Scatablog

Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?

2012-02-03T08:52:00.001-05:00

Perhaps that's what Willard will ask next.

Talk is cheap: Democrats need to show us the money

2012-02-02T14:52:00.004-05:00

Jared Bernstein, who was the Vice President's economist and the most progressive economist on the White House economic team, has from time to time advocated a "FAST" (Fix America's Schools Today) bill for emergency infrastructure investment. It's a great idea, but, of course, he laments the fact that it will go nowhere in Congress. Here is a comment I made on his blog post:

The right wing will spend tons of money advertising its position on public issues, as with the millions spent trying to build public pressure on the President to approve the pipeline. Our side seems to do nothing whatsoever -- except well-meaning blog posts for a minuscule audience -- to build public pressure for anything. Why not a campaign to put pressure on Congress to pass FAST? Or is it all just a sham for creating campaign talking points? Yes, the President cannot promote such a campaign directly -- the excuses are always at hand, aren't they -- but there must be some organization with money that believes in the importance of infrastructure. Is there any reason why the President can't drop a hint to some of his many wealthy friends that he'd appreciate some vocal support?

The President's big infrastructure speech, weak as it was on building a case for the critical need for massive infrastructure investment on a relatively permanent basis, came more than two years after it should have been given, and unfortunately came only after the press had declared the campaign to be on. I am not convinced myself that it's anything more than campaign positioning. The lack of any genuine effort to break through Republican resistance, with the de rigeur whines that it's probably all for naught, don't do anything to convince me I'm wrong.

The GOP’s Assault Upon Economic Reality

2012-02-02T01:16:00.000-05:00

JANUARY 30, 2012 5:31PM From Salon

The evidence continues to mount that the GOP’s insistent demands for still further reductions in federal, state and local spending have exacerbated and prolonged the current recession. In response, advocates for austerity measures have now begin to argue that demands for increased government programs to lift the economy and to reign in abusive business practices are nothing less than an assault upon free enterprise itself.

Former New Hampshire U.S. Senator John Sununu is a case in point. In an opinion column in today’s Boston Globe ( “Apple, not manufacturing, is America’s future,” January 30, 2011), Sununu showed that he is oblivious to the daily economic struggle of a majority of Americans who must grapple with high unemployment, declining wages, mortgage foreclosures, lack of access to affordable medical insurance, loss of retirement savings and diminished prospects for themselves, their children and their grandchildren. In his column, Sununu argued that we should not lament the loss of manufacturing. In order to support the proposition that corporations like Apple represent the future for America, Sununu had to ignore all of the evidence to the contrary. Previously for example, Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher reported in the New York Times (“How the U.S. Lost out on iPhone Work,” January 21, 2012) that nearly all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other assorted products sold by Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas, primarily in China by third-party vendors with whom Apple contracts for services and products.

One facility alone, Foxconn, employed 230,000 workers, who often worked six days a week, in shifts that lasted 12 hours per day. More than a quarter of Foxconn’s work force was reported to live in company barracks; many workers earned less than $17 a day; and the intolerable working conditions within its facilities have led to suicides and explosions from aluminum dust that killed and injured scores of workers. By contrast, Apple employs only 43,000 people in the United States and 20,000 overseas. As a result of its exploitation of these workers, the New York Times article noted that Apple made a profit of $400,000 per each of it’s actual employees, a sum greater than that made by Goldman Sachs, Exxon Mobil and Google. In response to that data, one current Apple executive stated, We sell iPhones in over a hundred countries, We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.”Sununu’s enthusiasm for Apple’s business model is expansive: “In just ten years, the market value of Apple has grown from $7 billion to over $400 billion. The return for mutual funds and pension funds owning the stock have been outstanding, and thousands of employees have earned financial security.” That enthusiasm, however, is not tempered by any recognition that, for millions of middle class Americans who do not directly own Apple stocks, the stock market has been an unmitigated disaster.

CNN News reported that, on September 29, 2008, Dow Jones lost nearly 778 points, in the biggest single-day point loss ever, after the GOP House rejected the government's $700 billion bank bailout plan. The day's loss totaled approximately $1.2 trillion in market value, the first post-$1 trillion day ever recorded, according to the Dow Jones Wilshire 5000, the broadest measure of the stock market. As a result, many middle income investors lost their life savings and have never recovered.

Apple’s predatory business practices and the out-sourcing of U.S. manufacturing must be viewed in the context of the American economy as a whole. Numerous studies report that more than 47 million Americans, including 9 million children, do not have health insurance. A study by Harvard University Medical School in 2009 attributed that the lack of medical insurance to about 45,000 deaths per year in the U.S.
Researchers for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 2010 reported that 17.2 million households - or 14.5 % of all households in the United States - were "food insecure" and that in one-third of those households "normal eating patterns were disrupted." In 3.9 million of those households, children went hungry. As the real unemployment rate climbed to approximately 20 million Americans in 2011, another 2.6 million Americans, according to the Census Bureau, descended into poverty. Almost simultaneously, the World Bank observed that the United States had a higher level of income inequality than Canada, South Korean or any country in Europe with the exception of Turkey. In October of last year, the Internal Revenue Service and the Congressional Budget Office released findings which showed that the top 1% of the American population continued to receive a disproportionate share of the country's wealth. In 2009, the 1.4 million who belong to the top 1% made an average of $1 million dollars in 2009. Further, since 1979, the share of U.S. Income enjoyed by the top 1% has increased from 9.18% to 17.9% as of 2009, or more than the entire bottom half of the U.S. population. Almost simultaneously, Forbes magazine reported that, as of November, 2011, the four hundred richest Americans enjoyed a combined worth of $1.53 trillion, which figure had increased from $1.37 trillion over the previous year. Their combined wealth was thus approximately equivalent to the GDP of Canada.

Sununu does correctly note a shortfall of trained U.S. works, including scientists and engineers. He, however, refuses to recognize that the same austerity measures that he and other GOP leaders have advocated have caused the lay-offs of thousands of public school teachers around the United States and forced state governments to cut back significantly their investments in pubic higher education.
Today’s Republican Party has become an apologist for an economic status-quo that is stacked against ordinary Americans The net effect of the extraordinary concentration of wealth and power has been that the decisions and predilections of fewer and fewer individuals now determine the outcomes in the American economy while the overwhelming majority of Americans have little ability to influence macro-economic trends or economic and political policies. In the alternate economic universe that so many GOP members inhabit, the enormous wealth now enjoyed by a mere 1% of the population should be an object of public celebration rather than the focus of civic opprobrium or class envy. As Erasmus once observed, “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

Our evil government at work

2012-01-31T12:27:00.002-05:00

Quote, unquote, from Michael Lind in Salon:

In fact industrial policy is as American as domestically produced apple pie. George Washington supported Alexander Hamilton’s plan for promoting American manufacturing by means of subsidies and tariffs, and Hamilton’s opponents Thomas Jefferson and James Madison eventually reconciled themselves to federal support for American manufacturing. Henry Clay proposed a similar “American system” of infant-industry protection and federal support for infrastructure. During the Civil War, Clay’s disciple Abraham Lincoln presided over the enactment of a version of the American System, based on high tariffs to protect strategic industries and federal land grants and financial subsidies for transcontinental railroads.

Industrial policy was even more successful in the 20th century U.S. After the Wright brothers invented the airplane, the federal government used airmail to subsidize the infant American civil aviation industry. The U.S. Navy worked with American companies to create the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), which spun off the NBC and ABC radio and TV networks. During World War II the government built vast numbers of factories, which were turned over at low prices to private companies after 1945.

The most innovative entrepreneur in the 20th century was the U.S. government. The federal government invented or developed nuclear energy, computers, the Internet and the jet engine. And it built the interstate highway system and completed the national electric grid, creating a continental market based on the technologies of the second industrial revolution.

To be sure, the government has sometimes backed failures, usually in the fad-driven energy field, like Solyndra or synfuels back during the Carter years. But few private venture capitalists can match the remarkable record of success of Uncle Sam. Indeed, venture capitalists in IT and social networking have exploited and commercialized technologies from the transistor to the Internet that were originally developed by America’s home-grown version of state capitalism.

