SAVE THE RICH! (Fuck the Poor - HARDER) Is It Margin Call Time? (Rich Moochers Hurting US Again and Again)

(If throwing a contribution Pottersville2's way won't break your budget in these difficult financial times, I really need it, and would wholeheartedly appreciate it. Anything you can afford will make a huge difference in this blog's lifetime.)




My thanks to my buddy, RJ.

For clearing this up.

(Even though they clearly have got it coming.)


And if you think what the 1% just did to the poor (90%) in the latest "Grand Bargain" is new . . . please please please DON'T!

Stop it now.

Moochers!

Mar 22, 2013

How Rich “Moochers” Hurt America

The 3-point plan of wealthy landlords, lenders and insurance providers -- the true "takers" threatening the nation

By Michael Lind

Mitt Romney (Credit: Reuters/Brian Snyder)

In a previous column detailing the true “makers” and “takers” in America, I argued that the greatest threat to American capitalism today comes not from public taxation supporting public programs, but from “private taxation” in the form of excessive private “rents” that subsidize private sector parasites or “rentiers” (like landlords, lenders and providers of health insurance and healthcare). These excessive private taxes or rents are costs on productive enterprise that can be as crippling as excessive public taxation.

In American politics as in the American economy, power and wealth have shifted from the industrial capitalists of old to the “rent lords” of the early 21st century, based in the overgrown FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) sector. The agenda of the new rentier oligarchy in the U.S. is quite different from that of traditional productive businesses. The Rentier Agenda consists of low taxes on rentiers, the privatization of infrastructure and social insurance, and a macroeconomic policy that favors creditors rather than debtors, including debtor businesses and debtor governments.

Low taxes on rentiers. In the late 20th century, the U.S. and a number of other capitalist countries made tax rates on capital gains lower than tax rates on wage income. This was supposed to encourage investment in productive enterprises, but in fact it merely provided the super-rich with windfall fortunes that have often been used for stock market and real estate speculation. Thanks to privileged tax treatment of capital gains, Warren Buffett complains that he pays lower taxes than his secretary, and Mitt Romney — the poster boy of rentier financial capitalism — paid 13.9 percent in taxes in 2010, lower than the combined employee and employer payroll taxes paid by low-income workers who pay no federal income tax (and not counting the state and local taxes that they pay). America’s rentier plutocracy has deployed campaign contributions to intimidate Congress into keeping taxes extremely low on those who make most of their income from investments, whether the investments enhance the American economy’s productive capacity or not.

Privatizing natural monopolies. The classic productive capitalist wants to found a company to provide a new, socially useful good or service and make money by sales. In contrast, the classic parasitic rentier wants to bribe the state legislature into privatizing and selling state roads so that he or she can make money without effort or innovation every time somebody drives and pays a toll. Not only progressives but mainstream conservatives used to agree that natural monopolies, such as many infrastructure services—water, electricity, transportation — should be either publicly owned or publicly regulated utilities. Today, however, some plutocrats, seeking guaranteed, recurrent streams of money for little or no effort, fund politicians and ideologues who favor privatizing or deregulating infrastructure and public utilities and cutting or voucherizing Social Security and Medicare, to force the elderly to buy financial products and costly health insurance from the rentier sector.

Anti-inflationary macroeconomic policy. The rentier class overlaps largely with the creditor class, much of whose wealth is in the form of debts that must be repaid by governments, businesses and individuals. In all times and places, the creditor elite has lived in fear that its wealth may be reduced by inflation, which permits the debtors to repay their debts in currency, which is nominally the same but in reality of ever-dwindling value.

Moderate inflation is the friend of governments with high debt loads, allowing them to pay down debts more easily without hurting the economy by raising taxes too much or cutting spending too much. Most businesses can live with moderate inflation, as long as they pass on price increases in inputs to their customers.  Nor is moderate inflation a threat to the working-class majorities in the U.S. and similar industrial democracies, as long as wages and social insurance, like Social Security, are adjusted for inflation. (Only an affluent minority of Americans have substantial private retirement savings that could be harmed by inflation.)

This means that the rentiers are much more willing to have central bankers and other government policymakers slam the brakes on the economy, at the slightest sign of inflation, than are productive businesses (if they are rational), governments or wage earners. Indeed, because rising wages in tight labor markets can sometimes contribute to economy-wide inflation, the creditor class can tolerate or even approve of high levels of sustained unemployment that devastates much of a nation’s population while depriving productive businesses of great numbers of consumers.

That’s the Rentier Agenda, then — low tax rates on unearned income flowing to passive investors, replacing public utilities with private toll-charging monopolies, and pursuing policies that deter inflation, even at the risk of prolonged, mass unemployment and idle factories. It is no exaggeration to say that the private sector rentiers are not only the real “moochers” and the real “takers” but also are the greatest threat to productive industrial capitalism, in the United States and the world.

What we need is an Anti-Rentier alliance. Such a coalition would scramble the usual patterns of politics. Progressives and conservatives alike would have to distinguish between productive businesses, which we should encourage, and rent-extracting parasites that need to be dealt with.

Pro-manufacturing liberals and Main Street conservative populists should unite against what the progressive economist Michael Hudson calls “the tollbooth economy” in alliance with what James K. Galbraith calls “the predator state.”

This is the second in a three-part series.

(Michael Lind is the author of Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States and co-founder of the New America Foundation. More Michael Lind.)

Still sitting here in limbo.

The Rich (1%) Aren't Like You and Me (99%): They Are Terrified That Rescuing the US Economy Will Cost Them Money (So, Please No Taxes Please for the Wealthy Please. Thank you!)

The wealthy opposed - while most Americans favor - instituting a system of national health insurance, raising the minimum wage to above poverty levels, increasing the Earned Income Tax Credit and providing a "decent standard of living" for the unemployed. They were also against the federal government helping with or providing jobs for those who cannot find private employment.

Unlike most Americans, wealthy respondents opposed increased regulation of large corporations and raising the "cap" that exempts income above $113,700 from the FICA payroll tax. And unlike most Americans, they oppose relying heavily on corporate taxes to raise revenue and oppose taxing the rich to redistribute wealth.

Ain't no big surprise.

(As the jilted lover always chimes.)

It was always an amazement to me when liberal friends made lots of excuses for why Hillary's new, improved health care system for the masses was dead-lettered by the health care organization owners. The essay below gives almost any observer a pretty definite indication of their priorities.

