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The New Pharisees

2012-01-24T14:35:00.000-08:00

As Newt Gingrich said about himself, it's exhausting work bullying Americans into being better people. He got so involved in it, and loved his country so much, he had to take a mistress. It's a novel defense.

What was the work he was so involved in that he didn't have time for his marriage? Investigating the infidelities of others, notably Bill Clinton. The Savanarolas-in-chief who tried to hound Clinton from office, Gingrich and his sidemen Livingston and Hyde, had their own women on the side. Gingrich's solution was open marriage. It's a bit like a bad country western song, which may be why it obsesses and appeals to the people inhabiting the geographic belt associated with that kind of music and the Bible. God forgives the sinner as long as he or she is busy informing on others. It's all very Republican. Republicans give people medals for this.

It's an old story and there's a long list, this GOP and SuperChristian roll call of misbehaviorists. Gay bashers who are gay in private. Puritans and God-botherers who peek in other people's windows but keep their own blinds drawn. There are also a lot of warmongers who refuse to serve in combat.

Liberalism never had this much appetite for sleaze, nor did it engage in hunting it down. A dirty mind needs an obsession, and what better than scolding and attacking others for the misbehavior you engage in yourself. When outed, attack. When accused, smear the accuser. When you are defending marriage, keep the loosest interpretation for your own convenience. And keep that righteous posture no matter what. The glass houses/stones rule doesn't apply to you. Jon Stewart does the best job of dissecting the strangeness. But is laughing at hypocrites enough?

It'd be funny if it wasn't so poisonous. And we'd be able to get rid of these creeps if they weren't so arrogant and their constituents weren't so easily manipulated. The crowd loved it when Gingrich scolded the moderator for sullying a debate by asking about Gingrich's disgraceful behavior. Is hypocrisy also the sort of thing to be confined to whispers in quiet rooms with doors locked? Add Republican cheers for adultery to the cheers for greed, selfishness, wrongful execution, torture, death to the uninsured, voter suppression and other new Republican ideals.

What creeps me out the most, I think, is how this hypocrisy and turpitude seems to be creeping northward, even into the land of the strong and above average. After two terms of Pawlenty our average has sagged noticeably. The creeps are uniformly right wing, religious and very Republican. When Minnesota Republicans learn to do hypocrisy really big they graduate to the big leagues. It's embarrassing to those who know how rational and decent Minnesotans are by and large. Most of us don't think sanctimonious Christian heterosexual adulterers are superior to gays and lesbians who are faithful partners and good parents.

Why Income Inequality is Bad for Business

2012-01-22T09:53:00.000-08:00

There's a very good, straightforward and powerful explanation of the importance of economic fairness in today's StarTribune, written by David Morris.

Income inequality as it exists in the U.S. today, an extreme inequality which the Republican Party is sworn to continue and increase, is bad economics, very bad for business, bad for the future of private enterprise, bad for our health, bad for our children and grandchildren, downright stupid when you measure its effects on education, and (today being Sunday, maybe we should consider this) it turns Christianity on its head. Why do these "super-Christian" and supposedly pro-business Republicans support policies which undermine everything they stand for? My explanation? It's a shell game, a trick, a sham, a con game. To use a phrase popular in the South "They'd climb a tree to tell a lie." They don't give a damn about the things they trumpet in speeches and commercials. Their loyalty is to money in their own pockets and power in their own hands.

One of the chief lies they tell is this: Democrats who favor greater income equality want everyone to earn the same. This is untrue. What we want is a return to the system which functioned well during the longest prosperity in American history, the period between the New Deal and the inauguration of Reagan, a period when workers' earnings rose as a companies profits rose. Since Reagan it's all been taken apart. Since 1980, the American Dream has been narrowed to the upper classes, to people who own stock for a living rather than working for a paycheck. They forget, and would like Americans to forget, that prosperous working people are the engine of a strong economy. Republicans treat them like the enemy.

Welfare for Billionaires––Only Billionaires

2012-01-20T10:46:00.000-08:00

If you count corporate welfare and tax subsidies of rich people and private companies, the U.S. is a welfare state but one that supports the rich and corporations rather than the poor and working classes. A prof from Washington State University explains it very well.

Moyers & Co discuss how a political system steered by billionaires benefits billionaires.

(Big surprise.)

Meanwhile... The sad and disastrous fact is the billionaires have their money and are content to allow the western economies to collapse rather than forfeit any of it to support such "socialist" schemes as roads and universities and libraries and hospitals. As if the public good is an anarchist plot. A prosperous nation is an insult to their belief system. Infrastructure made it possible for them to get rich, in fact multiplied their wealth-creation with the efficiencies cooperative systems create, but they think nobody else exists in their closed system of spas and resorts and private clubs. Money is created for THEM. People work for THEM. Their idleness is akin to the idleness of the old Roman gods, luxurious and self-justifying. Meanwhile the lives of those who work for a living are growing narrower, shorter, meaner and more unpleasant. To reward actual work––as opposed to dividends on riches–– would inconvenience the lucky 1%. Austerity is killing the European economy rather than inconvenience rich Europeans. Austerity is how the rich teach working people to be poor. It's not happening by mistake. Here's an enlightening article from the New York Review of Books.

How patriotic is it to offshore your millions? Is it worse when those millions are earned from exporting jobs to countries where people work harder and longer for a dollar a day? Is it OK if you sing God Bless America while you are doing it? That's Romney's approach.

The Do-Nothing Republican Congress

2012-01-07T09:45:00.000-08:00

This current Congress is controlled by Republicans with the sole purpose of preventing the President and the Democratic Senate from doing anything constructive. Their only declared goal: to make sure Obama is a one-term president. Historians from both ends of the political spectrum are calling it one of the most dysfunctional, least constructive Congresses in American history. This NPR story draws its insights from, among others, Norm Ornstein of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, who has co-authored two books on the scorched earth brand of Republican governance.

Contrast this Republican/Tea Party Congress with the Congress from Obama's first two years. Democrats achieved more in two years than any Congress since the '60s, some say more than had been acccomplished since the '30s. Democrats do things for regular people. Republicans cater to the top 1%. The partisanship has come from one side, the Republican side. All the compromising, flexibility, practicality and patient toil has been on the Democratic side. It's as if Republicans want democracy to fail rather than inconvenience their corporate clients. This Bloomberg article lists the achievements of Obama's first two years. Have we all forgotten? (And Bloomberg is hardly a liberal biased publication)

This Christian Science Monitor cites the six very big achievements Obama had with a Democratic Congress, over the intense blockade by Republicans.

This Washington Post article calls them "forgotten accomplishments".

Why forgotten––and forgotten already at the close of 2010? Because of the intense and constant abuse from FoxNews. Not only do more Americans "get their news from FoxNews" but those who do know less––less than people who don't read or watch any news at all. Consider it a nationwide brainwashing.

The sole failing of the Democratic Congress of 2009 and 2010? They didn't brag enough. They just got things done.

Contrast that with the Republican juggernaut that swept in in late 2010. The Republican goal? Same as it had been for the previous two years, but bolder and stronger. Block a recovery that Americans needed. Block reforms. Block jobs bills. Block consumer and environmental protections. (What they couldn't block they watered down.) Block increased taxes on the top 1%, whose wealth had grown in the aftermath of the financial crisis while most Americans suffered. Their goal was to make Americans angry. Discontent and anger helped them regain the House in 2010, it could help them retake the White House in 2012.

The only medicine that can help the nation recover from eight years of Bush, and now two years of a Tea Party relapse is a more Democratic Congress.

The Looting of America

2012-01-05T09:20:00.000-08:00

This video is worth watching. A former Assistant Housing Secretary for George H. W. Bush explains how the American financial sector has come to resemble a criminal enterprise. How the too-big-to-fail financial giants (who taxpayers bailed out) have systematically looted the middle class, with the protection of the Republican wave of deregulation. It's an interesting cool-headed rant. How valid are the allegations? I don't have the expertise to judge. They square with the events and the trends of the past thirty years, since Reagan inaugurated Voodoo Economics and started dismantling regulations. (The regulations that had safeguarded the longest period without a financial panic or significant downturn in American history, between 1937 and 1974––and the '74 downturn was caused by the 1973 OPEC oil embargo.)

While watching this I had the definite feeling that this played one way, leftward, away from corporate power, toward better government regulation, better enforcement of transparency and fairness...

...but then I find a very aggressive, Tea Party, Obama-bashing website that endorses her video too. (I find no progressive sites commenting on this interview.)

Question is: does common ground exist to overcome the hatred felt by the right wing populists toward this president, toward good-government types, toward Democrats and progressives? Can the Tea Partiers agree that the financial crisis was caused by financiers and speculators, not by the homeowners they ripped off?

Probably not, as long as they are funded by Wall Street billionaires like the Koch brothers and inspired by the manipulative rhetoric of FoxNews and talk radio. The rabble needs to be roused, and they tend to conform to their learned loyalties. Call it team spirit. Or herd instinct.

Scrooge Lives

2011-12-20T15:23:00.000-08:00

From Forbes, a very good examination of the argument over our serious long-term unemployment problem. (Which, by the way, has been deepened and lengthened because minority Republicans in the Congress don't want the economy to improve. You can see why: a better economy improves Obama's chances of being re-elected. Economic pain is a theoretical abstraction to the Republicans, and a very useful one.)

Republicans say people who are out of work are either lazy or picky or on drugs and need a good kick in the pants. They say the unemployed deserve to be unemployed, which by extension means their children deserve to be hungry and homeless.

Scrooge lives.

Here's another good short analysis of the Republican strategy, from the New Republic.

The Republican Party (which just shut the door on the millions of Americans worst hit by the recession Bush left us with) seems to have re-engineered itself as the party of the selfish, the greedy, "the haves and the have-mores" (the folks Bush jokingly referred to as his base). They've devised a cruel mythology to support their argument and have a large well-funded apparatus to push it. Lots of air time at FoxNews, lots of microphones, lots of radio listeners who swallow it whole.

This kind of thinking, this brutal meanness, isn't new to America, but it's never dominated a major party before. That it's also wedded to the loudest Christian groups is more than ironic, but these people are immune to irony. Super-Christianity was also allied with Franco, Mussolini and Hitler in a time that seems increasingly similar to ours.

Something to think about as we watch A Christmas Carol and It's A Wonderful Life. Merry Christmas indeed.

Too Big To Arrest?

2011-12-16T09:07:00.000-08:00

From the Atlantic comes a timely discussion of the stupid rule that reads (I'm paraphrasing) "if you steal billions of dollars in a complicated way without getting sweaty it's not a crime". Why do really big thieves always get away with it? Answer? Magic. What a victim doesn't understand can't be a crime. Amounts so big a policeman, a hundred policemen, can't count them can be stolen with impunity.

And from Business Insider, this list of the most egregious severance packages. CEOs who screw up aren't fired exactly. They are given so much money they have to leave their jobs to count it. Ordinary employees are lucky to leave fully clothed.

If a they can hire an 8 year-old cheaper your employer will fire you, but they will let a CEO lose them billions and keep him around. If they don't keep him around they will pay him millions to ease his embarrassment and theirs. Why is it if you protest without a permit you are beaten up, if you steal $100 you end up in prison, but if you steal a billion you are rewarded? There is very little proportionate justice. Very little justice at all. Nobody gets what they deserve especially those con artists who steal billions. It makes you want to punch someone or sue someone or see someone perp walked but the ones you want to see perp walked are immune. You've heard of Too Big to Fail. They're also Too Big to Arrest. So the victims are left to take out their frustrations on each other.

As J. D. Hackensacker III said “That's one of the tragedies of this life: that the men most in need of a beating are always enormous.”

(Those of you who don't know who J. D. Hackensacker III was should get acquainted with the films of Preston Sturges.)

Rich People Are Not Job Creators Sez Business Week

2011-12-12T11:09:00.000-08:00

Taxes on the rich stimulate economies. If you don't believe me, maybe you'll believe a non-communist billionaire entrepreneur who's started several successful companies, writing in the certifiably non-socialist magazine Bloomberg Business Week.

Hanauer has this to say: "I’ve never been a “job creator.” I can start a business based on a great idea, and initially hire dozens or hundreds of people. But if no one can afford to buy what I have to sell, my business will soon fail and all those jobs will evaporate.

"That’s why I can say with confidence that rich people don’t create jobs, nor do businesses, large or small. What does lead to more employment is the feedback loop between customers and businesses. And only consumers can set in motion a virtuous cycle that allows companies to survive and thrive and business owners to hire. An ordinary middle-class consumer is far more of a job creator than I ever have been or ever will be."

Not only is the term Job Creators a lie, it is a lie that kills jobs. It protects and rewards the idleness of capital and impoverishes the average consumers who actually do create jobs in their millions by buying stuff and paying for services. Impoverish the average consumer and you put capital to sleep in the pockets and closets and jewelry drawers of the very rich. By lowering the taxes on the rich, especially the rich heirs who've never worked or created a job in their lives, and you incentivize the idleness of wealth and penalize the hiring and paying of workers.

Henry Blodget does a great job of explaining the dynamics of what Hanauer is talking about on the website Business Insider, another non-anarchistic non-socialist business publication.

Blodget: "For a specific example, Hanauer points out that his family owns 3 cars, not the 3,000 that might be bought if his $9+ million were taken home by a few thousand families.

"If that $9+ million had gone to 9,000 families instead of Hanauer, it would almost certainly have been pumped right back into the economy via consumption (i.e., demand). And, in so doing, it would have created more jobs.

"Hanauer estimates that, if most American families were taking home the same share of the national income that they were taking home 30 years ago, every family would have another $10,000 of disposable income to spend.

"That, Hanauer points out, would have a huge impact on demand — and, thereby job creation."

As I've pointed out before a multi-millionaire CEO who justifies his raises by lowering his employees' pay and benefits doesn't take his five million or hundred million dollar paycheck and buy a thousand refrigerators or a hundred cars as his employees would do. He buys another company and makes it leaner and meaner, or he buys his wife or mistress a $50,000 tennis bracelet. Tax cuts to rich people do not create jobs because lower taxes disincentivizes investment in the factory or the employees. Rewarding up and taxing down kills economies. It rewards rich people pocketing their gains, what I prefer to call hoarding. It certainly ain't job creating.

If you prefer, I first heard Hanauer's story on NPR. Consider this, if taxes are lowered on rich people they have less incentive to give money to public radio.

The Gingrich World of Aristocrats and Serfs

2011-12-09T16:43:00.000-08:00

There's a very cynical calculation that goes through every Republican mind, a dollar calculation. If you're a rich Republican it's how long and hard you can get people to work for how little and how little you can get away with paying in Lincoln's hated income taxes on the earnings your underlings are sweating out for you. If you're a poor Republican you obviously can't do calculations.

John Nichols of The Nation magazine converted Gingrich's calculation about poor children and "overpaid" school janitors to a simple equation using Gingrich's income as a metric. What it boils down to is plain fat ugly rich man's greed and prejudice.

Nichols summation of Gingrich Mathematics is worth posting wherever you post things: "Even in a party where cruelty is now considered a political virtue, there is something unsettling about a man who collected $30,000 each month to offer an hour of historical counsel to Freddie Mac administrators attacking elementary and secondary school janitors who, according to fresh Bureau of Labor Statistics data, earn a mean wage of $13.74 an hour, or $28,570 per year."

So Newt, who earns $30,000 an hour to "advise" bankers and financiers about history thinks school janitors are overpaid. In the old way of things Newt imagines he would have been one of the overseers on a horse watching his peasants till his land, and his peasants' children too, preferably peasants of a different color and owned instead of paid.

In Gingrich's world of aristocrats and serfs with government regulations and taxes happily out of the way, we get back to the world that our Founding Fathers fought the revolution to overturn. The nasty brutish world of European aristocracies and poor people who fled in ships to these savage shores. This country wasn't founded to evade taxes or to "liberate" the rich. Those who think taxes are evil actually think society is evil, or are rich enough to think society is unnecessary. George Washington thought otherwise when he mounted an army to collect taxes from recalcitrant citizens in western Pennsylvania. Education? Jefferson left his presidency off his tombstone but included his founding of the University of Virginia. (He had no grand plans for making poor students work as janitors.)

Thomas Paine had this to say about citizens' obligations to the public good. He took a dim view of the very rich, of people like Gingrich and his clientele:

"All accumulation, therefore, of personal property, beyond what a man's own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes on every principle of justice, of gratitude, and of civilization, a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came."

Lizz Winstead (the creator of the Daily Show, who by the way grew up in my neighborhood) takes a shot at laughing Gingrich out of the race. Which may be unwise. He's such a monster we could do worse than keeping him around.

6 WalMart heirs worth as much as 30% of all Americans

2011-12-08T11:29:00.000-08:00

From Salon comes this news: six wealthy WalMart heirs aren't just "rich" they are worth as much as the bottom 30% of the American population combined.

I will pause to let your head get around that obscene statistic. Six people who don't need to work for a living are worth more than 90 million working class people combined.

Why are rich people a protected species?

What's worse is that poorest 30% of Americans are forced by circumstances to shop at WalMart. Sadly the poor don't see ironies and the rich find them amusing.

A friend just sent me this piece from The Nation, detailing how uncharitable old Mr. Walton was, and how his heirs, while philanthropic, tend to be generous towards PACs and front groups who do what the Walton family wants, to help make the Walton family even richer. Even self-serving "generosity" is tax deductible, so in a sense we are all doing the Waltons' bidding. Concentrated wealth is a positive evil.

Vast Income Inequality Has Its Fans

2011-12-07T14:16:00.000-08:00

When each new economics report comes out telling us that the extremely rich have again taken more of the pie and more of the people who do the work are falling into poverty, Wall Street's paid apologists go on TV and lend pithy quotes to columns for the Wall Street Journal.

These apologists are wrong but they manage to hide behind a lot of manipulated data. It isn't unfair to compare their song and dance to one of those three card monte tricksters on street corners, the guys who always win your money. The very rich always win because they use the same kinds of tricks. The money gets manipulated out of working people's pockets into the pockets of the people who win the game. Is it still theft when it's billions of dollars instead of tens and twenties? Let's just say it's complicated enough that it's harder to prosecute. The New Republic's Timothy Noah and Jonathan Chait and economist Brad Delong explain it much better than I do.

MarketWatch: The rich continue to get much richer while everyone else is poorer.

Business Insider: The middle class was losing ground even when the economy was good.

Business Week: the social contract is unraveling in developed countries because of extreme income inequality.

From the Guardian: looking at the data. It isn't pretty, unless you are one of the handful of lucky winners. Imagine a lottery that rewarded winners with money stolen from you...

Think conservatives are pro family? This Guardian writer says "think again".

If you think poverty is all right as long as you have your health, consider that the poorer you are the shorter your lifespan. This BBC report shows this is even true in the UK where access to healthcare isn't restricted to people of means as it is in the US. Is this pro-life? No, it's only pro-life for the wealthy.

The Atlantic has the charts and graphs. Having had personal experience with their rigorous fact checking department I know they are reliable.

Want to see where the big money is? Look here, at the website of the Paris School of Economics.

They know when you're sleeping and they know when you're awake

2011-12-05T09:27:00.000-08:00

Big Brother is already here. He's very tech savvy, very control-minded, very cynical and (no surprise) very right wing. Is there any wonder the 1% knows how to game the financial system?

First, from the Daily Beast: is your IPhone app secretly working for the pro-life movement? It sure appears that way.

Here's a similar story from Alternet about how the Wisconsin Governor's right wing is gaming the internet and social media to shut down the effort to recall him. Are Go-Daddy and Facebook in league with national Republican operatives?

It's all pretty chilling. Media dominance and concentrated money go hand in glove. Look at how cynically the Republican Party uses FoxNews to dominate the political argument, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, in 50 states. And their viewers are less informed and more misinformed than people who don't follow the news at all. They want Americans dumb, lost and clueless.

Martha Stewart Died For Our Sins

2011-12-02T08:54:00.000-08:00

Jon Stewart does a quick explanation of how insiders helped insiders to trillions of taxpayer dollars. The enablers of the collapse helping out the perpetrators of the collapse. To do what? Well, to give themselves enormous bonuses for one thing. It's nice to be a financial insider.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg News tells us, Bush's Treasury Secretary was giving a very special group of close personal friends a heads up on what was going down so they could invest their billions appropriately and get extra special rewards. And Congress wasn't even told about all of this. Bush, Paulson, Hedge Funds, the Inner Circle, but not American taxpayers or Congress. Hm...

Will someone explain to me why Martha Stewart went to jail?

Good Economics vs. Bad Economics-You Choose

2011-11-30T20:32:00.000-08:00

It's time to choose sides. Despite what you hear on the money programs and from the Wall Street cheerleaders, there are very good economists who think austerity economics is a bad idea. Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz, our most recent Nobel economists, are on the Democratic side of this argument, the side of the 99%. Others are stepping up too.

"On November 13th 2011, economists from the University of Massachusetts Amherst drafted an open statement to the Occupy Wall Street movement pledging their support. Since then, more than 250 economists from around the world have added their names. Read more at econ4.org "

To be fair, there are two sides to this argument. Having watched the documentary Inside Job, I know that some economists know exactly who butters their bread and it isn't working people. It's the people who now have all the money who butter their bread. Some economists are happy to tailor their ideas to suit their benefactors.

Then there are the mouthpieces for the 1%, who earn a lot of money just by being mouthpieces. For instance, there's Ann Coulter, who said recently that she thinks the horrible dirty worthless people of the Occupy movement should be gunned down by the police. It worked on the Vietnam protesters, she says.