Economic growth measure revision: GUOP (Gross Upper One Percent Product)

2012-01-30T02:50:00.001-05:00

A salient quote from CATHERINE RAMPELL in “Growth Accelerates, but U.S. Has Lots of Ground to Make Up” NYT, January 27, 2012

"Corporate success has not translated into big benefits for American workers and consumers so far in this recovery. Today, the nation produces more than it did when the recession began in 2007, but it manages to do so with six million fewer jobs. Companies seem reluctant to use their mounting profits to invest in new workers. “Businesses have been holding much higher levels of cash than they have in past,”

Comment: That’s 6 million less consumers with the remaining experiencing declining real income. No surprise that the engine of the US economy-Consumption is not increasing fast enough to drive an acceptable GDP growth rate of 5-6% compared to the current 2-3%. Failure of banks to lend their obscene level of excess reserves that is retarding investment is no small factor in this anemic growth (slowest recovery out of the last 14), but policy makers seem in denial of the role of the banking system is dragging down the recovery or are scared of bank lobbyists. Time to make the 99% exponentially more scary than bank lobbyists.

Right Wing Misinformation from GOP Front Foundations

2012-01-29T01:59:00.000-05:00

From the DC underground:

Checked this out on Snopes. It is all a lie. There is a guy at the Heritage Foundation/AEI whose job it is to generate one of these lies every day and start circulating it through the viewers of Fox Noise. He gets paid over $200,000 a year to do this and lives in a mansion in Potomac next to the Avenel Country Club.

The three who brought down Wall Street.

Here's a quick look into the three former Fannie Mae executives who brought down Wall Street.

Franklin Raines was a Chairman and Chief Executive Officer at Fannie Mae.
Raines was forced to retire from his position with Fannie Mae when auditing discovered severe irregularities in Fannie Mae's accounting activities.Raines left with a "golden parachute valued at $240 Million in benefits.
> The Government filed suit against Raines when the depth of the accounting scandal became clear.

Tim Howard - was the Chief Financial Officer of Fannie Mae. Howard "was a strong internal proponent of using accounting strategies that would ensure a "stable pattern of earnings" at Fannie. Investigations by federal regulators and the company's board of directors since concluded that management did manipulate 1998 earnings to trigger bonuses. Raines and Howard resigned under pressure in late 2004. Howard's Golden Parachute was estimated at $20 Million!

Jim Johnson - A former executive at Lehman Brothers and who was later forced from his position as Fannie Mae CEO. Investigators found that Fannie Mae had hidden a substantial amount of Johnson's 1998 compensation
from the public, reporting that it was between $6 million and $7 million when it fact it was $21 million." Johnson is currently under investigation for taking illegal loans from Countrywide while serving as CEO of FannieMae.
Johnson's Golden Parachute was estimated at $28 Million.

WHERE ARE THEY NOW?

Raines works for the Obama Campaign as his Chief Economic Advisor.
Howard is a Chief Economic Advisor to Obama under Franklin Raines.
Johnson was hired as a Senior Obama Finance Advisor and was selected to run Obama's Vice Presidential Search Committee.

Our government is rotten to the core ! Are we stupid or what? Vote in 2012..it is the most important election of our lives.

Hobson Choice of Candidates:

2012-01-29T01:53:00.002-05:00

Sen. Boxer of CA asks how you could vote for either GOP candidate (Romney-MT or Gingrich-NG) based on their following statements:

"Corporations are people, my friend... of course they are. Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to the people. Where do you think it goes? Whose pockets? People's pockets. Human beings, my friend." —MR

"I was not a lobbyist, I was never a lobbyist, I never did any lobbying. Don't try to mix these things up. The fact is I was an adviser strategically." —NG describing his $1.2 million contract with Freddie Mac

"I like to be able to fire people." —MR

"Over here you have a policy which, with Reagan and me as speaker, created millions of jobs — it's called paychecks. Over here you have the most successful food stamp president in American history, Barack Obama." —NG

"I should tell my story. I'm also unemployed." —MR

"There's no question at times of my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked far too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate." —NG explaining why he cheated on his first two wives

"PETA is not happy that my dog likes fresh air." —MR retelling the story of strapping the family dog to the roof of the car

"We don't do — you know, we don't do elaborate things. ... Well, go, you go talk to Tiffany's. All I'm telling you is we — we are very frugal." —NG in response to the revelation that he and his wife once owed between $250,000 and $500,000 in a credit account to the jeweler Tiffany's

"President Obama wants to put free enterprise on trial." —MR

"I think that my ability to organize and orchestrate things would be vastly greater than a normal politician." —NG

"I get speaker's fees from time to time, but not very much." —MR describing the $360,000 in speaking fees he received over a one-year period

"I have two grandchildren; Maggie is 11, Robert is 9. I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time they're my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American." —NG

"Go get a job after you take a bath." —NG speaking about Occupy Wall Street protesters

"Really poor children, in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works so they have no habit of showing up on Monday." —NG

Typical GOP Rebuttal to President's SOU Address

2012-01-25T01:40:00.002-05:00

My comments are in CAPS annotated into the original report from Yahoo news, 1/24/12. As usual the arguments are hypocritical and factually inaccurate.

In the Republican response to State of the Union address Tuesday night, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels took aim at Obama for "efforts to divide" the American people and accused the president of obstructing economic growth in the United States. The president spent much of his speech touting his administration's economic achievements and announcing initiatives related to trade." Anyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned, doesn't know what they're talking about," the president said at one point in his address .But Daniels, former budget director for George W. Bush, sharply countered that glowing perspective in his response." The president did not cause the economic and fiscal crises that continue in America tonight," . "But he was elected on a promise to fix them, and he cannot claim that the last three years have made things anything but worse: the percentage of Americans with a job is at the lowest in decades BECAUSE GOP BLOCKED JOB CREATION AND WITH GOP POLICIES WOULD BE MUCH WORSE.." Daniels castigated the president for his tactics--saying under the Obama administration the government has "held back" economic recovery BECAUSE GOP BLOCKED FURTHER STIMULUS AND TRIED TO BLOCK QE2 WHICH WHY 2-3% GDP GROWTH OCCURRED . The governor criticized the administration's attempts to build a middle class using "borrowed dollars" and reckless "In three short years, an unprecedented explosion of spending, with borrowed money, has added trillions to an already unaffordable national debt," spending GOP CREATED 12.5 T OF THE 14 T IN US DEBT Daniels said. "And yet, the president has put us on a course to make it radically worse in the years ahead GOP BLOCKING EXPIRATION OF TAX CUTS FOR RICH IS LARGELY WHAT IS MAKING IT WORSE. "Daniels criticized the president for rejecting the Keystone XL pipeline project and other energy-related measures Daniels labeled as "extremism" by the Obama administration.GOP RUNS OVER ENVIRONMENTAL REGULATION AND CAN’T WAIT 6-9 MO. FOR RESPONSIBLE DECISION ON APPROVAL. After advocating a simplified tax system and lower regulations, Daniels stood up for Republicans in Washington, in contrast to Obama, who RIGHTLY blamed the GOP for obstruction in Washington (though Obama also called out Democrats.)"It's not fair and it's not true for the president to attack Republicans in Congress as obstacles on these questions IT IS TRUE," "They and they alone have passed bills to reduce borrowing, reform MEANING ELIMINATE PER KISSWEB entitlements, and encourage new job creation NO GOP BILLS OFFERED THAT WOULD CREATE JOBS, ONLY PROFITS AND INCOME FOR THE 1%, only to be shot down nearly time and again by the president and his Democrat Senate allies. "Daniels characterized Republicans as the party able to pave a better future for the country.VIA SAME FAILED POLICIES OF GREAT RECESSION. Accusing the president of stoking class warfare has been a hallmark of Republican talking points in recent months, prompted by Democrats' unsuccessful efforts to remove tax loopholes for the country's wealthiest earners last year--ONLY CLASS WARFARE IS THE 1% RIPPING OFF THE 99% AIDED BY THE GOP POLICIES something which Obama doubled down on during his address Tuesday night .Daniels hit that point home:No feature of the Obama presidency has been sadder than its constant efforts to divide us,BY ASKING 1% FAIR SHARE to curry favor with some THE 99% Americans by castigating others. As in previous moments of national danger, we Americans are all in the same boat. ONLY THE 1% ARE IN A DIFFERENT BOAT.

President's SOU address

2012-01-25T01:25:00.003-05:00

In case you missed it, a brief outlines of Obama's State of the Union speech. Found nothing I won't support, especially the financial crimes unit, except sop to the fossil energy industry, e.g. offshore drilling and LNG. Rethuglicans will continue to fantasize that free markets can do what the Pres. outlined when it never has (as Pres illustrated with his analogy to the post WW2 generation US economy) and call the Pres and anyone supporting him or who doesn't support the Rethuglicans a socialist. There was talk show banter post speech refuting that the Pres is a centrist (he is) and framing him as a socialist.

