Month: August 2014

Austerity is giving Europe one of its greatest economic crises in history

by David Atkins

Matt O’Brien at the Wapo’s Wonk Blog puts out this sobering graph and commentary:

As I was arguing last week, it’s time to call the eurozone what it really is: one of the biggest catastrophes in economic history.

There have been plenty of those lately. And it’s not just the Great Recession. It’s the way we’ve struggled to make up the ground we lost since. The United States, for one, has had its slowest postwar recovery. Britain has had its slowest one, period. But, six and a half years later, Europe has distinguished itself by not having much of a recovery at all. And, as you can see above, that’s about to make it worse than the worst of the 1930s.

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It’s a policy-induced disaster. Too much fiscal austerity and too little monetary stimulus have crippled growth like almost never before. Europe is doing worse than Japan during its “lost decade,” worse than the sterling bloc during the Great Depression, and barely better than the gold bloc then—though even that silver lining isn’t much of one. That’s because, at this rate, it’ll only be another year until the eurozone is well behind the gold bloc, too.

So how is Europe making the Great Depression look like the good old days of growth? Easy: by ignoring everything we learned from it.

Back then, there were two types of countries: ones that had left the gold standard, and ones that were about to. But that “about to” could take awhile. That’s because governments were sentimentally attached to gold, even though, as Barry Eichengreen has shown, giving it up led to recovery. They simply equated the gold standard with civilization, so they were willing to sacrifice their economies for it. And sacrifice them they did. Although there were limits in extremis.

O’Brien goes on to compare the Euro itself and the fight by Eurozone countries to defend it as comparable to the gold standard. I think he’s right to an extent, at least in terms of how the Euro has been constructed without the flexibility to allow Eurozone countries to spend themselves out of an economic crisis.

The idea of a single currency uniting European nations has a lot going for it. I’m no economist and thus not equipped to suggest a path forward, but there has to be a way to promote trade, travel and solidarity in Europe without denying Eurozone nations at varying stages of economic development the flexibility to do what is necessary to grow their economies.

I also suspect that the austerity mania has more to do with the elites’ social and economic philosophy than it does with defense of the Euro per se. The Euro simply gives rich people with a perverse sense of cosmic justice the excuse to tell the plebs how much belt-tightening they need to do, under the excuse that the unified currency will collapse if they don’t. Something tells me that the IMF would likely be doing the same thing to Greeks using the drachma that Germany is doing to Greeks using the Euro.

So yes, the Euro has its problems. But the mentality that leads to austerity economics and the abandonment of everything we learned since the Great Depression is by far the bigger problem.

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“The Real America is with you!”


by digby

Via Mother Jones, here is a sampling of the thinking among donors to Officer Darren Wilson’s support fund:

I can’t wait for this summer to be over …

Another “qualified” player on the GOP’s deep bench

by digby

Would you hire this man?

Adam Laxalt was described by his firm’s evaluation committee as “a train wreck” who “doesn’t even have the basic skill set,” according to a review of his performance two years ago.

The assessment by the Lewis & Roca Associate Evaluation and Compensation Committee (AECC) suggested that Laxalt attend seminars to “address basic legal principles” because of his “horrible reviews” and because he “has judgment issues and doesn’t seem to understand what to do.”

The recommendation: A “freeze in salary, deferral, and possible termination.”

The summary of the findings, which I have obtained, authenticated and posted below, is incredibly scathing and derogatory. The conclusion: “You need to work on the quality of your work. You need to work on your legal writing skills.”

Other than that….

Soon after this assessment by the firm, Laxalt was made “of counsel,” a position that allowed him the luxury of not being evaluated. Not only was Laxalt known inside the firm to be pursuing a political career, but the evaluation also chided him for linking to “political articles” on the firm’s website, a likely reference to his anti-gay-marriage screeds.

Laxalt’s brutal evaluation also was markedly dissonant from his self-assessment, in which he described himself as exceeding expectations and “outstanding” in his performance. That lack of self-awareness was also noted by the evaluation committee.

Ok. So he’s a lousy lawyer with a very inflated, somewhat delusional, ego. Why should anyone care about this?

He’s running for Attorney General of Nevada.

You cannot make this stuff up:

Dick Cheney calls him “courageous” and says electing him “is of the highest priority.

John Bolton traveled across the country to headline a fundraiser for him. Newt Gingrich, Frank Fahrenkopf, Tom Ridge and Ed Meese (remember him?) all appeared at the same D.C. event to celebrate his candidacy. Donald Rumsfeld gave him a personal check for $5,000, part of a half-million-dollar haul.

Who is this remarkable contender attracting such a list of national GOP luminaries? What remarkably accomplished figure could warrant such attention? Who can command encomia from a former vice president, attorney general, defense secretary, House speaker, chairman of the Republican National Committee and Homeland Security secretary?

Adam Laxalt, that’s who.

Who?