Larry Summers, who led Obama's economic team, doesn't come off very well in Inside Job, but he is on the right side of the argument now, favoring aggressive stimulus and tax cuts to working people––instead of more billions thrown at the rich, at corporations and banks. He's no fool.

Concentrated wealth got us here. It made our economy topheavy and fragile. It sucked the life out of the consumer economy by making working people less prosperous and less able to make ends meet.

Our economy will only revive when working people feel prosperous again, confident that their jobs are secure, that their health and their families are secure, that their children have a future. We need to shift from the Reagan economics of concentrated wealth. Those economic policies promoted and exploited broad insecurity and vulnerability rather than broad prosperity and strength.

Today, more than 2 million Brits took to the streets to protest their government's austerity policy. What is Austerity? It's the rich elite's answer to global recession. "We have money so we get to buy. Everybody else is poor, so they should live that way."

AUSTERITY IS HOW THE RICH AND POWERFUL TEACH WORKING PEOPLE TO BE POOR.

That is where austerity measures bite. They bite the poor, the working people, the middle class who are getting poorer every year. Austerity bites the victims of the global collapse which was caused by the very rich.

In this country it's the Republican economic policy. They want most Americans to be a lot poorer, a lot less secure. When Americans are afraid they work harder and longer for less. That's the long term Republican goal. In the short term the Republicans simply want Americans to suffer, figuring an unhappy populace will vote for Republicans next year. They are happy for Americans to fail in order for Obama to fail.

Do you want to see what effect Republican policies have? Look at the map of the British austerity measures put in place by their Conservative government.

Austerity doesn't work during a recession. It hasn't before. It won't now. Imagine an airline pilot in a stalling aircraft. Does he see the emergency as an opportunity to save fuel? No. He pushes the pedal down and accelerates out of the dive.

Here are some sound commentaries from economists on the intelligent side of this argument, setting out the dire consequences of these ugly conservative policies. From EconMatters.com

From CNN

Here's Robert Reich's useful and persuasive debunking of the Republican austerity policies.

Sadly, cable television is dominated by a Republican network and talk radio is all Republican all the time. And a lot of Americans are easy to fool.

How Corporations Became Persons and People Became Garbage

2011-11-28T09:02:00.000-08:00

I finally got around to reading an article in the New York Times. It was about how the people with money and corporations with money are keeping this money "in the family." Paying themselves and their near and dear. It's not circulating, it's not building, it's not being productively invested, it isn't putting people back to work. During the Great Depression this narrow holding of money, whether it was in a farmer's mattress or a safe deposit box, was called "hoarding" and people who did it were classed as Scrooges or worse.

Today's hoarders of great wealth look a lot more handsome in their tennis outfits or on the town. They photograph well. The television programs about rich people make us admire them, while the programs about regular people usually make them the butt of the joke. Wealth self-advertises and self-justifies. Money = Moral; that's the gist of the Prosperity Gospel, the fastest growing religion in America. Still, however attractive these people are, this hoarding of cash, concentrating the wealth and power in fewer hands, happens at a cost. It benefits few to impoverish many. Big always wins, small always loses. (Picture a large man taking a smaller man and shaking him upside down to get the last bit of cash out of his pockets.) I'll give you a moment to decide which category you fall under.

Here's the New York Times article that got me thinking today.

During a downturn, those with money always buy shares from those with less. They offer very little. Those with too little money have to cash out their holdings at a loss, just to make ends meet and rich people aren't in a hurry. It's a buyer's market. At the top of the business cycle the ones with money (and inside information) are the ones selling. Buy low, sell high.

Human beings are bought and sold the same way. Those with money in hand are in the catbird seat when workers are desperate for jobs. They can hire cheap, they can buy their supplies cheap, pay vendors a discount price...or they can wait and let the desperation deepen into a lower wage scale, wait for the price to go down. (They can afford to be patient, and are happy to remind themselves that "patience is a virtue". A virtue that they avoid practicing with those who owe them money.)

In a recession money is worth more and people are worth less. Humanity is degraded in measurable ways. To think this way people with money step out of their human role, forget they are human beings for the moment, and assume their alternate role: they try to think how their money would think, how their corporation would think, and they persuade themselves that this is more "prudent" more "responsible", more "high-minded", when it's just more cold-blooded and inhumane.

Right now the teachers and plumbers and mechanics and students and nurses protesting on Wall Street are being dehumanized and beaten and pepper-sprayed, while the champagne class in the towers and the comfortable classes in their suburbs are invisible and protected, their names hidden behind the corporations who are allowed to stand in for them. People of all classes and all ages and backgrounds, as soon as they have a grievance, are called "dirty", "longhaired", "lazy", "garbage", "violent", "depraved", "perverted", "smelly" by the well-dressed pundits on FoxNews. Corporations have a well-paid apparatus to shape public opinion, and cable news has everyone's attention 24 hours of every day, so the public is being instructed how to think.

The Daily Show does a much better job of putting the pushback into context, and it's funny.

The terms of all transactions are dictated by the more powerful party, and they get to tell everyone what to think of the transaction. Now, thanks to the Supreme Court appointees of Reagan and two Bushes, corporations are people and money is speech. Meanwhile ordinary people are not people, are garbage to be thrown away, especially if they don't have a job, and lack of money becomes a handy measure of human worthlessness. It's a strange distortion of how our forebears thought. Adam Smith, Lincoln, TR, the Founding Fathers and the Sermon on the Mount turned upside down and inside out by the best public relations money can buy.

O'Reilly: The American Revolution is Over

2011-11-25T10:15:00.000-08:00

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION IS DEAD

By William O'Reilly (from the archives)

In the beginning, there was some sympathy toward the revolutionaries, who believe the parliament in London should lift its monarchist and commercial tyranny from our shores. In the face of the present conditions, that message is a powerful one, and so the folks who wanted independence got some traction.

But the more we saw and heard, the more fair-minded Americans came to believe that this rebel movement was not interested in legitimate issues. Many of them simply want to blow up the economic system.

In addition, some of their behavior was and is reprehensible: shooting at British soldiers from behind trees, throwing expensive imported tea into Boston harbor, tarring and feathering their opponents, speaking treason in public, all kinds of provocation against our British rulers, all kinds of depraved behavior in general.

A picture taken by the New York Post shows empty rum bottles that were taken out of the encampment of the Continental Army. Isn't that nice? I don't believe we've seen any rum bottles at respectable Tory tea gatherings, or am I wrong?

The pamphleteers (and we know their names) are still trying to portray these so-called “Freedom Lovers” as the liberal equivalent to respectable Tory business leaders. One simple question: Would you prefer that your daughter have tea in a respectable drawing room in a fine Tory household or in the ugly squalor of Valley Forge? You make the call, remembering the rum bottles.

A recent Wall Street Journal poll asked: Do you consider yourself a supporter of the signatories to the Declaration of Independence? Sixty-three percent of Americans say they do not support the movement; just 28 percent say they do.

Because troublemakers George Washington and John Adams and John Hancock were sympathetic to the movement in the beginning, along with many members of that radical crowd, such as known alcoholic Samuel Adams and notorious atheist Ben Franklin, this presents a big political problem for them. And so officials in 11 cities got together to discuss how to deal with this “American Revolution.”

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)
TORY MAYOR OF NEW YORK: “What had started as a political movement and a political encampment ended up being an encampment that was no longer in control of the people who started them.”
(END AUDIO CLIP)

And that's true. To be fair -- and we always are on "The Factor" -- some of the Revolutionary movement are well-intentioned folks who believe the British colonial system is no longer fair. That's a legitimate debate. But they have been overrun by thugs, anarchists and the crazies who intimidate. If you are a violent person, people usually back off. And George Washington's army, which is comprised mostly of people who can't get any other kind of job, has lost most of its battles anyway. Who can support such sorry ineptness? These lowlife characters are ragged and dirty from sleeping in the open, and many of them don't have any shoes. They probably don't bathe very often. A bunch of bearded longhaired hippies. How can any decent person say they are legitimate?

So the "American Revolution" movement is dead, finished as a legitimate political force in this country. And that's a good thing.
And that's "The Memo."

Hello Child Labor

2011-11-22T09:19:00.000-08:00

Newt Gingrich said the other day that he would fire all school janitors and have children clean the schools themselves. (Story from the LA Times)

This is the new GOP. And he is their resident genius.

For those who might be nostalgic for those "wonderful days" when children died in machinery and up chimneys and never went to school, but were usefully and profitably employed at low wages undermining the pay scale of their parents, here's a bit of background on child labor. It wasn't very picturesque or charming, but children were a lot easier for employers to bully, exploit and abuse. "Suffer the little children" I guess. TR would be appalled at the modern version of his Republican Party.

The Looting of American Creativity

2011-11-21T09:43:00.000-08:00

From Forbes, an important piece about how the captains of our biggest industrial corporations have been looting our creative capacity and pocketing whatever they can take.

You should call it looting. It's the sort of thing we used to read about when mobsters bought a company and hollowed it out before dumping it, but now it's the model used by big capital management companies. (It sounds a lot like how Mitt Romney got rich: by selling off parts of companies he acquired, laying off masses of employees, and pocketing the cash.)

Such single-minded (you might say narrow-minded or short-sighted) pursuit of profits is a loser's game. It's not sustainable, not responsible. (Remember when American business used to be responsible?) In the cases cited here, where capacity is sold off overseas, it's certainly not very patriotic, even if the tycoons involved do wear a flag lapel pin. What's the word I'm looking for? What's the opposite of creative? Sure: destructive. That's the preferred model of the last thirty years in American businessthink. You could write a vampire movie using this business model.

Creative assets have been invented and developed in the U.S. often with large taxpayer investment, collective genius harnessed and supported by universities and government scientific grants. But in many cases the things Americans helped create are no longer American; they've been offshored to evade societal obligations. Obligations that responsible Americans used to be proud to shoulder. And the infrastructure and educational system that nurtured the creativity is left to rot because the profiteers refuse to pay back into the creative cycle. They've looted the creative infrastructure, offshoring our American genius to evade taxes. As if the American genius was theirs to take. What happens to the inventors once their creativity has been mined and sold away? The huge dividends from this process have been pocketed by a very narrow class.

We are taught by the media to distrust migrants, but the multinational corporate model is a migrant too, a much less helpful version, a more dangerous version, without nationality, without any sense of responsibility or loyalty or conscience. Without any wish to be American unless it profits them and doesn't tax them. Here's an interesting 2007 article from investigative journalist Lucy Komisar about how Merck and other companies do their offshore shuffle.

First they came for the blue collar jobs, and I said nothing. Then they came for the white collar jobs... What mid-century cautionary tale am I reminded of here? This warning article was published six years ago by the Economic Policy Institute. Did we listen?

But (and are we surprised?) offshoring doesn't fulfill the promises it makes, as this 2007 article from CIO magazine demonstrates.

"Sixty percent of companies that send their operations offshore fail to meet their operation performance expectations, and more than a third (34 percent) fail to mee their savings expectations, according to a new study from global management consulting firm A. T. Kearney."

Occupy Wall Street Isn't About Real Estate

2011-11-20T11:04:00.000-08:00

From Reuters, a good summary of the cluelessness of "the haves and the have-mores" who've been catered to and hugely benefited over the past 30 years.

If you think this preferred treatment of the very rich is an illusion or an invention, it was expressed very succinctly and clearly, even arrogantly and jokingly, by George W. Bush when he ran for the presidency in 2000. He might almost have been addressing a frat dinner at Yale. The man oozes privilege. How did America not see this and worry about it? We were carefully instructed otherwise by a media owned and operated by the 1%. Journalists who tried to tell the truth were let go, muzzled, discouraged, suppressed, edited. More systematically they were not given microphones on 24 hour cable news.

Could there be a more cynical, cheerful acknowledgement of what's become of this country?

Nicholas Kristof says something important in today's New York Times: the Occupy movement isn't and needn't be about the real estate. It is and should be about the idea of vast inequality, vast power of the very few vs. powerlessness of the many.

Via MSNBC, a retired Phildelphia police captain worries that the brutal crackdowns in NY, Oakland, Seattle and elsewhere represent corporate America using the police as hired thugs. Hired violence is a chilling throwback to darker periods in our history. Watch the more documentary passages in The Grapes of Wrath and you'll see how police were co-opted by the powerful and the moneyed in a period of economic depression. We don't need to borrow examples from the Nazi era, we have our own.

These evictions also remind me of the violent treatment of the 1932 Bonus Army by Douglas MacArthur, with the encouragement of President Hoover, as explained in the Guardian newspaper.

I also can't help being reminded of the American Revolution. Valley Forge has been mentioned, as the occupiers faced a winter in the open, but the more important comparison is with the strategy Washington used then against overwhelming odds. He didn't confront, he avoided battles that would destroy his smaller force. He used evasive tactics. He and his army endured and eventually won. He won by enduring and keeping the message alive. 99% of Americans need to understand how much wealth and power has been taken from them by the 1% over the past 30 years. This is a fact that Wall Street is working very hard to obscure and disguise.

Here's a good summary of the victory of the 1% written by Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz.

Here's a very good summary of what the 1% have stolen from all of us, from the New York Review of Books. We should resurrect the term "Robber Barons" first employed by journalists like Mark Twain in the 19th century.

Vigorous regulation of Wall Street has come from both parties in the past. Today, we only see it from the Democrats. (Obama's attempts to get more thorough reform have been thwarted by a lockstep Republican minority in the Senate.) People forget the original opponent of Wall Street power was Theodore Roosevelt, a progressive Republican who would be drummed out of today's GOP.

Many progressives wonder why Obama hasn't waded fully into this Wall Street confrontation. Why hasn't he given a speech like FDR's famous "I welcome their hatred" speech calling out the plutocrats of great wealth? Well, these times are different. Washington is more narrowly divided, and the powers arrayed on the side of Wall Street are more considerable than they were in the 1930s. Here's a very useful discussion of these times vs. those times, by my friend Eric Black.

Prior to the New Deal most old people lived in poverty. FDR eliminated old age poverty, and in some ways helped create what we've come to call The Generation Gap. Much of that gap is a difference in world view between insecure young people and secure old people. The young of today fear they won't have the secure life their grandparents have enjoyed. And it appears their grandparents don't care or don't understand. Lori Sturdevant has a good piece about this in today's StarTribune. The blindness of older Americans to what is happening to their children's and grandchildren's future is downright alarming, and it makes it hard for the White House to be more confrontational. It's not about government debt at all; it's about the impoverishment of the vast majority of working Americans. A new Pew Center report examines this gradual but dramatic trend across age groups; it's summarized in The Atlantic.

The defenders of Big Money have no problem being confrontational. This recently discovered memo from a Wall Street lobbyist lays out their plan to discredit the Occupy movement. They have the lock on cable news and talk radio and the advertising apparatus to do this. A link to the actual memo is enclosed.

Here is a careful backgrounder on one of the counterprotests that's gotten a lot of play. Like the Tea Party movement, there is a bogus element. The Tea Party was funded by billionaires. The Occupy movement is genuine grass roots, with all its variety and occasional anger and shabbiness. It's real.

Dumb and Dumber-Republicans on Camera

2011-11-18T08:58:00.000-08:00

Heck, it's Friday. Here's a short collection of the stupidity of the Republican presidential field. Our allies and friends must really wonder about us.

Rick Perry's goofy speech in New Hampshire

Rick Perry's oops moment in the recent debate

Herman Cain's prolonged inability to answer foreign policy question in Milwaukee

Michele Bachmann's long list of gaffes and misstatements

How do choose one Sarah Palin gaffe from among so many? Here's the goofiest.

Here's some choice Gingrich. The man is funnier when he's wrong because he's so arrogant about it.

Romney, the robocandidate, always seems prepped and memorized. Or is it a microchip? He's still consistently and woefully out of touch with average Americans. Here's a recent instance reported in The Week.

Out of touch? Are we surprised? After all, Romney made his millions by leveraging and downsizing American companies and moving their jobs overseas, as this NYTimes story reported.

We've forgotten how inept a Republican president can be. I wonder sometimes if the ineptness is a blind, a way of diverting our attention so we don't see how hard and effectively Republicans work to degrade the middle class and cater to the very rich.

Bush had many excruciating moments. His father set a low bar when he vomited in the lap of the Japanese president, but Bush Junior had no trouble going lower. I remember his glassy eyed pauses best. I'm remembering one especially long pause in a 2004 debate. I'd describe it as a fugue state. He won re-election anyway, thanks to a few Diebold machines in Ohio.

These Bush gaffes are almost too numerous to catalog.

And another bit of pure Bush, on camera, on mike. Scary.

A carefully reported story about President Bush cheating during the 2004 debates was spiked by the New York Times. Why are Republicans shielded from serious reporting? Maybe the stupidity act makes the news media feel protective.

Financial Armageddon or Revenge of the Nerds?

2011-11-17T09:49:00.000-08:00

Whatever happened to all the evil scientists who used to be paid big money to plan the end of the world? The designers of nuclear destruction. The actuaries of armageddon who calculated how many people could be killed how quickly for how much money and how more could be killed with less damage to property, and then had dinner and watched TV and went to bed. Whatever happened to them when the cold war ended?

A lot of them turned their mathematical brilliance to devising clever methods (tricks, games) for private financial companies. Methods, it turned out, as diabolical and destructive as the weapons they devised for the military.

Here's a 2009 article from the New York Times.

This blog post from 2007 describes the new brains behind the hedge funds as a cheerful revenge of the nerds. It's all a fun, profitable game. No social sense required. What does that imply?

Calvin Trillin wrote a humorous piece a couple of years ago about how much safer our economy was in the hands of the dumber members of the WASP aristocracy who were either too lazy or too dim to cause much trouble. (I found the relevant passage in this essay on the New Republic's website.)

'“The financial system nearly collapsed,” [said Trillin's barroom friend], “because smart guys had started working on Wall Street.” '...

'I reflected on my own college class, of roughly the same era. The top student had been appointed a federal appeals court judge — earning, by Wall Street standards, tip money. A lot of the people with similarly impressive academic records became professors. I could picture the future titans of Wall Street dozing in the back rows of some gut course like Geology 101, popularly known as Rocks for Jocks. ...'

'“Two things happened. One is that the amount of money that could be made on Wall Street with hedge fund and private equity operations became just mind-blowing. At the same time, college was getting so expensive that people from reasonably prosperous families were graduating with huge debts. So even the smart guys went to Wall Street, maybe telling themselves that in a few years they’d have so much money they could then become professors or legal-services lawyers or whatever they’d wanted to be in the first place. That’s when you started reading stories about the percentage of the graduating class of Harvard College who planned to go into the financial industry or go to business school so they could then go into the financial industry. That’s when you started reading about these geniuses from M.I.T. and Caltech who instead of going to graduate school in physics went to Wall Street to calculate arbitrage odds.”'

Here's an article from a blog out of Columbia University about math and physics geniuses working at hedge funds.

Here's an article referenced in the above article, from ALPHA, a magazine for hedge fund whizzes. Imagine a magazine for hedge fund thinkers... "What the Well-Dressed Quant is Wearing" is about miniskirts, I think. (Sorry. An obscure reference to the inventor of the miniskirt.)

Whether you're a nuclear physicist or a hedge fund mathematician, the small dots on the map or the diagram aren't people with lives and families and houses and livelihoods and dreams about the future, they are only abstractions, they are little bits in your calculations.

I'm reminded of a famous soliloquy from the Third Man, spoken from the top of a ferris wheel:

"Victims? Don't be melodramatic. Look down there. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you 20,000 pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money? Or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man, free of income tax. The only way you can save money nowadays."

So what's a superior brainbox to do these days? Build bridges or cure diseases or sort out complex societal issues? No, it's much less stressful and more lucrative to go work at a secluded campus in leafy Connecticut and figure out ways to game the financial system. Here's a roadmap for your little genius who's considering where to go after high school. Courtesy of a prof at the University of Illinois. If your child is employed blowing up the global economy he might be able to keep his immediate family safe. You can hope. Or you can run a risk analysis of it.

The Just World Bias

2011-11-12T11:13:00.000-08:00

There's an excellent column in The Guardian by Oliver Burkeman. You probably know a lot of positive thinkers. Share this column with them.

There is a belief out there that people get what they deserve. That rape victims asked for it. That poor people deserve to be homeless and hungry. As Herman Cain says to cheering Republican crowds, "If you don't have a job, blame yourself!" The people with money and power like the "just world bias" because it justifies their good luck. It turns them from lucky people into nobility.

In today's StarTribune a column by former Strib business reporter Mike Meyers describes how the Republican Party shapes our tax system to help the rich and punish the poor.

If you go to one of those new, very large, very successful "Christian" churches, I suggest you raise your hand and ask about this. I'm sure your pastor has a ready answer. Maybe Jesus was wrong about the less fortunate. Or maybe He really preferred rich people.

The Long Con

2011-11-09T10:21:00.000-08:00

This excellent article in Rolling Stone sorts out the myth from the history giving a very good picture of what amounts to a Long Con. A fraud that's required decades of planning and patience on the part of the Republican Party, and patient investment by its rich friends. A bit like Madoff's ponzi scheme, except for the rich friends who are walking away with trillions, much of it in taxpayer dollars.

I miss Eisenhower. I wish a lot more Republicans missed Eisenhower too. By modern Republican standards Eisenhower was a Marxist and Reagan himself was a Socialist on the Swedish model. This economy we are experiencing is the economy the Republicans want. It's the one they planned for.

