Oddly, Glennzilla does not mention in his list of people who predicted disaster if we invaded Iraq one of the foremost voices who was inexplicably dismissed and derided by the entire press corps, presumably because the man we had elected to be President of the United States is fat.
Digby: "The country is going to hell in a frigging handbasket because of bad decisions piled upon bad decisions, years in the making, and the White House acts like the country's various expressions of its fear and angst are inconvenient side trips that they just have to avoid or barrel through on the way to reelection. There's a very real sense that they just don't get it, which is, in my view, the thing that's making people very, very nervous. One person's cool under pressure is another's cold and indifferent."
Well, at least Alan Simpson can't say he wasn't told that the crap he spews about Social Security is bollocks. (Now, can someone tell Lawrence O’Donnell?) And, "Meanwhile, Simpson should be happy: Carson, whom he told to get back to him once she'd found "honest work!" is leaving her job as head of the Older Women's League (OWL) to be a senior staffer at the Senate Special Committee on Aging. Simpson, a former Republican senator from Wyoming, was previously the chairman of that committee. Carson confirmed her new position to HuffPost but declined to comment." (via)
Krugman: "Why do people like me feel the need to revisit the fateful decision to go for an underpowered stimulus right at the beginning of the Obama administration? It's not about 'I told you so', or at least not mainly. It's about the economic narrative, which will matter long after the current players are off the scene. The way the right wants to tell the story - and, I'm afraid, the way it will play in November - is that the Obama team went all out for Keynesian policies, and they failed. So back to supply-side economics! The point, of course, is that that is not at all what happened."
Who Rules America? Well, you already knew that, but still. (And there is some useful advice, here, but it overlooks the point that social change agents on the right didn't have to devote all their time to social activism, but just hired a lot of people to do it for them, giving those people a huge investment in believing what they were saying.)
Charlie Brooker is contemplating chocolate bars and looking for buzzwords to use about right-wingers. I'm too lazy to send him the word on "cheap labor conservatives", but I don't think that's quite what he's looking for. But I agree that it's no use simply calling people "racists" or "bigots" when there's a whole lot more there to unpack that is most assuredly not being unpacked by the listener.
Once again, it turns out that the right-wing doesn't have a sense of humor, and some famous actor's tweeting is worse than Glen Beck.
I'm told that the NYT front-paged this bra earlier, although perhaps not now. While looking for it, I discovered that the NYT, perhaps trying to hide the fact that it's encroaching on my territory, automatically bumped me from their front page to http://global.nytimes.com. Grrr. Yet more evidence that our "communications" organizations are trying to break rather than enhance our communications.
As I said sometime earlier, Solomon and McChesney were indeed very good (again), and reminded me of that Jim Hightower line, "There's nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes dead armadillos." And that's about where Obama and his pals have been leading us with their "centrism", where our "progressive" friends have been leading us with their "pragmatism", and where we are about to end up unless Obama suddenly starts to notice that he's screwing the pooch and decides that it isn't really a good idea to keep doing it. But, as I say, he hangs out with guys from the Chicago School of Economics and is unlikely to have that particular lightbulb go off.
As Ian Welsh points out, it is simply a canard that Obama's hands have been tied. Obama had the power to do many, many good things, and he refused every opportunity to do them. He refused to even attempt the most basic steps of negotiation with the opposition, asking not for a higher goal than what we really needed, but a lower goal as a pre-compromise, thus lowering the bar further still. He alleged (when he was trying to get elected) that he believed single-payer was the best way to go, but then he started babbling about the public option before he'd even started making a case for single-payer, having simply declared that passing single-payer wasn't politically feasible. (Oh, yeah? Start pounding it into the general public that everyone in America can get effectively free health care without raising taxes, and see how far Congress gets trying to resist it past the next election.) He even telegraphed to the press that he wasn't even really trying to get his so-called "compromise" of the public option, but instead was hoping the threat of the public option would frighten the insurance companies into slightly softening their viciously predatory and fraudulent practices - which it didn't. If he'd really wanted single-payer, he could of course have spent a lot of time explaining how real socialized medicine actually works in Britain and used it as the scare image of what "the left" was demanding, forcing the not-so-left to welcome single-payer as a longed-for compromise. And that has been his pattern with everything.
Oh, wait, not everything, because there were some things he never had to try to get past Congress in the first place - he could simply have done them.
Don't Ask, Don't Tell: Obama can issue a stop loss for any soldiers any time he wants. Bang, that's it, at least for as long as he's President.
HAMP (the program supposedly intended to help homeowners, which hasn't): This program is totally under administrative control. If Obama wanted it to work, there's nothing to stop him.
Habeas Corpus: Obama can give everyone in Gitmo their day in court. Restoring habeas corpus is totally at his discretion, and he has chosen not to.
Social Security: After Congress voted down a debt and deficit commission, Obama went ahead and created one anyway - and stacked it with people with track records of wanting to slash Social Security.
In short, Obama has managed to side-step Congress in order to work against Democratic policy positions (e.g., Social Security), but otherwise has ignored executive privilege when he wanted to continue Bush-era policies (e.g., detention without trial at Gitmo) or to ignore the rights and needs of everyday Americans (e.g., HAMP and DADT). To the Obama administration, Congress is a very selective obstacle.
And, as Ian continues, there are still plenty of things Obama can still do - and he can start by firing Bernenke. But:
The idea that Obama, or any President, is a powerless shrinking violet, helpless in the face of Congress is just an excuse. Presidents have immense amounts of power: the question is whether or not they use that power, and if they do, what they use it for.
Obama has a huge slush fund with hundreds of billions of dollars and all the executive authority he needs to turn things around.
If Obama is not using that money and authority, the bottom line is it's because he doesn't want to.
So the good scenario - the worst is over - unemployment will drop all the way down to 9% by the end of 2011!!
In January 2009, the administration projected that unemployment would drop below 7% by the end of 2011, without any stimulus.
And that's the optimistic view because they still don't want to do anything. Because doing something about it would mean wages might not continue to be depressed, people might not continue to be out of work and losing their homes, and fear of destitution would not frighten people into giving up their freedoms and their dignity for a crust of bread.
Meanwhile, what's happening to those people who laughed at the dirty hippies and put their faith in magical market theories?: "One example of academics gone terribly wrong, one that I feel badly about, is a relative who swallowed whole the teachings at Harvard's School of Business about creative debt, a.k.a. 'deficits don't matter'. Now underwater in a huge mortgage, his retirement funds and borrowings against a house, invested in the market, disappeared, as did so many other retirement plans. Now, he's struggling to keep his home from foreclosure while his wife is working in retirement to manage their living expenses. Like all too many of our generation, under assurances that economic theories he'd paid dearly to study, combined with the siren call of living high and paying later, this business school believer went over a cliff of controlled and rational planning sold widely by the purveyors of debt. Those credit card companies and financial houses are living high, even now, on those outdated theories' effects."
Hey, but hope springs eternal, which I suppose is why someone from the administration is saying sensible things in The New York Times. Oh, wait, it's an election year. I'm not holding my breath to find out that Obama's secret plan is to suddenly say, "See, we tried to do things the way the conservatives wanted, and they were wrong. We let some people have a commission on the deficit, and the only thing they could think of was to cut Social Security and keep tax breaks for millionaires - they're not serious. They freak out whenever we even mention helping Americans get back to work. So now we're going to ignore them and listen to the dirty hippies people who were right instead."
Michael Tomasky thinks it's a mystery, but (although, like Digby, I agree with #6), face it, he telegraphed all along that he believed in Reaganism more than he believed in liberalism, and that's why he's governing like a jackass.
And, anyway, they could pay for all that domestic spending without changing a thing, if they wanted to - all they have to do is write the checks.
I've always believed Martin Luther King was shot because he understood the real problem. It's obvious to me why Glenn Beck suddenly started sounding like a preacher when he made his Beckorama speech and was pretending to be MLK. He wanted to sound like a preacher. He may even have read or watched that speech (the real name of which I can't remember or find, but it wasn't "I Have a Dream"). But, of course, he was preaching a very different gospel.
But This Week in Tyranny, we continue the march into decline, and I'm sure Blackwater will be available to sort things out.
ONN report on Time magazine's launch of an "advanced" version of Timeaimed at adults.
This time I did remember to bring my camera, so I managed to get some shots of the current display at the optician's. (Larger image here; detail here.)
Ian Welsh: "What makes me saddest of all things in the world is this: the vast majority of the time the right thing to do morally is the right thing to do in terms of broad self-interest, and yet we don't believe that and we do the wrong thing, thinking we must, thinking that we're making the 'hard decisions'."
Jane Hamsher says, "President Obama, It's Time to Can the Catfood Commission." I guess it's polite to try to pretend that Obama is acting in good faith, but he didn't appoint this commission because he thought it would be good for Americans, and he certainly didn't do it because he thinks it's important not to treat working people with contempt. The fact that Alan Simpson is a pig isn't likely to change that. Jerry Nadler wants to fire Simpson, but as Atrios says, "Simpson isn't the problem. The whole crew is."
Krugman starts out being polite when he says, "I'm finding it hard to read about politics these days. I still don't think people in the administration understand the magnitude of the catastrophe their excessive caution has created. I keep waiting for Obama to do something, something, to shake things up; but it never seems to happen." And maybe he really does believe that the administration doesn't grasp that they are destroying America's economy and it's chances of recovery, but I think he may be forgetting that all Obama's friends are from the Chicago school, and they think that disaster would be a good thing. But he says, " the important thing is that all signs are that the next few years will be a combination of economic stagnation and political witch-hunt. This is going to be almost inconceivably ugly."
And one thing we can be sure of is that protecting Americans from real threats to our way of life is simply not on the table.
What's important, of course, is crippling a radio station that someone swears on. Funny the things they feel are okay to waste money on, eh?
