Little noticed in this "Arab Spring"

By Carl 

Israeli citizens are demanding more liberal government:

TEL AVIV, Israel -- While the world has been focused on the anti-government movements that sprang up during the Arab Spring, the largest protests in Israeli history have been sweeping the country for the past two months, threatening to destabilize the government with calls for extensive change.

The protests began with a Facebook petition over the cost of cottage cheese. They now include a litany of demands, including a return to the days when the government took a more active role in subsidizing costs. Protesters also want changes in the tax system, more subsidized government housing and more spending on health and education.

Last weekend, more than 150,000 people participated in a nationwide march to protest high housing costs. The organizers are calling for another march this weekend and promising an even larger turnout.

Israeli officials admit surprise at the strength and staying power of the protesters, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded this week by canceling a scheduled increase in the price of gasoline that was to have gone into effect Tuesday.

That's not popcorn popping, that's the sound of the heads of neo-conservatives and right-wing Zionist bloggers like Pamela Geller exploding.

In a time of austerity measures in America and much of Europe, tiny Israel is deciding, yes, we the people need more.

In fairness, Israel is a nation built on socialist values. As a small island of Judaism in a larger hostile environment, people who are crammed together learn the importance of looking out for one another.

Here in America, we could have adopted the same basic moral values, but chose instead to live with the romantic illusion of "rugged individualism."

Bollocks, as the British would say. "No man is an island," as John Donne put it. Opportunity in America is defined as the culmination of the tribe fostering the one. No one gets rich in this nation on his own, and our tax codes and social constructs ought to recognize this. For behind every rich person in this nation lies an entire community and network of people who work to support his or her opportunities. 

And since greed drives the acquisition of wealth, you can guaran-damn-tee he or she ain't rewarding those folks adequately.

America stopped being about "fairness" a long time ago. It stopped being about opportunity more recently, but still, the barriers to entry in any market are in direct violation of the basic principles of laissez faire economics put down by Adam Smith (who believed in soaking the rich, by the way).

That kind of rugged individualism, where a person through the sweat of his own brow and the dirt under his fingernails, could carve out a modest life for himself that allowed him to be free of working as an indentured servant on someone else's farm, that kind of rugged individualism one can admire. But it's not the rugged individualism people think of today.

It's not the rugged individualism of free enterprise and competition. Now, markets close to competition. Companies will patent everything in sight, including your own DNA, to claim rights to them. Try "going Galt" when you leave your DNA everywhere.

Today, if you don't wear a helmet while riding a motorcycle, you're a rugged individualist. An idiot, but an RI nonetheless. Note that you're middle class enough to *afford* the motorcycle in the first place. You were not someone's slave who suddenly freed himself through dint of hard work and savings. 

Americans have a very hard lesson to learn. We are not individuals. We pretend we can be. And in some small ways, we can be, but not in ways that matter.

A friend of mine said to me recently, "You can be a slave to the corporatocracy under Republicans or a slave to government under the Democrats." There's at least some truth to the latter, and a lot of truth to the former -- although I challenged him to show me how he could be a slave under Democrats. I got a lot of talk about Spain. Not sure it was relevant.

We are slaves. Nearly all of us earn a living making someone else wealthy.

A few of us earn part of our living making someone else wealthy, and part of our living siphoning wealth off other people: in other words, with an economy that is effectively a zero-sum game, you are either being sucked dry or sucking someone else dry. Neither is a particularly pleasant moral position to take.

That the corporatocracy has dug it's siphons so deeply into our society was an inevitable outgrowth of Republican policies (and sadly, many Democratic ones, too).

For my part, I'd rather be a slave to a government that at least once in a while has to get my authorization to enslave me, and that every so often, gets overruled. It sure beats an autocracy of boards of directors and CEOs with no fealty to shareholders, much less other stakeholders like employees or vendors.

Americans could learn a lesson from the Israeli people. When the notion of fairness goes out the window, the best strategy is not to be more antisocial, but less. 

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)

You forget I'm in America

By Distributorcap

Did you know that the United States doesn't have any rich people? There are no millionaires, no billionaires, no nouveau riche. If you listen carefully to the words of such brilliant orators as Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, they never mention the wealthy, never say anything about the monied class.

If you listen very carefully to the recent speeches from the man of 1,000 chins and the man with the bronzed male member, what we have in the United States are "job creators." Rich people -- puh-leezee, this is America, not the French aristocracy of 1788.

Here is where Anita breaks out into song:

"I like to be in America, Okay by me in America, Everything free in America" -- where Bernardo keenly observes, "for a small fee in America."

You have to give the GOP credit for adherence to the Prime Directive -- the only good public is a stupid and misinformed public. It sure has paid off well for the Job Creator class of America.  Phase 1 began in 1981 with the ascension of the genteel and amiable Lucifer himself, Ronald Reagan, the first step in the nation's climb back to the landed gentry.  Reagan gutted social programs, proclaimed welfare queens drove Cadillacs, declared ketchup a vegetable, stated trees cause pollution, and made education (along with fat tub of lard William Bennett) a very, very evil thing, even more evil than that nasty evil empire with its evil headquarters in Moscow. Phase 2 was ushered in by the creative marketing genius of Lee Atwater. If you are going to lie, cheat, steal, misinform, and mislead to get ahead, make sure you do it consistently and convincingly.  And use lots of video and pictures, like people sitting in a tank.

And the final phase, Phase 3, was the inevitable mainstreaming of the politics of  hate -- it's us vs. them, it's the winner takes all, it's knowing the only good compromise is a non-existent compromise. Using the valuable lessons (or is it lesions) from Phase 1 and Phase 2, the King of Tiffany Despicable himself, Newt Gingrich, marketed Phase 3 into a profitable and influential cottage industry known as Fox News.