The Rule of Accumulated Advantage

2011-11-06T10:06:00.000-08:00

The Wall Street Journal, usually the megaphone of Wall Street's more devout worshippers, has a very readable cranky counter-argument today. It seems most of what you read about stocks and investments is tailored to please the large company offering them. This happened with the private rating agencies who tailored their assessments to their customers' demands, which is like an oncologist asking you whether you'd like him to see cancer on your x-ray or something nice. Financial analysts and journalists have been far too nice to Wall Street for years. This is how bubbles are made.

Love, money, admiration, credit ratings, applause, sexual favors, media coverage, protection, immunity, security, and (apparently) the blessings of God, Jesus and the Holy Ghost all increase as you move up the scale. The bigger and richer you are the more you get, the more help you get, the more sympathy you get, the more everything. (The Queen always gets the most presents, not only because everybody wants to please her but because, unlike other mortals, she has two birthdays every year.)

The rich today are handled with the gentle concern the vulnerable once could beg for. The poor and vulnerable are increasingly scorned. Is this because of the Prosperity Gospel? It's strange to think that Darwin and Herbert Spencer's bleakest thoughts are now the guiding principles of the followers of Jesus. (As Herman Cain says "If you aren't rich, blame yourself!") The most popular churches say that riches are a sure signal that God loves you more than other people. No wonder they're popular; they tell their biggest donors exactly what they want to hear. Churches kiss up, not down like they used to. We always knew the rich really inherit the earth, but now it's part of the gospel, preached from the pulpit and included in the holy decrees from the Wall Street Journal op-ed pages.

The Vatican's careful protection of its shepherds is nothing compared to the protection financial journalists and analysts give to the enormous banks. They praise bad investments and cover up dubious ones. They praise those who reward them for their praise. Is this their job? Is the priesthood meant to interpret and warn or is it there to uphold the almighty? It's a sad and dangerous fact that all favors and advantages accrue upward unless something corrects the system. Peer review applies the corrective rigor to the scientific community, where even consensus has its contrarians who insist on the alternate possibility.

Competition used to apply this rigor to free enterprise. Competition gave the entire system greater stability. Failures, a natural event, still happened but they were smaller. Now we have Too Big To Fail. Now failure and consequences are only dished out to regular people––whose only mistake was believing a corporation's annual report or the admiring words of a financial analyst who privately wanted the love of the CEO and the board. Increasingly, rewards are privatized upward while risks are socialized to everybody else, to ordinary people, less exalted people, to laid off employees and to us as taxpayers.

In a quarter when Goldman Sachs announced a half billion dollar loss it also announced ten billion dollars in bonuses to the executives who delivered that loss. How many billions did the US Treasury throw at Goldman during the recent crisis? Did Goldman absorb any losses from the havoc it helped create? What is wrong with this picture? We once had restrictions on this kind of thing; we demanded them and they served us well. Until we forgot why they were there, and began believing the Reaganite fairy tale about the self-regulating genius of Wall Street. About how our economy was magically protected by fairies and elves. The bigger they are the more regulation they need. It would give the rest of us more freedom and less to worry about.

Today's Must-Read-the art of the possible and the manipulation of history

2011-11-05T14:02:00.000-07:00

A great Ezra Klein analysis of the new Suskind book about the economic crisis and Obama's handling of it. Suskind does what opponents, critics and fantasists love doing: he simplifies complex situations, evades hard facts, ignores contradictory evidence, and assumes he would do better than the people he writes about. Economics is a dismal science, politics is an ugly business and democracy is a grueling enterprise, but all three are necessary. Fantasists do not perform well in these fields but they have no trouble writing about the practical people who do the work.

In effect, Suskind and many other Obama critics are impatient, impractical, unforgiving people, with short attention spans and short memories. Obama didn't have the luxury FDR had. FDR arrived when the worst had happened and was given a large majority to put things right. We could have done worse this time around. We may yet do better if we show, wisdom, patience, practical sense and unity.

Un-American Business

2011-11-04T08:21:00.000-07:00

All the productivity gains of the past thirty years have been paid upwards, but, hell, that's what productivity gains do or they cease to exist.

Because "increased productivity" is another way of saying workers are working longer/harder/faster for the same or less money. (Or have been replaced by machines.)

That Americans don't understand this shows how good their media are at lying to them, disinforming them, misinforming them, how good the propaganda is. When workers applaud productivity gains they are applauding the enrichment of someone else.

American business used to honor three loyalties: to the customer, to the employees, and finally, when the other two were satisfied, to shareholders, themselves. The first two loyalties have been degraded by a devotion to profit and only profit. Because profit boosts share value and share value boosts bonuses linked to share value. Profits have become God. Because obligations to customers and employees (in a societal sense the same thing) subtract from profit they have become the great enemies of American business.

Praise of the noble employee is lip service; the nobler he/she is the less he/she will work for. (You know how sacred such things as pension obligations are if you've read Ellen Schultz's book Retirement Heist.)

Today's treasured customer is thought of in predatory terms. "New and Improved" usually means they've put more air in the cereal or made the hardware flimsier or the software buggier. A key economic shift occurred when insurance companies ceased to think of themselves as insurers of people and began thinking of themselves as raisers of capital.

The problem is capital has nowhere to go if the customer hasn't got enough income to spend on goods and services. And the customer is the employee. In the past decade American business has shifted its focus from fulfilling needs and wants to exploiting vulnerabilities and shortages and fears. We live in a predatory economy. Next stop? Kleptocracy.

Corporatocracy

2011-11-03T10:12:00.000-07:00

There isn't a Doctor Evil plotting world domination in some remote bunker. No, it's done at Davos and Jackson Hole and the Bohemian Grove, whenever the rich and powerful get together over cocktails. They know each other, they do deals, they share interests and goals. They own us. Now there's science to prove it.

Do you think these very well organized corporations don't know how to rig wages worldwide?

Do you wonder if, maybe, they collude to profit from shortages and panics? If they profit from them, do you think they might be tempted to cause them?

Ever suspected that drug companies might actually conspire to cause shortages to keep drug prices high? How clever. (They're so carefully protected by the Republicans that Obama has had to use executive orders to fix the problem.)

Did you realize these very rich corporations also know how to avoid taxes? They're actually pretty good at it.

The word for this kind of dominance is "oligopoly". It's the opposite of a free market and very anti-democratic.

This is what the 99% are angry about. Too big to fail is too big altogether. It makes the world economy unstable and unworkable.

The 1% Is Fine, Thanks For Asking

2011-10-26T08:49:00.000-07:00

The New York Times headline reads "Top Earners Doubled Share of Nation’s Income, Study Finds". The story will spoil your lunch.

The Washington Post reports the same results under a different headline: "Nation’s wealthiest 1 percent triple their incomes, according to CBO report." The Times didn't want to upset the mandarin class too much. Double sounds less unfair than triple.

Either way the upper upper upper class is eating our lunch. And breakfast and dinner. Maybe the message is that once you are so very rich it doesn't matter whether your income tripled or doubled. Who can keep track? Poor them, with all that income to sort out. What a headache; let's give them some more tax breaks to help them deal with it.

Another thing that's making lives more unequal is that so much more of the government's "help" is dished out to people who don't need it but just heard it was available. Imagine if rich people demanded equal access to food stamps. Rich farmers and big farmers get more relief than poor and small farmers. Big companies get more help than the small businesses who stand in as the poster children of the Chamber of Commerce (which has been screwing them for decades.)

The financial rescue was supposed to help all of us, but notice who butted to the front of the line. The too-big-to-fail banks and financial companies and major corporations (many of whom, like GE, have bigger financial services sides than their old manufacturing sides) hogged it all. They are hoarding trillions, refusing to share it, pay it out, invest it or use it to hire people or order inventory.

They are using it instead to give enormous bonuses to their tip top people. Goldman Sachs reported a $393 million loss this past quarter, but that's a fraction of the $10 billion bonuses it will pay to its executives for delivering that loss. Go figure.

Never mind, it doesn't compute. Heads they win, tails they win. The 1% always win, the 99% always lose. At least since Reagan changed the rules.

Income Inequality is Killing Us

2011-10-25T10:11:00.000-07:00

This short TED lecture by Richard Wilkinson is worth watching and sharing. You might want to pause the video, as I did, to look more closely at the graphs. The TED lecture series is wonderful, a great place to learn from the best minds out there.

I like Professor Wilkinson's statement at one point, looking at a graph on upward mobility: "If you really want to live the American Dream I suggest you move to Denmark." I don't remember who he was quoting. Income inequality is killing us, but it's also making us miserable while we're alive. This is what is putting people into the streets.

Richard Wilkinson is an epidemiologist and professor at Nottingham University, and founder of the Equality Trust.

A Narrowing Sense of Loyalty

2011-10-24T09:05:00.000-07:00

David Carr has a pertinent column today. Maybe it explains why the news media has been dismissive of the Occupy Wall Street movement. It also raises, again, a key element in the current crisis. It's a matter of loyalty.

When a business ceases to be concerned with what it delivers to its customers and only interested in delivering cash to its owners, we have a problem. When this is the model everyone is copying our society is in trouble. When our news is crafted in a way that supports this model we have a hard time resisting it, but that is the picture we get from most of our reporting class––most uniformly on FoxNews and on radio. That, in the words of the recent Bush White House, is "our new reality."

Pay cuts for workers are seen as a revenue source by those further up the food chain. It's unattractive, antisocial, predatory, but it's described admiringly in the business press. American business used to have three key loyalties: to customers, employees and owners. (I've written about this before.) But there's been a dramatic shift in the past forty years; the first two have been degraded to feed the last loyalty. We are loyal to our companies but our companies have ceased to be loyal to us.

All obligations to employees and customers are set on the debit side and seen as negative to the only true value, profit, and profit feeds the bonus machine. So employees and customers are, in a very fundamental sense, seen as the enemy in many or possibly most executive suites and also by the economists and accountants who equip business plans with their rationale. Look at our present economy: 99% of Americans are in financial difficulties and afraid, but very eager to work for whatever they can get. This is a very pleasant picture for the lucky few.

Look at the Austerity model being pushed by Republicans today. Is it telling us that we never deserved the broad prosperity of the recent past? Was the postwar boom an illusion or an aberration or a problem that it took the executive class forty years to eliminate?

Does prosperity belong only at the top of the pyramid? We get to build that pyramid and admire it from a distance, but in the economy built by Reagan and Milton Friedman and Grover Norquist and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the pyramid is purely for the glorification and enjoyment of the small class whose names are engraved at the top. And this circles back to something I wrote in 2002 and posted to this blog's first entry in 2004. Who are we working for? What are we creating with our labor? What is this vast efficient machinery meant to do? Who is it meant to serve?

What Has Reaganomics Done For You?

2011-10-17T10:22:00.000-07:00

Today's must-read is from Mother Jones.

Look at the graphs and read the data and ask yourself: "What has Reaganomics done for me?"

Better still: "What has Reaganomics done TO me? To my neighbors? To my neighborhood? To my kids' schools? To our family budget?"

To all of us...

Our Bad Habit of Blaming Everyone

2011-10-16T09:47:00.000-07:00

This series of short pieces by James Fallows of the Atlantic (one of our most astute and fairest political analysts) graphically details the absurd gymnastics the press employs to keep up the make-believe, to avoid telling Americans that one side (the Republican side) is chiefly responsible for the dysfunction in Washington right now.

Article One.

Article Two.

Article Three. They are brief, readable, and more to the point than my commentary here.

Bad habits have bad consequences. When it's a bad habit of a large institution like our news media, the consequences are enormous. To avoid showing "preference," American journalism behaves like a bad parent, blaming both children for what they know full well has one culprit. A decent family therapist could tell you what the result is. It gives permission to the Republicans to do what they like and spit in the Democrats' face, which is what they've done. Why be moderate when extremism causes no negative comment and gives greater leverage?

Why be law abiding when crime isn't punished? Why be a public-minded corporation when a predatory business model pays better and has no negative consequence? Imagine a court system that avoided a verdict on anything, blaming victim and assailant alike. Americans have come to despise political correctness that protects minorities and vulnerable people from abuse, but there is another form of political correctness being exercised today: it protects the powerful and the rich and their political handymen in the Republican Party. It's corrupting our public conversation.

Here's a quiet little article in the Washington Post, which got no traction in the big echo chamber of 24 hour cable news. It isn't the Democrats who can't get things done. It's the Republicans, resorting to the filibuster at levels never seen before in Congress, not even in the bad old days when partisans had fistfights on the floor of the House.

The go to guy for guaranteed political deadlock is Republican leader Mitch McConnell. It's strangely apt that the one true master of making our government as slow as a turtle actually looks and sounds like one. Here's another very sharp analysis of McConnellism by James Fallows.

America is being told the opposite, though. Watch the news or read a newspaper and you get the idea that the failure is being set up by both parties equally or by the Democrats who really sincerely want Obama to fail. But the opposite is true.

The Republican Party has been engaged in a 30 year effort to make government fail. To make it less efficient (government is actually far more cost effective than private contractors the Republicans are constantly touting, especially in defense operations where the private contractors have enormously ballooned the cost of waging war.) The Republican goal is to make government NOT work. To make government smaller, weaker and dysfunctional. To privatize it, which means to hand it over to corporate ownership, just as elected Republicans are owned by corporations. Do we want government by corporation? Corporations are not run as democracies. They are run from the top down. What the Republican Party wants is the end of democratic government.

Norman Ornstein, a conservative Washington observer from the American Enterprise Institute, examines the dysfunction of government and lays it directly at the feet of Republicans in this article published in Foreign Policy magazine. Obama and his slim Democratic majorities achieved a lot in two years. But getting the system to work was agony.

Ornstein: "So what went wrong? Republicans, having been thrashed at all levels in 2008, did not respond to the voters' rebuke by cooperating with the majority or trying to find common ground. Instead, repeating a tactic employed with great political success by Republicans in 1993 and 1994 against a newly elected President Bill Clinton, they immediately united fiercely and unremittingly against all the Obama and Democratic congressional initiatives. In the Senate they used delay tactics -- the filibuster and the hold -- in an unprecedented fashion, to block a large number of Obama administration nominees for executive branch positions and draw out debate to clog the legislative process and make an already messy business even messier. The session's legislative accomplishments occurred because Democrats maintained enough discipline -- and had large enough margins -- to enact their bills with the support of Democrats alone."

But look at the photo. The mug shot of the problem has both Democrat and Republican leaders in it. Reid who did everything he could to reach compromises and pass bills and McConnell who vowed that his one priority over four years was to make Obama's presidency a failure. The headline, too, blames both for the stubborn obstructionism of one party, muting the criticism, smudging the report, hiding the conclusions, misleading the reader. The Republicans get off easy thanks to the editor and the picture editor. Is that their job––to give Republicans covering fire?

At some point anyone who tries to work in a system so rigged toward one side becomes a sap, a pigeon, a fool. The Republicans are delighted at how angry Democratic voters are at their elected representatives. The public doesn't know what is happening. By not reporting the bad faith of the Republican Party the press becomes an enabler, an accessory to the theft of our functioning democracy. Here's a very good New Republic piece by Jonathan Cohn discussing the smoothest practitioner of false equivalency around, David Brooks.

This is not a new issue. It's been happening ever since the news media was charmed into bed with Ronald Reagan. It's distorted America's understanding of key issues, leading us to alarming levels of stupidity on science and events and economics. Most Americans now think there were WMD in Iraq; there weren't. Most Americans believe scientists are split on climate change; they are almost unanimous that it is happening and human activity is the cause. Mostly this is because news editors remove any stress or conclusion from topics covered. "Is the earth round? No one really knows, and opinions differ." We complain about bad government policy, but this foolish policy of our news media is a major cause of that. Being lied to is worse than being uninformed.

From the Washington Post, on how the news media have blamed both parties, wrongly, for the debt impasse.

Good coverage on this topic from the Washington Monthly, at the time of the Arizona shooting, when the Republican gun-rights and violent-language crowd were very aggressive and dominated the news cycle. There was a tradition among rival mobs in Chicago in the 1920s to send enormous floral tributes to the families of mobsters they'd rubbed out. I am reminded of this wonderful tradition when I hear Republicans commenting on deplorable events like oil spills and mass shootings.

Here's a round up of very good commentary at the time of the Arizona shooting spree, with astute comments by a Gulf Coast blogger.

This column by Bob Cesca discusses how the news media carefully hides Republican hypocrisy, spreading it around, damning all politicians. Apparently to avoid embarrassing Republican officeholders. What other reason could there be?

Discover magazine attacks the Republican war on science––and the media's refusal to report it. Most Americans have the wrong understanding of key scientific issues of our day, mostly because the news media have avoided informing them in clear terms. And this avoidance isn't accidental. It happens because of intense pressure from powerful industrial and religious groups and their party of choice. Galileo would have a very hard time with today's Republicans.

This excellent piece by Neil Buchanan, law professor at George Washington University, dissects a pernicious outgrowth of the False Equivalency problem: the tendency of columnists (like Thomas Friedman of the New York Times) to declare a pox on both parties and call for a third party. A stupid idea in a non-parliamentary system that already is having a hard time compromising. Friedman wrongly suggests that the middle is vacant. Any Democrat could tell you their representatives have tried so hard to find middle ground, there's some real concern they've lost track of their original principles. Until the Republicans devoted themselves to destroying our system it used to work pretty well, through compromise, and most Americans ask for and expect compromise. But because of how politics is reported, compromise is punished and extremism is given a free pass. These days it is almost entirely extremism with a Republican face.

The 99% Are Being Heard

2011-10-14T09:46:00.000-07:00

Most of the mainstream media still don't "get" what the Wall Street protests are about. This CBC interviewer tries rubbishing the protesters in the usual way, and Pulitzer Prize reporter Chris Hedges politely explains where the interviewer is wrong and then calmly folds the man up and puts him back in his sanitary wrapper.

There must be a circulating rule book titled "How to Dismiss, Insult and Marginalize Anyone Who Opposes the Total Power of Hedge Fund Billionaires", which instructs network talking heads how to be rude to people outside the money elite. Most TV hosts are contemptuous of this movement, and contemptuous in the same way, using the same words, the same references to the 60s and hippies and drugs and guitars and bongos. There has to be an approved script. Maybe Frank Luntz provided it.

(You might not know this, but most TV talking heads live in small furnished apartments inside the pockets of the expensive suits you see billionaires wearing when they creep from marble office to forty foot limousine. So talking heads are always alert to the moods of their billionaire hosts. Sadly, they have a tin ear for the lives and concerns of the real people living on the other side of the TV screen.)

Good news. According to this story in Business Insider, the Occupy Wall Street movement, sometimes called "The 99%", are twice as popular as the "Tea Party" movement (which is paid for and fully owned by the Koch Brothers and other billionaires).

The movement is spreading and gaining allies. It has a way to go yet. Take a look at the popular protests that took place in Paris in 1968. They were huge. They involved everyone, every class, every walk of life. Their mistake was resorting to violence––if they hadn't they would likely have succeeded.

The trick of true influence is a mixture of assertiveness and patience. The 99% have a real message. They are us. They are teachers, electricians, firemen, students, nurses, engineers, small businesspeople, retirees, people from working and middle class neighborhoods.

The majority of Americans agree that concentrated wealth has harmed the economy, made it less stable, less sustainable. We aren't pushing for confiscation of capital, we are talking about putting capital to work the way we used to. Putting Americans to work, and paying for that work in a way that strengthens the entire economy not just the top 1%.

Call it liberal if you like. But wouldn't a true conservative want to restore and keep the institutions and rules that have worked well for us? The system that grew out of the New Deal worked very well between 1945 and 1980, the most prosperous period in American history. The Republican revolution dismantled that system, and we've seen what happened. Look who's prospered and who hasn't.

Trading with Our Enemies–Treason or Patriotism?

2011-10-13T13:41:00.000-07:00

From Bloomberg News: the Koch Brothers flouted U.S. law prohibiting trading with enemies of the U.S. They did business with Iran, who funded the recently convicted underwear bomber and other terrorists far more competent and dangerous. The person who uncovered the wrongdoing was a Koch employee whose job it was to check company compliance with laws and ethics. When she found non-compliance she was quickly transferred and subsequently fired.

Is this new? No. Unique? Not at all.

Trading with the enemy used to have the quaint label of "Treason", but no longer. When Dick Cheney was chief executive of Halliburton, his company traded with Iran too. They broke explicit U.S. laws in doing so. A grand jury was empaneled and a Senate Committee reported on the lawbreaking, but Mr. Cheney did not go to jail. Maybe because he'd become George W. Bush's Vice President.

Forbes magazine reported on Halliburton's ingenuity in evading laws. But Halliburton isn't the only company mentioned. Dell, Hewlett Packard and Microsoft are also tagged. Treason? Corporations are (thanks to the Republican majority in the Supreme Court) legally classified as "people" ––except when they commit treason. Then they aren't people and are immune from capital punishment.

A BBC report from 2002 shows Cheney was also linked to charges of stock manipulation and corporate fraud. Again nothing happened. He was Vice President.

A good summary of the corruption at Halliburton under the leadership of Dick Cheney and during his period as Vice President when he fed contracts to the company and continued to receive payments from the company can be found at Business Ethics magazine.

This way of doing business may be treasonous but it is commonplace and seldom punished. Halliburton has since moved its headquarters to Dubai as a way of evading American taxes, regulation and legal liability. It still earns its billions off the American taxpayer but it keeps its offices and profits safely offshore.

