Southern Order

You've read here before how I have bemoaned Dixification, the preferred socio-economic model of Southern conservatives, and how it is spreading to the rest of the country. I've written about the centuries-long tradition of a deeply anti-democratic model of hierarchy and privilege, of low wages, benefits, taxes and regulations; replete with voter restriction, fierce hostility to unions, and the ongoing animosity to any social change that upsets long-standing social hierarchies.

Again, the argument is that conservative politicians support policies that do not make economic sense, but that is not the intent. Liberal policy wonks scratch their heads trying to figure out why Republicans are so determined to avoid sensible and proven policies. But they misunderstand the nature and intent of the deeply reactionary politicians that now dominate that party, many state governments, and come January, even more of the federal government.

It is gratifying, in a grim sort of way, to see there is a growing awareness of what Dixification is and how it is redefining national politics as never before.

To cite just one example, Doug Muder's recent post reminds us that the current invective from teabaggers is Southern at its core:

It’s not a Tea Party.

The Boston Tea Party protest was aimed at a Parliament where the colonists had no representation, and at an appointed governor who did not have to answer to the people he ruled. Today’s Tea Party faces a completely different problem: how a shrinking conservative minority can keep change at bay in spite of the democratic processes defined in the Constitution. That’s why they need guns. That’s why they need to keep the wrong people from voting in their full numbers. 

These right-wing extremists have misappropriated the Boston patriots and the Philadelphia founders because their true ancestors — Jefferson Davis and the Confederates — are in poor repute.

But the veneer of Bostonian rebellion easily scrapes off; the tea bags and tricorn hats are just props. The symbol Tea Partiers actually revere is the Confederate battle flag. Let a group of right-wingers ramble for any length of time, and you will soon hear that slavery wasn’t really so bad, that Andrew Johnson was right, that Lincoln shouldn’t have fought the war, that states have the rights of nullification and secession, that the war wasn’t really about slavery anyway, and a lot of other Confederate mythology that (until recently) had left me asking, “Why are we talking about this?”

By contrast, the concerns of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and its revolutionary Sons of Liberty are never so close to the surface. So no. It’s not a Tea Party. It’s a Confederate Party.

Let's be clear on this: the most powerful members of Congress are overwhelmingly from the old Confederate south. They are deeply overrepresented in Washington, all the more so when voting population is considered. They are not here to work together, or fix things, to improve government, to promote democracy, nor to put the economy back on track. They are here to reestablish the old order, destroy what they hate, and maintain privilege and power for the few.

Wall Street Should Reconsider Its Allies

By now it should be clear that Wall Street money was behind the rise of the Tea Party, a loose ragtag collection that felt empowered enough to attend rallies and hold misspelled signs as they vented and raged. Call them Wall Street's shock troops. It was a deft move; convince the middle class, at least enough of it- the white, disaffected, conservative, Republican-voting, mostly Southern portion, to howl against President Obama and how his radical Marxism was going to destroy the economy. But by all means ignore what Wall Street banks had been doing to the economy and how relentlessly wealth trickled upwards--out of the middle class communities, including those in reliably Republican Red states, and into the hands of banks and the investor class. That the investor class has been able to shield huge amounts of money from taxation, often sending it abroad where it did no good for the middle class communities that once held it, and how this is the primary driver of government debt; its all several dots that teabaggers refuse to connect.

Wall Street appears to be reassessing its strategy. It was never the investor class's intention that a right-wing, pseudo-populist Tea Party would actually win more than a token few seats in Congress. The intention was to deflect government from doing anything to rein in Wall Street's gravy train and to make sure rank and file Republican voters didn't start caring that Wall Street is corrupt and reckless. A couple more dots not connected.

Instead, we are now witnessing, once again, what happens when right-wing extremists, the perpetually-aggrieved sons of the South, actively undermine that which they cannot control. The South with its deeply undemocratic instincts on full display, has proven to us once again that this country has never truly been a united states.

Wall Street may have seriously misjudged Southern animosity towards government, the one that feeds and protects the investor class, but it also misjudged Barack Obama. The instinctive reaction to Democratic presidents, one that is seriously at odds with reality, and one that even the moneyed class makes, is that they are bad for business: They raise taxes and impose regulations. And everyone knows that doing that slows growth and kills jobs. "You can't tax your way to prosperity." "Government just gets in the way." The bromides are endless.

Sorting out whether such boiler-plate corporate talking points are actually true will have to wait for another post (Actually, the data is compelling: Wall Street is a blight on the US and Democrats have a better record on growth, job creation, and the budget). The point here is that corporate America, and especially Wall Street, have much for which to be thankful. In a more just and equitable world, one that believes that equal application of the law is not a mere slogan, many bankers and traders would be doing hard time and not printing their own "get-out-of-for-free" cards.

But prison terms and inadequate legal representation are for the poor and working class. White shoe lawyers, fines, and no admission of guilt are the quite acceptable cost of doing business for the wealthy. This is an arrangement that Obama need not have tolerated, but he did. And the re-imposition of regulations proven to be highly effective in the past, the ones that brought us decades of banking stability? Obama didn't go there either, to the utter dismay of many banking experts.

I don't expect teabaggers to figure it out, but Wall Street should know that energy production in the US has increased dramatically since Obama took office. Remember how Republicans told America that Obama would cave to environmentalists and implement job-killing energy legislation, all because of that hoax called global warming? How we would have $10/gal gasoline, and how it was all part of his socialist plan? The reality is this: "US oil output hit its highest level in 20 years in July in a power shift with big geopolitical consequences." And this: "U.S. To Become World's Largest Oil Producer, Overtaking Russia."

Wall Street knows this and benefits from it. Instead, it feared that Obama would raise their taxes to a level that still would have been lower than that under Reagan, implement sensible regulations that had been in place under Reagan, and, I don't know, uphold the law.

So right wing operatives, financed by Wall Street and others, told a gullible and poorly-informed America that Barack Obama was radically anti-business and therefore anti-American. Two easy marks: Teabaggers, who are predictable prey to fear, uncertainty, and doubt. And President Obama himself, who should have done more to put an end to Wall Street's plunder. If Wall Street were more honest, and if teabaggers were more educated, they would realize Barack Obama has governed like a moderate Republican. 

Dude, Where's My Pension?

One of the most egregiously inaccurate memes in America today is that there is a large class of takers/losers/slackers/Democrats who rake in money, benefits, and services they did not earn so they can continue an indolent lifestyle. They take it, as the story goes, from hard-working Americans, the ones who have jobs, pay their taxes, are pro-family, and vote Republican. I can hear it now: "This country would be fine if it weren't for certain of us getting what they don't deserve."

But as has been so common as of late, redstate angst has been fueled and then redirected by those who jerk their nose ring. One wonders how unequal wealth has to get in this country before all of us, not just some of us, realize how jaw-droppingly wrong the "creators vs takers" mythology really is.

Wall Street continues to play the central role in the trickle-up of assets from the middle class to the one percent. One way not well publicized, no surprise, is how these financiers raid public pension funds.

First a prelude. You have undoubtedly heard how burdensome state and local pension funds have become and how the gap between funded and unfunded obligations continues to grow. It is this growing gap that has conservatives howling about how public employees, goaded on by their reckless unions, are destroying state finances. Underneath it all is the conviction that the teachers and other workers have padded themselves enormous nest eggs they not only don't deserve, but have to be paid by the rest of us. Teachers living high on the hog? Who knew?
  
That brings us to Matt Taibbi, a journalist among the best at getting at the facts and telling a great story, especially the kind oligarchs would prefer you didn't hear. In a recent Rolling Stone article, Taibbi relates how pension funds are being looted by Wall Street. There is a lot in it, including some background on Rhode Island Treasurer Gina Raimondo and her Wall Street-financed role in gutting her state's public pensions and how Rhode Island became a model now being inflicted on the rest of us.

I urge you to read it all, but I'll highlight several points here. Whiz-kid Raimondo helped push through state legislation a cynic would call "pension reform", but financiers call gravy. The new legislation has enabled Raimondo to turn over millions of dollars of pension assets to hedge funds, who have the unmatched ability to generate huge fees, regardless of performance. Worse, the hedgies are run by ideologues who sit on the board of the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank that promotes privatizing public pensions. Nice way to get paid.

