Month: September 2012

Headline ‘o the day

by digby

Mayor’s reputation tarnished in teachers union dust-up

The measure of who won and lost in Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s showdown with the Chicago Teachers Union won’t be clear until the details of the new contract emerge, but last week’s strike took some of the luster off the mayor’s self-portrait as an innovative leader brimming with new ways to solve the city’s most vexing challenges.

The long, stressful path to getting a contract in place offered a glimpse that Emanuel perhaps is not as multidimensional as he tries to appear. Repeatedly, the mayor turned to one tool: the attack.

That singular approach contributed to the first teachers strike in 25 years and served to heighten organized labor’s suspicions of the new mayor, whose union bashing kept him from playing a hands-on role at the negotiating table.

I don’t know what the Villagers are going to do with that. It’s almost as if they don’t know what the hell they’re talking about:

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

John Heileman should be forced to eat crow for this spectacularly embarrassing performance, but I’m sure he won’t be. We’ll just have to settle for Rahm being publicly humiliated. And that’s pretty good.

h/t to RP
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Cruel Britannia

by digby

Larry Summers on Britain’s impending lost decade, via Brad Delong:

It is the mark of science and perhaps rational thought to operate with a falsifiable understanding of how the world works. So it is fair to ask economists… what could happen that would cause you to… acknowledge that the model you had been using was flawed? As a vigorous advocate of fiscal expansion… I have for the past several years suggested that if the British economy – with its major attempts at fiscal consolidation – were to enjoy a rapid recovery, it would force me to substantially revise my views….

Unfortunately for the British economy, nothing in the past several years compels me revise my views….

The cumulative output loss from this British downturn in its first five years exceeds even that experienced during the 1930s… a decade or more of Japan-style stagnation [is] emerging as a real risk.

An effective policy approach to Britain’s economic problems must start with the recognition that the principle factor holding back the British economy over both the short and medium term is the lack of demand…. [A] car might have many infirmities, but if its electrical system did not work the car would not go. If that was fixed, the car would run, even with other problems. So it is today. Moreover, to a greatly under-appreciated extent in the policy debate, short-run increases in demand and output would have medium to long-term benefits…. A stronger economy means more capital investment and fewer cuts to corporate research and development. It means fewer people lose their connection to good jobs and become addicted to living without work. It means that more young people get first jobs and it means more businesses choose leaders oriented to expansion rather than cost-cutting. The most important structural programme for raising Britain’s potential output in the future is raising its output today.

The objection to this… is profoundly flawed….[T]he behaviour of financial markets suggests that economic weakness rather than profligacy is the main source of concern… the costs of buying credit insurance on the UK to rise when overall interest rates fall… it is evolving optimism and pessimism about the future, not changing views about fiscal policy driving markets… the primary determinant of fiscal health in both the US and UK over the medium term will be the rate of growth… austerity policies that slowed growth could even backfire in the narrow sense of raising debt-to-GDP ratios and turning debt unsustainability into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Britain must change the pace of fiscal consolidation to stand a chance of avoiding a lost decade… hen demand is needed for growth and the private sector is hanging back, the first priority must be for the public sector to stop exacerbating the contraction.

But hey, it isn’t just Britain and it isn’t just conservative Republicans. Just listen to Ed Rendell, mainstream American Democrat:

Ed Rendell: I’m the co-chair of the campaign to fix the debt with Judd Gregg and we’ve got now 2,000 of the 5,000 major corporations signed on to the campaign we’ve raised 26 million dolars for a PR campaign right after the election to try to get peopel to focus. I think the American business community is going to weigh in with Republicans and say “enough, we want this done.”

Alex Wagner: that would be a bold strike by the business community

[More stupid irrelevant cross talk about nothing … see below]

Wagner: Luke, before we let you go, the president talks a lot about the fever breaking. I know you just gave us a sort of pessimistic view of the next couple months. But do you think the fever could break inside the Republican party come next year if in fact he is re-elected?

