Month: February 2012

What’s Happening in Greece

by David Atkins

Talos at European Tribune writes from on the ground in Greece:

How is Greece taking the new loan deal that accompanies the PSI? Most compare it to a dictatorship, a foreign occupation, the kind of terms a victor imposes on a defeated country. No wonder: Two years of the most grinding austerity, has caused a destruction of the Greek economy that has no precedent, in peacetime, as official nominal wages dropped 15%, unemployment passed the 20% mark and, according to polling company VPRC, the bottom 90% of Greek households, suffered in 2011 alone loss of income on average ~45% of their incomes.

Greece is already a “labor wasteland” where jobs are near impossible to find and when they materialize they are more likely to be “black”, uninsured, well below the poverty threshold.Yet the new loan deals mandate among other things:

* The dismantling of collective bargaining and the annulment of the current collective agreement. “Labor law” in Greece will not be a meaningful subject any more

* Across the board cuts in nearly all of private sector wages and salaries to the tune of 22%. This includes the minimum wage (which will be now around 580 euros net, and under 500 euros if you are a new entrant into the job market). This affects all sort of benefits i.e. the unemployment benefit which is reduced to 369 from 461 euros. This in a country where the cost of living in its capital is still higher than that of Berlin.

* Immediate elimination of rent subsidies for the poorer, cuts in pensions, mass privatization at fire sale prices (including the Athens and Thessaloniki water companies, and the lottery/football pool company, whose market price right now is at two years profits) etc. This on top of galloping social destruction, a health system that is going to the dogs (the decay of which is producing even stronger superbugs) and public services being destroyed or annihilated.

* At the same time whatever debt will remain – and it will be huge and unsustainable anyway – will now be under English law, and not Greek law, meaning that the terms of the loans will be draconian.

And much, much more: 650 pages of it that Greek MPs were required to read in 24 hours since they received the package, Saturday, to vote on it on Sunday. The process is illegitimate, and constitutionally questionable yet the two government coalition partners (socialists and conservatives – the far right LAOS rightly figured that this will destroy it electorally and removed its ministers from the government), are extorting their MPs: “pain or destruction” they warned, along with the PM. Everything will be rationed, Greece will leave the euro and remain a third world country for ever. Sane people disagree. But they are not in government.

Follow the links within the piece and read the whole thing to get a sense of just how awful these austerity measures are, and you’ll understand why Athens is in flames.

There is a lot of blame to go around in Greece. The ratio of its social safety net to its GDP does not actually exceed that of most other social democracies. But corrupt politicians have wrecked the country’s finances through neoliberal policies and by simply failing to collect taxes, particularly during election years, in order to gain support. The major financial institutions then charged outrageous fees for servicing Greek debt, while helping Greek politicians hide it so that it could not be known and managed more effectively.

Now the austerity mavens are using this opportunity to destroy the social contract in Greece as a matter of shock doctrine emergency, promising enormous economic disaster if Greece doesn’t toe the line.

But Greece need do nothing of the sort. Argentina and Iceland have already shown a path forward for countries reeling from a combination of predatory banks and corrupt neoliberal politicians; the only wrinkle in the plan is Greece’s membership in the EU. But that is the European Central Bank’s problem, not Greece’s. If the EU fears contagion too much to allow Greece to devolve its debt in an orderly manner, then the EU must commit to taking the necessary stimulative measures to put the Greek economy back on an even keel.

That would mean enacting the opposite of austerity, no matter what the Bond Lords might demand. If the EU cannot commit to that course of action, then it should allow the Greeks to manage the crisis in their own sovereign fashion, readopting the drachma at a devalued rate while telling the private banks to stuff it.

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Virtually Speaking Sunday: Corey Robin and me

by digby

09:00 EST/06:00PST

Asking for it

by digby

Liz Trotta may be the biggest piece of work on Fox News and she outdid herself today. Get a load of this:

TROTTA: …just a few weeks ago, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta commented on a new Pentagon report on sexual abuse in the military. I think they have actually discovered there is a difference between men and women. And the sexual abuse report says that there has been, since 2006, a 64% increase in violent sexual assaults. Now, what did they expect? These people are in close contact, the whole airing of this issue has never been done by Congress, it’s strictly been a question of pressure from the feminist.

And the feminists have also directed them, really, to spend a lot of money. They have sexual counselors all over the place, victims’ advocates, sexual response coordinators. Let me just read something to you from McClatchy Newspapers about how much this position on extreme feminism is costing us. “The budget for the Defense Department’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office leapt from $5 million in fiscal 2005 to more than $23 million in fiscal 2010. Total Defense Department spending on sexual assault prevention and related efforts now exceeds $113 million annually.” That’s from McClatchy Newspapers.

So, you have this whole bureaucracy upon bureaucracy being built up with all kinds of levels of people to support women in the military who are now being raped too much.