While Glenn Beck apparently thinks he's MLK, even to the point of thinking he might be assassinated (by who?), Roland S. Martin remembers that King's 'dream' was radical economic message: "First, we need to stop calling it the March on Washington. It was officially called the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. If you leave off the "Jobs and Freedom" part, it sounds like black folks just went for a walk that day. Upset with the lack of economic opportunities for blacks at the time, as well as the voting rights injustices, the organizers wanted to put pressure on Congress and the President Kennedy administration to put their muscle behind a comprehensive civil rights bill. No, the 1963 march had nothing to do with some hokey values espoused by a radio/TV windbag. It was a day to assemble a mass of people to represent a show of strength and to get leaders in Washington to listen to the urgent need across the country."
Matt Taibbi figures stoking a race war is just what they do to keep everyone distracted from putting the blame where it really belongs, but wonders why no one has organized a boycott against the sponsors of the hate channel.
While it's true that passing a law to "protect" newspapers from having their articles quoted and linked on the web is an insanely stupid and self-defeating idea, I've always been surprised that the newspapers didn't set up some mechanism from the beginning that prevented non-subscribers from seeing whole articles on the first day of publication - say, post the headline and first paragraph in a format that required subscription to see the rest, then unlock it the next day. After all, newspapers have always been relatively ephemeral and of value only on the day of publication - after that, you had to go to your library to read them. (And, just as importantly, you always could go to your library to read them for free. It was just more of a pain in the ass.) For some reason, the papers seemed to think it was a good idea to do it backwards - you may recall that you used to have to subscribe to the NYT or to Nexus-Lexus in order to access archival material, even though you could see it for free on the date of publication.
I met this guy at the pub who mentioned he had a blog. I checked it out, and noticed a familiar theme. He's writing about British policies, but he might just as well be talking about the Republicrats.
The upward redistribution of the last three decades has nothing to do with the market and a belief in "market fundamentalism." This is about a process where the rich and powerful have rewritten the rules to make themselves richer and more powerful.
For example, they wrote trade rules that were designed to put downward pressure on the wages of the bulk of the U.S. workforce by placing manufacturing workers in direct competition with low-paid workers in China and other developing countries. This had nothing to do with a belief in "free trade." They did not try to subject lawyers, doctors or other highly paid workers to the same sort of international competition. They only wanted international competition to put downward pressure on the wages of workers in the middle and bottom, not those at the top.
This elite has instituted a system of corporate governance that allows top executives to pilfer companies at the expense of their shareholders and its workers. Top executives are overseen only by a board of directors who owe their hugely overpaid sinecures to the executives they supervise. And of course the Wall Street barons themselves are given a license to gamble with the implicit promise that government picks up their tab when they lose. [...] No progressive movement will make any progress until we understand the battle we are fighting. Our income is a cost to the rich. They will look to cut it wherever they can, whether this is wages for private sector workers, pensions for public employees, or Social Security for retirees. That is their target.
We have to fight back using the same logic. Their income is our cost -- the multimillion dollar bonuses for the Wall Street wizards is a direct drain on the economy. So are the bloated paychecks of top executives and their lackey boards. Progressives must be prepared to use all the same tactics to bring down the income of the rich and powerful that they have used to reduce the income of everyone else.
I've been describing this plan here for quite some time, and Baker has been unpacking the term "free trade" for quite a while - maybe the only person to keep hammering this point, that there is no free trade and that its purpose is not as described. Thomas Friedman (and Brad DeLong) may want to believe (or want us to believe) that this is about raising the standards of the poor in India, but that isn't happening and this was never the way to do it. The way you raise standards elsewhere is to refuse to do business with countries that don't live up to a higher standard - make US standards high, and tell everyone else that if they can't do the same for their people, they can't get our dollars for their slave-labor products. We are doing the reverse, with predictable results: Reward evil and drive out the good.
Or, as Paul Rosenberg puts it:
What they're after right now on the global scale is a massive roll-back of social insurance, wages, and middle-class wealth. In short: They want to wipe out the middle class that has taken several centuries to create, and return us to the pre-modern world that is divided almost entirely between rich and poor, with a small middle class that consists almost entirely of hangers on servicing the rich as glorified servants.
And Scarecrow points us to a scribe, long loathed here at The Sideshow, who I'm sure will be richly rewarded for servicing the rich since he apparently thinks social spending is the only "wasteful" spending: "Matt Bai and the editors of the New York Times have printed an article ostensibly about Democratic Congressman Earl Blumenauer and his willingness to cut wasteful spending to reduce the deficit - as though eliminating unhelpful or harmful programs were an unheard of position for Democrats even though they just adopted legislation to cut unjustified payments to health care providers and private education lenders by hundreds of billions. But that misdirection isn't even the main problem. With no apparent oversight from the Times' editors, Bai turns the 'news analysis' article into a Republican talking point attacking Social Security and the US Government's credit worthiness. You can see upcoming 'corrections and retractions' written all over this one."
Is it possible that people really believe this stuff that is manifestly untrue and makes no sense at all? Or are they just making it up as they go along? I think it's the old Rovian playbook, myself - throw it all out there to muddy up the waters, say anything to make it sound like you know what you're talking about, but get the job of screwing the middle-class and destroying America done.
You Have Been The Victims Of A Terrible Swindle - but it's not "intergenerational theft" so much as yet another scam played by the rich against the rest, and I really wish people would acknowledge that. It's not a particular generation that did this, and a considerable number of those who did are young compared to the people who are being blamed.
Psst! Digby! I think I have the answer to your question: It's called The Prosperity Gospel. What it unpacks as is simply this: Bad things only happen to bad people, so there's no such thing as an "innocent victim". That's why Scalia thinks it's okay if innocent people are executed and why so many of our "leaders" think it's okay to destroy the lives of millions of people. They deserved it! God doesn't like them! (Alternatively, there's the Chicago School of Economics, where it's just that they are elites who should run things and the rest of us should serve them. I think they're probably all atheists, but in a bad way.)
I guess Kos wants me to waste more time worrying about imaginary filibusters. There are no filibusters. There are people saying they'll filibuster, but it's pretty bloody easy to say that when you know you'll never have to. It's like saying, "I'll climb Everest and be back in time for dinner." If no one's gonna call you on it, we can pretend it's true.
I can't help thinking this song is addressed to Obama about his having made off with the Democratic Party.
The optician's shop in Lamb's Conduit Street often has unusual displays, and I meant to bring my camera that night but I forgot and had to enlist a friend to take the picture with her phone. So the quality suffers, but it's still a pretty cool image.
It is rather astonishing to see, of all things, a Baby-Boomer whining about how These Kids Today need to start growing up and living like adults. Just leaving aside the fact that, as as Digby notes, every generation has had to listen to this crap from their elders while they were still wet behind the ears, Boomers of all people should remember the constant litany of complaints that have followed their entire lives from their elders and from those who forgot that they were, in fact, Boomers themselves and doing nothing significantly different from others their own age.
But then, there has always been a certain kind of person who can be so ignorant that they believe they pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps when in fact their parents and entire society had built a rising platform under them. Thanks to FDR and LBJ, you had a much better chance of finding some kind of independence (even being able to pay for your own apartment in downtown Washington, DC) when you were 17 at the time that the Boomers were emerging into adulthood. That's because there were jobs for just about anyone marginally competent who wanted one, and housing was not terribly expensive. It was possible to get a job that paid $100 a week with no particular skills other than reading and writing, which may not sound like much until you realize that $52 a month was enough for a comfortable place (with a washer and dryer!) in the Lower East Side (the "East Village"), $100 a month could get you a roomy apartment in Georgetown, and $200 a month was all you needed to rent a nice brownstone house in Dupont Circle. A kid with a guitar only needed a couple-few paying gigs in a bar to cover that - and there were plenty of places hiring kids with guitars for the night. (Someday we can talk about the free air fare, too.)
And then all the guys who couldn't get laid in college put on bowties and declared themselves cool, and decades of conservative campaign put a stop to all that.
Now we are sliding back to those pre-FDR days when parents supported their kids until the kids were ready to support their parents. The freedom for families to cut the apron strings was a result of the liberal economics that no longer hold sway in America, and anyone who wants to complain about These Kids Today not moving out fast enough had better start agitating for more government spending on domestic programs - more rebuilding of infrastructure, more student grants (I can remember when "student aid" turned into "student loans", better known as "student debt"), expanded Social Security, and all those other ways of moving money throughout the economy that the dirty hippies keep saying we should have. Unfortunately, along with the hippies, the Baby-Boom generation also had its full complement of squares.
"GOP candidate: Use prisons as 'welfare dorms'. Republican candidate for governor Carl Paladino said he would transform some New York prisons into dormitories for welfare recipients, where they could work in state-sponsored jobs, get employment training and take lessons in 'personal hygiene.'" Mmmhmmm..
I imagine Atrios is really angry over HAMP, and alternatively hanging his head in his hands. I certainly am, but the thing is, everyone should be angry over HAMP, and too many people aren't. And in the White House, it appears that cheating Americans out of more money is part of the plan. "HAMP'd: Someone should resign in disgrace but, you know, that doesn't really happen anymore." "Horror Show: Thanks for finally admitting the HAMP was essentially an 'extend and pretend' plan, a way to gouge a few more pennies out of desperate homeowners before dumping them on the streets. We're from the government, and we're here to fuck you over." "The Horror Show Continued."
Dean Baker: "If this disaster was preventable and we know how to get out of it, why didn't our leaders try to stop it before it happened? Why don't they take the steps necessary now to get the economy moving again? The answer to both these questions is simple; the politicians work for someone else." (via)
Diane says: "Shame On President Obama ... ...And shame on us. What do the UK, Poland, Lithuania, Spain, Australia, Canada have in common? All have official investigations and/or legal cases pending over their countries' role in the CIA's Bush-era programs of kidnapping and torture. One country is noticeably absent from the list: the US."
