Month: October 2013

Disaster capitalism in full effect: using default Armageddon to gut earned benefits programs

by digby

I noted on twitter yesterday that Village elder Bob Woodward was on TV pimping his book called The Price of Politics which apparently calls for cuts to the so-called “entitlements”. John Amato documented the atrocity:

WOODWARD: In this book, you can see there are some ideas that they both have, believe it or not, that would be good for the country, be good for everyone. For instance, entitlement cuts.

TAPPER: Right. Everybody agrees that the current state of these social safety net programs is on an unsustainable path.

WOODWARD: Totally unsustainable. When I interviewed the president about this for the book, he said, oh, yes, it’s bad politics for Democrats but then he went on to say it’s untenable to not do this.

Now, how much have we cut or reformed entitlements in the Obama presidency? Zero. They need to get on with that task. This is where Paul Ryan, maybe has come up with a good idea.

TAPPER: Big bargain, yes.

WOODWARD: Yes — well, at least do some reform on entitlements and do something that’s really serious about tax reform. That’s what needs to be fixed.

I want to give a big shout-out to Jake Tapper, who is usually much more nuanced than this, for helping push the meme that “entitlements” are on an “unsustainable path”  — as if we’re careening into a disaster on these programs any minute.  At a time when we may be on the verge of a real economic cataclysm at the hands of lunatics, even discussing a bogus deficit “crisis” years down the road is truly destructive. In fact,  everyone should ask themselves why we would even be talking about this with average Americans economically struggling right this minute and the Republicans are threatening to default on the debt and send the world careening into chaos. It’s textbook disaster capitalism. You can look it up.

I guess we have to keep reminding people that SS is fine for another two decades and that “fixing” whatever shortfall might exist within the funding stream does not require benefits cuts. Indeed, we need to start looking at raising benefits because it just isn’t going to be enough as it is. (The idea of cutting desperately needed benefits for our own citizens so we can afford to continue to enrich the Military Industrial Complex is sickening.)

Also too: Medicare and other assorted health care costs are coming down and we should probably see if the health care reforms might just solve that problem too before we start slashing away with a meat-ax at medicare. And just for shits and giggles it might be worth a mention that the deficit projections are already plummeting due to the austerity that’s already been inflicted on the nation over the past few years and point out that the only thing that’s stopping it from dropping even more precipitously are the government policies that are holding back employment and economic growth.

Sigh. It look like deficit fever is spiked once again and everyone just gets delirious whenever it happens.

Anyway, Woodward must be awfully happy to see this:

Officials say House Republicans are offering to pass legislation to avert a default and end the partial government shutdown as part of a package that includes cuts in benefit programs.

Senior aides to Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor outlined the proposal at a late-night White House meeting Thursday with senior administration officials.

In addition to ending the shutdown and increasing the debt limit, the proposal includes an easing of the across-the-board spending cuts that began taking effect a year ago, and replacing them with curbs in benefit programs that Obama himself has backed.

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QOTD: Atrios

by digby

Why this isn’t a really a game:

The longer this shutdown goes on, the more chance that the just barely recovery reverses itself. It’s one thing to have a recession after a boom period, quite another to have a recession before there was really a recovery from the last one.

And, yes, I’m always negative about the economy, but, you know, 5 years later and unemployment is at 7.3%.

I’d just add that the real unemployment rate is actually around 10%.

Update:  Oh hey, look at this:

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Where’s the populist revolt, guys?

by digby

I assume by now that everyone’s seen the polls that show the GOP’s approval rating sinking like a thousand pound boulder.(There are others that show a less extreme reaction, but still quite bad.) Let’s just say that they haven’t exactly been wowing the public with their wily strategy to end Obamacare.

I cannot help but enjoy the squirming of certain right wing bloggers, attempting to come to terms with all this. This is from Allahpundit, via Andrew Sullivan:

The Cruz strategy for defunding (or delaying) ObamaCare was, as I understood it, to stand firm even if it meant a shutdown and then wait for public opposition to the law to build to the point where O would have no choice but to cave. The only two major polls about the health-care law that have been taken after the shutdown, though, show its unpopularity decreasing. Where’s the populist groundswell that’s supposedly going to make Obama blink? Would five polls prove that the strategy wasn’t working? Ten? We know how this theory of populist revolt could be confirmed, but how could it be falsified?