The 1% Aren't Like the Rest of Us

By Benjamin I. Page and Larry M. Bartels, Los Angeles Times

22 March 13

The ultra-rich share few of the priorities of most Americans, but their access to policymakers is greater, a study finds.
ver the last two years, President Obama and Congress have put the country on track to reduce projected federal budget deficits by nearly $4 trillion. Yet when that process began, in early 2011, only about 12% of Americans in Gallup polls cited federal debt as the nation's most important problem. Two to three times as many cited unemployment and jobs as the biggest challenge facing the country. So why did policymakers focus so intently on the deficit issue? One reason may be that the small minority that saw the deficit as the nation's priority had more clout than the majority that didn't.

We recently conducted a survey of top wealth-holders (with an average net worth of $14 million) in the Chicago area, one of the first studies to systematically examine the political attitudes of wealthy Americans. Our research found that the biggest concern of this top 1% of wealth-holders was curbing budget deficits and government spending. When surveyed, they ranked those things as priorities three times as often as they did unemployment - and far more often than any other issue.

If the concerns of the wealthy carry special weight in government - as an increasing body of social scientific evidence suggests - such extreme differences between their views and those of other Americans could significantly skew policy away from what a majority of the country would prefer. Our Survey of Economically Successful Americans was an attempt to begin to shed light on both the viewpoints and the political reach of the very wealthy.

While we had no way to measure directly the political influence of those surveyed, they did report themselves to be highly active politically.

Two-thirds of the respondents had contributed money (averaging $4,633) in the most recent presidential election, and fully one-fifth of them "bundled" contributions from others. About half recently initiated contact with a U.S. senator or representative, and nearly half (44%) of those contacts concerned matters of relatively narrow economic self-interest rather than broader national concerns. This kind of access to elected officials suggests an outsized influence in Washington.

On policy, it wasn't just their ranking of budget deficits as the biggest concern that put wealthy respondents out of step with other Americans. They were also much less likely to favor raising taxes on high-income people, instead advocating that entitlement programs like Social Security and healthcare be cut to balance the budget.

 Large majorities of ordinary Americans oppose any substantial cuts to those programs.

While the wealthy favored more government spending on infrastructure, scientific research and aid to education, they leaned toward cutting nearly everything else. Even with education, they opposed things that most Americans favor, including spending to ensure that all children have access to good-quality public schools, expanding government programs to ensure that everyone who wants to go to college can do so, and investing more in worker retraining and education.

The wealthy opposed - while most Americans favor - instituting a system of national health insurance, raising the minimum wage to above poverty levels, increasing the Earned Income Tax Credit and providing a "decent standard of living" for the unemployed. They were also against the federal government helping with or providing jobs for those who cannot find private employment.

Unlike most Americans, wealthy respondents opposed increased regulation of large corporations and raising the "cap" that exempts income above $113,700 from the FICA payroll tax.

And unlike most Americans, they oppose relying heavily on corporate taxes to raise revenue and oppose taxing the rich to redistribute wealth . . . .

_ _ _ _ _ _ _

And the rest of the article goes on like that. Kind of. If you disallow the confusion (and I really didn't have the heart today to go into that mindfield) about who really pays the taxes and what benefits they receive (and how gullible the lower class is in buying into the "deficit is our biggest problem" lie . . . .).

Some discerning commentary followed.

Is the 99% getting smarter politically about its adversaries?

We'll have to wait for the next election I guess.

COMMENTS:

- Walter J Smith 2013-03-22 06:54

The pro 1% biases in this article are astonishing: "The wealthy are likely to have better information about the costs of government programs (for which they pay a lot of taxes)..."The wealthy pay less than one-third of the taxes they paid during the Eisenhower Administration. They pay far less than any others, when those payments take into consideration their ability to pay instead of waste that money on conspicuous consumption, like the lavish displays of wasteful wealth they love presenting to prove their assumed inherent superiority.

If we get a "larger-scale national study," the need for which was hardly demonstrated by this article, then it will need some architects of that study to civilize it a bit, and bring it down from the sanctified abstractions that leave its authors dizzy with their own confusions about taxation and wealth.

What we need are articles helping us see why it is a waste of time voting for policymakers whose devotions are a foregone conclusion. What we need are studies that help us see how to cooperate even though our pseudo-intelligentsia seems more devoted to pedalling confusions than to clarifying reality. It would be a great help to have a public information service that wasn't primarily devoted to promoting the 1% sleaze.

+7awen 2013-03-22 07:06

Duh. But thanks for doing the research to show what we "not so smart" people already knew.

Is This the End of the Democratic Party Progressives? (We Are ALL So Screwed)

(If throwing a contribution Pottersville2's way won't break your budget in these difficult financial times, I really need it, and would wholeheartedly appreciate it. Anything you can afford will make a huge difference in this blog's lifetime.)


Many of us think that's a rhetorical question.

Especially Bobby Reich. (Don't miss the comments!)

Selling the Store

By Robert Reich, Reich's Blog

21 March 13
Prominent Democrats - including the President and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi - are openly suggesting that Medicare be means-tested and Social Security payments be reduced by applying a lower adjustment for inflation.

This is even before they've started budget negotiations with Republicans - who still refuse to raise taxes on the rich, close tax loopholes the rich depend on (such as hedge-fund and private-equity managers' "carried interest"), increase capital gains taxes on the wealthy, cap their tax deductions, or tax financial transactions.

It's not the first time Democrats have led with a compromise, but these particular pre-concessions are especially unwise.

For over thirty years Republicans have pitted the middle class against the poor, preying on the frustrations and racial biases of average working people who can't get ahead no matter how hard they try. In the Republican narrative, government takes from the hard-working middle and gives to the undeserving and dependent needy.

In reality, average working people have been stymied because almost all the economic gains of the last three decades have gone to the very top. The middle has lost bargaining power as unions have shriveled. American politics has been flooded with campaign contributions from corporations and the wealthy, which have used their clout to reduce marginal tax rates, widen loopholes, loosen regulations, gain subsidies, and obtain government bailouts when their bets turn sour.

Now five years after the worst downturn since the Great Depression and the biggest bailout in history, the stock market has recouped its losses and corporate profits constitute the largest share of the economy since 1929. Yet the real median wage continues to fall - wages now claim the lowest share of the economy on record - and inequality is still widening. All the economic gains since the trough of the recession have gone to the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans; the bottom 90 percent continue to lose ground.

What looks like the start of a more buoyant recovery is a sham because the vast majority of Americans have neither the pay nor access to credit that allows them to buy enough to boost the economy. Housing prices and starts are being fueled by investors with easy money rather than would-be home buyers with mortgages. The Fed's low interest rates have pushed other investors into stocks by default, creating an artificial bull market.