Luke Russert: well, it’s a question we talked about a few days ago on your show which is if Mitt Romney loses, what is the catharsis within the Republican party? Do they become more conservative and say, “you know what we nominated a guy who was way to liberal, way too moderate” or do they say “we need to reform ourselves and not be so rigid.” And that’s honestly a question which I think is very hard to fathom which direction they’ll go this far out …

Rendell: Don’t you think if the president’s re-elected, he can frame the issue by saying I want to do Simpson-Bowles, some form of it, I want to do it now, let’s all get in and do our jobs. Then the Republicans have a real Hobson’s Choice..

Russert: If both sides agree to jump in the deep end holding hands. But you’ve seen, is there the impetus to get to that magic number 217 votes in the House, it’s hard to say…

Rendell: if the president and the Democrats are on board, and the Republicans say no

Russert: If they’re on board in terms of raising the Medicare age

Rendell: uh huh, uh huh

Russert: possibly, possibly. Then you could say the Republicans will be out in the woods for the 2014 midterms. It’s tough, it’s tough. We all thought this would happen in the summer of 2011 and you saw that that deal died. Mr Woodward wrote a whole book about it.

Hey, why should Britain be the only nation to have a lost generation?

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Corey Robin to the white courtesy telephone please

by digby

Reactionaries are calling:

Former Pennsylvania senator and presidential candidate Rick Santorum openly criticized libertarians in his speech to the audience, saying that “economic conservatism — libertarian types can say, oh, well, we don’t want to talk about the social issues. Without the church and the family, there is no conservative movement. There is no basic values in America in force, and there is no future for our country.”

Later, Santorum told BuzzFeed and a reporter from Reason that libertarianism could be “very positive, but you have to understand I’m conservative and not libertarian.”
His patience wore thin for the kinds of libertarians who might not vote for Mitt Romney. He encouraged those who might vote for Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson to “vote for Barack Obama” instead.

Perkins rejected the idea that conservatives might have difficulty forging an alliance with libertarians and identified Santorum, however improbably, as the key link between the two factions.

“His candidacy was a large part of that by making the economic argument for marriage,” Perkins said.

“If you look at the libertarian viewpoint which I share in terms of I want a smaller government, I want less government, well how do you do that?” Perkins asked rhetorically. “You strengthen the American family. Because if you look at the government that has expanded, it has expanded to make up for the family which is in decline.”

“Right there is a good starting point for libertarians and social conservatives together.”

Uh huh. If you doubt it, read this book:

Also too, this.

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Selective religious outrage

by digby

Susie reminds us today that no religion owns the patent on irrational behavior:

While listening to all the outraged right wing rantings about free speech and how Muslims were a separate, primitive class of religion for their outraged and violent response in Libya to the deliberately provocative work of a California porn director, I kept thinking to myself, “Why does this all seem so familiar?”

And then, last night I watched Martin Scorcese’s 1988 film, “The Last Temptation of Christ”, and it all came flooding back.

Click over for the reminder of the right wing Christian violence that film spurred.

I remember pointing out a similar disconnect during the conservative crusade for the Danish cartoons. Even as that was happening, so was this:

Rome’s Catholic, Muslim and Jewish leaders have united to condemn pop star Madonna’s decision to stage a mock-crucifixion when she performs in the Italian capital on Sunday a stone’s throw away from Vatican City.

The lapsed-Catholic diva’s latest irreverent performance sees her wearing a fake crown of thorns and descending on a suspended, glittery cross as part of her worldwide “Confessions Tour”.

Having already been criticised in the United States, Catholics priests from across the Eternal City have gone one further saying the act is blasphemy.

Cardinal Ersilio Tonino, speaking with the approval of Pope Benedict XVI said: “This time the limits have really been pushed too far.

“This concert is a blashphemous challenge to the faith and a profanation of the cross. She should be excommunicated.”

“It is disrespectful, in bad taste and provocative,” Father Manfredo Leone from Rome’s Santa Maria Liberatrice church said late on Wednesday about the star’s latest stage stunt.