Fast forward to 2010 and Social Security (an insurance program everyone pays into) is only known as an "entitlement." (Entitlement is so mainstreamed now it doesn't even register as doublespeak on any scale any more). So is Medicare. But corporate subsidies, economic breaks for oil companies, Big Ag, Big Pharma, defense contractors etc. -- not so much entitlements but "economic engines."

In 2011, we can now add "Job Creators" to the lexicon of a society hastening its descent into a world driven by five-second bytes laced with Orwellian language and insidious totalitarian tactics.

I am no economist, but one day some TV pundit, one who is not as concerned about the theater of the government and as about the governing of the government, is going to publicly state that tax cuts for Job Creators simply do not create one fucking job. Tax Cuts for the class known as Job Creators creates money for Job Creators.

There is really only one thing that creates jobs, and that is demand (Middle English demaunden, Anglo-French demaunder, Medieval Latin dēmandāre) -- period.  Demand for goods and services (do I sound like my Econ 101 professor or what?) creates a need for someone to supply those very needed goods and services. Giving more money to people who already have more money than they know what to do with is just not going to create jobs. Or enough jobs. Yes, it will create a few more gardeners, maids, and nannies and maybe a few mechanics to service the Cadillacs driven by the corporate welfare queens. But millions of jobs for a humming 14 trillion dollar economic engine -- that and a few crumpets will get you dinner with Marie Palinette.

John Boehner and the Man of the 1,000 Chins can ramble on and on and on about how tax increases now are the worst thing ever and that more tax cuts to those billionaires will really, really, really create more jobs (insert red slippers and click 3x). And since mumbling tax cuts (like mumbling entitlements and Job Creators) makes such a melodious soundbite, the great Reagan Uneducated Class (RUC for short), now in their 30s-40s, who were trained well in Atwaterian Marketing and Gingrichian Sociology (or rather sociopathology) - still think that giving the top 1% (who earn 24%of the income) more money will all of a sudden make America the land of milk and honey and paved roads and bullet trains.

Skyscrapers bloom in America

Cadillacs zoom in America (without welfare queens)

Industry boom in America

In 1980, the top marginal tax rate was 70%. In 2005, the top marginal tax rate was under 40%. For the top 1%, after-tax income rose 176% in those same 25 years, while for the bottom 40% it rose just 12%. In 2008, the top 10% on the economic scale held 80% of all the financial assets. Seems equitable, huh?

Can someone please ask Chins, Boehner, Cantor, and even Grover Norquist exactly what jobs those Job Creators are going to create with all that extra money to generate enough demand to get the economy going? Salespeople at Prada and Gucci aren't going to allow America to keep pace with a world more interested in their internal infrastructure than external police actions. Everyone (including teabaggers) knows that tax cuts for the wealth simply cannot create enough (or any) jobs to correct the economy of 300 million Americans. Only creating the demand for real services and industries and goods will.

People (and there are millions) who continue to fall for the continuous Orwellian horseshit being pitchforked by the Republicans simply fail to see that the only jobs those Job Creators are creating are permanent (and cushy) jobs (with a pension and health care for life) for McConnell, Boehner, Cantor, DeMint, and the other assorted lunatics of the GOP. 

Anita: Free to be anything you choose.

Bernardo: Free to wait tables and shine shoes.

Cooling down the hotbeds

By Capt. Fogg

Every word is a prejudice,

said Nietzsche. That's why one man's pillar of probity is another man's "hotbed" of heresy.

You know these colleges are hotbeds of liberalism!

said the man across the table.

These kids just aren't old enough to be able to tell what they're being taught from the truth. They're not teaching both sides.

He's got an interesting point. High levels of education in our country do seem to be associated with high levels of free thinking and pragmatism and therefore must be caused by it as proved by the cum hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy -- and whereas that's obviously bad and according to the divine doctrine of judging truth by what the less educated are comfortable with, it's therefore quite obvious that opposing viewpoints in other fields this Republican might be ignorant of or disagree with are not being given equal or preferred classroom time or assigned reading: the voice of the people isn't being heard at Harvard.

Disciplines like mathematics, physics, biology, engineering, and medicine? They only teach one side, and that's elitist. Everything has two equal and opposite sides, the right side being, by definition -- right. You know all those things are best left to folksy opinion, anonymous blog comments and to websites run and funded by Republicans who hold forth from country club and yacht club dinner tables all over America.

In history classes, we can be sure courses are not being taught about the secret liberal cabal ruining the world from its headquarters in Kenya, about the danger of subjecting corporations to the law rather than letting them write it, or that those poor women in Salem really were agents of Satan and why universal suffrage doomed the country to divine wrath. Why, even Pythagoras and Newton and Einstein are treated as relatively established authorities and one hardly hears of the four elements or phlogiston or the aether or divine creation as acceptable differences of opinion at those hotbeds any more. And what of alternative cosmologies and opposing views in the sciences and history and literary criticism? Well, in fact they are being talked about and constantly tested, but we do have the other conservative doctrines of "if I don't know, nobody knows" and the inapplicability of past experience to the present time -- and that, dear reader, is that. It's a hotbed.

No, what they should be doing at Columbia or the London School of Economics and Political Science and other centers of liberal propaganda and academic honesty is reciting the catechism that includes such credos as: tax cuts pay for themselves and never, ever cause recessions; massive concentrations of wealth and political power in the hands of a tenth of one percent of the population make for opportunity and "freedom"; and, like a driverless car, the markets will always stay on the road -- and so government should stay out of business practices and move into the pulpit, as God and the Founding Fathers intended.