One implication, as Taibbi notes, is that Rhode Island's public workers are losing control of their assets, where they are invested, and how hefty the fees might be.

The state's workers, in other words, were being forced to subsidize their own political disenfranchisement, coughing up at least $200 million to members of a group that had supported anti-labor laws. Later, when Edward Siedle, a former SEC lawyer, asked Raimondo in a column for Forbes.com how much the state was paying in fees to these hedge funds, she first claimed she didn't know. Raimondo later told the Providence Journal she was contractually obliged to defer to hedge funds on the release of "proprietary" information, which immediately prompted a letter in protest from a series of freaked-out interest groups. Under pressure, the state later released some fee information, but the information was originally kept hidden, even from the workers themselves. "When I asked, I was basically hammered," says Marcia Reback, a former sixth-grade schoolteacher and retired Providence Teachers Union president who serves as the lone union rep on Rhode Island's nine-member State Investment Commission. "I couldn't get any information about the actual costs."

 Taibbi goes on to say:

Today, the same Wall Street crowd that caused the crash is not merely rolling in money again but aggressively counterattacking on the public-relations front. The battle increasingly centers around public funds like state and municipal pensions. This war isn't just about money. Crucially, in ways invisible to most Americans, it's also about blame. In state after state, politicians are following the Rhode Island playbook, using scare tactics and lavishly funded PR campaigns to cast teachers, firefighters and cops - not bankers - as the budget-devouring bogeymen responsible for the mounting fiscal problems of America's states and cities.

Taibbi tells us that the looting began as early as 1974, with the passage of ERISA, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act. Not a bad law, as it was intended to protect retirement accounts in sundry ways. Unfortunately, congress saw to that a huge loophole exempted public pensions. And that is when the fun began. The loophole in ERISA is what has allowed politicians of all stripes to raid --they would say "borrow"-- public pensions to redirect funds to more immediate needs, some worthy, some less so. But this is the reason there are unfunded pension liabilities; it's easier to borrow than it is to pay back.

It is not unlike social security, which has grown an enormous surplus-- the opposite of what conservatives tell you--only to see it "borrowed." Paying back the unfunded pension plans, just as putting the money back into the Social Security Trust Fund, is indeed painful, but it is not because the funding requirements have been onerous. Wall Street and mostly Republican politicians want you to think they are, so you will acquiesce to the ongoing destruction of middle class pensions.  

This shit gets so depressing. What galls me is not just that Wall Street and the politicians it has bought continue to reshape the country to suit moneyed interests, it's that so many of us don't see it, or believe crap that tries to pin it all on unions, spending, deficits, or those "job-killing" regulations. People at the top, where the money and power are, have convinced people in the middle, where the votes are, that undeserving people at the bottom, where the misery is, are the problem.

Republican Welfare States

Here is a factoid/jpeg that began floating around the web recently. It's NJ Governor Chris Christie pushing back against the increasingly strident KY Senator Rand Paul, who can't seem to stop haranguing those --even Republican stars-- who are to the left of him, which is nearly everyone.

This should outrage you. The hypocrisy should disgust you. But I am guessing you did not  hear much about this-- the dust-up between Christie and Paul, but far more importantly, the essential truth Christie made about how federal tax dollars are distributed to the states.

As Christie noted:

“I find it interesting that Senator Paul is accusing us of having a gimme, gimme, gimme attitude toward federal spending when in fact New Jersey is a donor state, we get 61 cents back on every dollar we send to Washington,” Christie said. “And interestingly Kentucky gets $1.51 on every dollar they sent to Washington.”

So it's nice to see Gov. Christie acknowledge what academics, wonkish progressives, and civics teachers have known all along: Red states are America's biggest welfare recipients. It is worth noting that the transfers are normal and legal. A crucial role of the federal government is to redistribute according to votes in congress, e.g., our representatives apportion money to fund or help fund bridges in OH, prisons in KS, scientific research in CA, and schools and military spending just about everywhere.

Conservatives have worked hard to convince Americans that what happens is that hard-working Americans, the real ones who vote Republican, have their income appropriated by communists socialists Democrats, who then hand it out to undeserving ingrates --mostly them there coloreds--living in more urban blue states unwilling or unable to compete in a free market. That's the only reason they voted for Obama, don'tcha know?

Let's be clear: federal tax dollars go where they do because congress votes it that way. It should also be clear not only that some states benefit more than others, but those that garner the most per-capita aid from the federal government are America's reddest, most conservative states.

The list below illustrates my point. There are several variations of this as the rankings will vary a bit over time. This one is from the Tax Foundation and it measures the amount of money received from the federal government compared to $1 paid in federal taxes.

The first 10 are the heaviest recipients of federal largess: They are mostly low-tax havens, and they all use out-of-state tax dollars to pay their bills. They are also overwhelmingly red states.

New Mexico  $2.03
Mississippi  $2.02
Alaska  $1.84
Louisiana  $1.78
West Virginia  $1.76
North Dakota  $1.68
Alabama  $1.66
South Dakota  $1.53
Kentucky  $1.51
Virginia  $1.51 

The list below is the 10 states that received the least in federal spending for each $1 of federal taxes paid. Federal taxes taken from these states are used to help pay the red state bills.  As you can see, these states are overwhelmingly blue. 

Colorado  $0.81
New York  $0.79
California  $0.78
Delaware  $0.77
Illinois  $0.75
Minnesota  $0.72
New Hampshire  $0.71
Connecticut  $0.69
Nevada  $0.65
New Jersey  $0.61

You didn't think those southern conservatives were actually trying to save you money, did you? You know, by getting government off your back? By letting you keep more of your hard-earned money? You earned it, you keep it, right? The bromides are endless, but only the hopelessly naive does not realize all politicians are in Washington to bring home the bacon. What is less well-known, but obvious if one only looks, is how well red state Republicans enrich their states with "other peoples' money," as the expression goes. As you can see from the chart, the tax dollars tend to come from higher wage states, the workers of which earn more and pay more taxes. If anyone has a reason to complain, it is blue states, the liberal ones that voted for Obama, for they are subsidizing the red ones. 

Presidential Limits

It is difficult to overstate the steaming shit pile that was handed to Barack Obama on his first day of office. Those who choose to ridicule the President for pointing this out have forgotten the "yeah, that's right," chorus line that Republicans sang so heartily when Reagan took office and how he would fix all the terrible things Carter had done. They, and Reagan, knew what they were doing; every positive snippet of news was to accrue to Ronnie; any bad news was obviously the legacy of his Democratic predecessor.

Don't let your brain take the lazy way out on this. Don't say both parties do it and leave it at that. Both parties throw blame at their opponents, to be sure. but it is an insipid and unhelpful observation. Let's not forget that the federal budget deficit, the national debt, and the trade imbalance were all relatively modest when Reagan took office. Our infrastructure at that time was viewed around the world as excellent, and manufacturing played a proportionately far larger role. We had the world's largest current account surplus when Carter left office. When Reagan left, we had the world's largest deficit.

The point here is not to claim that Carter did such a wonderful job. But we must remind ourselves how much this country, and this economy, have changed in recent decades. When President Obama took the oath of office in a ceremony that Chief Justice Roberts screwed up, he faced the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. He also inherited two long and costly wars that served little purpose except to get men killed and enrich defense contractors, as war always does.

But even if you support(ed) the war(s), and choose to not blame Bush (or Cheney), the point remains that the US fought those wars without paying for them. That much is indisputable. Instead, the horrendous costs, separate and addition to the Defense Department's already mammoth budget, were added to our federal debt. That was George Bush's decision, not Obama's.

And need I remind anyone that those wars came after Bush passed his huge tax cuts for the wealthy, thereby giving back the budget surplus carefully built up during the Clinton era when tax rates and economic growth were both higher.