Lulz. Yeah, that’s a problem. I guess it never occurred to them that everybody with even half a working brain cell knew that the President would never agree to defund, delay or otherwise sabotage his signature piece of legislation. They have a majority in one house of congress which came about only as a result of gerrymandering. And yet they really thought there would be a populist uprising so strong it would force the president to abandon the major accomplishment of his administration. It’s nuts.

Cooler heads knew better. The question is whether or not they can get enough members of their own party to realize that their dream is dead and to take what they can get. Which is substantial.

They’re not there yet:

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) fired up the conservative crowd at Friday’s Values Voter Summit, painting the fight over ObamaCare as a battle for basic freedom and calling on Republicans to redouble their efforts to end the program.

Speaking without notes and walking around the stage, Cruz warned that the Obama administration wants to “violate every single one of our Bill of Rights” and attacked establishment Republicans for refusing to take up the fight.

“We can’t keep going down the road much longer. We’re nearing the edge of a cliff, and our window to turn things around I don’t think is long — I don’t think it’s 10 years,” he said.

Cruz warned “that train wreck, that disaster, that nightmare that is ObamaCare” must be stopped — and stopped now.

“If there is one overall strategy in Washington it is risk aversion,” Cruz said, mocking the Republicans who didn’t join his fight. “We went over their heads — to the American people.”

He asked the crowd to keep up the fight, dismissing media reports that his push to defund ObamaCare was hurting the Republican brand. He joked that The New York Times was already writing about Hillary Clinton’s second term.

“The greatest trick the left has ever played is to convince conservatives we cannot win. The media will tell us that believing in free market values, believing in the Constitution, believing in freedom are extreme views. It is a lie,” he exhorted to cheers.

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Waiting, waiting, waiting

by digby

So, this seems to be where we are right now:

Following the meeting at the White House last night, House Republicans sent over a framework on how to proceed that fundamentally mirrored their initial offer they presented President Obama in person.

The framework included a six-week debt ceiling increase, and details about a process to reach a larger budget agreement and discussion of negotiating a continuing resolution deal in the days to follow the temporary debt ceiling increase.

“The nature of the discussion is all around reasonable discussions to get the government open, raise the debt ceiling, and begin this process of negotiating,” says Chief Deputy Whip Peter Rosakm, who described the framework as “Lets do a temporary debt ceiling, then lets concentrate on the continuing resolution.”

It was sent at around 7:30pm and Republicans have not yet heard back from the White House.

As Appropriations Chairman Hal Rogers said last night, Obama objected to this plan because he wanted to focus first on reopening the government. However, GOP sources say that focus was premised on the belief, apparently mistaken, that resolution on a CR was not close at hand and the government could have stayed shut until Nov. 22, the new date at which the debt ceiling would need to be increased under the temporary extension.

Republicans say the meeting started poorly until House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan pleaded with Obama that he was missing a historic opportunity.

I heard Bob Casey on TV just now saying that they should agree to open the government at least until the end of the year. And he said they need to talk about reversing some of the sequestration cuts. When Sam Stein asked him if entitlements are on the agenda, he went to great lengths to now answer the question.

I actually think that’s a good sign. It means they know it’s a hot potato.

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Confirmation: it wasn’t 11th dimensional chess

by David Atkins

It’s good to see this out in the open:

Shortly before President Barack Obama was re-elected, he confided to John Podesta, an informal adviser, a vow he was making for his second term: He would never again bargain with Republicans to extend the U.S. debt limit.

The precedent, set in the agreement that ended a 2011 budget standoff, “sent a signal that this was fair game to blackmail over whether the country would default,” Podesta, a onetime chief of staff to President Bill Clinton and co-chairman of Obama’s 2008 presidential transition, said in an interview. “He feels like he has to end it and end it forever.”

The stand Obama has taken on the latest fight over the government shutdown and borrowing limit — refusing to tie policy conditions to raising the debt ceiling — is an attempt to repair some of the damage that he and his aides believe he sustained by making concessions to Republicans to avert a default two years ago, according to former top administration officials and advisers…

If Obama makes concessions again to House Republicans over raising the $16.7 trillion debt limit, “he’ll be viewed as a guy who you can hold up,” said Podesta, chairman of the Center for American Progress, a Washington research group with close ties to the administration.