If there was ever a time for the Democratic Party to champion working Americans and reverse these troubling trends, it is now - forging an alliance between the frustrated middle and the working poor. This need not be "class warfare" because a healthy economy is in everyone's interest. The rich would do far better with a smaller share of a rapidly-growing economy than a ballooning share of one that's growing at a snail's pace and a stock market that's turning into a bubble.

But the modern Democratic Party can't bring itself to do this. It's too dependent on the short-term, insular demands of Wall Street, corporate executives, and the wealthy.

It was Bill Clinton, after all, who pushed for repeal of Glass-Steagall, championed the North American Free Trade Act and the World Trade Organization without adequate safeguards for American jobs, and rented out the Lincoln Bedroom to a steady stream of rich executives.

And it was Barack Obama who continued George W. Bush's Wall Street bailout with no strings attached; pushed a watered-down "Volcker Rule" (still delayed) rather than renew Glass-Steagall; failed to prosecute a single Wall Street executive or bank because, according to his Attorney General, Wall Street is just too big to jail; and permanently enshrined the Bush tax cuts for all but the top 2 percent.

Meanwhile, over the last several decades Democrats have allowed Social Security taxes to grow and its revenue stream to become almost as important a source of overall government funding as income taxes; turned their backs on organized labor and labor-law reforms that would have made it easier to form unions; and then, even as they bailed out Wall Street, neglected the burdens of middle-class homeowners who found themselves underwater and their homes worth less than what they paid for them because of the Street's excesses.

In fairness, it could have been worse. Clinton did stand up to Gingrich. Obama did get the Affordable Care Act. Congressional Democrats have scored tactical victories against social conservatives and Tea Party radicals. But Democrats haven't responded in any bold or meaningful way to the increasingly concentrated wealth and power, the steady demise of the middle class, and further impoverishment of the nation's poor. The Party failed to become a movement to reclaim the economy and our democracy.

And now come their pre-concessions on Social Security and Medicare.

Technically, a "chained CPI" might be justifiable if seniors routinely substitute lower-cost alternatives as prices rise, as most other Americans do. But in reality, seniors pay 20 to 40 percent of their incomes for healthcare, including pharmaceuticals - the prices of which are rising much faster than inflation. So there's no practical justification for reducing Social Security benefits on the assumption inflation isn't really eating away at those benefits as much as the current cost-of-living adjustment allows.

Likewise, although a case can be made for reducing the Medicare benefits of higher-income beneficiaries, as a practical matter their savings are almost as vulnerable to rising healthcare costs as are the more modest savings of middle-income retirees. "Means-testing" Medicare also runs the risk of transforming it into a program for the "less fortunate," which can undermine its political support.

In short, Medicare isn't the problem. The underlying problem is the sky-rocketing costs of health care. Because Medicare's administrative costs are a fraction of those of private health insurance, Medicare might be part of the solution. Medicare for all, or even a public option for Medicare, would give the program enough clout to demand health providers move from a fee-for-service system to one that paid instead for healthy outcomes.

With healthcare costs under better control, retirees wouldn't be paying a large and growing portion of their incomes for healthcare - which would alleviate pressure on Social Security. I'm still not convinced a "chained CPI" is necessary, though. A preferable alternative would be to raise the ceiling on the portion of income subject to Social Security taxes (now $113,600).

Besides, Social Security and Medicare are the most popular programs ever devised by the federal government, which is why Republicans hate them so much. If average Americans have trusted the Democratic Party to do one thing it has been to guard these programs from the depredations of the GOP.

Putting these two programs "on the table" is also tantamount to accepting the most insidious and dishonest of all Republican claims: That for too long most Americans have been living beyond their means; that we are rapidly approaching a day of reckoning when we can no longer afford these generous "entitlements;" and that prudence and responsibility dictate that we must now begin to live within our means and cut back these projected expenditures, particularly if we are to have any money left to invest in the young and the disadvantaged.

The truth is the opposite: That for three decades the means of most Americans have been stagnant even though the overall economy has more than doubled in size; that because almost all the gains from growth have gone to the top, most Americans haven't been able to save enough for retirement or the rising costs of healthcare; and that because of this, Social Security and Medicare are barely adequate as is.

Paul Ryan's House Republican budget takes on Medicare, but leaves Social Security alone. Why should Democrats lead the charge on either?

The Republicans are already slashing help for the young and the disadvantaged. Democrats shouldn't succumb the lie that the elderly and young are in competition for a portion of a shrinking pie, when in fact the pie is larger than ever. It's just that those who have the largest and fastest-growing portions refuse to share it.

We are the richest nation in the history of the world - richer now than we've ever been. But an increasing share of that wealth is held by a smaller and smaller share of the population, who have, in effect, bribed legislators to reduce their taxes and provide loopholes so they pay even less.

The budget deficit "crisis" has been manufactured by them to distract our attention from this overriding fact, and to pit the rest of us against each other for a smaller and smaller share of what remains. Democrats should not conspire.

Needy children should be getting far more help, better pre-school care, better nutrition. Seniors need better healthcare coverage and more Social Security. All Americans need better schools and improved infrastructure.

The richest nation in the history of the world should be able to respond to the legitimate needs of all its citizens.

(Robert B. Reich, Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, was Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration. Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the last century. He has written thirteen books, including the best sellers "Aftershock" and "The Work of Nations." His latest is an e-book, "Beyond Outrage." He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine and chairman of Common Cause.)

Comments

+18#Abigail2013-03-21 08:35

All my working life deductions were made from my salary, whether I wanted or not, to pay for future social Security and Medicare benefits. The money in the Social Security fund is not the Government's, it is the workers'! Interest which was earned by this money was put into the general funds, so in effect, was stolen from the workers. Taking either of these "benefits" (which are really returns on the workers' investments is pure robbery), and not in keeping with the ideals of our Constitution.



+17#Don Thomann2013-03-21 08:38

What we need is a real progressive party!
The "Democratic Party" has been infiltrated a bunch of Republicans in "sheep's clothing" and they think no one is noticing!



+15#cordleycoit2013-03-21 08:42

The working class tried to trust the Democrat's and that didn't work they were sold out. So a lot of them tried the Tea Party only to be abandoned by the Repugs, Sold out by everyone and disowned we had best review all the options. One thing for sure we don't trust the suits.



+14#BradFromSalem2013-03-21 09:19

The Democrats giving away a slice of Social Security benefits and limiting access to Medicare does not do anything at all to deal with environmental issues, create jobs, or reduce income inequality.

There is nothing for anyone in America to gain from these ideas. Nobody. On the other hand everyone loses. Every one.

Which Democrat or Socialist in either the Senate or the House will stand up and say what I just wrote?

