Month: June 2012

Chart ‘o the day

Rand’s wet dream

by digby

He’s from the Tea Party and he’s come to take his country back:

Dustin Siggins: Thank you for your time. I really enjoyed your interview with Erin Burnett, and how you outlined your positions on spending and taxes. I posted on ityesterday, and was hoping you could expound upon what you said about not jumping up and down when it comes to entitlement reform, and how you instead simply believe it’s fiscal reality.

Sen. Rand Paul: Sure. This is what the “grand bargain” idea was all about. Democrats think working with us on Social Security will bring a compromise. They think we want changes to Social Security and we will agree to bring taxes up. This is wrong-headed. We are not jumping up and down to reform entitlements; we want to fix them because they are broken. The Deficit Commission wanted a “grand bargain,” but the whole concept misses the point.

DS: You also told Burnett that you don’t mind if some wealthy people pay more taxes once loopholes are cut out, etc. Can you explain that a little, please?

Sen. Rand Paul: If you flatten and simplify the code, some will pay more taxes. But in the aggregate, when it comes to the two large pies of the private sector and the government sector, you want the government sector to shrink. So some people will pay more in taxes, but you won’t need as much revenue to come into Washington. With a flatter system with fewer loopholes you won’t have as much money coming into Washington, but with a smaller government people will pay less overall…

If Obama wants re-election, we should make the Bush tax cuts permanent. He is not likely to do that, but (and it’s too late) he could come to us and say “You guys have some good ideas on Social Security, why don’t we sit down together to reform Social Security?” About a year ago he sat down with all of the Republican Senators and the question I got to ask him was related to that: why we don’t gradually raise the age and means-test? Just these changes could save the program for 75 years, or probably forever.

My bill looks to make these kinds of changes, and includes an index linking retirement to longevity. Medicare will have to change the same way as Social Security, but it’s so broken it needs other reforms. My plan institutes some of the same market forces as Paul Ryan’s plans, and gives Americans the Congressional health care plan. I think this latter point is very important, as it’s hard for people to say we are trying to gyp seniors when we are giving them the same health care system Congress has. Everyone already believes Congressmen have such a great system for themselves, and so this take advantage of that.

He says later in the interview that his “Medicare” plan will save a trillion dollars and I assume that’s because most people will just have to die a lot younger. That’s called “freedom.”

Ezra says the Republicans are cleverly changing the terms on Social Security to say they are “fixing” it rather than cutting it, but I honestly don’t think there’s anything new in that. They have always said they were “fixing” it, “reforming” it and “saving” it. And they can never get a majority to believe them. The ones that do are pathetically gullible and the rest know very well that they are lying.

As for old Rand, he’s keeping it real:

He’s actually released a budget that would cut spending so deep you wouldn’t need to raise taxes. But as my colleague Dana Milbank has pointed out, Paul’s plan would:

cut the average Social Security recipient’s benefits by nearly 40 percent, reduce defense spending by nearly $100 billion below a level the Pentagon calls “devastating,” and end the current Medicare program in two years — even for current recipients, according to the Senate Budget Committee staff. It would eliminate the education, energy, housing and commerce departments, decimate homeland security, eviscerate programs for the poor, and give the wealthy a bonanza by reducing tax rates to 17 percent and eliminating taxes on capital gains and dividends.

It’s a libertarian wet dream. The good news is that if he can also legalize drugs we can all either stay high so our dystopian hellscape doesn’t seem so bad, or we can easily kill ourselves with narcotics. It’s not as if there isn’t a silver lining.

.

.

Why is pension envy OK but “class warefare” isn’t?

by David Atkins

It’s called pension envy: the resentment that non-union employees often feel toward workers with good union pensions and benefits. As the results of the Wisconsin recall and ballot initiatives in San Jose and San Diego show, pension envy is not a phenomenon limited to the right. As a small business owner without unemployment benefits or even much in the way of retirement savings to fall back on should things go south, I myself feel it from time to time. Digby wrote an excellent and lengthy piece earlier today about pension envy and the way the Right has managed to marginalize the union movement in the United States while keeping Americans fighting one another for scraps.

But the puzzling phenomenon in all of this is the fact that pension envy is supposedly widespread, justified and politically acceptable, but resentment of the ludicrously wealthy who have stolen the nation’s wealth from its workers is not. Someone who is upset over teachers’ vacation and retirement pay should be a hundred times as angry at the ludicrous salaries of Wall Street executives skimming off the corporate profits that should be going to better private sector wages. There are a few probable explanations for it beyond simply the hostile conservative rhetoric that plays well with their base.