SHAWN: Well, many would say that they need to be protected, and there are these sexual programs, abuse programs, are necessary —

TROTTA: That’s funny, I thought the mission of the Army, and the Navy, and four services was to defend and protect us, not the people who were fighting the war.

And then there’s this:

Trotta also appeared on Fox News yesterday to discuss a Newsweek story about the persecution of Christians globally. During the segment, the topic of CBS News reporter Lara Logan’s sexual assault was raised, and Trotta said:

TROTTA: I think the Lara Logan thing is a completely separate thing. Any woman – and I’ve been in those crowds – any woman who’s going to be in one of those highly passionate crowds in the Middle East where Islamics are running around yelling “Allahu Akbar” is taking her life in her hands. And so, I mean, you know the least that can happen to you is that you’ll get felt up, so you have to know that going in. But I think that’s separate from what’s happening to Christians. They are being sacrificed for their religion.

She’s one tough gal. And one despicable human being.

Whitney Houston unleashes the racist id

by digby

Dear God this is horrible:

There’s a real sickness running rampant in the right wing; the Fox News comment thread on Whitney Houston’s death is yet another disgusting deluge of outright racism: Singer Whitney Houston Dies at 48 | Fox News.

There are almost 5000 comments posted in the thread — these are from the first few pages. Notice that the racist bastards deliberately misspell their slurs or insert random spaces, so they aren’t caught by word filters. And many of the worst comments have numerous “likes” from other commenters.

Click here to read these comments. I honestly can’t stand to have them polluting my blog. It’s about the worst I’ve ever seen.

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A smart looker rather than a chaste maid

by digby

Courtesy of @justinwolfers here’s an interesting chart ranking what men wanted in a spouse in 2008 compared to 1938.

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Remember this?

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” … “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

The last few years have proven that this was not just a glib comment from an arrogant neo-con. It was an accurate description of the way most global elites see the world.

QOTY: Crusades edition

by digby

Long before Newtie established himself as the leading conservative historian in this presidential race, Rick Santorum had been giving interesting history lectures on the campaign trail. This is from a year ago:

“The idea that the Crusades and the fight of Christendom against Islam is somehow an aggression on our part is absolutely anti-historical.And that is what the perception is by the American left who hates Christendom.”

Defending the crusades isn’t something you hear every day. I have to give him credit. Newtie only had the nerve to re-write the history of the civil war.

Referring to the “American left,” Santorum observed: “They hate Western civilization at the core. That’s the problem.” Santorum also suggested that American involvement in the Middle East is part of our “core American values.”

“What I’m talking about is onward American soldiers,” Santorum continued. “What we’re talking about are core American values. ‘All men are created equal’ — that’s a Christian value, but it’s an American value.”

He’s number one:

Ken Silverstein, “Dim and Dimmer” a list of the ten dumbest members of Congress The Progressive, March 1998:

Senator Rick Santorum is No. 1: “The boy blunder of American politics and a one-time lobbyist for the World Wrestling Federation, thirty-nine-year-old Santorum repeatedly humiliates himself in public.

h/t to @delong

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One more thing

by digby

…before I drop this subject for the time being. Sarah Posner’s excellent postmortem on the contraception controversy raises a hugely important point which I failed to discuss in my earlier posts on this. It’s not just about the Bishops and the right — it’s also about the Religious Industrial Complex. You know, the powerful group of allegedly liberal religious scolds as represented by the likes of Melinda Henneberger, Amy Sullivan and various Third Way centrists:

[T]he Democratic pundits and strategists who since John Kerry’s loss in 2004 have been pressing the party to be more “friendly” to religion are declaring victory—and castigating Obama for not heeding their calls to begin with.
[…]
Neither Obama nor his surrogates ever publicly defended his administration’s rule on these [constitutional] grounds. And because the ensuing media firestorm over the rule was not just driven by the usual conservative suspects, but by a handful of Democratic and liberal pundits, it took on a different hue. What made it a man-bites-dog story, and subject to the more scintillating horserace coverage the media adores, was that “even progressive Catholics” like E.J. Dionne and Michael Sean Winters were up in arms about it.

Burns Strider, the political strategist who, as an aide to Nancy Pelosi, launched the House Faith Working Group and later advised Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, complained to Politico, “There could have been a more inclusive conversation that included more members of the faith community” over the contraception coverage. He warned, “Electorally speaking, you can’t deny that we’re a nation of faith. In the public sphere, you ignore that at your own peril.” Another, anonymous strategist said, “They [the White House] don’t seem to have their finger on the pulse of the modern religious, Democratic-leaning voters, which is roblematic.”[…]

Time contributing editor Amy Sullivan has been critical of Obama for being “tone deaf” on the contraception issue and castigated liberals for their lack of “gratitude” for the Catholic Health Association’s role in passing health care reform. The CHA’s supposed heroism in the legislative battle would not have been necessary, however, had Democrats like Bart Stupak not insisted on holding up the legislation at the behest of the Bishops in the first place, based on false claims that it required taxpayer funding of abortion coverage. In the wake of this week’s events, though, former Congressman Stupak also complained to Politico, “Why do they [the Obama administration] keep stepping on these land mines? Talk to us—that’s all we’re asking.”

