Month: March 2013

Your Daily Grayson

by digby

The Other 98% released a video on YouTube Tuesday evening, showcasing Grayson’s efforts to bring light to hundreds of thousands of Americans in favor of repealing sequestration. Grayson delivered a petition signed by 300,000 individuals directly to House Speaker John Boehner’s office. While Boehner was not present, the message was said to have been passed along.

I realize this is considered to be in the realm of fantasy by beltway insiders, but I don’t think it’s any more of a fantasy than any other of the surreal policies that have become policy in the last few years. The idea that the only possible choices here are to cut entitlements and raise taxes or continue with the sequester is utter nonsense. They can cancel these cuts and come up with a real budget that makes sense. And it’s not as impossible as they think. There are constituents out there in the land who are being hurt by these cuts, from small town businessmen to huge military contractors.  At some point that pressure is going to be brought to bear and these people will have a choice to make. And it would be really nice if the only plan the Democrats really had on the table didn’t throw old and sick people on the pyre.

The sequester was a bad idea, particularly once the Democrats allowed it to be decoupled from the expiration of the Bush tax cuts. Just cancel it and start over. No more Grand Bargains no more deficit obsession, just a budget.  I honestly don’t think it’s any more out of the realm of possibility than anything else — as long as the Democrats don’t panic.

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Young conservatives “discuss” climate change

by David Atkins

Mike Stark, amateur journalist and documentarian, caught up with a few young conservatives at CPAC and asked them about climate change. Here’s what happened:

What’s remarkable about this is that until the end, each and every one of them simply insisted one of three things: 1) it’s a liberal conspiracy that doesn’t exist; 2) it’s a good thing because it’s cold outside; or 3) there must be some “free market” solution out there somewhere.

Not a single person could come up with a remotely “conservative” answer to what to do about climate change.

That’s because, frankly, there isn’t one and they know it. That’s true of many things, of course, but in the case of climate change it’s so patently obvious that no “free market” conservative approach exists to deal with the problem that it becomes an existential threat to conservative philosophy.

It’s not just Koch money that prevents Republicans from coming to terms with climate change. If they ever did, it would be a tacit admission that their entire ideology is a failed fraud.

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Your moment of zen: shoe edition

by digby

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“The doctor has ordered a very large chill pill”

by digby

Jared Bernstein has posted some very important information that one can only hope both the White House and the Democrats are aware of and prepared to change direction because of.  It shows that our runaway medical costs are actually slowing down and he posits that there’s good reason to believe that it’s permanent rather than transitory:

My colleague Paul Van de Water recently noted that CBO’s 10-year forecasts for the growth of Medicare and Medicaid have come down by $500 billion relative to those from a few years ago. We don’t yet know whether any of this will last—whether we’re looking at another “whoops” moment. But because the initiatives ticked off above are targeted at changing highly inefficient incentives embedded in the delivery system, using technology to improve productivity (which typically lowers costs), and providing better oversight, they certainly have the potential to be lasting. And remember, while the recession is surely playing some role in recent cost savings, that role is surely less pronounced in Medicare and hospital readmissions.

So my guess is there’s something lasting going on here, and that means the doctor has just prescribed a very large chill pill for those who want to whack away at Medicare and Medicaid and CHIP because “they’re going bankrupt…bankrupt I tell you!” They’re not, and our energies would be much better spent on careful research on the factors behind these recent cost trends and how we can build on them. The goal is not to diminish these extremely valuable programs. It’s to ehhance their efficiency so as to ensure that they remain a solid part of American social policy.

Read the whole thing for the details.But the upshot is that we have just enacted a bunch of reforms to the system that are having an impact. Who knows if it will work over the long term, but the idea that we need to slash the hell out of our “entitlements” before all the data is in, is just daft. In fact, this whole discussion has been daft from the beginning. From the idea that austerity was a good idea in a downturn to the idea that we would make major changes to our health care system and then fail to see how they work before deciding that costs are too high, this rush to deficit cutting has been a disaster.

As Bernstein says, our leaders need to take a chill pill. We need to take a break from all the unnecessary Grand Bargaining and all the politicians need get out of this rut of thinking the world will end if they don’t cut spending. Obama’s legacy is going to be Obamacare. He doesn’t need the grand bargain, it was always stupid. And if Obamacare succeeds in reducing the deficit as Bernstein’s chart indicates may be happening, he can take credit for that too. That’s a lot. It’s enough.

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Centrist Democrats refuse to cash in on the GOP’s biggest weakness

by David Atkins

Greg Sargent, in addition to generally knowing what’s going on around Washington better than most pundits, also has a way of distilling what many of us already know into easily digestible conclusions. Today he makes the excellent point that while the public generally wants to curb deficits, they don’t agree with Republicans on how to do that:

Republicans know they can’t abandon the Ryan fiscal vision because the right won’t let them — and because they just don’t want to — and they also know that they can’t talk about its specifics, either. Instead, they must stress only the general goal of balancing the budget, and on savaging Dems for not being willing to balance it.

