Yes We Can-Can

Charles Krauthammer is mad enough to stomp bunnies, a man consumed with the type of bitterness that can only come from being thwarted by putative allies when a cherished goal is in sight. Things were going so well. With an assist from elderly social conservatives in patriot drag,* the GOP had successfully rebranded the economic free fall and debt juggernaut Bush bequeathed to the American people as the consequence of Obama’s “reckless spending, new entitlements and oppressive regulation with higher taxes.”

The GOP’s electoral victories in 2010 put conservative fantasies about tossing old ladies and elderly gents into the maw of the private insurance industry and slashing social programs that serve the poor like Freddy Krueger on a meth binge tantalizingly within reach. And then Gingrich and Perry had to go and fuck everything up.

According to Special K, Gilded Age-levels of wealth inequality have nothing to do with the economic shit-pile, and Wall Street marauding is so irrelevant to the issue that it doesn’t even merit a mention. No, these extraneous topics were injected into the debate by the president as a “class-envy gambit” to bolster his political fortunes. And Obama’s strategy would have totally bombed due to “suffering in part from its association with an Occupy rabble that had widely worn out its welcome.”

But then, “the struggling Democratic class-war narrative is suddenly given life and legitimacy by…Republicans! Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry make the case that private equity as practiced by Romney’s Bain Capital is nothing more than vulture capitalism looting companies and sucking them dry while casually destroying the lives of workers.” And now “Romney’s wealth, practices and taxes take center stage.”

How bad is it? This bad:

“Wednesday, the Republican House reconvened to reject Obama’s planned $1.2 trillion debt-ceiling increase. (Lacking Senate concurrence, the debt ceiling will be raised nonetheless.) Barely noticed. All eyes are on South Carolina and Romney’s taxes.”

The opportunity to demagogue once-routine debt ceiling hikes? Gone. A Koch-funded photo op featuring tricorn-hatted Tea Partiers staging a Hoveround siege of the Capitol? To ashes in Krauthammer’s mouth it turns. All thanks to those meddling kids on the GOP presidential slate. Damn them. Damn them to hell.

*H/T to fellow Rumproast blogger Hunger Tallest Palin for this dead-on description of the Tea Party.

[X-POSTED at Rumproast]

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To Russia With Love

Mitt Romney wants you to know he is entitled to his half a billion, and if you think there is a problem with the current concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny, tiny minority of sociopaths, well to fucking Russia with you:

Let me tell you something. America is a great nation, because we’re a united nation. And those who are trying to divide the nation, as you’re trying to do here, and as our president is doing, are hurting this country seriously. The right course for America is not to try to divide America, and try and divid us between one and another. it’s to come together as a nation.

And if you’ve got a better model — if you think China’s better, or Russia’s better, or Cuba’s better, or North Korea’s better — I’m glad to hear all about it.

But you know what? America’s right, and you’re wrong.

No one is suggesting we turn this into the former communist Russia, as Mitt is implying. All people are suggesting is that we stop lowering taxes for the very few and ending the 30 year reign of terror waged on the middle class by Mitt and his cohort. What’s even funnier is that even though Mitt is raking in millions at a tax rate lower than you, me, and virtually everyone in the country, he fails to realize that America he wants and has been working for more closely resembles the current Russian oligarchy, with a fantabulous concentration of wealth in the hands of a few people and corporations. According to wikipedia, the ratio of wealth of the top 10% to the bottom 10% and the top 20% and bottom 20% in the US and Russia negligible- (15.9 and 8.4% respectively for the US, and 12.7 and 7.6% for Russia). We are the third most unequal industrialized nation after… wait for it… Mexico and Russia.

So Mitt, you trust fund asshole, there is no reason for the bottom 99% to go to Russia, because as far as income disparity goes, they’re already there. Instead of lashing out at people who are rightfully pissed, he and his campaign should spend more time honing their message for the general electorate- for example, explaining how sheltering massive wealth in the Grand Caymans is the patriotic thing to do. Or how you think receiving millions a year from Bain and investment dividends makes you “unemployed.”

