Month: June 2012

Self-serving myths and the billionaires who love them

Mexican telecom mogul Carlos Slim, who with a fortune of $65 billion is the world’s richest man, believes that struggling countries need to raise their retirement age to 70 in order to help fix their finances:

Countries should have people work until they are older to reflect longer life expectancy rates, Slim reportedly said…Slim added the current retirement age was established “when jobs were more physical and people died at 60, but now we live until 85 or 90.”

El Universal reported one of the world’s savviest businessmen as saying: “We live in the knowledge society, so knowledge and experience should be valued. This is why a person’s work life could be increased.”

One more time with feeling:

MYTH: People are living longer, so it makes sense to raise the retirement age.

FACTS:

• Numerous studies have documented that increases in life expectancy in retirement have been skewed in favor of those with higher incomes and more education, with higher income white men seeing the greatest gains, and low-income minority women seeing decreased longevity.

• Compared to new male retirees in 1982, today’s higher income male retirees can expect to live an additional five years, but lower income men are living just 1.1 years more in retirement.

• For women, overall life expectancy has stagnated, with lower-income women seeing declines in life expectancy, and upper-income and more educated women seeing modest improvements.

• Increases in life expectancies are mostly due to increased survival during childhood.

• Even under current law, younger generations will work considerably longer than workers in the past. The average number of years a 20-year-old man could expect to work rose from 39.0 to 42.0 between those born in 1899 and those born in 1949. Those born in 1999 will average 45.0 years of work before retirement age.

MYTH: Older workers have more experience, so it’s easy for those 55 and older to find jobs.

FACTS:

• Often older workers can’t work longer, even if they want to. An analysis of the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics data revealed that during April 2010, the job market for Americans 55 and older had never been worse.

• Additionally, many mid-life individuals are “structurally unemployed” meaning that demand for their now increasingly obsolete skills will not suddenly increase in demand after the recession ends. Many of them are underwater on mortgages and faced with family caregiving. responsibilities for aging parents, young children or adult children who cannot find work.

• There has been a 17% increase in age discrimination cases since 2007, according to the EqualEmployment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), suggesting struggles for older Americans in securing and maintaining good jobs.

MYTH: The beneficiary to worker ratio keeps dropping, so we need people to work longer in order to pay full benefits.

FACTS:

• With a fertility rate close to the replacement rate, any positive net immigration will contribute to labor force growth, which can in turn offset increases in life expectancy and stabilize the beneficiary-to-worker ratio.

• Even though the beneficiary-to-worker ratio is expected to rise with the Baby Boomer retirement, it will level off after 2035 despite projected increases in life expectancy at retirement.

Nice little economy you’ve got there …

by digby

And they call the unions thuggish. Get a load of this:

Facing economic uncertainty, defense contractors are plotting to spur Congress to nix the automatic budget cuts set to begin next year.

The plan? Threaten to send out layoff notices — hundreds of thousands of them, right before Election Day.

Congress, industry leaders contend, has left them few options. Federal law, they say, requires employers to give notice of 60 days to workers facing layoffs.
[…]
“I’ve been told by some of our major employers that layoff notices are going to come before the election,” said Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.), a member of the Armed Services Committee and a vocal critic of the automatic cuts. “It’s dangerous and irresponsible for Congress to play with this.”

“Negotiations in Congress can’t wait for the lame-duck session because there’s going to be a devastating impact to our defense industrial base before then,” she told POLITICO.

Right. It’s dangerous and irresponsible for the congress to play with this. But playing chicken with the debt ceiling, domestic programs and massive tax cuts every few months is necessary for budgetary discipline.

And, by the way, when did it become ok for the head of OMB to weigh in with political advice?

“We have made it clear that we believe that the sequester is, by design, bad policy,” OMB spokesman Kenneth Baer told POLITICO in a statement. “Congress should do its job and pass a balanced plan for deficit reduction as it was charged to pass under the Budget Control Act.”

Guess what? It was “charged” to do that by … itself. It can “charge” itself not to do it just as easily. Contrary to popular myth, “deficit reduction” is not an edict from God Almighty. They don’t have to do it right now. They shouldn’t do it right now. It will be a bad deal for Americans and the American economy in the long run and will do nothing to help in the short run.

The defense contractors aren’t going to cut off their noses to spite their faces. Best case scenario for the moment:

“Not a day goes by when I don’t spend some time on sequestration,” [ Jim Dyer, a lobbyist with Podesta Group who represents some of the top defense firms] said. “Everybody’s asking about it.”

Still, he hasn’t seen any indication on Capitol Hill that there will be a resolution soon.

“Kicking the can has become such an acceptable policy that it wouldn’t surprise anybody,” he said.

