Month: December 2013

Free of racism at last, TGAWFAL

by digby

Bless their hearts …

Today we remember Rosa Parks’ bold stand and her role in ending racism. pic.twitter.com/uxIj1QmtkU
— RNC (@GOP) December 1, 2013

Think Progress points out that the celebration of the end of racism may be a tad premature:

Some research contends that “racism cost the president more than five million votes in 2008 and 2012″ and a 2012 survey from the Associated Press found that “51 percent of Americans explicitly express anti-black prejudice, up from 48 percent in 2008.” The survey concluded that 79 percent of Republicans are likely to express outright racial prejudice, compared to 32 percent of Democrats.

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Seeking rents and magic misdirection

by digby

In the post below, David asks an interesting question:

Trickle-down economics is a known and proven failure. The experience of record stock market highs, record corporate profits, low effective tax rates and record income inequality in the context of a stagnant economy is all the proof anyone should need that the conservative theory of economics is a sweeping failure.

So why does it still constitute a valid opinion in the public square, even as creationism and climate denialism are increasingly laughed out of it?

He answers it with the fundamental truth that for a lot of people, government is seen as a simple tool to take their money and give it to people who don’t “deserve” it. I’d certainly agree that that’s how these ideas are sold to the people — by appealing to their baser natures.

But what’s really going on? It’s hard to believe the financial industry and the 1% see it in these simple terms? Not that they don’t believe wholeheartedly in their own moral superiority and the idea that their work ethic and contributions to the economy are so much greater than the polloi that they have earned their vast reserves of wealth.

But there must be more to it, right? They must have a reason for their dedication to austerity. And that reason is simple greed: the government is competing with them for “insurance” dollars. They are rent seekers and every time the government provides a service efficiently and at lower cost, it takes the provision of that “service” away from a private entity that could make a profit at it. All the propaganda about government being the problem and the private sector being the solution is in service of creating wealth for the rent-seekers. Obviously.

And by the way, guess who’s out there right now, helping them do it?

“While there is more work to be done, the team is operating with private sector velocity and effectiveness, and will continue their work to improve and enhance the website in the weeks and months ahead,” the administration wrote in a report outlining its success.

Here’s Chuck Todd and the Villagers, earning their money:

 

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

And we wonder where people get those crazy ideas? (Never mind that it was the private sector that fucked this up in the first place.) But if nothing else, the way the health care reforms are of huge benefit to the rent-seekers while simultaneously perpetuating the myth that the government is inept proves the point. They are very good at this one thing.

Anyway, there is a great deal of money to be skimmed by financial wizards and insurance company share-holders from health and pension programs. Everybody needs them. They’ve already managed to grab hold of virtually all the private pension management in this country and all that’s left is Social Security. By starving it of funds, they hope to force more and more people to put money into market based schemes from which they can siphon off even more profit. They see every penny the government extracts for the common good as stealing from them their rightful share.

So, there’s that, which most of you already know. However, I had not thought of this more recent rationale for their behavior, although it seems obvious now that I think of it:

Via the false deficit hysteric narrative of government’s fallibility, liability, and potential insolvency, Wall Streeters and those who identify with them attempt to distance themselves from the bubble-prone, leverage-dependent nature of their business and exonerate the Wall Street perpetrators of financial mayhem and distract from the systematic fraud at the heart of the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2008. While there were and are calls for holding Wall Street accountable and restructuring the private securities business along the lines of the Glass Steagall Act of 1933, the deficit hysteria campaign has been counter-propaganda aimed at the would-be prosecutor and regulator of Wall Street, the US federal government. The moral and political outrage that should have been directed largely at Wall Street and its enablers in government, was instead diverted or countered by the falsely-premised, “fiscal responsibility” discourse.

That’s an excerpt from these two essays by Michael Hoexter at New Economic Perspectives, both of which are well worth reading.

It was always somewhat inexplicable to me that Wall Street was unable to see that it was killing its own golden goose over the long haul by failing to rein in these excesses. This explains why and I’m sort of surprised I didn’t put this together before now. It was misdirection.