The real point here is the severe constraints Barack Obama faced when he took office, many of which John McCain would have also faced had he won. Taxes, primarily for the rich, had been reduced so much early in Bush's tenure that it has become arithmetically impossible to meet our relatively modest social spending needs, our huge military appetite, our substantial and neglected national infrastructure, and also balance the budget. And this is on top of a massive trade deficit, a declining manufacturing base, and most jarringly, the fallout from Wall Street's casino capitalism.

I have posted before on the overwhelming challenges Obama faced on inauguration day, challenges that would be huge even if Congress decided to, you know, work together and solve some problems. Unfortunately, President Obama has had to face an additional challenge that a President McCain would surely not have--unprecedented obstructionism. Along the way, Americans have come to learn, to their disgust or delight, the surprising flaws of our federal government and how determined ideologues can lay bare the constitutional limitations of the executive branch.

Republicans control only the House; Democrats control the Senate, despite all appearances, and, of course, the White House. And yet Dems in the House are helpless to stop the unending stream of bills that Tea Party reactionaries promote.  Well, you might say, Republicans control the House, so it figures they would dominate legislation. In the Senate, however, Democrats are in a clear majority, but it usually makes little difference because of the Senate's self-imposed 60 vote supermajority "requirement."

Thus, even flaccid and feeble legislation, mere tweaking, has little chance of being enacted. Anything that does pass is so watered down as to be useless. And that is not because most members of Congress, or even all Republicans always want to oppose the President; it is sufficient that only a determined minority, the Tea Partiers of the House and Senate, choose to obstruct, as they so often have. Let me put it this way: the seemingly intractable John Boehner would not be making those asinine, vapid, and breathtakingly stupid comments on economic policy if teabaggers in his party did not have such a tight grip on his nuts.

Historians are at pains to find a period when the flaws of the federal government were so transparent. Parliamentary governments around the world are taken back by the inability of America's two-party presidential system of government to tackle the most basic tasks, such as properly regulated banks, appropriate tax revenues, a modern infrastructure, and demographic well-being, such as on health care, child mortality, and housing. All of these are becoming a national embarrassment, instead of world-leading, as they once were.

We are now seeing with increasing frequency that even legislation large majorities of Americans want, such as background checks on gun purchases, cannot get passed. There are just enough Republican reactionaries in the House, sometimes helped out by pandering Democrats in the Senate (I'm looking at you, Max Baucus), to derail even the most popular legislation. This can happen, mind you, even when a majority of both houses of Congress and the president favor such legislation. This is not majority rule, it is not even checks and balances as the founding fathers envisioned. It is the tyranny of an ideologically-driven minority.

This is new territory for America.

Our Free Press is Failing Us

As a kid growing up, long before the Internet, I thought that any bit of substantive news that made it out of one source, such as a big-city newspaper, would inevitably get widely disseminated by other sources, another newspaper, then another, then the 6 o'clock news, the weeklies. It would all happen quickly and efficiently, whether you liked it or not.

Now, and only partly because of the Internet, several uneasy trends have become apparent:  1) that bit about "substantive news" getting widely disseminated was probably never true, though arguably more so than now, 2) news is more shallow and dumbed-down now than in the past, and 3) though the Internet has opened up numerous sites to tap for data and commentary, and has given us unprecedented opportunity to explore ever further afield, it has also made it easier for us to pursue our preferences and ignore the rest. In so doing, we have erected philosophical, ideological, and religious filters that tend to confirm our world views rather than challenge them.

Nor has the Internet compelled the mainstream media to be more balanced, or to even cover stories, viewpoints, and evidence that discerning readers--and alternative news enthusiasts-- know exist. And that can happen--is happening--with major subjects that affect us all.

Ask yourself how many corporate-owned news organizations are covering the efficacy of raising the payroll tax cap on Social Security. Over and over we hear the major outlets argue for, or repeat the talking points of the investor class on Social Security: it is in trouble, it is a big part of the budget deficit, and we need to cut benefits to those who desperately need it because doing so will narrow the federal deficit and somehow spur growth. Here is an example of how our feckless media allows conservative politicians to misrepresent Social Security.

The reality is that over the years Social Security garnered a roughly $2.5 trillion surplus, a surplus that Congress has tapped to fund other programs. And now Congress does not want to pay it back. Doing so would draw attention to ethically questionable action; messing with people's retirement. And yes, the claim that social security is nearly bankrupt, wrong in the first place, is especially galling given the surplus it ran up which Congress then "borrowed." The real kicker is that a simple tweak like raising the payroll tax would also reveal the viability of social security, which contradicts the mostly Republican narrative that Social Security is failing us. It should be clear now that Republicans don't actually want to strengthen social security. This is why they seem so tone deaf to simple solutions: They are not looking for solutions and they don't want talk of solutions to enter the debate. Policy experts, economists, and so many others have, often in great detail, made it clear the "sky-is-falling" talking points are egregiously inaccurate. Here are some facts on social security.

One may disagree on complex policy issues while acknowledging that there is room for alternative views. Our media should be asking why Congress does not remove the Social Security cap. Let opponents defend their refusal publicly. Challenge their insipid talking points. But we are not even having that debate, not publicly, not with any consistency or honesty.

Reactionaries Still Win

There has been a recent spate of triumphalism from Democrats that is more than a little disconcerting. It sounds too much like 2009: Republicans are hurting, they have offended far too many women, gays, and immigrants. Demographics are inexorably turning against the mostly white, anti-science, anti-everything, etc.

While I think that is mostly true, it's worth remembering that similar analyses were widespread after Obama won in 2008. And then the 2010 mid-terms got in the way and we got hit with a gaggle of the most ideologically-strident reactionaries to occupy the House in generations.

Liberals have a point, to be sure. Just a few years ago, Republicans seemed to be on the cusp of a permanent majority in Congress. Then came a voter backlash against Republicans in 2006, 2008, and in 2012, which seemed to send a message to Republicans that the politics of hate, fear, and exclusion had run its course.

And yet Republicans seem to be doing pretty well at exercising power, certainly when you consider their low approval ratings in most polls. They may be out of sync with voter preferences on many policies,  but there is more to winning elections than actually appealing to the voters, as common-sensical as that may seem to most Democrats. I have always argued that Republicans do unusually well in elections, winning seats and influence all out of proportion to what data on voter registration and party identification would suggest.

That trend seems as strong as ever. It may surprise some to see how many ostensibly blue states are dominated by Republican governors and state legislatures. As for governors, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and New Mexico come to mind. People who gloat, or despair, over the Republican Party's poor showing in recent national elections, to Obama primarily, forget how well the party has done in the House of Representatives as well as in state elections.

One can argue that many Republican victories have more to do with money, gerrymandering, and voter apathy than it does with true popularity and fair elections, (except in the US Senate, which is constitutionally guaranteed to give a huge advantage to small, rural states have over large states, no gerrymandering required). But to focus on these realities will always be interpreted by the false equivalency crowd  as sour grapes.

Academicians and Democratic policy wonks may understand what is at stake, and do their best to draw attention to our deeply undemocratic system of government,  But in the end, and for whatever reason, Republicans continue to win numerous elections. The fact that they increasingly resort to various ploys, such as voter suppression or clever gerrymandering, is of little concern to them.  Republicans never give up and incessantly plan for the next election and how they can win. And if it looks as if they are constantly scheming for a legislative or legal advantage, it is because they are. Republican politicians learned long ago that winning elections is something quite different from good governance or effective policy. Authoritarian personalities in particular place little emphasis on fairness. All that crap about voter fairness and the will of the people is for principled losers and civics teachers.

As for unequal representation in the Senate, the pictures below provide a glimpse of the disparity.  The Republican Party is surely in trouble, but various built-in advantages, along with a fickle and confused electorate, make it likely that America's right wing will find a way to retain power.

This group of senators, 62 of them, represents about a fourth of America

 

 So does this group of 6

source: NY Times.

Who's this Jerry Mander guy?

Republicans have gone through through a lot of hand wringing after last November's election losses. Many operatives were criticized for not doing better. After all, the money just poured into Republican campaign coffers; "we paid for this election fair and square." But party faithful cannot complain too much, not when you consider how deeply unpopular and reviled Republicans in Congress are. It is a wonder they won as many seats as they did. Let's just say Republicans did well, though for the wrong reasons.