“Being raised on a cross with a crown of thorns like a modern Christ is absurd. Doing it in the cradle of Christianity comes close to blasphemy.”

Strangely, none of the conservative free speech advocates who bent over backwards to defend the Danish cartoonists — and now this nutball wingnut Copti Christian who made the “film” about Islam — had a thing to say in Madonna’s defense. They crucified Andres Serrano for his “blasphemous” artwork.

Sam needs his own show

by digby

Sam Seder filled in for Chris on “Up” this week-end and did a great job. I really wish MSNBC would give him a show during the week in place of some of the daily shows that are driving me nuts. He’s great in the Hayes format, but I think he’d also be really good in the daily news cycle format they follow during the week. It’s hard to do these shows well and Sam brings a certain performance skill and personality to the genre (which both Chris and Rachel have as well) that most of the wonks don’t possess. Let’s hope MSNBC has the good sense to bring him into the mix. Much of the current weekly line-up is in danger of losing regular viewers (like me.)

Here are a couple of segments from the show this week-end in which he and his guests tackle a highly unusual TV subject — poverty:

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

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

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The Myth of the Sensible Republican Dies Hard 

by tristero

On the basis of this op-ed, Nick Kristof has few illusions about Mitt Romney’s qualifications for president. He knows he would be at least as bad as Bush. Even so, he writes:

The Republican Party is caught in a civil war on foreign policy, and Romney refuses to pick sides. In contrast to his approach on the economy, he just doesn’t seem to have thought much about global issues. My hunch is that for secretary of state he would pick a steady hand, like Robert Zoellick, but Romney has also surrounded himself with volatile neocons.

Let’s put aside for now how steady Mr. Zoellick’s hands are and assume that he really is as sane as he’s portrayed in the media to be (a dangerous assumption, I know, but let’s just say). There is no way he would be Secretary of State in a Romney administration.

As Kristof implies above, Romney’s attracting neocons to his campaign like flies to bullshit. But it’s worse than Nick understands. As MoDo makes abundantly clear in a column adjacent to Kristof’s, both Romney’s and Ryan’s empty little heads are being filled to the brim with the weird worldview of the neocons, and they’ve been parroting their positions on the stump. Now neocons no-likey Zoellick and they have a lot of friends in the media who would create a huge stink if Willard chose this presumed appeaser and China-lover who is “soft” on Israel.

No, my friends, Romney would surely nominate none other than the Moustache of Doom – the odious John Bolton – for Secretary of State. In the words of Daniel Larson of the American Conservative.

We should assume that a [John] Bolton nomination is quite possible in the event of a Romney victory, and a Bolton confirmation might be as well.

Instead of “assume” substitute the word “fear.”For who is John Bolton? Well, among other things John Bolton said publicly in 2009:

Unless Israel is prepared to use nuclear weapons against Iran’s program, Iran will have nuclear weapons in the very near future.

Yeah, Bolton then qualified this by saying he meant to refer “merely”to Israeli military action, not a strike using nuclear weapons (his reasoning probably being that Israel couldn’t use nukes because everyone knows Israel doesn’t, um, have any).

But even if Bolton only misstated his intentions… that’s one fuckuva stupid misstatement, the kind that could, you know, freak out a paranoid, unstable, isolated government and get them to do paranoid, unstable things. It’s the kind of a thing no person should say if they want to be considered seriously for a high position requiring even a scintilla of diplomatic skill.

Yep. Romney, the master of putting his foot in his mouth when it comes to foreign policy, really hearts John Bolton. They’re cut from the same cloth. And even now, as disgusted as he clearly is with Romney, Kristof still has a long way to go before he fully groks what is going on with the Republican Party, how truly sick it is, and how dangerous it is for any modern Republicans to hold power.