The Democrats and Socialist just need to lay down those three litmus test standards. Enviroment, Equality, Employment. Remember, both Boehner and Ryan have publicly admitted that the deficit (or is it the debt?) is a long term problem. C'mon Dems, they have handed you the gun to shoot down their plans, now use it.



-8#joedeane2013-03-21 09:21

I become highly irritated at Reich for pretending the Democrats might do something sensible about the vile economic situation that they helped so much to create. That is a sham and he must know it. Reich is no dummy.




+3#Billsy2013-03-21 09:44

What do you expect Reich to do? Appeal to republicans for progressive ideas? He's part of the solution, not the problem, so please direct your anger and frustration elsewhere. Want a thriving progressive party? Start building it locally. I've been supporting independent candidates for years now. Only a matter of time before they start gaining traction, or our empire crumbles.



+1#jon2013-03-21 09:47
quote:

"As Dean Baker, chief economist at CEPR, predictor of the housing bubble collapse, Fannie Mae bankruptcy, and subsequent financial disaster, has widely stated, a social security problem doesn't really exist. "According to the Social Security trustees' report, if we did absolutely nothing the program could pay every penny of scheduled benefits through the year 2036." Cutting the contributions (as has been proposed) would be disaster, though. The best solution (if we want a long-term approach) would be to tax all income for social security, not merely the 1rst $100,000.00, which unfairly singles out the working and middle class."



+1#rjf7r2013-03-21 09:58

"Chained CPI" is a rich person's fantasy idea that the poor and those of modest means are careless with their expenditures and could easily replace a more expensive thing with a less expensive thing. (The reality of course is that those of modest means already have to be far more careful with their expenditures than are the rich, and thus really don't have this fantasy option.)



0#mgwmgw2013-03-21 09:59

I am not certain how much having government try to take care of poor people is a good idea, but those who find the Democrats to be insufficiently interested in that goal might consider the Green Rainbow Party http://www.green-rainbow.org/

There would be nothing like watching their poll numbers go down to get the Democrats' attention. Getting elected is every politician's first priority.

I am in favor of stronger alternatives to the Democrats and Republicans, because then more problems and solutions may get discussed, even if the smaller parties do not win major elections.

I sometimes think that the Democrats and Republicans have been bought by the same buyers, which is why the practical end results of both parties look so similar to each other in some respects.

Financial Complexity Follies: The Elites Designed A New System That Redistributes From Middle/Bottom To Top (The GOP's Real Agenda Blusters On To Victory)

Lawyer: It’s Generally Preferable To Not Be Mentioned In Detail In An Insider Trading Complaint

Hope this clears things up.

Read more

_ _ _ _ _ _ _

I think more and more these days about this great Interfluidity post about complexity in finance:

Financial systems help us overcome a collective action problem. In a world of investment projects whose costs and risks are perfectly transparent, most individuals would be frightened. Real enterprise is very risky. … This is a core problem that finance in general and banks in particular have evolved to solve. A banking system is a superposition of fraud and genius that interposes itself between investors and entrepreneurs.

Like so many good con-men, bankers make themselves believed by persuading each and every investor individually that, although someone might lose if stuff happens, it will be someone else. You’re in on the con. If something goes wrong, each and every investor is assured, there will be a bagholder, but it won’t be you. 

Bankers assure us of this in a bunch of different ways. First and foremost, they offer an ironclad, moneyback guarantee. You can have your money back any time you want, on demand. At the first hint of a problem, you’ll be able to get out. 

They tell that to everyone, without blushing at all. Second, they point to all the other people standing in front of you to take the hit if anything goes wrong. It will be the bank shareholders, or it will be the government, or bondholders, the “bank holding company”, the “stabilization fund”, whatever. There are so many deep pockets guaranteeing our bank! There will always be someone out there to take the loss. We’re not sure exactly who, but it will not be you! They tell this to everyone as well. Without blushing.

Once I objected: well, no, complexity in finance is about intensive specifying of rules, not ambiguity. Laying out crystal-clear waterfalls is important. Finance people hate ambiguity; complexity is a way to avoid it.

Have I mentioned lately how much I love Dean Baker?

No:? Well, consider it done.

Capitalism, Steven Pearlstein and Morality

by Dean Baker

The Washington Post had a major column by Steve Pearlstein on the front page of its Outlook section headlined, "Is Capitalism Moral?" The piece notes the sharp upward redistribution of income over the last three decades and asks whether we should just being willing to accept market outcomes.

 

Demonstrators in Dundas Square in Toronto, Canada protest greed and inequality in 2011. (Photo: Vince Talotta/ Toronto Star)
 

Of course this question is absurd on its face. The upward redistribution of the last three decades was the result of deliberate government policies designed to redistribute income upward; it was not the natural workings of the market. 

For example, trade policy was quite explicitly intended to place segments of the U.S. workforce in direct competition with low paid workers in Mexico, China and other developing countries. The predicted and actual result of this policy has been to push down the wages the bottom 50-70 percent of the workforce to the benefit of those at the top.

This was hardly the free market. We could have adopted trade policies that were designed to put doctors, lawyers and other highly paid professionals in direct competition with their much lower paid counterparts in the developing world. If we had done this, doctors in the U.S. might be earning closer to $100,000 a year rather than the current average of more than $250,000 annually. This would transfer more than $100 billion annually to the rest of the country in the form of lower health care costs.

The government also strengthened and lengthened the periods of monopoly protection provided by both patents and copyrights. This has hugely increased the amount of rents being paid to high-end earners, the pharmaceutical industry and the entertainment industry at the expense of everyone else.

The government has also helped management against labor by having laws that asymmetrically punish workers and management. If workers have a strike that is ruled illegal, the case can immediately go into court and the leaders of the strike can be thrown in jail. By contrast, when management breaks the law to prevent workers from organizing, the case goes to the National Labor Relations Board, where it can be dragged out for months or even years. Management will almost never face imprisonment as a result of its lawbreaking.

In the last three decades the government has allowed banks to merge and grow large enough so that they enjoy an implicit guarantee from the government. This guarantee provides a subsidy to the big banks that has been estimated to be as large as $80 billion a year. The financial sector also enjoys a special low tax status in that it is exempted from many of the taxes (most importantly state sales taxes) that affect other industries. This is also an implicit subsidy.

Even the state of the macro economy is a policy decision, not a market decision. The fact that almost 8.0 percent of our workforce is unemployed is the result of a policy decision that put a greater emphasis on limiting deficits and debt than maintaining full employment. (There is no natural market level of government surpluses/deficits. Whatever the government does is a policy decision -- sorry natural market lovers.) 