CBS Marketwatch published this in 2003, as America went to war:

"When individual Americans are accused of helping terrorists, they're thrown in jail and their names are dragged through the mud. But when major U.S. corporations are caught trading with the enemy, they get just a slap on the wrist from the government. In the past two weeks, the government has revealed that 57 companies and organizations have been fined for doing business with terrorists, despots and tyrants."

"However, neither the government nor the companies are forthcoming with the public about the details of the illicit trade with rogue governments like Iraq, Cuba, North Korea, Iran and Sudan."

Not done yet. This article from The Guardian outlines how the father of George H. W. Bush and grandfather of George W. Bush helped finance the Nazi war machine, funneling investment money to the companies that used slave labor to prepare Germany to invade Poland, France, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Belgium Norway, and rain bombs on London. His firm helped build the war machine that precipitated the global war that killed (by conservative estimates) 60 million people. This financing of the Nazis was legal until war broke out. The war declaration finally made it a crime and the capital investments were seized in 1942. He lost lots of money but Senator Bush didn't go to jail. Why was Prescott Bush less immune than Dick Cheney?

There's another kind of treason that doesn't involve aiding fascist dictators bent on destroying America. If it's homegrown is it more patriotic? Prescott Bush was also one of the Wall Street figures behind a 1934 plot to overthrow the Roosevelt presidency. Here is a recent BBC program about the plot which nearly turned America into a fascist state.

Today's Wall Street bigshots may be losing the ability to be traitors here at home. They've exported so many jobs and so much of our manufacturing muscle to China that America isn't really worth overthrowing anymore.

It will be interesting to see whether Immelt does anything to repair his anti-American record. This article in Foreign Policy Magazine asks the same question. He's now in charge of restoring the American jobs picture, hired by Obama much as Wall Street pirate Joseph Kennedy was hired by FDR to set up the SEC. Who knows the criminals better than these guys?

Getting back to massive criminal extortion, and back to the Koch Brothers–––the Koch Bros have now been implicated in the 2008 spike in gasoline prices––at a time when demand was slack and supply was sufficient prices still went to record highs. How much did these manipulations steal from Americans? And how much did this theft of household liquidity contribute to the near collapse of our economy in late 2008?

This is predatory behavior similar to the kind of market gaming that Enron traders laughingly executed against the utilities customers of California.

Listen to those tapes, reported years later when obtained by CBS News, and you get a sense of the cold-bloodedness of the traders involved, and the cold-bloodedness of the game Enron set up and exploited. Enron did its damnedest to bankrupt the largest state in the nation rather than let up when public finances imploded and citizens suffered rolling blackouts.

"They're f------g taking all the money back from you guys?" complains an Enron employee on the tapes. "All the money you guys stole from those poor grandmothers in California?"

"Yeah, grandma Millie, man"

"Yeah, now she wants her f------g money back for all the power you've charged right up, jammed right up her a------ for f------g $250 a megawatt hour."

Traders or traitors? Businessmen or criminals? It's hard to tell the difference. Sometimes, not often but sometimes, corporations are run by psychopaths. (I covered this in an earlier post.) When this happens, it happens because there's lax regulation, because there's a sense of impunity, because the government watchdogs have been defanged and defunded, and there's too much money available to be stolen. When this happens it's very hard for an ethical company to compete. And there are ethical companies. Most corporations are pretty good employers and good citizens. By cracking down on the bad actors wouldn't we be helping them? Maybe a few good corporations should join the protests on Wall Street.

Today's Must Read-The Panic of the Plutocrats

2011-10-10T08:00:00.000-07:00

Krugman won a Nobel Prize in Economics. So did Joseph Stiglitz. Why, instead, do Americans believe the stock speculator "experts" who dominate FoxNews and CNBC and CNN-Money? Krugman nails it again today. Now I know what the P stands for in GOP: Plutocrat.

What's alarming and disgusting is how much of our broadcast air is devoted to these Plutocrats, these puffed up aristos, many of whom have "earned" their fabulous lifestyles by speculating with mommy and daddy's money, playing with inherited wealth. America has changed in the past forty years from one that values and rewards work to one that worships and protects the few people with great wealth. Teddy Roosevelt called them "malefactors of great wealth". He was a Republican, but not today's kind of Republican.

The modern Republican Party caters to wealth. Working people don't have it. The financial system and the post-Reagan decline of the middle class has seen to that. The system has skewed so radically because of Reaganomics (the "trickle-down" fairy tale) to the point where owning is now more honored than working. Those who own stocks for a living pay a much lower tax rate than people who work. And anyone who doesn't like this is called a Marxist or a Hitler.

Nonsense.

The Wall Street protesters are protesting unfairness and the kind of Old World aristocracy America was created to get away from. (Think Louis XIV) We 99% are angry about the restoration of the Old World model––except for those still hypnotized by the Murdoch media. If the Tea Partiers would think about it, they belong to the 99% too. We have common cause.

The Demands of the 99%

2011-10-06T15:40:00.000-07:00

Last night Keith Olbermann read a very articulate and comprehensive list of demands issued by the Occupy Wall Street group. It might be better to characterize them as a list of charges demanding redress or correction. A list of grievances. Naomi Klein addressed the protesters; her important speech is published in The Nation. Krugman wrote this morning that this is a watershed moment. We must seize it.

These individuals, working people, students, people who used to work until they were outsourced or downsized, teachers, nurses, engineers, communications workers, ministers, janitors, firefighters, neighbors, friends, are not radical. They are in a very important sense true conservatives. They are for restoring the rules and the rights and the public institutions that functioned well during the best half century of American history, the years following the New Deal. These rules and rights were honored and preserved by FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Ford, Carter, even Nixon. But since the Reagan years these rights and rules have been systematically eroded or taken from citizens and given to corporations and corporations have been allowed to evade their obligations as members and leaders of our society. The corporation isn't a dangerous thing except when it works against the society and the people in it. Often corporations have been a strong progressive force in our lives, advancing civil rights, retirement security and other benefits, but without limits and reasonable regulation by the people and their democratic government corporations can be a dangerous thing.

The founders knew this. Contrary to what false conservatives say on television, the founders had concerns about the concentration of wealth. James Madison had this to say:

“[T]he day will come when our Republic will be an impossibility. It will be an impossibility because wealth will be concentrated in the hands of few. A Republic cannot stand upon bayonets, and when the day comes...we must rely upon the wisdom of the best elements in the country to readjust the laws of the nation to the changed conditions.”

The founders' beliefs and ideas resemble not only what is being expressed by the protesters on Wall Street but the ideas put forward by the president and the Democrats and shut down by the Republicans in Congress. Reasonable limits on corporate power is not a radical idea. Progressive taxation didn't make Eisenhower a communist. President Washington formed an army to go after tax evaders. Hamilton created the national debt not as a burden but to enable the American economy to grow and prosper. The Republicans in Congress and their wealthy and powerful allies on Wall Street need to be subject to reasonable restrictions and levels of taxation. It is the working and middle classes who need protection and help.

Jon Stewart on Pathetic Hypocritical Tone-Deaf Pinky-Out Tea-Drinking Elitism on FoxNews

2011-10-06T10:30:00.000-07:00

The best coverage of the Occupy Wall Street movement has been in the Guardian.

The best analysis of the pathetic hypocritical tone-deaf pinky-out tea-drinking elitism of the talking heads on Fox and other television media has been Jon Stewart's. In this broadcast he's absolutely ruthlessly honest and on target. He helps them damn themselves with their own words.

Please share these links with everyone you know.

Some More Slogans for Your Wall Street Placards

2011-10-05T09:16:00.000-07:00

DO AS YOU'RE TOLD
Vote Republican

MAKE YOUR BOSS HAPPY
Vote Republican

Make a few rich people
Very, very happy
Vote Republican

LOSERS WEEPERS
Vote Republican

Money Floats to the Top
Vote Republican

BORN ON THIRD BASE?
Vote Republican

One for you.
A million for me.
One for you.
A million for me.
(Vote Republican)

Herbert Hoover!
Rah! Rah! Rah!
Vote Republican

Capitalism has a Cruel Beauty
Vote Republican

PAVE YOUR OWN ROADS
Vote Republican

REAL AMERICANS BANK IN THE CARIBBEAN
Vote Republican

“We’re broke! We’ve had to sell one of our houses in Aspen! Please help!”
Vote Republican

FOLLOW THE MONEY
Vote Republican

STEAL BIG
Vote Republican

Every Man for Himself
Vote Republican

MARTHA STEWART DIED FOR YOUR SINS
VOTE REPUBLICAN

OBEDIENCE IS FUN
VOTE REPUBLICAN

Words for Your Wall Street Placards

2011-10-04T08:48:00.000-07:00

I wrote these as part of an unpublished ad campaign eight years ago. Some of them appeared on placards in the hands of a group called Billionaires for Bush, an elite troupe of mature lefties who showed up at Bush rallies in tiaras and furs, some of them in drag, screaming like teenagers at a Justin Bieber concert. Sad to say, the slogans are still relevant, still ironic. I'm not against capitalism, but it used to belong to all of us.

FREE THE RICH
Vote Republican

FOREIGN CHILDREN MAKE THE BEST SHOES
Vote Republican

JESUS PREFERRED RICH PEOPLE
Vote Republican

Get a cool job parking Bentleys
Vote Republican

Make believe you’re Rich
Vote Republican

Trick. Cheat. Win.
Vote Republican

HELP WANTED:
gardener,
chauffeur,
upstairs maid.
Vote Republican

EAT CAKE
Vote Republican

TAXES ARE FOR LITTLE PEOPLE
Vote Republican

We know best
Vote Republican

Wealthiness is next to Godliness
Vote Republican

Money belongs to the rich
Vote Republican

Your kids would rather inherit money than clean air
Vote Republican

WE OWN YOU
Vote Republican

Enron demonstrates the beauty of an unregulated marketplace
Vote Republican

Heads I win
Tails you lose
Vote Republican

"Goldman Sachs rules the world"

2011-10-03T08:09:00.000-07:00

Stock trader Alessio Rastani had a moment of remarkable candor on the BBC last week.

"For most traders we don't really care about having a fixed economy, having a fixed situation, our job is to make money from it. Personally, I've been dreaming of this moment for three years. I go to bed every night and I dream of another recession. When the market crashes... if you know what to do, if you have the right plan set up, you can make a lot of money from this."

"This is not a time right now for wishful thinking that governments are going to sort things out. The governments don't rule the world, Goldman Sachs rules the world," said Rastani.

He expressed an eager hope that the economy would crash in the next year because it was going to make him very rich. These are the people who will control events. Unless we restore some of the regulations removed by the last four presidents prior to Obama. One good idea would be to place a tiny transaction tax on share trading.

"...a tax of just 0.05 percent (one twentieth of one percent) levied on each stock, bond, derivative or currency transaction would be aimed at financial institutions’ casino-style trading, which helped precipitate the economic crisis. Because these markets are so vast, the tax could raise hundreds of billions of dollars a year globally for cash-strapped governments and could increase development aid."

It might also help limit the large financial speculators who buy thousands of shares for split seconds and then sell them, forcing the markets quickly up or down in massive computer driven gyrations. Those gyrations are making traders rich because they earn fees for every transaction. These traders profit from a panicked market. They profit from inadequate public information, from their own prior information or inside information, from asymmetries of information and from broad insecurities and public worries.

Barbara Ehrenreich has a very good piece in the Washington Post. How strange it is to live in a country where most people are hurting, worried and living at their limits but the rich are treated like a special protected class. It's worth reading and sharing.

"...consider Daphne Guinness, profiled at length in this past week’s New Yorker, who is apparently best known for wearing clothes, which she draws from a wardrobe of 2,500 garments, 450 pairs of shoes and 200 handbags. On the day she was interviewed, she wore a high-collared, presumably bespoke shirt by uber-designer Alexander McQueen, “a pave diamond brooch,” silver sheaths on two of her fingers and “custom-made sparkly silver Mary Janes, with a three inch platform under the toe” — not the heel, the toe. Well, to each her own, but she might as well walk around Manhattan wearing a sign saying “My husband stole your pension.”" The super rich are flaunting again because they've been rebranded by the Republicans as "Job Creators"––without creating any jobs. Their money isn't invested in factories or employees but luxury goods.

But anyone or any party that takes the side of the poor against the rich or the powerless many against the powerful few will find he has powerful enemies. Money puts people in office and guess where the money is. Meanwhile we have a large powerful political and media apparatus devoted to the aid and protection of the very rich: the Republican Party, Fox News, the Wall Street Journal and the entire Murdoch operation, and most of talk radio.

No Exit to Brooklyn

2011-10-02T15:38:00.000-07:00

There are conflicting stories about what happened on the Brooklyn Bridge yesterday. The Times reported an entrapment maneuver by the NYPD but twenty minutes later backed away from that story. The Guardian reports conflicting accounts of the same event (some saying the police led the protesters on, some saying the police did no such thing) but paints a clear picture of non-violent non-threatening protesters manhandled by police. One documentary filmmaker and photographer was there, and her version of events is unambiguous: the police created a situation and exploited it.

I'm reminded of the children's story: "Come into my parlor, said the Spider to the Fly." Did the New York police entrap the protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge? Was their retreat strategic? Did they have arrests in mind?

There is a justification for entrapment which argues that the crime is obviously a crime. But didn't the police have bullhorns? Why didn't they announce, loudly and clearly, "If you walk onto this thoroughfare you will be arrested." Did they? Why didn't they?

Plain, unelaborated reportage can suggest all kinds of things, can be interpreted to the preference of a diversity of readers. But blunt questions can and should illuminate the reporting by laying out the obvious things that were not said, that were not done, that were enabled, that were suggested falsely.

A policeman who says "After you" could be inviting you onto a prohibited roadway or inviting you to buy illegal drugs; but law abiding citizens might believe the police are giving permission, might believe they are offering a temporary license to do something, or an escape from a place that has suddenly become too small for the crowd that has assembled.

The police have a responsibility to the crowds they are policing that is greater than their responsibility to the absent and powerful groups the assembled are there to protest. The New York Police Department is there to protect and defend New Yorkers, all New Yorkers, not just the owners of New York but the renters, the hired workers, the unemployed New Yorkers, the students going to school there, the recent graduates who live there, the powerless as much or more than the powerful. The powerful have their own protections.

The Familiar Anti Christ Rumors

2011-09-29T10:38:00.000-07:00

When logic and good sense fail you can always call up the bogeyman. The Republican Party has been working this theme ever since Obama began his run for president. It's one of their dog whistles.

There have been posters of Obama with a Hitler moustache. Obama, the first black president, is "the Other", "Not like us", "Obama isn't an American", "Obama isn't a Christian." (He's both Christian and American born, and having risen from working class roots he's more like us than the patricians running for the Republican nomination, but truth is as irrelevant as logic and good sense.)

Last week someone in the audience shouted that Obama is The Anti-Christ. Which raises the End Times rumors, another useful dog whistle. When Republicans don't want to deal with real problems––joblessness, climate change, financial insecurity, extreme wealth disparity––they call up scapegoats. They blame immigrants, Muslims, African Americans, socialists, communists, Christians of other denominations, unions, children, old people. Satan. The bogeyman. They call the president of another race and political party The AntiChrist (as reported in this NYTimes piece.) They can't handle the present time, so they bring up the End Times.

Is this craziness catching? Is it religion or science fiction? L. Ron Hubbard advised other science fiction writers decades ago that the best way to get rich was to found a religion (as reported in this Wall Street Journal article from 1997) and there have been a lot of strange new "Christian" sects and factions in the past few decades. Many emerged as a way to make money, and fell when the money disappeared, often with the religious leader. But the ride will last as long as the money lasts. (This LATimes article from 1987 will recall the charlatans of that time, Swaggart, Bakker, Robertson and Roberts. Oral Roberts tried to extort $8 million from his followers, saying God would kill him if the money wasn't given to his ministry.)

One of the loopier religious loops out there is the Prosperity Gospel, which preaches worldly riches. (This article from BeliefNet discusses the flaws in this fringe of Christianity.) It appeals mostly to people worried about their security in a time of financial crisis. "If God loves you He will make you rich." The pastor might as well say "rich like me" because the pastors pushing the prosperity gospel are always very prosperous themselves. Big cars, expensive suits, private jets, fancy homes unlike the spartan parsonages most conventional churches provide. These pastors are living proof of their gospel and look prosperous indeed, prosperous out of the pockets of the flock. Michele Bachmann's biggest religious backer, Mac Hammond, has had his own run-in with the IRS which only makes him more beloved by his mesmerized parishioners. Imagined persecution is good for money-raising.

But why preach earthly prosperity when the world is going to hell around you? Why is God making you rich if He's about to take it all away? This is what thinking rational people, even Christians, call a contradiction.

Because the prosperity gospel's flip side is always Armageddon. These demagogues have a private line to the holy truth, a bit like stock touts have an inside line on the next winner. If you've ever heard Michele Bachmann's cooing, bedroom voiced prayer about the End Times, you have to wonder what planet her secret messages are coming from. "God loves the poor––Send me money." It is always tied to a demand for money, for her campaign or the very special pastor who prays for it on radio and TV. Those pantsuits and hairstyles her husband art directs are not cheap.

Why do we take any of these people seriously? Money from heaven in one breath and the rain of fire in the next. I suppose it's good television just as creepy movies about demon possession and secret messages in Da Vinci paintings are good television. Whipping up end times fears gets people talking, and fear gets them into the fold. The prospect of these GOP choices puts the fear of God into me.

If he wasn't being sarcastic in the Gospels, Jesus favored the poor and condemned the rich; so why do these "fundamentalist" "Christians" turn the Gospels on their head?

And again, why if "the end-times are near" are these so-called "Prosperity Christians" piling up money they can't take with them? All the GOP candidates cater to the notion that "Jesus Preferred Rich People", either outright or in code. Creating a false picture of Jesus may be the worst kind of blasphemy.

Actually, to give Bachmann proper credit, many leading Republicans worship a goddess rather than a God, and her name is Ayn Rand. You want values? Hers are definitely HOT. It's all about getting what you want, whatever cost to the people around you. If you want the Anti Christ it won't be a centrist liberal like Obama, it'll be someone toting a copy of Atlas Shrugged, with a cross and a flag on his or her lapel.

Violent Suppression of Peaceful Wall Street Protesters

2011-09-28T08:55:00.000-07:00

Lawrence ODonnell gives a rightly angry eight minutes to analyzing the brutality police are meting out to protesters in the Wall Street Occupation movement. He does a judicious and intelligent job of it.

International Business Times posted this short video. Captured from the street, it illustrates the smug amusement of the haves for the hapless on the street below. Drinking champagne and laughing, as if they know the police are working for them.

From the Nation, a welcome rebuke to the New York Times' embarrasingly biased article. The Times sent a columnist instead of a reporter and she casually cherry picked a few odd protesters, using them to discredit the whole movement and its grievances. I've not seen a balancing story from the Times. The Guardian has, so far, done the best job of covering the protests. Here's a good piece in the Guardian by Amy Goodman.

The Un-Christian Super-Religious Republican Party

2011-09-27T09:41:00.000-07:00

Today there's an excellent Washington Post article by Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, professor at Chicago Theological Seminary, who explains how un-Christian the Republican Party's economic policies really are. Worth reading and worth sharing.

This well-argued opinion piece from the Rev. Jennifer Butler, Executive Director of Faith in Public Life, says the same thing, calling the Republican efforts in Congress downright immoral.

Luckily, even though there are millions of dollars and hundreds of radio and television platforms pushing it, Americans aren't buying this strange Anti-Christian brand of Christian Capitalism. This poll from the Public Religion Research Institute in partnership with Religion News Service found that more Americans think capitalism is at odds with Christian values.

Actually, when you sit down and read the New Testament, read it with your heart not your bank book, Jesus does sound like a Socialist, if not a downright Marxist. This liberal Jesus doesn't jibe with the Romney/Bachmann/Perry/ Cain/Santorum/Paul/Christie/Boehner wing of the Republican Party (all of the Republican Party these days) who think Jesus was sent by our Heavenly Father to make us very wealthy and provide us with an affordable servant class. The Republican Big Idea is that the poor should learn how to obey their masters.

This article from Religion Dispatches speaks to this harsh anti-worker, anti-union thread. Republican strategists have been aggressively pushing in that direction, using carefully lifted Bible verses. Verses that spoke to the lives of slaves in Biblical times are being used to justify slavery today, sometimes saying, as Bachmann has, that slaves had it better than today's unemployed. Suggesting that slavery would be a good solution to today's problems. That Jesus was, by some bizarre misinterpretation, a hard capitalist, an anti-liberal, pro-slavery, anti-tax anti-public school right winger. Fruitcake theology.

Was Jesus a socialist or was he a banker? When you read him do you think his heaven on earth would look like Scandinavia or would it look like pre-Mandela South Africa? This post on the Real Economics blog sorts the different threads of Christian economics.

Jesus Was a Socialist:

"The Protestant Reformation may have started in Martin Luther's Germany, but the reformist impulse would not stop there. Luther had one especially radical notion—that everyone could through the tools of literacy and study come to an understanding of his or her relationship to God. With this idea, the authoritarian relationship of the church was shattered. The Protestant Reformation shattered Christianity into thousands of sects large and small. Yet out of this cacophony would emerge dominant themes.