The Wikileak With The Dragon Tattoo - An unfounded but serious charge against WikiLeaks spokesman Julian Assange - a journalist who puts the truth out there - does have that feel, doesn't it? Oh, wait, it reminds me of something else, too.
Well, at least the coroner admitted that this taser death was a homicide. Not that we can expect any accountability; it's now standard that cops and prison guards can murder people with impunity. (The UK is no different in that respect, by the way.)
Alan Grayson thinks there are more important things to be talking about than whether a Muslim community center gets built in Manhattan, but if we must talk yet again about 9/11, we should be talking about the administration that let it happen.
"Troops: Refusing to attend Christian concert got us into trouble. The Army said Friday it was investigating a claim that dozens of soldiers who refused to attend a Christian band's concert at a Virginia military base were banished to their barracks and told to clean them up."
"Economic forecaster: 'Greatest Depression' coming: Collapse of middle class means there's no fuel for recovery, Gerald Celente argues. The US economic recovery in recent quarters is little more than a 'cover-up' and the world is headed for a 'Greatest Depression,' complete with social unrest and class warfare, says a renowned economic forecaster. Gerald Celente, head of the Trends Research Institute, told Yahoo!News' Tech Ticker that there's no risk of a 'double-dip recession' because the first "dip" never ended."
I'm always entertained at the way a new communication technology is decried as corrupting art and communication. Take, for example, Gutenberg....
I was sitting around wishing I could see Lou Stathis again, and then I remembered and wanted to make this cool photo more accessible to people who hate Facebook as much as (or more than) I do, and was very annoyed to find that "The new Flickr photo page. Bigger. Faster. More Flickr-er" is dumber, slower, uglier, and much more annoying than the Flickr I've been finding so useful.
I was tempted to save this link for the anniversary of something either really cool or something not so lucky at all, but what the hell, have some lucky moments. (Although I rather liked this advice, too, possibly because I used to finish assignments way in advance of deadlines, and then life got different.)
What's even better than cheap labor? Slave labor: Pay no attention to the giant elephant in the room. The problem is not 'undocumented workers' or 'illegal immigration' or 'organized labor.' The problem, as always, is greed. Slave labor in the interest of corporate profits is not just fine and dandy. America has become the foreign country you were always grateful you didn't live in.
As the GOP spend more and more on buying judicial elections, you can expect even less justice when you try to enforce contracts against Big Money.
Jacob Davies' "Post Twentieth Century Stress Disorder" provides us with a lightning history (and also made me wonder if we could just convince all the wingers that it is Muslims, rather than Jews, who run the banking system that wrecked the economy...oh, but then they'd just round up Jews Muslims instead of bankers, dammit. Anyway, I'm not sure I buy this analysis. I think people just have really short memories and too much testosterone floating around.
I was interested to learn that The Cook Report downgraded the chances of ten Democrats to retain their seats in the next election ("(CA-47 Loretta Sanchez, FL-02 Allen Boyd, GA-08 Jim Marshall, IA-03 Leonard Boswell, IL-11 Debbie Halvorson, OH-16 John Boccieri, PA-08 Patrick Murphy, PA-10 Chris Carney, SD-AL Stephanie Herseth Sandlin, TN-04 Lincoln Davis" - either from "Likely" to leaning D or from "Lean D" to "Toss Up"), and that all but two of them are Blue Dogs. Of course, if they lose because the base can't bring themselves to work for these creeps, the take-away lesson in the Village will be that they were too liberal.
I was looking at this MoDo column from last week and felt a true sense of wonder at how fast she can have an insight and then run away from it in order to fit it all into the prevailing Villager narrative. She as much as calls Obama a flip-flopping liar in the column, but attacks "the left" for not putting their faith in him and accepting the necessity of "compromise". Not that she has any idea who "the left" is - she apparently believes "the left" were the people who proposed the Public Option. No, that was Barack Obama who proposed it as a compromise between what the majority of the public wanted (universal access to real health care) and what the insurance companies wanted (forcing everyone who didn't already have health insurance to buy their fake insurance plans). Without the public option, what we have is, um, just what the insurance companies wanted, and no compromise. What the actual left wanted was, of course, a National Health Service-style scheme where the entire medical system was owned and operated by We The People and run as a government program.
This is old news but I'd been meaning to mention it, and wow, even the Daily Mail has been willing to entertain questions about David Kelly's death, noting the statement of the detective who found his body: "'I certainly didn't see a lot of blood anywhere. There was some on his left wrist but it wasn't on his clothes. On the ground there wasn't much blood about, if any.' The Hutton Report said there were bloodstains on a water bottle next to the corpse. Mr Coe said: 'I didn't see any bloodstains on the bottle and I didn't check the knife.' His account matches that of two experienced paramedics at the scene, who said the lack of blood was puzzling. And the Guardian on the possibility of reopening the inquest: "The move comes after nine experts, including Michael Powers, a QC and former coroner, and Julian Blon, a professor of intensive care medicine, called for a full inquest into Kelly's death saying the official finding - haemorrhage from the severed artery - was 'extremely unlikely'." (via)
The United States is heading to the Third World on the stupid train: "It's no accident that the social democracies - Sweden, France and Germany, who kept on paying high wages - now have more industry than the United States or the UK. During the '70s, '80s and '90s, the Anglo-Americans, the neoliberals, The Economist crowd, and the press generally, would taunt the social democrats in Europe: "You'd better break the unions." That's the way to save your industry. Indeed, that's what the United States and the UK did: They smashed the unions, in the belief that they had to compete on cost. The result? They quickly ended up wrecking their industrial base. But Germany, Sweden and France ignored the advice of the Anglo-Americans, the Financial Times elite, the banking industry: Contrary to what they were told to do, they did not wreck their unions."
Sammy says: "MoveOn asked me to ask folks on the street what they thought of plans to raise the social security retirement age, cut social security benefits and extend tax breaks for millionaires. Their verdict? Watch and find out."
Bluegal says it's the Tweet of the week: "In fairness, we've been building 'ground zeros' near Iraqi mosques since March 2003"
Due to some rather tragic technical difficulties, the post I was going to upload is locked up in a computer that decided not to work when I got home and turned it on, so instead you get this:
I don't know why I never thought to look there before, but a number of people have put up video sets of gorgeous stills of the Aurora Borealis like this one. But I also found this time-lapse video of a single night's performance in Norway, and an episode from BBC's The Sky At Night with some rather impressive footage.
The long-awaited match-up between CS Kendrick and Stuart Zechman on Virtually Speaking Sundays had a few interesting sparks.
Since I know some of you never click on links, even when you are about to comment that I ought to mention something that is directly referred to in the text and conveniently provided link, I thought I'd give you the vital section of this now-legendary piece by Conceptual Guerilla, even though he seems to have a strange aversion to that honorable piece of punctuation known as the question mark. It didn't have a permalink at the time I first found it, and in order to make sure it never again gets lost, I've made a page for it at The Sideshow Annex as well, but I did finally find it, so, here is the relevant excerpt from:
Is there really a catch phrase - a "magic bullet" - that sums up the Republican Right in such a nice easy-to-grasp package. You better believe it, and it's downright elegant in its simplicity.
You want to know what that "magic bullet" is, don't you. Read on. You've still got two minutes.
Right-Wing Ideology in a Nutshell
When you cut right through it, right-wing ideology is just "dime-store economics" - intended to dress their ideology up and make it look respectable. You don't really need to know much about economics to understand it. They certainly don't. It all gets down to two simple words.
"Cheap labor". That's their whole philosophy in a nutshell - which gives you a short and pithy "catch phrase" that describes them perfectly. You've heard of "big-government liberals". Well they're "cheap-labor conservatives".
"Cheap-labor conservative" is a moniker they will never shake, and never live down. Because it's exactly what they are. You see, cheap-labor conservatives are defenders of corporate America - whose fortunes depend on labor. The larger the labor supply, the cheaper it is. The more desperately you need a job, the cheaper you'll work, and the more power those "corporate lords" have over you. If you are a wealthy elite - or a "wannabe" like most dittoheads - your wealth, power and privilege is enhanced by a labor pool, forced to work cheap.
Don't believe me. Well, let's apply this principle, and see how many right-wing positions become instantly understandable.
Cheap-labor conservatives don't like social spending or our "safety net". Why. Because when you're unemployed and desperate, corporations can pay you whatever they feel like - which is inevitably next to nothing. You see, they want you "over a barrel" and in a position to "work cheap or starve".
Cheap-labor conservatives don't like the minimum wage, or other improvements in wages and working conditions. Why. These reforms undo all of their efforts to keep you "over a barrel".
Cheap-labor conservatives like "free trade", NAFTA, GATT, etc. Why. Because there is a huge supply of desperately poor people in the third world, who are "over a barrel", and will work cheap.
Cheap-labor conservatives oppose a woman's right to choose. Why. Unwanted children are an economic burden that put poor women "over a barrel", forcing them to work cheap.
Cheap-labor conservatives don't like unions. Why. Because when labor "sticks together", wages go up. That's why workers unionize. Seems workers don't like being "over a barrel".
Cheap-labor conservatives constantly bray about "morality", "virtue", "respect for authority", "hard work" and other "values". Why. So they can blame your being "over a barrel" on your own "immorality", lack of "values" and "poor choices".
Cheap-labor conservatives encourage racism, misogyny, homophobia and other forms of bigotry. Why? Bigotry among wage earners distracts them, and keeps them from recognizing their common interests as wage earners.
The Cheap-Labor Conservatives' "Dirty Secret": They Don't Really Like Prosperity.
Paul Rosenberg, with a little help from Rachel Maddow, on Cowardice:
This Administration is a failure by choice. It has not been defeated by its enemies, but by itself. By its own actions--and more tellingly, by its own inactions, its failure to act, or even to think of acting. It is a victim of its own lack of imagination as well as its lack of courage.