Dickhead.

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A Novel Approach to Profit

This is pretty rich:

Hedge funds have been known to use hardball tactics to make money. Now they have come up with a new one: suing Greece in a human rights court to make good on its bond payments.

The novel approach would have the funds arguing in the European Court of Human Rights that Greece had violated bondholder rights, though that could be a multiyear project with no guarantee of a payoff. And it would not be likely to produce sympathy for these funds, which many blame for the lack of progress so far in the negotiations over restructuring Greece’s debts.

The tactic has emerged in conversations with lawyers and hedge funds as it became clear that Greece was considering passing legislation to force all private bondholders to take losses, while exempting the European Central Bank, which is the largest institutional holder of Greek bonds with 50 billion euros or so.

So while millions of Greeks wallow in poverty, unemployment, and squalor, a bunch of hedge fund jackasses will be suing them in the European Court of Human Rights, hoping to squeeze a little bit more blood from the stone. It can’t be said enough- the balls on these guys.

What part of risk do these guys not understand? No one guarantees you the right to a profit, it is up to you to do due diligence and make sure your investment is sound. These guys want to turn that on its head and say it is a human right to profit on your gambling. Which, I guess, makes as much sense as a corporation being viewed as a person.

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Wingers Hate Evil Fat Cats? The Zombie Lie That Just Won’t Die

If Nate Silver is right about the New Hampshire outcome—he’s saying Romney 38.5%, Paul 18.6%, Huntsman 17.0%, Santorum 12.3%, Gingrich 11.5%, Perry 1.2%—then it will turn out that capitalism-bashing did absolutely no harm to Mitt Romney, and that the two guys who sound most like Democrats in attacking Romney’s business record will have finished fourth and fifth, in a state that’s seen as having a moderate GOP voter base.

So won’t that end all the talk about how even Republicans hate the rapacious rich?

Nawww. Pundits and bloggers will just say we need to wait for all that Sheldon Adelson money to work its magic for Gingrich in South Carolina; maybe they’ll say that Jon Huntsman still has a chance, or that he could have a chance if his billionaire daddy would just give millions to his super PAC.

People, please: just stop. Wingnut base voters don’t want Gingrich and Perry to bash Romney as a businessman. Wingnut base voters don’t want Huntsman to bash Romney as someone who wouldn’t serve his country under Obama. Wingnut base voters love businessmen, and they hate Obama vastly more than they love their country.

Stop trying to pretend that Republicans are rational, decent, sane, patriotic people. They’re not. They’re sociopaths and crackpots. They would burn this country to the ground just to rid it of their political opponents. They would openly embrace negative tax rates for billionaires and big business if Fox and Limbaugh started pushing the notion. And every time you portray them as sane, or seemingly sane, or potentially sane, you make it less likely that the rest of America will address the menace in its midst.

(X-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.)

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Folks lend a hand in a hell hole

In most presidential campaigns that I can remember, at least one candidate talked a lot about how he spent a lot of time in a Bieber-forsaken hell hole like like Scraton, PA or Hope, Arkansas or a Vietnamese POW camp or whatever mill-town John Edwards grew up in, where people didn’t have any money or food, but where everyone pitched in and it all turned out okay. Not all candidates do this—Hawaii is too vacationy, whichever wealthy suburb Bush I grew up in is too Connecticuty—- but the popularity of the ritual was probably tied to the idea that anyone can grow up to be president or vice-president, no matter where they were born (with Obama, it was already surprising enough that a black guy might become president so there was no reason to take this angle).

There’s been nothing like this in the Republican primary at all so far, just a bunch of rich guys talking about screwing the blah and electrocuting illegal aliens.

Is this related to the fact that no one even pretends there’s any class mobility in the US anymore, or is it coincidence?

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What Mitt Romney’s Free Market Looks Like

Via Greg Sargent, this Reuters piece is a must read:

The young men in business suits, gingerly picking their way among the millwrights, machinists and pipefitters at Kansas City’s Worldwide Grinding Systems steel mill. Gaping up at the cranes that swung 10-foot cast iron buckets through the air. Jumping at the thunder from the melt shop’s electric-arc furnace as it turned scrap metal into lava.

