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

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.

Theology as Personality

In the video below Cenk Uygur hits on an essential truth; the shameless habit of christians, especially the religious right, to cherry pick their theology to suit their personality, their ideology, and their pocketbook. Did not your christian god repeatedly talk of caring for the poor and needy? Did he not repeatedly denounce those who sought earthly possessions?

Apparently not if you're a Republican. America's right wing must be using a different Bible, the one called Atlas Shrugged.

Jobs Up, Boehner Complains

The US Labor Department has just released its December employment data. As the Labor Dept.'s website says, "The number of unemployed persons decreased by 556,000 to 14.5 million in December, and the unemployment rate dropped to 9.4 percent. Over the year, these measures were down from 15.2 million and 9.9 percent, respectively."

Not bad. Many remain jobless, but the drop in the unemployment rate was substantial, the biggest one-month drop since 1998 (also under a Democrat). The still-high figure of 9.4% is the lowest since July 2009.  According to Nancy Pelosi, now the House Minority Leader, President Obama and the Democratic Congress created more jobs in 2010 than George Bush did in all of his eight years. The new Speaker of the House, John Boehner, from whom I have yet to hear a single statement or sound bite that is both substantive and coherent, replied that the data shows the need to cut spending in order to grow the economy.

Boehner pulled that positively Hooveresque conclusion from his ass.  He, Cantor, and the rest of his crowd just cannot accept that federal spending has a stimulative effect. To be more precise, they happily spend when they are in power and when the money goes to their districts. Spending, and the deficit, become problems only when Democrats are in control.

Did you notice how Republicans, primarily Boehner, railed against the federal deficit ever since Obama took office, but changed their tune late last year when it looked like they were going to score a victory for their richest benefactors by getting Democrats to agree to Bush-era tax cuts for all (by holding the unemployed hostage, no less). Then, for several weeks Republicans laid off the deficit rhetoric and instead insisted that we should never raise taxes in a week economy, as if the richest 2% of America would suffer. Now that they secured the tax cuts for the rich, Republicans are back to inveighing against the deficit.  

As for those jobs, Boehner should get an eyeful of the chart below. It's from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Obama has done remarkably well given the catastrophe handed to him by Bush and Wall Street.

ThinkProgress has a nice summary of Bush's record of job creation:

As the Wall Street Journal noted in the last month of Bush’s term, the former president had the “worst track record for job creation since the government began keeping records.” And job creation under Bush was anemic long before the recession began. Bush’s supply-side economics “fostered the weakest jobs and income growth in more than six decades,” along with “sluggish business investment and weak gross domestic product growth,” the Center for American Progress’ Joshua Picker explained. “On every major measurement” of income and employment, “the country lost ground during Bush’s two terms,” the National Journal’s Ron Brownstein observed, parsing Census data.

The Road to Oligarchy

When you spend a lot of time studying a subject, or follow events closely, you may assume that the issue at hand has become common knowledge, or at least has the attention of most sentient beings. I learned long ago, and still have to remind myself, that this is usually not the case. Recently I was again surprised by a poll that showed that 94% of Americans do not know who John Boehner is. This is a man who is constantly in the news, and in front of a camera. People will learn more than they wanted to know when he becomes Speaker of the House in January.

For the same reason, I have to assume not many have kept up with this country's slide into oligarchy. The evidence is there, and so is the reportage. It is not comforting.

For a small sampling, see Robert Freeman's article, It's Official: Rich Declare War on the Middle Class. As Freeman relates, "... all of the income and wealth gains for middle Americans from the “golden years” between 1945 and 1975 have now been wiped out.  Or more accurately, have now been transferred to the very rich."

Andy Kroll's How the Oligarchs Took America notes how thoroughly conservative elites have captured institutions, including the court system, the media, and the minds of many Americans since Ronald Reagan (greed is good). He also refers to an excellent new book that happens to be on my ever-growing reading list, Winner-Take All Politics, by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson. As Kroll relates,

Unlike so many pundits, politicians, and academics, Hacker and Pierson resist blaming the usual suspects: globalization, the rise of an information-based economy, and the demise of manufacturing. The culprit in their crime drama is American politics itself over the last three decades. The clues to understanding the rise of an American oligarchy, they believe, won’t be found in New York or New Delhi, but on Capitol Hill, along Pennsylvania Avenue, and around K Street, that haven in a heartless world for Washington’s lobbyists.

And for an analysis on how our warrior class has assisted the transfer of wealth, see Gilbert Mercier's cheerily entitled The American Empire is Collapsing and Americans Will be the Last to Know. My only quibble is that many Americans do know (there I go again), but we are at a loss as to what we can do.

More Evidence Tax Cuts at the Top Don't Work

Democrats, at least some of them, and many in the progressive blogosphere, have been making a set of arguments on tax cuts, and why they should not be extended to the very wealthy. It is very simple, though it clearly makes little difference to Republicans set on rewarding their benefactors. The evidence against tax cuts may be on our side; the power to implement stupid policy is clearly on theirs, especially if President Obama, in his obsessive quest for bipartisanship, wilts in the face of the constant right-wing haranging.

Yet more evidence of the ineffectiveness of marginal tax-rate reduction comes from Moody's Analytics, an outfit that has long served hand in glove with Wall Street. As reported in Bloomberg, Moody's Analytics recognizes that Bush's tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 largely resulted in increased savings for the very wealthy. As Chris Cornell, an economist who researched the issue for Moody's, states, “I would tend to wonder how much the tax cut actually influences spending behavior...Spending by the top 5 percent of households seems much more closely tied to business-cycle issues than it does to tax-cut issues.”

Of course, Chris; wealthy households have far more than they know what to productively do with already. Giving them a tax break just compounds the effect.

Despite this, Republican leaders, John Boehner and Mitch McConnell in particular, continue to make the case that we must plunge ourselves further into debt roughly $700 billion so that rich people will have even more.  And they do this while howling that we must cut the deficit. That's chutzpah.

I suppose they deserve some sort of credit. No matter how inane their arguments may be, no matter the evidence that contradicts them, and no matter how blatant their class-warfare rhetoric may sometimes be, they remain consistent on some level. They know how, as Matt Taibbi puts it, "to set big groups of voters off angrily chasing their own tails in response to media-manufactured nonsense, with the Tea Party being a classic example of the phenomenon."

And they know Wall Street, having thrown shitloads on money at Repubicans, expects a return on its investment. And they know how to deliver, don't they?