Oh, sure, one can argue that it's not a failure at all. That it's doing exactly what the ruling class wants it to do. But though true in one sense, that's utter bullshit in another. FDR was hated by the ruling class. But he saved their bacon by going against their petty, narrow-minded, self-destructive instincts. Obama is destroying America--including America's ruling class--by not standing up against the self-destructive passions of the moment. Heck, he can't even speak out for the First Amendment against hypocritical clowns like Newt Gingrich.
We are in a fight for the soul of America, as well as the soul of the Democratic Party. And although those who stand against us have a great deal of organizational power, they are losers at bottom. They are liars and cowards. Their vision of America is a sham and a disgrace. And they are condemned by all the minute particulars of what they have done and not done in our names.
Shame on them all. And shame on us, if we let ourselves be cowed by them.
And speaking of Rachel, a glimpse at how so much of the evil going on in America today can thank one of the most powerful groups in America: the prison industry.
Center for Economic Policy Research: "The Washington Post really really hates Social Security. They hate Medicare almost as much. Therefore they are willing to give its critics space to say almost anything against the program (the real cause of September 11th) no matter how much they have to twist reality to make their case. Today, Republican Representative Paul Ryan stepped up to the plate. The Post felt the need to give him an oped column after Paul Krugman cruelly subjected Mr. Ryan's "Roadmap for America's Future" to a serious analysis last week. This violated the long accepted practice in elite Washington circles of not holding proponents of Social Security and Medicare cuts/privatization accountable for the things they say. It is therefore understandable the Post would quickly give a coveted oped slot to Mr. Ryan to make amends for such a grievous breach of protocol." (via)
So the other night was supposed to be the best night to see the Perseids, and the sky was so gorgeous, and I really thought I'd finally get to see a shooting star. I went out in between doing things on and off but I didn't have time to hang about, and by the time I was able to take a break and just sit around watching for a while, it had clouded over, and there's been no sky ever since. Bummer. But have a picture. (And while I'm there, this x-ray of flowers is kind of neat, too.)
March on Washington, Oct. 2nd - Susie says she will be there if she has to crawl: "August 5, 2010, WASHINGTON - The AFL-CIO executive committee voted unanimously this morning to join One Nation, Working Together, a new national coalition of labor and civil rights groups that has as its purpose to 'reorder America's priorities by investing in the nation's most valuable resource - its people.'"
One of the things Watertiger and I touched on Sunday night on Virtually Speaking (download the podcast!) all too briefly was the latest move in the anti-immigrant mania being pushed on the right, but unlike me, Digby actually watched the segment on This Week where the Village discussed the subject, and has their view. Of course, if I'd been there, I would have suggested "immigration reform" that eliminates the concept of "illegals" altogether and simply requires that all alien residents hired in the US must join a union, must have a right to strike, and must be paid at least one cent more per hour than any American with the same job. Of course, not many people would support it, but just think how much less attractive hiring foreigners would be to the Bosses if such a law existed. Also, more from Digby on Wall Street's economic terrorists (and the people who cave in to them), and eight popular lies. And Tristero on making stupidity respectable.
Sirota, "Report: Obama Launches New Program to Help Corporations "Take Advantage of Low Labor Costs" Abroad: In recent months, President Obama reversed his campaign promises on trade issues - first by dropping his pledge to renegotiate NAFTA and then by pushing to pass NAFTA-style trade agreements with South Korea, Panama and Colombia. Now, with the unemployment crisis persisting, the key jobs question is once again front a center in American politics. Specifically: How do we create jobs here at home and build our most valuable 21st century industries? The first and foremost answer is that our government should stop doing stuff like the program described in this stunning new report from Information Week."
If you've seen Gibbs' remarkable put-down of "the professional left", you probably noticed that almost every word of it is wrong, but Aravosis notes that, "This interview with White House spokesman Robert Gibbs is really quite remarkable. Not in its substance - President Obama's staff smears the Democratic base, and our issues, on a regular basis. No, what's remarkable is that a senior White House official has finally gone on the record in order to smear the Democratic base. That's unprecedented. It also puts to the rest the White House's prior defense, whenever a senior unnamed official went after the base, of claiming it was a rogue employee who didn't represent the President. Gibbs clearly does." But before that Aravosis said an interesting thing in response to Gibbs' claim that the left didn't help Obama get elected: "Then there's all that work we did for the campaign, all the dirty work they asked us to do - and we did it, gladly, and quietly - none of that counted either, apparently." Dirty work? I wonder what he means. Via Suburban Guerrilla.
When Google leaps into bed with Verizon, it's definitely time to worry about the future of the internet. I mean, if you weren't worried already. Which you should be.
Meanwhile, David Cameron's very public project to destroy Britain proceeds apace, and I don't see the Lib Dems doing anything to stop it. And they could, the bastards. What's their excuse?
Strangely, someone in my very own comment thread fell for this right-wing campaign to lie about the people trying to set up the Muslim center in New York.
Even Frank Rich has noticed that the Democrats clever plan of doing nothing but trying to run against Bush and Palin while doing nothing to address joblessness is not a good campaign strategy. (And I see even Rich is now able to put the word "moderates" in quotes when referring to right-wing nuts like Grassly and McCain.) And if even Alan Greenspan can recognize that the Bush tax-shift (the one they call the Bush "tax cuts") should expire, why, pray tell, can't the Democrats? It serves Obama to be able to pretend it's all the GOP's fault, but he's only been doing their job for them.
Cocaine Nation reviewed: "Although Feiling doesn't soft-pedal the harm of drug dependence - to addicts, mainly, but also to their families and communities - he argues convincingly that the remedy promoted most aggressively by the United States has proved far worse than the disease."
I'm not big on petitions, but you might want to sign one to defend WikiLeaks, and we're still in danger of losing the internet, so do what you can to stop it.
I've just finished reading Stieg Larsson's Millennium series, turned into a trilogy only by his untimely death. Be that as it may, I still feel like I'm waiting for the other seven planned books and can't wait. Even Thom Hartmann recommends it. (Don't start reading the second one until you've got the third one, but get it.)
Just so you know i haven't magically cheered up, have some Blues For Nothing.
This is an odd article about the thinking of the Catfood Commission: "A source familiar with the proceedings of the working group on discretionary spending tells TPM that some commissioners, including one military contractor, would prefer to save money by freezing military pay and scaling back benefits, rather than by eliminating waste in defense contracting." Leaving aside the fact that there really isn't much scaling-back left to do with what few benefits the troops still have left, what I found particularly odd was an earlier sentence in the article: "Though most of the commission's work occurs behind closed doors in small working groups, early reports indicate that the GOP's unwillingness to support any significant tax increases are pushing the group toward proposed entitlement slashes and larger budget cuts." It's that word "GOP". Obama could have put anyone he wanted on this commission. In fact, he didn't even need to have a commission. Instead, he appointed a whole bunch of people whose mission in life is to take as much away from 98% of Americans as possible to this commission. It's a bit late to be blaming the GOP for any callousness and stinginess that comes out of it.
Atrios: "If the Dems were smart there would be no debate about the "Bush tax cuts" instead they would let the Bush tax cuts expire as the law currently requires and come up with their own exciting "Obama tax cuts" or "Democratic tax cuts" or whatever. Why they want to essentially give Bush credit for their tax cutting is bizarre." Because Democrats refuse to talk to anyone who is to the left of the Republican leadership, they talk like Republicans. It's the only language they know. (via)
Also via Atrios, I see that his chief economic advisor is leaving because she just doesn't feel like his chief economic advisor. I bet she was pretty pissed off at having to try to defend stuff she doesn't believe in, either. (More here..) (Also, can someone tell me what's in this video, since it's "not available in your country"?)
Paul Krugman on The Flimflam Man: "One depressing aspect of American politics is the susceptibility of the political and media establishment to charlatans. You might have thought, given past experience, that D.C. insiders would be on their guard against conservatives with grandiose plans. But no: as long as someone on the right claims to have bold new proposals, he's hailed as an innovative thinker. And nobody checks his arithmetic. Which brings me to the innovative thinker du jour: Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin." You'll never guess what bright new idea this Republican has for solving the deficit problem... unless you've noticed that it's what conservatives are always doing or trying to do.
Meanwhile, in China, there may be good news - people willing to confront their serfdom and fight for a union movement. Trying to for unions in the United States - where we had a Constitutional right of free association - was a bloody struggle. The Chinese have no such right written anywhere, but they are fighting all the same.
David Waldman has a clarification about "ethics trials" here, but what he doesn't explain is why, with all the obvious graft and corruption on the conservative end of the spectrum, the only thing we're hearing about ethics trials is regarding two of the more progressive members of Congress. I'm not a huge fan of Rangel, but he really is one of the few people left in Washington who doesn't sound like a right-winger 24/7. And so is Maxine Waters. Hm, I wonder what they have in common.
There are intermittent sightings of the Northern Lights in the far north of Scotland now and then, but the other night they were visible as far down as central Scotland, which is very rare indeed (more). Seattle got a peek, too. (Pretty.)
Ansible reports: "H.G. Wells inspired a £1000 story competition for under-25s (linked with the Wells Festival - see below or www.wellsfestival.com), which had no entries owing to two strict requirements: handwritten submissions and no horrid science fiction. 'Last year there were plenty of entries because the competition was open to writers of all ages and stories could include science fiction, depicting ghastly invasions of our everyday lives by all sorts of nameless horrors,' complained contest setter Reg Turnill (94). He has since dropped the unpopular conditions and extended the 20 July deadline."
More Kooper & Bloomfield in another musical interlude. (I knew I was going to enjoy Sneakers from the first notes of the opening title music.)