The first is that they’re not mutually exclusive occurrences. The partisan divide may suggest that people would be either upset by pension envy or by radical income inequality, but not both. But polling on income inequality and the results of recent elections involving public union pensions suggests that there is a lot of both simultaneously. The difference is that few politicians dare to put initiatives on the ballot or pass laws that seriously impact the incomes of the top 1%, and that corporate cash is able to overwhelm union money in most cases where the two are comparably tested. It’s also important to remember that unions themselves are not monolithic: many union members are Republicans, and there is a significant divide between public sector and private sector labor. Those factors combined to cause 38% of union households to vote against the recall. There is even some pension envy within the labor movement itself.

Another theory is that there is a special resentment of people who get paid with tax dollars, as opposed to those who are seen as taking money out of the private sector. This one is less persuasive to me: teachers, firefighters are police and respected professions; private sector unions don’t have markedly better approval ratings; and Wall Street CEOs face extremely heavy anger that goes beyond their having taken taxpayer bailouts. Still, if the labor movement is to survive, it probably must do a better job of expanding aggressively into the private sector and not be siloed into taxpayer-funded jobs, a situation that will inevitably lead to political demise.

But there’s a third explanation that I think is salient as well: regular people have much more everyday contact with public employees than with the super rich. As angry as regular voters are about inequality, most have no idea about the true extent of it. In the old days the Rockefellers and Carnegies would make ostentatious displays of their wealth. Nobles and peasants used to live in close proximity, and the palaces were but a short distance away from the slums. Meanwhile, there were multiple layers of social strata separating the nobility from the working class, including radically different dress styles and linguistic registers.

We don’t see as much of that today. The democratization of wealth has meant that the very rich tend to look and act much more similar to the working class than they ever have before. Transportation and communications technology also allows them to paradoxically lead lives more separated from the working class than they ever have before.

What that boils down to is that people rarely knowingly see a member of the top 1%. But they do see teachers, firefighters and police every day. Pension envy is in their faces every day in a way that income inequality usually is not.

I see no way to immediately solve that problem beyond continuing to rhetorically highlight the vast income inequalities in this country, and fixing the campaign finance system that makes politicians so terrified of fighting for the middle class against the interests of the top 1%.

.

The Sununu Spin

by digby

I’ve always loathed this jerk, but he is always one of those guys who is wiling to come right out and defend the indefensible, so you have to give him a sort of credit:

Transcript via Think Progress:

SUNUNU: Let me respond as a taxpayer, not as a representative of the Romney campaign. There are municipalities, there are states where there is flight of population. And as the population goes down, you need fewer teachers. As technology contributes to community security and dealing with issues that firefighters have to deal with, you would hope that you can, as a taxpayer, see the benefits of the efficiency and personnel that you get out of that.

JANSING: But even if there’s movement to the suburbs, teachers and policemen are needed somewhere.

SUNUNU: But I’m going to tell you there are places where just pumping money in to add to the public payroll is not what the taxpayers of this country want.

JANSING: Do you think that taxpayers of this country want to hear fewer firefighters, fewer teachers, fewer police officers, from a strategic standpoint?

SUNUNU: If there’s fewer kids in the classrooms, the taxpayers really do want to hear there will be fewer teachers. […] You have a lot of places where that is happening. You have a very mobile country now where things are changing. You have cities in this country in which the school population peaked ten, 15 years ago. And, yet the number of teachers that may have maintained has not changed. I think this is a real issue. And people ought to stop jumping on it as a gaffe and understand there’s wisdom in the comment.

This is just utter bullshit, although I’m sure the right wingers will quickly incorporate it into their pack of lies. “Hey, we just think that we should stop hiring all those extra teachers who aren’t needed now that the population’s going down. And the tea partiers and their friends will nod their heads and agree that they’re just trying to cut the fat.

And, by the way, when they’re demonizing teachers as lazy parasites feeding off the hard earned dollars of job creators, keep in mind who they are talking about:

In 2007–08, some 76 percent of public school teachers were female, 44 percent were under age 40, and 52 percent had a master’s or higher degree. Compared with public school teachers, a lower percentage of private school teachers were female (74 percent), were under age 40 (39 percent), and had a master’s or higher degree (38 percent).

It’s a predominantly female profession. But then I guess I should give Mitt Romney credit because unlike Scott Walker, he went after the predominantly male police and firefighter professions (with whom he apparently has a longstanding beef) as well. I guess that’s what counts as feminism in right wing circles.

.