Iraq troops home, were dedicated as an effective team. Gov’t must act the same

Common values: job, home, educate kids, retire require play by one set of rules-Am. Way

-the way WW 2 generation did it. Paid fair share, worked fair share-to save Middle Class.

Jobs

-Bush lost 5 mil

-Stimulus recovered 4 mil

-2011 added 2 mil with more coming from trade deals with Columbia & Korea

-Pass the payroll tax and UI extension

Key to jobs-led by mfg. and -enabled by tax reform

-tax breaks for making jobs in US

-min. tax rate for corporations

Education

-repeal doubling of Ed loan interest rates

-Fed help to colleges that control tuition

-set up partnerships between colleges and companies on tech skills, e.g. Piedmont CC & Co.X

Financial Reform-never another meltdown cause no more bailouts

-enforce Volker rule

-financial crime squad under AG

-Consumer Protection Bureau-no more razzle dazzle loans and credit cards

Housing-mortgage reworks

Energy: more fossil and LNG, but more renewable

Infrastructure:

-Fed investment in innovation: NASA, energy critical

-Stronger US led coalition: sanction Iran to the table. Stand with M.E. democracies

Strong, but trimmed down military

Fed gov’t must work like the Bin Laden hit team, not for ideology goal, but for better USA goal

When the Prison Steals More than the Inmates

2012-01-20T16:47:00.003-05:00

The GEO Group, along with CCA (Corrections Corporation of America) are the two largest private prison and immigrant detention operators in the country. At an average rate of $200 per night/per inmate, private prison operators profit over $5 billion a year. How do they do it? Like con-artists, they lure town councils and local government officials with promises of easy money and increased revenue. However, what they don't tell them is at what cost! .Littlefield, Texas found out the hard way. The GEO Group promised increased "product" (aka detained immigrants) and alleged prosperity for a town that was struggling with an economic crisis. Instead, what Littlefield got was a mega-complex private facility, an additional $10 million contractual debt, and a fleeing population. CCA and the GEO Group have spent more than $20 million lobbying local, state and federal officials and in campaign contributions to candidates running for these offices. They do so to have more facilities built and to increase their already bloated profits – even if these immigrant detention centers are not needed. Stop the private prison racket.

Language games: "reform"

2012-01-15T14:18:00.002-05:00

A comment I made on another blog :

Beware of the word "reform."

Social Security "reform" means cutting benefits for your grandparents, your parents and you, or privatizing the program by handing control of those taxes over to Wall Street.

Medicare "reform" means eliminating Medicare for ordinary people by turning it into a voucher program for buying private insurance.

"Entitlement 'reform'" -- both terms deserve air quotes of their own -- means making recipients of Social Security and Medicare get fewer benefits in the future and pay more themselves. It also means ignoring the law and pretending that the taxes collected expressly and specifically for Social Security and Medicare may be used for other purposes more to the liking of the Beltway establishment.

Tort "reform" means making it extremely difficult for you or your family to get redress or fair compensation for death or injuries caused by defective products. (It means protecting poor defenseless corporations and their platoons of Ivy League-educated Big Firm defense lawyers against the unstoppable force of a storefront plaintiff's lawyer.)

Malpractice "reform" means making it virtually impossible for you or your family to get redress or fair compensation for death or injuries caused by negligent medical practice. (It means protecting poor defenseless doctors and their platoons
of insurance-funded Ivy League-educated Big Firm defense lawyers against the unstoppable force of a storefront plaintiff's lawyer.)

Tax "reform" means reducing progressive tax rates, eliminating taxes on income from investments and even the wealthiest estates so the wealthy will pay a lower share of the nation's tax liability and you will pay a higher share.

When you hear the word "reform," at least when it is uttered by a Republican, a Business Roundtable suit or a Washington pundit, you can be sure it does not mean anything that will help you in any way whatsoever. It does not mean anything that will help the country. It will not help the economy. It means nothing more nor less than protecting the wealthy and screwing you. Period. End of story. It's time for the rest of us -- the 99.9 per cent -- to tell the "reformers" to sit down, stop lying and shut up.

The Rethuglican Schtik

2012-01-15T13:29:00.002-05:00

Pay no attention to the men behind the curtain

January 14, 2012
NYT Op Ed

What They Don’t Want to Talk About

Ever since Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry started criticizing Mitt Romney’s actions at Bain Capital — and talking about the thousands of people laid off as a result of Bain’s investments — party leaders have essentially told them to shut up. That response is a pretty good indication of how deeply party elders fear the issue of economic inequality in the campaign to come.

“What the hell are you doing, Newt?” Rudolph Giuliani asked Thursday on Fox News. “This is what Saul Alinsky taught Barack Obama, and what you’re saying is part of the reason we’re in so much trouble right now.”

Mr. Giuliani has one thing right: Republicans are indeed in growing trouble as more voters begin to realize how much the party’s policies — dismantling regulations, slashing taxes for the rich, weakening unions — have contributed to inequality and the yawning distance between the middle class and the top end.

The more President Obama talks about narrowing that gap, the more his popularity ratings have risen while those of Congress plummet. Two-thirds of Americans now say there is a strong conflict between the rich and the poor, according to a Pew survey released last week, making it the greatest source of tension in American society.

That makes Mr. Romney and his party vulnerable, as he clearly knows. He said on Wednesday that issues of wealth distribution should be discussed only “in quiet rooms.” And he accused the president of using an “envy-oriented, attack-oriented” approach, “entirely inconsistent with the concept of one nation under God.”

Mr. Romney’s image of a country where workers have nothing but admiration for benevolent, job-creating capitalists (and no one is so impolite as to mention jobs destroyed) bears very little relationship to reality. But his suggestion that it is un-American to talk about rising populist resentment is self-serving and hypocritical. Republicans, in particular, have eagerly stoked such resentments against minorities and the poor.

That was the essence of the “Southern strategy” that Republicans, beginning with Richard Nixon, used to urge white voters to defect from a Democratic Party that supported civil rights. It continued for decades with attacks on busing, affirmative action, immigration and welfare, and was sounded most recently by Mr. Gingrich, with his attacks on Mr. Obama as “the food stamp president.”

Fanning resentment of the poor — and deflecting attention from the relentless Republican defense of the rich — is also central to the party’s current political strategy. That’s why so many Republican candidates and lawmakers keep talking so angrily about poor people not paying federal income taxes. That’s how the Tea Party got started in 2009, when Mr. Obama proposed lowering interest rates for homeowners who were behind on their mortgages and conservative activists saw an opportunity to pit the affluent against their struggling neighbors. And that’s why Mr. Romney constantly accuses the president of trying to create “an entitlement society,” which is simply a variant on Ronald Reagan’s welfare-queen anecdotes.

And yet if Democrats dare to point out that the income gains of the top 1 percent have dwarfed everyone else’s in the last few decades, they are accused of whipping up class envy. Alan Krueger, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, noted in a speech on Thursday that the median income in the United States had actually declined since 1999, shrinking the middle class while the income of the top 1 percent soared. Such inequality is corrosive. And pointing it out has nothing to do with envy and everything to do with pressing for policies to help America’s struggling middle class.

Anyone who criticizes Mr. Romney’s business practices now faces the absurd charge of putting free-market capitalism on trial. No one is trying to end capitalism, but President Obama is calling for more effective regulation to protect consumers. While Republicans attack a supposed “entitlement culture,” Mr. Obama is calling for strengthening a desperately needed safety net. And he is calling for raising taxes on the wealthy, particularly for those on Wall Street and in private equity, to protect that safety net and reduce the deficit.

Mr. Romney has based his campaign on his business experience. Americans need to know how that experience was gained, and what values — if any — it represents. Class reality has nothing to do with class warfare.

More Romney Unsubstantiated Positions

2012-01-14T01:24:00.002-05:00

From Market Watch's Delamaide, 1/12/12

Romney maintained in his NH victory speech Tuesday night that Obama’s policies of bigger government and burdensome regulation are responsible for the slow recovery. He has produced no evidence to support that assertion.

He implied that the increase in the deficit is a bad thing, but he has never taken the time to explain why or how. He has pledged to balance the budget, but he has never shown us why we should care about that.

