One of the really frustrating things about arguing with right-wing true believers is that they have a security blanket, and they cling to it. It’s the market. The magical market will fix everything. Capitalist fundamentalists are willing to ignore all manner of actual historical and economic evidence in order to assert that market forces are the best solution to every problem. This phenomenon is quite evident in the health care debate. Our system costs more, is less efficient, is more riddled with pointless bureaucracy, and covers far, far fewer people than the various systems employed by most other industrialized nations. Nevertheless, conservatives (American ones, anyway) cling to their security blanket. The market is always the answer - evidence be damned. Health care, their argument goes, is just another commodity, so the market will save the day. (In my view, a lap top computer is a commodity; access to health care should be a human right).
Paul Krugman’s recent post “Health care is not a bowl of cherries” is brief but makes an important point: the health care debate is bogus. There are many parties involved who are honestly trying to figure out how to improve the American health care system. Many on the right, however, are contributing nothing of value, and only making the process more difficult. Because they insist, with something that is quite close to religious zeal, that the market will always fix everything. Krugman responds, in particular, to people like Greg Mankiw and George Will. Here’s an excerpt from Will’s column, illustrating his childish attachment to market fundamentalism:
As market enthusiasts, conservatives should stop warning that the president’s reforms will result in health-care “rationing.” Every product, from a jelly doughnut to a jumbo jet, is rationed — by price or by politics. The conservative’s task is to explain why price is preferable. The answer is that prices produce a rational allocation of scarce resources.
Krugman’s response is spot-on (and I can identify with his palpable frustration):
Um, economists have known for 45 years — ever since Kenneth Arrow’s seminal paper — that the standard competitive market model just doesn’t work for health care: adverse selection and moral hazard are so central to the enterprise that nobody, nobody expects free-market principles to be enough. To act all wide-eyed and innocent about these problems at this late date is either remarkably ignorant or simply disingenuous.
I guess it doesn’t matter what economists know, or what evidence suggests. Conservatives will cling to their security blanket. It makes them feel good.
This time it comes from the tax-evading, prostitute-frequenting gasbag Dick Morris. Obama has already been accused of being Hitler, of hoping to institute Sharia law in America, of wanting to build concentration camps for children, of attempting to nationalize the whole American economy, and of generally being a terrorist’s best friend. Now, the revolting Morris tells us that Obama has effectively repealed the Declaration of Independence. I hesitated to post this video, as it is a particularly transparent and disgusting attempt to sell books. But it is also important to confront this sort of nonsense.
Doughy-looking strawberry enthusiast and Missouri State Representative Cynthia Davis is apparently sick and tired of all of those poor, hungry kids in her state who are receiving - you guessed it - food. Food. Food for the hungry. Cynthia Davis is against food for the hungry.
(Here’s a shocker - she’s a Republican).
There are 100,000 more unemployed people in Missouri now than there were two years ago, and twenty per cent of children in the state live with hunger. Representative Davis, however, questions whether food assistance programs are necessary, since “hunger can be a positive motivator” and “if you work at McDonald’s, they will feed you for free during your break.”
Cynthia Davis, you preposterous buffoon, I HATE WHAT YOU JUST SAID.
Here’s the syrupy, misleading, childish vision of the Reagan legacy that right wingers love so dearly, expressed through the famous “morning in America” ads:
Here’s more evidence, from Paul Krugman this time, of just how far-reaching the negative effects of Reagan’s deregulating, mindlessly flag-waving, race-baiting, tree-hating, union-busting presidency have been. The emphasis here is on the deregulating part:
“This bill is the most important legislation for financial institutions in the last 50 years. It provides a long-term solution for troubled thrift institutions. … All in all, I think we hit the jackpot.” So declared Ronald Reagan in 1982, as he signed the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act.
He was, as it happened, wrong about solving the problems of the thrifts. On the contrary, the bill turned the modest-sized troubles of savings-and-loan institutions into an utter catastrophe. But he was right about the legislation’s significance. And as for that jackpot — well, it finally came more than 25 years later, in the form of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
…
Attacks on Reaganomics usually focus on rising inequality and fiscal irresponsibility. Indeed, Reagan ushered in an era in which a small minority grew vastly rich, while working families saw only meager gains. He also broke with longstanding rules of fiscal prudence.
…
The increase in public debt was, however, dwarfed by the rise in private debt, made possible by financial deregulation. The change in America’s financial rules was Reagan’s biggest legacy. And it’s the gift that keeps on taking.
If only someone had tried to warn us about this guy. Oh - right.
If the government-sponsored “public plan” version of heathcare Obama favors is so much crappier and more inefficient than the current ones, why is the industry wasting so much money and resources to defeat it?
The wild paranoid fantasies of the right continue. Republican Representative Pete Sessions of Texas apparently thinks Barack Obama is a really, really evil guy. Obama, Sessions says, hopes to wreak havoc on our country in order to carry out his power-hungry agenda.
At the beginning of April, a Fox News poll asked respondents whether they believed that President Obama “wants the financial crisis to continue so government can take over more businesses and grow the federal government.” Only 23 percent said that they thought Obama wanted it to continue, but that minority view was recently endorsed by a top-ranking Republican official. Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX), the chairman of the NRCC, told the New York Times that he believes President Obama aims to “‘diminish employment and diminish stock prices‘ as part of a ‘divide and conquer’ strategy to consolidate power.”
Sessions further argues that Obama’s platform is “intended to inflict damage and hardship on the free enterprise system, if not to kill it.”
