fellow students, who were reacting badly about Joe Paterno’s firing and blaming the 17-year-old, said Mike Gillum, the psychologist helping his family. Those officials were unavailable for comment this weekend.

The name-calling and verbal threats were just too much, he said.

Other alleged victims are turning to each other for support, since they fear others will out them and cause a media swarm. The only encouragement for Victim One, Gillum said, is watching other alleged victims come forward because they felt empowered by his courage.

“He feels good about that,” Gillum said. “That’s the one good that’s come of all this.”

I took some heat for my post some time back defending progressive homeschooling/unschooling. But this is a perfect encapsulation of what is wrong with the school system, aside of course from a chronic lack of funding.

The culture in most schools, from the most destitute public schools to the most elite private schools, is dominated by children rather than adults. Principals and teachers tend to be too busy, and too afraid of parents of abusive kids and of the kids themselves to take any significant action against peer pressure and pervasive bullying.

Any kid that said a word cross-wise to Victim #1 should have been faced with immediate expulsion, and their parents should have been called up and berated by the principal. That sort of appalling behavior will extend into adulthood, and if it’s not being corrected by a parent (who is probably just as asinine as their offspring), then it should be corrected by whatever adults are in charge on campus. That’s how it would work in a just society. Instead, this poor soul is now being subjected to another round of victimization by his peers and forced to leave his school and his few friends. And nobody is doing a damn thing about it.

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Police, pain and peppers

by digby

Quite a few professional police officers and criminal justice academics are weighing in on this notion of “pain compliance” in the wake of that pepper spray assault at UC Davis.

As awful as these incidents have been, I can’t tell you heartened I am by the fact that people are finally speaking up on this subject. Indiscriminate tasering has been going on for years now, it’s clearly documented and rarely has anyone questioned the right of the police to inflict pain for mere non-compliance. (The tasering of the mentally ill is a separate subject.) YouTubes have gone viral and the comments to them suggest that many, many people find such violence hilarious and support it fully. I won’t even go into the way Hollywood uses it for cheap laughs.

Indeed, the most common arguments I hear on this topic is “if an officer tells you to do something, you don’t ask questions, you do it” and “the cops first obligation is to protect his own safety and the safety of other cops.” This means that a police officer essentially has the right to immediately taser/pepper spray anyone who doesn’t immediately respond in order to preserve his or her own safety. And the definition of “safety” is pretty malleable, as we saw this week-end:

UC Davis Police Chief Annette Spicuzza said officers used force out of concern for their own safety after they were surrounded by students.

Does any one remember this? Probably not, since it was hardly covered except by a few blogs and Democracy Now:

The New Orleans City Council has unanimously voted to move ahead with the demolition of 4,500 units of public housing. Under the plan, the city’s four largest public housing developments will be razed and replaced with mixed-income housing. Hundreds of people were turned away from the City Council meeting. Police shot protesters with pepper spray and tasers.

Many police officers and citizens believe that pain compliance on peaceful demonstrors is completely acceptable, including the use of batons. Here’s one commenting on the UC Davis assault:

Charles J. Kelly, a former Baltimore Police Department lieutenant who wrote the department’s use of force guidelines, said pepper spray is a “compliance tool” that can be used on subjects who do not resist, and is preferable to simply lifting protesters.

“When you start picking up human bodies, you risk hurting them,” Kelly said. “Bodies don’t have handles on them.”

After reviewing the video, Kelly said he observed at least two cases of “active resistance” from protesters. In one instance, a woman pulls her arm back from an officer. In the second instance, a protester curls into a ball. Each of those actions could have warranted more force, including baton strikes and pressure-point techniques.

And in everyday life they use tasers and pepper spray on grandmothers and children, on people already in restraints, in wheelchairs and in sickbeds. They do it all the time. Normally it is considered so “harmless” that it doesn’t even merit a small news story — unless someone dies. Which happens fairly frequently.