And virtually everyone in our government helped them do it.

Since rich people don’t create jobs, why are conservatives taken seriously on economics?

by David Atkins

Henry Blodget at Business Insider points out again, using data, what many of us grow tired of repeating over and over: rich people don’t create jobs:

As America struggles with high unemployment and record inequality, everyone is offering competing solutions to the problem.
In this war of words (and classes), one thing has been repeated so often that many people now regard it as fact.

“Rich people create the jobs.”

Specifically, by starting and directing America’s companies, rich entrepreneurs and investors create the jobs that sustain everyone else.

This statement is usually invoked to justify cutting taxes on entrepreneurs and investors. If only we reduce those taxes and regulations, the story goes, entrepreneurs and investors can be incented to build more companies and create more jobs.

This argument ignores the fact that taxes on entrepreneurs and investors are already historically low, even after this year’s modest increases. And it ignores the assertions of many investors and entrepreneurs (like me) that they would work just as hard to build companies even if taxes were higher.

But, more importantly, this argument perpetuates a myth that some well-off Americans use to justify today’s record inequality — the idea that rich people create the jobs.

Entrepreneurs and investors like me actually don’t create the jobs — not sustainable ones, anyway.
Yes, we can create jobs temporarily, by starting companies and funding losses for a while. And, yes, we are a necessary part of the economy’s job-creation engine. But to suggest that we alone are responsible for the jobs that sustain the other 300 million Americans is the height of self-importance and delusion.

So, if rich people do not create the jobs, what does?

A healthy economic ecosystem — one in which most participants (the middle class) have plenty of money to spend.

Over the last couple of years, a rich investor and entrepreneur named Nick Hanauer has annoyed all manner of rich investors and entrepreneurs by explaining this in detail. Hanauer was the founder of online advertising company aQuantive, which Microsoft bought for $6.4 billion.

What creates a company’s jobs, Hanauer explains, is a healthy economic ecosystem surrounding the company, which starts with the company’s customers.

The company’s customers buy the company’s products. This, in turn, channels money to the company and creates the need for the company to hire employees to produce, sell, and service those products. If the company’s customers and potential customers go broke, the demand for the company’s products will collapse. And the jobs will disappear, regardless of what the entrepreneurs or investors do.

This isn’t he-said-she-said economic theory. This is known fact, demonstrable time and again through empirical evidence just like evolution or climate science.

Yet while there’s general agreement on treating the consensus around evolution and climate science as known fact regardless of the moneyed interests who would prefer otherwise, there’s no such consensus on economics. In fact, much of the economics profession seems, as Paul Krugman often laments, to contradict its own basic models in service to the propaganda interests of the wealthy.

Trickle-down economics is a known and proven failure. The experience of record stock market highs, record corporate profits, low effective tax rates and record income inequality in the context of a stagnant economy is all the proof anyone should need that the conservative theory of economics is a sweeping failure.

So why does it still constitute a valid opinion in the public square, even as creationism and climate denialism are increasingly laughed out of it?

Conservatives get very upset when liberals accuse them of racism and prejudice as their basic underlying motives. But even discounting plain evidence of said prejudice, it’s simply too easy to draw the conclusion that some form of prejudice must be the underlying motive for refusing to attempt to boost demand-side growth rather than supply-side growth. Boosting supply-side growth is such an obvious and dramatic failure that the only rational explanation for the insistence on refusing demand-side growth is that some folks just don’t like the idea of certain kinds of people getting demand-side help.

Without that prejudice, the supply-side position wouldn’t just be laughably weak under peer review, it would be risible politically as well.

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Everybody loves Jep: The Great Beauty

Miracle on 125th Street: Black Nativity

So it took Judge Janice Brown living up to her extremist promise to wake up the Democrats?

by digby

If the Republicans want to bellyache about losing the filibuster for judicial nominees, maybe they ought to call in truce in the War on Women:

Within hours of each other, two federal appeals courts handed down separate decisions that affirmed sharp new limits on abortion and birth control. One on Oct. 31 forced abortion clinics across Texas to close. The other, on Nov. 1, compared contraception to “a grave moral wrong” and sided with businesses that refused to provide it in health care coverage.