"In political terms, the center would be occupied by Luther and his followers. On one hand, his teachings about the worth of the lowliest among us would inspire the Peasant's Revolt of 1524-25. On the other, he would encourage the secular authorities to brutally suppress the uprising. Lutherans would run the governments of the Nordic countries for hundreds of years and were a part of feudalism, yet there were plenty good Lutherans in those countries who could find reasons to explain why Jesus and Luther would have loved cooperatives and become Social Democrats. Lutherans have more or less put themselves out of business as a religion but their cultural heritage still makes it true that if a social welfare system works anywhere, there's a good chance it is happening where Lutherans once roamed the earth.

"The Reformation's left would be occupied by the followers of Menno Simon—the Swiss Anabaptist. Now it may be pretty hard to imagine the very culturally conservative Mennonites and Amish as lefties but consider this—Christianity had managed to keep silent or encourage the practices of human slavery for over 15 centuries before Simon and friends wrote principled objections to it in 1534. They are SERIOUS about staying out of wars and have been since their founding. Their economic beliefs encourage sharing and community, and because they are so honest, a lot of the expensive apparatus of contracts is avoided. Not surprisingly, they are usually very prosperous. You can think of them as hippies—only with skills and excellent work habits."

Or Jesus Was a Pure Market Capitalist:

"And then we come to the right. John Calvin was Frenchman living in Geneva who would literally set Christianity on its head. For example, usury had been considered the mortal sin for over 1000 years. Now Calvin would teach that Jesus did not mind moneychangers so much—he just didn't want them setting up shop in the temples. For most of history, Christians were the poor, the folks with the shit jobs, the slaves. Now Calvin would teach that God made people rich to show that he loved them.

"Calvinism would migrate to USA in many forms but the dominant one was through the Puritans who came to Massachusetts. These folks would organize our most prestigious schools like Harvard and Yale. When people talk about WASPs, they are talking about worship-the-rich Calvinists. But the Calvinists are not limited to the snooty set. Oh no, no, no. Find some mouth-breather that denies evolution or climate change and thinks Jesus rode a dinosaur to church and in USA, the chances are about 99% you are talking to a Calvinist. Calvinism so defines the American culture that one is not wrong to think that when someone calls themselves a Christian and is not Catholic, that person is an off-shoot of the Calvinist impulse."

Do we believe the Martin Luther King Jesus or the Milton Friedman Jesus? The Jesus of "feed the poor, help the afflicted" or "money grows on trees"? Michele Bachmann and Mitt Romney believe Jesus was an MBA, that being rich is the most crucial part of Christianity. The richer you are the more Christian you are. Whose Bible did that come out of? The Gospel of Riches version of Christianity is the church of Swiss Bankers and Wall Street.

American voters need to know the difference. We need to be worried about what the hard Right Wing has in mind. The bankers' side is all Republican. Wall Street's Jesus is Republican. The former slave states are all Republican. What does that tell you? Jesus wasn't necessarily anti-capitalist, but he preached a softening of capitalism's hard edge. That is Liberalism. Jesus was a Liberal. He was on the side of the little guy, of the masses, the owner of the hardware store down the street, the small farmer, the public school teacher with forty kids in her class, the two-earner family whose earners are unemployed and have a mortgage to pay.

Ugly Suppression of Peaceful Wall Street Protesters

2011-09-26T15:55:00.000-07:00

I got this YouTube link from a friend in NY.

Penning the protesters up with orange mesh and then macing them.

Watch it in slow motion.

Pretty awful. Pretty damning.

Why did the MSM cover protests in Cairo and Tripoli but refuse to cover them here?

Five tea party fruitcakes show up in colonial garb carrying a poster showing Obama with a Hitler moustache and it ends up on the national news. They get to trot out their oddball ignorance for the networks.

But thousands of college educated citizens show up to protest Wall Street greed and nobody hears about it.

There is good coverage from the great British newspaper, The Guardian. Wish we had the Guardian here.

Raw Story is now reporting spreading protests across the country. This has the feel of genuine protest, not the astroturf dummied-up phonies of the Tea Party, but real people really mad about real things.

Farm Politics

2011-09-26T13:38:00.000-07:00

A good story from NPR. (Does NPR do any other kind?)

This quote seems to catch the gist of it: "According to the Environmental Working Group's crunch of USDA numbers, between 1995 and 2010, 10 percent of farmers who received subsidies took home three-quarters of farm subsidy dollars. About 62 percent of American farmers don't receive any subsidies at all, according to 2007 data."

When FDR created the idea of farm subsidies it was to keep poor farmers on their farms during years of low commodity prices, and to help stabilize the prices of those commodities. It worked. Since then, though, farms have consolidated into immense businesses. Agri-business owns farmland. Farming has gone corporate, and the corporate side of farming is taking most of the subsidies. To borrow a farm analogy, the larger pigs have a way of shouldering the smaller ones away from the trough. Wrong? Maybe not, but we should know what is going on. There are good reasons for having small farms, family farms, just as there are good reasons for having small towns. But is modern farm legislation helping either?

Invisible Protesters Occupy Wall Street

2011-09-25T10:19:00.000-07:00

Keith Olberman featured this invisible phenomenon the other night, and then again with Michael Moore the next night.

Nobody is covering the protests on Wall Street that have been going on for a week.

Meanwhile five people show up in colonial costumes with signs saying Obama is a Nazi and it's on all four network news programs and the front page of every newspaper.

Is it because most American side with Wall Street?

Or does Wall Street own the public conversation?

Google Chairman Favors Federal Stimulus Spending

2011-09-24T08:27:00.000-07:00

Good interview via Mother Jones. A corporate leader who seems to understand how a consumer economy actually needs consumers.

Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman, GOOGLE: "The economy is today stuck behind the power curve. It needs a lot of encouragement. It needs not just something like the jobs bill, but also significant government stimulation in terms of buying power and investment. Otherwise we're set up for years of extraordinarily low growth in the economy and no real solution to the jobless problem."

Christiane Amanpour: But you say significant stimulus. Obviously this is a political environment where the only real conversation is about cutting. Do you see any expectation or possibility of a climate for more stimulus?]

Schmidt: "Well that's a political question. But the current strategy is ludicrous. You have a situtation where the private sector sees essentially no growth in demand. The classic solution is to have the government step in, and with short-term initiatives help stimulate that demand. If they do it right, they'll invest in income and growth producing things, like highways and bridges and schools."

In other words, the radical budget cutting being forced by the Republicans is exactly the wrong thing. The Obama jobs bill is the right thing, if he can get it passed.

This corporate leader understands what most Americans don't: our economy won't recover without another strong jolt of stimulus. Corporations won't spend their money (in some cases OUR money, which they got in rescue packages) unless consumers show the confidence to spend, and consumers won't have that confidence if they don't have money in their pockets and if they're worried their employer is about to lay them off or cut their pay, which is what employers do when they're uncertain.

The consumer/employer/manufacturer cycle is a whirlpool right now, leading us down. Only federal stimulus will do the trick, like it did in 2009 when the entire world economy was on the brink. Then it did work. It will work again if Congress will let it work.

The problem we have is REPUBLICANS DON'T WANT A GOOD ECONOMY. They want Obama to fail, and in order for him to fail we as a nation must fail. Then Republicans can take over again. Do we remember what got us here? The dangerous finances of Bush and his Republican enablers.

Fundamentalist "Christians" and Israel

2011-09-23T09:53:00.000-07:00

I'm surprised no one makes this comparison.

The fundamentalist "Christians" on TV and Colorado Springs and other enclaves across America "love" Israel the way prospective heirs used to "love" the dying rich relative in nineteenth century novels.

They love Israel because they know Jesus will come when an independent Israel is consumed in fire and bloodshed according to the book of Revelations, or according to some interpretations of the book of Revelations. They don't care so much about Israel qua Israelis but Israel as a stepping stone to ancient prophecy. These "Christians" are less interested in preserving our world as they are in ending it in a specific way, and soon.

Just some thoughts I had reading Michael Tracy's Mother Jones piece this morning. I wish more political commentators would make this comparison.

Class Warfare or The Social Contract

2011-09-23T09:08:00.000-07:00

Today's must read is Paul Krugman's column. Here's an excerpt:

"Republicans claim to be deeply worried by budget deficits. Indeed, Mr. Ryan has called the deficit an “existential threat” to America. Yet they are insisting that the wealthy — who presumably have as much of a stake as everyone else in the nation’s future — should not be called upon to play any role in warding off that existential threat. Well, that amounts to a demand that a small number of very lucky people be exempted from the social contract that applies to everyone else. And that, in case you’re wondering, is what real class warfare looks like."

The cry of Class Warfare has worked well for Republicans for many years. It's worked even better for their clients. Especially the very rich, who own for a living instead of working, whose incomes have been multiplied by five while working people's incomes have been flat or declined. Working people's incomes have measurably declined against rising costs of healthcare, housing, tuition and food. But the rich are fine. The rich are protected by a whole political party.

Taxes on income from stock sales and money manipulation, which is how the rich "earn" their money, have declined. Millions made by buying and selling shares in fractions of a second as they rise and fall are taxed at a rate that's roughly half of what working people pay for their eight, ten, twelve hour days. Fair? Fair doesn't enter into it. The preferable tax rates for financial manipulation are the Republican sacred cow, the Republican golden calf. Voting against them is therefore "class warfare".

The Social Contract is a phrase the Republicans don't use very much. It raises the notion of obligation. Rich people get rich by mastering the art of accounting and accounting dislikes obligations. Obligation is a cost that subtracts from profit. Obligations avoided make the shareholder richer and the executive stock options fatter. So the idea of obligations to others in society is foreign to them. People who live outside their balance sheets don't exist, and people who weigh on their balance sheets are a problem to be avoided.

This is the sad result of forty years of "BusinessThink" in our politics. Owners––stockholders––are valued over workers because of how profits are accounted. There should always be three loyalties in business, but American BusinessThink has abandoned two of them: the customers and the employees. The rest of society was jettisoned long ago.

We need to be reminded what The Social Contract is. It's what our nation was founded on. Adam Smith, the architect of capitalism, wrote about it, but the users of his architecture have managed to forget the most important parts of what he wrote, the parts they find it convenient to forget, just as they forget the inconvenient parts of the Bible and the Constitution. Remind yourself by reading Krugman's column today.

Rick Perry Wants More Poor People Working Harder For Less Money and Paying More Taxes

2011-09-22T09:16:00.000-07:00

A good article from the Guardian last week points up the flaws in Rick Perry's Texas jobs picture.

Let me see if I understand this: Rick Perry wants more people to be poor, and wants more poor people working harder and longer for less, and wants more poor people paying more taxes so rich people can pay less than they already do which is less than poor people pay.

Nod if you agree.

I get this information from Forbes, by the way. And CNN Money. And the New York Times.

More middle class Americans have become poor in the past ten years, so Bush already accomplished what Perry said he wants to do. And Bush already guaran-darn-teed that very very rich people paid lower income taxes than bus drivers and office managers, making it better to own for a living than work for a living. And all the other Republican candidates agree on this. So what's the fuss about? Why are networks covering this? Instead of covering thousands of protesters on Wall Street...

So, the real Texas story? More jobs but not enough to keep up with the population growth. More jobs but lower paying jobs, more new government funded jobs than private sector ones, and worse conditions in many important categories. In effect, Perry has done to Texas what George W. Bush did to the U.S. Do we need it done all over again?

From INC. Magazine: High Tax Norway is an Entrepreneur's Paradise

2011-09-20T09:20:00.000-07:00

Today's must read. Share this INC. magazine article with a small business person you know.

"Only two countries in the OECD—Chile and Mexico—pay a lower percentage of their gross domestic product in taxes than we Americans do.

"But there is precious little evidence to suggest that our low taxes have done much for entrepreneurs—or even for the economy as a whole. "It's actually quite hard to say how tax policy affects the economy," says Joel Slemrod, a University of Michigan professor who served on the Council of Economic Advisers under Ronald Reagan. Slemrod says there is no statistical evidence to prove that low taxes result in economic prosperity. Some of the most prosperous countries—for instance, Denmark, Sweden, Belgium, and, yes, Norway—also have some of the highest taxes. Norway, which in 2009 had the world's highest per-capita income, avoided the brunt of the financial crisis: From 2006 to 2009, its economy grew nearly 3 percent. The American economy grew less than one-tenth of a percent during the same period. Meanwhile, countries with some of the lowest taxes in Europe, like Ireland, Iceland, and Estonia, have suffered profoundly. The first two nearly went bankrupt; Estonia, the darling of antitax groups like the Cato Institute, currently has an unemployment rate of 16 percent. Its economy shrank 14 percent in 2009."

Why did these "high tax" countries weather the recession better? Because their citizens didn't have the bottom drop out of their world. They didn't panic about their retirement accounts because they have a government that insures that. Safety nets are there to guard against the uncertainty problem. The Right in this country thinks the only ones entitled to safety nets are large corporations. That's what's holding us back.

INC. is the international magazine of entrepreneurship. It's the small business bible. It isn't aimed at or written by Wall Street or corporate types. And this article makes perfect sense. America isn't falling behind because of high taxes. We'd be much better off, less worried, more stable, more secure if our tax rate was higher and fairer. If the government took care of the things individuals and companies shouldn't have to worry about. Consumers would be freer to spend. Entrepreneurs would be freer to innovate. Think how productive we could be. Look at how entrepreneurs thrive in Norway. All they have to focus on is what they do best.

A fairer system with Eisenhower era tax rates could remove the healthcare burden from small business and from everyone. That is a major source of uncertainty today. Imagine not having to worry about it. Imagine being able to concentrate on what you do best. (I'm a small businessman, have been for 35 years. I know I would like this.)

How American Corporations Plundered Employee Pensions

2011-09-18T23:26:00.000-07:00

Wall Street Journal reporter Ellen E. Schultz discusses her new book RETIREMENT HEIST in this interview with Salon.com. How did many major American corporations plunder their employees' retirement funds? It wasn't complicated. It was surprisingly easy for them to do. First they hired expert help. Legal and accounting experts. Then they went to work. Read and share this interview. RETIREMENT HEIST is an important book.

"Think of pensions as a debt. If a company can reverse a debt, it can record it as income. And that income is the same as if they got it from selling trucks or whatever it is the company sells. There were billions in promises to retirees for pensions and healthcare and death benefits and life insurance, and the companies figured out that if they cut or eliminated them altogether then they could get those billions in profit -- and even use them for executive compensation."

But what are promises? What are obligations? Why do large profitable companies steal pension funds? Because they can, and their executives instruct them to do so. They are rewarded for doing so.

Remember, a corporation is properly called a "limited liability corporation". In a legal sense, in a purely capitalistic sense, they are formed and operated to avoid obligations, to evade responsibilities, to figure out ways of delivering as little as possible for as much money as possible. "Innovation" often involves devising ways to give poorer, cheaper, delayed and/or non- service for as much as they can charge. Companies that do this are admired for "outcompeting" their competitors, and their shareholders are the envy of the shareholders whose companies have more scruples.

Not all corporations behave this way, but without regulations to keep the game fair the ones that do cheat have a competitive advantage.

This is happening more and more because consulting companies and corporate leadership pow-wows and business schools have taught business leaders to ignore two of the three loyalties corporations have, the loyalty to the customer and to the employee, and to put all effort and dedication to pleasing the third group––the owners and shareholders. Corporate executives usually belong to this group. When possible the loyalty is confined to the executives themselves, leaving shareholders holding the bag.

High and Low

2011-09-15T08:55:00.000-07:00

Why is our economy so miserable right now? Americans work harder, longer, for less money. Where have the fruits of increased productivity gone? Look up.

As this article in the Guardian reports, CEOs are getting paid big money. It's even bigger when they fire more people (and pay less––or nothing––in taxes.)

Which may explain what's happening to the people in the middle. Middle class workers are becoming extinct. How do we know? Corporate planners are no longer planning for the middle class consumer. New products are aimed at the rich and the poor. High and low. The Guardian has noted this trend, as has the Wall Street Journal.

The middle class is a shrinking market, and it's shrinking because of policies pushed by business and their political allies. For the past twenty years companies have been offshoring jobs––helped by "conservatives" in Washington. For thirty years they've been killing unions. Corporations with cash are buying out competitors and firing their workforce. It's a downward spiral. What's strange is the way millions of American workers are collaborating with their own degradation. And how is it good for business for consumers to have less money to spend?

We are becoming Mexico, Columbia, Nigeria. We are becoming a "Banana Republic", thanks mostly to Banana Republicans. And it isn't the store. It's much less pleasant.

Look at Rick Perry's Texas. The job growth he's touting has a worrisome pattern. The Guardian has a story today on the nature of those new jobs. They pay poverty wages.

The other jobs Rick Perry "created" in Texas, the ones paying a decent livable wage, are government jobs, the kind of jobs Republicans normally hate.

Corporations Are Hoarding Trillions

2011-09-14T15:22:00.000-07:00

We've been hearing it from a number of reliable sources. Trillions of dollars are being withheld from the economy. Which is why the economy is flat. ABC News reports this. USAToday. The Salt Lake Tribune. Consumers don't have money to spend. Government revenues are down. So where are these phantom trillions?

Corporations have it.

The same corporations who are demanding more tax cuts. Presumably to sock away with the trillions they're holding now.

Why aren't they spending it? Because they're afraid. (The polite word is "cautious".) Afraid to invest in product or equipment or hiring because consumers aren't buying. And consumers aren't buying because they're either unemployed or afraid of being unemployed. Also because their pay hasn't risen much in recent decades, which is the sort of thing that adds to the trillions corporations have in their private stash. It's a circular problem, one bad habit leading to another. We underpay American workers and they cease to be good consumers, and they pay fewer taxes, which causes our infrastructure and schools to deteriorate, which hurts our business economy down the road. The only beneficiaries of this dynamic are the companies who are paying themselves too much and investing too little, but that benefit won't last forever.

In the 1930s the behavior was called HOARDING. It was considered foolish, antisocial and unpatriotic, and rightly so. Money hidden in the mattress does nobody any good. Scrooge was a hoarder. Picture America's biggest corporations as so many Scrooges.

The Economist magazine has a good discussion of the foolishness of corporate hoarding. The problem is contained in this pull quote:

"If cautious firms pile up more savings, the prospects for recovery are poor. Economies will be stuck in the current—and odd—configuration where corporate surpluses fund government deficits. If firms loosen their purse-strings to hire workers and to invest, that will allow governments to scale back their borrowing."

The Economist is a highly respected financial journal, not a liberal talking shop.

The Republican talking points deny the main problem. They recommend fixing the recessionary cycle by feeding more money to the companies already refusing to spend the trillions they have.

From Republican presidential candidate and former pizza CEO Herman Cain comes this arrogant, self-righteous screed, explaining why corporations aren't using their trillions to add jobs.

"It's their money. It's their money. It's their money."

If that isn't clear enough Cain says they can burn their trillions at their corporate picnic if they'd like, but why should they hire anyone? Businesses are in the business of making money, he says, not of employing people. Why would they want to employ people when there's low demand for goods?

Why is there low demand for goods? Because corporations aren't employing people.

Why would any sane person recommend giving the holders of these idle trillions more tax cuts? They aren't doing anything with the cash they already have. We might give them tax cuts proportionate to the new hires they make. Employed people pay taxes and buy goods. That's part of the Obama Jobs Bill.

The point is, these trillions are only "their money" because the taxpayer rescued their sorry hides after they drove the economy to the brink of collapse. They've responded by taking that rescue money and keeping it. They've accepted that taxpayer help and helped themselves. They've used that taxpayer cash to buy competitors and lay off workers, to export factory jobs and white collar jobs to China and elsewhere where workers come cheap.

Republicans cite "uncertainty" but this top market analyst says that's plain foolish.

"I don't buy it simply because there's always uncertainty. You never know what an employee will cost two years from now. You never know what regulations await in the future. You never know what tax rates will be five years from now. Uncertainty isn't black and white. All that exists is the perception of uncertainty, and that perception usually isn't drawn up by a careful analysis of the future. It's typically an extrapolation of the recent past -- often a terrible mistake." (In other words corporations are scared and greedy.)

Here's an interesting article about where these cash rich corporations stash their billions. Written in 2008 when the economy was teetering.

Business Insider offers a financial parable, pitting the hoarder's prospects against those of the productive business owner. The hoarder doesn't come out well.

And for an alpha and omega view of hoarding, there's this essay from a religious blogger. Hoarding money is un-Christian, apparently.

Godless fools.

Or are they? Godless, yes. Fools? Maybe the plan is to hold these trillions and make the economy crash so angry Americans elect another Republican president. Our economy is cyclical, why not our political system? Wash, rinse, repeat. We may see the cataclysm Bush caused happen all over again. Don't worry about the Republicans. Their friends are the ones holding all the money.

The GOP Goal? The End of Democracy

2011-09-13T09:59:00.000-07:00

From one of the smartest observers of politics around, the very conservative (in the old fashioned sense) American Enterprise Institute's Norm Ornstein, comes this analysis of the political mess that Republicans have made of our democracy. Today's Republicans aren't actually conservative, they are dangerously radical. They simply do not want government to function.

This sole focus is underlined by Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, who states clearly that the chief goal of the Republicans in Congress is to get Barack Obama out of office. Not one of their goals, but job one. Frankly, I think it's their only goal. Which means they are very happy that the country run off the rails, that the economy collapse, that unemployment get worse instead of better, that everyone is miserable and hating each other, because all of those things further their main goal. I'm reminded of the old southern custom of barn burning. If you don't have it, destroy it. If you don't control it, kill it. If you can't own it, burn it down. We're witnessing a kind of political terrorism. The opposite of practical conservatism.