“They looked like a bunch of high school kids to me. A bunch of Wall Street preppies,” says Jim Linson, an electronics repairman who worked at the plant for 40 years. “They came in, they were in awe.”

Apparently they liked what they saw. Soon after, in October 1993, Bain Capital, co-founded by Mitt Romney, became majority shareholder in a steel mill that had been operating since 1888.

It was a gamble. The old mill, renamed GS Technologies, needed expensive updating, and demand for its products was susceptible to cycles in the mining industry and commodities markets.

Less than a decade later, the mill was padlocked and some 750 people lost their jobs. Workers were denied the severance pay and health insurance they’d been promised, and their pension benefits were cut by as much as $400 a month.

What’s more, a federal government insurance agency had to pony up $44 million to bail out the company’s underfunded pension plan. Nevertheless, Bain profited on the deal, receiving $12 million on its $8 million initial investment and at least $4.5 million in consulting fees.

Basically, what Bain Capital did to GS Technologies and their workers is a miniature model of what they want and have been doing to America- extract the resources, enrich themselves, loot the Federal treasury, then tell the people there is no money left and we’re going to have to cut your pensions, your SS, and your medical care while they run off to overseas tax havens to deposit their loot while chanting about job creation and free markets. Bain and Mitt Romney pocketed $8 million for the price of a community, all these workers pay and benefits and pension, and $44 million in federal money.

At least some people are starting to notice.

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The Cost Of The Payroll Tax Cut

Steve Benen is most likely correct when he notes the GOP “negotiators” in the Senate side of the payroll tax cut fight starting next month have no intention of extending the cut at all.  Senators Crapo, Barrasso and especially Jon Kyl being involved means the Republicans are signaling that they are okay with destroying any deal in an election year.

[T]he likelihood of there even being an agreement now borders on fanciful. Republican participants won’t be willing to compromise, and most of them don’t fear failure since they oppose tax breaks for the middle class on principle.

What about the risk of being blamed? Remember, as far as GOP leaders are concerned, the process itself offers cover. Instead of last week, when House Republicans became the clear villains, when the conference committee struggles to come up with a bipartisan solution, the party will find it easier to spread the blame around.

“It’s not our fault,” GOP leaders will say. “We tried to work with Democrats on a deal, but one didn’t come together. Oh well.”

For Republicans, it’s the best of all possible worlds: middle-class taxes would go up, the economy would take a hit, public disgust for Washington would be renewed, and the media would feel obligated to say “both sides” failed to reach an agreement.

Now Benen’s scenario depends entirely on the “Earth is flat, view differ” Village “journalism” that is so pervasive in the press, and with the election season officially beginning on Tuesday in Iowa, we’re already seeing the GOP also-rans work the refs.  The larger problem is that the GOP is basically trumpeting the fact they want to screw over the middle class, and the Village is more than happy to go along with the idea of “shared sacrifice.”

You have to be pretty cynical to think that the GOP will win this fight.  Sadly, such a level of cynicism is not only recommended, it’s absolutely necessary.

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I believe he’s gonna work me into the ground

Gnoot has a post up about his proposal to prepare kids from poor families for the low paying, menial jobs they will often be forced to take after leaving school by giving them low paying, menial jobs while they are at school.

Wouldn’t it be great if New York City schools served their students as well as they serve some of their custodians?

Students—especially those from very poor families—would be better served if they had the opportunity to earn money part-time at school by doing some of the tasks custodians are now performing so expensively.

Dozens of poor students could have part-time, paying jobs for the $100,000 a year New York schools pay some custodians. For that amount, more than 30 children could work just two hours each school day and each take home $3,000 a year by the time they are 12 or 13 years old.

Some of this work could be clerical; other tasks could be janitorial, such as cleaning the cafeteria, or emptying the trash, or vacuuming the classrooms. These are similar to the chores many parents require their kids to do at home, and it would allow 12- and 13- year olds to make money they desperately need. Giving children the opportunity to earn money would help teach work habits, and letting them do so in their schools would build a stronger commitment to that community.