Elizabeth Warren surging?

by David Atkins

After retooling some fairly staid campaign communications (including some fairly dull, preachy ads) , it appears that Elizabeth Warren’s campaign is hitting its stride in Massachusetts. That’s partly because of the bounce from her DNC convention speech and for Democrats in general after the convention, but partly because of great new ads like this one:

And lo and behold, at least one poll is showing her surging ahead by 6 points:

The survey of Bay State voters conducted Sept. 6-13 by the Western New England Polling Institute through a partnership with The Republican and MassLive.com, shows Warren leading over Brown, 50 to 44 percent, among likely voters.

The gap among registered voters is even larger, according to the survey, which concluded Warren leads 53 to 41 percent. The poll of 545 registered voters has a 4.2 percent margin of error, while the sample of 444 likely voters has a 4.6 percent margin of error.

Tim Vercellotti, professor of political science and director of the Polling Institute at Western New England University, said Warren’s lead comes in part from the fact that she’s shored up support among Democrats to 89 percent, while losing only six percent of her party’s support to Brown.

Part of that bump, he said, may be attributable to the fact that polling started at the end of the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., and just two days after Warren delivered a prime-time speech ahead of former President Bill Clinton at the event.

I’ve said before that any chance of pushing the Democratic Party to the left on economic issues in the near future hinges on Elizabeth Warren’s fate in Massachusetts, regardless of the outcome of the Presidential election. That still hasn’t changed.

Please help her out if you can.

Saturday Night at the Movies

 New York, Nouveau York

By Dennis Hartley 

Wrecks in the city: 2 Days in New York

As Woody Allen continues gallivanting around Europe, leaving Manhattan vulnerable to incursion by Visigoths and Vandals, the inevitable has occurred. In fact, it is likely that around the same time the quirky NYC native’s ode to the City of Light, Midnight in Paris was opening in theaters, a quirky Parisian-born filmmaker was quietly invading Allen’s beloved Big Apple, churning out precisely the type of oft-lamented “earlier, funny” movie that his most ardent fans have been pining for (turnabout is fair play?). So who is this usurper, boldly laying claim to the Sacred Throne of Neurotica? Julie Delpy, perhaps best known to American audiences for her work in Richard Linklater’s popular diptych Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, first tasted the whine in 2007 by writing, directing and co-starring in the Allen-esque rom-com 2 Days in Paris. Now, she’s made a sequel called 2 Days in New York…and it’s one of the funniest films I’ve seen this year.

 Delpy once again casts herself as Marion, a French ex-pat living in Manhattan. In the 2007 film, we joined her and her neurotic American boyfriend (Adam Goldberg) on a trip to Paris, where they ultimately found themselves reassessing their tempestuous relationship. Five years have passed; and in a cleverly staged preamble, we quickly discern that while they ended up having a child together, they amicably decided it would be best for their mutual sanity if they went their separate ways. Marion has a new man in her life, a long-time pal turned lover named Mingus (Chris Rock) who has a tween daughter from a previous relationship. The four all live together in a cozy Manhattan loft. Marion and Mingus are the quintessential NY urban hipster movie couple; she’s a photo-journalist/conceptual artist; and he’s a radio talk show host who also writes for the Voice.

 The already high-strung Marion is on edge for several reasons. She has an important gallery show coming up, for which she is literally selling her soul for. No, seriously (I won’t spoil that for you). Then there’s her family, who have just flown in from France for a visit and to get acquainted with her new Significant Other. The relatively buttoned-down Mingus is in for a bit of culture shock. Right off the bat, he finds that Marion’s father (real-life dad Alpert Delpy, reprising his role from the previous film) reeks rather heavily of imported sausages and cheeses (which he unsuccessfully attempted to smuggle through airport security). Marion’s exhibitionist sister (Alexia Landeau) likes to parade around the apartment in various stages of undress, and her perpetually baked boyfriend Manu (Alex Nahon) is nothing if not eccentric (these people are like The Out of Towners in reverse). And yes…much Franco-American culture-clash comic mayhem does ensue.