This narrow, self-defeating, self-destructive obsession is also in action outside of the Congress, in the widespread and deliberate effort by national Republicans to shut millions of people out of the voting process. Young people, old people, working people, non-homeowners, people of color, the poor, the marginalized, all are facing fierce Republican efforts to prevent them from voting.

Column in Washington Post.

A moderate blogger compares the GOP effort to Jim Crow.

Rolling Stone does a full story on the GOP vote suppression strategy.

Only Deficit Spending Will Save Us

2011-09-12T10:21:00.000-07:00

Today's must-read comes from the chief economist at the Financial Times.

People have been bullied and misled about the so-called "ogre" of deficit spending. During a recessionary period, when businesses are not spending and tax revenues are down, the government becomes the key player. All other players are sitting on the sidelines, so government has to act. Government has to spend when no one else will. It may be the most crucial role government plays in our lives––unless you subscribe to the idea that government's only role is blowing up our enemies and fencing our borders.

The founders knew the importance of a national debt. Alexander Hamilton created a robust national economy by creating the national debt. Washington presided over this. Business wealth grew in America because we had a national debt. The great presidents knew this and used this tool to create infrastructure. Eisenhower didn't win WWII, rebuild Europe or build the interstate highway system with ready cash.

FDR got us through the Great Depression with deficit spending. Without it millions would have died of starvation and disease, not to mention millions more households that would have been broken up, homes and businesses lost. Instead, well built bridges and parks, roads and dams, electrical grid work in rural areas, hospitals, schools and public buildings were the result. We still see those projects in use today. We also see several generations who got higher education through the G.I. Bill, the last liberal "good deed" created by FDR. Millions would never have gone to college but for the New Deal.

FDR did make one key mistake, though. In 1936 he promised to balance the budget. His attempt to do so when the economy was still weak caused a second recession in 1937. It was only the massive deficit spending of WWII that finally ended the Great Depression.

In good times we pay our debt back... unless we have a Republican leadership that decides good times are a reason to loosen up, to throw no-strings tax breaks at corporations that are shifting jobs overseas.

Government needs to do the opposite of what businesses do. In bad times, government must spend. In good times, government spending is less important than government oversight to make sure the private sector doesn't create another financial collapse. Think if it as Id and SuperEgo. In good times the private sector needs a grown-up in the room, a conscience. In bad times, it needs someone to clean up its messes.

Big Lies

2011-09-08T09:33:00.000-07:00

Two and a half years later we continue to hear Obama being blamed for the big deficit. Deficits are inevitable during recessions, but Obama didn't create the famous 1.3 Trillion dollar deficit of 2009. Bush created it, as the ultra conservative Cato Institute points out.

Honesty has never inconvenienced FoxNews though. If there's a useful lie, repeat it, louder if possible. Eventually it will collect a consensus around it, giving it "truthiness", and it'll become what people believe is true.

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” Joseph Goebbels

The Republicans have also learned it's useful to exhume the Founders and use them like sock puppets. (There's a good story about this in the Atlantic. They call it Zombie Economics.) Never mind that the Founders would never have said what the Republicans pretend they said. Remember, Alexander Hamilton created the National Debt to help our economy grow, and Washington used the military to enforce tax collections. It didn't end there. Our greatest presidents supported what the Republican Party opposes today, and deplored what the Republican Party now stands for. Lincoln favored Labor over Capital. Theodore Roosevelt was a progressive lion who pushed worker protections and aggressively broke up the largest corporations of his time. Eisenhower opposed massive military spending. Even our bad presidents are better than the current Republican leadership: Nixon proposed universal health care and created the EPA.

Folksy Republican Stunned By Questions

2011-09-07T16:56:00.000-07:00

Doug Grow wrote a story that's being played out in town hall meetings all across the country. Some Republicans have started keeping their town halls private and members-only. Some will only take written questions. (Good way to keep embarrassing questions out.) Some just never go home. There's no need to if their campaign is financed by offshore corporations.

Show You Care

2011-09-07T14:38:00.001-07:00

This short video will have you reaching for your credit card and a box of Kleenex. Adopt A Job Creator...Why didn't I think of that?

Show you care by helping those who need your help the least. That's the American way. Recently at least.

A Republican Speaks Out

2011-09-06T11:46:00.000-07:00

It's refreshing to hear the truth, even when you already know it.

We live in strange times. "Conservatives" are hell bent on destroying the middle class and all the functioning institutions from the best half-century in American history.

We have clean water, and the Republicans are working hard to repoison it, and the air, and rape the environment generally.

They hate good government, because they want no government. They want no government because that would remove the inconvenience of democracy.

Republicans have presented and passed laws all across the country to remove young people, old people, poor people and people of color and ethnicity from the voter lists. Why? Because fewer voters make them likelier to win elections. Whiter and richer voters are likelier to vote Republican.

Mike Lofgren spent 16 years as a Republican congressional staffer. He's no fan of Democrats, but he's learned to loathe and fear Republicans and what they are trying to do. Republicans aren't conservatives, they are radicals. Lofgren calls them terrorists. They are happy to destroy America because most of their antitax corporate clients are by now safely offshore. They have succeeded in turning the U.S. into a third world country.

Here is a list of the bills Republicans have blocked in Congress. It isn't spending they are against, they are against government doing good. They are against anything that would help Americans while a Democrat is in the White House.

Today's Must Read

2011-09-04T14:09:00.000-07:00

The Bill of Rights as rewritten to suit America's new, officially protected, Supreme Court endorsed and validated SuperCitizens (as ghostwritten by Thomas F. Schaller of the Baltimore Sun.)

Why is it millions of Americans, and I mean average wage-earning Americans with mortgages to pay and families to feed, carry water for the corporate elite who've been suppressing their standard of living for the past 30 years? Is it because FoxNews tells them to? Is it because they bought the Republican team sweatshirt and will cheer for that team no matter what? Or are that many Americans just happy to do as they're told? Is it obedience or ignorance or cowardice?

Profiting from Misery, Privation and Disaster

2011-09-02T09:39:00.000-07:00

As families huddled to worry about jobs, food and rescuing the family home, Goldman Sachs was gleefully talking about financial crisis as profit opportunity. Who are these people? Are they the type who go through victims' pockets at the scene of an accident? It isn't limited to Goldman, or Wall Street. Many of the vultures lurk in hedge fund compounds in Connecticut, picking the bones of the fallen––when possible helping them fall before picking their bones. This story from BusinessInsider is particularly chilling.

This paragraph from the Guardian caught my eye.

"But a new theory is emerging among traders and economists. The same banks, hedge funds and financiers whose speculation on the global money markets caused the sub-prime mortgage crisis are thought to be causing food prices to yo-yo and inflate. The charge against them is that by taking advantage of the deregulation of global commodity markets they are making billions from speculating on food and causing misery around the world."

In other words, crisis is more profitable than stability. If that's the opposite of what most modern economies base their prosperity on, that's fine with the speculators who profit. Picture a cat playing with a mouse.

Real Economics describes the center where global food speculation takes place, the Chicago Board of Trade. Some will point out the necessary mechanism of the Chicago Board; it gets food where it's needed in an efficient fashion through the market system. But what happens when the market makers realize they profit more from inefficiency, from shortage, from panic? Markets need to have a superego to rule their id, an Apollonian side to keep the Dionysian under control. We need responsible, humane governing institutions, which is exactly what Republican radicals in the U.S. Congress are trying to shut down and disempower.

The World Food Programme paints an ugly picture of the profitability of global hunger.

The role played by speculator manipulation of supply is no secret in the fuel category (from McClatchy News)

What is the result? More of our limited consumer dollars are locked into chasing fuel and food, leaving less for other areas of spending. It works like a heavy stone tied to the ankle of the economy. What makes it harder for 300 million Americans fills the pockets of the speculators, which means hedge funds, banks, Wall Street, the folks who fund the Tea Party.

Do market makers actively precipitate disaster in order to profit from it? There were plenty of shills pushing the profit opportunities in the BP oil spill––even if they didn't cause it.

But you have to wonder sometimes. In the week Dick Cheney's memoir hits the shelves this question should strike all of us: what influence did Dick Cheney, the former chair of Halliburton, have on the awarding of billions in war contracts to his old firm? Did he want the war to happen for private business reasons? Iraq was a war virtually made for Halliburton. The U.S. protectorate supervised the collapse of the Iraq system, the destruction of all its institutions and their subsequent privatization. Is Iraq the perfect model of Disaster Capitalism? (This Amy Goodman-Naomi Klein interview caught the drift as it was happening in 2005, but the reporting never reached the mainstream press.)

The ruling ideas behind what Naomi Klein called The Shock Doctrine aren't conservative. They are the opposite of conservative. They are radical. They are anti-patriotic. They are anti-institutional, anti-national, anti-citizen. They are against the notion of functioning societies and economies because breakdown is what makes these operators rich. Wide public failure is their opportunity. Your hunger is their feast. And increasingly, these are the people at the controls at the centers of the so-called Free Market.

The Late Great Middle Class

2011-09-01T09:34:00.000-07:00

For the past generation the Middle Class has been stuck or declining while tip top incomes and accumulated wealth have grown enormously. Taxes that previous Republicans thought fair have been labeled "Communist" and "class warfare".

Taxing the rich isn't Communist. Nor is it Communist to pay working people decently; it's practical. Better paid employees pay the taxes that build the roads but they also make better consumers, which makes a stronger economy. A topheavy economy, like the one the Republicans have built, is unstable and more likely to collapse. Here is an excellent report from the BBC website.

Business insiders are noticing what's happening to the middle class, and they're worried even if the very rich don't care. They know you can't run an economy on jewelry and yacht purchases.

As noted in The Economist (hardly a leftist magazine), this ongoing recession, caused by the recklessness of the largest investors and financial institutions, is causing the impoverishment of the middle class, but is also discarding an entire generation of young people. New graduates from college may never gain their footing, careerwise and incomewise.

And there's this, from Forbes, on Rick Perry's odd rant that the middle class doesn't pay its share of taxes.

It isn't only the "liberal" media that's acknowledging how our tax structure tilts to benefit the upper classes. (And how it doesn't create jobs.) Responsible conservative journals are writing about it too. Our economy is unfairly rigged. Besides being unfair, it's also less productive and impractical.

Having a Secure Backup

2011-08-31T09:01:00.000-07:00

Our parents and grandparents told us it was smart to have extra put by for a rainy day, but what happens when the rainy day fund in the coffee can under the floorboards is washed away with the house? What happens when your neighbors are too busy rescuing themselves to help you? We've learned from experience that institutional reserves are more practical than letting everyone fend for themselves. We need government, because the government is us.

When flood or drought or an earthquake strikes, it's good to live in a big country. (Joe Conason has a very good piece about this at nationalmemo.com.) A nation needs to plan for disasters that are more than local. Republicans are busy looking for redundancies to eliminate, but redundancy is an essential part of planning and planning is a key role of government. In a crisis big government is better than small. Extra is better than not enough. The Republicans are mocking the government response to Hurricane Irene, but it's better to be there early with sufficient force than too late with too little as happened to the previous administration with a previous hurricane.

Redundancy isn't the enemy of efficiency; it's crucial to maintaining efficiency in a crisis. Redundancy is a key part of emergency planning at the government level. It's been part of planning by governments of both parties, until the Republicans began thinking small.

There's a rationale for the Republicans' slimming obsession: disaster is an excellent profit opportunity for corporations that Republicans represent. War, disaster, famine, pestilence, epidemic, any or all the horses of the apocalypse will make opportunists very very rich if government is as small as Republicans would like it to be. But it will cost us.

It's called "Disaster Capitalism" and government preparedness is just what they don't want. Naomi Klein wrote about it in her book Shock Doctrine.

Here's a strange glimpse at the far extreme. Apparently the concept of personal redundancy is pretty important among the survivalist folks who demand less sufficiency in government. These podcasters preach the redundancy of two homes, for instance, which is nice for them. But consider this: when millions of people stockpile extra food, extra supplies and hide cash under the mattress, what does it do to the broader economy? What happens to those who can't afford to stash a year's worth away (or five years' worth)?

During the Great Depression this kind of behavior was called "Hoarding". Apart from how self-centered it is, hoarding causes shortages among those who aren't hoarding, who can't afford to or think it's wrong. Hoarding cash depresses the economy. (The corporations sitting on trillions in unspent government bailout money are the prime culprits here.)

There is a vital pragmatism to redundancy at the national level. It's been understood by most modern presidents. Roads and bridges to carry traffic if one or more are damaged, redundant lines of communication, backup power supply lines and backup power capacity. Securing these are the most important role of government, but the "cost cutters" eye sufficiency and backups as "waste" and "excessive". The way George W. Bush considered the revenue surplus he inherited from Clinton as free money he could throw away. Which is why we are experiencing shortages now. We could be more prepared and better equipped, but the Republicans want us to be less so. Why? Because it might make their clients rich.

Sanitized for Your Protection

2011-08-30T10:51:00.000-07:00

There's an excellent piece at CommonDreams.org, written by an Austin Texas high school history teacher who tells how the Texas history curriculum has been purged of impure thoughts and inconvenient truths.

Texas has sanitized the high school curriculum, not for the protection of the students but to protect the ruling elite. The textbooks are sanitized to keep students from learning about any proto-socialist or communitarian views held by the Founding Fathers, to disguise the founders' occasional agnosticism and open-minded theism, to erase any useful understanding of how the union movement in the twentieth century led to the forty hour week, the weekend, the paid vacation, to the idea of giving employees raises and benefits like health insurance and pensions. Instead of learning about how Washington and Hamilton introduced the idea of a national debt to spur investment and economic growth, Texas school children will learn about Estée Lauder and a handful of other business tycoons. They'll learn how the House Un-American Activities Committee bravely saved America from the march of Communism––no mention of the witch-hunt, the censorship, the careers ended, the innocent lives destroyed or the broad fear they created. In Texas textbooks, Westward Expansion did not drive native Americans from their ancestral lands or kill millions with disease and privation, it saved their souls. History is all about how you look at it. Conservatives and Republicans have warned us about propaganda; this is it.

Last year the CSMonitor reported on the "whitening" effort in Texas education, to make slavery less significant in the history books, to whitewash it. Maybe this is how Michele Bachmann got her notions about how slavery was happier than the lives of African Americans today. In case you don't remember, this is how the Soviets taught history. I guess Texans and Republicans learned something from the Cold War.

IBG-YBG

2011-08-23T09:21:00.000-07:00

I came across this term by accident, coined in 2007, in a book by Jonathan Knee, and blogged a couple of times since. Quoted here and enlarged on a bit here, it's still not in common usage. IBG-YBG: I'll Be Gone, You'll Be Gone. Another way of saying "Never Mind" or "What, Me Worry?" As acronyms go, it's very clever, pointing up a pernicious habit in the financial and ruling classes. This passage seems especially ironic, reading it now, after the collapse IBG-YBG thinking precipitated.

"The bankers who pressed . . . questionable telecom credits at Morgan in their quest for market share, fees, and internal status coined an acronym that could well be a rallying cry for what the entire investment banking industry had become more broadly. "IBG YBG" stood for "I'll Be Gone, You'll Be Gone." When a particularly troubling fact came up in due diligence on one of these companies, a whispered "IBG YBG" among the banking team members would ensure that a way would be found to do the business, even if investors, or Morgan Stanley itself, would pay the price down the road. Don't sweat it, was the implication, we'll all be long gone by then."

(Jonathan A. Knee, The Accidental Investment Banker (Oxford University Press, 2006, pp. xvi-xvii)

This knack for committing crimes that won't be discovered till years later reminds me of a recent president. James Wolcott wrote about him in Vanity Fair:

"On the last page of Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack (2004), Bush, asked how history would judge the war in Iraq, verbally shrugs: “History. We don’t know. We’ll all be dead.” And on the first page of Robert Draper’s Dead Certain (2007), Bush cautions, “You can’t possibly figure out the history of the Bush presidency—until I’m dead,” then inserts a piece of cheese into his mouth. This exit clause isn’t something he invokes only to reporters. In Bill Sammon’s The Evangelical President (2007), an aide confirms to the susceptible author that Bush doesn’t brood about the petty setbacks that bedevil less serene souls: “His attitude is a very healthy one. He says, ‘Look, history will get it right and we’ll both be dead. Who cares?’ ” If only the estimated 1.5 million Iraqis displaced by the war and driven into Syrian exile could adopt such a healthy outlook, maybe they too would learn how not to sweat the small stuff."

Getting Underlings to Commit Your Crimes

2011-08-22T08:58:00.000-07:00

Reading the news I often get the feeling I've read the same thing before. There's this from a Stephen Moss profile of historian and Hitler biographer Ian Kershaw in the Guardian:

" ...the phrase most associated with Kershaw: "working towards the Führer", the idea that though Hitler was not dictating every aspect of policy the entire bureaucratic apparatus devoted itself to trying to interpret his wishes. "People second-guessed what he wanted," Kershaw explains. "He didn't need to command everything. People interpret 'getting rid of the Jews' in different ways, and cumulatively that then pushes along the dynamic of the persecution without Hitler having to say 'do this, do that, do the other'."

And this paragraph from Michael Wolff's analysis of the Murdoch scandal in AdWeek from a week ago:

"It’s all about the organization. It’s an organization all about doing what Rupert wants you to do, or doing what you imagine Rupert wants you to do, or doing what you imagine your boss imagines Rupert wants done. There are few companies as large as News Corp. that are so devoted and in thrall to one man. There are few companies which, over so long, have so assiduously hired the kind of people who would be in thrall to one man. Indeed, News Corp. can be quite a disorganized and scattered company, and yet its driving premise, what unites and motivates this oft-times gang-that-couldn’t-shoot-straight enterprise, is to do as Rupert would have you do."

In the Reagan White House, this same management style gave Reagan "plausible deniability" when his subordinates were selling advanced weapons to Iranian terrorists and using the profits to arm Central American guerillas that Congress had refused to support. Ollie North's "neat idea." They knew what the president wanted and got it done without explicit instructions. When the crime was discovered, the boss avoided blame.

The useful managerial instruction "I don't care how you do it...just get it done" has caused of a lot of misery in the world, but it takes awhile for the consequences to fall on the perpetrator. The harm hits everyone else first. Ethical managers know better. It isn't a new phenomenon. In the twelfth century Henry II had an archbishop named Thomas á Beckett who he wanted dead, and some eager minions who took care of it for him.

A Different Kind of Strike

2011-08-21T10:50:00.000-07:00

From Thomas Frank, writing in Harper's.

"A series of psychological studies appeared recently showing that the rich are quantitatively less nice than others. My object in the latest issue of Harper's Magazine, is to ask how that might be remedied, how the rich might be made nicer. My answer:

"Let us consider a different sort of strike, one that might help the emotionally arrested rich in their time of need. I propose a twenty-four-hour refusal to fawn. A servility strike. A day without deference..."

Two Speeches-Two Romneys-one for taxing rich people-one against

2011-08-19T19:31:00.000-07:00

One day, two audiences, two contradictory stands on tax cuts for rich people, same Republican.

First, Romney opposes tax cuts for the rich

"I'm not for tax cuts for the rich," Romney said. "The rich can take care of themselves. I want to get America working again. And so I want to make sure that whatever we do in the tax code, we're not giving a windfall to the very wealthy."

Then, Romney supports tax cuts for the rich

...several times today, he was asked about the New York Times opinion piece by billionaire Warren Buffett calling for increased taxes on the wealthy as a way to cut the deficit. “I disagree with Warren. And I do want to keep the Bush tax cuts in place,” Romney said.

Is America Going Insane?

2011-08-18T12:55:00.000-07:00

There's a great and eye-opening article in the Harvard Business Review by Umair Haque. He asks some key questions, and raises others.

Why are the lives of millions being broken for the enrichment of a very few? Why is it that small crime brings long prison sentences while enormous frauds have no consequences––other than multi-billion dollar rescues with consequent bonuses?

Watching political and economic news unfold it seems as if we are living inside a Swiftian or Orwellian satire. The anchors smile, the financial reporters smile, the political brokers smile, the citizens smile. Everybody smiles as if nothing is happening.

Americans are so wedded to normality that they refuse to acknowledge that normality has been undone. The social contract has been broken. But who broke it? To answer that you need to look at who has benefited. Who is winning? More importantly, who is winning enormous amounts in every game they play? Why has the game been rigged and who has rigged it?

What puzzles me most is this: millions of Americans whose lives have been diminished, whose prosperity has been stolen from them over the past 25 years, continue to side with the very rich who have benefited from their ruin. Why do these people take sides against the leaders and agencies who want to right these wrongs, who want to punish the wrongdoers from the financial class––the Enrons and AIG's, the fixers of markets and the sellers of bad securities? Why do ordinary citizens side against themselves, especially when things get tough?

It's easier to see how the perpetrators seem so normal and competent. They dress well. They live well. They have handlers and bodyguards and personal hairdressers. They are secure. Self-assuredness is very attractive. They also have the luxury of not caring. There is research that shows very very rich people tend to have an atrophied or malfunctioning sense of empathy. There's an excellent article discussing this on the MSNBC website.

There've also been studies indicating that many of the people who gain the top in business have the advantage of a psychopathic personality. These aren't fringe studies. They represent the prevailing school of thought which guides our penal systems. In our justice system small time psychopaths are imprisoned but successful ones are given positions of power.

Previously, I've cited the program about this on This American Life. There's also a provocative article on psychopathic business leaders in Fast Company.