Laxalt is only 34, has never run for office before and is campaigning for attorney general—attorney general!—in Nevada, where he has been a cipher until just recently and whose last name explains … everything. That’s because Laxalt has one of the most unusual pedigrees in American politics: He’s the grandson of Paul Laxalt, the former senator and Ronald Reagan confidant once known as “the first friend”—still, at 91, casting a long if not always visible shadow in Nevada politics. Awkwardly, young Laxalt is also the illegitimate son of Sen. Pete Domenici, his grandfather’s longtime Senate colleague. In fact, it was only last year that Adam Laxalt’s mother Michelle, a 24-year-old Reagan operative at the time of the affair and now a well-known Washington lobbyist, revealed her son’s parentage for the first time, a sensational revelation that almost certainly had the effect of clearing the way for his political career.

Of course it did. He’s GOP royalty.

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About that Tea Party alliance

by digby

This, from Tea Party Nation:

The real outrage here should be that groups are going through Ferguson and looting. Brown’s death is simply an excuse for some people to go and get “free stuff.”

Michael Brown is dead because he fought the law and the law won. Had Michael Brown decided not to fight the police, he would be alive today.

Michael Brown’s death is no excuse for rioting and looting. But then again, those on the left want to encourage this.

Michael Brown’s mistake was in not being a white guy in a cowboy hat.

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The cupcake wars

by digby

George Will:

Contempt for government cannot be hermetically sealed; it seeps into everything. Which is why cupcake regulations have foreign policy consequences.

Yes, he said that.

His point is that people mistrust government because of silly regulations and therefore they mistrust it to make foreign policy decisions too. And from my perspective, if that’s what it takes to mistrust the government’s foreign policy then so be it. They should mistrust the government’s foreign policy and question the hell out of it.

To be fair, Will takes the right and the left to task for this by pointing out the bloodthirsty border politics of the right wing as an example of government overreach although he then throws a little red meat to the wingers by implying that Joe Biden and Harry Reid are the leaders of a nanny state movement emanating from Washington when the militarization of police he decries throughout the piece is energetically backed by the right wing warhawks and law and order Republicans. And he also fails to address the fact that Republicans are acting batshit crazy which almost certainly has an effect on the public’s faith in government. Watching these clowns on TV doesn’t exactly inspire a lot of confidence. (But then George Will appears on FOX news every day so he’s an accomplice to the crime.)

The funny thing is that the silliest of these “nanny state” laws Will holds responsible for the mistrust in government come from the vaunted local governments so revered by conservatives as the most legitimate form of democratic representation. It turns out they can be very petty bureaucrats too. How odd. Why one might just think that it’s not really a problem with government, big or small, but with flawed human beings, an insoluble problem that can only be mitigated by education and social/cultural influence, a much harder task and one that’s ongoing. Devolving to the local governments will hardly make things better. It’s likely to make it much worse for a whole lot of people. Think Salem and witches.

This is what tasers are good for

by digby

I’ve written many, many posts about the dangers of tasers being used as a torture device to obtain instant compliance as a convenience for the police. (I just wrote one today for Salon.) But I have been reluctant to call for the total banning of tasers for one reason: if they are used as they were designed to be used, that is, in place of bullets in cases where officers might otherwise use lethal force, they would be an extremely useful tool in the law enforcement toolbox. Unfortunately, they are far more often used simply as a “clean” way to inflict pain on subjects who are arguing or ignoring police orders. That is not a life and death situation and impatient cops casually using electro-shock, usually within no more than a few seconds, is an authoritarian control mechanism not a life-saving alternative to deadly force.

This is what tasers are supposed to be used for:

We may never really know what happened in the three minutes between when Michael Brown was stopped for jaywalking and when he was shot and killed by Officer Darren Wilson.

But we do know what happened on Tuesday during the 23 seconds between when St. Louis police arrived and when 25-year-old Kajieme Powell was shot and killed on Riverview Blvd. We know because police released the video. Powell walks around the sidewalk and a small grass embankment. He ignores police warnings to drop his knife. He advances on police at a normal speed, his arms swinging at his sides. And he is shot nine times, including while on the ground.

I forced myself to watch it even though it makes me sick. And this situation was an excellent example of where police could have used the taser gun instead of a real gun. He was close enough to hit easily and he had a knife which would have required him to be a lot closer to the police to inflict harm on them. That is a situation in which it makes sense to use a taser.

It’s harder to say in the Michael Brown case because the accounts we’ve heard indicate that the stop was for something very minor from which the officer could have just moved on instead of escalating it. Common sense says that the confrontation should have never happened at all. But even if it had been a reasonable confrontation and Brown went for the weapon, the fact that he had walked away and was unarmed argues for the use of the taser over the gun.

Tasers should be a very useful tool. But until police agencies start putting them in the same category as a deadly weapon (which they can be) and train officers to use them only in cases where they would otherwise feel obliged to use a gun, tasers are going to be used as torture devices rather than replacements for the use of guns in self-defense.