Here is a former police officer and professor of criminal justice explaining what’s wrong with all this:

In the police academy, I was taught to pepper-spray people for non-compliance. Ie: “Put your hands behind your back or I’ll… mace you.” It’s crazy. Of course we didn’t do it this way, the way were taught. Baltimore police officers are too smart to start urban race riots based on some dumb-ass training. So what did we do to gain compliance? We grabbed people. Hands on. Like real police. And we were good at it.

Some people, perhaps those who design training programs, think policing should be a hands-off job. It can’t be and shouldn’t be. And trying to make policing too hands-off means people get Tased and maced for non-compliance. It’s not right. But this is the way many police are trained. That’s a shame. (Mind you, I have no problem using such less-lethal weapons on actual physical threats, but peaceful non-compliance is different.)

I know that it’s arduous for the police to have to physically deal with citizens or remove protesters engaged in non-violent civil disobedience, but that’s how we do things in America. Or at least that’s what we’re supposed to do in America.

This amazing article from a couple of weeks ago in The Nation by the former chief of police of Seattle, goes deeply into the broader subject of police militarization:

[T]he police response to the Occupy movement, most disturbingly visible in Oakland—where scenes resembled a war zone and where a marine remains in serious condition from a police projectile—brings into sharp relief the acute and chronic problems of American law enforcement. Seattle might have served as a cautionary tale, but instead, US police forces have become increasingly militarized, and it’s showing in cities everywhere: the NYPD “white shirt” coating innocent people with pepper spray, the arrests of two student journalists at Occupy Atlanta, the declaration of public property as off-limits and the arrests of protesters for “trespassing.”

The paramilitary bureaucracy and the culture it engenders—a black-and-white world in which police unions serve above all to protect the brotherhood—is worse today than it was in the 1990s. Such agencies inevitably view protesters as the enemy. And young people, poor people and people of color will forever experience the institution as an abusive, militaristic force—not just during demonstrations but every day, in neighborhoods across the country.

Much of the problem is rooted in a rigid command-and-control hierarchy based on the military model. American police forces are beholden to archaic internal systems of authority whose rules emphasize bureaucratic regulations over conduct on the streets. An officer’s hair length, the shine on his shoes and the condition of his car are more important than whether he treats a burglary victim or a sex worker with dignity and respect. In the interest of “discipline,” too many police bosses treat their frontline officers as dependent children, which helps explain why many of them behave more like juvenile delinquents than mature, competent professionals. It also helps to explain why persistent, patterned misconduct, including racism, sexism, homophobia, brutality, perjury and corruption, do not go away, no matter how many blue-ribbon panels are commissioned or how much training is provided.

As I have written too many times, this militarization of our society at large, not just the police, was bound to catch up with us. (The recent calling of the president the “commander in chief” of the people, rather than just the military symbolizes this as well as anything.)

I think BagNews summed it up with these two pictures:

Michael Shaw archly notes:

After all the cracking down that’s been going on Stateside, a fresh look at Egyptian riot cops today reminds me how much we do things bigger and better in America.

(Click here to see the story of the two pictures — the first is Cairo the second is Portland.)

Oh, and for those of you who complained about my characterization of pepper spray as torture read this from today’s Scientific American. It’s torture all right. And it’s dangerous as hell, particularly when inhaled:

As the North Carolina researchers point out, any compound that can influence nerve function is, by definition, risky. Research tells us that pepper spray acts as a potent inflammatory agent. It amplifies allergic sensitivities, it irritates and damages eyes, membranes, bronchial airways, the stomach lining – basically what it touches. It works by causing pain – and, as we know, pain is the body warning us of an injury.

In general, these are short term effects. Pepper spray, for instance, induces a burning sensation in the eyes in part by damaging cells in the outer layer of the cornea. Usually, the body repairs this kind of injury fairly neatly. But with repeated exposures, studies find, there can be permanent damage to the cornea.