Every day that goes by without a Grand Bargain struck by foolish politicians and their billionaire owners is a good day for America. It would be a better day for America if we could get some relief for homeowners and a real fiscal stimulus but I’m trying to stay in the real world here. The best we can hope for is that the partisan desire of the GOP to destroy their enemies will allow us to live to fight another day. It ain’t much.

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Tax exemptions for me but not for thee

by digby

You have to admit they have a point. It’s just wrong when those who are exempt from paying taxes get involved in partisan politics:

The social conservative group, headed by former Christian Coalition executive director Ralph Reed, kicks off its annual summit Thursday afternoon with luncheon speeches by two potential Mitt Romney running mates, Sens. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.).

The gathering is one of two major social conservative conferences considered campaign-trail “must-stops” for GOP White House contenders; the other is the Family Research Council’s Values Voter Summit, which takes place in Washington in the fall.
Friday and Saturday bring speeches by several of Romney’s former opponents, including former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), businessman Herman Cain and former senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.)

Romney himself addresses the gathering on Saturday morning; the summit concludes Saturday night with the presentation of awards to Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) and Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch (R), both of whom emerged victorious from last week’s recall election.

Other top conservatives expected to address the summit include Reed; Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.); Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.); Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus; Virginia Senate GOP nominee George Allen; commentator Glenn Beck; Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist; Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell (R); Family Research Council President Tony Perkins; Indiana Senate GOP nominee Richard Mourdock.

Of course, it’s not as if these people can deliver the votes in return for supporting their positions that Media Matters can, so they’re not the same level of threat to our democratic system. But still …

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I stand with Darcy Burner

by David Atkins

There is apparently a significant pushback against Darcy Burner for her brilliant presentation at Netroots Nation. Sadly I was unable to attend the conference in person–it was the first one I’ve missed–but it remains an electric message even via web video.

I’m not going to provide links (google if you care), but a blogger at Balloon Juice and a writer at Seattle PI have pre-emptively declared Darcy to be too extreme to win public office. Too extreme because Darcy has the audacity to suggest that the one out of three women who have had an abortion might have the temerity not to be ashamed of their choice.

It’s apparently too extreme to say this:

“If you are a woman in this room, and statistically this is true for about one third of the women in this room, if you’re a woman in this room who has had an abortion and is willing to come out about it, please stand up!”

There is a legitimate argument to be had about the time at which a viable fetus should or should not be considered something like its own person. Many Americans feel conflicted about this subject, and I have long contended that it’s this deep bipartisan discomfort about the language of “choice” associated with viable fetuses that is the cause of our losing ground on this issue.

But if you’re a man who is deeply discomfited by women feeling unashamed over having normal abortions of non-viable fetuses (namely, 99% of all abortions), take your discomfort and go elsewhere with it. Somewhere away from any men and women of honor and courage.

The rest of us will stand with Darcy, refusing to be cowed by bourgeois patriarchal moralism.

If you can chip in a few bucks to help Darcy prove her detractors wrong, scare the pants off the patriarchs and take her message to Congress, please do so.

We need her in Congress.

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Broccoli Is The New Welfare Cadillac

By tristero

Go for it, people. Tell me how broccoli really is good for me. Yawn. Are you through? Good, because the only thing that matters is that, properly cooked,  Broccoli tastes great.

So, while you’re scarfing down a plate full of roasted broccoli stems – the best part – you might want to take a squint at this article. Of course, the rightwing argument is totally specious. But the way their argument is worded is extremely cunning. I wonder: what if good arguments – i.e. ones that were commonsensical, i.e., ones that were liberal – were couched in rhetoric as finely honed as bad conservative arguments?

BTW: Rachel, Jon and Stephen? As great as they are, they’re not in this league. Or perhaps I’ve missed the echoes of their rhetoric in recent comments from the Supreme Court bench re: important decisions? We need more, a lot more, work on rhetoric.

Call it the Seamus fund

by digby

For so many reasons, Mitt Romney should fund this documentary. Via Jezebel:

The outcome looks bleak when the dogs are finally removed from the house — both, one only a puppy, are completely limp and unconscious — but things take a fortunate turn when one firefighter removes his own oxygen mask and gives it to the dogs instead. Much to the relief of the owner (and viewer), the dogs are up in no time.

It’s the least he can do.

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The bloody work of hairless monkeys

by David Atkins

Whenever I read about something like this…

In the deadliest day in Iraq since the withdrawal of the United States military in December, a series of explosions that mostly targeted Shiite Muslims amounted to an emphatic demonstration of the still potent capabilities of the Sunni insurgency and a reminder of the instability left behind by American forces.