“These are the kinds of decisions we are going to have to live with,” a blunt Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic majority leader, warned his caucus later as it weighed whether to make historic changes to Senate rules. Those changes would break a Republican filibuster of President Obama’s nominees and end the minority party’s ability to block a president’s choices to executive branch posts and federal courts except the Supreme Court.

The moment represented a turning point in what had been, until then, a cautious approach by Democrats to push back against Republicans who were preventing the White House from appointing liberal judges. All the more glaring, Democrats believed, was that they had allowed confirmation of the conservative judges now ruling in the abortion cases. Republicans were blocking any more appointments to the court of appeals in Washington, which issued the contraception decision.

Faced with the possibility that they might never be able to seat judges that they hoped would act as a counterweight to more conservative appointees confirmed when George W. Bush was president, all but three of the 55 members of the Senate Democratic caucus sided with Mr. Reid. The decision represented a recognition by Democrats that they had to risk a backlash in the Senate to head off what they saw as a far greater long-term threat to their priorities in the form of a judiciary tilted to the right.

It’s kind of hard for me to believe it took this long for them to figure that out, but better late than never.

Very quickly and unexpectedly, abortion and contraceptive rights became the decisive factor in the filibuster fight. First there were the two coincidentally timed decisions out of Texas and Washington. Then momentum to change the rules reached a critical mass when Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California and a defender of abortion rights, decided to put aside her misgivings, in large part because the recent court action was so alarming to her, Democrats said.

Mr. Reid and many members of his caucus found it especially disquieting that in 2005 they agreed to confirm the two judges who wrote the recent decisions — Janice Rogers Brown of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and Priscilla R. Owen of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit — as part of a deal with Senate Republicans, who controlled the chamber at the time and were threatening to limit Democrats’ ability to filibuster judges if some of Mr. Bush’s nominees were not approved.

Imagine that. You back off and play nice and confirm right wing extremists to the courts and look what they go and do. They issue extreme right wing rulings. I hate when that happens.

Anyway, it seems to have finally awakened the Democrats to the fact that the judicial legacy of eight years in the White house was going to be nil, leaving their mistakes during the Bush administration unbalanced for decades to come. (Pigs will fly out of my crock pot sooner than the GOP will back down on this.)

This isn’t quite right, though:

Conservatives have always viewed the federal courts as a last line of defense in the country’s cultural and political fights. Among their base it is a central tenet that electing Republican presidents is vital precisely because they appoint right-leaning judges who will keep perceived liberal overreach in check.

The issue has never been as powerful for liberals. Consider, for example, how often Republican candidates laud Supreme Court justices like Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas compared with how relatively rarely Democrats mention liberal justices like Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

“Republicans and conservatives have been better about the base understanding the significance of judicial nominations than the groups left of center,” said Jay Sekulow, chief counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice, which fights for conservative causes in the courts.

Actually, liberals spent decades chasing a dream that they could get back the white conservative vote they lost back in the 60s and one of the primary strategies for doing so was to shed the image of the Warren Court what with all the civil rights and civil liberties that upset those good old boys and girls so much. It was a conscious decision. And it has blown up in their faces with no political benefit. It’s too late to stop the Federalist Society revolution, but maybe now they will at least start to mitigate the damage a little.

This is the result of their “grown-up in the room” strategy:

In the case before the Washington appeals court, Judge Brown issued an opinion siding with Freshway Foods, a produce company that opposes contraception and abortion so strongly that some of its delivery trucks have been emblazoned with signs declaring, “It’s not a choice, it’s a child.” In the opinion, she likened the government’s requirement that the company cover birth control for its employees to affirming “a repugnant belief” and wrote that the company would be forced to be “complicit in a grave moral wrong.”

For a long time the Democrats bargained with women’s bodies to try to get votes from people who would never vote for them and it never worked.  Some things you just can’t split the difference on (and that’s assuming the other side isn’t simply playing you for a fool.) I’m ever so slightly optimistic that our leaders may have finally learned their lesson.

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