Here’s the thing, Gnoot, you crap-filled, sociopathic blowhard.

I may be a fictional, sweary old lady who knows two fifths of fuck-all about poverty and the challenges facing inner city kids, or about how we could improve their financial position while increasing their self esteem and encouraging them to learn.

However, I’d be willing to bet quite a lot of money that the answer is not making them stay back after school to clean up other students’ shit for six bucks an hour.

Arsehole.

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In The Business Of Giving You The Business

Kind of a depressing WaPo piece here about America’s House of Not So Commons and politics increasingly being a rich person’s game:

Between 1984 and 2009, the median net worth of a member of the House more than doubled, according to the analysis of financial disclosures, from $280,000 to $725,000 in inflation-adjusted 2009 dollars, excluding home ­equity.

Over the same period, the wealth of an American family has declined slightly, with the comparable median figure sliding from $20,600 to $20,500, according to the Panel Study of Income Dynamics from the University of Michigan.

The comparisons exclude home equity because it is not included in congressional reporting, and 1984 was chosen because it is the earliest year for which consistent wealth statistics are available.

The growing disparity between the representatives and the represented means that there is a greater distance between the economic experience of Americans and those of lawmakers.

That particular understatement could power multiple suns.  Being a career politician is, well, a very lucrative career.  Combine this with the fact that maybe 10-15% of House districts are ever truly competitive in an election by design and you start to understand just how depressing the chore of fixing Congress is.  Some 90% disapproval for the institution, majorities now saying that their own Representative needs to be tossed, but maybe 60 out of 435 seats will change hands, at most, 80.  The other 350 or so are in zero danger of losing their seat even in an election year where the House has roughly the same approval rating as breeding velociraptors down the hall from a hospital neonatal ICU.

The Senate fares no better of course and is actually in many ways far worse, but if you should still somehow be wondering why it seems like everyone with “Rep.” in front of their name has no idea how the 99% actually lives, there’s a distinct, structural reason for that.  Also, good luck ever getting these clowns to agree to term limits, which would be a vital component of any fix.

For the one percent, by the one percent.  Could you imagine more than one percent of Congress ever consisting of pipe-fitters, school teachers, auto mechanics, computer engineers, or nurses?  It might be good for America.  It would be slightly less good for people with a net worth of $725,000 or more, which is why it wouldn’t happen.

All the kvetching about the Presidency is one thing, but until we strip mine the professional grifters out of Congress, ain’t nothin’ gonna change, bro.

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The lady’s not for spurning

Nooners has been hitting the turps again.

The left in America has largely thrown in the towel on Ronald Reagan, but in Britain Thatcher-hatred remains fresh. Why?

Because she was a woman. Because women in politics are always by definition seen as presumptuous: They presume to lead men. When they are as bright as the men they’re disliked by the men, and when they’re brighter and more serious they’re hated. Mrs. Thatcher’s very presence was an insult to the left because it undermined the left’s insistence that only leftism and its protection of the weak and disadvantaged would allow women to rise. She rose without them while opposing what they stood for. On the other hand, some of the Tory men around her had been smacked on the head by her purse often enough to wish for revenge. What better revenge than to fail to fully stand up for her to posterity?

And so her difficult position. But one senses that is changing.

Of course, it has nothing to do with the Poll Tax riots, her opposition to sanctions against South Africa, the closure of 150 coal mines and the resulting devastation of mining communities and mining unions, the abolition of school meals, Section 28, the massive long-term unemployment and hardship she inflicted on communities (particularly in the North) from which many have still not recovered, the slashing of higher education funding, the privatisation and deregulation of everything possible, or the fact that Margaret Thatcher was an evil, rabid, vicious, mean-sprited, homophobic, Reagan-snuggling, Pinochet-loving old trout.

No. It’s all because she’s a woman.

Silly me.