Rooting for the Plutocrats

by digby

I don’t follow basketball, so I didn’t know the story that Dave Zarin relates here. But I have followed the saga of Los Angeles football, so I’m aware of the sickening taxpayer blackmail by wealthy team owners. It’s a truly remarkable insight into the minds of the 1%:

For non-NBA fans, as recently as 2008 the OKC Thunder were the Seattle Supersonics, a team of great tradition, flare and fan support. They were Slick Watts’s headband, Jack Sikma’s perm and Gary Payton’s scowl. They were a beloved team in a basketball town. Then the people of Seattle committed an unpardonable offense in the eyes of David Stern. They loved their team but refused to pay for a new taxpayer funded $300 million arena. Seattle’s citizens voted down referendums, organized meetings and held rallies with the goal of keeping the team housed in a perfectly good building called the KeyArena. Despite a whirlwind of threats, the people of Seattle wouldn’t budge, so Stern made an example of them. Along with Supersonics team owner and Starbucks founder Howard Schultz—who could have paid for his own new arena with latte profits alone—Stern recruited two Oklahoma City–based billionaires, Clay Bennett and Aubrey McClendon, to buy the team and manipulate their forcible extraction from Seattle to OKC.

Stern is a political liberal who has sat on the board of the NAACP. Bennett and McLendon are big Republican moneymen who hobby is funding anti-gay referendums. Yet these three men are united in their addiction to our tax dollars. In Oklahoma City, where rivers of corporate welfare awaited an NBA franchise, Stern, Bennett and McClendon had found their Shangri-La.

Bennett, Stern and McClendon lied repeatedly that they would make every effort to keep the team in Seattle, McClendon however gave the game away in 2007, when he said to the Oklahoma City Journal Record, “We didn’t buy the team to keep it in Seattle, we hoped to come here…. We started to look around and at that time the Sonics were going through some ownership challenges in Seattle. So Clay, very artfully and skillfully, put himself in the middle of those discussions and to the great amazement and surprise to everyone in Seattle, some rednecks from Oklahoma, which we’ve been called, made off with the team.”

While Bennett said all the right things about keeping the Sonics in Seattle, a team executive dinner on September 9, 2006, tells you all you need to know about the man and his motives. On that fine evening, the Sonics management, all held over from the previous ownership regime, all Pacific Northwesters, gathered in Oklahoma to meet the new boss. Bennett made sure they were sent to a top restaurant, and picked up the bill. As the Seattle execs sat down, four plates of a deep fried appetizer were put on the table. After filling their mouths with the crispy goodness, one asked the waitress what this curious dish with a nutty flavor actually was. It was lamb testicles. Bennett laughed at their discomfort and the message was clear: the Sonics could eat his balls. (See Sonicsgate.com for a full accounting of this theft.)

What a lovely group of people. We should all be so thankful they are the ones running the world. What could go wrong?

As Zarin points out, the media will hail the Oklahoma team for its plucky, small town values while excoriating the Miami Heat’s big time players who advocated for themselves. We do still hate certain kinds of greed apparently — the greed of the talented individual. Corporate greed, on the other hand, is the American way.

.

A dazed and confused lame duck

by digby

Dday interviewed Senators Whitehouse, Brown, Cardin and Merkeley at netroots Nation about the lame duck “fiscal cliff” and frankly it sounds like nobody knows what the hell is going to happen. I would urge you to read the whole thing to get a sense of what they’re all talking about.

Cardin said the most likely scenario was an extension of everything, save the payroll tax cut, for a period of time, perhaps six months, while everyone regroups. Clearly there are a bounty of options on order here, ranging from a broad deficit deal that could harm the economy in the near term, to an extension that tries to expand growth while keeping the deficit steady.

It would be nice to put all this behind us, but I’m convinced that short of a total repudiation of the GOP (which can be read as a repudiation of their small government message) anything that happens in the lame duck will be bad. Perversely, it’s the crisis atmosphere and lagging economy that’s giving these deficit fetishists in both parties the opening they need to accomplish their nefarious goals, so delay is our friend. Who knows where we might be next year at this time? And at least these disaster capitalists won’t have made things worse. As long as they insist on doing nothing real to boost the economy, the best we can hope for is that they do nothing at all.

Update: Paul Krugman the optimist:

America’s near-term outlook isn’t quite as dire as Europe’s, but the Federal Reserve’s own forecasts predict low inflation and very high unemployment for years to come — precisely the conditions under which the Fed should be leaping into action to boost the economy. But the Fed won’t move.