So yeah, government waste sucks, it’s rampant at every level, and taxes are a vicious racket, and everyone should be pissed off . What’s hilarious about the teabaggers, though, is how they never squawk about waste until the spending actually has a chance of benefiting them. You will never hear of a teabagger crying about OPIC giving $50 million in free insurance to some mining company so that they can dig for silver in rural Bolivia. You won’t hear of a teabagger protesting the $2.5 billion in Ex-Im loans we gave to GE through the early part of this decade, even as GE was moving nearly a hundred thousand jobs overseas over the course of ten years. And Michelle Malkin’s readers didn’t seem to mind giving IBM millions in Ex-IM and ATP loans at the same time it was giving its former CEO, Lou Gerstner, $260 million in stock options.
In other words teabaggers don’t mind paying taxes to fund the salaries of Bolivian miners, Lou Gerstner’s stock options, deliveries of “sailboat fuel,” the Hermes scarves on Sandy Weill’s jet pillows, or even the export of their own goddamn jobs. But they do hate it when someone tries to re-asphalt their roads, or help bail their slob neighbor out of foreclosure. And God forbid someone propose a health care program, or increased financial aid for college. Hell, that’s like offering to share your turkey with the other Pilgrims! That’s not what America is all about! America is every Pilgrim for himself, dammit! Raise your own motherfucking turkey!
What we’re talking about is a vision for high-speed rail in America. Imagine boarding a train in the center of a city. No racing to an airport and across a terminal, no delays, no sitting on the tarmac, no lost luggage, no taking off your shoes. (Laughter.) Imagine whisking through towns at speeds over 100 miles an hour, walking only a few steps to public transportation, and ending up just blocks from your destination. Imagine what a great project that would be to rebuild America.
Now, all of you know this is not some fanciful, pie-in-the-sky vision of the future. It is now. It is happening right now. It’s been happening for decades. The problem is it’s been happening elsewhere, not here.
In France, high-speed rail has pulled regions from isolation, ignited growth, remade quiet towns into thriving tourist destinations. In Spain, a high-speed line between Madrid and Seville is so successful that more people travel between those cities by rail than by car and airplane combined. China, where service began just two years ago, may have more miles of high-speed rail service than any other country just five years from now. And Japan, the nation that unveiled the first high-speed rail system, is already at work building the next: a line that will connect Tokyo with Osaka at speeds of over 300 miles per hour. So it’s being done; it’s just not being done here.
There’s no reason why we can’t do this. This is America. There’s no reason why the future of travel should lie somewhere else beyond our borders. Building a new system of high-speed rail in America will be faster, cheaper and easier than building more freeways or adding to an already overburdened aviation system –- and everybody stands to benefit.
Glenn Beck recently had a segment on his show featuring a Thomas Paine impersonator — complete with authentic Brooklyn accent — who delivered a 2 minute commercial rant in support of today’s teabagging revolution. While I’m sure that Thomas Paine’s head would explode if he could witness today’s America, the idea that he’d agree with Glenn Beck and his merry band of anti-taxation teabaggers is beyond hilarious.
I’d invite Glenn to actually read some of Thomas Paine’s writings; it’s a good antidote to the common Republican disease of projecting your own political perspectives and culture war values onto the “founding fathers.” Beck suffers deeply from this delusional experience of history. He’s particularly afflicted today, imagining Paine as an avuncular figure who took him fishing and then, seconds later, imagines Paine as his “great, great, great, great, great . . . grandfather.” This kind of “choose your own adventure” approach to history is a mainstay of the Republican mind and has been used to support a range of hagiographic absurdities such as the little-known fact that Thomas Jefferson was the nation’s most strident opponent of the separation of church and state. Such caricatures of reality would be an object of scorn and pity were they not broadcast to millions of lizard-brained viewers every night on Fox television.
A good place for Beck to start would be Paine’s essay entitled “Agrarian Justice” which examines how to make our civilization more just and equitable. Beck would be shocked to learn that the essay claims that private property is the cause of evil and suffering in the world. And certainly Beck would begin pouring gasoline on everything in sight (perhaps even himself) when he discovers that the essay articulates a detailed plan whereby wealth would be redistributed from wealthy property owners to poor, landless Americans.
In the essay Paine argues that in order to understand how our civilization ought to be organized, it is helpful to understand its true nature and origins:
To understand what the state of society ought to be, it is necessary to have some idea of the natural and primitive state of man; such as it is at this day among the Indians of North America. There is not, in that state, any of those spectacles of human misery which poverty and want present to our eyes in all the towns and streets in Europe.
Poverty, therefore, is a thing created by that which is called civilized life. It exists not in the natural state. On the other hand, the natural state is without those advantages which flow from agriculture, arts, science and manufactures.
The life of an Indian is a continual holiday, compared with the poor of Europe; and, on the other hand it appears to be abject when compared to the rich.
Civilization, therefore, or that which is so-called, has operated two ways: to make one part of society more affluent, and the other more wretched, than would have been the lot of either in a natural state.
Unlike our current-day high priests of laissez-faire capitalism, Paine sees that while the accumulation of wealth carries great benefits, it also invariably creates misery since it makes some people rich while making others desperately poor. Paine claims that these poor, miserable people would have been better off in the state of nature — living like Indians — than sleeping on the cold-hard cobblestone streets of civilization.