With the proper training police wouldn’t be torturing and killing citizens with tasers. But they could have been used in the Powell case for sure and probably in the Brown case and two young men would be alive today. It’s not the tools that are the problem. It’s the way they’re used.

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“Just do what I tell you…”


by digby

My piece in Salon today is about this un-American idea that you are required to instantly comply with a police officer’s orders lest you get shot, electrocuted, pepper sprayed or beaten:

Earlier this week, an LAPD police officer (and current professor of “Homeland Security,” whatever that means) by the name of Sunil Dutta wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post in which he offered this piece of advice to members of the public when dealing with police officers: 

“[I]f you don’t want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton or thrown to the ground, just do what I tell you. Don’t argue with me, don’t call me names, don’t tell me that I can’t stop you.”

Later he suggested that one needn’t submit to illegal searches or stops and said that citizens are allowed to refuse to consent to a search of your car or home if there’s no warrant. He also says that an officer must let you go if there’s no legal basis to stop and search you. How that’s supposed to work is a little bit obscure. After all, that would easily be seen as arguing and telling him that he can’t stop you — and then he will feel free to tase you, pepper spray you, shoot you or beat you.

I go on to discuss this notion that you cannot argue with police and how that’s been particularly impacted by the taser.

From my twitter timeline, I get the impression this really upsets the right wingers. I wonder how many of them defended the Bundy protesters against the tasering they received?

I know I did.

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A Village full of Very Serious People

by digby

Where being wrong means never having to say you’re sorry — or give up your lucrative job:

Why Washington is the best town to be wrong in. http://t.co/eGjzCfWILS
— Chris Cillizza (@TheFix) August 21, 2014

If the name doesn’t ring a bell, maybe you know his work. He’s the Republican pollster who predicted just weeks before the June election that then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) would win his primary by 34 points. This week, Cantor packed up his Capitol Hill office, having lost that election by 10 points.

“The worst part of it is, you build a relationship with a longtime friend and you never want to lose,” McLaughlin says now, noting that he has not seen Cantor — a client for almost 15 years — since before that fateful night. “That’s a loss that you never get over.”

That might be especially true if you were a young Republican congressman climbing the ranks of leadership, as Cantor was. For McLaughlin, the anguish may be real, the embarrassment may keep him up at night, but his employment status? That hasn’t changed.

“We got attacked right after it,” he says, adding that he didn’t lose any of his current clients running in the 2014 cycle. “There was a feeding frenzy of people calling up all our clients asking if they would continue to use us. But they stuck by us.”

He’s just a pollster. But the same holds true if you are an economist, policy analyst, military tactician or top political strategist. They take care of each other. Which is nice. For them.

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Lyin’ Ryan

by digby

He just can’t help himself:

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) on Wednesday praised welfare reform for reducing child poverty, even though child poverty is higher today than it was before welfare reform. Speaking to former GOP congressman and current MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, Ryan said, “You voted for a bipartisan bill in 1996, welfare reform, that did more to reduce child poverty than any reform in the modern era.”

The child poverty rate in 1996 was 20.5 percent, according to the government’s numbers. The rate declined each year after Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act until 2000, when it fell to 16.2 percent. But then something sad happened: The rate started going back up. It reached 21.8 percent in 2012, the most recent year for which data is available.

What happened was that an epic tech bubble that had everyone working burst. Welfare reform was a failure. But the Jack Kemp Travelling Tribute show isn’t going to admit that.

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“They return just to die”

by digby

Good God this is awful:

By the time Isaias Sosa turned 14, he’d already seen 15 bullet-riddled bodies laid out in his neighborhood of Cabañas, one of the most violent in this tropical metropolis. He rarely ventured outside his grandmother’s home, fortified with a wrought iron gate and concertina wire.

But what pushed him to act was the death of his pregnant cousin, who was gunned down in 2012 by street gang members at the neighborhood gym. Sosa loaded a backpack, pocketed $500 from his mother’s purse, memorized his aunt’s phone number in Washington state and headed for southern Mexico, where he joined others riding north on top of one of the freight trains known as La Bestia, or the Beast.

Crossing the Rio Grande into Texas, Sosa was apprehended almost immediately by Border Patrol agents as he desperately searched for water.

After a second unsuccessful attempt to enter the U.S. last fall, he now spends most of his days cooped up at home, dreaming of returning yet again.

“Everywhere here is dangerous,” he said. “There is no security. They kill people all the time.”

“It’s a sin to be young in Honduras.”

Like thousands of other undocumented Honduran children deported after having journeyed unaccompanied to the U.S., Sosa faces perilous conditions in the violent neighborhood from which he sought to escape.

“There are many youngsters who only three days after they’ve been deported are killed, shot by a firearm,” said Hector Hernandez, who runs the morgue in San Pedro Sula. “They return just to die.”

At least five, perhaps as many as 10, of the 42 children slain here since February had been recently deported from the U.S., Hernandez said.

I wish I could understand how people could send these kids back to that hell. It’s just beyond.

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