This all may look quite silly on paper; and granted, much of it is pure silliness. Compared to the previous film, there is some unevenness in the script; this could be attributable to the addition of co-writers Landeau and Nahon this time out. But still, for the most part, it works nicely, thanks to the charming Delpy’s ability to elicit consistent belly laughs, despite her tendency to vacillate from high-brow to low-brow (first rule of comedy: whatever works). It’s interesting to see Rock essentially play the straight man (although he still fires off some of the film’s funniest lines). While I think he is brilliant as a stand-up performer, I’ve found much of his previous film work off-putting (I suspect it was not so much a reflection on his abilities as it was his choice of projects). He’s very good here, projecting a more appealing screen presence by just reining it in a bit. Vincent Gallo has a hilarious cameo (playing himself…and parodying himself) that doubles as a satirical jab at art poseurs. OK, so it isn’t Annie Hall, but this is about as close as you’ll get in 2012.

 Previous posts with related themes:
 Midnight in Paris

 Saturday Night at the Movies film archive

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It seems as though progressives are always yammering on about “messaging” and “narratives” but to my ears it often ends up sounding strained and inauthentic when they get down to specifics. I’m not indicting anyone in particular, but as someone who does think that words and arguments matter, it’s a bit frustrating. And as anyone who reads this blog knows, I truly loathe all the metaphors politicians and pundits commonly use to describe our economy and the government functions that affect it. So, I was pleasantly surprised to read this new book by Anat Shenker-Osorio called Don’t Buy It: The Trouble with Talking Nonsense about the Economy and finally see someone explain why all the metaphors and narratives we currently use are all wrong and then suggest some new ones that might actually work.

In the forward she discusses my most hated trope — the “sacrifice” theme — which she ties, rightly, to religious rites and themes of human sacrifice. And she dissects all the common economic metaphors such as the economy as an (ailing) body that needs to be brought back to good health, the economy as a natural element like weather or water, and the economy as a moral enforcer. All of these elements imply that “the economy” is actually some sort of deity that we must worship and/or accept but never question or interfere with. She tackles all those themes with progressive definitions of what the economy is and what it’s function in our lives does. This isn’t stern daddy/nurturant parent “ways of knowing” stuff but more practical approaches to how to talk and think about these issues outside the narrow confines of conservative Luntzian discourse.

And then to demonstrate how to put these ideas into action she suggests four audacious policies that take the discourse and really turn it on its head:

Create less work for each and more for all (by work sharing)
Base what you owe in student loans on what you make
Ensuring the right to live in your house
Make manufacturing inequality expensive

All of these are radical ideas within our current cramped political options. But they didn’t come out of thin air. Shenker-Osorio cites many economists and academics as well as real world examples of where it works to back up her arguments. I particularly like the last one: adjust the corporate tax rate to the ration of CEO pay to the average worker. If these guys want to continue to pay giant salaries to themselves while they screw their workers, the company is going to have to pay a premium so that society can pick up the slack. Maybe the shareholders are fine with that. And maybe they aren’t …

It’s also a fun and savvy read, unlike some of he other books of this genre, full of accessible pop culture references and vivid imagery. I’m sure I’ll be using some of these concepts in my writing. It’s vitally important to challenge the (highly successful) conservative shaping of our discourse over the past 30+ years and this book has a bunch of really good ideas about how to start doing that. If you’re interested in this subject, I recommend it.

Also, for those in LA, Anat will be appearing at the Last Bookstore at 3pm tomorrow for a book signing.

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A massive crime against this nation by the 1%

by David Atkins

As we watch Republicans claim that tax cuts for the rich are the only way to stimulate the economy, and both parties cower before the Bond Vigilantes, it’s important to remember this:

The fact that the Dow is at over 13,500 but unemployment remains above 8% is proof of a massive crime against this nation by the 1%. It may be “legal” crime, but it’s a crime nonetheless.

American corporations are doing just fine, amassing record profits. The American people are not, enduring continuing economic pain. That alone should destroy the entire conservative and neoliberal economic program. It has no functional basis for continuing to exist except to benefit the very richest among us.

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