Republicans were never in the running for the White House, not really. Despite hopes, and indeed, firm convictions they would prevail, Republicans paid the price for nominating a deeply flawed candidate.

And though they lost a few seats in the Senate, Republican pols and voters remain dramatically over-represented. The reason why there are so many Republicans in the Senate-whether they actually control it or not, is simple enough; the reason has been with us since the very beginning of the republic. The US Senate is not designed to reflect proportionate representation. As every civics class ought to teach, only the US House of Representatives sends members in accordance with each state's population; big states have more representatives in the House than do small ones. It's only fair, you see.

The Senate, on the other hand, was designed at the outset to counter the potential for big-state tyranny. So each state sends two senators regardless of size. Sounds kind of, sort of, reasonable, maybe. Except that what we now have is small-state tyranny. One result is that a state such as Alaska, with population of about 750,000, or Wyoming, with population of about 570,000, have equal voting power with California, with over 38 million, or New York, with over 19 million. And wouldn't you know it, AK, WY, and several other small, rural states reliably send Republicans to the Senate.  Of course, there are small blue states that benefit as well, including Vermont, Delaware, and Hawaii. But taken together, Republicans win senate seats with fewer votes, sometimes far fewer, especially in the rural, ranching and farming states. The fact that millions more Americans actually vote for Democratic candidates than they do for Republicans, and have less to show for it, reflects systemic electoral misrepresentation that skews the Senate towards Republicans, rural farmland, and Dixie.

This disproportionate representation, you may say, is regrettable, but worth it because it helps offset the proportional representation in the House, which obviously favors large states. And besides, proportional representation is written in stone, or at least the US Constitution. So yeah, there's that.

Now we see, pace the Constitution, that Republicans are overrepresented in the US House as well. Color me not surprised.

Here's how Bill Berkowitz, writing in Alternet, puts it:

Tens of millions poured into a stealth redistricting project before the 2012 elections kept dozens of GOP Districts safe from Democratic challengers.

If somewhere in the recesses of your mind you were wondering how, despite President Barack Obama’s re-election victory and the Democratic Party’s gains in the Senate, Republicans continue to control the House of Representatives, think redistricting.

Redistricting is the process that adjusts the lines of a state’s electoral districts, theoretically based on population shifts, following the decennial census. Gerrymandering is often part and parcel of redistricting. According to the Rose Institute of State and Local Governments at Claremont McKenna College, Gerrymandering is done “to influence elections to favor a particular party, candidate, ethnic group.”

Over the past few years, as the Republican Party has gained control over more state legislatures than Democrats. And, it has turned redistricting into a finely-honed, well-financed project. That has virtually insured their control over the House. “While the Voting Rights Act strongly protects against racial gerrymanders, manipulating the lines to favor a political party is common,” the Rose Institute’s Redistricting in America website points out.

Dana Milbank writing on Jan. 4, also acknowledged the important role of gerrymandering:

The final results from the November election were completed Friday, and they show that Democratic candidates for the House outpolled Republicans nationwide by nearly 1.4 million votes and more than a full percentage point — a greater margin than the preliminary figures showed in November. And that’s just the beginning of it: A new analysis finds that even if Democratic congressional candidates won the popular vote by seven percentage points nationwide, they still would not have gained control of the House.

The analysis, by Ian Millhiser at the liberal Center for American Progress using data compiled by the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, finds that even if Democrats were to win the popular vote by a whopping nine percentage points — a political advantage that can’t possibly be maintained year after year — they would have a tenuous eight-seat majority.

In a very real sense, the Republican House majority is impervious to the will of the electorate. Thanks in part to deft redistricting based on the 2010 Census, House Republicans may be protected from the vicissitudes of the voters for the next decade. For Obama and the Democrats, this is an ominous development: The House Republican majority is durable, and it isn’t necessarily sensitive to political pressure and public opinion.

According to the Jan. 4 final tally by Cook’s David Wasserman after all states certified their votes, Democratic House candidates won 59,645,387 votes in November to the Republicans’ 58,283,036, a difference of 1,362,351. On a percentage basis, Democrats won, 49.15 percent to 48.03 percent. 

This in itself is an extraordinary result: Only three or four other times in the past century has a party lost the popular vote but won control of the House. But computer-aided gerrymandering is helping to make such undemocratic results the norm — to the decided advantage of Republicans, who controlled state governments in 21 states after the 2010 Census, almost double the 11 for Democrats.

Gerrymandering has been with us from the republic's beginnings, and it certainly isn't just Republicans who jockey for advantage.  But the most recent redistricting results are ominous. The country is divided more than it has been in generations; Republican indifference to voter preferences, along with some clever insulation from the voters themselves, come at a time of breathtaking extremism in that party's politics.

"He who controls redistricting can control Congress." Karl Rove

Feckless

We heard a lot of criticism directed at President Obama when gasoline prices started to climb earlier this year. Republicans, knowing how easily many voters can be manipulated, thought they had a campaign issue: just remind everyone that gas prices are going up, ignore the complex set of factors that explain the rise, especially Wall Street speculators, and just blame the President.

They lined up at the mic to do just that:
      In February, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell made the laughably inane claim that “This President will go to any length to drive up gas prices and pave the way for his ideological agenda.”
      In March,  Mitt Romney declared, “He gets full credit or blame for what’s happened in this economy, and what’s happened to gasoline prices under his watch..."
     In April, House Speaker John Boehner said, “The president holds the key to addressing the pain Ohioans are feeling at the gas pump and moving our nation away from its reliance on foreign energy. My question for the president is: what are you waiting for?”

As it turned out, Boehner didn't have long to wait. Now that gas prices are falling, he and other Republicans have grown silent. Romney said Obama deserved credit, as well as blame, for what has happened. That is simplistic nonsense, of course; the fact that Congressional Republicans have spent three years obstructing the President apparently is not a factor for Romney. Let's be clear on that point: you may agree with Republican tactics and say the Dems must be stopped, etc., but you cannot later ignore the Republicans' role in the Washington logjam and pretend it wasn't a factor.

In any event, Romney is a little slow about giving Obama "full credit" on gas prices. Now one might say that Obama doesn't deserve much credit or blame: The White House inherently has few short-term options on oil prices and cannot be expected to simply step in and ratchet down gas prices. American presidents do not have that kind of power.

But that doesn't mean Obama didn't have some options, or that he didn't use them.

What's that? You didn't hear all about it? And some people still think our corporate-owned media has a liberal bias. To make a bad situation worse, the White House has done a poor job of sharing Obama's message and accomplishments. It's as if he believes the media is an honest broker and is motivated to get the full story out. Peter Cohen, writing for Forbes, captures this frustrating imbalance:

When he was running for President in 2008, Barack Obama struck me as a gifted orator. But now that he’s running for re-election, it feels to me that the messaging power of his political opponents is like Hurricane Katrina blowing against a chipmunk’s squeal. So I am confident that a piece of excellent news for drivers resulting from a little-noticed policy from Mr. Obama will get no attention at all from the media.

In April, I predicted that President Obama’s $52 million plan to increase the margin requirements and otherwise tighten the screws on oil speculators — who borrow huge sums to bet on the direction of oil without taking delivery — would cut oil prices by 10 percent. He’s beaten that prediction, and the lowered price of gasoline has added $78.4 billion to its consumers’ spending power.

Cohen has much more to say on the specific steps Obama has outlined to combat high prices, including:

  --Increase by a factor of six Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) surveillance and enforcement staff “to better deter oil market manipulation,

  --Boost 10-fold, to $10 million, the civil and criminal penalties against “firms that engage in market manipulation,

  --Give the CFTC authority to increase the trader margins — the amount of their own capital that traders must set aside for each bet...

These and other factors, including increased domestic oil production, have driven down oil and gasoline prices. Cohen puts it in human terms:

So just how much has Mr. Obama stimulated the economy through his April crackdown on oil speculators? Well, if my experience is any indication, the answer is quite a bit. After all, I was paying about $4.05 a gallon for mid-grade back then and this week the price had fallen to $3.49.

That 56 cents a gallon decline would amount to me saving about $582 a year — assuming that I fill up my 20 gallon tank once a week. But if the AP is right, that same 56 cent a gallon drop would add $78.4 billion to U.S. GDP.