Romney consistently accuses Obama of trying to transform our great country into a European social welfare state. Let’s leave aside the question of whether that is a truly evil thing or not, and ask what evidence there is for that claim.

Is it because the president believes everyone should have health insurance, just as Romney did when he was governor of Massachusetts? Or is it because Obama believes a marginal increase in the tax rate on higher incomes could alleviate some of the budget stress in the midst of an economic slowdown?

The fact is that nothing Obama has done is remotely close to European social welfare (more’s the pity for us), let alone anything like socialism, which is just a bogeyman Republicans have used for more than a century to characterize Democratic initiatives.

No Victory at the Wire for Newt

2012-01-11T20:43:00.004-05:00

Ari Fleischer recently made a case for Gingrich pulling out the GOP nomination.
(http://www.cnn.com/2012/01/11/opinion/fleischer-newt-gop/index.html?hpt=hp_t1).
Not a bad case, but the problem is GOP needs independents to win and Romney is the only GOP candidate who can get them. The GOP right wingers will have to vote for him regardless for the obvious reason that they won't vote for Obama. This is a no brainer. Rethuglicans: forget about being Newtered or APauled. Prepare to be Mittigated. However, that punishment won't be enough to fit their crimes.

Actual jobs data

2012-01-09T01:26:00.008-05:00

Reported by Meteor Blades, Daily Kos Labor

Notice the really bad numbers are before President Obama took office or before he had a chance to affect what was going on. ADP reports blow-out job growth for December. Fifth week of jobless claims below 400,000. Automatic Data Processing Macroeconomic Advisors reported on 1/6/12 private payroll employment soared to 325,000 in December, more than 100,000 higher than predicted by the most optimistic of experts who were surveyed ahead of time by Bloomberg. ADP’s estimates of payroll growth are based on data from the payrolls of 400,000 businesses covering 24 million employees. The report does not include government jobs. Data included in the report end at the 12th of each month. The surprising numbers could be a good omen for what gets released Friday by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics in its monthly jobs
report. Expert consensus predicts the BLS will announce a (seasonally adjusted) 155,000 jobs were created. The ADP report could boost those predictions. Although the ADP numbers and those from the BLS often diverge sharply, analysts use both as part of their intelligence-gathering to determine the health of the labor market.

Last month, the BLS reported private sector job growth at 140,000 jobs, while ADP's revised numbers clocked in at 204,000. Here's what the ADP numbers have looked like over the past five years:
December 2007: +37,000
December 2008: -659,000
December 2009: -61,000
December 2010: +247,000
December 2011: +325,000
Meanwhile, the Department of Labor reported first-time claims for unemployment insurance benefits in the week ending Dec. 29 fell 15,000 to 372,000 from last week's revised 387,000. It's the fifth week that initial claims have been below 400,000. That trend has encouraged economists because it indicates improvement in a weak labor market. The four-week running average that analysts prefer because it flattens volatility in the weekly numbers fell to 373,250, a decrease of 3,250 from the previous week's revised average of 376,500. Here's what those numbers looked like for the last week of December over the past five years. (The recession officially began in December 2007.)
2007: 356,000
2008: 524,000
2009: 465,000
2010: 404,000
2011: 372,000
In a third report out this morning, employer-announced jobs cuts were down 1.6 percent over November, to 41,785, according to consultants Challenger, Gray & Christmas. That's considerably worse than December 2010, when 32,004 job cuts were announced. During the entire 12 months of 2011, 606,082 job lay-offs were announced, up 14 percent from the
529,973 lay-offs in 2010. Of the total, 183,064 in 2011 were government job lay-offs.

Republican Super PACs Serve As Bailout Fund For Troubled Senate Candidates

2012-01-09T00:39:00.001-05:00

From National Memo

Thu, 01/05/2012

Matt Taylor

Some Republican Senate candidates are too big to fail.

Which is why GOP operatives are dumping millions of dollars in unaccountable campaign cash into competitive 2012 Senate races where their candidates have fallen behind Democratic opponents. Groups like the Karl Rove-affiliated Crossroads GPS have already bought hundreds of TV ads in the key state of Ohio, where incumbent Senator Sherrod Brown is facing a less-than-inspired challenge from Republican State Treasurer Josh Mandel.

This kind of bailout advertising blitz would not have been possible before 2010, when a trio of Supreme Court decisions reversed limits on political activity by a range of independent groups. Now, so called "Super PACs" and 501(c)(4) nonprofits -- "social welfare organizations" that can accept unlimited amounts of money from anonymous donors as long they don't use the majority of their cash on electioneering -- like Crossroads can "sponsor ads that specifically advocate the election or defeat of a candidate," according to Colby College campaign finance scholar Anthony Corrado.

An outspoken populist and unabashed progressive who served seven terms in the House before defeating Senator Mike DeWine in the Democratic wave year of 2006, Brown has proven an effective messenger on the economy in a major swing state where Republicans have long made inroads among the socially conservative white working class; they even won the governor's mansion from a once-popular Democratic incumbent with broad bipartisan appeal in 2010. But an attempt to gut labor rights for public employees was just resoundingly rejected in a statewide referendum and has hurt the GOP's chances going into next fall's elections.

Brown, who is more popular than President Obama in the state, is the obvious favorite over Mandel, an untested 34-year-old whose campaign has been marked by blunders like illegally using photos from the Columbus Dispatch on his website, which he subsequently removed after being caught. According to the latest polls, Brown's lead has expanded to 15 points.

Enter Karl Rove.

A year before the election, his Crossroads GPS group has already spent over half a million dollars airing television commercials attacking Brown for his liberal voting record and association with Barack Obama. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has spent over $1.5 million ripping Brown on the airwaves for raising energy taxes and voting for the health care reform law. The nonpartisan fact-check group Politifact called the ads "mostly false."

"The Crossroads GPS ads are airing to make sure Senator Brown is held accountable for his record, which is far to the left of Ohio," said Nate Hodson, a spokesman for the group.

The barrage is best understood as a response to Mandel's weak standing with voters -- and Sherrod Brown's persona as a champion of labor and the working class.

"I think he is much like Elizabeth Warren in his ability and willingness to speak very directly about the Republican agenda, their philosophy, their support for the super-rich vis-à-vis the middle class," said former Ohio Governor Ted Strickland, whose failed 2010 re-election bid was damaged by early Super PAC spending. "He is not a wallflower and he does not sit idly by and let the right wing get by without being directly and effectively challenged."

The comparison with Warren is telling, because it is she and Brown who have attracted more early Super PAC spending than any other Democrats in the country. Warren's opponent, Scott Brown of Massachusetts, though perhaps a more able politician than Mandel, is in a tough position in a Democratic state and his seat, like that in Ohio, is vital to the Republicans' hopes of taking back the Senate in the fall.

"American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS, they’re looking to retake the Senate, and there’s four seats they need to do that," said Bill Allison, editorial director at the Sunlight Foundation, a good government group. "The idea with the early spending is you try to freeze in the public’s mind a negative image of a candidate, and also drive up name recognition of the challenger. In that sense, Super PACs play a huge role."

It doesn't hurt that Democrats like Warren and Brown are anathema to the Republican base.

"What these outside groups are looking at is, they want to pick up seats, but also knock out some of the people they really don’t like," said Kyle Kondik, an analyst at the University of Virginia Center for Politics. "It’s one thing to want to beat an incumbent. Of course Republicans want to beat Jon Tester in Montana, Claire McCaskill [in Missouri], but I think they would relish beating Brown a bit more. Also, I think Josh Mandel, the state treasurer in the race, is someone who national Republicans would like to boost up. Whether he’s ready for prime time is a totally different story."

Crossroads GPS is the 501(c)(4) affiliate of American Crossroads, the Super PAC founded by Rove and other top Republican officials that spent nearly $40 million on Senate and House races in 2010.

This unregulated campaign finance environment harkens back to the Watergate era, when sustained public outrage produced some of the first major election reform laws in decades.

"What we have now is a situation where it is extremely easy for people with large amounts of money for shaping a congressional race to put it in early," said Richard Briffault, a Columbia law professor who specializes in campaign finance. "The so-called independent money is increasingly less about ideology and more about targeting or helping -- more commonly targeting -- specific candidates. These are in effect shadow campaigns, maintaining a little bit of distance from campaigns because they have to do so legally, but basically being totally supportive, supporting or opposing a particular candidate."