What this gets back to is a basic truism about American politics, one that favors Republicans in some ways, and not in others: The public favors the idea of getting government spending under control in the abstract — hence the support for “balancing the budget” — but broadly disagrees with Republicans on the specifics of how to accomplish this. The new “balanced budget” strategy is explicitly designed to get around this problem by emphasizing the general idea of spending cuts rather than the Ryan plan’s specifics. But there is no willingness to rethink the party’s basic priorities to deal with it.

The political fault lines in the traditional press tend to be drawn between Democrats who want to maintain social programs at the expense of deficit spending, and Republicans who want to slash deficits at the expense of the social programs. This, of course, is far from the truth. There are plenty of Democrats who are obsessed with curbing deficits even if it means cuts to Social Security and Medicare. The President is among them.

Regular readers of this blog know that neither Digby nor I believe that deficits are actually that big a problem. But what if Democrats didn’t have to make a choice between appearing insouciant about deficits and maintaining social programs?

As it turns out, of course, we don’t. The Budget for All (formerly the People’s Budget) balances the budget while doing what poll after poll shows the public really wants: improving social spending while making corporations and the wealthy pay their fair share again.

If the conversation stops being about who wants to balance the budget and who doesn’t–or worse, just what proportion of Social Security and Medicare cuts will be “needed” to curb the deficit–and starts being just about the way we get there, Republicans will be in even bigger trouble than they already are.

All it would take is enough Democrats willing to buck against corporate contributors and the wealthy parents their kids go to school with.

That shouldn’t be all that hard. Money talks in politics, but not loudly enough to drown the awful, unpopular noise of the Ryan budget.

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Dark thoughts about “Shock and Awe”


by digby

In looking back over my posts from the early days of the Iraq invasion, I’m still struck by how little we really knew or understood about the reasons for the war. We all knew the official reasoning was nonsense — the inspectors had found nothing and the administration pulled them out. But why?

I speculated a lot, as did everyone, and it’s interesting to see what we were all thinking. This was the time of “Shock and Awe” and I had some dark thoughts about why they decided to destroy the country in order to save it:

Seeing The Forest quotes Drudge today : 


THE BLITZ, THEN SIEGE OF BAGHDAD STARTS IN FOUR DAYS: Troops hope to have Saddam Hussein surrounded in Baghdad within four days after an unprecedented aerial blitz which will obliterate one in 10 major buildings in Iraq… Developing… 


He then comments: 

This fits with one of these rumors we have been hearing — that the Iraq war is happening because the right wingers want to demonstrate America’s superior power to the world. They want to show the world what we can do to anyone that opposes us.

Destroying one of every ten major buildings in Iraq? Because we think Iraq might attack us someday? Because, as Bush said in his speech last night, they might attack us in five years?

I might add that there now appears to be several other very important reasons to destroy one in ten buildings in Baghdad: 


Bechtel 
Halliburton 
Fluor 
Parsons 
LBG 
etc 


These are American owned international construction firms. In a move so cynical and so audacious that it is hard to wrap your arms around, it would appear that the Bush administration is preparing to destroy the infrastructure of an entire country and then repay their largest campaign contributors with huge no-bid contracts to rebuild it. 


And, happily for all concerned, these companies — operating outside the onerous regulatory climate of the United States — can cut corners to their hearts content while obscenely overbilling the government by the billions, all under the fog of war. And nobody pays any taxes at all! 


It’s not all about oil. It’s simpler than that. It’s just all about money.Big Business spent over 100 million dollars installing the idiot sock-puppet to do its bidding and he is doing it — not that he, or even many of those surrounding him probably know it explicitly. He thinks he’s been ordained by God and some others are sincere, if deluded, in their belief that the best thing for the world is American “benevolent hegemony,” however oxymoronic that is in the context of “Shock and Awe.” Being generous one could say that those neocon idealists like William Kristol, who laid out the positive vision for the Pax Americana, are the most useful idiots the corporatists could have ever dreamed of. 


The real question now is whether the businesses who own the Bush administration are thinking long term or short term. Do they value stability and predictablity to protect their long term investments or are they modern quick hit artists? If it is the latter then we are led back to the corporate scandals and find that the scariest aspect of this is that Bush’s single most enthusiastic big money supporter was a company built on a foundation of quicksand — Enron. 


It’s bad enough that the powers behind the throne are ruthless enterprises that care nothing for democratic institutions. What if the truth is that the modern American crony-run operations that really call the shots are not only undemocratic but incompetent as well? It’s literally the worst of all possible worlds.

It’s amazing how the threads of all the crises of the last decade all weave together isn’t it?