Shortly after midnight Wednesday, a homemade bomb exploded here in the capital, a harbinger of what was to come. Around 5 a.m., a truck bomb exploded in Khadamiya, a Baghdad neighborhood where Shiite pilgrims had begun to gather to commemorate the life and death of a revered imam who was the Prophet Muhammad’s great-grandson. From then on, reports of other attacks flooded in from around the country — Samarra, Kirkuk, Mosul, Falluja, Ramadi, Hilla — and by midday officials said more than 70 people were dead and at least 260 people wounded. The only large cities spared were the southern port city of Basra and the holy city of Najaf.

It reminds me of this:

The Sack of Magdeburg (German: Magdeburgs Opfergang or German: Magdeburger Hochzeit) refers to the siege and subsequent plundering of the largely Protestant city of Magdeburg by the forces of the Holy Roman Empire and the Catholic League during the Thirty Years’ War. The siege lasted from November 1630 until 20 May 1631.

On the latter date, Imperial Field Marshal Gottfried Heinrich Graf zu Pappenheim, and Johann Tserclaes, Count of Tilly, attacked Magdeburg for its rich stores of goods. When the city was almost lost, the garrison mined various places and set others on fire. After the city fell, the Imperial soldiers went out of control and started to massacre the inhabitants and set fire to the city. Of the 30,000 citizens, only 5,000 survived. For fourteen days, charred bodies were carried to the Elbe River to be dumped to prevent disease.

In a letter, Pappenheim wrote of the Sack:

I believe that over twenty thousand souls were lost. It is certain that no more terrible work and divine punishment has been seen since the Destruction of Jerusalem. All of our soldiers became rich. God with us.[2]

At the time of the Peace of Westphalia ending the war in 1648, the city’s population had further dropped so that only 450 people were still living in the city.

The devastation was so great that Magdeburgisieren (or “magdeburgization”) became an oft-used term signifying total destruction, rape and pillaging for decades. The terms “Magdeburg justice”, “Magdeburg mercy” and “Magdeburg quarter” also arose as a result of the Sack, used originally by Protestants when executing Catholics who begged for quarter.

Obviously, religious wars and sectarian conflicts are often extensions of other more mundane struggles over territory and resources. But they also often take on a life of their own.

I think a lot of people on the Left believe that if we only eliminate imperialism and create sustainability of energy, food and other resources, we can achieve a world free of violence and war. These are admirable and desirable goals, of course. Sadly, a study of human nature from before civilization to the modern day tends to disprove the hypothesis that achieving these thins will lead to world peace.

Human beings everywhere love to form in-groups and out-groups, and those groups will fight each other for the stupidest possible reasons. It happens in indigenous tribal groups, constantly warring with one another and raiding their neighbors: I will never forget the story in a college anthropology class of the men of an Amazonian tribe who during a raid in which the women were kidnapped and the men killed as usual, had chased a 10-year-old boy up a tree and proceeded question him for 10 minutes on his lineage to find out if they were related by blood. After slowly and calmly determining that they were not, they shot the boy down with bow and arrows. And, of course, this same sort of morally blind insanity happens constantly among “civilized” peoples everywhere east and west. Rarely has there ever been a culture with a history as bloody and brutal as those of the native Hawaiian kingdoms.

People everywhere are essentially hairless monkeys whose basic dispositions haven’t evolved that much despite our larger brains and capacity for more moral decision making.

If the reasons to fight don’t exist, they will be invented. Fighting over which version of the same god to worship has to be one of the most nonsensical, yet it is also depressingly commonplace.

Minimization of war and human suffering will depend on tightly binding people and civilizations to one another, and on taking a dim view of the in-groups and out-groups that people use to separate themselves from one another. And that in turn will require a stronger multinational peacekeeping force, not a weaker one. Peace and the reduction of human misery depend heavily on it, particularly in the inevitable age of a panoply of nuclear-armed nation-states. Left to their own devices, it is inevitable that nation-states will eventually become embroiled in nuclear conflict or that nuclear weapons will fall into the hands of belligerent non-state actors. At this point in our evolution we’re still as overgrown toddlers playing foolishly with loaded guns in a grand, modern technology version of Lord of the Flies.

Turning an isolationist eye of indifference toward all of this will not prevent bloody conflict for stupid reasons from enveloping humanity. It will simply guarantee it.

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Adelson’s Mad Money

by digby

Everyone seems to be having a case of vapors over Sheldon Adelson donating 10 Million dollars (!) to the Romney effort today. But does everyone understand that Sheldon Adelson is worth 25 billion dollars? He’s the 7th richest man in the United States.

The following illustration compares an human being against a stack of $100 currency note bundles. A bundle of $100 notes is equivalent to $10,000 and that can easily fit in your pocket. 1 million dollars will probably fit inside a standard shopping bag while a billion dollars would occupy a small room of your house:

Adelson has 25 of those rooms full of money. Even if he does spend a full hundred million, as he’s been reported to be planning, it is the equivalent of a modest week-end getaway for you and me. He really is that rich.