Just in case you had failed to notice already how repellent Tim Geithner is, he had an op-ed in the NYT the other day called, of all things, "Welcome to the Recovery," in which he pretends that, well, spring is here and robins are in bloom and the green shoots are chirping away or something. And I'm sure it is, and they are, for him and his over-fed cronies who have worked diligently to destroy the middle-class and are succeeding magnificently. For the rest of us, of course, the nights are drawing in, and for some it's the dead of winter and may never be spring again. Atrios disliked the article so much that he spent a series of posts pointing out the absence of any mention of housing (and foreclosure, and the designed-to-fail HAMP), how this crises means the economy can't recover, and how downright dishonest and nasty it is to claim it's just about training the unemployed to have 21st Century Skillz.
And, honest to gods, I so want to smack people around when they talk about retraining. Some of the most skilled and educated people in America are out of work and will probably never have another job because they are regarded as too old. For the most part, they will have better educations and be more literate and have wider experience than the younger people who come up behind them because they were educated before the Reagan administration set to work destroying our educational system. More of these people than you might imagine are pretty up-to-date with the skills required for modern technology, but even in the wonderful high-tech area, there are only so many jobs to go around. And, in addition to that, an awful lot of modern management is actually uninterested in anything other than mediocrity, because they want to make sure you all know that you are utterly replaceable cogs in their engine. They don't actually like the highly-skilled and would rather have a bunch of people with limited skills around. People who know their place - they think less of themselves, and it's easier to convince them that they are just lucky to have a job, you see. (And, I don't know if you've noticed this, but you seldom get to be Director of the IT department by knowing anything about IT. You usually get there by knowing how to push people around and demoralize them sufficiently that they are afraid to ask for anything - not a particularly modern skill at all.)
Even at the lower levels, it doesn't exactly take all that much training to get up to speed. There was a period back there in the '80s when companies were desperate for programmers and various sorts of hardware people and they were grabbing secretaries and turning them into software designers. Now they won't even grab experienced programmers and let them maintain software. At least, not if they actually want to earn a living at the job. As far as modern corporations are concerned, there is no percentage in providing real products and services; the important industry is figuring out how to cheat you out of a living wage and take away your property. (That last is important. Someone did a study a while back tracking the fortunes of black families in America, and what they found is that the ones that managed to get ahead were those who had managed to buy land. But even our small parcels of land are being clawed back from us by the rich, now. They even managed to get people to remortgage homes they already owned outright in bad deals that are stripping assets they earned the whole of their working lives. And Obama found a clever way to squeeze them even more with HAMP, as Chris Hayes explains.)
The thing is, most of us already have the skills needed for the 21st, an awful lot of which are just minor adjustments on 20th century skills. Thanks to the economic crunch, which has been going on a lot longer than our captured media will admit, innovation in technology has been pretty much down to zero for the last decade. Maybe you need to brush up on the most popular spreadsheet program, but that's the work of about 15 minutes. IOZ is right about this - the whole idea that unemployed workers need to be retrained with higher-order skills is a scam. Go look around at what's on offer in retraining programs - they are offering to train you in skills you already have. Skills that aren't helping you find a new job. In fact, you very often have to try to sound less skilled and educated just to make it as far as an initial interview for the kinds of jobs that are available, most of which are jobs you got an education to avoid having to take.
You've already lost your most intimate personal freedoms, of course. At work they are checking your hair and urine to make sure you don't have any fun off the job, and apparently your "freely entered" contracts allow private companies to give away your private information to other private entities as well as the government, giving you "a far more effective police state than ever existed in East Germany."
I hadn't realized before the Bloomberg story came out that insurance companies were actually holding soldier's death benefits in their own accounts instead of simply paying a lump sum as is normally done.
Poor David Stockman. He knows that the current Republican leadership is screwing us, but he doesn't really understand why.
Instead of worrying about how best to support our glorious president, a good thing to do would be to fight in the war against the War On Drugs. For a start, you could Just Say Now.
Huxley vs. Orwell? (Personally, I see it as a false dichotomy - it's always been both the carrot and the stick.)
I Think Krugman is getting that sinking feeling: "What lies down this path? Here's what I consider all too likely: Two years from now unemployment will still be extremely high, quite possibly higher than it is now. But instead of taking responsibility for fixing the situation, politicians and Fed officials alike will declare that high unemployment is structural, beyond their control. And as I said, over time these excuses may turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy, as the long-term unemployed lose their skills and their connections with the work force, and become unemployable. I'd like to imagine that public outrage will prevent this outcome. But while Americans are indeed angry, their anger is unfocused. And so I worry that our governing elite, which just isn't all that into the unemployed, will allow the jobs slump to go on and on and on." Atrios is, of course, right again, and again: "I guess it should have been obvious for some time, but it's clear that many in the Federal Reserve-Industrial complex always see rising wages as bad. Not simply wages rising faster than productivity gains, or even wages rising faster than inflation, but wage increases period. What this means, of course, is that those who set monetary policy think things are 'good' when the predator class increasingly has the power to extract all rents from workers. Can you say "cheap-labor conservatives"?
"Fox News gets front row White House seat over NPR: Fox News is moving up to the front row of the White House press room, and while that might sound like inside baseball to some, the symbolism is significant. In some ways, this is the very stuff of culture wars, in fact. There was a lobbying effort going on to try and keep Fox News from moving into the front row after a seat opened up with the resignation of UPI's Helen Thomas. Fox News didn't get the seat Thomas had held -- front row center. That went to AP. But Fox News did get AP's old front row seat rather than NPR and Bloomberg, which will be in the second row where Fox used to sit."
Chris Hedges: "We have to stop believing that we can effect change through established political or social organizations or electoral politics, and I think that still remains a huge hurdle for us people who in the end, through accommodation of fear and very clever advertising, are herded like sheep into a dysfunctional system, which is how so many people who should have known better voted for Obama. The environmental crisis that we're about to face will be even more catastrophic than the economic, and we have to, on a personal level, reconsider how we relate to the society at large and to the ecosystem. We have both personal and social decisions to make. At this point most people are not willing to make those choices or take those steps."
On Virtually Speaking Sundays with nyceve and emptywheel, yes, Marcy Wheeler did indeed say she thinks if Obama doesn't appoint Elizabeth Warren, he should be primaried.
John Prescott's testimony about the shocking conversations he was having with his Democratic friends in the Senate just "a couple of days after 9/11" leads Jacob Davis to say in Obsidian Wings: "I guess this is old news, but I still have it in me to find it a little shocking that Democratic Senators were openly talking about invading Iraq right after 9/11. Washington is very strange." Meanwhile, Hans Blix (who really should have said more at the time) explains why the Iraq war was illegal.
Somebody figured out the right way to promote the 40th Anniversary Special Edition of David Bowie's Space Oddity. (Nevertheless, I am reminded to say no thanks to whatever bright light decided the revamp of the YouTube site should make it harder to find the clean, direct link to an individual video.)
You can only look at this page once, so make a note of it: a story from November of 2001 called "U.S. Exploring Ways To Sell War Against Terrorism To Overseas Audiences". You may remember hearing something about this at the time. You may even remember people being outraged about it. But you did know, didn't you? "Presidential advisers huddle with Hollywood executives. Cabinet members and generals meet with Muslim media. White House aides in London and Pakistan "war rooms" arrange pro-American publicity. The United States is cranking up efforts to build and retain foreign support for the war against terrorism. [...] Fearing a waning of overseas support as U.S. bombs drop over Afghanistan, the Bush administration is working closely with advertising agencies and local experts to find more ways to disseminate its message against terrorists.
The corporate media wants to talk about Breitbart a lot and blame the internet for bad news, and they also want to dismiss the Wikileaks story as being more of the same. But The Problem Isn't Fast News, It's Dumb News. Dumb, right-wing news.
Republican leaders on Thursday filibustered the $42 billion package - which several Republicans helped write and had the backing of the Chamber of Commerce and the National Federation of Independent Business - making passage before the August recess highly unlikely.
Did they? The cited story says:
With 60 votes needed to advance the legislation, the tally was 58 to 42, with Democrats unanimously in favor and Republicans all opposed. The majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, switched his vote to no at the last minute, a parliamentary step that allows him to call for a re-vote.
That's not a filibuster. When Harry makes them filibuster, then maybe he'll have an excuse. And then we will see. Except the he won't, and we won't.
Early readers of this blog may recall that I've spent a lot of time looking at the issues raised by discrepancies in the election results we saw in 2000 and 2004 (e.g. here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and with growing alarm, here and here.). And that I keep trying to tell people that this is important, for a number of reasons, including the fact that if you don't know who won those two elections, you cannot properly analyze the political terrain around succeeding elections.
For example, there is a great deal of fantasy that it was Ralph Nader who cost Gore the election - a foolish evaluation in light of the fact that many times the number of votes Nader received simply disappeared in an instant from Gore's recorded totals in Volusia County. That didn't happen because a few thousand people voted for Nader, it happened because Jeb Bush was making sure that his brother didn't lose.
I'm not talking about the tiny number of votes by which, according to the NORC count as reported by The New York Times, Gore really won the election. I'm talking about many thousands of votes that were flipped, eliminated, or simply not reported throughout Florida because of deliberately tweaked machines that were programmed to undercount Gore votes and in at least one case that we know of reprogrammed mid-election night to delete at least 16,000 votes in a single Florida county - and that isn't counting the other states (including Tennessee) where quite a few curious events seem to have depressed Democratic votes.
The truth is that it never mattered how many people voted for Nader, because the GOP machine in Florida was going to make sure that Gore's votes always appeared to be fewer than Bush's. And the conservative machine going all the way up to the Supreme Court stood ready to make sure that Bush was installed in the White House. The fact is that if conservatives decide it's time for their people to win, their people are going to win unless the rest of us work very hard and with great vigilance and diligence to prevent it from happening. We haven't. We waited for Al Gore or Jesse Jackson to tell us to do something in Florida instead of getting out there and refusing to accept what was going on. Leading progressive bloggers actually banned discussion of the astonishing numbers in 2004 (despite the fact that far fewer people voted for Nader and yet Bush still "won"). And we pissed our chance away in the last election because we got distracted by the shiny object that is currently in the White House, and we will keep right on doing it unless we stop being scared off by Nader Derangement Syndrome.