The more worrisome effects have to do with inhalation – and by some reports, California university police officers deliberately put OC spray down protestors throats. Capsaicins inflame the airways, causing swelling and restriction. And this means that pepper sprays pose a genuine risk to people with asthma and other respiratory conditions.

And there have been numerous studies and reports to that effect, including the documentation of numerous deaths. And still it’s used.

Have any of you inhaled dried chipotle peppers? I have and it was horrible. That’s Jalapeno pepper for those who aren’t proficient in “pepperology”, less than half the scale of pepper spray.

Update: Mike Stark writes in to point out that my comment above rather grandly understates the scale. He said: “less than half the scale of pepper spray” is precisely correct in the same way that a new born kitten weighs in at “less than half the scale” of an overweight African elephant…”

Tough medicine

by digby

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Dylan Ratigan: Oh, yes, it’s a board game coming out for this holiday season. They’ve perfected it in Washington and we’ll all get to play soon enough. Any chance, though, of a final deal? Is there anything about my narrative that’s too cynical or too vicious an indictment? Can you correct me in some way?

Luke Russert: well, Dylan, there was some talk of an 11th hour deal today. Senator John Kerry called some members of the super committee into his office in an attempt to grab the low-hanging fruit. Maybe a couple hundred billion that both parties could agree on. We’ve heard from capitol hill aides on both sides, saying that meeting was very much about aesthetics, trying to show the members of congress that those people were serious about debt reduction, on the eve of this super committee announcing that it would fail.

Remember when John Boehner and President Obama both said failure is not an option? It looks like failure will be the option. And really, the reason why, Dylan, it comes down to two things. The issues that have plagued not only this congress, but this country. Republicans will not see taxes go up under any circumstances, Democrats do not want taxes touched under any circumstances without revenue.

If you look at the backdrop, Dylan, just look at the stats. Federal revenue now is at its lowest level since 1950. If you extend the Bush tax cuts the way the Republicans want, you get $3.8 trillion added to the deficits. If you add them the way Democrats want, you get $3 trillion added over the next three years. If you don’t do anything to medicare or medicaid or social security, those programs will not be solvent.

Both parties don’t want to tell the american people it’s time to drink their tough medicine.

Both parties are going to try to take 2012 as the avenue to have this debate further. But as this debate goes on and on and on. The real difficult decisions, the real ideas of how are we going to cut this deficit, they go unanswered.

All so folks can can get re-elected, continue to get their $174,000 salaries, and the beat goes on and on. The special interests get rich, the parties can argue and argue and argue.

In terms of this super committee, Dylan, they had an opportunity to do something special. They had an up or down vote in the United States Senate, filibuster proof. That is so valuable here on Capitol Hill, I can’t tell you. And they punted it all away, because they were besieged with the same thing that has killed every idea here on Capitol Hill, the partisan interests on both sides.

Dylan Ratigan: you’re starting to sound like me, first of all, Luke, so you’re probably going to get thrown out of there. I can’t imagine you’re going to last in D.C. much past the next month or so.

Apparently they forgot to tell Ratigan that Luke Russert was raised on vacuous beltway platitudes like these from the time he was a little boy on his big daddy Tim’s knee.

It is really, really rich to be lectured by this fatuous little jerk about “drinking my tough medicine” when he was handed the celebrity spokesmodel job he has now without any real qualification or slightest bit of talent beyond doing a bad impression of his father (who also wasn’t that great) for several years now. How much do you think this callow little boy is worth?

Here’s reality from Krugman:

Again and again, slight upticks in interest rates have been attributed — in news stories, not opinion pieces — to debt fears, despite the complete absence of any actual evidence to that effect.

Bloomberg today has an interesting twist: U.S. Futures Decline on Concern Supercommittee Won’t Agree on Budget Cuts. In reality, US rates are down, suggesting no increase in debt concerns whatsoever.

But if you read the Bloomberg piece carefully, what it actually says is that market players fear that the absence of a debt deal means no stimulus. So the actual fear is not that spending won’t be cut enough, it is that it will be cut too much — which actually makes sense, and is consistent with the action in stock and bond markets.