To Paine, this problem of inequity begins with the dawn of civilization, which he links to the cultivation of land and the creation of private property:
There could be no such thing as landed property originally. Man did not make the earth, and, though he had a natural right to occupy it, he had no right to locate as his property inperpetuity any part of it; neither did the Creator of the earth open a land-office, from whence the first title-deeds should issue. Whence then, arose the idea of landed property? I answer as before, that when cultivation began the idea of landed property began with it, from the impossibility of separating the improvement made by cultivation from the earth itself, upon which that improvement was made. [. . .]
Cultivation is at least one of the greatest natural improvements ever made by human invention. It has given to created earth a tenfold value. But the landed monopoly that began with it has produced the greatest evil. It has dispossessed more than half the inhabitants of every nation of their natural inheritance, without providing for them, as ought to have been done, an indemnification for that loss, and has thereby created a species of poverty and wretchedness that did not exist before.
This is pretty much the inversion of Republican talking points and other efficient-market fetishists. Paine argues that private property does not exist in the state of nature: men did not create land and God did not hand out deeds to property to be held forever. Paine even goes as far to claim that land is actually the “common property of the human race.” In the original state of nature “every man would have been born to property. He would have been a joint life proprietor with the rest [of mankind] in the property of the soil, and in all its natural productions, vegetable and animal.”
Again, Paine thinks creating wealth is a wonderful thing. It has made our civilization possible and produced “agriculture, arts, science and manufactures.” But it is in the nature of private property to create disparities as a small minority accumulates a monopoly over the land and all the wealth it is capable of producing. To Paine, this arrangement is a “dispossession.” A class of landed individuals have taken away the “natural inheritance” of other people and have not provided them any form of compensation for their loss. And the “poverty” and “wretchedness” that have emerged from this are therefore a grave injustice.
As a consequence, Paine argues that these individuals should be compensated for their loss of the land, stating that “Every proprietor . . . of cultivated lands, owes to the community ground-rent (forI know of no better term to express the idea) for the land which he holds . . .” And while Beck and his teabaggers see such thinking as robbery or “subsidizing the losers” or “punishing success,” Paine clearly states that this is simply a question of justice:
In advocating the case of the persons thus dispossessed, it is a right, and not a charity, that I am pleading for. But it is that kind of right which, being neglected at first, could not be brought forward afterwards till heaven had opened the way by a revolution in the system of government. Let us then do honor to revolutions by justice, and give currency to their principles by blessings.
Having thus in a few words, opened the merits of the case, I shall now proceed to the plan I have to propose, which is,
To create a national fund, out of which there shall be paid to every person, when arrived at the age of twenty-one years, the sum of fifteen pounds sterling, as a compensation in part, for the loss of his or her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed property:
And also, the sum of ten pounds per annum, during life, to every person now living, of the age of fifty years, and to all others as they shall arrive at that age.
And there you have it. Thomas Paine, rabid leftist commie fascist socialist eat-the-rich spread-the-wealth teabagger who thought it was consistent with the spirit and principles of the revolution to provide for the welfare of every citizen.
At least Beck is right about one thing: Paine was a great American.
Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina continues believe that it is more important to engage in ideological posturing than to help the citizens of his state. Rejecting stimulus money, which is intended to help South Carolina’s economy and educational system, has become a kind of crusade for the governor. He’d rather look like a true believer in the eyes of Grover Norquist types, apparently, than use federal funds to improve the lives of real people in his state.
He recently told an unemployed South Carolinian that rather than take stimulus money, he’d say some prayers for the unemployed. He also wants to reject stimulus money dedicated for educational purposes, even if it costs 4,000 S.C. teachers their jobs. For Governor Sanford, it doesn’t matter if your school is falling apart, or if your class sizes are getting out of control; what matters is that he makes a point about his dedication to his morally and economically bankrupt principles.
Sanford goes as far as to say that accepting federal aid for his state’s school system would be “fiscal child abuse” because it results from deficit spending and therefore isn’t sustainable. So if you are a teacher in South Carolina, and you find yourself unemployed, or if you are a student in a crumbling school, things may be pretty grim for you. But you can rest assured that your governor sleeps well at night, knowing that he is sticking to his belief that the magical market and small government will solve all of our problems. The fact that is isn’t true doesn’t seem to matter to Sanford at all.
Michele Bachmann may be a complete lunatic. She may just be dumber than a bag of hammers. One thing is for sure - she’s ready to lead the revolution! Check it out:
Hannity and Bachmann - that’s quite a tag team.
If you can’t bear to listen to Sean Hannity interview Michele Bachmann, well, I don’t blame you. So here are some of Michele’s highlights:
To the barricades! -
At this point the American people - it’s like Thomas Jefferson said, a revolution every now and then is a good thing. We are at the point, Sean, of revolution. And by that, what I mean, an orderly revolution — where the people of this country wake up get up and make a decision that this is not going to happen on their watch…we can’t let the Democrats achieve their ends any longer.
This bit is really dramatic -
Economics works equally in any country. Where freedom is tried, the people rejoice. But where tyranny is enforced upon the people, as Barack Obama is doing, the people suffer and mourn.
Obama is elected, and the people suffer and mourn. Spectacular.
Here’s some more paranoid rambling -
Right now I’m a member of Congress. And I believe that my job here is to be a foreign correspondent, reporting from enemy lines. And people need to understand, this isn’t a game. this isn’t just a political talk show that’s happening right now. This is our very freedom, and we have 230 years, a continuous link of freedom that every generation has ceded to the next generation. This may be the time when that link breaks. And I’m going to do everything I can, I know you are, to make sure that we keep that link secure. We cannot allow that link to break, because as Reagan said, America is the last great hope of mankind. where do we go–
“would somebody tell me the last time you saw a kid sleeping under a bridge?”
