Is Michele Bachmann Right After All?

World Net Daily (always fascinating) reports Michele Bachmann blames/thanks Obama for triggering the End Times. Hooray! Now Jesus will come!

A priest on FoxNews says we can't trust our "atheist president" because he isn't afraid of eternal damnation.

The Dallas Morning News reports Texas Governor Abbott has called out the National Guard to keep watch on U.S. Military maneuvers which he thinks are a secret plan to take over the state of Texas.

(This is from way last year) Tom Delay, unseated corrupt Republican Speaker of the House, explains how God wrote the U.S. Constitution.

In Kansas, a new law permits prosecutors to put teachers in jail for assigning books they disapprove of.

In Texas, the state has approved a new history textbook for schools which includes Moses as one of our Founding Fathers.

The Guardian makes an interesting observation: in most American cities police can be put in jail for shooting animals, but not for shooting people.

Speaking of the Baltimore riots, New York Magazine published this interesting list of times white people have rioted, burned and looted over stupid things like basketball teams winning games.

On Fox'N'Friends a black woman put in a leadership post in the Miami police raises fears she might be a dangerous Muslim terrorist.

…maybe these are the End Times.

The Systematic Looting of the American Dream

Who owns the shining new residential towers going up in New York and other major cities? Don't answer; you wouldn't know them. The dream home used to be a widely shared American Dream, but this is no longer the case. (Because of Citizens United our political system is now owned the same way by secretive billionaires, many of them foreign, using piles of hoarded cash to buy residency and public policy.)

Increasingly the American Dream of homeownership is reserved for billionaires. They have extremely expensive pieds a terre in places all over the world, where they may only live a few days a year thereby evading the usual obligations to pay for local infrastructure and public services. What do you want to bet their real estate fees and taxes, if any, are paid by their companies and deducted from their income taxes, again, if any. The top 1% have learned to levitate above ordinary concerns and obligations of citizenship. What they want, they buy. What they don't want to do, they buy out of.

And what has happened to middle class homeownership? The opposite. Going, going, gone. Homeownership has become a privilege of the few who own for a living and those who work for a living are increasingly excluded.

The daily sermon fed to us for years by the banking industry and by the Republican Party was that homeownership was next to godliness. It was a measure of how responsible and hardworking you were. Now they seem to be saying that working class homeowners are to blame for the recent financial collapse. Not true, in fact. Middle class homeowners are the playthings of the 1%. The investment schemes that benefit people who own for a living are devised to skim fees and penalties and ownership from people who work for a living.

With incomes down we see more working people looking for ways to make ends meet. Reverse mortgages are advertised as a simple way to balance the family budget. By looting the family’s wealth. What choice do some families have? Looting of this kind happens when there is an exploitable advantage. Incomes have lowered for most Americans since 1980, a gift of Reaganomics. That has made most Americans exploitable.

Where have we seen this systematic looting of value before? We used to read about mobsters who took over small companies and looted their value at the point of a gun. It was a crime back then.

But more recently we’ve seen this same model used by the great heroic Venture Capitalist. The gun isn’t necessary because the middle and working class household is already being made insecure and exploitable by the decline of working incomes.

The Venture Capitalist looks for decent companies who pay their employees decently and maybe have a fully funded retirement plan for them––companies that have been untouched by Reaganomics. What does this Venture Capitalist do? He charms the company’s owner, offers him a nice check, and then he buys the company. Before the check clears he sucks all the money out of the pension fund and uses it to pay the former owner. Then he lays off employees and pockets those savings. Then he has a balance sheet that shows all of this “profit” which he uses to sell the company at an inflated price.

I realize the Nazi analogy is completely forbidden today. But the Nazi miracle was financed in a similar way, by confiscation from Jews and liberals. Someday we may be able to see the criminality of what is going on, or at least its unfairness and dishonesty. But right now it is legal. And it is also sanctified by the sacred memory of Ronald Reagan who set this middle class decline in motion.

The Looting of America

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.

The Looting of American Creativity

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."

Romney the Job Killer

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".