Posts
. . . the Pain Caucus — my term for those who have opposed every effort to break out of our economic trap — is going wild.
Paul Krugman does not sugarcoat it. Hang on. It's gonna be a bumpy decade! (Emphasis marks added - Ed.)
. . . For the big concern about quantitative easing isn’t that it will do too much; it is that it will accomplish too little. Reasonable estimates suggest that the Fed’s new policy is unlikely to reduce interest rates enough to make more than a modest dent in unemployment.. . . And there goes the best hope that the Fed’s plan might actually work.
Think of it this way: Mr. Bernanke is getting the Obama treatment, and making the Obama response. He’s facing intense, knee-jerk opposition to his efforts to rescue the economy. In an effort to mute that criticism, he’s scaling back his plans in such a way as to guarantee that they’ll fail.
And the almost 15 million unemployed American workers, half of whom have been jobless for 21 weeks or more, will pay the price, as the slump goes on and on.
Nick Kristoff has some even worse news for your future plans as he exposes Our Banana Republic. (Emphasis marks added - Ed.)
In my reporting, I regularly travel to banana republics notorious for their inequality. In some of these plutocracies, the richest 1 percent of the population gobbles up 20 percent of the national pie.
But guess what? You no longer need to travel to distant and dangerous countries to observe such rapacious inequality. We now have it right here at home — and in the aftermath of Tuesday’s election, it may get worse.
The richest 1 percent of Americans now take home almost 24 percent of income, up from almost 9 percent in 1976. As Timothy Noah of Slate noted in an excellent series on inequality, the United States now arguably has a more unequal distribution of wealth than traditional banana republics like Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guyana.
C.E.O.’s of the largest American companies earned an average of 42 times as much as the average worker in 1980, but 531 times as much in 2001. Perhaps the most astounding statistic is this: From 1980 to 2005, more than four-fifths of the total increase in American incomes went to the richest 1 percent.
That’s the backdrop for one of the first big postelection fights in Washington — how far to extend the Bush tax cuts to the most affluent 2 percent of Americans. Both parties agree on extending tax cuts on the first $250,000 of incomes, even for billionaires. Republicans would also cut taxes above that.
The richest 0.1 percent of taxpayers would get a tax cut of $61,000 from President Obama. They would get$370,000 from Republicans, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. And that provides only a modest economic stimulus, because the rich are less likely to spend their tax savings.
At a time of 9.6 percent unemployment, wouldn’t it make more sense to finance a jobs program? For example, the money could be used to avoid laying off teachers and undermining American schools.
. . . So we face a choice. Is our economic priority the jobless, or is it zillionaires?
Read on for the rest of a very good argument as to why America is now viewed worldwide as either governed by the purposively ignorant or malignantly vicious.
I've always liked Robert Reich's easy style of presenting an argument. He states the case, treats all sides fairly, and makes it clear that some on those sides are nuts. This article was published before the election, but it is a perfect commentary right now on what the Rethugs have announced will be their policy toward US for the next two years, the growing cynicism on the part of the victims, and his (Reich's) plan of action that should work (in a country of intelligent citizens anyway). (Emphasis marks added - Ed.)
Not only is income and wealth in America more concentrated in fewer hands than it’s been in 80 years, but those hands are buying our democracy as never before – and they’re doing it behind closed doors.
Hundreds of millions of secret dollars are pouring into congressional and state races in this election cycle. The Koch brothers (whose personal fortunes grew by $5 billion last year) appear to be behind some of it, Karl Rove has rounded up other multi-millionaires to fund right-wing candidates, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is funneling corporate dollars from around the world into congressional races, and Rupert Murdoch is evidently spending heavily.
No one knows for sure where this flood of money is coming from because it’s all secret.
But you can safely assume its purpose is not to help America’s stranded middle class, working class, and poor.
It’s to pad the nests of the rich, stop all reform, and deregulate big corporations and Wall Street – already more powerful than since the late 19th century when the lackeys of robber barons literally deposited sacks of cash on the desks of friendly legislators.
Credit the Supreme Court’s grotesque decision in Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission, which opened the floodgates. (Even though 8 of 9 members of the Court also held disclosure laws constitutional, the decision invited the creation of shadowy “nonprofits” that don’t have to reveal anything.)
According to FEC data, only 32 percent of groups paying for election ads are disclosing the names of their donors. By comparison, in the 2006 midterm, 97 percent disclosed; in 2008, almost half disclosed.
Last week, when the Senate considered a bill to force such disclosure, every single Republican voted against it – thereby revealing the GOP’s true colors, and presumed benefactors. (To understand how far the GOP has come, nearly ten years ago campaign disclosure was supported by 48 of 54 Republican senators.)