Ask and ye shall receive.
Today’s NY Times has an article on the recent eruption of shantytowns, tent cities, and under-bridge dwellings that are reminiscent of “Hoovervilles” during the Great Depression.
During his recent press conference, president Obama stated that the Republicans have thus far only criticized his budget ideas and have yet to offer any constructive ideas of their own.
Today, the Republicans responded. After pouring over spreadsheets, agonizing over data, researching history and asking experts, the Republicans decided that the answer is . . . . . . to give a HUGE tax cut to the rich.
Seriously, I’m not kidding:
House Republican leaders called a press conference Thursday to unveil their “alternative budget.” While it was thin on specifics, it does include one major policy proposal: a huge tax cut for the wealthy.
Under the Republican plan, the top marginal tax rate would be slashed from 35 to 25 percent, facilitating a dramatic transfer of wealth up the economic scale. Anyone making more than a $100,000 would pay the top rate; those under would pay 10 percent.
House Minority Leader, John Boehner, strutted out with a phalanx of Republican flunkies, waving a blue document in the air before a gaggle of reporters:
“Two nights ago, the president said, ‘We haven’t seen a budget yet out of Republicans.’ Well, it’s just not true, because here it is, Mr. President,” said House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio), waving a blue document in the air.
He was greeted with hostility. Reporters demanded that Boehner reveal specific details. But the Republicans had not gotten beyond the idea of giving grotesquely oversized tax cuts. This exchange is priceless:
“Are you going to have any further details on this today?” the first asked.
“On what?” asked Boehner.
“There’s no detail in here,” noted the reporter.
Answered Boehner: “This is a blueprint for where we’re going. Are you asking about some other document?”
A second reporter followed up: “What about some numbers? What about the out-year deficit? What about balancing the budget? How are you going to do it?”
“We’ll have the alternative budget details next week,” promised Boehner. Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) had wisely departed the room after offering his opening remarks. (”Today’s Republican road-to-recovery is the latest in a series of GOP initiatives, solutions and plans,” he had offered.)
A third reporter asked Boehner about the Republican goal for deficit reduction, noting President Obama aimed to cut it in half in five years. “What’s your goal?”
“To do better,” said Boehner.
“How? How much?”
“You’ll see next week.”
“Wait. Why not today? Because he asked you to present a budget.”
“Now, hold on,” said Boehner. “The president came to Capitol Hill and laid out his blueprint for his budget during the State of the Union. He didn’t offer his details until days later.”
“In general, where do you see cuts coming?” the Huffington Post asked.
“We’ll wait and see next week,” he said.
Another reporter reminded Boehner that he has “criticized Democrats for throwing together a stimulus quickly and nobody knew what they were voting on. Are you saying that your budget will be unveiled on the same day that the House is expected to vote on it?”
“No, I expect it’ll be out next week,” he said, though the House is expected to vote on the budget next week. “But understand that a budget really is a one-page document. It’s just a bunch of numbers.”
Still, as I mentioned back in October, Marx appears to be making a bit of a comeback. Marx and Engels began the Communist Manifesto with the claim that “A specter is haunting Europe - the specter of Communism.” The powers that be, they claimed, had entered into a “holy alliance to exorcise this specter.” Well, it isn’t 1848 anymore. And the establishment isn’t exactly trembling over the possibility of communist uprisings. But Marx’s analysis of capitalism won’t go away. Because it shouldn’t. It haunts us still.
And as more time passes, eventually the real words and ideas of Marx and Engels will be further liberated from the horrors of the phony Marxism of monsters like Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot. We might then be able to take seriously the critiques of capitalism that Marx produced, without having to entertain an irrelevant debate about Stalinism (which was a murderous disaster that had nothing to do with what Marx actually wrote).
John Cassidy’s 1997 New Yorker essay “The Return of Karl Marx” was quite prescient and is well worth a read. The abstract is here. And Christopher Hitchens has a piece in the April issue of The Atlantic that mentions and develops themes introduced in Cassidy’s essay. Hitch:
As I write this, every newspaper informs me of frantic efforts by merchants to unload onto the consumer, at almost any price, the vast surplus of unsold commodities that have accumulated since the credit crisis began to take hold. The phrase crisis of over-production, which I learned so many long winters ago in “agitational” meetings, recurs to my mind. On other pages, I learn that the pride of American capitalism has seized up and begun to rust, and that automobiles may cease even to be made in Detroit as a consequence of insane speculation in worthless paper “derivatives.” Did I not once read somewhere about the bitter struggle between finance capital and industrial capital? The lines of jobless and hungry begin to lengthen, and what more potent image of those lines do we possess than that of the “reserve army” of the unemployed—capital’s finest weapon in beating down the minimum wage and increasing the hours of the working week? A disturbance in a remote corner of the world market leads to chaos and panic at the very center of the system (and these symptoms are given a multiplier effect when the pangs begin at the center itself), and John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, doughty champions of capitalism at The Economist, admit straightforwardly in their book on the advantages of globalization that Marx, “as a prophet of the ‘universal interdependence of nations,’ as he called globalization … can still seem startlingly relevant … His description of globalization remains as sharp today as it was 150 years ago.”
I think it is safe to say that if we want to get some perspective on our current economic situation, Marx has a little more to offer than, say, CNBC. But I think we’re stuck with CNBC for now; because, as Marx himself put it, “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.” Damn.