And the trend away from traditional campaign organizations toward these stealth operations will only continue as operatives learn to test the limits of the Federal Election Commission's weakened enforcement powers.

Romney's Big Lie: Obama "Has Not Created Any New Jobs" Redux

2012-01-07T16:45:00.001-05:00

Republicans aren't job creators

by Jed Lewison

Just in case anybody (yeah, I'm talking about you, Mitt Romney) tries to blame President Obama and the Democratic Party for the mess created by George W. Bush and the Republican Party, here's a handy chart that shows which party has a better track record on putting America to work:

Source: St. Louis Fed/BLS Data.

Republicans want a united America! As long you're white, male and rich

2012-01-05T00:20:00.006-05:00

Check Mittens' latest: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/01/03/1051122/-Mitt-Romney-plays-the%C2%A0hate%C2%A0card-again

Hours before the caucuses, [Mitt Romney] made his final pitch to Iowa voters in an ornate ballroom at the Temple for the Performing Arts in Des Moines.
Democrats will "poison the American spirit by pitting one American against another and engaging in class warfare," Romney said. "I believe in an America that is one nation under God, and I will keep it that way."

As always, Republicans only hyperventilate about "unity" when protecting the privileges of the wealthiest. They certainly don't seem so concerned about "pitting one American against another" when demonizing gay Americans, or brown Americans, or Americans who live in Chicago, Massachusetts, or San Francisco, or Americans who aren't Christians, or Americans who vote Democratic, or Americans who exercise their reproductive freedoms, or Americans who value Social Security and Medicare, or Americans who prefer to breathe clean air and drink clean water, or Americans who don't want to see Miami below sea level, or poor Americans who are taking your money, or ... you get the point.

Their entire schtick is predicated on pitting Americans against Americans. Without such demonization, they would be unable to function as an ongoing concern. But if someone points out that perhaps the wealthy should pay a few percentage points more in taxes to balance the nation's finances, or that Wall Street should be reformed to keep them from destroying the world economy again? Pass the smelling salts!

Mitt, get this right—this isn't pitting one American against another. It's pitting the over 99 percent of Americans (including a healthy chunk of the one percenters) who still believe in an America in which everyone can have a chance at success against a tiny selfish greedy fringe that wants to hoard all wealth for themselves.

Rethuglicans: Want to Keep Claiming High Wages Like in Germany Hurt the U.S. Economy?

2012-01-04T00:59:00.003-05:00

Jobless Rate in Germany Edges Lower, Hitting 6.8%

By JACK EWING

Published: NYT, January 3, 2012

FRANKFURT — The German economy remained mostly immune to the malaise afflicting the rest of the euro zone in December, with data released Tuesday showing that unemployment fell slightly during the month and that the average number of jobless people for the full year was the lowest in two decades.

With nearly half a million job openings, Germany appears likely to continue to resist the downward pull of the sovereign debt crisis, at least for several months. The seasonally adjusted unemployment rate fell to 6.8 percent in December from 6.9 percent in November.

Romney's Big Lie: Obama "Has Not Created Any New Jobs"

2011-12-28T02:44:00.000-05:00

Think Progress - Of course, like Romney's repeated assertions that Obama made the economy "worse," the claim that he hasn't created any new jobs is false. As Steve Benen noted, the private sector has added 2.3 million new jobs since March 2010, and it took the Obama economy one year to create more jobs than the economy under President Bush did in eight. There are, indeed, fewer net jobs now than when Obama took office early in the recession, but his policies, including the stimulus, effectively turned months of job losses into months of consistent job gains.

Classical Economists: the social scientists who are unsocial and anti-science

2011-12-15T14:20:00.006-05:00

In this excellent discussion of so-called pro-market economists
("Occupy Economics Departments: Conventional economists have a lot to answer for but will they listen?"), David Morris gives us a little factoid I never fully grasped before that actually offers profound insight:

A few weeks ago the Nobel Prize for Economics was announced. The press dutifully noted that it wasn’t one of the official Nobel Prizes inaugurated in 1901. Yet the media continue to call it the Nobel Prize rather than by its actual name: The Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.

Knowing that the prize is issued by a bank might help people understand why, since its inception in 1969, 70 percent of these economics prizes have been awarded to Americans compared to only 39 percent of the real Nobel Prizes in chemistry, physics, literature and medicine. And why ten have been won by University of Chicago faculty.

The study of economics may indeed help us understand the world and design appropriate policies. But we need to drop the pretense that economics is a science based on laws and objective models and accept that it is a normative discipline. We need to own up to the bias inherent in conventional economic models and the social damage policies based on those models has wrought.

Morris' article starts from the recent walk-out by Harvard University students protesting the inherent conservative bias in the introductory economics course taught by Greg Mankiw, a frequent adviser to Republican candidates and President Bush.

Right now, we have a University of Chicago economist (Casey Mulligan) who seems to be arguing that -- I kid you not -- the reason we have high unemployment is generous unemployment compensation and too many workers who want to use it to take a vacation. Under this theory, several million got this hankering for leisure within the space of a few months as the Bush economy imploded and unemployment soared.

Of course, the U of C has been the center of modern classical economists with its theories about how "the market" is perfect because everyone in the economy has perfect information, acts totally in self-interest on rational expectations and so forth -- and all of these assumptions, when plugged into mathematical algorithms that most of us shrink from in fear, even though the assumptions not only cannot be supported by real life evidence but seem to push the outer envelope of absurdity, are supposed to convey the status of a "science" to their compilation of theories. Of course, it's just a coincidence that their implicitly libertarian theories are used to support right wing politics and low taxation of the wealthy, and justify letting banks do whatever they want because "the market" will correct any abuses. Their notion of "the market," by the way, seems even to go so far as to preclude enforcement of ancient laws against fraud.

So we have the University of Chicago Economics Department advancing these frivolous theories, and yet they get all these Nobel Prizes there. Well, now we know the awards should at best be identified as "Nobel" Prizes in Pro-Banking Economics. Understanding the true nature of the prizes closes the disconnect there. The greatness of the University of Chicago, as verified by all those "Nobels," is a sham. Casey Mulligan looks in his picture like a very nice guy. But the stuff he writes is used by very not nice people to do some very not nice things to a lot of people. How long will it take for the truth to start bringing down those glowing rankings the institution receives?

Don't worry. It's only record levels of climate-killing methane gas. We are God's chosen people. He will protect us. We don't have to lift a finger

2011-12-15T02:36:00.000-05:00

by David Atkins, DigsbyBlog 12/13/11

It seems like every day brings more alarming news that would shock and alarm an intelligent species with the capacity for foresight. Sadly, humanity doesn't seem to be such a species.

Yesterday brings news of a shocking level of methane gas being released into the atmosphere via climate-change-induced permafrost melt--one of those positive feedback climate change loops we keep hearing about:

Dramatic and unprecedented plumes of methane – a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide – have been seen bubbling to the surface of the Arctic Ocean by scientists undertaking an extensive survey of the region.

The scale and volume of the methane release has astonished the head of the Russian research team who has been surveying the seabed of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf off northern Russia for nearly 20 years.

In an exclusive interview with The Independent, Igor Semiletov, of the Far Eastern branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said that he has never before witnessed the scale and force of the methane being released from beneath the Arctic seabed.

"Earlier we found torch-like structures like this but they were only tens of metres in diameter. This is the first time that we've found continuous, powerful and impressive seeping structures, more than 1,000 metres in diameter. It's amazing," Dr Semiletov said. "I was most impressed by the sheer scale and high density of the plumes. Over a relatively small area we found more than 100, but over a wider area there should be thousands of them."

Why does this matter?

Scientists estimate that there are hundreds of millions of tonnes of methane gas locked away beneath the Arctic permafrost, which extends from the mainland into the seabed of the relatively shallow sea of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf. One of the greatest fears is that with the disappearance of the Arctic sea-ice in summer, and rapidly rising temperatures across the entire region, which are already melting the Siberian permafrost, the trapped methane could be suddenly released into the atmosphere leading to rapid and severe climate change.

And why is methane so bad? Adam Siegellinks to this piece at Thinkprogrss by Joe Romm to explain:

Scientists learned last year that the permafrost permamelt contains a staggering “1.5 trillion tons of frozen carbon, about twice as much carbon as contained in the atmosphere,” much of which would be released as methane. Methane is is 25 times as potent a heat-trapping gas as CO2 over a 100 year time horizon, but 72 times as potent over 20 years!

