Worthy of Contempt

There is a fair number of ideas, attitudes, or policies that I truly despise and consider worthy of contempt. Three prime examples that come to mind are wage theft, tax avoidance, and voter suppression. Obviously they are not on the same immoral level as, say, genocide, but they are all too common, tolerated, and even defended by our politicians, parties, and corporate leaders. And they are mostly ignored by a feckless media.

I have posted on wage theft before, and will do so again. I will address tax avoidance as well, in part because it is becoming increasingly prevalent. 

Voter suppression; where to start? How about the fact that over time and throughout the world it has been overwhelmingly a political weapon of conservatives, the overclass, the wealthy, monarchists, and other authoritarian-types. In the United States, voter suppression has been consistently utilized, sometimes with decisive results, by the same groups who bleat endlessly about the constitution, their love of democracy, and the sanctity of the rule of law.

Voter suppression isn't voter fraud. The latter is extremely rare though claims of voter fraud have become an increasingly common charge or scare tactic promoted by those who want to make the voting process more difficult, onerous, and discouraging than it already is.

And as it turns out, that means Republicans. This conclusion is unavoidable for one reason distilled into two words: massive evidence. Think about the various state efforts to tighten voting requirements, to require more personal identification, or limit voting hours and precincts.  How about "voter caging"? Republicans are behind them all.

Now I am not saying only Republicans will resort to dirty tricks, or use questionable methods to discredit an opponent. I am reminded of LBJ's rise to the US Senate where his operatives, under his direction, most likely did some creative ballot stuffing. And that was not just a hard-ball tactic; it was clearly illegal.

Voter suppression isn't even always illegal. And what is contemptible to one may be realistic tactics to another. So there is a gray area as to what is smart and tough, and what is unethical or crosses the legal line.

My real point is that regardless of how one feels about election season ethics, it has been conservatives, including Southern Dixiecrats of the past, and now almost always Republicans, who most consistently work to prevent high voter turnout and to restrict eligibility. This reflects sentiments entirely consistent with American conservatism. It was conservatives who opposed the right of women to vote, who implemented unconstitutional poll taxes, and for whom giving voting rights to former slaves was anathema. 

There has been much academic ink written on this phenomenon. The reasons why Republicans are more likely to indulge in voter suppression are well-documented and based on sound theoretical foundations. For those who would like to see how voter suppression relates to personality, especially an authoritarian personality, see the work of Professor Bob Altemeyer, especially his classic, The Authoritarians.

ThinkProgress recently posted From Poll Taxes to Voter ID Laws: A Short History of Conservative Voter Suppression. 

 Conservatives have said voter id laws are necessary to combat mass voter fraud. Yet according to the Brennan Center for Justice, Americans are more likely to be killed by a bolt of lightning than commit voter fraud. And the Bush administration’s five-year national “war on voter fraud” resulted in only 86 convictions of illegal voting out of more than 196 million votes cast. Instead conservatives are employing an old tactic: using the specter of false voting to restrict the voting rights of minorities and the poor...

There is more at the link above. And while you are at, see the excellent investigative reporting by Greg Palast from last fall, where he explores the motives of Arizona's show-me-your-papers legislation espoused by Republicans; you know, the ones that bray endlessly on personal freedom and how they will get government off your back.

The backdrop, as Palast explains, is that Republicans were insisting there was serious voter fraud:

In 2008, working for Rolling Stone with civil rights attorney Bobby Kennedy, our team flew to Arizona to investigate what smelled like an electoral pogrom against Chicano voters ... directed by one Jan Brewer.

Brewer, then Secretary of State, had organized a racially loaded purge of the voter rolls that would have made Katherine Harris blush. Beginning after the 2004 election, under Brewer's command, no less than 100,000 voters, overwhelmingly Hispanics, were blocked from registering to vote. In 2005, the first year of the Great Brown-Out, one in three Phoenix residents found their registration applications rejected.

That statistic caught my attention. Voting or registering to vote if you're not a citizen is a felony, a big-time jail-time crime. And arresting such criminal voters is easy: after all, they give their names and addresses.

  

So I asked Brewer's office, had she busted a single one of these thousands of allegedly illegal voters? Did she turn over even one name to the feds for prosecution?

No, not one.

 Good job, Greg. That is how investigative reporting is done.

America's Problem is Low Taxes, Not Spending

It has quickly become a Republican talkling point that the US does not have a taxation problem; it has a spending problem. No need to raise taxes, they say. Just cut all that wasteful spending, and we will be all right. After all, teabaggers tell us we are Taxed Enough Already.

The reality is dramatically different. The chart below shows "general government expenditures as a percent of GDP". It is taken from the OECD "iLibrary" and can be found here. The bars represent each country's annual average for 2006-8. The blue bar is the average for all OECD countries combined.

The US is the seventh bar from the left, below the average and far below most of  Europe's most developed states. Note also that the gray diamonds hovering above each bar represent that govenment's average expenditure for 1995-97. They show that the spending percentage for the US was virtually unchanged for the subsequent decade.