Rush isn’t happy with the questions the press asked Obama last night. In particular, he is troubled by a question that made reference to a recent report that claims that one in fifty American children will experience homelessness. Limbaugh calls this statistic “bogus.” His evidence? A different report? Some government statistics, maybe? Nah. He counters the report and the statistic with this: “would somebody tell me the last time you saw a kid sleeping under a bridge?”
Limbaugh creates his own tailor-made reality for his listeners. He appears to feel perfectly entitled to declare things to be true or not true just by his own proclamation, without evidence or context. And his listeners appear quite comfortable in Rush’s reality (they call themselves “Ditto Heads,” after all; so I guess we can’t expect a lot of ciritical pushback from his audience). And this man, sadly, is taken very seriously by many people in this country.
(And by the way - what are you doing under those bridges anyway, Rush? Shopping, maybe?)
Don’t forget to book your seat on the Las Vegas foreclosure fun bus (with complimentary cocktails)! For those of you on the East Coast, you’ll have to settle for the A.I.G. Employees House Tour (with complimentary rotten fruit).
American International Group is giving its executives tens of millions of dollars in new bonuses even though it received a taxpayer bailout of more than $170 billion dollars.
AIG is paying out the executive bonuses to meet a Sunday deadline, but the troubled insurance giant has agreed to administration requests to restrain future payments.
The Treasury Department determined that the government did not have the legal authority to block the current payments by the company. AIG declared earlier this month that it had suffered a loss of $61.7 billion for the fourth quarter of last year, the largest corporate loss in history [bold added].
The revolution should start any time now. Aaaaany time now.
UPDATE:
Apparently, AIG isn’t giving out “tens of millions of dollars” in bonuses to reward its employees for screwing up royally. Because that would be ridiculous. According to the WSJ, they’re giving out hundreds of millions:
American International Group Inc. will pay $450 million in bonuses to employees in its financial products unit. That division was at the heart of AIG’s collapse last fall, which compelled the U.S. government to provide $173.3 billion in aid to keep it running.
Here’s the culmination of the John Stewart takedown of the preposterous (and possibly criminal?) gasbag Jim Cramer. I’ve been enjoying this for its comeuppance value, and for pure entertainment. But this little affair also shows why the Daily Show and John Stewart have legitimately become and important part of our media culture - because they do the work. The Daily Show actually asks difficult questions, and digs up evidence. As Stewart often points out, the show is meant to be entertainment first. But I feel better knowing that Stewart is out there, in many cases doing the work and asking the questions that our sad excuse for a mainstream news media won’t. And as an added bonus, Stewart’s show is pretty funny, too.
John Stewart continues to make an ass of Jim Cramer. This isn’t exactly heavy lifting for Stewart, of course, because Cramer is…what’s the word? Oh yes - an ass. This video gets better and better as it continues:
TPM describes the incredibly “selective” (read: “patently ideological”) way that textbook giant McGraw-Hill presents the recent history behind our current economic woes:
You may not have been aware of this, but apparently “good intentions caused the financial crisis.” That’s the headline of a helpful educational primer for kids on the website of McGraw-Hill, a major provider of school textbooks.
In places, the writeup, which explains the historical background of the push for increased home-ownership, and offers a cogent explication of mortgage-backed securities, is quite helpful.
But it’s hard to tell this story properly if, for political reasons, you have to steer clear of any explicit acknowledgment that the deregulation of the financial system — out of a mix of misguided ideology and fealty to corporate interests — was a major contributor to the collapse. Nor does the flat-out greed and borderline fraud of many major Wall Street banks enter into McGraw-Hill’s telling of the story.
The lastest wingnut response to the economic proposals of the Obama administration is to emulate characters from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Here’s the idea, in small:
John Galt is the copper-haired, white-boy protagonist in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Galt leads a revolutionary movement in which all the top leaders of the banks and corporations forsake their corporate jets and perks to work in diners or as subway repair guys. No they weren’t fired by Galt. Rather, Galt urged them to go on strike and withdraw their expertise from an increasingly socialist world. Deprived of the genius of their genius, the world economy collapses.
The current avatars of John Galt, however, are far less ambitious. Today, “Going Galt” refers to the act of wilfully cutting back on your work so that your income will fall below the $250,000 limit to avoid paying higher marginal tax rates.
A number of pundits have argued how completely insane and counterproductive this is from a purely economic perspective. Daniel Gross, writing for Slate, demonstrates that
Obama’s proposals don’t mean the government would steal every penny you make above the $250,000 threshold, or that making more than $250,000 would somehow subject all of your income to higher taxes. Rather, you’d pay 36 cents to the government in income taxes on every dollar over the threshold, rather than 33 cents.
So members of the elite 2% of Americans who make more than $250,000 a year are actually planning to give up tens of thousands of dollars just to prevent three pennies from each marginal dollar above $250,000 from being used to, say, provide healthcare for those who can’t afford it.
Gross cites real-life examples such as a dentist who plans to reduce “her income from her current $320,000 to under $250,000 by having her dental hygienist work fewer days and by treating fewer patients. [That way, she] would avoid paying higher taxes on the $70,000 that would be subject to increased taxation if Obama’s proposal is signed into law.”
So, by my math, at a personal cost of $44,800, this savvy dentist has prevented Uncle Sam from collecting an additional $2,100. Take that, socialist hordes!