Face it: universities, public and private, are hotbeds, and that's cold comfort. Hell, why don't we do as that great capitalist prophet, Mao Zedong, did and simply close them down? The people know best!

(Cross-posted from Human Voices.)

We used to call it "trust busting"

By Carl

Finally, some rational thought from the Federal Reserve:

"I think the disagreeable but sound thing to do regarding institutions that are TBTF [ed. note. Too Big To Fail] is to dismantle them over time into institutions that can be prudently managed and regulated across borders," he said. "And this should be done before the next financial crisis, because it surely cannot be done in the middle of a crisis."

Adam Smith would roll over in his grave to understand how perverted his elegant economic system, for all its initial flaws, has become, corrupted by the aggregation of money, power, and influence. He intended for small businesses to compete against each other to provide goods and services to consumers.

Indeed, our Founding Fathers had a great and long debate about even opening up a national bank which would serve as a 800 lb gorilla in the banking system to provide leverage against large business combinations attempting to wrest control of the national money supply. Inevitably, businesses of all sizes fail. It's just a question of time.

If a major multinational bank fails, it doesn't just hurt its employees and shareholders as we've seen. It threatens the entire nation, from its financial security right down to its physical security.

And that's not good.

"Too Big To Fail" is, quite simply, too big. Full stop.

We've discussed on this blog the marvels of distributed power generation. Money is power. Banks should be hacked down to manageable sizes that service the communities they are located in, with no direct entanglements in regions where they have no business being in, and I don't just mean geographic. I mean economic sectors, business sectors, even political sectors.

Will this harm the banking system? I don't think so. I think the system will evolve, perhaps parent corporations that can hold smaller banks under an umbrella, with governmental oversight to make sure there isn't as much crossover as there is now will be established.

One thing is certain: the banking system we have now is on the road to yet another collapse. Businesses fail. Industries fail. Banking will fail again unless we address the inherent flaws immediately.

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)

Polling ignorance: Why Americans supposedly reject Keynesian economics

By Michael J.W. Stickings

"Americans Reject Keynesian Economics," blares a headline at Rasmussen Reports.

Wait... what?

While influential 20th Century economist John Maynard Keynes would say it's best to increase deficit spending in tough economic times, only 11% of American adults agree and think the nation needs to increase its deficit spending at this time. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 70% disagree and say it would be better to cut the deficit.

In fact, 59% think Keynes had it backwards and that increasing the deficit at this time would hurt the economy rather than help.

To help the economy, most Americans (56%) believe that cutting the deficit is the way to go.

Eighty-three percent (83%) of Americans, in fact, say the size of the federal budget deficit is due more to the unwillingness of politicians to cut government spending than to the reluctance of taxpayers to pay more in taxes.

I'm sorry, but this is fucking ridiculous. What the hell do Americans know about economics, let alone about the intricacies of Keynesian economics? How do they possibly know what would "help the economy"?

They don't. The poll is just a reflection of bias and ignorance "across demographic and partisan lines."

People don't like paying taxes and don't like supporting programs for other people. It's that simple. And, as the poll shows, it's not just Republicans that don't. Democrats, who should prefer "the Keynesian approach," given their general political preferences, don't like taxes or spending either.

So does this mean Americans by and large prefer small, limited government? Perhaps, but only until they're actually pressed. Do they want a strong military, effective national security, Social Security, Medicare, etc.? Of course they do. Do they want the government programs that they like? Sure. But how do they expect to pay for all of that? Well, they don't want to pay for it themselves -- who does? -- and so what they prefer is for others to suffer so that they may benefit.

So it's hardly surprising that Keynesianism, which Americans don't understand, isn't terribly popular. But the alternative is what? Are we to assume that Americans love monetarism? Would they prefer their economy to be solely in the hands of central bankers? Hardly.

And they certainly don't know what's best for the economy as a whole. America is a democracy, yes, but it's a good thing policy isn't set by public opinion poll.

Sesame Street - Explains Bernie Madoff & Ponzi ?

JENNY McCARTHY - Suavenomics ?

Jenny McCarthy has teamed up with Suave shampoo to promote their new ‘Beauty Stimulus Campaign’ also known as Suavenomics. The actress hit Times Square in bustling Manhattan and waved a placard.



I love marketing and advertising in general, but the audacity of the ad companies to aggressively market a recession in the middle of a recession to the victims of the recession is mind boggling ! Kudos Gentlemen Kudos !
Suave's suavenomics campaign

Chris Matthews and the velocity of sexism

By Michael J.W. Stickings

This morning, I referred to Chris Matthews's "egotism and sexism." Earlier this afternoon, Media Matters sent out this latest example of the former.

Matthews was interviewing CNBC financial reporter Dylan Ratigan. In this clip (see below), Ratigan discusses the movement of money in the economy, specifically the frequency of movement, or activity, or what is known as the velocity of money. In terms of economic stimulation, the key is not just to inject more money into the economy but to increase the velocity of money in the economy.

Now, Ratigan's a decent reporter, and he's talking here about a rather complicated subject. And you would think that any good interviewer, and any decent person, would engage him with similar gravitas.

Not Matthews, who, evidently in well over his head, pulls out a typically lame and predictably sexist comeback:

Well, maybe if husbands should pay their wives for cooking dinner tonight, we can move the money around.

There's Chris Matthews for you. As charming as ever.

GOP to blue collar Americans: Screw you

By Libby Spencer

While the GOP is busy disguising its union busting mission as a call for 'responsible management,' (by which they mean screw the union workers first), in obstructing the $14 billion Big 3 bridge loan, the 'responsible' beneficiary of the multibillion dollar bailout of the financial industry doesn't seem to be outraging Mitch McConnell enough to demand wage concessions from the white collar workers of AIG. The company received $152 billion tax dollars and what are they doing with it? Paying millions to some employees in its new retention program.