Obama is surrounded by a core group of aides who are mostly veterans of the 2011 debt negotiations, which were followed by the first downgrade of U.S. government debt…

At the same time, a political breakdown that leads to a debt default carries greater risk over the long run for Obama than for the Republicans. An economic crisis that might tip the country back into recession would tarnish his presidency and the durability of his initiatives such as expanding health care to millions of uninsured Americans and pushing through the most sweeping changes in financial-market rules in seven decades.

“There’s a hell of a lot more at stake for the president of the United States,” said Leon Panetta, Obama’s former defense secretary and Central Intelligence Agency director. “Nobody remembers who was speaker of the House when we went into the Depression; everybody remembers who the president was.”

He added: “Presidents who are successful are ultimately presidents who are able to get it done, get beyond this crisis. We cannot be a country that is constantly facing crisis.”

This is a good thing. People make mistakes, and it’s all for the better when they learn from them. Whether one believes that the President actively wants to cut earned benefits or not is irrelevant to the question of whether negotiating budget issues in the face of a debt ceiling crisis is a good idea.

It isn’t. It wasn’t, and the President acknowledges that. One can wonder why this wasn’t obvious to him and his advisers at the time when so many of us were loudly pointing it out, or why they didn’t apply the same lesson learned from 2011 to the sequester battle of January 2013. But so be it. It’s the sign of a good leader to be able to learn from mistakes and make corrections.

But let’s all stop pretending that the President was playing 11th dimensional chess in 2011. He wasn’t. He wanted a grand bargain on the deficit (wrongly) and he thought the debt ceiling negotiations would be a good time to get it. That was an even bigger error that emboldened Republicans and put the nation at risk. Those of us who called it an error were right, his defenders were wrong, and the President is now admitting that and acting on it–much to his credit.

Which makes him, ironically, a far bigger adult and smarter person than those who pretend he’s always the biggest adult and smartest person in the room.

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Moment of zen

by digby

Three speakers at August’s pitiful Ex-Gay Pride rally recently appeared on a podcast, Deeper Waters, to explain how ex-gays in America like themselves are just like the Jews living under Nazi Germany. Deeper Waters hosted PFOX’s Greg Quinlan, Douglas McIntyre of Homosexuals Anonymous and Grace Harley, who says she is ex-transgender.

“The Lord brought to me the Jewish Holocaust in my prayer time and it brought tears to my eyes, because He said, ‘as the Jewish people were being victimized, demonized, demonized to the point that all the Germans and all the people started believing and accepting it, guess what folks? That’s happening here in America,” Harley said, with Quinlan in agreement. “Ex-gay people like myself — we are being so demonized and hated and this is your God they’re hating.”

I guess somebody forgot to tell Harley that Hitler rounded up gays and sent to concentration camps too … Ooops.

Oh, and then there’s this:

Harvey said that Obama has “homosexual orientation tendencies,” proving that we are in the Last Days: “The spirit will not dwell with us too much longer because we truly are in the End Times. Any time you have the head of a country with homosexual orientation tendencies, and I say that because Jesus said, ‘if you look at a woman with lust you have committed adultery,’ if you have the heart of the homosexual in your heart and your mind then you are without even committing the act, you are there.

Not that there would be anything wrong with obama being gay but you know … he isn’t. But hey, Ann Coulter said Bill Clinton was gay so this really isn’t all that bizarre by right wing standards:

DEUTSCH: Off the air, you were talking about Bill Clinton. Is there anything you want to say about Clinton?

COULTER: No.

DEUTSCH: No? OK. All right. Did you find him attractive? Is that what it was?

COULTER: No!

DEUTSCH: You don’t find him attractive?

COULTER: No. OK, fine, I’ll say it on air.

DEUTSCH: Most women find him attractive.

COULTER: No.

DEUTSCH: OK, say it on air.

COULTER: I think that sort of rampant promiscuity does show some level of latent homosexuality.

DEUTSCH: OK, I think you need to say that again — that Bill Clinton, you think, on some level has — is a latent homosexual. Is that what you’re saying?