That’s not much for a $15 trillion economy, but it represents a 1,508 percent return on Mr. Obama’s $52 million investment, in two months.

In the final analysis, I notice a double standard. Republicans attack Obama for not doing something about high gas prices. He, in fact, did something, including increased drilling and permit approval. Not a sound of approval from his critics, and not much coverage in the media. In the spring, Obama also outlines his plan to rein in speculators. By the first day of summer oil prices were off 21% from their April highs.

Republicans blame Obama for not doing something about gas prices even as they insist government should stay out of free markets. He does something, brings down prices, and they call it government meddling. Weren't you the guys blaming him for not doing anything?

Feckless assholes

Undermine What Works

Hope you are keeping up with the drama with our postal service, the one many claim is poorly run and should be rescued by privatizing it. Here is a quick summary, as provided by Stephanie Whiteside at Current.com.

The Senate has scrambled to prevent the closing of hundreds of local post offices and give communities a right to appeal closures after the U.S. Postal Service proposed the closings in response to a budget gap.

Officials claim the gap is due to a move towards other services  — people paying bills and conducting business online rather than relying on the postal service. But is email the main reason for the gap?

While the postal service may be facing challenges due to the Internet, it's not the only reason the agency is feeling squeezed. In 2006 Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, which requires that the Postal Service pre-fund 100 percent of its health benefits for 75 years. Not just that, but the USPS was given only 10 years to accomplish the task. That's something no other organization(public or private) is required to do. Prior to the 2006 act, USPS generated a profit; now, with the additional $5.5 billion a year it must pre-fund, it's facing a budget shortfall. 

Is it really any surprise, as Whiteside points out, that industry lobbyists, meaning competitors to the USPS, were in favor of the legislation? Said legislation, passed when Republicans held Congress and the White House, also made it more difficult for the USPS to innovate and experiment with new avenues of growth.

The problem now is that the postal service is being compelled to close numerous small rural PO's to cut costs, an extraordinarily inefficient tactic that will save a pittance but ensure that many communities will have greater costs and hobbled mail delivery. And of course, thousands will lose their jobs.  Here is a similar take on the impact of the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, including a video on how rural America will be hurt.

I can only hope that these rural folks will gain a sense of irony. We're talking mostly red state America, the ones that want government out of their lives, the ones who think private firms will always provide better service. As the PO closings continue, it is they who will pay more and get less. Just don't tell me our government is doing this. That "Accountability Act" of 2006 wasn't passed by Congress, it was passed by Republicans in Congress. And those same Republicans know how their low-info voting base works: Fox and others will try to pin this on Obama. They will use it as more evidence of government ineptitude. They won't tell you it was their own legislation, signed into law by George Bush, and that it was meant to bring down the USPS. 

Obama's Burden

A recent cover story of The Week magazine relates the difficult choices President Obama faces in Afghanistan. These choices are part of the larger set of problems he has faced since his first day in office. The two endless (and thankless) wars in the Middle East were only his biggest foreign challenge for a president who also had to overcome the biggest economic recession since the 1930's, the spectacular fallout from Wall Street's recklessly irresponsible activity; activity, it should be added, that was condoned and even applauded by free market ideologues, including Alan Greenspan.

All of this in addition to a massive trade deficit, one caused by policies that have allowed widespread offshoring of jobs and a corporate culture that does not take manufacturing seriously--these are the prime reason industries have been hollowed out.  This bears repeating: It is our own incoherent industrial policies that have contributed the most to our weakened industrial base and the mammoth trade deficit that it engendered, not China, not Japan, not foreign oil.

Obama faced two hugely expensive wars, neither of which was going well. He was forced to choose from several poor choices. The wars have added enormously to the national debt, an issue that did not seem to bother Republicans while Bush was in office.

The US has generally paid for its wars by raising taxes. We certainly did so in WWII, the Korean War, and Viet Nam. Many voters have forgotten how unusual and as we now know, reckless it was for George W. Bush, who inherited a huge budget surplus, to first squander the surplus by passing costly tax cuts for those already wealthy.  He too was faced with a large national debt as well as a seriously eroding infrastructure. He opted for tax cuts, the budget deficits returned, and then he went to war. Bush and the Republican-controlled congress refused to pay for it and the federal government has been growing its deficit ever since.

Obama tried to do what many economists said he must do; stimulate the economy, and keep the budget deficit from becoming too large, not an easy task, but then he did not create the conditions and policies in place when he took office. Others created them; Obama is getting blamed for them.

The irony is that Obama's fiscal stimulus was conventional, mainstream, and conservative. Keynes himself made it clear that government stimulus spending was very much a conservative alternative to the much greater pain of allowing massive unemployment and the resultant upheaval and unrest.

Obama gets blamed for continuing unemployment too, of course. The realty is that we have a much smaller industrial base that will call back workers when conditions improve. This is a big reason the recession lasted as long as it did, and why the recovery is so slow: there are far fewer good-paying jobs. Instead, millions of people have been forced to settle for poorer paying jobs than the ones they once held, and often with fewer benefits. Lower wages exacerbates economic recovery.

The final kicker is one left out of most analyses that focus on the mortgage crisis. The middle class carried the economy all the way until near the end of Bush the Lesser's second term. They did so by running up massive personal debts on their credit cards. That was unsustainable, of course, so once the Wall Street bankers crashed the economy, and unemployment started to rise, middle class consumers cut back on expenses. The cutbacks were prudent for the individual, but they hurt spending, tax receipts, and other peoples' jobs that depended on spending.

This is the mess the President faced on inauguration date. None of it started with him. And the process, the wars, the deindustrialization, the irresponsible tax cuts, the eroding infrastructure, the mortgage bubble, the suppression of wages, the dominance of unaccountable banks, all of it, was well under way long before most of us had even heard of Barack Obama.

Now bear in mind that most of the same people who got us in this mess, including essentially every Republican in congress, are completely opposed to Obama's every effort to extricate us, as if we can actually dig ourselves out of the hole, the one the middle class did not dig, without some pain and sacrifice. So if Obama tries to raise taxes to where they were in the Clinton boom years, he is a big government socialist. Never mind that taxes were higher under Reagan. If he tries to cut subsidies to Big Oil, as if they they needed it, he is undermining business. If he tries to rein in our out of control defense spending, he is endangering America's security. Never mind that the level of spending he proposes would still be higher than it was in Bush's first term. And every effort to get Wall Street under greater control, before it ruins it again for the rest of us, is opposed. Republicans insisted in 2010 that the Bush tax cuts be extended, and they were willing to shut down Washington to get them.  And now, of course, Obama gets blamed for the inevitably larger budget deficit.

Republicans have left the President with few options: Republicans will continue to support looser regulations and lower taxes (for the rich). Never mind that these are what created the financial mess in the first place. Only now are Republicans insisting on lower spending, not coincidentally on the programs that help the bottom half of society. Any honest appraisal of the federal budget will show that even significantly lower spending will do little to close the budget gap, not when tax revenues-from individuals and corporations alike-are the lowest they have been in decades.

Here is a short video that covers much of the above. It offers up in graphic form the impact on the federal deficit and debt of the wars, the bank bailouts, the recession, and most of all the Bush tax cuts.



One more thing; Obama even got Osama bin Ladin, after the trail had gone cold, so no, Bush, you don't get credit. 

Corruption Unabated

Here's a reminder of the fallout from Bush's decision to invade Iraq. In addition to massive loss of life and a country with its infrastructure destroyed, Americans (with help from Iraqis) are now plundering funds that were meant for rebuilding Iraq. As the video below explains, there is widespread waste and systemic fraud with almost no accountability.

And not much coverage by our mainstream media.

Not that there wasn't a publicized effort to uncover the problems. The Commission on Wartime Contracting had issued several reports that recognize the multitude of issues. Among other things, the commission reported $30 to $60 billion lost through waste and fraud.

It closed down earlier this year because congress defunded it. And while its website does offer some downloadable data to the public, Congress has decided that some key findings should be hidden from public purview until 2031.