The carbon is locked in a freezer in the part of the planet warming up the fastest (see “Tundra 4: Permafrost loss linked to Arctic sea ice loss“). Half the land-based permafrost would vanish by mid-century on our current emissions path (see “Tundra, Part 2: The point of no return” and below). No climate model currently incorporates the amplifying feedback from methane released by a defrosting tundra.

But what the heck do all these scientists know? Real Amurkans know it's time to get science out of politics, tackle the real threat to humanity posed by gay military service, and give the jaahb creators more tax breaks. And that's all that really matters, right?

Et tu CSPAN

2011-12-12T14:02:00.004-05:00

Income inequality is a myth

From the DC underground

Have you noticed that if the Senate or the House are not in session CSPAN is usually running a lecture by some whore at the Heritage Foundation or the American Enterprise Institute. This from the famous "liberal media." Last night I stumbled on one of these con job lectures. The whore of the week was a guy named James Pethokoukis who was presenting his argument that income inequality in America is a myth, and all those dozen books I have read over the last 7 or 8 years on the subject and all those articles by hundreds of respected economists were lies and part of a vast conspiracy. The website listed here discusses Pethokoukis work.

http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/aeis_myth_of_equality.php?page=all

It is the only objective of the Heritage Foundation, Amercian Enterprise Institute, Americans for Progress and all the other so called "think tanks" funded and run by the same cadre of oligarchs to generate reports that are peer reviewed by the Wall Street Journal and argue the black is actually white, night is actually day, and all government regulation is bad. The technique of spreading false contradictory data to confuse the masses was developed by the tobacco lobby to keep Americans smoking cigarettes 30 years after science knew it was killing us. The Heritage Foundations was formed to get such contradicting reports out fast. The conduits for misinformation at the time were too slow and legislation banning CHC got through without the usual crap. If you want to read a good history of the technique read "Merchants of Doubt."

My Comment: AKA the 5P Syndrome (the preposterous proposition of perversion perpetrating politicos)

Candid Blogs on Newt

2011-12-12T13:44:00.001-05:00

Re-fried Bullsh-t is still the same old bullsh-t

Permalink Submitted by doc4cd1 on Mon, 12/12/2011 - 11:11am

BTW most of the 1960s weirdo-hippy-freaks did NOT become conservatives. Second, the Tea-Party is not Conservative it is Radical Reactionary...at best. That older White men are impressed with Gingrich is a testament to their lack of insight. These older folks should remember what "scape-goating" is all about (think Gypsies, Communists and Jews in the 1930s....Germany....Hitler and his followers....DUH). Tag some group as the cause of the problems the public faces and keep harping on that and pretty soon the people have had their collective attention diverted from the real problem. In this case, it is NOT "illegal aliens" that have caused the problems in America. It is the Reactionaries belief that government (regulations that control banking and mortgages and corporate behavior and social security and medicare) is bad. All of the things I have mentioned, parenthetically, would stop the Reactionary rape of the Middle Class and return some semblance of equity to our social and financial structure. Gingrich is the shining example of a personality disordered, egocentric shill. He does not believe in anything other than his own agrandizement and financial well being. This is a man that served divorce papers to his wife, in the hospital, while she was dying of cancer. Shoot the bast--d, don't elect him President. Anyone who is that cold hearted will clearly put his own self-interest before ANYTHING else. There is NO EXCUSE for what he did!!!! Evangelicals support this man.....if Gingrich meets Christ in Heaven...count on it....warp speed transfer to Hell. I seem shrill because I am deeply troubled as to why the Middle Class keeps electing Republicans to office

re-fried bullshyt..

Permalink Submitted by mezzie57 on Mon, 12/12/2011 - 11:20am

I completely agree with everything you've said. Newt tried to get one of his marriages annulled after producing two children? who does that? He didn't want to pay child support. How anyone could think this man has any principals at all is beyond me. He pushed harder than anyone in D.C. to have Clinton impeached meanwhile in the backseat of his lovers car he was getting his head stroked while his wife sat wondering where the hell he was. Newt is the worst possible choice for any office let alone a presidental post

newt

Permalink Submitted by theuglytruth on Mon, 12/12/2011 - 11:45am

Ok it's time to tell the truth. The republican party are the party of ego!!! They are for one thing collectively and that is their own self angrandizing, self centerd and self loving selves. They have given up all compassion in a bargin with the devil (newt, rush, savage, hannity, O'reilly, trump etc)that allows them to give generously to them selves (Intellectually), while they pooh pooh any and all other peoples who don't look like them (White) don't think like them (ignorent) or live like them (in glass houses) and why the media and the social scean don't want to say any of this has me courious as to how far our country has dipped into the well of of forgetfullness. look to the past and you will see where the people live.

Teddy Roosevelt: 193 recess appointments during a one second recess

2011-12-10T00:59:00.004-05:00

This is what you call executive decision-making. When he was facing a Congress that tried to prevent him from governing by refusing to approve his appointments, TR got creative. In the split second between the gavels closing one Senate session and opening a new one, TR made 193 recess appointment.

I've wondered about the Obama administration's passivity in response to Republican obstructionism. His recess appointments have been sparse, and the unfilled offices are piling up. Obama could take the following position: that by refusing to even permit votes on appointments that require Senate approval, and then refusing to go formally into recess in order to prevent him from exercising his Constitutional authority to make recess appointments, the Senate is deliberately interfering with his executive authority and effectively preventing him from fulfilling his Constitutional obligation to execute the laws of the land; accordingly, for purposes of making appointments he is entitled, he is declaring a constructive recess, making the appointments and moving on to conduct the country's business -- including protecting hard-working Americans from depredations by unethical financial institutions by getting the new Consumer Financial Protection Agency up to speed.

OK, so he does this and Republicans throw a gigantic hissy fit. What are they going to do about it? The Supreme Court won't touch a dispute between its sister branches of government, the Republicans draft a resolution condemning his actions, and the majority Democratic Senators vote it down. With relentless attacks on the Republicans for abusing their offices by refusing to let the President make appointments he is Constitutionally obligated to make, the Democrats could create both a legal and political stalemate.

I can make a better Constitutional law argument for this as Bush's (and now Obama's) lawyers could make -- again on the basis of Executive branch prerogatives -- for allowing indefinite detention with no due process rights. This is asserted even in the case of American citizens, and even on U.S. soil, if they are declared by the President, with no provision for judicial review, to be "enemy combatants."

I Got Spine. Fool me Once

2011-12-09T01:19:00.002-05:00

Obama's New Square Deal

Wed, 12/07/2011 - 3:13pm —

E.J. Dionne National Memo

WASHINGTON -- President Obama has decided that he is more likely to win if the election is about big things rather than small ones. He hopes to turn the 2012 campaign from a plebiscite about the current state of the economy into a referendum about the broader progressive tradition that made us a middle-class nation. For the second time, he intends to stake his fate on a battle for the future.

This choice has obvious political benefits to an incumbent presiding over a still-ailing economy, and it confirms Obama's shift from a defensive approach earlier this year to an aggressive philosophical attack on a Republican Party that has veered sharply rightward. It's also the boldest move the president has made since he decided to go all-out for health insurance reform even after the Democrats lost their 60-vote majority in the Senate in early 2010.

The president's speech on Tuesday in Osawatomie, Kan., the site of Theodore Roosevelt's legendary "New Nationalism" speech 101 years ago, was the Inaugural address Obama never gave. It was, at once, a clear philosophical rationale for his presidency, a straightforward narrative explaining the causes of the nation's travails, and a coherent plan of battle against a radicalized conservatism that now defines the Republican Party and has set the tone for its presidential nominating contest.

In drawing upon TR, Obama tied himself unapologetically to a defense of America's long progressive and liberal tradition. The Republican Roosevelt, after all, drew his inspiration from the writer Herbert Croly, whose book "The Promise of American Life" can fairly be seen as the original manifesto for modern liberalism. Thus has the tea party's radicalism encouraged a very shrewd politician to take on a task that Democrats have been reluctant to engage since Ronald Reagan's ascendancy.

Obama was remarkably direct in declaring that the core ideas of the progressivism advanced by Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt were right, and that the commitments of Reagan era supply-side economics are flatly wrong. He praised TR for knowing "that the free market has never been a free license to take whatever you can from whomever you can" and for understanding that "the free market only works when there are rules of the road that ensure competition is fair and open and honest."