COULTER: Yeah. I mean that sort of just completely anonymous — I don’t know if you read the Starr Report. The rest of us were glued to it. I have many passages memorized.

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Boehner bong hits

by digby

In case you were wondering why John Boehner seems to be just a little bit more mellow these days, perhaps it’s because he’s spending time with his new son-in-law and maybe getting a little green therapy (and I’m not talking about the toxic strain called Republican Greedhead.)

The daughter of House Speaker John Boehner tied the knot over the weekend with her Jamaican-born love, who was once busted for marijuana possession. Lindsay Boehner, 35, and 38-year-old Dominic Lakhan wed Friday evening in Delray Beach, Fla. Lakhan was reportedly arrested in 2006 when Florida cops found 4 grams of pot in his ashtray after a routine traffic stop.

Lakhan, wearing a dapper gray suit and sporting dreadlocks extending to his waist, exchanged vows with Boehner at a small bed-and-breakfast as the bride’s straight-laced Republican father and another 80 guests looked on. Lakhan’s new father-in-law is an observant Catholic, a strict conservative and an opponent of marijuana legalization.

I don’t know if Rastafari belief* is considered to be an acceptable “Judeo-Christian” religion among the religious right, but from the length of his dreds, this fellow appears to be a true believer:

I think it’s kind of great, personally. The daughter of the Republican Speaker of the House marrying a Jamaican Rastafarian is a testament to American progress. I do have to wonder how rank and file conservatives feel about this, however. They tend to be less enthusiastic about such exotic mixed families.

*The Rastafari movement is actually not a religion. It’s a spiritual ideology.
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Ryan’s Hope

by digby

Robert Costa is probably the best political reporter with sources inside the GOP. He just reported this out:

According to my sources, the House is poised to pass a six-week extension of the debt ceiling. One member of the leadership team says he’s “increasingly optimistic” that when the bill comes to the floor in the coming days, it’ll have significant Republican support. The ease of passage, he adds, can mostly be credited to Paul Ryan, the budget committee chairman, who has played a major, but low-key role in the GOP’s internal deliberations.

For weeks, instead of getting heavily involved in the shutdown talks, Ryan has worked on the edges, focusing on Ways and Means Committee meetings and floor huddles. During these sessions, he has urged his colleagues to support his push for broader fiscal talks, even if they were uncomfortable with tabling parts of their Obamacare agenda. Initially, it wasn’t an easy sell, but eventually many conservatives began to buy in. They didn’t like Ryan’s pitch, which asked them to lower certain expectations during divided government, but they slowly agreed with him that their dug-in position was unlikely to yield much.

By earlier this week, Ryan’s allies tell me a group of nearly 150 House Republicans had confided to Ryan or the leadership that they were coming around on the debt ceiling; if he’d lead talks on tax reform and entitlement reform, they’d give him the leadership their blessing. After weeks of seeing a debt-ceiling standoff as the only “conservative option,” Ryan had quietly ushered them away from that strategy and toward a longer endgame. His Wall Street Journal op-ed gave his cause even more momentum.

That factor was an important one this morning when Speaker John Boehner unveiled his plan for a six-week extension. Ryan’s dogged, behind-the-scenes efforts, plus a shift by conservative groups to fight chiefly on the continuing resolution, created an atmosphere of acceptance for Boehner’s proposal. Ryan had made Boehner’s plan palatable, days before it was floated.

We don’t know what’s going to happen, obviously. The meeting between the GOP leaders and the White House just ended with reports that the WH told them no dice unless they open the government first. The White House put out this statement:

RT @ZekeJMiller: BREAKING WH readout of Obama-GOP meeting pic.twitter.com/rJMcoDYlpb
— Joseph Weisenthal (@TheStalwart) October 10, 2013

The NY Times says the president told them to take a hike.  But it also writes this:

Despite the president’s decision, the House Republican offer represented a significant breakthrough. Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, said Republicans were now willing to go to formal negotiations with Senate Democrats over a long-term, comprehensive budget framework, a move Republicans have resisted since April. And while House Republicans are divided over even a short-term increase in the debt ceiling, Representative Tim Griffin, Republican of Arkansas, said the proposal would pass with Republican and Democratic votes.