The company has told 168 employees they'll receive between $92,500 and $4 million per individual if they stay with the company for one year. [...]

Even though there are more layoffs every month, AIG says its top talent is being recruited to rival companies. In fact, the company says two of its top people just left this week, despite being offered big retention payments. AIG says it needs its best people to keep its healthy businesses profitable until it can sell them and the company plans to sell 65 percent of its businesses to repay its federal loan and get back on track.

I don't suppose it's possible no amount of money will keep some of their best talent from jumping ship when it's evident the company is extremely likely to fold anyway. But as the enraged critics on Capitol Hill point out, with "tens of thousands of people being laid off from Wall Street and financial firms every day" it's ridiculous to think that they wouldn't be able to find qualified replacements for anyone who might quit because they didn't get a multi-million dollar "retention" bonus.

Outraged pols on the Hill are sending sternly worded letters demanding details on the program. As if that's likely to work. Maybe they should have demanded some pre-determined compensation criteria before they handed over the big bucks, as they're now demanding from blue collar workers.

And I don't just blame the GOP here. Harry Reid is just as responsible for failing to stand up to the GOPers scare tactics. Frankly, I'm not so sure Reid secretly wouldn't like to see organized labor taken down himself. He's sold us out to his corporate overlords right along and management always wants to suppress labor, no matter which party they presumptively support.

I'm thinking since these people are effectively our employees, though they seem to have forgotten that long ago, perhaps it's time for the citizenry to demand some wage concessions from them.

(Cross-posted at The Impolitic.)

Bailouts and the corporate form

By LindaBeth

Some things have really been bothering me about the auto bailout talk vis-a-vis the financial sector bailout, and especially the recent Citigroup bailout.

First, I agree with Rachel Maddow that something seems off when the (white collar) financial sector can get a quick bailout with few strings attached with no blame placed on employees and CEOs compensation structure (or any suggestion that it be revamped to take the federal funds), but in the case of the auto manufacturing (blue collar) sector, the quick blame is placed on the unionized workers, with their outrageous expectation for health care and decent wages. These worker "demands" are unreasonably passed on to consumers in the form of higher vehicle prices, according to conservatives like Cal Thomas, and that's the real reason US car manufacturer's cannot compete. Meanwhile, CEOs still rake in overly inflated incomes, benefits, stock options, and other perks instead of lowering vehicle prices so as to not "pass on" health care costs to the consumer. Be sure to check out this excellent analysis of the cost-per-employee figures being used to blame union labor.

Class warfare, indeed. I don't mind criticizing compensation structure, but how is unionized labor being blamed for the failure of the auto industry? What about the auto CEOs? And finance CEOs compensation is irrelevant to their bailout? This is akin to blaming welfare to the poor for the economic strain on the middle class, while the average compensation for an S & P 500 CEO in 2007 is projected to have been $14.2 million; in 2006 the average Fortune 500 CEO received $10.8 million, which is 364 times the average worker. In 2007, the Ford CEO's total compensation was $21,670,674, and GM's CEO's was $14,415,914. The average of auto worker's wages (not the pay of the average worker, but the average of workers' pay) is $20.53/hour, or $42,702/year--just below the median income. And it's the unions' fault?

Second, why is the troubled banks seen as economically "necessary" and an industry with $1.1 direct workers (in 2005) and several million related workers is not? Auto manufacturing, like the manufacturing sector of time past, has been a way for lower-skilled, less educated workers to have jobs with security, with decent wages, and health care. Sure, they can get new jobs, but what will these new jobs look like? In our deindustrialized economy, when these jobs go, they aren't going to be replaced with like jobs. The loss of these jobs will undoubtedly create new economic hardships for a slew of families. When we start talking about "necessary" industries, I want to ask, Economically necessary for who, and why?

Third, and this is really what's been getting me, I am absolutely floored that when corporations are coming to the government for help in a state of desperation and vulnerability, that we are not adequately using this leverage to make demands for corporate change. We have the position of power here. These CEOs don't want their companies to go down--think of their company stock and stock options that would become valueless! Why aren't we using it to get the regulations and accountability we've desired of them?

I just used the excellent film The Corporation (watch it in installments here) in my sociology classes this week in doing the Politics and the Economy chapter, so after watching it again -- 3 times this week -- it's been invading my thoughts. Underlying the definition of the modern corporation is that it's only legal obligation is to the shareholders, and that under a ridiculous usage of the 14th Amendment, the corporation itself is a person, meaning that no actual human being is held responsible for the actions of the corporation. This was not always so. Originally, corporations existed for the purpose of the public good. Now, they do not have any commitment to the community or tho their employees; they are legally required to act in the best interests of their shareholders in the pursuit of short-term profit (which, not surprisingly, is tied to a huge chunk of CEOs' compensation). Corporations and their activities are not held accountable to the democratic process, which is supposed to keep institutional power in check. Well, until now. To me, our economic crisis ought to be an opportunity to evaluate the way we do business (literally) in the United States, and to make steps that will hold corporations ultimately accountable to the interests of the public good (environmental, social welfare, whatever), not the interests of pure profit.

(Cross-posted to Speak Truth to Power.)

More Obamanomics

By Creature

I know Obama has chosen some of the very people who got us into this mess to help get us out, but, like Mike Malloy, I'm not in the mood to yell about that just yet. If solace is needed I look to some of the new minds Obama has hired and I look to people smarter than me for their positive take on the old minds.