The decision to put a higher priority on deficit reduction than maintaining employment levels also redistributes income upward. The people who are unemployed are disproportionately at the lower end of the income ladder. Also, high rates of unemployment put downward pressure on the wages of the bottom half of the workforce even if they are employed.

The massive upward redistribution of the last three decades has been the result of these and other deliberate policies that had the goal of redistributing income upward. It was not the result of free market capitalism. (This is the topic of my book, The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive.) The real question is whether a system that is designed around policies that redistribute from the middle and the bottom to the top is moral.

Pearlstein's piece is incredibly dishonest to imply that the upward distribution of the last three decades was just a natural occurance. Perhaps he really doesn't know better, but someone in an editorial position at a major newspaper should.

Dean Baker is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). He is the author of The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer and the more recently published Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of The Bubble Economy. He also has a blog, "Beat the Press," where he discusses the media's coverage of economic issues.

Take a gander at the following essay's mention of the Koch-funded legislature in Kansas.

Anyone else remembering what North Carolina now proudly displays in the statehouse?

(Hint: Republican control under Koch advocate Art Pope, anyone?)

The GOP's Real Agenda

Tim Dickinson, Rolling Stone

Dickinson writes: "The reactionary impulses of the Republican Party appear unbowed. Across the nation, the GOP's severely conservative agenda ... is moving forward under full steam."

READ MORE

Since last fall, Republicans have pretended to be more moderate - but their politics are harsher and more destructive than ever.

fter watching voters punish the GOP in the 2012 elections, Republican elites have been talking a brave game about reforms that would make the party less repulsive to Latinos, women and gay-friendly millennials. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, the GOP's hip-hop-quoting young standard-bearer, is pressing conservatives to back an amnesty for undocumented immigrants. Dozens of party stalwarts, headlined by former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, renounced their opposition to gay marriage in a Supreme Court brief. GOP bigwigs have even launched New Republican - a group modeled after Bill Clinton's centrist Democratic Leadership Council - which seeks to rebrand the party as "colorblind," "not anti-government" and dedicated to "ending corporate welfare."

Don't be fooled. On the ground, a very different reality is unfolding: In the Republican-led Congress, GOP-dominated statehouses and even before the nation's highest court, the reactionary impulses of the Republican Party appear unbowed. Across the nation, the GOP's severely conservative agenda - which seeks to impose job-killing austerity, to roll back voting and reproductive rights, to deprive the working poor of health care, and to destroy agencies that protect the environment from industry and consumers from predatory banks - is moving forward under full steam.
 

The hardcore rump of the party is even working to punish moderate outliers like New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie - the party's most popular leader - who was denied a speaking role at the conservative movement's annual convention, CPAC. Today's GOP may desperately need to remake itself as "culturally modern, environmentally responsible and economically inclusive," argues David Frum, a veteran of the George W. Bush White House, but it remains, he says, in the throes of a "Tea Party tantrum."

As it works to lock in as many retrograde policies as possible before it finally chooses to either modernize or die, the Republican Party is like a wounded beast: Rarely has it been more dangerous.

THE DEFICIT: HYSTERICAL AUSTERITY

In the Tea Party narrative, president Obama is a reckless socialist spending America into oblivion. In reality, the president has governed like an old-school Republican. Despite having taken heroic measures to rescue the economy in 2009, Obama has presided over the slowest expansion of federal spending since Eisenhower - and repeatedly offered to help Republicans slash the social safety net as part of a "grand bargain" that would restore the nation to fiscal balance.
 

Thanks to a rebounding tax base and the nearly $1 trillion in budget cuts that both parties agreed to in the first phase of the debt-ceiling deal, the deficit, entering 2013, was shrinking at a faster clip than at any time since the peace dividend after WWII. Federal outlays on both guns and butter were on a path to hit postwar lows as a percentage of gross domestic product by the end of Obama's second term.
 

But for anti-government Republicans, simple belt-tightening isn't enough. Since 2009, the party has fetishized the kind of draconian cuts to social services that have been practiced in Europe in recent years - and that have failed spectacularly to revive economies there. And today, with the imposition of the sequester - $1.2 trillion in across-the-board budget cuts divided between domestic and military expenditures - the Republicans have finally succeeded in bringing shock-and-awe austerity to America.
 

The sequester was born of Republican recklessness - a fixture of the debt-reduction package that the House GOP secured in 2011 after threatening to push the United States into default. In theory, neither party wanted these cuts. They were designed to be so politically toxic that lawmakers would be forced to work out a smarter mix of new revenue and targeted spending reductions.
 

During the "fiscal cliff" negotiations that opened 2013, President Obama laid out a fix to the sequester mess, limiting domestic and defense spending cuts to $200 billion. He sought to make up the difference by leveraging government purchasing power to reap $400 billion in health-care savings and banked another $200 billion by ending waste in farm subsidies and other "mandatory" spending. Obama rounded out his proposal by demanding sacrifice both from the wealthiest - limiting tax deductions and loopholes for the rich - and from future retirees, trimming Social Security payouts by adjusting the way Washington measures inflation. Twenty years ago, this is the kind of self-negotiated proposal that might have been floated by Republican Sen. Bob Dole. But the party of Eric Cantor and John Boehner reacted as if it had been proposed by Hugo Chávez.
 

The GOP House's counterproposal lurched into even greater Tea Party extremism. A budget bill passed in December by the House would have protected defense contractors by restoring all Pentagon spending and delivered the $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction on the broken backs and empty stomachs of low-income Americans - hollowing out social programs, decimating food-stamp benefits, even abolishing Meals on Wheels for hundreds of thousands of hungry seniors. Speaker Boehner praised his caucus for endorsing these "common-sense cuts."
 

Underscoring the priorities of today's GOP, their plan also contained a huge giveaway to reckless Wall Street speculators by eliminating the funding necessary for the government to shutter huge financial institutions. The bill also would have given Congress the ability to zero out the budget for the hated Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the watchdog agency brought to life by Elizabeth Warren that protects homeowners and credit-card holders from the abuses of predatory lenders.

As a result of the GOP's refusal to negotiate in good faith, America is now being subjected to austerity-by-a-thousand-cuts. Budgetary sadists like Paul Ryan will delight in the sequester's blows to vital anti-poverty programs: $285 million a year from heating assistance to keep the poor from freezing to death in their own homes. Another $543 million will be cut from nutrition assistance - throwing as many as 750,000 at-risk kids and moms out of the WIC program. California and Texas alone likely will be forced to lay off more than 2,000 teachers - leaving some 350,000 students in the lurch. Tens of thousands of preschoolers will be kicked out of Head Start.