How has this affected all of us? We should feel more than an outraged sense of fairness. It hasn't just insulted us, it's harmed all of us. It has crippled our society. It has put decent fairminded people at a disadvantage and, in too many cases, it's put the cleverest most cold-blooded people in control of our working lives and our security. Our system encourages large crime while punishing the helpless and relegated who use small crime to stay alive.

There have been recent periods when lax regulation and unwise incentives have created waves of largescale looting of the economy. Unlike the looting of a $30 toaster, which will result in a jail sentence, this largescale financial looting is legal (thanks to Republican deregulation and Republican judges). It's also massively costly to everyone in the society. Scientists and academics are noticing this and studying it (here's one study), but so far the general public isn't paying attention. Possibly because it's being hidden from them by the smiling happy people on television.

It's Amazing What Most Americans Don't Know About Incomes

2011-08-17T10:38:00.000-07:00

This segment by the NewsHour's economics reporter discloses what most of the news media works so hard to disguise:

ALMOST ALL OF THE GAINS IN THE PAST THIRTY YEARS HAVE GONE DIRECTLY INTO THE POCKETS OF THE TOP 1%.

That means productivity gains––workers working harder and more efficiently for longer hours––are being paid less and less to the workers themselves, and instead are going to the people who don't work at all.

Which, if you like, is a pretty fair description of a slave economy. An old-fashioned peasant and master economy. In a properly run economy the gains are enjoyed by everyone who works for a living. Instead, in America, we now glorify and pamper the leisured owner class.

We live in a country with more inequality than most African kleptocracies. Most Americans THINK we have an income distribution similar to Sweden's. That's what they'd like it to be.

The saddest part of it is most Americans have no idea about the real distribution of incomes or wealth, because the airwaves they own and the internet they log onto and the newspapers they buy every morning refuse to inform them.

Middle Class Fear is the GOP's Best Weapon

2011-08-16T11:37:00.000-07:00

Middle class worry has worked very effectively for the Tories in the UK, as this piece from the Guardian explains. In England, David Cameron, the Conservative leader who has been sacrificing programs for the working and middle class in order to protect the perks and benefits of the super-rich, is privately glad riots have broken out in London and Manchester. The violence takes his corrupt bargain with Rupert Murdoch, tabloid baron and owner of FoxNews and the Wall Street Journal, out of the news. And it also gins up the worries of an already worried middle and working class, people who feel insecure about their jobs are more pliable when violence threatens everything they've earned

Meanwhile, in this country, Republicans are delivering exactly the economy they want, as this article from Alternet.org explains. Stagnant, insecure, fragile, panicky. They love it. Fearful people are more obedient and more easily fooled. People working their brains out trying to stay even aren't as likely to ask hard questions. They are more likely to watch the propaganda programming on FoxNews that juices their fears and directs them not at the causes but at each other.

I've been pushing the word "HOARDING" as it pertains to the trillions corporations and super rich investors are sitting on. Is it any different than hoarding food in a famine or water in a drought? I'm glad to see the word is being properly applied.

Another article, by a professor at UC Santa Cruz, with useful charts and graphs, explains the poisonous asymmetry in the American economy. Imbalance causes instability. On a fundamental level, worried workers make poor consumers. What ought to worry Main Street is that the Big Boys don't care much about America. Their toast is buttered by growing prosperity in other countries. How patriotic is that?

Today's Must-Read

2011-08-15T08:55:00.000-07:00

From the Wall Street Journal there's this interview with economist Nouriel Roubini. Roubini places blame for this economy squarely on George Bush and Republican policies:

This morning's must-read is an excellent Warren Buffett piece in the New York Times. Buffett has been saying the same thing for several years, that our tax policies coddle the rich and punish working people. Tax the rich fairly, as Eisenhower did, or even as gently as Reagan did, and goodbye deficit. A fair policy would prevent a second recession, but a second recession is exactly what the Republicans want. More people ought to be saying this out loud.

I've said it before: the engine of our economy isn't the rich, the so-called "job creators" who aren't creating any jobs. The engine of any economy is the working men and women, the people who work and earn paychecks that they spend on groceries and mortgages, cars, new refrigerators, new clothes, on goods and services.

Corporations and Rich Interests Created this Economic Mayhem

2011-08-14T21:06:00.002-07:00

Today's must-read. A very good piece in the Washington Post by Steven Pearlstein, an intelligent writer about markets and money, and one who lives far enough from Wall Street not to be in thrall to it.

As I watch the stock market drop like a stone, again, fueled downward by panic selling by small investors, whose retirement will materialize or not depending on what happens in five minutes, and then zoom just as quickly upward, lightened by the absence of thousands of little people who got off at the bottom, I think of the "bounce effect".

The "bounce effect" is a term I invented to describe something I overheard on television: the "useful elimination of investors who have no business owning investments." Here I'm quoting a "market expert" explaining creative destruction on one of the television stock market programs. This was years ago now but it's happening again and worse than ever. The economy drops hard and bounces back up, without thousands, millions, of poor losers.

When bad things happen to little people, big people will explain why it's a good thing. Ever since Reagan restacked the deck against all little people in America we've had no explanation of the bad events except ones that let the big investors, the big market manipulators, the "market makers" off the hook.

This cannoning stock market and these three years of a bad economy are the lovechild of Wall Street and K Street. Americans need to begin asking their Republican representatives and their corporate bosses who pay for the Republican campaigns, "Is this the economy you wanted?" I believe it is. I believe they are privately very happy for most Americans to be fearful and impoverished because a worried workforce works harder for less, and a worried electorate is more obedient.

They are happy to impoverish the government because they hate it. Without a democratic government there is no one to boss them. Without government spending there is no spending right now, and no help for this economy. Meanwhile they are giddily tearing down useful institutions and replacing them with nothing. This is what revolutions are made of, only they are the revolutionaries and we are the innocent bystanders.

Hypocrisy-du-jour

2011-08-13T10:11:00.000-07:00

Jon Stewart (and his writers) are again the sharpest news analysts in the business, taking apart the hypocrite-du-jour on FoxNews. It's really funny even if it makes you mad.

"We deserve what we get, dammit. But everything everybody else gets is wrong and greedy and unfair." The evil entitlements are those going to other people. Those entitlements not going to attractive, blonde, highly paid FoxNews anchors with attractive children destined for exclusive private schools.

Is this or is this not the core belief of all Republicans?

To put it differently, Republicans who make their living off capital gains are Hard Working Americans. Everybody else is lazy and undeserving and damn lucky Republicans are nice enough to employ them at a poverty wage.

Republicans who make millions off the government are doing so out of selfless patriotism––the millions they receive are accidental. Other people who make a meager living off the government are parasites and Communists.

This is called hypocrisy and Americans would laugh at it if Republicans weren't holding a gun to our head.

I think this is what Mr. Stewart is noticing. Maybe I should do his blogging for him...

Talking Back to your Tea Party Brother-In-Law

2011-08-12T16:08:00.000-07:00

This post by economist Jared Bernstein is the smartest, most useful piece of writing I've come across this year.

Memorize it.

Send it to everyone you know.

Send it to your elected representatives, your governor, your mayor.

Send it to your newspaper. If they won't print it, send it to your alternative newspaper.

Tack it to lampposts. Leave copies where you have coffee every day.

Xerox copies and drop them from an airplane over the State Fair.

If it does nothing else, it might shut up those smug relatives who feed off the garbage on FoxNews.

It may be a hopeful sign when the economists who help Republican politicians with their math start calling the Republicans stupid and dangerous. Here's an article from the New York Times.

We are in the grip of dangerous extremists eager to trigger complete economic collapse so (at least this is the theory) Jesus will come rescue them. I doubt He will though.

Standard & Poors or Dumb & Dumber?

2011-08-09T10:11:00.000-07:00

Should the name be Standard & Poors or Dumb & Dumber? Here's a very good analysis in The Nation.

And another by Joe Nocera in the New York Times.

The Times is also reporting that the S.E.C. has downgraded S&P back for their own failings. Why didn't the S.E.C. downgrade the credit raters credibility earlier?

Remember, S&P and Moody's and Fitch were the ones who rated Enron AAA and did the same for the fraudulent toxic securities Wall Street dumped on customers prior to the 2008 collapse. The credit rating agencies caused the collapse by selling their ratings rather than making corporations earn them. And who had to clean up the mess? Taxpayers. It's S&P's mistakes that have ballooned our national debt. As I said the other day, blaming Obama for this is like blaming the surgeon for the cancer you wanted removed.

The real causes get lost in the noise as mommy and daddy argue. The problems we have aren't obscure or hard to understand, just hard to hear anyone talk about on television, unless you count Jon Stewart who may be the best explainer around. Maybe it's because he's allowed to use obscenities. We need them to describe what is going on.

Then there's the dull, boring but pithy and usually dead-on correct Brookings Institution.

But these causes are just political. The real cause of America's thirty year decline has been Reaganomics. Ronald Reagan (who was officially declared a god several years ago) established the rule that people who work should be paid less and pay more in taxes, and that people who own and don't work at all or work very little should reap the big rewards and pay taxes at a lower rate.

This dynamic took a robust economy and made it fragile, nervous, unstable and underfed. What feeds an economy? Incomes from honest work. Who has thrived most in Reagan's economy? The predators, the parasites, the "creative destroyers", the manipulators, the people who shuffle money rather than making products or delivering services. Reaganomics has hollowed out the America we grew up in, moving the wealth and the productivity offshore to low-wage havens and their private islands. Maybe Americans are finally waking up to this. I hope so.

Blaming the Surgeon for the Cancer He's Removing

2011-08-07T10:05:00.000-07:00

Today's Must-Read is from the Daily Beast, Tina Brown's hard-hitting digital newspaper. And nobody deserves to be hit harder than Standard & Poors.

As Noni Prins's article explains, S&P was "factory-stamping" AAA bond ratings on all the garbage Wall Street could manufacture in the run up to the financial meltdown of 2007-2008, and pocketing enormous fees.

The U.S. debt problem right now, which S & P is deploring, is largely made up of S & P's toxic garbage that we taxpayers (and our government) had to clean up.

A bit like blaming the surgeon for the cancer he's been asked to remove. The U.S. government removed the cancerous investments S&P and Moody's fed into the U.S. economy.

Instead of S & P downgrading U.S. Treasury Bonds, the U.S. Justice Department ought to be putting S & P on trial for its massive fraud. But major financial players appear to have total immunity.

This would be outrageous satire if it were satire, but it's not. It's all true, and we're paying for it.

The Day the Middle Class Died

2011-08-06T12:32:00.000-07:00

Today's must-read is from Michael Moore. Sometimes he's a bit annoying. Sometimes he's a blowhard. Sometimes he goes too far (endorsing Nader over Gore). Sometimes he's right. He's right about this.

Let's Worship the "Job Creators"

2011-08-04T09:20:00.001-07:00

(What jobs?)

I read in the New York Times today how the very rich are spending their money. (No recession there.)

Is this how "job creators" "create jobs"?

(I'd love to know which premium PR consultant the GOP hired to rebrand the filthy rich.)

So instead of taxing rich people we tax the middle class and the working poor. What jobs are created? Jewelers? Couturiers? Expensive pedicurists?

And there is this worrisome article from Reuters about how cuts in infrastructure spending is hurting us. Instead of needed infrastructure spending (which would employ a lot of people, who would pay taxes) we get spending on $9000 sequinned tweed outfits and $50,000 tennis bracelets.

Instead of repairing roads that are falling apart and bridges that are falling down, we can comfort ourselves that a few very rich people are able to buy more fabulous new outfits and expensive foreign cars. To add to the closets and garages-full they already own. What jobs? No jobs. They don't need jobs.

Goodbye American Dream

2011-08-01T08:51:00.000-07:00

MarketWatch is reporting that paychecks account for the lowest percentage of GDP in history, and corporate profits are taking the largest percentage ever.

So why are we shifting taxes off of corporations, their shareholders and CEOs and onto workers?

Because the Republican Party represents people who own, not people who work. And because of this work means less today, it pays less. Owners are the gods in this new America. They can hold the nation to ransom. Ordinary taxpayers pay taxes corporations used to pay. We pay their legal fees when they break the law. We pay their fines and penalties. We pay for their mistakes by bailing them out when they fail.

TooMuchOnline is reporting that top management consultants like Booz & Co. are telling American businesses to pay their employees less than they are worth so they can keep all the money themselves. That is the expert advice of the Harvard Business School. Stiff the worker. But obscenely overpaying executives is OK.

(What makes this relevant today is how it affects the budget deficit. The vast majority of average earners, those whose incomes have flattened or disappeared, are the ones who pay taxes. The individuals and corporations who have reaped the greatest income hikes are the ones who have had the biggest tax cuts. This is where the budget deficit comes from.)

If you look at the pay graph over the past four decades, they've already accomplished this––the pay of average employees has been level for that long. (see Lane Kenworthy's economics blog.) There've been no increases for the American worker at any level (except the very very top) since Reagan declared Morning in America. It was a very cold morning, and an end to the American Dream.

Who does the American Dream belong to now? Look at the numbers. The most favored Americans are those who don't work at all.

This economy, this dead economy––for millions of Americans––and insecure at best for most, is out-of-this-world rewarding for the top top people, the ones with the enormous Republican tax cuts, the ones with Boehner and Cantor and McConnell slugging for them. The ones who own instead of working.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reports that the income gap between the middle class and the extreme upper class has tripled.

The Washington Post reports on what this new exclusiveness creates: an insulation from the society that supports them, the society they live off of. As they earn more they care less about the people whose work creates their wealth.

Wall Street and the too-big-to-fail financial institutions, who taxpayers bailed out with trillions, reward themselves with billions apiece and handsome bonuses. But will they "loan money"? Will they hire? Will they get the economy going again? Why should they?

This bum economy is exactly the economy the bankers and Wall Street and Big Oil and their Republican operatives wanted.

The Greater Danger–False Equivalency

2011-07-28T10:46:00.001-07:00

I have been writing about this problem for years, to no avail. Both sides of every political issue are carefully equalized in most news reports. Even when opinion is heavily on one side, as is the case with the tax/deficit issue right now––a sizable majority in most polls want some spending cuts but also want revenues raised by taxing rich people more, at least by removing the enhanced cuts they got from Bush. But false equivalency ignores consensus. It gives the two sides equal weight.

More worrisome, the false equivalency ignores merits of the arguments. If (as I believe is the case now) one party has become dangerously radical, impractical, inflexible and irrational, it's automatically made equal with the more rational, moderate, flexible, practical party opposing it. The Republican Party's dominant fringe has made compromise impossible. Compromise is the essence of democracy. To cut it out of the process endangers how our democracy functions, but this radicalism is disguised and denied. The Republican Party's radical tactics are reported very cautiously and respectfully. In the midst of a serious crisis precipitated by one party, the media's habitual balancing makes it appear both parties are equally to blame.

This false equivalency rewards and encourages radicalism, it rewards inflexibility, it rewards extremism. It penalizes flexibility, reason, moderation and maturity on the other side. And it makes cynics of us all, because we are constantly told that both parties are equally extreme, equally inflexible.

I see the present impasse as a hostage situation. The Republican Party's radical fringe knows that moments of crisis can be exploited for political gain. They are holding 300 million Americans hostage and making demands. Their demands would seriously degrade the lives of the poor, the weak, the unemployed, veterans, the sick, the working poor, the middle class and further enrich and empower the rich and powerful. But they hold the gun, and because no news organization feels comfortable reporting this we are left believing that the hostage takers and the people negotiating for their release are morally and rationally equal. This is why the international community wants to downgrade our debt, because we are behaving irrationally. And our news media aren't helping.

I think the present predicament is largely attributable to news media's false equivalency. I'm not sure if it's cowardice or laziness or naive faith or a very wrong sense of fairness, but it's a dangerous habit.

GOP Effort to Shut Down Voting

2011-07-27T10:42:00.000-07:00

Republicans are moving aggressively all across the country to make it harder for people to vote. The effort deliberately targets the poor, urban voters, young voters, students and people of color. You can read more about it here.

(The Republicans have a funny reason for what they're doing. See below.)

I keep returning to this, but it's crucial and very few Americans know about it. Back in 1980 Paul Weyrich stated the longterm strategy of the Republican Party–––Make it harder for people to vote. (Here's the evidence. They filmed Weyrich's speech.) Prevent people from voting. Shrink the electorate. Shrink the democracy. Shut the American people out of decisions... unless they agree with Paul Weyrich––and are rich and white and right-wing and "Christian" enough.

Killing our democracy was the best way to guarantee Republican domination. Domination was and continues to be their goal.

This came on the heels of the GOP's southern strategy, designed to gather in all the white voters angry about civil rights, and keep them angry.

What's ironic is, the same party that sought to capture the poor angry white vote then set about limiting all voting, especially among households earning less than a few hundred thousand a year.

Doing so while waving a flag made it appear patriotic. But the goals embraced by the Republican Party since the late 70s are deeply antidemocratic.

While worshipping the founding fathers they have pushed an agenda that is fundamentally opposed to the ideals the founders put on paper.

If you don't think voter fraud is the biggest threat to democracy today, you should watch this report from Stephen Colbert. Laughing is permitted, but the GOP isn't a joke, it's controlling America right now.

Hostage Situation

2011-07-26T11:43:00.001-07:00

Obama is in a difficult position. He wants to protect the essential programs many millions of middle class and working class households rely on, and wants to do so by removing the tax breaks enjoyed by the very rich, who pay much lower tax than everybody else. The Republicans are willing to crash the economy to protect the rich and are happy to gouge everybody else if they can. I am reminded of the National Lampoon cover from 1973: "If You Don't Buy This Magazine We'll Kill This Dog." The dog is us. The Republican goal is to nail down an economy like the one we are living through right now, one that doesn't work for anyone but the upper class.

It's a hostage situation. President Obama is trying to free 300 million hostages (the American people) from a set of ruthless well-armed and cold-blooded extortionists, which requires very careful negotiating. Problem is half of the hostages don't seem aware which side is holding them hostage and which side is trying to get them released unharmed.

Here's a pretty good analysis from my friend at Forbes.

Extreme Politics is Killing Our Democracy

2011-07-25T16:12:00.000-07:00

Today's must-read is a piece from Reuters. Extreme gerrymandering of districts has eliminated moderates, especially moderate Republicans. (We still have a number of Blue Dog Democrats, who resemble the Republicans of Nixon's day.)

Extreme politics is making it impossible for us to find a deal on raising the debt limit. Here's a good history of the debt limit issue from the CBC. It's an artificial crisis that suits the Republican caucus very well. The Republican leaders voted for George W. Bush's raises to the debt ceiling. Every president in the past fifty years has raised the debt ceiling, repeatedly. Who did so the most? Reagan, almost 200%. Second place? George W. Bush, almost 90%. It's only become a GOP issue since Obama took office, raising the question: is this Mitch McConnell's way of delivering on his pledge to make Obama a one-term president? In the midst of the biggest economic crisis in 75 years, McConnell said his top priority was to make sure Obama wasn't re-elected. This is the economy the Republicans want.

Extremes in incomes is killing us too. Here's an interesting study from the Washington Post. If the ratio between rich and middle class earners had remained the same as it was in the 1960s there would be no deficit and no recession. Better paid workers are better consumers, better at keeping up with their debts, more secure homeowners, need fewer government programs, and they don't evade taxes as aggressively as the rich do.

Writing Laws by Remote Control

2011-07-25T08:42:00.001-07:00

The income the middle class has lost over the past four decades (ever since Reagan put a kick me sign on our back) has all been funneled upward. Not all of this money can be spent at Tiffany and Bergdorff and on fifth and sixth mansions for billionaires who need more closet space. Some has been spent paying for the writing and enacting of state laws to cut taxes on billionaires and outlaw unions and deregulate corporate pollution, fraud and dangerous products. Big Oil, Big Pharma and Big Tobacco created a group called ALEC which instructs Republican lawmakers how to make laws. Sadly nobody knew how elaborate the ALEC project was until an insider started feeling lousy about what he was doing and shared the story with a reporter.

Here's a great Terri Gross interview about this with John Nichols.

John Nichols has written an excellent series for the Nation magazine about ALEC and what these documents have disclosed.

Coverage and analysis from TruthOut.

Among the documents revealed through the Center for Media and Democracy, are bills prefabricated by ALEC, with help from the industry groups who wanted to have regulations gutted or consumers unprotected. Big Oil, Big Tobacco, Big Pharma, industrial agriculture, big polluters, gun manufacturers and dealers, the private prison industry and others.

The same ALEC-written bills were proposed in multiple state legislatures, ushered through the democratic process with ALEC supervision, and passed into law, where their enactment will be overseen by judges tutored by the Koch Brothers and others. Law by remote control.

Some background on the investigation by PR Watch and the Center for Media and Democracy.

How to Steal an Election

2011-07-23T10:32:00.000-07:00

There's important new reporting on the bizarre, unexplained, last-minute 6.7 point shift from Kerry to Bush in 2004. It was a shift that directly contradicted the exit polling. It remains unexplained, and news media have religiously ignored the story. Why does it matter? Bush made Supreme Court appointments whose decisions handed vast powers to corporate campaign donors prior to the 2010 election that handed power back to the Republican Right Wing. Bush also ballooned his deficit and ran the economy into the ground by keeping his hands on the controls for four more years. At some point we need to stop trusting and begin examining. Reporters and news organizations need to report and analyze the information in front of us.