The reality is that US government expenditures are a relatively modest percentage of GDP. Needless to say, US expenditures would be even lower were it not for our monstrously expensive industrial-military complex.

In other words, the US is not spending nearly as much on non-military items as some politicians would have you believe. Our overall spending levels are relatively low, and entitlement spending that directly benefits families is even lower. The US does not have a tax and spend issue. Our national debt is burgeoning because we keep reducing taxes on the wealthy and on corporations.

The chart below shows spending for families as a percent of GDP for the US and four other OECD members. This represents the socialistic spending and entitlements Republicans say is out of control and must be cut. Background and additional charts can be seen here.

Finally, have a look at the next chart. It comes from the same place as the first one. It also encompasses the same time frame. The one below measures taxes as a percent of GDP. The US is the fourth bar from the left, putting us even further down the OECD list.

To summarize, the US is not a tax and spend socialist nightmare. Government spending is comparatively low; spending on entitlements, welfare and the like is proportionately even lower. Teabaggers and others who buy into Congressman Paul Ryan's asinine spending bill, the one that guts Medicare and lowers taxes on the rich even more, are full of some serious shit.

Read Robert Reich, who details why we must raise taxes on the rich.

Why the Rich Vote Republican

On March 23, I posted an article on the results of wage suppression and the shift in wealth from Main Street to Wall Street. Here is another revealing graph. Not sure you can see it well, but the vertical green line indicates the beginning of the Reagan Presidency. The blue line represents the average income in real terms, of the bottom 99% of all Americans; the pink line indicates the top 1%.

The effects of FDR's New Deal, beginning in 1935, vividly show how the American middle class was created.  The graph also shows how that same middle class has been squeezed in recent decades as conservative policies, such as outsourcing, hostility to unions, financial deregulation, an indifference to deindustrialization and other feckless trade policies, have dramatically stunted average income for the bottom 99% (a trend that began before Reagan) and have boosted average incomes for the top 1%, primarily through tax cuts, just as dramatically.

If you are the least bit willing to give your brain a chance, you must surely realize that Republicans are pushing policies to further undermine the middle class and shift ever more wealth to the very top.

Blaming the Victim

Do you remember when teachers, public employees, Planned Parenthood, NPR and PBS crashed the stock market, wiped out half of our 401Ks, took trillions in TARP money, gave themselves billions in bonuses, and paid no taxes? 

Me Neither.

Pass it on...

Signs Our Health Care System is Broken

Here are a few signs we have a shitty health care system. Read them and consider why citizens in other industrialized countries have no desire to adopt our system.

1. Spam e-mail for Canadian drugs. We are all besieged with email offering low-cost pharmaceuticals from the land of Molson. Ever thought why? Many reasons, one of which is that our own government has guaranteed profits for the domestic drug industry. The Bush administration made it illegal for medicare to negotiate for discounts, or to obtain cheaper Canadian or other foreign-made drugs. (Just another Bush travesty Obama has embraced).

So now we get a steady stream of offers, of questionable legality, from abroad because they know we are getting ripped off.

2. Fundraisers to pay medical bills. This time it is grandpa's hip; next time it will be your co-worker'sw emphysema. Please give what you can. For millions of Americans getting sick without insurance puts a life at risk and a family ever closer to bankruptcy. This shit happens because our health care system lets it happen. Yeah, yeah, I know; much of this is supposed to end with health care reform. We'll see.

3. Medical tourism. Yet another growing industry, as Americans desperately seek medical care, even of questionable quality, because of prohibitive US prices. High quality care in industrialized nations is often cheaper, even after airfare and hotels, than the domestic stuff.

A hat tip to Southern Beale. See her post here for a more extensive purview. She is absolutely correct when she says: "Too many people are getting far too rich off of our current system. American healthcare no longer serves the majority of its customers. Which is precisely why nothing will change without a huge fight."

Yup, health care is a profit center in America. It does not serve citizens very well, but it enriches the health care industry, the investor class, and politicians willing to obstruct real reform.

And that is why we are unable to change it.

Does Ideological Purity Make You Stupid?

If you are Milton Friedman, it does.

This is too good, in a nauseating, face-palm, sort of way, to pass up.




Hat tip to the Frankfactor, which I heartily recommend.

Maher Calls For Class War

Maybe we are seeing a little momentum from the American majority? Here is Bill Maher again. He makes too much of Charlie Sheen, as so many do, but his essential point is worth repeating.  When will the middle class realize the overclass does not give a shit about others or this country, and will keep taking from us as long as we keep letting them. Sheen is nothing but bread and circus writ modern.

Push back, hard, to the point where they shit their pants because they realize they have gone too far. It's the only thing that will get their attention.

The Price of Tax Cuts

Just so we're clear on who and what are the prime contributors to our federal budget deficit. It sure as hell is not the welfare queens,unemployment benefits, or social security (which is paid in advance anyway). We had balanced budgets when marginal tax rates were substantially higher. We could have them again if we raised the marginal tax rate, not to uncharted territory, but only back to previous levels.