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What are the odds of overtime play…

The Republicans Leadership of the House (well at least the Orange One) have decided to cave on their latest hostage taking excursion. That means that on Friday morning, Boehner will ask fellow Republican House members to support President Obama’s position on the payroll tax cut extension by unanimous consent. If all goes according to plan, then folks will not see their taxes increase, unemployment extensions end and medicare payments to doctors shrink on January 1st.

That is a pretty big “if”.

Afterall, we are talking about the Republican Party and the Tea Party mob that controls it. Just one House Member—seeking to become the new hero of the 27 percenters—could throw the entire game into overtime. All he or she would have to do is object to the motion for unanimous consent. That would extended any final resolution to some time next week when all members of the House would be forced to take a recorded vote on the two month extension.

Now, no sane person, party or movement would do that—but we are talking about the Tea Party—so I think the odds are slightly better than 50/50 that one of their wankers in the House will object and force another week of nonsense before the majority of the House overwhelming votes to support the President. And the person forcing a week of delay will become an instant hero to the wingnuts demanding the crazification of all politics. The base will love it.

And they’ll hate Boehner for his cave.

It is only a matter of time before Cantor and some of the boys surround John to stick in the knives.

So it goes.

Cheers

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The comedic stylings of Pravda on the Potomac

It’s funny because it assumes that the weeping Orange one was ever in control of anything.

Claiming that any establishment Republican is in charge of the Republican Party is a beltway in-joke that can be told over and over again. Every Conservative “leader” is just a mini-Danton living in fear of the moment when the mob turns on him or her. Perhaps this is why John is a fountain of tears.

Cheers

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Suffer Little Children

Good post by Steven Taylor over at OTB and Rick Santorum’s odd morality:

Having said that (and hopefully have forestalled comments along those lines), Santorum does keep saying things that I think a substantial portion of the population believes. To wit: he frequently makes moral claims that paint the picture of a universe in which all outcomes are justly generated by the actions of individuals. In this universe, people are successful because they work hard and make good choices and people fail because they do not work hard enough and/or because of bad choices.

Now, let me stipulate another point: it is doubtlessly true that hard work and good decisions are incredibly helpful to the generation of success whilst slothfulness and bad decisions frequently lead to bad outcomes. This is not the issue. The issue is the degree to which is it possible to neatly categorize the citizenry into nice, neat boxes of the good and hard-working (i.e., the successful) and the bad and slothful (i.e., those who have failed in one capacity or another). Indeed, this issue is the crux of the social policy debate and is at the heart of contemporary partisanship (e.g., it is why Republicans frequently cast tax increases as “punishing achievers”—a phrase rife with normative judgments about the way the universe works).

Along these lines we can go back a few weeks to a town hall meeting in Iowa where Santorum extolled the value of “suffering” and apparently finds it problematic that various policies (e.g., food stamps, Medicaid, etc.) ameliorate suffering because, after all, “suffering is part of life and it’s not a bad thing, it is an essential thing in life.”

The thing is, Steven doesn’t realize it, but the only thing that separates Santorum from most of our elites is how blunt he is- he actually uses the word suffering, and not some euphemistic bullshit like “shared sacrifice” that David Brooks or Douthat or some other douche bag might trot out. It’s the core of the entire mythology they have used to divide “real America” from the decadent coastal elites. Real Americans understand “belt-tightening” and don’t want a “handout” and will “pull themselves up by their bootstraps.” It’s so ingrained in our conversation that we actually have people making the honest-to-goodness argument that we shouldn’t extend unemployment benefits during the worst recession since the Great Depression because… we don’t people too comfortable while unemployed or they might not look for a job.

Now, mind you, as with everything else involving the GOP, this is a hoax. When they talk about suffering, they aren’t talking about the rich and well-to-do. They are talking about everyone else out in idiot America who hasn’t been able to see through this shit and keep voting Republican because both sides do it or the baby jeebus told them to save snowflake babies or because Obama is coming for their guns or because gays make them feel icky. That’s how they can simultaneously argue that the payroll tax should die but god forbid any tax cuts on the rich expire.