The elections in danger of being rigged or stolen are the close ones. The 2010 elections were close, but uniformly shifted rightward. This one-sided veering of elections dates to 2000. George Bush won his two elections very narrowly. As a Florida computer programmer explains in the testimony linked to below, it is the close elections that can be flipped without being questioned. The 2006 midterms and the 2008 election were not as close, and therefore were not affected.

This spring's election for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court was very close, and was narrowly won by the Democratic challenger over incumbent Republican David Prosser...until an election official in suburban Milwaukee, who happened to be a former aide to Prosser, an aide with a checkered history, who had been involved in cases of serious election discrepancies in the past, magically "found" additional votes on her personal computer that she had "forgotten" and had kept "safe" on her personal computer. Prosser was declared the winner, and a subsequent investigation was suppressed by the court on which Prosser now sat. With Prosser on the court, Republican governor Scott Walker was able to solidify his radical measures over the angry protests of citizens. Elections, even rigged ones, have consequences.

Again, it all goes back to 2000. The Republicans bragged about how they would handle the counting of votes.

In this short video a computer programmer testifies under oath to being asked by the Speaker of the Florida legislature to write a program to rig the Florida vote count in 2000. He also testifies to his certainty that there were sufficient anomalies in the 2004 count in Ohio that that vote count was also rigged.

Here is an interview with the Florida programmer.

In 2006 a Utah Republican election official said the Diebold election machines could not be trusted. As a result Diebold was able to get him removed from an office he'd held for 23 years.

Hacking Democracy is a documentary about how the 2000 and 2004 elections were stolen. This first of nine segments tells how Al Gore received MINUS 16,022 votes in Volusia County.

A description of what happened in Volusia County Florida in 2000. Reported in New Zealand, but not heard very widely in the U.S.

Mark Crispin Miller did some great reporting on the bizarre anomalies in the 2004 election. His articles appeared in Harper's.

The broader media ignored the story, preferring to keep the public placidly uninformed. Here is a lecture he delivered on the subject. Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. (Thank you YouTube.)

An interview with Mark Crispin Miller

A pretty fair summary of what happened in recent elections.

Another summary from the UK, explaining the various means of rigging American elections using the voting machinery.

A pretty fair analysis of how election fraud has unfolded in the U.S., not at the hands of individual voters (the target of Republicans trying to suppress the vote) but by the machinery and the officials handling the election.

Analysis from OpEd News in 2004. With many links to academic experts on the technology that was used to steal the 2004 election.

Here's a very chilling summary of the cataclysmic and strangely uninvestigated elections of 2000 and 2004.

To cap it all, there is the mysterious death of a conspirator, Michael Connell, who wanted to testify. Before he died, this IT expert for the Bush Cheney White House, gave a deposition describing what had occurred in Ohio in 2004 and his hand in it. A source said Connell's life had been threatened by Karl Rove.

These concerns seemed moot in 2008. They should worry us again. And it reads like a bestselling thriller.

The Tax Evasion Industry

2011-07-22T10:19:00.000-07:00

Everybody hates the tax man, so people tend to laugh when tax evaders get away with it. Never mind that Jesus advised people to pay their taxes, and President George Washington personally led an army to go after tax evaders in western Pennsylvania.

Taxation is both Christian and patriotic. So how do flag wavers and bible thumpers get away with their evasions? Plain and simple? They cheat. They leave honest citizens to carry their burden. They sit at the table and order food, they eat and drink, and they leave before the check arrives. They may be good at business, but mostly they're good at avoiding their responsibilities as citizens and neighbors. They are lowlifes. We shouldn't admire them. We shouldn't allow what they do. Mostly we shouldn't be paying their debts for them.

Here's a very good article by Chuck Collins in Sojourners.

Tax evasion is a big business model, and the biggest tax evaders are corporations. Companies like Amazon.com outcompete the small independent bookstores by evading sales taxes. There's an excellent article about this in Mother Jones.

The "Double Irish" maneuver corporations use to avoid paying taxes. Clever them, poor us. Here's a useful diagram.

The U.S. may have a high rate of corporate tax, but corporations don't pay it. The Daily Beast has a list. It's worth sharing with your conservative friends.

The top corporate tax dodgers include GE, Eli Lilly, Google, Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp (FoxNews and the Wall Street Journal), Boeing, Pfizer, Oracle, Altria (Philip Morris), IBM, Goodrich, TimeWarner, Morgan Stanley, the Hartford, Devon Engergy, Hewlett Packard and Microsoft.

Talking About the Late Great Middle Class

2011-07-21T08:13:00.000-07:00

Here are some links to a few excellent talks about what's happening to the American middle class. America is oddly oblivious, perhaps because the people who deliver our news aren't middle class and are therefore insulated.

Krugman discusses the great prosperity of America's postwar years, and how it came apart.

Another Nobel economist, Joseph Stiglitz, explains what's happened and is still happening to the great American middle class.

The Collapse of the Middle Class, a talk by Elizabeth Warren

How did American workers keep heads above water after Reaganomics became our national religion? Working two jobs, working longer, borrowing, not going to the doctor.

If you haven't seen it before, Robert Reich explains the plight of the middle class in two minutes.

The Two Income Trap, with professor (and future senator?) Elizabeth Warren

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GHg3GAeQ1Y&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB7jdjsFErM&feature=share

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czKWF0lGikg&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9twENPYkdcI&feature=related

Deadbeats, Radicals, Vandals, Anarchists, Republicans

2011-07-20T09:06:00.000-07:00

It's getting pretty difficult to think of Republicans as conservative, considering all that they're trying to tear down. Conservatives don't play chicken with the U.S. economy. They don't conduct off-the-books wars or lie us into them. Real conservatives don't max out the national credit card and leave the next president with a bankrupt economy. So what are these new Republicans? News organizations and prominent journalists from here to Australia are trying to figure that out. Follow the links to today's must-reads.

Republicans are Deadbeats who don't fulfill agreements or honor contracts.

Republicans are Radicals, eager to undo every functioning institution.

Republicans are Anarchists, who want no government at all so they can run amok.

Republicans are Vandals, looking for opportunities to burn, loot and pillage.

Today's Republicans are not conservatives because they don't want to preserve what works. They want to tear down programs and institutions that have worked efficiently and well for the best part of fifty years, the most prosperous and stable period in American history.

Privatizing Our Democracy

2011-07-18T13:41:00.000-07:00

There are some chilling articles being published these days. A few making it into the mainstream media describe what's going on in state capitals all across America, where "Tea Party" Republicans, funded, organized, trained and instructed by Big Oil, Big Tobacco and Big Pharma, are taking orders from bosses like the Koch Brothers and working to kill not only the middle class but representative government as we know it–––while neatly wrapped in the flag and singing God Bless America.

From TruthOut.Org

From In These Times

It's like a scene out of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington; government by the bosses.

What's the alternative to government operated for the convenience and profit of multinational corporations and rich individuals like the Koch Brothers and Rupert Murdoch? It's us. It's government by us.

It's ordinary, practical, people-centered elective government. Ever since Teddy Roosevelt that's meant "progressive" government, not big government necessarily, or not any bigger than we are––let's face it, the US is now home to over 300 million people––but progressive, focused on more of us doing better and living better, having better jobs and secure lives.

This is both progressive and conservative. Flexible and practical. Led for and by the people rather than for and by corporate bosses. It's as American as apple pie.

It's both liberal and conservative––conservative in that it preserves and improves what works. Which means preserving what worked well for the best fifty years in America history–– the time-tested institutions and commonsense rules, put in place by TR and FDR and Truman and Ike. This is what the modern Republican Party is trying to tear down. The Republican Party isn't conservative at all, it's dangerously radical.

Evading Responsibilty Through Mathematics

2011-07-16T12:33:00.000-07:00

Today's Must-Read comes from the online chautaqua BigThink. (Visit it. Read it. Subscribe, before you get distracted by something trivial.) Today's BigThink reminds us (and we need reminding) that mathematics doesn't/shouldn't/cannot remove or diminish the necessity of ethical decisions.

Our biggest mistake is delegating our ethics and our humanity to logarithms, to mathematics. Does profit know right from wrong? It doesn't care, and we should. If we don't know any better than this we aren't human. If our elected officials and our bosses don't know any better than this they don't deserve to lead. Rationalization is something we were supposed to outgrow in childhood. It's embarrassing to see it's become part of how our society operates. It may kill us yet.

Laughing at Rupert Murdoch, Ha Ha

2011-07-14T09:28:00.001-07:00

We can laugh at Rupert Murdoch all we want, but he's laughing at us because he has enormous power over us. Think of it: a right-wing Australian owns a dominant part of the American media, the key parts being the Wall Street Journal and FoxNews. He uses these platforms to lie to us. Does he also use them to spy on us?

The Daily Show's take is funny in a creepy kind of way. Andy Borowitz's piece begs the question: are the readers and viewers of Murdoch's news operations intelligent enough to be granted adult privileges? Should Murdoch be trusted with a news operation at all?

No, we shouldn't laugh. News tells us what to do in our lives, and if we are lied to we behave like fools. Corrupt news is a public danger. Here is an excellent summary of the Rupert Murdoch machine, with excellent links.

The shameless, predatory propaganda 'n scandal sheet News of the World [sic] is just one media enterprise owned by Rupert Murdoch. He also owns the Times of London, the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal and FoxNews. Would you guess that he runs his other organizations any differently than the runs the NOTW?

Ran, actually. The British public, after being nauseated and addicted by it for years finally had enough and Murdoch shut it down...presumably shifting the vermin from that paper to his other papers. Not to FoxNews, presumably, because it's all vermined-up. But it does make you wonder... Does the Wall Street Journal engage in the same criminal tactics to get news and to distort the news into balloon animals to amaze its captive audience? What about the New York Post? What about FoxNews? Dumb question. I think we need an aggressive progressive paper like the Guardian over here. It was the Guardian that blew the lid off the News of the World [sic] sleaze factory.

Springtime for Millionaires

2011-07-11T11:53:00.000-07:00

From Mother Jones, and from many non-partisan sources, a lot of useful visuals and diagrams describing what has happened to the middle class. Who stole our prosperity? Guess.

The best way to eliminate the deficit would be to pay all Americans better instead of restricting prosperity to the top one percent. This would make us all better taxpayers, better consumers. We would all feel more secure.

In the past forty years, since Reagan declared "morning in America", only the very few at the top of the income graph have seen an increase in income against the rising cost of living. To borrow a phrase from a popular musical, it was Springtime for Millionaires when Reagan began the reign of Reaganomics. It ended the broad prosperity begun by FDR and continued by Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Carter. Reaganomics stole from the many to enrich the few. Robin Hood in reverse. So why do people revere him?

The Long Game

2011-07-08T09:26:00.000-07:00

Before he hooked up with Murdoch's money, Roger Ailes was a GOP dirty trickster and propagandist. Many of the top Republican ops learned how it was done while working for Nixon.

The "Southern Strategy" for scooping up the angry white South angry about civil rights was conceived under Nixon. The South that never forgave Lincoln for freeing the slaves had voted Democratic for a hundred years but Nixon saw an opportunity to appeal to the region's racism (and juice it a bit) and the South has been solid Republican ever since.

Papers recently discovered in the Nixon Library show that Roger Ailes came up with the concept for FoxNews while working for Nixon. Eisenhower Republicanism died during the Nixon years and was replaced with something nastier, something that appealed to hatreds and fears rather than hopes and dreams. If news organizations delivered inconvenient truths, Ailes had the idea of controlling the news by owning it. Cynical? Yes. Successful? That too.

The Rupert Murdoch Propaganda Machine

2011-07-07T08:36:00.000-07:00

Rupert Murdoch lies for profit. Coincidentally, his newspapers and broadcast companies function as the propaganda arm of the Republican Party here and the conservatives in Britain. Their power is his power and he does very well for them.

The News of the World, the infamous London tabloid, fools millions of working class Brits every week with its addictive sleaze and distortion. Their methods are outrageous. The most recent revelation involves the Murdoch tabloid reporters and editors hacking into the cell phone of a kidnapped child, leading frantic parents to believe she was still alive, stripping the privacy and dignity of crime victims to sell newspapers. The story was broken by reporter Nick Davies of the Guardian.

This is predatory journalism. Actually, to use the word journalism degrades that important and often heroic profession. What Rupert Murdoch's company engages in isn't journalism, it's just predatory. Rupert Murdoch thinks of the reading public as so many defenseless and deceivable chumps.

This behavior isn't any different at FoxNews here in the U.S. TruthOut published a very good piece recently about the set of tactics used. The "news" operation is run by Roger Ailes, who is not a newsman but one of the most egregious practitioners of smear politics and dirty tricks, and a deep-dyed Republican. Rolling Stone recently published an excellent and damning portrait of Ailes.

FoxNews makes no pretense of actual truth or decency. Beyond its cynical slogan of "Fair and Balanced" there is no attempt to be either. The stream is all pro-Republican and harshly anti-Democratic 24 hours a day. News is a team sport. it's about winning the political game to push Murdoch's right-wing agenda as hard as it can be pushed and thereby increase Murdoch's personal wealth and corporate power.

The Murdoch operation is a throwback to the ugly press of an uglier time. Shades of Germany in the 1930s, and a period in this country when newspaper magnates bragged about starting wars in order to sell newspapers. The goal of the Murdoch organization isn't to inform but to provoke.

They are willing to intentionally distort and misrepresent clear facts about the most critical issues of our time to toe an ideological line and win a political ballgame. (This piece by Shawn Otto describes how Fox took a Reuters headline about global climate change and changed it to give it the opposite meaning, helping stall efforts to head off the looming calamity.)

What Fox does is insulting and beyond dishonest, it's criminally dishonest. FoxNews has demonstrated again and again that it doesn't deserve to be allowed anywhere near the public airwaves, any more than an embezzler should be handed the presidency of a bank.

What the Middle Class Loses the Upper Class Keeps

2011-07-06T10:24:00.000-07:00

Today's must-read is a New York Times article about how the richest bankers and corporate heads are paying themselves better in this recession than they earned before they helped tank the economy and we bailed them out.

Also, Mother Jones reports on how American workers work harder and longer for less money than they earned a generation ago. Not a good thing, unless you own instead of working for a living.

The Wall Street Journal, Rupert Murdoch's Republican Party newspaper, is reporting that workers who once could expect to earn more and have greater job security as they gained experience, skills and efficiency, now earn less and have less job security as they get past 40. The opposite of how it worked in Eisenhower's America.

Note that the WSJ's solution is to pour more of your earnings into Wall Street (boosting stock prices and executive bonuses and options, while skimping on the middle class "good life"). Was this negative trend part of a long range Republican plan? I don't think they achieved this by accident.

American workers have always been proud of producing more goods and services and doing so better and quicker and therefore earning more for it. It's enabled them to join the middle class, own homes, send children to college and retire comfortably. It also enabled them to be better consumers, which made a lot of businesses more prosperous. A broad prosperity is a more durable prosperity. This was the model until 1980, when the Reagan Revolution changed the formula.

The model since 1980 has been for workers to produce more goods and services better and quicker... but earn the same, or often less, for doing so. Since 1980 the prosperity of people who work and produce has not been considered prosperity at all, it's been relabeled a negative, a debit, a burden, a liability, a cost.

The wages of average workers have remained flat or declined since 1980. This was part of the Reagan Revolution too, but something a lot of people didn't realize they were voting for. This "doing down" has crossed over into the public sphere as well, where the temporary upper bracket tax cuts are sacred but the middle and working class tax cuts and benefits are negotiable and easily taken away, and now, as a finishing touch, middle class public employees are losing their rights and their job security. The job security in the public sector was something that allowed government to pay lower wages, but now security is gone too. Ironically, the savings are being shared out very narrowly to the very rich, with burdens shifted simultaneously onto the middle class.

Prosperity and security have become a narrow right, an upper class right, as was the case before the Great Depression. The real "gift" of Reaganomics is a new aristocracy and a growing servant class. The shift we are seeing is "validated" by Republican mathematics, which puts middle class prosperity in the cost column and upper class prosperity in the profit column, one bad and to be avoided, the other a sacred good to be protected. We need to change the math. It isn't fuzzy, as one Republican once said; it's actually crystal clear, but it's wrong, it's unfairly weighted, its values are skewed toward the values we revolted against in 1776. Ironically, the Republicans are using pictures from the 1950s, the broad prosperity they are destroying, to advertise the new narrower economics that benefits only their richest clients. Un-rich Republicans will receive their reward in heaven, supposedly.

Romney the Job Killer

2011-07-05T08:52:00.000-07:00

From Politico, a condensed description of how Mitt Romney made his half billion dollar fortune. First he inherited many millions. That's important. Then he founded Bain Capital and went into the business of buying up undervalued or struggling American manufacturers, in some cases for the purpose of stripping their assets, laying off thousands of workers, and pocketing millions, leaving the companies in bankruptcy. In these cases Romney's investment firm got very rich and left workers and creditors holding the bag.

The story about Romney was told most fully in the Boston Globe in 2007. If you don't have the $5 to read the full Boston Globe article, you can find key parts of it online, as in this blog. There's also a link to the archived piece.

You have to wonder why this story, published once in the Globe, hasn't been read since by anyone covering Romney's campaign. You don't hear questions asked about it. To hear him talk, Romney created jobs. Do you hear reporters clearing their throats and challenging him? No. At best his record is mixed. He created profits for Bain Capital and its clients, but even the successes have a significant downside. The millions investors gained, others lost.

Romney's job appears to have been to hunt the quarry and stand aside while his company took the quarry apart. Another Boston Globe piece described the Romney method for keeping his hands clean.

The Massachusetts AFLCIO has kept tabs on Romney's record.

Workers who lost their jobs told their stories in a series of ads. It's a shame reporters haven't been interested. But workers' stories are never as interesting as stories told by people with money.

Romney's main success story involves Staples, which Bain Capital bought and grew. It's successful today, but how many Main Streets have been destroyed by this model of big box retail? How many small local retailers were ground out of business? It's a zero-sum story in which big wins and small loses. Why should small businesspeople see Romney as a hero or any kind of ally?

The key to the Romney Republican business model is low prices and low wages, using volume and dominant size to kill competition. Dominance not only helps them suppress wages but also the suppliers' prices. All the money gained is paid out to the people at the top of the company, the owners, the equity partners, the moneymen.

Romney has a cute line he repeats, deploring “lifetime politicians” who “have never run a corner store, let alone the largest enterprise in the world.” But Romney inherited millions and made more by depressing wages, closing down companies and running mom and pop stores out of business. In a nutshell, that is the Republican model and we shouldn't be voting for it.

This neat summary comes from a Republican rival:

"And I would also suggest one needs to look very carefully at what exactly the business record is," Huckabee said. "If it's taking companies who are in serious trouble, buying them when they are in pain, selling off their assets, and then making a huge profit off of it, that's not something a lot of Americans can relate to, except those who have lost their jobs because of those kinds of transactions. If that's the turnaround, there are a lot of Americans who would really not like to see their own lives turned around quite like that."

The New York Times wrote about Romney's career in 2007. The damning material is there, but simply stated rather than analyzed.

Meanwhile Romney the businessman who made his bones by laying off workers jokes about being unemployed.

Left and progressive bloggers find this provocative enough to comment on. Sadly the mainstream media won't touch it. They're too afraid of being called "liberal".

Michele Bachmann Should Scare Us

2011-07-01T15:23:00.000-07:00

Curl up close to the AC with a tall cold drink and try not to let this Rolling Stone article scare you enough to wet your pants. It's a must read.

Michele Bachmann metastasized several years ago and it's too late to stop her now. Please don't laugh. We've spent several years laughing at her––because she is funny, like those improbable bimbos in Scary Movie––but, seriously, this is one of those times when we need to be afraid. We need to be worried. We can't run away. We need to confront the danger for what it is.

Maybe it comes down to the Big Lie. Bush Jr. had a gift for the Big Lie, but Bachmann is even better at it. She's faster and she's everywhere. (Is there an end-times creature that has the power to be in many places all at once? Where's my Book of Revelations?)

Bush seemed to lie without comprehending. He was as clueless as the average American. Bachmann has this cunning ability to state falsehoods as if she believes them utterly, as if God himself whispered them in her ear. As if they are true because she believes them. And while the mean journalist is pointing out what she's gotten wrong or asking her to clarify a misstatement, she's onto another lie larger and stranger than the last. She does it without blinking, and her sincerity vouches for every word.

Also there's her delivery. Her falsehoods are fired off in rapid clusters making it hard to shoot them down. You can't stop them all. While the knowledgeable person is questioning her about one lie in a paragraph of lies, she's quickly on to other lies bigger and stranger than the last bunch.

Her career resembles W's in another way. She makes us laugh. Apparent inadequacy is sometimes charming and amusing. Someone this ill-informed and strangely-informed ought to be laughed out of politics, but because America loves to laugh and the news media is forbidden to tell a Republican they are lying, Bachmann is media gold.

And unlike Bush, she doesn't appear to be stupid. Someone smart enough to know better who is so provably wrong about so many things becomes downright dangerous. She is smart enough to know better, so there is a reason she pushes the ridiculous and the false.

Unlike Bush, it isn't flim-flam. She isn't someone else's puppet. With her it's a cultlike zealotry. She is on a personal crusade. It's a belief system based on the end-time notion that if she can cause enough irreparable harm, wreck enough public institutions, pour enough sand in the works, derail enough systems, impoverish enough people and allow the very rich to steal enough money, and get the rest of us to herd ourselves down the sluice toward economic and environmental disaster... if she can make things bad enough, Jesus will come and rescue us, or at least rescue the people who voted for her. And if you believe that will happen, maybe we all deserve the outcome.