He also eviscerated supply-side economics, a theory promising that "if we just cut more regulations and cut more taxes -- especially for the wealthy -- our economy will grow stronger."

"But here's the problem," Obama declared. "It doesn't work. It has never worked. It didn't work when it was tried in the decade before the Great Depression. It's not what led to the incredible postwar booms of the '50s and '60s. And it didn't work when we tried it during the last decade."

A White House that just a few months ago was obsessed with the political center is now not at all wary, as a senior adviser put it, of extolling "a vision that has worked for this country." But this adviser also noted that Obama implicitly contrasted the flexibility of the Rooseveltian progressivism with the rigidity of the current brand of conservatism. The official pointed to Obama's strong commitment to education reform, including his critique in Osawatomie of "just throwing money at education."

"You can embrace it (the progressive tradition) if you can make the point that philosophies and political theories can evolve as facts on the ground change," the adviser said. The liberalism Obama advocated thus contains a core of moderation that the ideology of the tea party does not. Finally, Obama has realized that the path to the doors of moderate voters passes through a wholesale critique of the immoderation of the right.

For months, progressives have asked why Obama wasn't invoking the populist language of Franklin D. Roosevelt and his attacks on "economic royalists" and "the privileged princes" of "new economic dynasties." What progressives often forget is that FDR offered these words only when his first term was almost over, in his acceptance speech at the 1936 Democratic National Convention. Roosevelt did not become a full-throated economic populist until the election was upon him -- and only after he was pressed by a left and a labor movement that demanded more of him.

Facing his own re-election and pushed by an Occupy Wall Street movement that has made economic inequality a driving issue in our politics, Barack Obama discovered both of his inner Roosevelts.

E.J. Dionne's email address is ejdionne(at)washpost.com.

Reader's Rejoinder:

Geez Mr. President, it's about time. But make no mistake about it, it is a class war. Only until recently the middle class has been attacked repeatedly on every front and barely whimpered under the withering assault. That's why these sociopaths on the right have become so emboldened to do the demented things they do. They got no resistance. Well taken to it's logical conclusion there would be a bloody revolution if that were to continue. Time to restore balance and engage in mutual sacrifice so we can reap mutual benefit. Either that or we can descend into the hell that tyranny inevitably bring (in the form of corporate facism).

Uh No

2011-12-08T08:48:00.002-05:00

Atrios posts "Uh No," in response to an article wherein Jamie Diamond, the CEO of JP Morgan Chase claims that most bankers like him pay over 50% in income tax. Atrios correctly points out several errors that AP failed to even mention in this calculation, but even Atrios missed the point. Diamond argues that rich bankers pay 39.6% in Federal Taxes and 12% in New York State and City taxes, totaling over 50%. Uh, no. As Atrios notes, the top Federal rate is 35%. However, that's the top marginal rate. As Atrios fails to mention, the first tiers of income are a) not taxed at all and later tiers are taxed at lesser rates. That, together with exemptions and deductions means that a wage earner with $1 million of wage income would probably only be taxed at about 27% on average at the Federal level. Further, the New York State and City taxes are deductible from the Federal taxable income, so the actual combined rate would be less than 40%, not over 50%. Moreover, a person with income in this range would almost certainly have significant (perhaps all, as, for example, hedge fund managers) of his/her income coming in the form of interest, dividends and capital gains, all of which are taxed at a maximum rate of 15% at the Federal level and even that has a $60,000+ exemption for married filers ($30,000+ for singles). So most of these folks are not paying anything close to 50% in taxes.

Just about all you need to know about Newt

2011-12-02T13:35:00.003-05:00

From Kevin Drum:

Newt loves Freddie Mac: Then and Now

How Republicans (and everyone else) think Newt would be a spectacular candidate

Maybe this GOP Goof is One Even Spineless Dems Can Run With

2011-12-02T02:11:00.001-05:00

Republican Intransigence On Payroll Tax Cut Could Imperil Senate Campaigns

Wed, 11/30/2011 - 5:49pm —

Matt Taylor

Republican hopes to recapture the Senate could be derailed by the national party's opposition to extending payroll tax cuts for most Americans by slapping a surcharge on the wealthiest, resurgent populism in the critical state of Ohio serving as the most concrete example of the major political risks at play.

On a conference call Wednesday afternoon to make his personal pitch for the Middle Class Tax Cut Act of 2011, which would extend and expand the payroll tax cut for workers enacted at the beginning of this year, Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, up for re-election next fall, lambasted Mitch McConnell and Republicans for their opposition, which he said was simply about protecting the rich.

"It’s remarkable that one political party is so intent on protecting people making a million dollars a year that they won’t budge on anything," he said, before expressing optimism that public pressure would ratchet up and force the GOP's hands.

"I’m hopeful pressure from the public will get them to change their minds on this."

And opinion polls make clear that this is an example of an epic disconnect between elites (politicians in Washington) and actual Republicans across America.

"This is something where the Republican leadership could potentially alienate not just swing voters but also their own party base if they insist on letting the cuts expire," said Tom Jensen, director of Public Policy Polling, noting that his firm found in August that over 70 percent of Republicans oppose letting payroll tax rates rise. "That will be a big liability for the party in competitive Senate races in places like Virginia, Montana, and Missouri next year."

Republicans are primed by their public and elected leaders to support tax cuts -- always and absolutely. That McConnell and Co. have other ideas in this case could prove a liability in their campaign to take control of the Senate -- or so Dems are hoping.

"I think it hurts Republican senators or Republican candidates who don’t take a stand," said Justin Barasky, press secretary for the Ohio Democratic Party. "If [State Treasuer] Josh Mandel [Brown's likely opponent] is willing to do two fundraisers in D.C. but isn’t willing to say he’s for extending a payroll tax cut for the middle class, it shows you he’s not on their side; he’s more comfortable with high-priced lobbyists."

Mandel's campaign declined a request for comment, but neutral political observers handicapping Senate contests see an opening here for Democrats to press their case on income inequality, even if candidates outside of Congress might be able to duck the issue.

"One of the benefits in a lot of these Senate races, is a guy like Josh Mandel in Ohio, they don’t actually have to vote on any of these things, they’re bystanders," said Kyle Kondik, a political analyst at the University of Virginia Center for Politics. This is in contrast to Republicans like Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts, who says he backs extension of the payroll tax break but is dancing around a specific proposal to do so, reluctant to defy GOP orthodoxy on something as fundamental as raising taxes on the rich while simultaneously looking to burnish his image as a moderate.

"Pure strategy: it makes sense for him not to say anything at all; he doesn’t have to," said Jason Johnson, a Hiram College political scientist. "Mitt Romney didn’t have to say anything about Issue 2 [which would have enshrined anti-union legislation passed by Republican Governor John Kasich], he could have just let it fail and showed up in Ohio some time next year after he won the primary. But he made a mistake by making an announcement."

Romney told the press just days before the anti-collective bargaining law was rejected by a broad majority of voters that he supported it, which Johnson said makes Ohio an extremely tough lift for the Republican presidential frontrunner -- and by implication, that party's candidates down the ballot.

Is There a Republican Gaffe Big Enough for Dems to Seize Upon?

2011-12-02T02:07:00.001-05:00

In his New York magazine essay "When Did the GOP Lose Touch With Reality?," former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum basically says Republicans have made the terrible political error of believing their own propaganda: portraying a mild-mannered centrist like President Obama as a hardcore revolutionary.

"The business model of the conservative media," he writes, "is built on two elements: provoking the audience into a fever of indignation (to keep them watching) and fomenting mistrust of all other information sources (so that they never change the channel)."

Trapped in a world of "pseudo-facts and pretend information," even "Republican billionaires are not acting cynically. They watch Fox News too, and they're gripped by the same apocalyptic fears as the Republican base."

Should dogma force them into nominating a satirist's daydream like Newt Gingrich, the winning side in 2012 could be the one that kept its sense of humor.

(Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Gene Lyons is a National Magazine Award winner and co-author of "The Hunting of the President" (St. Martin's Press, 2000). You can email Lyons at eugenelyons2@yahoo.com.)

Mortgage Servicers: Getting Away With The Perfect Crime?

2011-11-30T00:21:00.001-05:00

National Memo, Mon, 11/28/2011 - 12:40pm —

Matt Stoller

Without prosecutions, there’s nothing keeping fraud from becoming a standard business practice.

In 2004, the FBI warned Congress of an “epidemic of mortgage fraud,” of unscrupulous operators taking advantage of a booming real estate market. Less than two years later, an accounting scandal at Fannie Mae tipped us off that something was very wrong at the highest levels of corporate America.