To some degree, good or bad, the Bush years have defeated me to the extent that Obama, and his early decisions, are the beneficiaries of that defeat.

(Cross-posted at State of the Day.)

Paulson to ask Congress for more TARP cash

By Creature

I guess my bigger question within the context of the Wall Street meltdown is why are things like mortgages, auto, student and credit-card loans being packaged as securities (and now in need of saving) in the first place? I know I may be missing something here, but wasn't there a time when a loan was just a loan?

(Cross-posted at State of the Day.)

Stupid Republicans

By Capt. Fogg

If we think the very rich are indeed different from you and me, it may not be much of a complement to them.

The talk around the Yacht Club these days involves a lot of snickering about Barak Obama and what "that man" will do to the economy. No, I'm not joking, but then neither are they. Perhaps Malcom Gladwell is right that material success has as much or more to do with circumstances than with talent or intelligence. Take the fellow with a yacht worth far, far more than than Joe the Plumber will make in his lifetime; a fellow who thinks that we're seeing a "slowdown" that will "bounce back" shortly and a slowdown that has nothing to do with George Bush, a Republican congress, deregulation or the idea that debt has no consequences if you cut taxes and pour money down a hole. I have as much faith in his genius as he has in the notion that America's success has been the result of its Christian piety.

Obama, of course, will raise taxes. That's axiomatic because he's a Democrat. Raising taxes will harm the economy, they say, even though it would be as fair to say that a bullet will harm a dead horse and the economy has done better under Democrats since WWII. Supply-side economics will work eventually and even if it doesn't, even if the "slowdown" becomes a full blown depression, we have to keep making it easy for the Great Gatsby to keep the twin Diesels fed. Did I mention that Obama is going to ruin the economy by raising my taxes?

(Cross-posted from Human Voices.)

Mienfoks Economics Refresher - BigBox Mart ?

Didn't hear a whole lot about this during the Presidential Campaigns !

Palin in Iowa

By Capt. Fogg

If you've taken Economics 101, you've heard of Adam Smith and the "invisible hand," the principle that causes markets to be self-regulating. It's usually considered to be at least a vertebrum in the backbone of conservative philosophy, but people (if we use the term loosely) like Sarah Palin apparently aren't aware of Smith or of principles of any kind, even if she can see a library from her window.

Adam Smith, whom some consider to be the father of capitalism, thought it fair, right, and proper that the wealthy should pay proportionately more in taxes than the less wealthy. By Sarah's dim light, however, the father of capitalism would be a socialist. In the crepuscular gloom of her perky little mind, any kind of tax is socialism: It's spreading the wealth around. Handing out government cheques as a stimulus isn't socialism, but to reduce taxes is the same as to increase taxes because it is socialism if it's taxes. Okay, so you're not from a small town and probably not a real American, so to make it perfectly clear, Obama's proposed tax cut for 95% of Americans is:

the philosophy of government taking more, which is a misuse of the power to tax.

Got that? Less is more and more is less and together it's socialism. Spreading $600 cheques around isn't socialism, because it's just giving (real) people back the money wealthier people paid in, but lowering taxes on nearly everybody is socialism because not only is it spreading money around, but a "massive tax increase":

It leads to government moving into the role of taking care of you, and government and politicians and, kind of moving in as the other half of your family to make decisions for you.

It's really impossible to make any sense of this gibberish, other than to infer from it that she's opposed to funding anything the government does, opposed to having the government do anything but pay for her husband's basketball tickets and her feloniously padded expense account -- opposed to government itself.

Who knows if it makes sense to her or to her audience or whether either of them care? It's a hate session. It would be less effective if it made sense. It's the kind of mockery that used to precede pogroms and purges and witch hunts and various slaughters of various innocents in the more primitive dream world Mad Sarah looks backward to as a guide. As pure chant-and-response shamanism, it seems to be as effective at eliciting shrill cries of "kill him" and "socialism" from the howling jackals as it is at scaring the hell out of anyone rational. Indeed, is anyone rational not terrified of allowing this simple-minded sociopath anywhere near Washington?

(Cross-posted from the Swash Zone.)

Way to go, Paul!

By Carl

A Nobel Prize in Economics?

STOCKHOLM, Sweden — The American economist Paul R. Krugman won the Nobel economics prize on Monday for his analysis of trade patterns and location of economic activity.

Mr. Krugman, 55, a professor at Princeton University in New Jersey and a columnist for The New York Times, formulated a new theory to answer questions about free trade, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.

“What are the effects of free trade and globalization? What are the driving forces behind worldwide urbanization? Paul Krugman has formulated a new theory to answer these questions,” the academy said in its citation.

“He has thereby integrated the previously disparate research fields of international trade and economic geography,” it said.

Gee... I can't imagine how the right wing is flopping about, gasping for air on that announcement. Go congratulate him.

"This is a crisis of leadership"

By Carol Gee

As "vulnerable GOP members reject[ed the] bailout," pundits, experts, officials and citizens alike chalked the bill's defeat up to failed Republican leadership or failed Democratic leadership. Depending on whose side they favored, opinion makers have spent the time on casting blame since the result emerged. Today's post will be another in my "leadership" series examining what makes a good leader, and hoping to maintain a bit of objectivity, rather than partisanship.

Faulty information is an enemy of good leadership. Leadership in the U.S. House of Representatives has been widely blamed for the defeat of the so-called Wall Street bail-out bill yesterday. There was a good amount of finger-pointing both from within and between the Democratic and Republican parties. Bipartisanship disappeared rapidly after the vote count was tallied. The blame for the Iraq war is now well placed because we now know that the administration's rationale for the invasion of Iraq was based on faulty information. We see that good leaders work from credible information. Just as a small example, the leaders of both parties were not working from trustworthy estimates of what the final vote could be, even though their overall goal was bipartisanship. Patrick O'Connor and John Bresnahan, from Politico.com. conclude what actually happened in, "Boehner's gamble: Could it cost him his job?" To quote:

. . . Blunt said he had come to the floor thinking 75 Republicans would support the plan. He was off by 10 — just short of the 12 that were needed to turn defeat into victory.