It's time to stop quivering in our boots over the possibility that if we start fighting back for real we will elect someone slightly more right-wing than the current crop of right-wingers leading the Democratic Party. There is no substantive difference between Bush's policies, McCain's stated policies, and the Democratic leadership's actual policies, so you might as well step up and admit that, you know, just because you're on their side doesn't mean they're on your side.*
* * * * *
David Dayen on how HAMP Is Hurting Liberalism explains that all the excuses some people make for Obama simply don't apply to this program that was supposed to help ordinary home-owners who were facing foreclosure but in fact only extends their debt before the axe falls. "The Administration designed this entirely on their own, using money already appropriated. And they designed it terribly. In fact, they lied right from the beginning, according to Sen. Jeff Merkley, who was also on the panel. He was told that the White House would devote $50-$100 billion in TARP money to homeowners and that they would fight for cramdown (what he would rather call lifeline bankruptcy) when it came up in Congress. These were the conditions under which Merkley voted to release the second tranche of the TARP money. And neither of these two things really came to pass. The White House stood mute as cramdown failed, and though HAMP is supposed to have $75 billion in backup, they've spent less than one-half of one percent of it." It's the perfect program to hold up as an emblem of Reagan's claim that nothing is worse than having the government "help" you.
Kunstler: "This compressive deflationary collapse is not the kind of cyclical "downturn" that we are familiar with during the two-hundred-year-long adventure with industrial expansion - that is, the kind of cyclical downturn caused by the usual exhalations of markets attempting to adjust the flows of supply and demand. This is a structural implosion of markets that have been functionally destroyed by pervasive fraud and swindling in the absence of real productive activity." We really are screwed, you know. Permanently.
Apparently, if one more person clicks on that ad to the right and buys a 2L4O T-shirt and tells them I sent them, I win a prize or something. And for those who prefer to be called "left" rather than "liberal", you can now choose a Too Left for Obama T-Shirt.
Jay Ackroyd and Watertiger were pretty good on Virtually Speaking last night, you should give it a listen.
I see via Atrios that Megan McArdle has set her inaccuracy filters on Elizabeth Warren, but fortunately I don't have to link to her to get a little debunking out of it.
At Netroots Nation, Obama sent a surprise video full of hope and change. Just reading the write-up made me want to slap his face, so I didn't watch it.
(And, personally, I think the Democrats just invented this woman to make Harry Reid look good.)
Of course, if you really want to solve serious racial problems in America, it wouldn't hurt to look at the area that has had a devastating effect not just on people of color and the black community, but our entire legal structure: The War on (Some classes of people who use some) Drugs. Like this case, for instance. But it's amazing how many people just want you to forget the issue. Or we get such "reasoning" as that marijuana is dangerous to users because it "contains bacteria and fungi that put users at risk for infection." I mean, seriously. And you might even be surprised at some of the people who are prepared to defend the administration's lack of interest in reversing the odious Drug War policies that have done so much harm.
Krugman notes that Karl Rove is all ready to rehabilitate Bush in the same way the GOP earlier did with Reagan. And, you know, it works - why, a couple of years ago both Krugman and I were observing that the wonderful things Obama believed about Reagan were utterly false. Now the GOP wants us to believe that the economy was really great because of Bush's policies.
Susie thinks Bernie Sanders is a bit late when he says, "While the middle class disappears and poverty increases the wealthiest people in our country are not only doing extremely well, they are using their wealth and political power to protect and expand their very privileged status at the expense of everyone else. The United States must not become an oligarchy in which a handful of wealthy and powerful families control the destiny of our nation." Um, yes, they already do. That's what you can expect when you stop having confiscatory taxes at the top margin - you let them get rich enough to buy off the government.
Meanwhile, also from Susie on Consumer Protection and Chocolate Salty Balls: "Geithner and Bernanke et al have constructed a large and fragile house of cards that rests on the notion that we will all pretend that the banking system is fine - until it actually is fine, and then it'll all be fine! In other [words,] for Warren to do this job as she sees fit, she'd have to acknowledge the financial instability of the banks, and they're not going to stand for it. Nope. In other words, they're doubling down on the strategy that's destroyed our economy."
Bruce Dixon: "From the established civil rights organizations like the NAACP to legions of elected Democrats and preachers and even people like our good friends at Color of Change, the main activity these days is an endless circling of wagons around the president, defending him against the flood of racist bile that spews daily from the likes of Fox News, the Tea Partyers and naysaying Republicans. But is that really where so much of our energy and creativity should be going?" Glenn Ford: "For the corporate media, which virtually invented the Tea Party, the NAACP's resolution demanding that the various Tea Party outfits disassociate themselves from racists, was the big news of the NAACP convention. [...] But, in the case of the Tea Party, my question is this: at what point will Black folks be able to say, We beat them? Will it be when the Tea Partyers go back to using racial code words instead of loud and rowdy redneck-talk? Is that all it would take to arrange a truce with racists, that they be more polite about it?"
The real war, as Glenn Ford notes, is much bigger than the Teabaggers: "Before Barack Obama had even taken the oath of office, in January of 2009, he promised to put all of the so-called "entitlement" programs "on the table," for cutting. There was no reason to doubt that Obama really planned to go after Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and other programs despised by the rich. After all, he had just been elected to a four-year term in a landslide and was, therefore, as secure as any politician can be. Obama was telling everyone who cared to listen that he was would certainly not stand in the way of gutting what's left of the American social safety net. Rather, Obama was telling Big Business that he agreed with them, that the poor and the elderly were sucking up too much of the nation's wealth, and there must be a day of reckoning. [...] In April of this year, Obama once again reminded everyone that everything is and has always been "on the table," as far as he's concerned, including Social Security. His so-called "deficit commission" is stacked with rich sociopaths sharpening their knives to carve up, sell off or otherwise doom Social Security. It is a battle that safety net defenders thought they had won against George Bush. Barack Obama has picked up Bush's marbles and put them back into play. He is the right wing's most potent weapon, the one before which liberal Democrats throw up their hands in surrender without the dignity of a fight. Obama, working in plain sight over the past 18 months, has constructed and rigged a deficit commission to render a kind of death sentence to the foundational program of Roosevelt's New Deal."
Steve Clemons warns Shirley Sherrod to kick the tires of the fancy new job Vilsack is offering, because it probably comes with less real power to be effective than the job she had before.
You know, I really don't want to hear how there's no money in newspapers anymore. It's always been a business with a high profit margin and it still is, so stfu, you whining crybabies.
A death in the family - In Georgia there's a stretch of Interstate 285, from I-20 to the Cobb County line, named in honor of Billy McKinney, an activist who later served in the state legislature and never stopped standing up for the people. On July 19th, his daughter Cynthia spoke at his funeral about his courage and love.
CNN actually has a fairly clean recounting of the debacle in their story about Vilsack's apology to Shirley Sherrod after she was forced to resign (including the fact that Breitbart's "correction" isn't much of a correction). Only problem is that it looks like it was the White House that really wanted to force her out without bothering to investigate first.
He spoke to Sherrod earlier Wednesday and said he asked for her forgiveness, which she gave. Vilsack also said he offered Sherrod another job in the department, and she was taking a few days to think about it.
[...]
Vilsack noted that "with all that she has seen, endured and accomplished, it would be invaluable to have her experience, commitment and record of service at U.S.D.A.," adding, "I hope she considers staying with the department."
Which is fair enough, although perhaps simply tearing up the resignation and then letting her decide would have been a better move. And, of course, none of the excuses being made for incredibly bad behavior of the administration, including Vilsack, rise much above The Dog Ate My Homework. You simply don't destroy the long career of a formerly anonymous employee without even investigating a charge that came from a known fabricator of libelous attacks on black people who are merely trying to do a good job of helping Americans.
And no points to the NAACP for jumping on the bandwagon without knowing what was going on, either. If they haven't noticed by now that the right-wing is in all out war mode against anyone who shows the least sensitivity to racism, they aren't exactly helping their own cause, are they?
The only appropriate response to any of this stuff has always been, "We'd like to find out what actually happened before we comment on any charges that come from people who are, of course, trying to destroy civil rights in America."
For example, no one who has any regard for civil rights goes out of their way to "expose" ACORN. Anything in that vein should have automatically spurred resistance from every part of the civil liberties community. And after that outrage, anything Breitbart had to say needed to be taken with a barrel of salt. "Let's see, a known right-wing operative who is in the habit of racist fabrications is trying to gin up fears of 'reverse-racism'. I wonder what could cause that?" That's how you treat this kind of bullshit if you have any brains.
Which, of course, leads us to the question of just what kind of brains are operating in the White House. Why is the administration in such a hurry to treat these things that deserve nothing but derision with such seriousness? What is it about Obama that nothing seems to fit in his comfort zone like screwing decent people?
Charles Pierce was Bob McChesney's guest on his NPR show Sunday, talking about Charlie's book Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free, and you can hear the stream or download the .mp3. (You also might want to listen to the archived show where McChesny's guest was Howard Zinn.)
Krugman: "The best way for Mr. Obama to have avoided an electoral setback this fall would have been enacting a stimulus that matched the scale of the economic crisis. Obviously, he didn't do that. Maybe he couldn't have passed an adequate-sized plan, but the fact is that he didn't even try." Krugman wants to say the Republican strategy of obstruction is working, but that would only be the case if Obama and the Democratic leadership had made the case for something worth obstructing and whipped their own caucus to support such policies. They didn't; in fact, they agreed with Republican arguments and whipped the Democratic caucus to kill any more liberal approaches.