Robert Costa reports that the GOP sees it going down like this:

In other words, House GOP ready to pass 6-wk ext, see if WH comes around as deadline nears…
— Robert Costa (@robertcostaNRO) October 10, 2013

Costa also tweeted that the GOP thinks the White House said no because they don’t think the GOP can muster the votes. Obviously, the Republicans think they can. And then they think the ball is in the Democrats’ court to temporarily raise the debt ceiling  — or let the country go into default.

Isn’t this fun?

Update:

Ok, things are looking a little bit more clear.  I’m not sure where the NY Times got its info but apparently, it wasn’t exactly …. right.  Anyway, here’s JOnathan Strong’s reports from the GOP side:

A group of key House Republicans came out of a meeting with President Obama, Vice President Biden and Treasury Secretary Jack Lew saying aides to both parties would begin negotiations this evening over a CR to end the government shutdown.

“The president didn’t say yes, didn’t say no. We’re continuing to negotiate this evening,” House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan told reporters.

Speaker John Boehner presented Obama the plan he announced to the conference this morning for a short-term debt ceiling increase to allow time for budget negotiations.

But Obama and White House officials objected over the need to first pass a bill to open the government.

“I think it’s clear that he would like to have the shut down stopped, and that would require a CR. And we’re trying to find out what he would insist upon in a CR and what we would insist upon in a CR,” said Hal Rogers, chairman of the Appropriations Committee.

Leadership and appropriations committee staffers will begin the talks this evening, but it’s unclear whether the talks, over the continuing resolution, will include negotiations over reforms to Obamacare.

The health care law was not discussed “in any substantive way. It was mentioned a couple of times,” Rogers said.

I’m going to guess that the leadership is whispering in the tea partiers ears that Obamacare will definitely be on the agenda when they get down to these “talks.” But it’s just a guess.

But it looks to me as if we might just get a temporary reprieve on the debt limit and reopen the government. And then they’ll get down to some serious horse-trading in the lead up to the next debt ceiling vote. Which will be totally unrelated to the debt ceiling, needless to say…

Keep in mind that the current CR, if it ever gets passed, will expire in 6 weeks as well. I’d guess the president would like to see that sword of Damocles lifted. (Perhaps an agreement to let it run for a year? Unfortunately, that would likely be at these hideous sequester levels …)

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Six Week Makeover

by digby

It looks like Boehner got some cover to extend the debt limit for six weeks from the leaders of his party:

The conservative wing that has led Republicans into a government shutdown and to the brink of default has given its blessing to Speaker John Boehner’s (R-OH) proposal unveiled Thursday to lift the debt ceiling for six weeks.

Arch-conservative lawmakers like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-OH) and Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) quickly backed the plan. Outside groups like Heritage Action and activist Erick Erickson of RedState said they wouldn’t go after Republicans who voted for it. These conservatives have been calling the shots for the GOP during these crises.
[…]
The logic is these conservatives want the GOP to keep fighting to unwind Obamacare in a continuing resolution, or CR, to reopen the many federal services that closed on Oct. 1. They believe the CR is the better venue to fight the battle. It is a retreat after they initially insisted on extracting policy concessions for any hike in the country’s borrowing limit ahead of the Oct. 17 deadline — a sign that they view the shutdown as a lesser political risk for pressuring Democrats to accede to conservative reforms.

I don’t know how they expect that to happen but I’m going to guess that John Boehner will be happy to let them think this will work in order to delay a default and try to come up with some kind of a human sacrifice that will either bring them back from the edge of the cliff or at least persuade a majority of the caucus to take a chance on defying the terrorists. It’s quite a delicate game.

Meanwhile, it would appear they are going to refuse to re-open the government which the White House is saying is a non-starter, but which everyone assumes they’ll go along with if it means avoiding the worldwide economic chaos of a default on the debt. And in any case it’s smart for the White House to pretend to hate this deal and be fighting it every step of the way lest the Republicans balk simply because the White House wants it. (That’s how they roll.)

So, here we are. With wingnut Don Quixotes’ twisted logic saving us from catastrophe:

“It seems the GOP has taken a hint and will continue the fight on Obamacare by punting the debt ceiling discussion six weeks to Thanksgiving,” RedState’s Erickson wrote in a blog post. “But we must keep the fight on Obamacare. If the CR and debt ceiling were combined, we could not hold the line. This now lets us hold the line and get the conversation back to Obamacare.”