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Thank you Bernie

by digby

…. for saying it:

Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein came to Capitol Hill this week to call for cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. As Congress and the White House are negotiating a year-end deficit deal, Blankfein sought to “lower people’s expectations” about their retirement and health care. He spoke with all the sympathy for someone struggling to get by on $14,000-a-year retirement that you’d expect from a Wall Street banker paid $16 million last year.

“Think about the arrogance of these guys on Wall Street who were bailed out by the middle class of this country when their greed and recklessness nearly destroyed the financial system and now they come to Capitol Hill to lecture Congress and the American people about the need to cut programs for working families,” Sen. Bernie Sanders said in a Senate floor speech.

BLANKFEIN FACTS: Lloyd Blankfein was paid $16.1 million in 2011, a 14 percent increase while earnings fell 47 percent  »

During the financial crisis, Goldman Sachs received a total of $814 billion in virtually zero interest loans from the Federal Reserve and a $10 billion bailout from the U.S. Treasury  »

Goldman Sachs received a $278 million refund from the IRS in 2008, even though it earned a profit of $2.3 billion that year 

Also too, this:

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Ten years on: Remember the Rally for America?

by digby

I suppose that most of us on the left side of the dial recall the numerous giant protests against the Iraq war.  Many of us probably participated.  But I wonder how many of us remember this:

In Pennsylvania, a police-estimated crowd of 6,000 attended the “Rally for America,” held on a field near Valley Forge National Historical Park, about 2o miles northwest of Philadelphia.

Rick Moody, 57, of Souderton, Pa., said he hopes American troops preparing for war with Iraq will get more support than troops did during the Vietnam War.

“If and when hostilities start, we should be unified,” Moody said. “And we’re the most anti-war people you can get.”

Chicago protesters also hoisted American flags.

“We are concerned with all of God’s children. And for all of those who question our patriotism: We love America because America is a place where when things are out of order, people can disagree and protest,” said Rev. Calvin Morris of Chicago’s Community Renewal Society.

The Chicago and Valley Forge rallies capped a weekend of nation-and worldwide protests, including one in Washington that park officials permitted for 20,000 people and appeared larger than that. Protesters in Portland, Ore., held a rally of similar proportions. Rally-goers sang patriotic songs and helped raise a gigantic American flag before reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.

These “rallies for America” were cited all over the news that day ten years ago as a counter point to the anti-war marches. But there was a little difference that nobody mentioned:

They look like spontaneous expressions of pro-war sentiment, “patriotic rallies” drawing crowds of tens of thousands across the American heartland.
In a counterpoint to anti-war demonstrations, supporters of war in Iraq have descended on cities from Fort Wayne to Cleveland, and Atlanta to Philadelphia. They wave flags, messages of support for the troops – and also banners attacking liberals, excoriating the UN, and in one case, advising: “Bomb France Now.”

But many of the rallies, it turns out, have been organised and paid for by Clear Channel Inc – the country’s largest radio conglomerate, owning 1,200 stations – which is not only reporting on the war at the same time, but whose close links with President Bush stretch back to his earliest, much-criticised financial dealings as governor of Texas. The company has paid advertising costs and for the hire of musicians for the rallies.

Tom Hicks, Clear Channel’s vice-chairman, is a past donor to Bush’s political campaigning. The two were at the centre of a scandal when Mr Bush was governor and when Mr Hicks chaired a University of Texas investment board that awarded large investment-management contracts to several companies close to the Bush family – including the Carlyle Group, on whose payroll Mr Bush had been until weeks previously, and which still retains his father.

“Should this be happening? No,” said Dante Chinni, a senior associate with the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a Columbia University programme based in Washington. “What kind of company is Clear Channel? What’s their mission? Are they a media company, a promotional company? For some people, Clear Channel’s reporting, for want of a better word, may be the reporting that they’re getting on the war in Iraq.”

Amir Forester, a spokeswoman for Premiere Radio Networks, a subsidiary of Clear Channel, said the rallies – which the company calls “patriotic”, not “pro-war” – were the idea of Glenn Beck, a syndicated talk radio host.

It was a good model. Fox took it up for the Tea Party.

On March 19, 2003 I wrote:

Now, let me get this straight. Celebrities are stepping out of bounds when they express political views opposing the President. But, large media companies sponsoring phony pro-military “rallies” replete with free flag swag is perfectly a-ok. Just trying to get the rules straight. 

“I think this is pretty extraordinary,” said former Federal Communications Commissioner Glen Robinson, who teaches law at the University of Virginia. “I can’t say that this violates any of a broadcaster’s obligations, but it sounds like borderline manufacturing of the news.”