The state of our national media outlets is distressing. On TV, we have never had so much information being broadcast so contstantly on so many stations (which should be a good thing). But the quality of the coverage is brutally low, and TV news puts a premium on those who can shout and rant, whether or not they make any sense. Cable news outlet CNBC is a perfect example. Matthew Yglesias on CNBC:
CNBC is a lucrative and somewhat influential television network, but the whole thing is also pretty much a fraud. Fox News is just a little itty-bitty fraud. They say they’re “fair and balanced” but really they’re conservative. I don’t think anyone’s really fooled or anyone is trying especially hard to fool anyone. It is what it is—cable news with a slant. CNBC, though, very earnestly purports to be a good source of information about business and economics and even economic policy. And it just isn’t. The whole thing is a farce. It’s as if we had a 24-hour news network dedicated entirely to the pronouncements of astrologists and entrail readers.
Robert Reich on CNBC’s wrong-headed, simplistic and ideological attack on Obama:
CNBC’s Jim Cramer, who bloviates nightly about stock picks, says Obama is pushing a “radical agenda” that’s destroying investors’ wealth. My friend Larry Kudlow, who rants nightly about nearly everything, says Obama is destroying capitalism. CNBC reporter Rick Santelli’s ballistic nonsense about Obama’s mortgage plan made him a pop-populist icon for a week or so.
And here’s John Stewart. Not to be too gushy, but Stewart is becoming a national treasure.
Dead people are the newest frontier in debt collecting, and one of the healthiest parts of the industry. Those who dun the living say that people are so scared and so broke it is difficult to get them to cough up even token payments.
Collecting from the dead, however, is expanding. Improved database technology is making it easier to discover when estates are opened in the country’s 3,000 probate courts, giving collectors an opportunity to file timely claims. But if there is no formal estate and thus nothing to file against, the human touch comes into play.
New hires at DCM train for three weeks in what the company calls “empathic active listening,” which mixes the comforting air of a funeral director with the nonjudgmental tones of a friend. The new employees learn to use such anger-deflecting phrases as “If I hear you correctly, you’d like…” New York Times
Telemarketing meets debt collections in the great financial meltdown of the twenty first century.
“In times of illness and death, the hierarchy of debts is adjusted,” said Michael Ginsberg of Kaulkin Ginsberg, a consulting company to the debt collection industry. “We do our best to make sure our doctor is paid, because we might need him again. And we want the dead to rest easy, knowing their obligations are taken care of.”
What ever happened to burying the dead with earthly riches for use in the afterlife?
DCM started a Web site called MyWayForward.com to provide the bereaved with information, tools and, some day, products. “We will never sell death. But it’s O.K. to provide things that could be helpful to the survivor,” Mr. Farsht said. Death will be the end of one customer relationship but the beginning of another.
Like some of his fellow Republican governors, Mark Sanford of South Carolina wants to reject some of the stimulus money from the federal economic recovery bill - money intended to help the people of his state. But if you’re poor or unemployed, and you live in the Palmetto State, don’t worry. The governor has an economic plan. Prayer.
On C-SPAN’s Washington Journal this morning, Sanford received a call from a Charleston resident who said he lost his job because he has been taking care of mother and sister, both of whom have serious illnesses. The caller told Sanford he is “wrong” to decline the money. “A lot of people in South Carolina are hurting. And if this money can come and help us out we need it.” In response, Sanford could offer him only his prayers:
CALLER: I hope you all are not playing politics with this. People in South Carolina are hurting. You know how unemployment rates are high right now and going up higher. We are running out of money in the unemployment bank — we need money for that, the people that need help. And I’m one of them, I can’t get no help. […]
SANFORD: Well I’d say hello to Charleston because its home and I’d say hello to this fellow this morning and say that my prayers are going to be with him and his family because it sounds like he is in an awfully tough spot.
Sanford offered no other alternative solution for his constituent and instead argued that the state could not accept money to extend unemployment benefits because “increasing the tax on unemployment insurance” would negatively “impact the caller’s family” (although he didn’t say how).
I can’t believe the caller accused the governor of “playing politics!” Surely Sanford is just taking a principled stand against wasteful government spending, right? So I’m sure that he must have taken a similar stand against the record profligacy of the Bush administration, too, right? And when he backed John McCain in 2008, it was because he saw a big difference betweeen McCain’s responsible economic policies and the big-spending, big-government policies of Bush, right? Wrong.
Hi, I’m Bobby Jindal, governor of Louisiana. I’d really like to let my citizens benefit from federal stimulus money that would extend unemployment insurance benefits — but I can’t. It might lead to an increase in taxes for businesses.
So says the G.O.P., apparently. Andrew Sullivan puts it this way:
I have to say even I am a little taken aback by the force of the Republican assault. Even in a downturn as swift and alarming as this one, even after an election that clearly favored one approach over another, even after the most conciliatory efforts by an incoming president in memory, these people have gone to war against the president. The president should stay cool. The rest of us should realize what motivates the GOP: the opportunism of selective ideology.
Their clear and open intent is to do all they can, however they can, to sabotage the new administration (and the economy to boot). They want failure. Even now. Even after the last eight years. Even in a recession as steeply dangerous as this one. There are legitimate debates to be had; and then there is the cynicism and surrealism of total political war. We now should have even less doubt about what kind of people they are. And the mountain of partisan vitriol Obama will have to climb every day of the next four or eight years.
I really have no stomach for excessive Republican partisanship right now. We just lived through a period in which we were told that we were not only partisans, but that we were unpatriotic, traitorous friends of terror if we disagreed with the Bush Administration.
Obama is not trying to invade a country on false premises. He is not trying to authorize torture. He is not trying to disregard the fourth amendment and the F.I.S.A. laws. Rather, he is trying to pass an (albeit imperfect) economic stimulus bill during a recession. And this is a recession that grew out of the poison soil of Bush’s economic policies. So from the Republican viewpoint, it is time for a partisan political war, I guess. WTF?