Maybe the Disclose Bill can get passed in lame-duck session. Maybe the IRS will make sure Karl Rove’s and other supposed nonprofits aren’t sham political units. Maybe pigs will learn to fly.
In the meantime we face an election that marks an even sharper turn toward plutocratic capitalism than before – a government by and for the rich and big corporations — and away from democratic capitalism.
As income and wealth has moved to the top, so has political power. That’s why, for example, it’s been impossible to close the absurd tax loophole that allows hedge-fund and private-equity managers to treat much of their income as capital gains, subject to a 15 percent tax (even though they’re earning tens or hundreds of millions a year, and the top 15 hedge-fund managers earned an average of $1 billion last year).
Why it proved impossible to fund expanded health care by limiting the tax deductions of the very rich. Why it’s so difficult even to extend George Bush’s tax cuts for the bottom 98 percent of Americans without also extending them for the top 2 percent – even though the top won’t spend the money and create jobs, but will blow a $36 billion hole in the federal budget next year.
The good news is average Americans are beginning to understand that when the rich secretly flood our democracy with money, the rest of us drown. Wall Street executives and top CEOs get bailed out while under-water homeowners and jobless workers sink.
A Quinnipiac poll earlier this year found overwhelming support for a millionaire tax.
But what the public wants means nothing if our democracy is secretly corrupted by big money.
Right now we’re headed for a perfect storm: An unprecedented concentration of income and wealth at the top, a record amount of secret money flooding our democracy, and a public in the aftershock of the Great Recession becoming increasingly angry and cynical about government. The three are obviously related.
We must act. We need a movement to take back our democracy. (If tea partiers were true to their principles, they’d join it.) As Martin Luther King (Jr.) once said, the greatest tragedy is “not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.”
What can you do?
1. Read Justice Steven’s dissent in the Citizens United case, so you’re fully informed about the majority’s pernicious illogic.
2. Use every opportunity to speak out against this decision, and embarrass and condemn the right-wing Justices who supported it.
3. In this and subsequent elections, back candidates for congress and president who vow to put Justices on the Court who will reverse it.
4. Demand that the IRS enforce the law and pull the plug on Karl Rove and other sham nonprofits.
5. If you have a Republican senator, insist that he or she support the Disclose Act. If they won’t, campaign against them.
6. Support public financing of elections.
7. Join an organization like Common Cause, that’s committed to doing all this and getting big money out of politics. (Personal note: I’m so outraged at what’s happening that I just became chairman of Common Cause.)
8. Send this post to your friends (including any tea partiers you may know).
(Robert Reich is Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. He has written twelve books, including The Work of Nations, Locked in the Cabinet, and his most recent book, Supercapitalism. His "Marketplace" commentaries can be found on publicradio.com and iTunes. Robert Reich's Blog)
Nice to know that PCR won't let those lying bastards continue to lie to us about job creation, isn't it? They aren't even using real numbers - just estimates based on past bad data.
The United States of America has become the country of the Big Lie. Those who facilitate government and corporate lies are well rewarded, but anyone who tells any truth or expresses an impermissible opinion is excoriated and driven away. But we “have freedom and democracy.” We are the virtuous, indispensable nation, the salt of the earth, the light unto the world."
Oh, Hell Yes! Makes me lonesome for the good ole days of the level of truth telling in the Soviet Union. (Emphasis marks added - Ed.)
Paul Craig Roberts
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics."
- Mark Twain
"If we cannot trust what the government tells us about weapons of mass destruction, terrorist events, and the reasons for its wars and bailouts, can we trust the government’s statement last Friday that the US economy gained 151,000 payroll jobs during October? Apparently not. After examining the government’s report, statistician John Williams (shadowstats.com) reported that the jobs were “phantom jobs” created by “concurrent seasonal factor adjustments.” In other words, the 151,000 jobs cannot be found in the unadjusted underlying data. The jobs were the product of seasonal adjustments concocted by the BLS.
As usual, the financial press did no investigation and simply reported the number handed to the media by the government. The relevant information, the information that you need to know, is that the level of payroll employment today is below the level of 10 years ago. A smaller number of Americans are employed right now than were employed a decade ago. Think about what that means. We have had a decade of work force growth from youngsters reaching working age and from immigration, legal and illegal, but there are fewer jobs available to accommodate a decade of work force entrants than before the decade began.
During two years from December 2007 - December 2009, the US economy lost 8,363,000 jobs, according to the payroll jobs data. As of October 2010, payroll jobs purportedly have increased by 874,000, an insufficient amount to keep up with labor force growth. However, John Williams reports that 874,000 is an overestimate of jobs as a result of the faulty “birth-death model,” which overestimates new business start-ups during recessions and underestimates business failures. Williams says that the next benchmark revision due out next February will show a reduction in current employment by almost 600,000 jobs. This assumes, of course, that the BLS does not gimmick the benchmark revision. If Williams is correct, it is more evidence that the hyped recovery is non-existent.