But Boehner told a different story. He said that the GOP leaders never thought they’d get more than 68 Republicans to support the bill — and that he sent Blunt to tell Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) as much nearly two hours before the vote.

“I sent [Blunt] down to talk to Hoyer, 11:30, quarter to 12, somewhere in that time frame,” Boehner said. “We had a pretty good idea where we were, where we thought we could get to. And Hoyer knew.”

Boehner added: “I did not talk to [Hoyer], so I don’t know what their conversation was. [Blunt] and I had that conversation. We talked about ‘Should we just rise [walk out]?’ It wouldn’t have been good, but I thought it would have been better than this. It really doesn’t make any difference.”

Democrats, for their part, said they assumed Blunt was lowballing his whip count to force Pelosi and the Democrats to line up more votes from their members.

In the end, as Pelosi and her team tried to flip votes in favor of the proposal, there was little Boehner or his Republican leadership team could do to entice those who voted “no” to switch their tally in support of the controversial measure.

“Given the unpopularity of this whole concept, it’s amazing that we got as many votes as we did,” Boehner said.

Information is power and rank and file citizens took some leadership power unto themselves this past week, directly contacting their Representatives in Congress. Callers were objecting in high percentages to the idea of bailing out those on Wall Street. With the election just weeks away, many vulnerable candidates were influenced by their constituents' points of view about the nature of the crisis. A few Reps exercised good leadership and voted from what their consciences dictated, going against expressed public opinion. No matter which side we would take regarding the current crisis, we are better served if leaders are willing to lose an election for principle.

Government is supposed to be in the business of exercising good leadership. As citizens we elect people to look out after our best interests, to protect us from harm, and to seek justice through lawmaking. At this time in history the economy is seriously out of whack because of a power-grabbing oligarchy and a Congress marked by weakness and lack of leadership. If any U.S. Representatives read the following analysis, it would go a long way to explain why the bail-out bill failed: "Grand Theft America#" by Stephen Lendman at Global Research is probably one of the very best articles one could read to truly understand what this crisis is about. (As an aside, it revealed the genesis of Paulson's moved to grab unreviewable powers). The author explores "the current dilemma that world leaders and financial experts are scrambling to figure out. . . . . . A global asset bubble. . . . Begun after Chicago School economics took hold under Ronald Reagan. Continued under GHW Bush. Became religion under Bill Clinton, and ultimately fundamentalism under GW Bush. . . . At 19%, George Bush scored lowest [rating] ever for a US president . . ." For your own information, I quote a few key paragraphs:

The crime of the century. The greatest one ever. Author Danny Schechter calls it "Plunder." The title of his important new book on the subprime and overall financial crisis. Economist Michael Hudson and others refer to a kleptocracy. A Ponzi scheme writ large. Maybe an out-of-control Andromeda Strain. An economic one. Deadly. Unrecallable. Science fiction now real life. Potentially catastrophic. World governments trying to contain it. Trying everything but not sure what can work. Maybe only able to paper it over for short-term relief. Buy time but in the end vindicate the maxim that things that can't go on forever, won't.

. . . The result of unfettered capitalism's fatal flaw - unbridled greed in a rigged system that rewards the few at the expense of most others. First an explanation of how it works. Free-wheeling, "free market" Chicago School fundamentalism the way economist Milton Friedman championed it in his 1962 book "Capitalism and Freedom" and taught it to students for decades. He believed that government's sole function is "to protect our freedom both from (outside) enemies....and from our fellow-citizens." Preserve law and order. Enforce private contracts. Protect private property and "foster competitive (unregulated) markets." Everything else in public hands is "socialism....blasphemy." Not to be tolerated.

. . . Yet Bush concluded that "democratic capitalism (is the) best system the world has ever devised" in spite of clear evidence that it's broken and corrupted. Exploits people for profit. Enriches the few at the expense of the many. Rewards criminals for their crimes. Protects the rich from beneficial social change.

In other words, unchallengeable czarist powers. In contrast to the 1930s Reconstruction Finance Corporation's (RFC) closely supervised operations. That era's Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) that refinanced homes to prevent foreclosures. And the 1980s Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC) mandate to liquidate assets from failed S & Ls. Not dispense free money for bad investments unchecked. The above authorities subject to judicial review. Not governed by a financial boss to run as he pleased.

. . . Given the bipartisan blame for today's crisis. The post-9/11 willingness to give the administration near-carte blanche authority across the board. Eight years of indifference to social needs and public welfare. Who now believes that policy going forward will change and that the agreed-on scheme will protect people or curb the secretary's authority. On his own initiative, George Bush usurped supreme power post-9/11 while few in Congress blanched. None in leadership positions. Little today has changed.

Leadership capacity rests on differing traits in different people. As examples, strengths such as being mutually respectful, "tough as a boot," calm in a storm, experienced, and incredibly articulate or intelligent, all come to my mind. Everyone in both parties has his or her own list. The story of John Boehner's easy-handed leadership style, one that respects the principles of his followers and lets them do what they want, is an interesting one. To further quote from the previous story:

The bruising tally — coming on the heels of a weeklong revolt — had some GOP members asking privately whether Boehner can hold on to his leadership post. He said he did everything he could.