Yet for all the pain they cause, these cuts will do little to balance the budget. As Fed chairman Ben Bernanke testified to Congress, "If you slow the economy, that hurts your revenues, and that means your deficit reduction is not as big as you think it is." Worse for a nation still mired in eight percent unemployment, Bernanke said, "This will cost a lot of jobs in the short run." The impact is particularly brutal for jurisdictions whose economies are dependent on federal and military contracts. Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C., are poised to lose a combined 450,000 jobs - double the losses projected for a megastate like California.
 

Some Republicans have attempted to blame the president for the pain caused by the "Obamaquester." But for the big bosses of the conservative movement, the true problem is that its cuts don't go far enough. Pointing to a right-wing think tank slamming the sequester as "insignificant," the GOP's anti-tax Svengali, Grover Norquist, snarked, "Ouch. Ouch. I cannot stand these 'meat cleaver' cuts in sequestration. Chain-saw massacre stuff."

TAX CUTS: STARVE THE STATES

Controlling only one-half of Congress, the Republicans can do little more than play defense by creating a deadlock in Washington. But with 24 statehouses now run by Republican governors and GOP-majority legislatures, the party is turning the states into laboratories for radical conservative governance.

In recent years, the GOP has sent talent from Congress back home to pursue its cruel economic agenda. From Louisiana to Kansas to Indiana, Republican governors with congressional pedigrees are working to slash state income and corporate taxes that hit the wealthiest - often calling on the working poor to make up the difference by paying higher sales taxes.

In Indiana, Gov. Mike Pence - until 2010 the number-three Republican in the House leadership - has asked the legislature to squander a rare surplus by passing an "across-the-board tax cut" that heavily favors the rich: Twenty-eight percent of benefits would go to the top five percent of earners. One in three low-income Hoosiers would see no tax cut at all.

In Louisiana, Gov. Bobby Jindal wants to abolish income and corporate taxes - financing the giveaway by increasing the flat tax on purchases. Jindal claims the proposal "will put more money back into the pockets of Louisiana families." That's a lie. Taxes on the poorest 20 percent would rise nearly $400 a year in order to lower taxes on the top one percent by $25,000.
 

In Kansas, Republican Gov. Sam Brownback, a former U.S. senator, is trying to pull off the same boondoggle with the backing of powerful allies - the billionaire Koch brothers, whose Koch Industries is based in Wichita, and the American Legislative Exchange Council, ALEC, a corporate front group that pushes right-wing policy across state legislatures.
 

Instead, the state is on track to pile up $2.5 billion in debt by 2018, yet Brownback is still calling on the legislature to whittle away at income tax rates - which he declares are on a "glide path to zero" - even if that requires higher sales taxes. Thanks to the Koch brothers, Brownback enjoys a rubber-stamp legislature.

Koch campaign cash in the past election put hardcore conservatives in control of both chambers; a board member of ALEC is now speaker of the Kansas House. If Brownback's latest cuts go forward, Kansas' $6 billion general fund will have been slashed by $1.1 billion a year, giving millionaires a tax cut of $28,000. "The magical growth model that the governor talks about only exists for the wealthiest Kansans who benefit from his tax plan," said Terry Forsyth, president of the Working Kansas Alliance.

VOTING RIGHTS: RIG THE SYSTEM

Republicans are painfully aware that a demographic tide has turned against them and that even turnout-suppressing voter-ID laws couldn't block the re-election of a Democrat to the White House in 2012. So party officials have become even more audacious in their plans to steal elections - this time by rigging the Electoral College itself.
 

The Electoral College is almost exclusively winner-take-all: The top popular vote-getter in Florida, for example, receives all 29 electoral votes. To benefit future GOP nominees, however, Republicans from blue-trending battleground states are seeking to divvy up their states' Electoral College bounty. These ploys are nothing more than dirty politics - and even GOP leaders admit it. "It's something that a lot of states that have been consistently blue that are fully controlled red ought to be looking at," said Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus, making clear that the strategy to reapportion Electoral College votes is appropriate only for strategically important swing states, not for Texas or Georgia.
 

In Pennsylvania, Republicans have introduced a bill to split Electoral College votes proportionally - a plan that would have robbed Obama of eight of the state's 20 votes in 2012. In Michigan, the state GOP has endorsed a plan to award an electoral vote to the winner of each congressional district. Because those districts were themselves gerrymandered by Republican politicians, this plan would have awarded Mitt Romney a majority of the Electoral College votes from Michigan - a state he lost by nearly 10 percent.
 

These state measures pale in comparison with a case now being weighed by the Supreme Court. Conservatives are hoping to nullify a bedrock provision of the Voting Rights Act, the law that brought democracy to the American South. "Section 5" of the 1965 law - renewed almost unanimously by Congress in 2006 - gives the Justice Department oversight of elections and redistricting in nine mostly Southern states. The suit is backed by the Koch-founded Cato Institute, which declared in a friend-of-the-court brief that "three generations of federal intrusion have been more than enough to kill Jim Crow.?.?.?.

Without the threat of federal interference, would state legislatures feel free to engage in mischief? It seems wildly improbable, even in the Deep South."

During oral arguments in February, the hard-right majority on the Supreme Court appeared receptive to this line of attack - which is not surprising. As a young attorney in the Reagan Justice Department, the current chief justice, John Roberts, wrote legal briefs challenging the constitutionality of the VRA. And in the February proceedings, Reagan appointee Antonin Scalia slammed the law that guarantees the franchise to all Americans as a "racial entitlement."
 

The recent history of the Deep South proves that racially discriminatory mischief is still with us. In Texas, where Gov. Rick Perry decries Section 5 as having been "unconstitutionally extended," the Justice Department used the provision to block a voter-ID law that could have disenfranchised some 600,000 duly registered voters - most of them black and Latino. (The law endorsed a conceal-carry gun permit as acceptable ID for voting but deemed student and even state worker IDs invalid.)
 

The Lone Star State also violated the Voting Rights Act in its congressional redistricting. A panel of three federal judges decried the "discriminatory intent" displayed by state legislators who had carved job-creating commercial centers out of majority African-American districts and redrawn the lines of at least one Hispanic-dominant district to "strengthen the voting power of?.?.?. Anglo citizens."
 

GLOBAL WARMING: DENY, DENY, DENY

The Republican party also remains committed to violence against the environment. The House Science, Space and Technology Committee, which has jurisdiction over global-warming research, has been stacked with hardcore deniers like California Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, who once blamed climate change on "dinosaur flatulence," and Georgia Rep. Paul Broun, a creationist who blasts science - "all that stuff I was taught about evolution, embryology, big-bang theory" - as "lies straight from the pit of hell."
 