Discounting the war production shutdown at the end of World War II, which was not a recession in the usual sense, Williams reports that “the current annual decline [in employment] remains the worst since the Great Depression, and should deepen further.”
Rand Paul's BS is outed over at The Progressive by Matthew Rothschild beautifully (if there be such a thing). (Emphasis marks added - Ed.)
The only antidote I can think of at this precipice in history is listening to some music of better times while making plans to limit your personal damage. Professor Michael Hudson documents that Finance Has Become a New Form of Warfare.. . . as Holly Sklar, the astute progressive economic analyst, put it recently.
“According to the latest IRS data, the 400 richest taxpayers increased their average income by 399 percent, adjusted for inflation, between 1992 and 2007.” By contrast, she pointed out, “Average wages are 7 percent lower today, adjusted for inflation, than they were back in 1973.” To top it all off, she noted, “The richest 1 percent has more wealth than the bottom 95 percent combined.”
Rand Paul can pretend that classes don’t exist in America, and he can propose policies that will help the richest and punish everyone else, but all he proves by doing so is that he’s the one who’s got no class.
I was hoping this was not true as I've seen this developing since the Days of Raygun. (Emphasis marks added - Ed.)
Broadcast November 05, 2010
The Federal Reserve will pump $600 billion more into the US economy and keep interest rates at historical low levels. The short-term impact of the Fed’s move, known as quantitative easing, has been a jump in stock prices across the globe. Many nations, however, have accused the United States of waging a currency war by devaluing the dollar. We speak to former Wall Street economist and University of Missouri professor Michael Hudson. "The object of warfare is to take over a country’s land, raw materials and assets, and grab them," Hudson says. "In the past, that used to be done militarily by invading them. But today you can do it financially simply by creating credit, which is what the Federal Reserve has done."
Remember this movie?
Johann Hari makes a very persuasive case that America Is Now Officially for Sale. Reminiscent of Halliburton enough yet? (Emphasis marks added - Ed.)
It's the Tea Party spirit distilled: pose as the champion of Joe America, while actually ripping him off
November 06, 2010
The laws and policies of the legislature of the United States of America are now effectively on e-Bay, for sale to the highest bidder. Are you a Wall Street boss who wants to party like it's 2007? Are you a Big Coal baron who wants to burn, baby, burn? Are you an insurance company that wants to be able to kick sick people off your rolls? Meet John Boehner, the most powerful Republican and soon-to-be Speaker of the House. But - of course! - you already have.
Here's an example of how you have worked together. In 1995, the House was going to finally repeal subsidies for growing tobacco, because an addictive cancer-causing drug didn't seem like the most deserving recipient of tax-payers' cash - until Boehner walked the floor of the House handing out checks from tobacco lobbyists to his fellow elected representatives. They changed their minds. The subsidy stayed. Explaining his check-dispensing, Boehner says: "It's gone on here for a long time."
So get your bids in: the House is open for business.To understand what has happened in the mid-term elections, the best guide lies in an unexpected place - the dusty vaults of Hollywood. In 1957, Elia Kazan directed a film called ‘A Face In The Crowd' that read the tea-leaves of the Tea Party back when Sarah Palin was merely a frosty zygote.
One morning a poor wandering Arkansas chancer named Larry ‘Lonesome' Rhodes is lying passed out on a jail cell where the local sheriff has detained him overnight. A pretty young radio producer arrives and asks if he'd like to tell her a story to be played on her show where ordinary folks speak to ordinary folks. He sings and rambles and offers corn-poke homilies. The clip is a huge hit - and he is soon given his own show, filled with country music and country wisdom which then shoots off into the stratosphere.
When Lonesome Rhodes becomes one of the biggest stars on US television, he starts receiving offers. Advertisers say that if he endorses their lousy products, they'll shower him with millions. He knows how to sell to ordinary people - and he is pushed to go further.
They ask him to sell the political causes that will make them richer too. He starts railing against social security and the old age pension and anything that taxes the rich to help the rest. He uses the tunes and slanguage of working class Americans to get them to emotionally identify with the people who are screwing them over.
He's brilliant at it - a gurning hyperactive huckster, saying that support and security for ordinary Americans is a betrayal of America. He makes himself rich by lying to the people he came from.
Fast-forward to 2010.
John Boehner came from a poor family of twelve children, and heroically worked three jobs (including as a janitor) to put himself through business school. But when he got to elected office, it turned out that there was alot more money to be reaped from serving the interests of rich people than serving the people he came from.