As author Michael O'Brien says in the video, congress is protecting the perps. Representatives and senators alike know that too many fat cats, in and around congress, will be implicated. So they cannot let the public know what really has been happening in Iraq and who benefited. They do what governments always do when they feel threatened: keep evidence from view and lie.

Twenty years on ice should take care of any statute of limitations.

The video is from RT America, and I highly recommend its Youtube channel.

All the Money Rich Bankers Could Ever Want

I believe the desire to hold the Federal Reserve Bank accountable to the American people is a major issue that progressives and disaffected right-wing populists, e.g. tea-partiers, have in common. Many do not seem to be aware of this shared interest.

The following is from Alan Grayson, former congressman from Florida. I have reproduced it in its entirety. The original is here. Mr Grayson is campaigning to win back his seat in 2012.

        The Fed Bailouts: Money for Nothing

I think it’s fair to say that Congressman Ron Paul and I are the parents of the GAO’s audit of the Federal Reserve. And I say that knowing full well that Dr. Paul has somewhat complicated views regarding gay marriage.

Anyway, one of our love children is a massive 251-page GAO report technocratically entitled “Opportunities Exist to Strengthen Policies and Processes for Managing Emergency Assistance.” It is almost as weighty as that 13-lb. baby born in Germany last week, named Jihad. It also is the first independent audit of the Federal Reserve in the Fed’s 99-year history.

Feel free to take a look at it yourself, it’s right here. It documents Wall Street bailouts by the Fed that dwarf the $700 billion TARP, and everything else you’ve heard about.

I wouldn’t want anyone to think that I’m dramatizing or amplifying what this GAO report says, so I’m just going to list some of my favorite parts, by page number.

Page 131 – The total lending for the Fed’s “broad-based emergency programs” was $16,115,000,000,000. That’s right, more than $16 trillion. The four largest recipients, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and Bank of America, received more than a trillion dollars each. The 5th largest recipient was Barclays PLC. The 8th was the Royal Bank of Scotland Group, PLC. The 9th was Deutsche Bank AG. The 10th was UBS AG. These four institutions each got between a quarter of a trillion and a trillion dollars. None of them is an American bank.

Pages 133 & 137 – Some of these “broad-based emergency program” loans were long-term, and some were short-term. But the “term-adjusted borrowing” was equivalent to a total of $1,139,000,000,000 more than one year. That’s more than $1 trillion out the door. Lending for these programs in fact peaked at more than $1 trillion.

Pages 135 & 196 – Sixty percent of the $738 billion “Commercial Paper Funding Facility” went to the subsidiaries of foreign banks. 36% of the $71 billion Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility also went to subsidiaries of foreign banks.

Page 205 – Separate and apart from these “broad-based emergency program” loans were another $10,057,000,000,000 in “currency swaps.” In the “currency swaps,” the Fed handed dollars to foreign central banks, no strings attached, to fund bailouts in other countries. The Fed’s only “collateral” was a corresponding amount of foreign currency, which never left the Fed’s books (even to be deposited to earn interest), plus a promise to repay. But the Fed agreed to give back the foreign currency at the original exchange rate, even if the foreign currency appreciated in value during the period of the swap. These currency swaps and the “broad-based emergency program” loans, together, totaled more than $26 trillion. That’s almost $100,000 for every man, woman, and child in America. That’s an amount equal to more than seven years of federal spending -- on the military, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, interest on the debt, and everything else. And around twice American’s total GNP.

Page 201 – Here again, these “swaps” were of varying length, but on Dec. 4, 2008, there were $588,000,000,000 outstanding. That’s almost $2,000 for every American. All sent to foreign countries. That’s more than twenty times as much as our foreign aid budget.

Page 129 – In October 2008, the Fed gave $60,000,000,000 to the Swiss National Bank with the specific understanding that the money would be used to bail out UBS, a Swiss bank. Not an American bank. A Swiss bank.

Pages 3 & 4 – In addition to the “broad-based programs,” and in addition to the “currency swaps,” there have been hundreds of billions of dollars in Fed loans called “assistance to individual institutions.” This has included Bear Stearns, AIG, Citigroup, Bank of America, and “some primary dealers.” The Fed decided unilaterally who received this “assistance,” and who didn’t.

Pages 101 & 173 – You may have heard somewhere that these were riskless transactions, where the Fed always had enough collateral to avoid losses. Not true. The “Maiden Lane I” bailout fund was in the hole for almost two years.

Page 4 – You also may have heard somewhere that all this money was paid back. Not true. The GAO lists five Fed bailout programs that still have amounts outstanding, including $909,000,000,000 (just under a trillion dollars) for the Fed’s Agency Mortgage-Backed Securities Purchase Program alone. That’s almost $3,000 for every American.

Page 126 – In contemporaneous documents, the Fed apparently did not even take a stab at explaining why it helped some banks (like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley) and not others. After the fact, the Fed referred vaguely to “strains in the financial markets,” “transitional credit,” and the Fed’s all-time favorite rationale for everything it does, “increasing liquidity.”

81 different places in the GAO report – The Fed applied nothing even resembling a consistent policy toward valuing the assets that it acquired. Sometimes it asked its counterparty to take a “haircut” (discount), sometimes it didn’t. Having read the whole report, I see no rhyme or reason to those decisions, with billions upon billions of dollars at stake.

Page 2 – As massive as these enumerated Fed bailouts were, there were yet more. The GAO did not even endeavor to analyze the Fed’s discount window lending, or its single-tranche term repurchase agreements.

Pages 13 & 14 – And the Fed wasn’t the only one bailing out Wall Street, of course. On top of what the Fed did, there was the $700,000,000,000 TARP program authorized by Congress (which I voted against). The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) also provided a federal guarantee for $600,000,000,000 in bonds issued by Wall Street.

There is one thing that I’d like to add to this, which isn’t in the GAO’s report. All this is something new, very new. For the first 96 years of the Fed’s existence, the Fed’s primary market activities were to buy or sell U.S. Treasury bonds (to change the money supply), and to lend at the “discount window.” Neither of these activities permitted the Fed to play favorites. But the programs that the GAO audited are fundamentally different. They allowed the Fed to choose winners and losers.

So what does all this mean? Here are some short observations:

(1) In the case of TARP, at least The People’s representatives got a vote. In the case of the Fed’s bailouts, which were roughly 20 times as substantial, there was never any vote. Unelected functionaries, with all sorts of ties to Wall Street, handed out trillions of dollars to Wall Street. That’s now how a democracy should function, or even can function.

(2) The notion that this was all without risk, just because the Fed can keep printing money, is both laughable and cryable (if that were a word). Leaving aside the example of Germany’s hyperinflation in 1923, we have the more recent examples of Iceland (75% of GNP gone when the central bank took over three failed banks) and Ireland (100% of GNP gone when the central bank tried to rescue property firms).

(3) In the same way that American troops cannot act as police officers for the world, our central bank cannot act as piggy bank for the world. If the European Central Bank wants to bail out UBS, fine. But there is no reason why our money should be involved in that.

(4) For the Fed to pick and choose among aid recipients, and then pick and choose who takes a “haircut” and who doesn’t, is both corporate welfare and socialism. The Fed is a central bank, not a barber shop.

(5) The main, if not the sole, qualification for getting help from the Fed was to have lost huge amounts of money. The Fed bailouts rewarded failure, and penalized success. (If you don’t believe me, ask Jamie Dimon at JP Morgan.) The Fed helped the losers to squander and destroy even more capital.

(6) During all the time that the Fed was stuffing money into the pockets of failed banks, many Americans couldn’t borrow a dime for a home, a car, or anything else. If the Fed had extended $26 trillion in credit to the American people instead of Wall Street, would there be 24 million Americans today who can’t find a full-time job?

And here’s what bothers me most about all this: it can happen again. I’ve called the GAO report a bailout autopsy. But it’s an autopsy of the undead.

Courage,

Alan Grayson

Conservatives Get Their Way

At the heart of America's often shallow debate about political economy, policy, and the direction this country should take, is the cluster of variables surrounding taxes, regulation, economic policy, and the proper role of government. The basic conservative argument is that taxes are too high, regulation is too onerous and counterproductive, and business is too hobbled by misguided bureaucrats. 