And don’t get me started on the glibertarians, who think basically the same thing, except without the religious component. To them, if you are suffering, it was because you made unwise choices in our fabulous free market FAP FAP FAP. At any rate, suffering is the entire core of the GOP philosophy. It’s just that you are the one they want suffering. But cheer up, I’m sure Chris Matthews will agree it builds character.

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RIP, USPS

The Post Office didn’t die, it was murdered:

Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night will keep your postman from delivering that Mad Men DVD you’ve been waiting for. But legacy labor costs and the disruptive force of the Internet? Yeah, that’ll do it.

Today, the Postal Service announced roughly $3 billion in service cuts that will slow down the delivery of first-class mail for the first time in 40 years. Starting in April, it plans to shutter more than half of its 461 mail processing centers, stretching out the time it will take to ship everything from Netflix DVDs to magazines. One-day delivery of stamped envelopes will all but certainly become a thing of the past.

The announcement is just the latest sign of a sad and increasingly dire fact: the Postal Service is in shambles. This past fiscal year, it lost a mere $5.1 billion. In 2012, it’s facing a record $14.1 billion shortfall and possible bankruptcy. In order to turn a profit, Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe says the agency needs to cut $20 billion from its annual budget by 2015. That’s almost a third of its yearly costs.

How did it come to this? The culprits include the Internet, labor expenses, and, as with pretty much every problem our country faces now, Congress.

This was a planned homicide:

At the very end of that year, Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 (PAEA). Under PAEA, USPS was forced to “prefund its future health care benefit payments to retirees for the next 75 years in an astonishing ten-year time span” — meaning that it had to put aside billions of dollars to pay for the health benefits of employees it hasn’t even hired yet, something “that no other government or private corporation is required to do.”

So when rural Americans start screaming because the mail isn’t coming, they can go blame their “fiscally conservative” Congresscritter.

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Nip this one in the bud

It’s panicky, I know, but I’ve seen this movie before.

Before every food stamp recipient in the country gets smeared and lied about by Newt Gingrich, before we start pretending there’s something to debate about Gingrich’s lie that food stamps are credit cards, and go wandering off into the he said/she said weeds where things are unknowable and mysterious, let’s just stipulate that there is A TON of easily accessible information on food stamps in all fifty states and at the federal level. Boat loads. Huge collections of facts and figures. It isn’t chaos out there in foodstampland. There isn’t a lot of gray. There isn’t a lot of discretion, and opinions don’t differ.

And we now give it away as cash—you don’t get food stamps. You get a credit card, and the credit card can be used for anything.

Food stamps aren’t credit cards. He’s lying.

Here’s a state, and here’s the federal government. That only scratches the surface, because we collect information on food stamps like we collect information on every state and federal program. There’s no excuse for anyone to repeat this lie, or treat it as debatable. If Gingrich continues to repeat it, and he will, he should be called out each and every time he does so. If he isn’t called out every time, then we’re in birth certificate and death panel territory, and we’ll never find our way back.

Here is a primer on food stamps that has many exciting facts and figures.

I think the “working poor” part of food stamps is always interesting. No one ever wants to talk about that, because then we’d have to admit that many, many people work at jobs that don’t pay enough to feed their families. Maybe we could have a roundtable on why that is, instead of making shit up.

I also like this. I’ll discuss this anytime. Doesn’t get talked about NEARLY enough. It’s from 2005, so well before the Age Of Obama:

Rural Americans disproportionately rely on the
Food Stamp Program to help purchase food for a
healthy diet. Based on our analysis of data from the
Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP),
22 percent of the nation’s population lived in nonmetropolitan or “rural” areas in 2001, but a full 31 percent of food stamp beneficiaries lived there.
Overall, 7.5 percent of the nation’s rural population
relied on food stamps, compared with 4.8 percent of
urban residents.

There’s also an “elderly people on food stamps” sector that Gingrich, noted policy expert, might want to learn about before he goes wandering off all crazy with the food stamp lies, because he’s already announced he’s targeting the elderly with these lies.

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