The committee is chaired by Texan Lamar Smith, who has taken more than $500,000 in oil money during his political career and recently received a $10,000 check from Koch Industries. In one of his first moves as chairman, Smith planned a hearing about giving global-warming skeptics a congressional platform in a House "review" of climate science - only to have it postponed because of a severe storm.
 

In the states, Kansas is poised to join Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas in passing ALEC-sponsored legislation mandating that schools teach the "scientific controversies" of climate science. In South Carolina, conservatives have suppressed publication for more than a year of a study predicting dire global-warming impacts in the state - which reportedly include flooded homes, shriveling wetlands, ocean dead zones, and an invasion of piranhas and Asian swamp eels.

For his part, Sen. Rubio in Florida doubts whether humans are driving climate change and believes we should just let it ravage the planet in any case: "We can pass a bunch of laws that will destroy our economy," he said, "but it isn't going to change the weather."
 

REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS: DECLARE WAR ON WOMEN

In Republican politics, limited government ends at a woman's vagina. Early this year, the GOP-controlled legislature of Arkansas passed a bill outlawing abortion after just 12 weeks' gestation, a law "designed to dial the clock back 40 years," said Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights. The measure was vetoed by Democratic Gov. Mike Beebe, who decried it as "blatantly" unconstitutional - under Supreme Court precedent a woman has the right to terminate a pregnancy before at least 22 weeks. But in March, the state legislature voted to override the veto, enacting the most restrictive abortion law in the nation - and setting up a certain court challenge that may tempt the Roberts court to reconsider Roe v. Wade.
 

Republican legislatures across the country are also pushing bills that would force a woman to be penetrated by a dildonic-ultrasound wand before she can legally terminate her pregnancy. A similar bill in Virginia last year became synonymous with the Republican party's "War on Women" - a PR fiasco that contributed to the loss of at least two Senate seats. But state Republicans are unabashed in supporting ultrasound mandates: "This bill is a priority," said Scott Fitzgerald, Republican state senate leader in Wisconsin. "It is long overdue."
 

In Indiana, lawmakers have sought to punish women seeking access to the abortion pill RU-486 by forcing them to undergo not one but two ultrasound penetrations. Public outcry forced the legislature to reduce the ultrasound mandate to one. "This bill is about politics, not women's health or safety," said Betty Cockrum, president of Planned Parenthood of Indiana. "Statehouse politicians need to get out of our doctors' offices."
 

THE SAFETY NET: SCREW THE WORKING POOR

The Supreme Court's decision to uphold the constitutionality of Obama-care last year also gave states the right to opt out of an expansion of Medicaid - the joint state-federal insurance program - to cover the working poor.

A few high-profile Republican governors, including Rick Scott of Florida and Christie in New Jersey, have embraced this Medicaid expansion as a sweetheart deal: The federal government will pay all costs for new enrollees for three years, ponying up 90 percent thereafter. But other GOP leaders who despise government are content to put the health of millions at risk rather than sacrifice ideology.
 

Rick Perry in Texas - who calls Social Security a "disease" - is refusing to expand Medicaid, claiming it would "threaten even Texas with financial ruin." In fact, Perry is looking a gift horse in the mouth. The feds would give the state $100 billion over a decade to cover nearly 2 million residents, while requiring just $15 billion in state matching funds. Perry's prominent peers include Govs. Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania, Nikki Haley of South Carolina and Scott Walker of Wisconsin, who count among the nearly 20 GOP leaders who so far have refused to expand coverage.
 

Even the Republicans' best efforts to demonstrate that the party is moving forward have backfired. The Violence Against Women Act expired in 2011, and Republican obstructionism blocked its reauthorization. After the election, GOP leaders were desperate to put the issue behind them. But to pass VAWA in February, Speaker Boehner had to suspend normal House rules, which require a majority of the majority party to pass a bill, and team up with Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats to reauthorize the law. In all, 160 House and Senate members voted against the act - all of them Republicans.
 

If this is the "new" Republican party, it looks even more radical than your father's, or even your grandfather's. A leading new face on the party's right flank - Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas - recalls a famous 1950s Republican right down to the crook in his nose. Channeling Sen. Joseph McCarthy, Cruz has declared Barack Obama to be "the most radical" president in our history, adding that Obama was educated at Harvard Law School by "Marxists" who, Cruz insists, "believed in the Communists overthrowing the United States government."
 

It may be tempting to believe that danger posed by the GOP's lunatic fringe is cabined off in the House and the states of the Great Flyover. But 2014 is already looming, and vulnerable Democrats will be contesting Senate seats in red states from Alaska to Arkansas and Louisiana to South Dakota, as well as in hotly contested battlegrounds like Virginia and North Carolina.

Flip just six seats, and the GOP will control Congress - and set the agenda of the last two years of the Obama administration. Here's hoping that when the next wave of Todd Akins or Richard Mourdocks charge onto the scene - mouthing off about "legitimate rape" or the latest Tea Party cause célèbre, that the American body politic has the good sense to shut that whole thing down.

The Lessons of Iraq? Ø (That's A Big Fat Zero, Bub!) Who Is Held Accountable For the Iraq Debacle?

In that sense, the Iraq War was the original event initiating the larger Age of Moral Hazard — an epoch whereby our failure to demand consequences for bad decisions has effectively encouraged the political class to get things horrifically wrong, as long as doing so serves powerful political interests.

So, who's accountable for the Iraq War lies and 2 Trillion-Dollar price tag?

Not the responsible ones, obviously.

After another decade we'll probably learn from MSM sources (all owned by the Koch Brothers) that the "librools" were the ones who tricked the poor President and his trusty Veep into thinking that Iraq had WMD's. And that Valerie Plame's husband, Joe, not only was sent to Niger by her but that he found the smoking gun (yellowcake uranium sold to Saddam's government) and then lied about it to cover up for the Communists.

As if 45% of them don't already think that.

The world as David Sirota (and I) see it:

Tuesday, Mar 19, 2013

Who’s Held Accountable For Iraq?

Despite all the fatalities, injuries and costs of the conflict, 10 years later we've apparently learned nothing

By David Sirota

After 10 years, $2 trillion spent, an estimated 1 million civilians casualties, and almost 37,000 U.S. troops deceased or injured, one of the biggest enduring stories of the Iraq War has to be how little the debacle changed anything in the United States (or, arguably, in Iraq).