After Obama announced the accommodation Friday, Sullivan tweeted that her book, The Party Faithful, would be helpful for “political institutions in recent firestorms.” In her book, Sullivan argued that Democrats needed to pay more attention to religious and anti-choice voters to win elections, charging that Democratic elites ignored this advice at their peril. One supposedly cautionary tale she related was how damaging it was that then-Democratic National Committee chair Terry McAuliffe didn’t recognize megachurch pastor Rick Warren when introduced to him at a social gathering.

President Obama won’t be dissing these Very Serious Religious People again anytime soon, that’s for sure. And that’s bad news for our secular country.

*Here’s just one little reminder of what our friend Melinda Henneberger, who was all over the TV this past week, is really about. From 2007:

Yesterday’s Wanker of the Day, Melinda Henneberger, has already been well and suitably chastised by other bloggers for being hopelessly wrong about Democrats and abortion. I won’t repeat what they said. Instead, I’ll focus on a passage that raised a red flag for me:

Over 18 months, I traveled to 20 states listening to women of all ages, races, tax brackets and points of view speak at length on the issues they care about heading into ’08. They convinced me that the conventional wisdom was wrong about the last presidential contest, that Democrats did not lose support among women because “security moms” saw President Bush as the better protector against terrorism. What first-time defectors mentioned most often was abortion.

When columnists talk about public opinion based on people they talked to, it’s nearly always bullshit…but there’s also something missing here, something missing from the whole piece: what Melinda Henneberger thinks.

So I looked around.

Her bio gives a clue: undergrad at Notre Dame, graduate study at a Catholic university in Belgium. Still, lots of people go to Catholic schools who don’t buy the whole ideology.

There’s another clue in a 2005 column in which she expresses support for a fictional candidate because he “stands up to the NARAL purity patrol” (and isn’t ‘purity’ a curious word to use, one more commonly used (without irony) by the hardcore anti-choicers).

A pre-election piece from 2004 shows she was singing the same tune back then:
The Democrats are likely to lose the Catholic vote in November—and John Kerry could well lose the election as a result. It’s about abortion, stupid. And “choice,” make no mistake, is killing the Democratic Party.

But still nothing about how she feels about abortion.

Finally, back in the good old days of Terri Schiavo, we get the answer:

If it is above our pay grade to opt to terminate life in the womb—and, for the record, I think it is—then it is also wrong to decide when inconveniently comatose spouses or brutal murderers should be “terminated.’’ Either life and death is up to us or it is not. [emphasis added]

So it turns out that the columnist who thinks the Democrats’ pro-choice position is hurting the party, who presents this as objective advice based on empirical observation, who does not mention her own position on the issue, is in fact anti-choice. And the column is doubly wankerrific: it’s hopelessly wrong and dishonest.

These are the people who really won a big one. They flexed their muscles and made it very clear to the Democratic Party that these policies are subject to approval from the Religious Industrial Complex and don’t ever forget it.

And keep in mind; we’re not talking about abortion anymore. We’re talking about birth control.

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When Will They Ever Learn?

by David Atkins

From the “nobody could have predicted” files:

The nation’s Roman Catholic bishops have rejected a compromise on birth control coverage that President Obama offered on Friday and said they would continue to fight the president’s plan to find a way for employees of Catholic hospitals, universities and service agencies to receive free contraceptive coverage in their health insurance plans, without direct involvement or financing from the institutions.

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops — which has led the opposition to the plan — said in a statement late Friday that the solution offered by the White House to quell a political furor was “unacceptable and must be corrected” because it still infringed on the religious liberty and conscience of Catholics.

The bishops’ decision to rebuff the compromise means that “religious freedom” will continue to be a rallying cry for some Catholics who have heard it preached from the pulpit for the last three weeks, for evangelical Christians on the religious right, for Republican candidates on the campaign trail and for members of Congress who are supporting a legislative fix on Capitol Hill.

There are two things to note about this. First and most obvious is that there is no reason to ever attempt to accommodate people like this. They will never be happy, and the person doing the accommodating will always be seen as more weak than reasonable.

Second, it’s fairly clear that the Bishops don’t really care all that much about this issue. They haven’t raised this much of a stink about the subject at a state level, even though they’re required by many state laws to provide contraception.

This is a political move by the Bishops to damage the President, and to rally support among the most extremist elements of an organization that lost its way and true calling some time ago. They’re acting purely as an attack arm of the theocratic Republican Party, and they should be treated accordingly.

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