What explains this trans-Atlantic paralysis in the face of an ongoing human and economic disaster? Politics is surely part of it — whatever they may say, Fed officials are clearly intimidated by warnings that any expansionary policy will be seen as coming to the rescue of President Obama. So, too, is a mentality that sees economic pain as somehow redeeming, a mentality that a British journalist once dubbed “sado-monetarism.”

Whatever the deep roots of this paralysis, it’s becoming increasingly clear that it will take utter catastrophe to get any real policy action that goes beyond bank bailouts. But don’t despair: at the rate things are going, especially in Europe, utter catastrophe may be just around the corner.

.

Last Tuesday night, when we all finally knew that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker had successfully beaten back his recall elections, the first Republican tweet I saw come through my twitter feed was this one:

That’s Romney’s top Florida campaign advisor.

That tweet was followed by the usual excessive conservative gloating and massive liberal despair as it became clear that Wisconsin was an even bigger loss than anyone had anticipated. And as the days went by, just about everyone declared the end of the union movement in one way or another, offering all manner of criticisms and observations, much of it interesting, a lot of it depressing.

Corey Robin responded by asking liberal critics to try to imagine how hard it is to organize in the workplace, which made me look back at my own career and realize just how difficult it must be, especially in large companies. Corporate life is built around individual competition with workers explicitly being pitted against each other for money, status and recognition. “Productivity” is gained by constantly expecting more for the same money and holding out the possibility that your extra work will be rewarded with entry into the executive suite (or maybe just a raise.) It’s almost impossible for me to imagine being able to organize even the most exploited office workers despite the fact that they are all being screwed. People are afraid to lose their jobs, of course, probably more so today than in any recent period. But they are equally afraid to lose their futures, the possibility of advancement, prestige and yes, real money.

I experienced this a little bit in the early days of raised consciousness around sexual harrasment, in the wake of the Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas hearings. (If you watch Mad Men then you have some idea of what it was like for women in offices in the bad old days. If anything, it was even worse during the 70s and 80s, after the sexual revolution.) We had a seriously deranged harasser in a very senior position and one of the office assistants filed a formal complaint. The reaction was was brutal and she ended up quitting over it (amidst lots of whispering about what a bitch she was for being so sensitive.)

What does this have to do with organizing a workplace? Not whole lot except that it was clear from the beginning that there wasn’t a bit of solidarity even among the victims beyond some sisterly gossip over drinks during the saga, much of which was later passed on to the bosses. Let’s just say that I wouldn’t have wanted to try to organize even that workplace, where the common behavior of some of the bosses was disgusting and the workers all clearly and immediately stood to gain by it stopping. It just wasn’t in the vocabulary. (Fear of litigation made the difference in the end.)

So where are we really? Rich Yeselson persuasively argues that the problem has been decades in the making as unions slowly but surely lost their power, but also their place in the popular imagination. As fewer and fewer people belonged to unions, they forgot what they were, much less what they were good for.

He writes:

It’s this head scratching perplexity about the very point of unions—not the corporate and rightwing anti-labor rage, which is eternal—that is snuffing unions out like the air. Decline has begot decline in an endless feedback loop—the workers don’t have familial or community links to unions anymore and, thus, do not think unions are, even potentially central to their lives; the middle class professionals and writers aren’t, via the genuine power of a Hoffa or Reuther and their membership, exposed to a culture of union power anymore; and the politicians aren’t nearly as dependent on the money and votes of union members.

He points out that this question of why people don’t form unions isn’t a new one and relates an anecdote from 30 years ago that echoes the complaint from this correspondent of Josh Marshall’s in the wake of the Wisconsin vote:

[I]t is also difficult for me to feel much sympathy or even understand Unions. I received a degree in Finance, Insurance and Real Estate in 1987, and have been in Sales and Marketing for most of the last 25 years in the Tech and CE sector.

I don’t want to demonize School teachers, and I am sure it must be a tougher job than I think. But over the last 10 years, I have taken a full 1 week off for vacation a grand total of 4 times. I take a day here and a day there, but if I am lucky it will work out to 2 weeks per year, usually less. Then there is the ever present e-mail, texts and phone calls that intrude into my evenings and weekends. Teachers get that much time off around Christmas time.

On my Son’s little league team, one of his teammates father was a teacher in the LAUSD. He told me that he wouldn’t know what to do if he had to work in the summertime. Really? I’ve only been doing it for a quarter century. But I do see his point, working has put a bit of a crimp in my life. Especially in the summertime. Actually, in reality, work is my life…

So I think there is a preception that the pay for teachers isn’t great, but not terrible either. But great benefits, a chance for a decent to good retirement, and it seems a bit like, if not a part time job, certainly not a full time job in any sense that I would recognize it. And pretty much limited accountability.