Today, on the 10-year anniversary of the Iraq invasion, America still has a massive, fiscally unsustainable defense budget; Congress still teems with lawmakers who fervently supported the Iraq War and who never admitted their mistake in promoting the WMD lies; the foreign policy establishment is still dominated by Iraq War proponents who never acknowledged their misjudgments and/or their willingness to suppress inconvenient information; the Washington press corps is still populated with reporters who failed to ask serious questions about the case for war; and the opinion news sphere is still promoting those who got the Iraq War flat wrong. And while there are some vague rumblings about the possibility of changed foreign policy outlooks, the fact remains that the Afghanistan War escalation, the intensifying drone war and the unauthorized Libya War suggest that the Iraq conflict’s lesson about the perils of “nation building,” “preemptive war” and blowback are still largely ignored.

To appreciate how little political fallout the Iraq War generated, consider how different the reaction was to American history’s most recent antecedent to the Iraq conflict. A generation ago, a similarly misguided war of choice in Vietnam resulted in such a fervent political backlash that a president was forced to opt against running for reelection, a slate of anti-war legislators was swept into Congress, and pro-Vietnam War Sen. Thomas Dodd and Gulf of Tonkin Resolution architect Sen. William Fulbright were voted out of office. At the same time, the leading voice in the establishment media dared to adversarially report fundamental flaws in the pro-war argument, to the point where it has become a mark of shame to admit you publicly backed the conflict.

To be sure, the reaction gap between Vietnam and Iraq can be explained, in part, by the fact that the former invasion generated more casualties, and by the fact that the former also involved mass conscription. That particular method of raising a fighting force tends to spread a war’s blood-and-guts consequences more widely through the population — and therefore creates the potential for a bigger political backlash — than a fighting force that is all volunteer.

However, that’s not the whole story. The other factor that explains the reaction gap between Vietnam and Iraq is a change in the political system. Simply put, in the last decade, that system has become almost completely impervious to any kind of consequences for bad decisions. Over time, such a lack of accountability has created a self-fulfilling feedback loop. With the public seeing no consequences for wrongdoing, the expectations of consequences, or feelings that they are even necessary, slowly but surely disappear.

This reality, of course, does not just define foreign affairs in the post-Iraq world. It is evident everywhere. From a refusal to prosecute a single banker connected to the financial meltdown, to the refusal to hold oil companies accountable for environmental destruction, to the refusal to hold education “reformers” responsible for the failure of their destructive policies, the modern era has taught us in myriad ways that there is no such thing as accountability for the politically connected.

In learning that lesson over and over and over again, most Americans have slowly come to accept that sad reality as immutable. Indeed, so accepting are we that few even flinch anymore when those who missed the financial crisis still appear on our televisions as financial experts, when those who have harmed America’s education system appear on our televisions as education specialists, or when still-unapologetic Iraq War cheerleaders appear on our televisions as Credible Foreign Policy Voices.

In that sense, the Iraq War was the original event initiating the larger Age of Moral Hazard — an epoch whereby our failure to demand consequences for bad decisions has effectively encouraged the political class to get things horrifically wrong, as long as doing so serves powerful political interests.

What is the converse of this dystopia? What, you ask, does a culture of basic accountability look like?

In a culture of accountability, no politician who voted for the $2 trillion Iraq War would be able to preen as a “deficit hawk,” yet so many who cast such votes nonetheless do (and are portrayed in the media as) just that.

In a culture of accountability, no politician who voted for the Iraq War would have been considered a serious candidate to occupy a government post that deals with foreign policy, yet from Hillary Clinton at the State Department to Denis McDonough in the White House chief of staff’s office to so many others in similar positions of power, Iraq War supporters still occupy those posts — and with almost nobody asking how that is possible.

In a culture of accountability, no pundit who cheered on the WMD “imminent threat” case for the Iraq War would be billed as as a national security “expert” nor given a major media platform to spout off about foreign policy, yet, from David Brooks to Thomas Friedman to Joe Klein to everyone else on lists like this, both conservative and liberal Iraq “hawks” still dominate national security opinion making.

In a culture of accountability, people like Dick Cheney and Colin Powell who crafted the lies that pushed America into war would only be able to show their faces on television as pure punch lines — and not as serious political voices. Yet, there they are on the tube, still treated as entirely credible.

In a culture of accountability, the relatively few politicians, political activists and scholars who opposed the Iraq War would be treated not just as courageous heroes, but as the truly prescient “experts” on national security, and those who blindly supported the war would be relegated to the historical trash heap. Instead, it is still the other way around: The warmongers like John McCain and Bill Kristol who got Iraq so wrong somehow remain the go-to authorities on all things war, while liberals who got Iraq right are still either largely ignored or marginalized.

Somehow, the pro-war ideologues are still promoted as dispassionate hard-nosed “pragmatists” while those who opposed the war see their prescience written off as just the product of blindly dovish ideology, and not of smart, well-considered forethought. In fact, in many instances, it is the Iraq War critics who still face punishment for their opposition. They, not the war proponents, are punished by being portrayed as the controversial radicals (case in point was Chuck Hagel, whose evolution from an Iraq War supporter to Iraq War critic — and whose willingness to apply Iraq lessons to Iran policy — were widely depicted not as solid reasons to confirm him as secretary of defense, but instead as good reasons to oppose his nomination).

The standard riposte to this is to insist that nobody lied, the intelligence was wrong, and that Iraq hawks did what any patriotic American would allegedly do by simply accepting what their government told them. This is supposed to absolve Iraq hawks from any consequences for their warmongering by casting it as both logical and unavoidable.

But, of course, deliberate lies were told, the intelligence was calculatedly cherry-picked, and most important of all, patriotism (and journalism) does not mean accepting without question the claims of government officials.

Yet, accepting without question is exactly what happened. Congressional lawmakers abdicated their constitutional oversight responsibilities, journalists ignored their Fourth Estate obligations to ask basic questions, and the transpartisan punditocracy became a megaphone for pro-war propaganda. That’s not by accident or unavoidable; it was the result of intentional decisions.

For most of us, if we were a party to such horrifically wrong, deliberately destructive and altogether extreme decisions in our own day-to-day lives, we would face punishing consequences, especially if we never bothered to apologize for our sociopathy. We would face public scorn and humiliation. We would probably get demoted or fired. We might even face criminal prosecution.

Until and unless the same standard is applied to the political establishment and media stenographers for their Iraq warmongering, there will be no change. We will still be living in the Age of Moral Hazard — and we should expect more Iraq-like debacles for decades to come.

David Sirota is a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist, magazine journalist and the best-selling author of the books "Hostile Takeover," "The Uprising" and "Back to Our Future." E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com.

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