This handy chart from Media Matters is rather telling.
No, you don’t have to be an economist to have an informed opinion about the stimulus bill. But do we need to hear more from Ed Rollins, Dick Morris, Bay Buchanan, Bill Kristol, and Michelle Malkin about the bill? Is that going to advance the discussion?
The video at the bottom of this post is utterly astounding. I have included it just to make sure you don’t think I’m making this stuff up.
Michael Steele, who is chairman of the Republican National Committee, tells us that “not in the history of mankind has the government ever created a job.”
The federal government employs over2,700,000 workersand hires hundreds of thousands each year to replace civil service workers that transfer to other federal government jobs, retire, or leave for other reasons. Average annual salary for full-time federal government jobs exceeds $67,000. The U.S. Government is the largest employer in the United States, hiring about 2.0 percent of the nation’s work force. Federal government jobs can be found in every state and large metropolitan area, including overseas in over 200 countries. The average annual federal workers compensation, pay plus benefits, is $106,871 compared to just $53,288 for the private sector according to the United States Bureau of Economic Analysis [bold added].
So 2.7 million people get up every day, drink some coffee and grab a bagel, hop on the subway or get in their cars, and then go to their jobs that don’t exist? How simply bizarre!
This next bit, however, is my favorite part. Steele says that he doesn’t like the stimulus package because it creates jobs that are temporary. Jobs created by government contracts, he says, aren’t real jobs, they’re just “work.” (What a fascinating distinction, Michael!) For example, Steele says “these road projects that we’re talking about have an end point.”
Yes. This is true.
Because, dumbass, all construction jobs are temporary and have an end point. Unless you’re building a stairway to heaven, your construction project will eventually end. While construction is going on, however, construction workers have jobs (or “work” if you prefer). Because Mr. Steele appears to be having a really hard time with this concept, we’ll explain it in simplest terms:
Imagine a construction project. Let’s say the government decides to spend money to put up a new building. Well, for a period of time, architects, engineers, project managers, carpenters, brick layers, pipefitters, plumbers, laborers, truck drivers, ironworkers, crane operators, sprinkler fitters, painters, and other people will be employed. Not unemployed. (Jobs!)
This is a good thing, you see. But there’s more to it. The government spending that creates this “temporary” project will be multiplied through the economy. This is called the demand multiplier effect. Those people working on the building will be making wages. You know - money. And they will save some of it. And they will spend some of it. They will buy lunch at the lunch cart, they will buy new work boots, they will have a beer after work, they will buy groceries, they will take their families out to dinner; maybe they will buy a car, or a boat, or perhaps they will renovate their kitchen. They can do these things because they have “work.” Therefore, the money spent on the construction project will not only effect the construction workers themselves, but also various other local businesses. And we didn’t even mention the other businesses that will benefit from this project, like the companies that supply all of the tools and building materials for this new building.
So government, in this case, has created jobs. And those jobs lead to wages, and to increased saving and spending - this is what we call “economic activity.” The result? The economy has been - pay close attention here - stimulated. The government will also see another kind of return on its investment, because the people employed on this job will pay income and payroll taxes.
Yes, Michael, eventually this project will “have an end point.” The building will be complete someday. That is the nature of construction.
So the government does create jobs, you see? It creates “government jobs,” but also other kinds of jobs. And when we are in a recession, and people are unemployed, they need jobs. Or “work,” if you prefer.
In his WAPO column today, Harold Meyerson makes the case for Obama’s pay-cap proposal for high-rollin’ welfare recipients:
Obama’s decision to put pay restrictions on the top executives of banks seeking a federal bailout is a classic instance of saving capitalism from the capitalists. Wall Street may yelp, but it will be politically impossible to keep the financial system afloat unless the public believes its money is not going to reward the very executives who brought that system down.
But Obama’s move isn’t just good politics; it’s good economics, too. Over the past two decades, Wall Street’s reward system has showered the most money on the guys who took the most risks with other people’s money. The financial structure that emerged from the New Deal ensured that small investors, pensioners and depositors wouldn’t be exposed to high levels of risk, but the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act and other follies of deregulation plunged everybody into the same high-risk pool. Congress and the president are working to devise new regulations that will restore some safety to the act of investing, but Obama’s pay directives — under which executives can cash out their shares only after they have righted their banks and repaid the government’s investment — are also intended to reward long-term performance over short-term gain.
Meyerson is correct. The citizens of the United States have every right to expect that their tax money will not end up rewarding members of the over-privileged classes for their short-sightedness and avarice. And a restoration of sanity in financial regulation is indeed crucial to the economic future of the country. The whole column is here.
Unlicensed plumber/fake war correspondent, “Joe” Wurzelbacher, will become the Republican’s new economic strategist:
Fresh off his stint as a war correspondent in Gaza, Joe the Plumber is now doing political strategy with Republicans.
When GOP congressional aides gather Tuesday morning for a meeting of the Conservative Working Group, Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher – more commonly known as Joe the Plumber — will be their featured guest. This group is an organization of conservative Capitol Hill staffers who meet regularly to chart GOP strategy for the week.
Wurzelbacher, who became a household name during the presidential election, will be focusing his talk on the proposed stimulus package. He’s apparently not a fan of the economic rescue package, according to members of the group.
Reminds me of what Obama said during the election: “Its like these guys take pride in being ignorant.”