Public Safety Unions I precieve to be much tougher, and stressful jobs. But oh lord, the motherload of great pay, great benefits, high degree of public respect. Retiring at age 50 or earlier seems a little ridiculous though, especially given the gold plated retirement package.

This fellow has a genuine gripe, no doubt about it. Many jobs suck and it sounds as though he is working harder for less money and isn’t happy about it. I feel for him. But considering all the reasons why that is, why does he resent those who have secured better working conditions through the unions?

He didn’t say explicitly that he’s mad because they are paid through taxes and are therefore doing well at his expense, but I’d guess that when you drill down that’s part of it. Still, he describes himself as a man of the left so I don’t know that this is about government and taxes nd the usual constellation of right wing concerns. More likely, and from the tone of his note, he seems to feel that it’s just generally unfair that some people have these secure, humane, well paid jobs and he doesn’t. And he’s right! Everyone should have them. (And there are quite a few places in the world where they do. Just not here.) So why not see it from that perspective instead of feeling resentment toward those who have managed a better deal? That’s the big question everyone’s asking themselves, I guess.

We know that it’s hard to organize workplaces and we know that most people no longer know what a union is, much less think it can do anything for them. But from where I sit, the real problem is that corporate values have filled the void, with ruthless competition, no job security — all holding out the false promise that the “best” and “hardest working” will rise to the top. In fact, our whole “exceptional” culture with its fetish for individualism and competition (fed constantly by corporate propaganda) works against the idea that we are in anything together. We don’t even have enough of a sense of community anymore to require people not to kill each other when it can be avoided.

How Presidential rhetoric matters

by David Atkins

In the endless debate over whether Presidential rhetoric matters, E.J. Dionne gets it:

Government is the solution.

Why don’t Democrats just say it? They really believe in active government and think it does good and valuable things. One of those valuable things is that government creates jobs — yes, really — and also the conditions under which more jobs can be created.

You probably read that and thought: But don’t Democrats and liberals say this all the time? Actually, the answer is no. It’s Republicans and conservatives who usually say that Democrats and liberals believe in government. Progressive politicians often respond by apologizing for their view of government, or qualifying it, or shifting as fast as the speed of light from mumbled support for government to robust affirmations of their faith in the private sector.

This is beginning to change, but not fast enough. And the events of recent weeks suggest that if progressives do not speak out plainly on behalf of government, they will be disadvantaged throughout the election-year debate. Gov. Scott Walker’s victory in the Wisconsin recall election owed to many factors, including his overwhelming financial edge. But he was also helped by the continuing power of the conservative anti-government idea in our discourse. An energetic argument on one side will be defeated only by an energetic argument on the other.

The case for government’s role in our country’s growth and financial success goes back to the very beginning. One of the reasons I wrote my book “Our Divided Political Heart” was to show that, from Alexander Hamilton and Henry Clay forward, farsighted American leaders understood that action by the federal government was essential to ensuring the country’s prosperity, developing our economy, promoting the arts and sciences and building large projects: the roads and canals, and later, under Abraham Lincoln, the institutions of higher learning, that bound a growing nation together.

It’s quite likely true that Presidential rhetoric is a blip on the radar of the factors that dictate his or her Party’s chances at reelection. It’s quite likely true that rhetoric browbeating Congress into passing a certain bill doesn’t do much good at all.

But it’s in the grand argument that these things matter. Ever since Reagan the Democratic Party at a national level has mostly ceded the notion that government is the problem. Entire books can and have been written on why and how this happened exactly. The most reasonable explanations lie in the fact that “government” became associated with giving handouts to “those” people in a country whose government has been crippled by issues of race and slavery since its inception, and the fact that starting in the 1980s Democrats faced a choice of taking lots of corporate money or getting slaughtered at the polls by being outspent by 10-1 margins.

Scott Walker’s win in Wisconsin would not likely have been changed by the President making lots of speeches about the issue over the last few months. But the Party’s general failure to address the issue of the positive effect of government spending in our lives has crippled the country (to say nothing of progressive politics) for decades now. Sometimes it almost seems if that charge were being led entirely by op-ed columnists like Krugman and Dionne, together with a chorus bloggers and a few largely ignored members of the Progressive Caucus in Congress.

It wouldn’t turn the tide immediately nor would it be measurable in any peer-reviewed political science study, but a little Presidential rhetoric on the subject would certainly help over the long haul.

.

Little wingnut monsters: even if you don’t feed them, they grow up anyway

Time To Fire Douthat