White House announces it's open season on government employees: "But I also have to wonder if they know what the optics of this are. If two-bit sociopathic wingnuts can scare them to this extent with obviously doctored videos, what happens when they see a real threat? Are they going to flap their arms like penguins and run around in circles screaming "they're coming to get us, run for your lives!!?" At this point, that doesn't seem entirely ridiculous." (Details at Mother Jones.)
It is always good to take any opportunity to debunk zombie lies about Social Security: "No, life expectancy at age 65 has not changed all that much, and those changes were anticipated. No, the beneficiary/taxpayer ratio is not an important issue. No, you can't do better investing the money in private sector funds (and people wouldn't do it anyway. 25-year-olds do not save 15% of their gross for retirement)."
You won't believe how bad Megan McArdle is at simple arithmetic. But it's not just that she can't do the math, but that she hasn't the imagination to see that dividing stimulus money up by every single person in the country is not the most efficient way to use $75bn. Of course, that's what we expect from people who think that allowing extremely rich people to skip out on their obligations to society is a worthier cause than creating millions of jobs and rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure. Normally I wouldn't link to a McArdle article at all, but most of her commenters are a lot smarter than she is and let her know the virtues of, among other things, having a calculator. (Not that you need a calculator when you are working with big round numbers like that - what you need is the ability to count the number of zeroes that go into your figures. She went for "none".) (via)
This Week in Tyranny, there's still plenty of lawlessness, unaccountability, violation of civil liberties, and lies in general, and if you think you see any light at the end of the tunnel it is probably an oncoming train. So, no change there, then.
The former head of MI-5 says the invasion of Iraq increased terrorism: "Giving evidence to the Iraq inquiry, Baroness Manningham-Buller said the action 'radicalised' a generation of young people, including UK citizens. As a result, she said she was not 'surprised' that UK nationals were involved in the 7/7 bombings in London. She said she believed the intelligence on Iraq's threat was not 'substantial enough' to justify the action."
As Anna observed to me, Tom Tomorrow is still spot-on, but it's a lot harder to laugh.
Noctilucent clouds are so high they glow in the dark. The pictures are pretty, but they might be telling us something more. (via)
Via Atrios, who reminds us that food stamps are actually very good stimulus, this horrifying nugget from David Obey: "We were told we have to offset every damn dime of [new teacher spending]. Well, it ain't easy to find offsets, and with all due respect to the administration their first suggestion for offsets was to cut food stamps." Note: He is not talking about the Republican leadership, he's talking about the White House. Those monsters who want to take food out of people's mouths aren't just Republicans.
The White House is apparently delusional, but they know who to blame. Don't blame me, you jerks, you ran around telling everyone you were going to change things and you just did more of the same. Nobody cares if you are bipartisan or post-partisan or whatever you call it. No one cares if you reach across the aisle, no one cares if you are "modern", no one cares about deficits. People care about whether they can get decent jobs and feed their kids and afford doctors' bills. If you want to stop bleeding money, stop spending it on wars and start spending it on feeding the real economy. You betrayed the people who voted for you, and you think they are disappointed because of bloggers? Who the hell do you think bloggers are? They're American citizens who are sick of being played and betrayed.
As we've all noticed, the prevailing wisdom in the news media is that everything bad or dangerous or reckless or foolhardy is liberal. Obama, for example, is "far left", what with his corporatist love of banksters and allergy to job-creation. No wonder no one even knows what it means.
Digby says we may have someone making the case that it's time for the security state to tighten its belt, in the form of a Dana Priest and William Arkin feature in the WaPo on the Top Secret hidden branch of government. Digby posts an internal National Intelligence Memo anticipating the feature and suggesting a PR campaign will be necessary to counteract the "unfavorable light" the feature is likely to cast on their institution of a police state. She says, "I will be very interested to see what this turns up. I don't know if it includes Homeland Security, but if it doesn't I suspect another investigation should be done there. This gravy train has taken on sacred status as the right has managed to morph the "support the troops" mantra into a "support the Military Industrial Complex," which is just another way of maintaining the police welfare state for connected white guys. If there's belt tightening to be done, this is the place to start." Atrios: "I knew someone who went back to school after the military-industry complex (aerospace mostly) in Southern California dried up a bit. He always joked that it was 'welfare for rich white people.' The secondary point of the WaPo story is that the intelligence-industrial complex has largely set up shop in the DC area, and it's sucking away all of our precious bodily fluids to make everybody in it RICH RICH RICH, or at least more comfortable than many in the Great Recession." And here: "Whatever the initial thoughts behind any of this stuff, it's a tremendous waste of money and resources which, as I said below, can't possibly, in the net, be useful. It serves to transfer money and power to elites while cementing the existence of a giant and extremely opaque patronage system. One with surveillance capabilities." When I was a child they used to frighten us about the evil commies by telling us that the USSR did all the things we are doing now. Ironically, they did not tell us that at least the Soviet police state provided job and a roof over your head if you kept your mouth shut. We're doing all the bad stuff without even making sure you are housed. They call that "freedom".
Last night's Virtually Speaking Sundays episode with Cliff Schecter and Stuart Zechman, on the news, who these idiots are, and what the hell they are doing. (podcast)
Sucking the oxygen out of the room and then wondering why no one can breathe: The only thing I know about Dylan Ratigan is this amazing moment in which my fantasy comes true - someone on TV telling the truth, even confronting one of the "respectable" people who wants to force us to eat catfood and calling his right-wing talking points a lie. Of course, it's just one clip from MSNBC, but oh, man, that was gratifying to watch. "Congratulations, and thank you for nothing." Whooo!
Chris Hayes: "Perhaps the most egregious aspect of the selling of the Iraq War was its false pretext. It never really was about weapons of mass destruction, as Paul Wolfowitz admitted. WMDs were just "what everyone could agree on." So it is with deficits. Conservatives and their neoliberal allies don't really care about deficits; they care about austerity - about gutting the welfare state and redistributing wealth upward. That's the objective. Deficits are just what they can all agree on, the WMDs of this manufactured crisis. Senator John Kyl of Arizona, speaking on Fox, has come out and admitted as much. All new spending increases must be offset, he said, but "you should never have to offset the cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans." So there you have it." And not just there; it's a total system failure.
Axelrod is saying Elizabeth Warren is definitely a candidate to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, but you and I both know that no one in the administration wants her there, especially Tim Geithner, who Obama has appointed to make that decision. I think Axelrod is just there for cover, so that still-in-denial progressives will waste time thinking there's a chance for her and pushing her, and then at the last minute Geithner and Obama will show the Villagers how cool they are by spitting in the dirty hippies' faces. Because that's exactly how they have done everything else all along, and there is no reason to think they will suddenly change course. I hope I'm wrong; I suppose it's possible. But I know that they are not here to restore American government, they are here to take it away. Bstrds.
I see from comments that even fairly astute observers have not cottoned on yet that the term "neo-liberal" (or "neoliberal") has nothing to do with liberalism and is in fact a "modernized" term for disguising a thoroughly right-wing economic agenda. CMike helpfully provides your signposts: "Broadly speaking, neo-liberalism seeks to transfer control of the economy from public to the private sector, under the belief that it will produce a more efficient government and improve the economic health of the nation. The definitive statement of the concrete policies advocated by neoliberalism is often taken to be John Williamson's "Washington Consensus", a list of policy proposals that appeared to have gained consensus approval among the Washington-based international economic organizations (like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank)" In other words, they want to reneg on America's obligation to its people and give all our resources to a small number of rich and powerful creeps.
In American war, we only see some of the faces. In real war, the story is a little different. We used to see more of that story, but those days are gone.
I wonder if Netroots Nation will actually ask Reid and Pelosi any meaningful questions. I don't expect to hear any meaningful answers, although it's possible they will trip up and say what they are really thinking. I expect, however, that this is all just a sop to try to lull a few progs into thinking these people are not determined to sell us all out.
Wolcott has a neat bit slamming Laura Ingraham and the hacks who treat her like she is worth paying attention to, but he also says that he has lost patience and taken HuffPo off his blogroll, reminding me that I still had it on mine, and though I will probably still look at it sometimes, I don't think it needs to take up valuable real estate there, either.
In UK news, The courts recently made an interesting decision against The Times in a defamation case, apparently saying that online news stories that suggest someone is a suspect in a crime should be updated to reflect that the person was cleared. The Times had argued that "the Reynolds responsible journalism defence" protected them, but. "The court also rejected The Times's appeal against the judge's finding that web publication of the same story was not protected by Reynolds privilege after the date when the newspaper knew Det Sgt Flood had been cleared by an investigation because it failed either to take the story down or add a note making clear that the situation had changed since the original publication." Lord Neuberger said, "The nature of the information contained in the allegations is of considerable public concern in that it involves police corruption, but the weight to be given to that point is very severely reduced by the fact that the information is contained in the allegations, which, as the journalists knew, were largely unchecked and unsupported." My friend Mark Stephens disagrees with the decision, but to me it looks awfully like newspapers are having their hands slapped for printing material that is little more than gossip without verification, and I can't help but concur. However, I think there's a difference between a major newspaper like The Times, which can afford to label and revisit articles in its archives and, moreover, ought to be more careful about implying more than they know. SwanTurton Solicitors have a different view of Reynolds from Mark's: "The recent deployment by The Times of the Reynolds defence in defending the claim against it by Detective Sergeant Flood well illustrates the chilling effect that this defence has on both truth and justice. It also illustrates the practical consequences of any defence which transfers the risk of publishing false and defamatory material from the multi-nationals who do so for profit to the individuals who are the subject of those publications, such as innocent serving police officers." Having watched newspapers destroy lives based on what turned out to be utterly false allegations, it's hard to take issue with that view.