… and liberal pundits rejoicing about the government shutdown that saved the world economy.

Is it too early to start drinking?

Update: it occurs to me that this is the perfect place to link to Perlstein’s excellent piece today on Republican goal post moving:

Some thoughts today on the apocalyptic horror that envelops us this week, thanks to our friends on the right. Last week I noted that conservatives are time-biders: “The catacombs were good enough for the Christians,” as National Review publisher William Rusher put it in 1960. That’s their imperative as they see it: hunker down, for decades if need be, waiting for the opportune moment to strike down the wickedness they spy everywhere—in this case, a smoothly functioning federal government. “My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years,” Grover Norquist said in the first part of the quote, whose more famous second half is “to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”

Twenty-five years. Given that sedulous long-termism, conservatives are also, it is crucial to understand, inveterate goalpost-movers—fundamentally so. Whenever an exasperated liberal points out that the basic architecture of the Affordable Care Act matches a plan drawn up by the Heritage Foundation in the 1990s, I feel a stab of exasperation myself—with my side. Theirs is not a clinching argument, or even a good argument. It means nothing to point out to conservatives that Heritage once proposed something like Obamacare. The Heritage plan was a tactic of a moment—a moment that required something to fill in the space to the right of President Clinton’s healthcare plan, an increment toward the real strategic goal of getting the government out of the healthcare business altogether… someday.

I am never more exasperated than when Barack Obama makes such arguments. He loves them! This week it was his observation, “The bill that is being presented to end the government shutdown reflects Republican priorities.” So why can’t they see reason?

Never mind the damage such pronouncements do to the president’s status as a negotiator, a point we’ve all discussed to death, though I’ll reiterate it anyway: even when Obamaism wins on its own terms, it loses, ratifying Republican negotiating positions as common sense. As that same conservative theorist William Rusher also put it, the greatest power in politics is “the power to define reality.” As I wrote last year, “Obama never attempts that. Instead, he ratifies his opponent’s reality, by folding it into his original negotiating position. And since the opponent’s preferred position is always further out than his own, even a ‘successful’ compromise ends up with the reality looking more like the one the Republicans prefer. A compromise serves to legitimize.”

Read the whole thing. Please. I beg you.

Well, just one more little taste:

I’ll close today with another quick gripe: the one about Democrats’ “winning” this hostage-taking horror show because the Republicans now have a 28 percent approval rating, lower than during the shutdowns in the mid-1990s. Well, in 1975, only 18 percent of Americans were willing to call themselves “Republicans.” Internally, the talk was whether the party should change its name. George Will said visiting Republican National Committee headquarters was like visiting “the set for a political disaster flick, a political Poseidon Adventure.” The bank holding the mortgage on the Capitol Hill Club, the private retreat where Republicans took their refreshment, was threatening to foreclose on the place. The party’s pollster, Robert Teeter, explained that a majority of Americans considered Republicans “untrustworthy and incompetent.” A desperate RNC commissioned a series of three TV programs called Republicans Are People Too!, which ended with a pitch for contributions. The second episode cost $124,000 to produce. It brought in $5,515. The announced third episode never ran.

They came back in 1978—too late for the political scientist Everett Carll Ladd to save face, for his book Where Have All the Voters Gone? had just come out, arguing, “The GOP is in a weaker position than any major party of the U.S. since the Civil War…. We are dealing with a long-term secular shift, not just an artifact of Watergate. The Republicans have lost their grip on the American establishment, most notably among young men and women of relative privilege. They have lost it, we know, in large part because the issue orientations which they manifest are somewhat more conseravtive than the stratem favors. The party is especially poorly equipped in style and tone to articulate the frustrations of the newly emergent American petit bourgeoisie—southern, white Protestant, Catholic, black and the like.”

They did pretty good in 1980, too. Don’t gloat.

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Oldest story in the book

by digby

Here’s a cartoon from the 1940s. Dire warning because the national debt was in the BILLIONS. pic.twitter.com/DKgcUZjOfI
— Stephanie Kelton (@StephanieKelton) October 10, 2013

By the way, if you aren’t following Stephanie Kelton on twitter you are missing out on important information. This is one of those “teachable moments”  — if we listen to the right teachers.

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