He took money from the insurance companies, and voted to deny healthcare coverage to sick children and to the people who hurried to the World Trade Centre on 9/11 to try to dig people from the wreckage, exposing them to deadly toxins.
He took money from defense contractors, and supported every war going. He tirelessly champions the overdog, while hoovering up their cash and flying on their private jets to some of the most luxury resorts in the world.
In the campaign, Boehner said his priority was to "stand up for ordinary Americans" against "the elite", and to "cut the deficit as a matter of urgency." So what has been his first priority as Speaker?
To fight furiously to keep the gigantic Bush tax cuts for the elite richest two percent of Americans, even though this alone will add two trillion dollars to the deficit over the next decade. It's very revealing.
He immediately dumps on his propaganda causes - ordinary Americans, and the deficit - while slavishly serving his one true cause: serving the interests of rich people like the ones who happen to pay for his campaigns and his jaunts.
This is the story of the modern Republican Party. They use the cultural signifiers of the good people of Middle America to get their emotional identification, meanwhile they pillage Middle America and redistribute its wealth to the rich.
Sarah Palin is the queen of this cause. She presents herself as a warrior for hockey moms and Momma Grizzlies, while spreading fictions to stop those very people supporting social programs that could save their lives: remember her claim that Obama's healthcare plan involved setting up "death panels" to execute the old and disabled? Her true slogan is Shill, Baby, Shill.
This is all made easy for Republicans by the fact that most of the Democratic Party slithers in the same trough of corruption, begging from the same billionaires and corporations, and so can deliver only a tiny notch more for ordinary Americans.
This makes left-liberal ideas look discredited, when in truth they are largely discarded.
To name just one: the very high unemployment in the US has been presented by Republicans as proof that economic stimulus doesn't work. But in reality, Obama's stimulus was appallingly small, and was counter-balanced by the fact that the individual states were slashing spending and laying people off.
Once you add the two together, there has been no net stimulus in the US economy at all.
The essence of the Tea Party - and the relevance of ‘A Face In The Crowd' - can be seen most plainly in Glenn Beck.
Just over a decade ago, he was a drug-taking, pro-abortion, perpetually drunk DJ on morning radio. One of his famous "pranks" was to ring up the wife of a radio-show rival a few days after she had a miscarriage and taunt her about her loss.
But then he stumbled into political commentary. After 9/11, Beck began to articulate a blubbery, blubbering hysteria, calling for the shooting of Michael Moore and the poisoning of Nancy Pelosi. He announced that any government program helping ordinary Americans was a step towards "communism", and prophesied:
"The country may not survive Barack Obama? If he does fundamentally transform America, we're done. You don't have to worry about a 2012."He shot up to be the second highest rated show in cable news, and assembled hundreds of thousands to a rally on the Mall. At times seems quite conscious of the manipulation: "They're getting so tired of me saying there's a Marxist in the White House, I gotta take it up a notch," he reportedly said to one private audience.But a few years ago, he began to do something stranger still. He announced that the US was going to experience hyperinflation and savings would be rendered worthless - so his viewers should transfer their cash into gold. But not just any gold. No: Obama was probably going to seize gold bullion and nationalize it, he warned, so they should buy gold coins. "I think people are running out of options on what, you know, could be worth something at all. You have to think like a German Jew, 1934," he said.
Meanwhile, Beck's program on Fox News is sponsored by a company called Goldline that sells gold coins. As it turned out there is no hyperinflation and no Obama plan to seize bullion. Yet Beck's claims - and constant praise for Goldline - have made him and the company considerably richer. The only people who are worse off are Beck's viewers: the investigative journalist Dana Milbank looked at 2008 and calculated that they would have seen a higher return if they had kept their money in cash than in golden coins.
A court in Missouri ruled a few years ago that Goldline pressured a woman in her eighties to invest $230,000 in gold coins actually worth half that sum. The Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating the company, and Senator Anthony Weiner says Beck and other on-air promoters "are either the worst financial advisors around or knowingly lying to their loyal viewers."
It's the Tea Party spirit distilled: pose as the champion of Joe America, while ripping him off.
There is, however, one significant difference from ‘A Face In The Crowd'. At the end of the film - spoiler alert - Lonesome Rhodes is finishing a show and, as the end credits roll and the music swells, he rants against his viewers, believing they can't hear him.
But in the control box, a producer deliberately flips a switch. Suddenly millions hear him say:
"Those morons out there. I'd give ‘em dog food and make ‘em think it's steak. Good night you stupid idiots. Good night you miserable slobs. They're like a bunch of trained seals - I toss ‘em a fish and they lap it up."
John Boehner and Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck are ridiculing their followers just as crudely.
Can't somebody at Fox flip the switch?
And one more for the road? Suzan _________________
No comments:
Post a Comment