Of course, we all know what happened next. Crime invaded the center of our banking system. Wall Street CEOs were signing on to SEC documents knowing they contained material misstatements. The New York Fed, riddled with conflicts of interest, shoveled money to large banks and tried to hide it under the veil of central bank independence. Even Tim Geithner noted that Lehman had “air in the marks” in its valuations of asset-backed securities, as the bankruptcy examiner’s report showed that accounting manipulation to disguise the condition of the balance sheet was a routine management tool at the bank. There’s a reason Charles Ferguson got an Academy Award for his work on the documentary Inside Job.

And yet, no handcuffs. The big news on prosecutions in the traditionally high-powered Southern District of New York are convictions for relatively petty insider trading that are unrelated to the collapse of the economy. The criminal charges could have been filed in the 1980s. U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara has brought minor civil suits against banks, but nothing significant, and no criminal indictments for the Ponzi scheme of the last four years.

And what happens when this kind of fraud goes unprosecuted? It continues, even today. The same banks that ran the corrupt home mortgage securitization chain are now committing rampant fraud in the foreclosure crisis. Here’s New Orleans Bankruptcy Judge Elizabeth Magner discussing problems at Lender Processing Services, the company that handles 80 percent of foreclosures on behalf of large banks (emphasis added):

In Jones v. Wells Fargo, this Court discovered that a highly automated software package owned by LPS and identified as MSP administered loans for servicers and note holders but was programed to apply payments contrary to the terms of the notes and mortgages.

The bad behavior is so rampant that banks think nothing of a contractor programming fraud into the software. This is shocking behavior and has led to untold numbers of foreclosures, as well as the theft of huge sums of money from mortgage-backed securities investors.

Here’s how the fraud works: Mortgage loan notes are very clear on the schedule of how payments are to be applied. First, the money goes to interest, then principal, then all other fees. That means that investors get paid first and servicers, who collect late fees for themselves, get paid either when they collect the late fee from the debtor or from the liquidation of the foreclosure. And fees are supposed to be capitalized into the overall mortgage amount. If you are late one month, it isn’t supposed to push you into being late on all subsequent months.

The software, however, prioritizes servicer fees above the contractually required interest and principal to investors. This isn’t a one-off; it’s programmed. It’s the very definition of a conspiracy! Who knows how many people paid late and then were pushed into a spiral of fees that led into a foreclosure? It’s the perfect crime, and many of the victims had paid every single mortgage payment.

A lack of criminal prosecutions means that unethical business practices like this one drive out ethical business practices. After all, why should a bank hire an ethical default servicer that charges a high price for its product when it can pay nothing to one that simply extracts from investors and homeowners?

The joke that is the U.S. Attorney network has become very old and very stale. And unfortunately, because of Attorney General Eric Holder, that joke is on us.

Matt Stoller is a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and former Senior Policy Advisor to Congressman Alan Grayson. The Roosevelt Institute is a non-profit organization devoted to carrying forward the legacy and values of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.

Did Drug Firms Hire Gingrich To Back Medicare Drug Benefit?

2011-11-30T00:20:00.000-05:00

National Memo Mon, 11/28/2011 - 10:33pm —

by Joe Conason

To look closely at Newt Gingrich is to see a failed statesman who pocketed tens of millions of dollars by exploiting his political celebrity and government connections over the past decade or so. Although the former Speaker never registered as a lobbyist, the corporations that financed his “for-profit” think-tank and his consulting firm weren’t simply charmed into writing those enormous checks.

But for Republican primary voters, Gingrich’s blatant buckraking may not be nearly as troubling as what he helped his corporate masters to achieve on Capitol Hill. Having accepted large sums from major drug companies as well as PhRMA, the industry lobbying group, he reportedly helped to push through the Bush administration’s Medicare drug benefit – which is anathema to the right-wing Tea Party voters whose support he is now courting.

As the Washington Post and other outlets have reported in recent days, the estimated take from Gingrich Inc., the conglomerate of Newt-centered consulting, publishing, and propaganda activities that he founded after leaving Congress in 1999, ranges upward of $110 million. He points out that he has written (or had ghost-written) about a dozen best-selling books and a number of television documentaries, and that he has also earned top dollar by delivering speeches – much like his old nemesis Bill Clinton (who has devoted a large proportion of his similarly huge earnings to charity and foundation work).

The largest proportion of the Gingrich bonanza, however, evidently derives from the Center for Health Transformation, an unusual profit-making “think-tank” in Washington, where most such organizations are not-for-profit; and the Gingrich Group, his consulting company which gave corporations “advice” while it supposedly refrained from traditional lobbying for legislation. He also operated a tax-exempt non-profit called American Solutions, which he seems to have used largely to finance millions of dollars worth of travel by private jet and limousine for himself and third wife Callista.

The “group” took in lucrative fees from the corporate likes of mortgage giant Freddie Mac, which paid Gingrich around $1.8 million over several years to help with troublesome Republicans seeking to shut down the government-backed firm. The “center” dispensed advice, videos, and conferences on health care to a huge variety of companies in the health field, which paid annual “dues” ranging from $5000 to $200,000 depending on their size after its doors opened in 2003. Familiar pharma names such as Astra Zeneca and Novo Nordisk were major customers, along with the official PhRMA lobby.

Precisely what the center did for these exorbitant sums is not clear, but some commentators suspect that its activities skirted lobbying even if it avoided the narrowest definition of that business. In his defense, both Gingrich and his friends have insisted he did nothing that could be construed as supporting legislation on behalf of a client.

Yet xonservative journalist Tim Carney, writing for the Washington Examiner, reports that the former Speaker used his connections on the Hill to promote passage of the Medicare drug bill, also known as Medicare Part D, in 2003 – which was designed to protect drug company profits no matter how high the cost to consumers and taxpayers. According to Carney, Gingrich was hired “by someone in the industry” during the contentious debate over the bill, when his successors in the House Republican leadership notorious twisted many arms in their own caucus to achieve passage.”

“Three former Republican congressional staffers told me that Gingrich was calling around Capitol Hill and visiting Republican congressmen in 2003 in an effort to convince conservatives to support a bill expanding Medicare to include prescription-drug subsidies,” Carney writes.
“Conservatives were understandably wary about expanding a Lyndon Johnson-created entitlement that had historically blown way past official budget estimates. Drug makers, on the other hand, were positively giddy about securing a new pipeline of government cash to pad their already breathtaking profit margins.”

There is much more to be found in the archives and bank accounts of Newt, Inc., from his relationship with the Chamber of Commerce to his advocacy of policies that benefited his corporate clients, whether or not he actually lobbied directly for them. But his promotion of the Medicare expansion may be his greatest vulnerability for the moment, as he assumes the front-runner position.

On Monday, the chair of Gingrich’s Center for Health Transformation estimated its revenues over the past decade at $55 million. Fees are flexible, she said, with “charter memberships” going for an annual fee of $200,000.

Another New Newt?

2011-11-28T19:18:00.001-05:00

From a Newsmax reader:
Are the Republicans really dumb enough to nominate possible the most corrupt career politician in their history. This guy has so many skeletons in his closet, he could be a Halloween exhibit at Disneyland. Newt is the most hated politician in the country. He embodies the definition of smarmy, and all the debate skills in the world will not translate well into the day to day minutiae that is running a country without sending it into a deepening chaos. This is a guy who called for the death penalty for anyone caught bringing in 2 oz of marijuana into the country, left his first wife who had put him through school including a PhD and refused to give her child support, making her rely on her church for food money; left the second wife after telling a staffer that she 'wasn't pretty enough to be First Lady', was charged with 80 ethics violations by colleagues in Congress and fined $300K for it (many who abstained from voting did so because they thought the fine wasn't large enough)... I could go on and on. There ARE actual sane, intelligent and reasonable men running for the presidency. Why does the MSM pretend Ron Paul does not exist? Gary Johnson, Buddy Roemer? They cannot be as marginal as this career sociopath, and yet this is what we hear about? Newt's debate skills as presidential timber??? How many pundits do we need to point out the difference between bullshit and honest, detailed answers which show a command of the issues, before we realize Newt is a just another lizard? If Newt Gingrich is elected president, what is left of this country will not survive the fallout, and I mean that phrase literally. He'd be an unmitigated disaster. Can you actually see this guy uniting the country?