No kidding. Perhaps the most interesting thing about this story is the fact that while rallies were extremely well covered this past week-end, they were presented as spontaneously growing up out of the pro-military grassroots. They were not portrayed as having corporate sponsorship and they certainly were not reported as being a product of a concerted talk radio campaign of right wing nut jobs and their GOP corporate masters. 


And I didn’t hear one journalist ask the obvious question of where they got all those damned flags! Somebody was handing them out and nobody asked who paid for them. More good work from the DeVry Institute School of spokesmodel journalism 


Clear Channel stations are still banning the Dixie Chicks, as well, with the full support of their parent company. Since they own vast numbers of radio stations, and already practice a form of legal payola that is rivaled only by the Mafia, we can consider this a “Luca Brazzi sleeps with the fishes” kind of message to the beleagered recording industry. 


Clear Channel plays Mighty Wurlitzer music only. And they are more than happy to pay for the privilege. 

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Balanced approach to balanced budgets: of course people think it’s a good idea.

by digby

Republicans have discovered that voters really like the idea of a “balanced budget” and are planning to run on it in the next election. People seem surprised by this for some reason:

The poll showed that 45 percent of Democratic voters think “balancing … the federal budget would significantly increase economic growth and create millions of American jobs.” A sky-high 61 percent of independents and 76 percent of Republicans agree.

But the data Republicans culled are much more granular than that.

Sixty-four percent of voters in Democratic-held districts — dubbed offensive districts by the NRCC — think balancing the budget creates a massive number of jobs. Swing district voters overwhelmingly agreed — to the tune of 62 percent. Fifty-seven percent of voters in Democratic districts represented by Republicans agree, as well.

It’s not only the broad idea of balancing the budget that’s a winner, but how Republicans want to do it also polls well. Seventy percent of voters in districts Republicans are targeting, and 67 percent of swing district voters support balancing the budget by reforming entitlements and cutting spending.

Hmmm, so voters think reforming “entitlements” and cutting spending will balance the budget and create jobs? By any chance could they be thinking that sounds like a “balanced approach”?

Obviously, since both parties treat deficit reduction like it is the holy grail, and the president has been saying this on a loop for about two years, it’s fairly natural that many people would assume that it must be required to revive our economy. Why else would they seek to do it when the economy is suffering? Whether or not it includes tax hikes is irrelevant. All they know is that everyone agrees that we must achieve “balance.” Even President Obama, who they trust and admire. (Wait, especially President Obama..)

The really good news is that the Democrats are likely to use this news as another scare tactic to allow them to move this along: they’ll say “it’s better if we cut your lifeline because we’ll be much gentler about it.” Don’t worry it’ll only hurt for a minute.

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Russia, Cyprus, the EU and the comedy of nation states

by David Atkins

Once upon a time there was a little country called Cyprus, an island located in the middle of a big sea. It had its problems and its wars, but it managed.

But there was also this very large called Russia. Russia had been controlled by an iron dictatorship that gave way very quickly to kleptocracy due to rapid privatization. Soon mobsters and anarcho-capitalists ruled this large country with little accountability.

The little country of Cyprus needed money, and the best way to get it was to open up its banks to all comers, like so many little countries and islands before it. So in came the Russian “capitalists” to fund the Cypriot banks.

Ah, but there was a little wrinkle. You see, the world’s banks had bitten off more risk than they could chew. The more a little country like Cyprus depended on is banks, the worse shape it was in once the Jenga tower of banking risk came crashing down.

Worse still, Cyprus had joined a confederation of nation states pegged to a single currency. So instead of being able to tell its bankers and Russian mobsters to eat their losses while the Cypriot people revalued their currency and took care of their people, the Cypriots were instead forced to ask their large neighbors to the north for help. And help did come–but with strings attached. The Cypriots had to make a few concessions the first time.

But it turns out that running an entire country on the back of a wholly corrupted financial system isn’t good for long-term prospects. So they needed help again.

At this point the big bad federation had a choice: they could attempt to leverage some of that multinational power to seize, freeze and redistribute the assets of the capitalist mobsters to the Cypriot or Russian people in a cooperative international venture. Or they could simply take a cut of every Cypriot bank account as a punitive tactic. They chose the last options. Which is interesting.

You see, the three oh-so-sovereign powers had some choices. Russia could have cracked down on the mobsters looting that great nation and sending the money offshore to Cyprus. But no. Cyprus could have told the EU it was leaving the Euro unless mob assets were frozen and a relatively small bailout for the real Cypriot people was given. And the EU could have chosen to take on the rich and powerful instead of the lashing out at average Cypriots.

But any of those options would have required taking on the power of multinational raiders on behalf of real people in the real economies of both their own and other nations. And as it turns out, nation-states are much more interested in protecting the riches of their wealthiest “citizens” than in doing the right thing by worldwide economies.

The world runs on an antiquated system destined for the dustbin. The situation in Cyprus is just the latest farce in this comedic cycle.

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