“You can’t break their arms, you can’t put your whole relationship on the line, ask them to do something that they do not want to do and have that member regret that vote for the rest of their life,” Boehner said. “Twenty years from now, nobody will care how anyone voted except those members. You can’t do that. You just can’t.”

. . . Boehner has [told] Republicans he would not lean on them as his predecessor, former Texas Rep. Tom DeLay, was wont to do. On some level, the problem was a lack of discipline. House Republicans lack the clear leadership chain that characterized their tenure in the majority under DeLay. The member-to-member relationships were much closer, so the whips typically had a better sense where votes stood before heading to the floor.

Boehner lacks the heft of former Speaker Dennis Hastert, who could always flip a few core votes in the final days before a tough roll call, and his party lacks any other heavy now that President Bush has only a few months left in office.

As the House prepared to vote Monday, Boehner delivered an astonishingly nonpartisan speech, telling the members who had already assembled on the House floor: “I don’t know that they get much tougher than this. No one wants to vote for this.”

When he finished, Boehner got more applause from Democrats than Republicans. . .

As a leader nation, the United States must now exercise good governance for the sake of the entire world. Whether we like it or not, we are an example of representative government that listens to its people, respects the rule of law, and looks out for the most vulnerable among us. Our top leaders had better be very careful about next steps. That means that the executive and legislative branches had must seek cooperative solutions that make sense to our own people, and not just to the oligarchs. Other nations are depending on that. So what are the next steps? The New York Times reports, Treasury and the Fed Looking at Options." To quote the article's conclusion:

. . . Mr. Rogoff cautioned that the real limitation for American policy makers is whether they can maintain the government’s long-term credibility. “The real constraint is not a bookkeeping one,” he said. “It is a sense of faith on the part of foreigners that the U.S. government will repay its debt. Our most precious asset is that credibility.”

The current crisis of leadership is partly our fault. We put these people in office without knowing the qualities of good leadership. My post's goal today has been to lay out a few of those key qualities, such as confronting reality, valuing the truth, exhibiting outstanding interpersonal skills, standing on principle, understanding compromise and conciliation, and being able to occasionally set aside ego. We will change a lot of leaders in the next few weeks; be careful about the qualities you look at when deciding.

Hat Tip Key: Regular contributors of links to leads are "betmo*" and Jon#.

(Cross-posted at South by Southwest.)

LA Representative wants the poor sterilized, rich to procreate more

By LindaBeth

I just heard on CNN that Louisiana's Rep. John LaBruzzo (R) is looking into a plan to pay poor women to have their tubes tied. This is based on his concern that poor people reproduce at a higher rate than more economically privileged people do, who pay more in taxes. Folks, this is his guess--he has no data to this effect. Mark Waller from The Times-Picayune reports on nola.com that "He said he is gathering statistics now."

Hmmm...so instead of looking at the actual range of factors that affect poverty and aiming to solve those, he's going to racistly assume that it's because they're voluntarily having "too many" children "they can't afford," and if they can't afford them, we should encourage, not free contraception and education, but sterilization, so he's then going to try to find data to support this?

It also could include tax incentives for college-educated, higher-income people to have more children, he said.

Now we're at the meat-and-potatoes. It's not really about "helping" people to avoid welfare (as if having kids is the prime reason people are on welfare in the first place), but also ensuring that the "right" kind of people reproduce--those who are wealthy and educated.

The idea here is that poor citizens receive social welfare and therefore do not have the "right" to have families. This is bullshit in and of itself. On top of that, LaBruzzo is essentially hoping for the "extinction" of the poor on account of his faulty logic that that would reduce or eliminate poverty, as if poverty were a function of people, not of societies and economic systems. Even more, well-educated, wealthier people should have even more children to make more educated, wealthy people! Who knew economic privilege was genetic!

OK, I know he's not saying that. But if he really thought about the implications of poverty begetting poverty, he might realize that helping people out of poverty is not at all accomplished by telling them not to have children (and since when should we coerce the poor with money to do invasive, irreversible, medical procedures on their bodies?--and for the record, he's sure not suggesting that we pay for or demand that poor women have abortions), but to help change the environmental circumstances and social structures that perpetuate economic inequality.

And never mind that the rhetoric that children and families are the "foundation" of our society that justifies a slew of tax advantages given to middle and upper class families. Forget the college tuition credits given, and deductions for homeowners' mortgages that partially subsidize the middle-class American life. The right consistently talks about tax breaks to help families out, but those breaks are for people who owe taxes to begin with: they are tax breaks for the middle class, not the poor. But folks like Rep. LaBruzzo seem appalled that folks on welfare would dare to be free citizens and have children, who allegedly are the reason for their poverty. Meanwhile, middle and upper class families benefit from their own share of social welfare in the form of tax deductions and government-guaranteed education (as well as partially taxpayer-funded state universities), and this welfare is completely invisible to them. I don't have kids, and I am forced, through taxation, to pay for the education of other people's children--even the wealthy.

In one way or another, aren't most of us social welfare recipients?

(Cross-posted to Smart Like Me.)

A phenomenal nine days

By Carol Gee

The deal between the administration and Congress is far from set -- Even though it truly feels like the sky is falling, Congress needs to resist pressure that will be enormous to make an agreement. If a solution is to be found to end the crisis, it must be able to pass Congress. But some members of Congress have their backs up. The assumptions under which the financial sector and the administration are operating have been and continue to be seriously flawed, exhibiting a sense of entitlement that is amazing. "Democrats battling to add restrictions to $700 billion bailout" is at McClatchy today. To quote:

"The Bush administration has called on Congress to rubber-stamp its bailout legislation without serious debate or efforts to improve it. That will not happen," said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.