The Republican prescription has been simple, persuasive for some, and amazingly consistent for a generation: cut taxes and everything good will happen. It is the elixir, the panacea, the cure-all for all that ails you. And if tax cuts are not enough (they are always a prerequisite), then just cut back on all that wasteful spending, which for conservatives means the welfare state and other transfers that go from deserving producers to the undeserving takers. 

To hear Republicans tell it, America is near comatose because of high taxes, radical unions ("big labor," as they say with a straight face), and more recently, government spending, not on defense of course, but on character-destroying entitlements such as social security, medicare, welfare, public education, and infrastructure boondoggles. 

Millions of Americans believe this argument; teabaggers in particular have been convinced that they are "taxed enough already" and that Democrats are transferring massive amounts of money "we don't have" to undeserving liberals who vote Democrat for that precise reason. Joshua Holland has an excellent article the title of which precisely captures what has become a real problem for the reality-based community: Thanks to Decades of Conservative Spin, Americans Are Hopelessly Confused About Taxes, Spending and the Deficit. 

As Holland states:

A good number of Americans are hopelessly confused about taxes, deficits and the debt. And it's no mystery why – conservatives have spent 30 years divorcing the taxes we pay from the services they finance. They've bent themselves into intellectual pretzels arguing that cutting taxes – on the wealthy – leads to more revenues in the coffers. They've invented narratives about taxes driving “producers” to sunnier climes, killing jobs by the bushel, and relentlessly spun the wholly false notion that we're facing “runaway spending” and are “taxed to death.”

Holland implicates the mainstream media for its failure to critically assess and challenge what has been Republican class warfare disguised as common sense. It is a narrative that has proved persuasive to people who do not often hear, and don't want to hear, analyses that challenge that narrative.

My immediate purpose is not to resolve ideological differences or to prove the efficacy of certain policy preferences. In this occasional series; let's call it "Conservatives Get Their Way," I want to show that regardless of how else you or I might feel about it, the inescapable conclusion is that on economic policy and legislation, including taxation, conservatives, the right-wing, the Republican party, and most assuredly, corporate America, have gotten most of what they have wanted on the policies, legislation, and legal opinions that overwhelmingly benefit them.

It is not a matter of conservatives wanting to move away from what they consider to be harmful, liberal policies. The reality is that Republicans, with the help of some Democrats, have undercut what they hate, and have already turned over power to wealthy oligarchs. The conservative charge that liberals, socialists, Democrats, dirty fucking hippies, a black President, "teh gays," and all the rest are destroying America, is demonstrably false. We do not have "Big Labor", high taxes, or profit-killing regulations, a large and expensive public sector, high social spending, or job-killing environmental regulations. In fact, we lag other industrialized nations on each of these points; our taxes are among the lowest, as is union membership and pubic sector spending.

So where does the US lead? Corporate profits and executive compensation. And of course, we do spend a pantload on defense, precisely what most conservatives and nearly all Republican politicians demand. 

The evidence more clearly shows that corporate America, the Republican party, and the conservative policies and legislation they say we need, but have already enacted, are undermining America's economic strength, its political institutions, and its social fabric. In other words, America's right wing not only has got its arguments mostly backwards, it is precisely the conservative policies they claim we need that have created the current mess, one that has been in the making for 35 plus years.

Conservatives get their way and they have the results one would expect; massive inequality, an unending gravy train for our bloated defense industry, executive compensation that has reached obscene levels, is largely detached from job performance (golden parachutes anyone?), and is loaded with money-saving perks denied to the rest of us. 

They succeeded in largely gutting private pension systems for workers, outsourced much of our manufacturing base to cheap labor countries, hobbled unions, have enjoyed significant productivity increases but have not shared those increases with their employees, and have beat back nearly all efforts to hold them accountable on the environment, tax loopholes, and regulations.

Much of this is vividly on display on Wall Street, where the perpetrators of massive fraud and malfeasance have managed to beat back essentially all efforts to hold them accountable and to rein in their ridiculously irresponsible behavior. 

Any no, it is not because Congress can't do anything; progressive Dems favor and vote for legislation that would return us to more stable and equitable times, legislation that we once had in place, such as Glass-Steagal.

It is because nearly all Republicans, joined by a few Blue Dog Democrats, have voted for the legislation that is so overwhelming favorable to the overclass.

It isn't Congress; it is Republicans in Congress.

Always More for Defense

The post below is originally from a blog called Southern Belle, who is rightfully disgusted that the US continues to spend vast amounts of money on defense. As always, Congress finds piles of it to spend on lucrative defense contracts, meaning your tax dollars going to upper management of corporate America and the investor class. They just can't break themselves from this gravy train. And Congress just can't muster the will to do the right thing. All this crap about shared sacrifice is a supremely obscene insult to anyone who cares to pay attention.

And remember, it is immoral socialism only when the jobless get unemployement benefits or the destitute get foodstamps. When corporate America gets $ billions for weapons we do not need, well, that is moral capitalism. So naturally they get tax breaks on top of it, too. It's only fair, you see.

"We don't need these weapon systems," you say?  Son, you are missing the point. The military brass is addicted to shit that blows things up and we enrich ourselves off that addiction because we can, just like those financial types on Wall Street. You could do it too if you just stopped caring about people that don't matter.

* * *

I am reproducing Southern Belle's article in its entirety. Go on over and read what else she has to say.

                       Because There’s Always Money For War!

WTF? We’re slashing budgets right and left, cutting back on “entitlements” and Medicaid and Pell Grants and having hissy fits over the paltry sums of money NPR receives, but we have a spare $7.5 billion to build nuclear bombs in Oak Ridge?

It’s a YES on the new bomb plant for Oak Ridge. Last Wednesday, the Department of Energy/National Nuclear Security Administration published its Record of Decision in the Federal Register. And the decision was no surprise: they selected the alternative they previously identified as their “preferred alternative;” a Uranium Processing Facility with the capacity to produce 80 nuclear secondaries per year.
The Record of Decision came on the heels of an audit performed by the Army Corps of Engineers that projected the cost of construction will soar to $7.5 billion. Of course, no one imagines costs will be constrained to that total over the next twelve years of construction. With half a billion dollars already spent on designing the facility and designers saying they are only 50% complete, it is clear that neither common sense nor fiscal responsibility will stand in the way of the bomb plant.

What the hell? Who are we building these bombs for? We already have more nuclear weapons than any other country on earth. What are we going to do, use them on some guys armed with box cutters? If 9/11 proved anything at all it’s what a colossal waste of money our Defense budget is. Anyone else remember how the big conversation pre-9/11 was the resurgence of the ridiculous “star wars” program?

It’s not just $7.5 billion for Oak Ridge, either. We’re set to spend $100 billion on a fleet of new ballistic missile launching submarines and $55 bilion on new bombers.

Why do we need these weapons? Who are we fighting? Who is the enemy? A bunch of men in pajamas in the hills of Waziristan riding around on donkeys? Are you kidding me?

I’m not the only one wondering:

At this stage in history, U.S. nuclear weapons serve no useful purpose other than preventing another nation from using nuclear weapons against the United States. And a study by two professors of military strategy at U.S. military colleges has suggested that that mission could be accomplished with roughly 300 warheads, compared with the 1,550 deployed warheads permitted under the New START treaty, and the roughly 5,000 currently in the U.S. stockpile if one counts all categories of non-deployed weapons. Going down to these levels would save additional billions in reduced operating and maintenance costs for the arsenal as a whole.
Not only have a growing list of former secretaries of state and defense, presidents and prime ministers, scientists and retired military officials called for the elimination of nuclear weapons, but if pushed by budgetary realities so would many current U.S. military leaders. While they won’t say so publicly, if forced to choose between nukes and major conventional systems it is my bet that nukes would lose out in that particular budget battle.

That wasn’t some pot-smoking DFH, that was William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy.