Fox News viewers were treated today to the sage words of Brit Hume who took it upon himself to articulate the “common knowledge” that the New Deal was an abject failure and that FDR was some kind of economic terrorist.
At the Guardian, Michael Tomasky has published his list of “the 19 worst Americans of 2008.” (Damn - it has got to be hard to narrow it down to 19, don’t you think?) Here are a few of the highlights:
19 ED Hill. Ms Hill is the Fox News anchor who referred to Barack and Michelle Obama’s on-stage fist bump in early June as a “terrorist fist jab”. I guess she’s well familiar with the various and sundry ways in which couples express intimacy - she’s been married three times herself. Fox announced in November that it wasn’t renewing her contract.
18 Don Blankenship. Who? He’s the head of a huge coal-mining company that is an industry leader, if one must put it that way, in so-called mountain-top removal mining. It’s a hideous practice that destroys mountains and communities, and Blankenship is its poster child. Our supreme court has agreed to hear a case in which Blankenship financed the election of a state judge who, in a $50m lawsuit, ruled for Blankenship’s company. Google Caperton v Massey, read more about Massey, and tell me if this fellow shouldn’t perhaps be even higher.
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11 David Addington. Dick Cheney’s top aide told Congress in June that he didn’t even know what the unitary executive theory of presidential power was. This would be rather like Lavrenti Beria insisting that Lubyanka prison was actually a hotel.
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5 Michele Bachmann. Of the many memorable moments the campaign produced, I will never forget watching this Minnesota congresswoman say on national TV in October that Obama “may have anti-American views” and endorse the idea of a media investigation of all members of Congress to determine whether their views were sufficiently pro-American. The single most appalling political statement of the year.
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3 George Bush. There were years when he would have been higher - 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007. I’ll give him a slight pass for 2001, what with the attacks and all that. In those previous years, he stole an election, started an unnecessary war, lied about it, approved torture, let a great US city drown and so on. This year he merely presided over the bankruptcy of the global economy. Twenty days and counting.
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The top two are a powerful combination of baffling incompetence on the one hand, and profound thievery on the other - Sarah Palin and Bernard Madoff.
I would suggest one addition to Tomasky’s list: Mitt Romney. I realize that he suspended his campaign rather early in 2008, thus sparing us from a full year of his hair and his bullshit. But his campaign, as long as it lasted, was grotesque. Is there a less sincere or more disingenuous person on the planet? He could not even tell the truth about his days as a great white (varmint) hunter. He took the political flip-flop to new levels. Case in point: gay marraige. When he ran for senate in 1994, he promised the Log Cabin Republicans that he’d be a better friend to the gay community than Ted Kennedy. But when he had to court the troglodyte right in the presidential primary, he got all homophobic-er than thou on us. And he just spouted nonsense, and was seldom called on it. He told us that he wanted to defend “traditional marriage,” because he agreed with “three thousand years of recorded history,” in which marriage was always the same - one man and one woman. “Marriage is not an ‘evolving paradigm,’” he told us. Always the same.
Dude. His great-grandfather had five wives. His great-great grandfather had twelve wives.
So which “traditional” marriage does he want to defend? Traditional plural marriage? Traditional arranged marriage? The kind of traditional marriage where all property and political rights revert to the husband alone? Or the tradition in which people of different races can’t marry each other? (Thank goodness for “evolving paradigms,” no?)
Romney would have to be wildly historically illiterate to believe the things he was saying. And I don’t think he is that stupid. And he would also have to be totally unaware of his own family history to believe those things, too. So I guess he was, as usual, just being his regular old dishonest self.
Sorry. I guess I used this post as an excuse to rant about Mitt Romney one last time. Man, I hate what he just said. Always.
The George giveth, and the George taketh away. He has given us plenty: phony war, illegal wiretapping, torture, a politicized justice department, more water pollution, a terrible reputation in the world, a gulag in Guantanamo, more severe class stratification, a lifetime worth of embarrassing linguistic blunders, unimaginably ballooning deficits and debts, and so much more.
Now, on his way out the door, his expert management of the economy taketh away. Your job.
Skittish employers slashed 533,000 jobs in November,the most in 34 years, catapulting the unemployment rate to 6.7 percent, dramatic proof the country is careening deeper into recession.
The new figures, released by the Labor Department Friday, showed the crucial employment market deteriorating at an alarmingly rapid clip, and handed Americans some more grim news right before the holidays.
As companies throttled back hiring, the unemployment rate bolted from 6.5 percent in October to 6.7 percent last month, a 15-year high [bold added].
Hm - 15 years ago. Right. That’s when we were still trying to recover from that other recession. The one that happened under that guy named “George Bush,” I think.
If you are looking for evidence that we have a completely f—ked up culture, look no further:
A man working for Wal-Mart was killed on Friday when a throng of shoppers surged into a Long Island, New York, store and physically broke down the doors, a police spokesman said.
The 34-year-old man was at the entrance of the Valley Stream Walmart store just after it opened at 5 a.m. local time and was knocked to the ground, the police report said.
The exact cause of death was still to be determined by a medical examiner.
Four shoppers, including a 28-year-old pregnant woman, were also taken to local hospitals for injuries sustained in the incident, police said.
Wal-Mart said it was saddened by the death of the man, who was working for a temporary employment agency serving the discount retailer, and by the injuries suffered by shoppers.
Personally, I find this story even creepier since the trampled man is referred to only as “a man.” He remains a namlelss martyr to Always Low Prices™ — a primitive blood sacrifice to placate the angry gods of the market.
Happy Holidays from everyone here at I Hate What You Just Said!