People close to the negotiations said that at least three areas of disagreement remained: limits on executive compensation at troubled firms, the terms of oversight of the Treasury's management of the bailout and whether taxpayers would gain an equity stake in companies that benefit from the bailout so that taxpayers could share in the firms' later profits.

Perhaps at the end of the week something will have happened, but many urge that the administration's plan has serious policy deficits, lacks accountability and likely badly underestimates what the actual bailout cost will be. "As Hill Debates Bailout, Wall St. Shifts Continue -- Paulson, GOP Oppose Democrats' Proposal to Limit Executive Pay." The Washington Post (9/23/08) has the story, from which I quote:

Senate Banking Committee Chair Christopher Dodd says it might be possible may meet approve the bailout by Friday, but it might take longer. . . . Congressional Democrats considering the Bush administration's emergency plan to shore up the U.S. financial system countered with their own demands yesterday, presenting draft legislation giving the government power to cut salaries of chief executives at firms that participate in the bailout and slash severance packages for their top management.

As an example of what some people in Congress are saying, I quote from an article Rep. Bernie Sanders wrote a few days ago (9/19/08) at The Huffington Post: "Billions for Bailouts! Who Pays?."# To quote:

The current financial crisis facing our country has been caused by the extreme right-wing economic policies pursued by the Bush administration. These policies, which include huge tax breaks for the rich, unfettered free trade and the wholesale deregulation of commerce, have resulted in a massive redistribution of wealth from the middle class to the very wealthy.

In my view, we need to go forward in addressing this financial crisis by insisting on four basic principles. . . Specifically, to pay for the bailout, which is estimated to cost up to $1 trillion, the government should:

1) The people who can best afford to pay and the people who have benefited most from Bush's economic policies are the people who should provide the funds for the bailout.

a) Impose a five-year, 10 percent surtax on income over $1 million a year for couples and over $500,000 for single taxpayers. That would raise more than $300 billion in revenue;
b) Ensure that assets purchased from banks are realistically discounted so companies are not rewarded for their risky behavior and taxpayers can recover the amount they paid for them; and
c) Require that taxpayers receive equity stakes in the bailed-out companies so that the assumption of risk is rewarded when companies' stock goes up.

(2) There must be a major economic recovery package which puts Americans to work at decent wages. . . (3) Legislation must be passed which undoes the damage caused by excessive de-regulation. . . (4) We must end the danger posed by companies that are "too big too fail," that is, companies whose failure would cause systemic harm to the U.S. economy.

A little heads up about what the Republicans will argue about the cause of the crisis comes from Josh Marshall* at TPM: Quote: "Democrats created the crisis by forcing banks to give too many loans to black people and other minorities." And Think Progress points out that "McCain Campaign Has Strong Ties To Corporate Lobbyists At Center Of Bailout."

This bears repeating as Congress and the White House negotiate -- "Meltdowns and Morality" by Ed Kilgore from The Democratic Strategist newsletter of 9/15/08. To quote:

As we all watch anxiously to see what the various maneuvers of the Fed and the Treasury and Wall Street mean for the rest of us, Matt Yglesias has made a simple but profound point that tends to get lost at times like these:

Unlike the guy who runs Lehman Brothers, the guys who clean the bathrooms in the Lehman Brothers office have, as best one can tell, been doing an excellent job. And yet if the company going under results in everyone involved losing their jobs, the guy who runs Lehman will wind up being better off than the guys who clean the bathrooms. This is because in the United States of America, hard work is the way to get ahead.

"Confronting Economic Meltdown" a forum -- The Washington Note's Steve Clemons is moderating a meeting this morning on at the New American Foundation. Participants include Congressman Walter Jones, former Senator Fritz Hollings and a panel of experts. (Link to streaming live). At the same time Ben Bernanke and Hank Paulson are testifying about the economy before a congress committee.

Background Stories -- a couple of analytical pieces for those who need to know a bit more.

• "Global financial meltdown"# comes from Global Research (9/19/08).


• A Yahoo! News story headlined - "Radical bailout plan has a jawdropping price tag."#

Hat Tip Key: Regular contributors of links to leads are "betmo"* and Jon#, who said, "The changes that Phil Gramm et.al. put in place are responsible for all this financial mess... Since we all are part owners of AIG, do we get a discount on our insurance?"

(Cross-posted at South by Southwest.)

Blasting the bailout out of the water

By Libby Spencer

Okay, I've just spent the better part of the day on the bailout at Detroit News. I have seven posts in a row on it. If I haven't convinced the Motor City citizens to barrage their Congresscritters, it won't be because I didn't try hard enough.

If you feel like plowing through the rhetoric, I wouldn't mind some feedback about how you think I did in building the case for outrage. If you don't feel like reading through it all because you probably don't need to be convinced, the bottom line is -- no deal as it stands right now. Clearly Bush's agenda here is to bankrupt us so the incoming adminstration is prevented from funding any progressive programs while allowing his cronies to loot the treasury down to the last penny. Best quote comes from one of Kevin Drum's friends who said, "It's like the Iraq War all over again -- Shock & Awe, followed by an occupation of Wall Street, and all with no exit plan."

Needless to say, time is of the essence. Contact your Congressman and your Senators and tell them no deal. Contact Obama here or here and ask him to take a leadership role in this.

Important Update: If you need help with talking points, Cernig posts a letter from the Agonist's blog, that spells out what's at stake very clearly, proposes a great solution and can be copied and sent with the permission of the author. I doubt I could state it better, so that's my plan. I remind you that you can send up to two free online faxes a day through freefax but any kind of contact will work. We need big numbers of outraged citizens to stop this before it's too late. Our future literally depends on it.

(Cross-posted at The Impolitic.)