That title being one of the many suggestions from Tuli Kupferberg's book 1001 Ways to Beat the Draft. Okay, I didn't expect him to live much longer, but still, I'm sad, and I'll continue to treasure the little things he sent me. Tuli was raunchy and funny and playful, and so people often forget that he was also a kind man who wished us peace. Farewell, Tuli.
And farewell to Harvey Pekar, who surprised many of us when we saw that first copy of American Splendor and couldn't stop reading.
I'm tempted to quote the whole first paragraph of Alterman's article on Kabuki Democracy, but I'll settle for the last bit: "Indeed, if one examines the gamut of legislation passed and executive orders issued that relate to the promises made by candidate Obama, one can only wince at the slightly hyperbolic joke made by late night comedian Jimmy Fallon, who quipped that the president's goal appeared to be to 'finally deliver on the campaign promises made by John McCain.'" I'd have said, "laugh bitterly at the painfully accurate joke made by Jimmy Fallon," but I think Alterman gives Obama too much credit. While I agree that the right wing has a formidable media machine, that Bush and Cheney did devastating damage to our government, and that undoing that damage was always going to be hard going, much of it would not have been impossible if we had elected a liberal president. But the simple fact is that Obama really always was and is what is now sometimes called a "neoliberal" and used to just be called right-wing. The fact that he doesn't appear to have foam-at-the-mouth right-wing "social policies" (and watch out for the elasticity of that phrase), doesn't change things: Someone who spouts Reaganite economic rhetoric and appears to believe in the attendant policies, whatever his reasons, is not interested in restoring the American form of government. (Oh, and by the way, let's stop letting people get away with pretending to be "socially liberal but economically conservative". An economic liberal is someone who wants the economic environment to be one in which private individuals can have life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That includes blacks, gays, women, and, yes, even people who don't share your religion. Right-wing economics quickly forecloses on individual freedom. That's why right-wingers hate liberal economic policies. It has nothing to do with "efficiency" or fiscal "responsibility" or anything else. This should be obvious to anyone who has noticed how utterly profligate and inefficient conservative economic policies are at everything except sucking the blood out of the real economy. While it is possible that Obama has so far been too stupid to notice this, there is no reason to believe that he will notice it and realize it is a bad thing if he is re-elected - another thing Eric is more certain of than I am.)
When a corporation damages your property, well, that's yourresponsibility. I realize right-wingers like to pretend that protecting private property is important, but they don't really mean "private property", they mean the property of the rich and powerful.
Some people still believe the fiction that the Chamber of Commerce is pro-business. But to be genuinely pro-business, you have to promote an environment that supports smaller, local businesses and promising new businesses, and they don't. In fact, they do the reverse: They support the stranglehold of giganti-business.
"House Democrats: Nancy Pelosi Tricked Us: Nancy Pelosi tricked her own caucus into voting for a bunch of crap they did not know about, and now she's running some bullshit campaign to blame the Republicans for wanting to do the very thing her own deception made possible: cut Social Security benefits. [...] She's turning into Tom DeLay in a skirt."
At The Washington Post, a funny thing happened on the way to "balanced" reporting - they treat a Wall Street equity strategist as a disinterested party but Paul Krugman as someone with an axe to grind.
It's funny, the Fed's brief is to maximize employment in the United States, but they seem to think they have some other job, and they are pretty happy with the current "pace toward 'maximum employment" even though it seems to be going in reverse direction. (I will say I am delighted to know there is a blog called Economists for Firing Larry Summers.)
Ethics waivers for golf. Of course, because that's more important than whether you can feed your kids or get medical treatment.
Only 529 donors? Can we stop talking about this woman now? I'm sure more people want Bernie Sanders to be president than would vote for Sarah Palin.
I refuse to link to a Fox story that a "study" by a right-wing "research" group found that the votes of convicted felons may have helped elect Al Franken, but I will note that only two states permanently remove the right of convicted felons to vote, and Minnesota is not one of them.
Sara Robinson says we are losing the fight because we've let the right-wing steal our words, and now we need new ones. But I don't want new ones - I want to ditch words that now stink of rhetoric and replace them with plain language of the sort people actually use. I want metaphors and similes that people can grasp instantly. I want things brought down to the level that people actually live with. Like, for example, simple flyers that you can stick through doors and pass out at church that say things like,
You worked hard and played by the rules, and now people in expensive suits who sat in offices recklessly gambling with other people's money want to stop you from being able to retire.
They exported jobs to other countries and made it harder to start new businesses to create new jobs. They slashed government spending to the point where even schools are closing. They failed to honor contracts that said they would put money into your pension fund, and now there is no pension fund. And now they want your unemployment insurance so they can gamble that away, too.
They say you need to tighten your belt to pay for their mistakes.
Well, why should you?
You paid for insurance to protect you from this. Demand what you paid for.
Social Security: You paid for it. We have the money. You earned it. You deserve it. And they don't.
Or something like that.
RJ Eskow: "The War For Financial Independence: Calls to Surrender: There's a new conventional wisdom forming in Washington, DC this July 4th, one that transcends party lines and the usual classifications of "left" and "right" as they're understood in that city. It's only being recognized now, because it deals with a number of different economic issues, but the underlying theme is the same: The American dream of financial independence and security is gone. The sooner you accept that and raise the white flag the easier it will be, so stop struggling. They're saying the ideal of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" is dead. Deal with it." Another way of putting it, of course, is that the Revolutionary War is over, and we lost to the Tories.
It's funny, I've known all my life that high income inequality leads to macroeconomic crisis, and Krugman himself is still working it out. But surely it's obvious that if you squeeze the rest of the population, the lazy rich people who think that financial "innovation" is the only kind that's interesting are not going to be the people who invest in creating an environment where real innovation can flourish. The truth is that since economic "conservatives" have taken over running our economy, there hasn't been any real innovation at all. And that stands to reason, since this environment is one in which the ordinary people who do things for themselves and do the real work - and are therefore the most likely to be inspired to real innovation - are simply not in a position to put their ideas into practice, to bring them forward. The very rich do not like real innovation because it destabilizes their order, it makes change possible - change that could weaken their position, or make the behavior of the masses less predictable. They like us to be predictable. But now, here we are, in a situation where we have allowed a few people to amass most of our nation's wealth and refuse to spread it around where it can do some good, and, well, bad things happen to unequal people. But of course, the remedy, we are told, is to apply leeches to stem the blood loss, and if you haven't stopped losing blood, bleed you some more.
Dan at Pruning Shears: "I started 'This week in Tyranny' as a leftover link roundup from my Thursday posts with the point of documenting our slide towards a police state culture. Sometimes I feel self-conscious about the title, maybe thinking it's a little too hyperbolic (and God knows the teabaggers have been gleefully hurling it around for the last year and a half for entirely different, specious, reasons), but stuff like this truly is indicative of an authoritarian environment where dissent is stifled. If that's not tyrannical I don't know what is. (Oh, and also see the almost comically creepily-titled Perfect Citizen program.)"
Someday I hope to hear Paul Krugman examine the question of why our elite movers and shakers and babblers believe things that are so obviously untrue. Nobody cares about deficits. If they cared about them, they would have cared about them just as vigorously during the previous decade when Bush was spending like a drunken sailor. They only care about them when there is a threat that public money will be used to actually serve the public - then, all of a sudden, they are the soul of frugality. What do you think causes that? (More on that from Atrios.) I mean, they really believe stupid, stupid things, or at least purport to. Maybe they have to, so they can sleep at night, secure in the knowledge that if their policies are destroying the lives of tens of millions of people, it's just not their fault. It can't be helped. Sorry. And yet, even some conservatives are beginning to notice. (Also: Krugman says the real-time debate between Hayek and Keynes is "A spectacular find", which it is.)
Health "insurance": The right to spend three hours arguing with your insurance company over a percentage of one (1) penny while you are being treated for leukemia. Isn't that how you define "freedom"?
In comments to the previous post, CMike tries to work out which presidents really had the worst unemployment records.
All those lazy, something-for-nothing loan-defaulters? They're rich people.
The Democratic leadership is determined to ignore the thing that really matters, and they apparently think they can win by bragging about their crap policy "wins" and pointing at the scary Republicans: "As it happens, though, Republicans are considerably more energized; noting the 'enthusiasm gap' Steve Benen warned: 'The awakening next January will likely be a rude one - intractable gridlock, endless and pointless investigations, and a progressive policy agenda brought to an immediate halt. Hell, presidential impeachment might even find itself on the table.' Such dire warnings seem to be part of the messaging about what might happen if the GOP gets control of the House or the Senate. The problem is, 'be afraid, be very very afraid' is not terribly motivating. Republicans spent two election cycles warning voters about Nancy Pelosi bringing her San Francisco values to the heartland, and it did not work out too well for them. More importantly, it ignores the elephant in the room." (And I'm amused that Steve thinks the progressive policy agenda hasn't already been brought to a halt. Anyone who thinks jobs aren't important is not interested in any kind of progressive policy agenda, unless you mean the progressive immiseration of the populace.)
A considerable part of the graft and corruption in Afghanistan can be blamed on graft and corruption in America that allowed corporations to stiff people they make contracts with, at every level. At home, your promise of a pension plan is a fantasy, your promise of health coverage is a fantasy, and so on. In Afghanistan, the promise to pay a local company for services rendered is also a fantasy. The fish rots from the head, in other words.
The G20 was an arrest orgy, and CathiefromCanada has been tracking the stories. (via)
Really, the only explanation I can find for this is that the entire Democratic leadership are actually stealth Republicans. Or they are just more stupid than I can credit.
I thought I'd posted a link to Kindra Arnesen's GulfEmergency testimony, but I suppose it might have been a victim of the recent tech hassles. And anyway, it's at Shakesville with a helpful summary, here.
One way the rich can control you is to make communication too expensive for the people who have the most to tell us. Like, for example, cutting off phone service for Elizabitchez. Because The Red Queen foolishly spent her money on food. Maybe you could help her out.
What's even better than cheap labor? 