It is the height of hypocrisy that Republicans and Conservadems like Joe Lieberman refuse to touch our Defense budget, yet keep crying about how the nation is broke. Oh my, we’re broke, we can’t pay our bills, oh dearest me, we’re just going to have to make grandpa go without his blood pressure medicine and grandma will have to eat cat food, what else can we do? Meanwhile we’re spending hundreds of billions of dollars on nonsense like this. We’re supposed to think of the jobs making those fighter jet engines, but somehow teachers and social workers don’t have real jobs?

This is insanity.

Ass Backwards Anger

Yesterday I came across this little item posted on my Facebook page by a teabagger who has often posted or commented approvingly of teabagger nostrums. We'll call her Sal.

Sal had the following data posted on her FB page:

Salary of the US President ..................$400,000
Salary of retired US Presidents .............$180,000
Salary of House/Senate .......................$174,00​0
Salary of Speaker of the House ............$223,500
Salary of Majority/Minority Leaders ...... $193,400
Average Salary of Soldier DEPLOYED IN IRAQ $38,000
I think we found where the cuts should be made ! If you agree.. RE-POST

This is the sort of pointless, feel-good pablum that ignorant teabaggers cannot resist. It's identity and tribalism substituting for knowledge and analysis.

So let's see; in our multi-trillion dollar economy, the salaries of Congress and the President are budget-busters and must be cut; you know, to save the country. Most members of Congress could make more in the private sector; most will when they leave government. Let's be clear about this: Congressional pay is relatively low compared to what most members of Congress could be doing; law and lobbying are two lucrative choices. Some prefer to line their pockets at Fox News.

Most members of Congress are relatively wealthy. They did not go into politics for the salary; the graft, kickbacks, and influence-peddling, perhaps, but not the salary. And while most are wealthy, some are not. Suppose we did slash pay for elected officials. That would make Congress more of a rich man's club than it already is. Only those independently wealthy could afford to serve in Washington. I think we already have a serious problem of bright and able, but not rich, individuals spurning government service because of low pay.

I realize that may not make any sense to people who think we can fix education by cutting teachers' salaries and benefits.

Sal is correct in her concern over the plight of our troops serving in harm's way. She seems unconcerned about the massive amounts of money being spent on the twin rat holes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Corporate America loves a bloated defense industry and it loves war. Every bomb, every sortie, every meal, every piece of equipment and spare part represents profits for defense contractors.

Now I know full well we have legitimate national defense interests, so you teabaggers can stop soiling your pants. My disgust is with simpletons who lose all sense of perspective. I mean, how many times do we have to hear about how defense contractors have overrun cost projections and trot back to the Pentagon for more. "We figured $4 billion for this project, but we will need a few billion more." And they get it. Talking about gaming the system.

Where is the outrage when the Army is charged $800 for a wrench, or $2000 for a toilet seat? Where is the outrage when the Pentagon admits it cannot account for billions of dollars in cash, lost in Iraq? Or the fact that Donald Rumsfeld himself publicly stated that the Pentagon's accounting was so flawed that a total of $2.3 trillion could not be located?

Do you remember when he said this? Sept 10, 2001. Talk about being pushed off the front page by subsequent events! And that does not account for the disappearing billions in Iraq after 9/11. Here is the video explaining where teabaggers should be venting their pathological and misplaced rage:



So um... yeah, government wastes money. But getting worked up over salaries of our elected officials and ignoring the real costs inflicted on us by corporate America, special interests, and our increasingly powerful overclass requires willful ignorance from those who have their brain stuck up their ideological ass. Pull it out, clean it off and give it a chance to learn about the pitfalls of misinformed ideological sophistry.

The videos below is a parody starring the infamous Nathan Spewman, but makes the same points in a slightly different way (I see Ugly Betty is grown up and very un-ugly).

Part One



Part Two:

Economic Stupidity at Work

Teabaggers in Congress are hard at work saving you money:

WASHINGTON -- If you think Congress doesn't understand the economy now, wait till you see what a key House panel wants to do to the people who help figure it out.

Lawmakers are taking on the budget for the Census Bureau, pushing cuts that could leave economists and businesses in the dark about key economic information even as they are trying to map a path through a treacherous, uncertain economy.

The House Appropriations Committee is set to put the final touches on a funding bill Wednesday that proposes to slash the government's data collection arm by 25 percent -- a cut that economists and statistics experts say could end up costing taxpayers and businesses billions.

"It's essentially turning out the lights as economic policymakers are trying to do their work," said Andrew Reamer, a George Washington University professor who focuses on economics and U.S. competitiveness.

The bill is the Commerce, Justice and Science appropriations measure for 2012, and the cuts in question target the Commerce Department's Census Bureau -- recently one of the bogeymen of the right. The cuts would take effect in October, leaving the bureau little time even to plan to mitigate the impacts.

And those impacts would be many. The Census Bureau declined to comment, but a member of Congress was willing to pass along the agency's estimate of what the cuts could mean.

"It would have major, permanent impacts on the nation's economic and demographic statistics," the bureau said, according to Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), a member and past chair of the House Joint Economic Committee.

"It leaves me rather speechless, actually," said Maurine Haver, the head of the National Association of Business Economists' statistics committee. "I just don't understand it."

Experts on the Census said there are several programs the bureau runs that could be affected by the proposed cuts. One is the $124 million Economic Census, which serves as the benchmark for the nation's fiscal reports, including evaluations of the Gross Domestic Product, jobs data and economic activity across industries.

"The Economic Census is the foundation for the country's most important measures of our economy," Maloney said. "A cut to the Census Bureau of this magnitude will undermine the confidence in our fundamental economic statistics, like the GDP..."

Read the entire article here.

One wonders what the strategy is, if any. All indications are that businesses are significant users of census data. Republicans usually want to undercut the weakest and most vulnerable in society, not business. One could argue that teabagger members of the House are so determined to cut spending, and show their constituents what a fine job they're doing, that they will attack whatever low-hanging fruit they can find. Many freshmen Republicans, the ones put into office by teabaggers, don't actually believe in government anyway.

The cynic in me says conservatives politicians want to hide America's deteriorating socio-economic demographic data from voters, the public, and the world, not unlike the way other countries do it, such as China. Researchers can bang Republicans over the head with empirical reality, sometimes known as facts, but it's harder if you can deny them some of that data in the first place. It is no coincidence that conservatives are the most vociferous opponents of the Freedom of Information Act.

Meanwhile, have you seen the new Fox News Logo?




The irony is that Fox viewers are far less likely to understand the joke precisely because they watch Fox News.

Willful Ignorance

OK, this is not new, but it serves as a reminder of how nutty some in Washington have become. Back in late March all 47 Republicans introduced a constitutional amendment that would require a balanced budget with spending capped at 18% of GDP.

I can hear it now: "What's wrong with that? 'bout time we get spending under control." People who ask that are either achingly naive about economics, the federal budget, and how government works, or they are teabaggers.  Lots of overlap there. And if you are wondering why there is no discussion on how to reel in our monstrous defense budget to, you know, cut wasteful spending, that's because there isn't any.

I will have to pick at the balanced budget fallacy a few snippets at a time. For now it is worth noting that none of the budgets Ronald Reagan or Bush the Lesser submitted were balanced. And Republicans, including the current leaders, were more than happy to raise the debt ceiling as needed when their man was in the White House. Here are some specifics:

June 2002: Congress approves a $450 billion increase, raising the debt limit to $6.4 trillion. McConnell, Boehner, and Cantor vote “yea”, Kyl votes “nay.”
May 2003: Congress approves a $900 billion increase, raising the debt limit to $7.384 trillion. All four approve.
November 2004: Congress approves an $800 billion increase, raising the debt limit to $8.1 trillion. All four approve.
March 2006: Congress approves a $781 billion increase, raising the debt limit to $8.965 trillion. All four approve.
September 2007: Congress approves an $850 billion increase, raising the debt limit to $9.815 trillion. All four approve.

More on raising the debt ceiling at Think Progress. More on the nutty idea about a balanced budget amendment here and here.

Meanwhile, j4kesutter has his own way of addressing teabagger wisdom in letter to the illiterate. Not sure what you mean, j4kesutter. Tell us how you really feel.

On an entirely different note, Hawaii has a web site up that allows you to explore the joyful possibilities of carving up the state's voting districts at this reapportionment map.