There’s no reason, by the way, that the failure of this deal should be attributed to an inability to pass any further stimulus. It’s not as if the Republicans would have allowed that in any case.

Plus this.

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Underwater Home Traps Driving Unemployment

by David Atkins

Chris Mims at Grist highlights a Brookings Institution report showing that the rise in homeownership is helping drive up unemployment numbers:

The U.S. is suffering crushing unemployment, yet workers can’t move to where the jobs are because they are trapped in underwater mortgages, explains a new report from Brookings. This, it turns out, is the ultimate fate of the “ownership society” that our government has been pushing for so long through Fannie, Freddy, and tax policy: People can’t migrate to where they’re needed most, even if their livelihood depends on it…

The data show that not only are people less likely to move from one state to another, they’re also failing to move even within the same county — say, to upgrade to a slightly better job across town, or shorten their commute.

The “ownership society” is one way of putting this. Another way of putting it, as I have said before, is priotizing assets over wages:

American public policy on both sides of the aisle reoriented itself away from a focus on wages and toward a focus on assets. Specifically, the idea was that wage growth was dangerous because it led to core inflation in a way that asset growth did not. American foreign policy became obsessed even more than it had been with maintaining access to oil, both to prevent future oil shocks and to prevent inflationary oil spirals. Wage growth was also dangerous because it would drive increasing numbers of American corporations to employ cheaper overseas labor.

But that left the question of how to sustain a middle class and functional economy while slashing wages. The answer was to make more Americans “true Capitalists” in Reagan’s terms. Pensions were converted to 401K plans, thus investing about half of Americans into the stock market and creating a national obsession with the health of market indices. Regular Americans were given credit cards, allowing them to take on the sorts of debt that had previously only been available to businesses. Most crucially, American policymakers did everything possible to incentivize homeownership, from programs designed to help people afford homes to major tax breaks for homeownership and much besides.

The greatest mistake of the Obama Administration has been a futile and misguided attempt to continue these policies, rather than reorient the economy toward a more sustainable and more just future.

In terms of homeownership policy, the right move is neither to try to reinflate the housing bubble nor to foreclose people out of their homes, but to move people from ownership of a home they will never be able to pay for to renting said home at lower, more sustainable rates. This will in turn drive home prices lower (which is where they need to go), while allowing people to escape their location trap homes in pursuit of employment opportunities. Lower home prices with more difficult-to-acquire loans will in turn attract responsible buyers still currently priced out of the market, which will in turn help reinvigorate the economy over time.

Like the case of people holding onto jobs they don’t want in order to continue to have private health insurance, this is another instance where “ownership society” market policy actually creates economic inefficiencies so profound that they seriously impact the real freedom of consumers and wage-earners.

The only people who are more “free” under our current laissez-faire market-driven policies are the executives of lending institutions and health insurance companies. Everyone else is trapped in jobs they don’t want and houses they can’t move out of, while the blowhards on Fox News accuse anyone who tries to liberate these people as enemies of “freedom.”

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Poll ‘O The Day

by digby

A new poll has a shocking finding: “Some News Leaves People Knowing Less”

Sunday morning news shows do the most to help people learn about current events, while some outlets, especially Fox News, lead people to be even less informed than those who they don’t watch any news at all…

[P]eople who watch Fox News, the most popular of the 24-hour cable news networks, are 18-points less likely to know that Egyptians overthrew their government than those who watch no news at all (after controlling for other news sources, partisanship, education and other demographic factors).

Media Matters has more:

Fairleigh Dickinson political science professor Dan Cassino stresses that because of the survey controls that were implemented, it’s not true that Republicans in general were uninformed about current events. But rather it was specifically Fox viewers who scored poorly. “The results show us that there is something about watching Fox News that leads people to do worse on these questions than those who don’t watch any news at all,” he said.

I hate to say it, but maybe it’s just that people who watch Fox news aren’t all that bright in the first place?

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