We have never before had so much money concentrated at the top. These are vast fortunes beyond our imaginations. It makes perfect sense that some of these oligarchs would spend tens of millions to buy elections. It’s not that much money to them. There is no shaming them about it.

They do care about their “legacies” and reputations, however, which is why he’s going to hide most of his spending behind the big GOP front groups. That indicates a vulnerability, don’t you think? Surely there’s a way to exploit that.

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Taking care of Jamie

by digby

Boy, Jamie Dimon must feel bruised and battered all over after the pounding he got in the Senate this morning:

“You’re obviously renowned, rightfully so i think, as being one of the most, you know, one of the best CEOs in the country for financial institutions,” crooned Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN). “You missed this, it’s a blip on the radar screen.”

Ouch!

Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) asked Dimon to sound off on the country’s budget woes. “I think you’re well aware of my concern about the fiscal condition of this country,” Bennet said. “I wonder if you could take the last couple minutes of this time to talk about how you see our relative position with Europe and other places, the political risk of our not accomplishing what we need to do in the fiscal side, and the upside if we could actually come together in a comprehensive way to address the long-term fiscal condition of the United States.”

Ooof. No more, please!

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) — a tea party hero — gave Dimon a full pardon. “I really appreciate you voluntarily coming in to talk with us,” he said. “It is important that we talk about things happening in the industry. It helps us as we look forward and, hopefully, it will contribute to best practice scenarios in industry. I appreciate your emphasis on continuous quality improvement. We can hardly sit in judgment of your losing $2 billion. We lose twice that every day in Washington.”

The humaaanity!

Sen. Jerry Moran (R-KS) asked Dimon and his firm to be good corporate citizens, if only to avoid complicating conservative free market messaging. “How you managed JPMorgan is the business of your board of directors, your shareholders, but it does have consequences to those of us who believe in the free-market system, its value, its merit. I have the sense and I hope it’s the case that it is a responsibility you understand. [Your] behavior really matters in our ability to be an advocate for a free-market that creates jobs and economic opportunity and allows Americans to pursue the American dream.”

Hasn’t the poor man had enough? Can’t we all get along?

Well, maybe:

So concerned were the senators that increased regulations might burden Wall Street that in an exchange with Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS), Dimon even offered to get neighborly with the people charged with policing his firm’s actions, to keep them well informed about financial regulatory issues.

“Me and lots of other folks, we’ll do whatever you want, we’ll even get apartments down here,” Dimon offered.

Hey, he’ll sleep with your wives for you if that’s what it takes. The man is is a saint.

Oy vey. But it’s probably a good thing to keep this in mind before you judge these Senators too harshly. They have needs:

JPMorgan is Banking Committee Chairman Tim Johnson’s second-largest contributor over the last two-plus decades, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, which analyzes campaign giving from companies’ employees and their political action committees since 1989. The same is true for the committee’s top Republican, Sen. Richard Shelby, and its second-ranking Democrat, Sen. Jack Reed.

The committee’s number-two Republican, Sen. Mike Crapo, and its third-ranking Democrat, Sen. Charles Schumer, are not far behind their colleagues, with JPMorgan ranking third and fourth, respectively, among their contributors.

Update: Meanwhile, Larry Sabato stares at his fingernails:

“Contributions are useful, but they do not protect you when you have gotten in trouble in a high visibility way,” said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. “That description fits Dimon just now.”

If you’ve done everything right we might let you live

by digby

I’m sorry, he’s an asshole:

ROMNEY: So let’s say someone has been continuously insured and they develop a serious condition. And let’s say they lose their jobs or they change jobs or they move and go to a different place, I don’t want them to be denied insurance because they have some pre-existing conditions. So we’re going to have to make sure that the law that we replace Obamacare with, ensures that people who have a pre-existing condition, who have been insured in the past, are able to get insurance in the future so they don’t have to worry about that condition keeping them from getting the kind of health care they deserve.

And the rest of you? Just go die. You don’t “deserve” to have health care. You’re parasites who didn’t do a proper risk assessment and there’s nothing we can do for you.

I guess this is going to be yet another avenue for the Republicans to divide the country. There are good people who’ve been working for the companies that Bain Capital comes along and destroys, and they deserve to be allowed to buy inadequate, unaffordable private insurance if they have an illness and are left with nothing. Everyone else — people who started a business, who couldn’t afford health insurance, who were out of the workforce, who got sick at the wrong time, well — too bad. If you aren’t “talented” enough to be a job creator or don’t have the good sense to know you are a worker drone and if you get sick you must cling to whatever soul-destroying job you have until they fire you, well, you aren’t a Real American, are you?

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