It would also help if we could reel in defense spending and the 2.5 wars we are waging. But higher taxes on those manifestly able to pay, and a scaled back military-industrial gravy train are anathema to the overclass.

They blame you for the problems they created, and now they want to punish you. It's called class warfare.

I Paid More Taxes Than Exxon, Boeing, B of A Combined

Lots of data has come out recently about how little America's top corporations are paying in taxes, both federal and state, and that's despite earning huge profits. So where is the outcry from teabaggers? Where are the demands about "paying your fair share"?

What makes this especially contemptible is that corporate America has managed to get Republicans to yelp about our high corporate tax rate, as if any corporation actually paid anything close to the nominal rate. How many times have we seen Republicans and other intellectual prostitutes stand before a camera and say we can create jobs and get the economy going if we would just lower corporate taxes? This does not even include the numerous corporations that not only do not pay taxes, but get $ millions or even $ billions back from the feds.

Senator Bernie Sanders has released a list of corporate giants that pay dramatically lower taxes than their profits would suggest. The list, shown below, is available from various websites. I got it from here. 

1)      Exxon Mobil made $19 billion in profits in 2009.  Exxon not only paid no federal income taxes, it actually received a $156 million rebate from the IRS, according to its SEC filings.
2)      Bank of America received a $1.9 billion tax refund from the IRS last year, although it made $4.4 billion in profits and received a bailout from the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department of nearly $1 trillion.
3)      Over the past five years, while General Electric made $26 billion in profits in the United States, it received a $4.1 billion refund from the IRS.
4)      Chevron received a $19 million refund from the IRS last year after it made $10 billion in profits in 2009.
5)      Boeing, which received a $30 billion contract from the Pentagon to build 179 airborne tankers, got a $124 million refund from the IRS last year.
6)      Valero Energy, the 25th largest company in America with $68 billion in sales last year received a $157 million tax refund check from the IRS and, over the past three years, it received a $134 million tax break from the oil and gas manufacturing tax deduction.
7)      Goldman Sachs in 2008 only paid 1.1 percent of its income in taxes even though it earned a profit of $2.3 billion and received an almost $800 billion from the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury Department.
8)      Citigroup last year made more than $4 billion in profits but paid no federal income taxes. It received a $2.5 trillion bailout from the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury.
9)      ConocoPhillips, the fifth largest oil company in the United States, made $16 billion in profits from 2007 through 2009, but received $451 million in tax breaks through the oil and gas manufacturing deduction.
10)  Over the past five years, Carnival Cruise Lines made more than $11 billion in profits, but its federal income tax rate during those years was just 1.1 percent.

The video below is a compilation of taxpayers wanting to know why they pay their share, and many corporations don't. Some nice suggestions about how we can share the video and make people more aware of what this country has become. If enough people can make these points, maybe we will hear less of this obscene shit about how teachers need to take a pay cut to balance the budget.

Because, sweetheart, if we don't push back, it will only get worse. 

Remembering Triangle Shirtwaist

The Triangle Shirtwaist fire was 100 years ago. Dozens of young women and girls died because of managers who didn't give a shit about workers' personal well-being. Seems that not so much has really changed.

The video below offers a heart-wrenching summary of what happened that day in New York, why unions were soon after able to push through some basic improvements for workers, and why the same and simliar tragedies have repeated themselves in outsourced factories overseas.

Too many people are willing to let the gains made in the last two or three generations slip away. Or more accurately, be taken from us by a coalition of an overclass, a large and breathtakingly misinformed swath of the electorate, and the Republican Party they support. An ineffective and ambivalent Democratic Party completes the picture

Watch this video and remember that unions created the middle class. Some Republicans, especially these new shits elected by teabaggers, are determined to strip away what made the middle class possible; minimum wages, pensions, child labor laws, social security, and more.

They want to take us back to the days and the working conditions of Triangle Shirtwaist.

The Results of Wage Suppression

Negligible wage growth for most Americans has been an underreported feature of our political economy for an entire generation. This is as corporate America has wanted it, not because they don't want Americans in general to have higher incomes, but because they care first and foremost about their bottom line. That may seem normal to Americans who grew up in a post-Reagan society, but the result is that corporations have come to dominate policy, and economic ideology, as never before. What is best for citizens, families, and communities need not concern the corporation or the investor class.

We are now seeing the results of 30+ years of wage suppression and the gigantic growth in inequality that was inevitable. In a very recent study by The Economic Policy Institute, Lawrence Mishel reveals just how little workers have benefited from decades of substantial productivity growth:

Over the last 30 years there has been very modest wage growth for the typical worker. This is not because the economy was weak and employers were strapped for cash or profits. The economy enjoyed soaring productivity between 1980 and 2009. The Figure compares median wage growth over that period to average gross domestic product growth per worker, a measure of what each individual worker, on average, contributed to the overall economy. This is equivalent to the growth of income per worker as well. While average income per worker grew 59.0%, median wages grew by just 11.2%. Over this same period the amount of wealth (household assets less liabilities) per worker grew by 63.7%. 

What we usually hear and read is the ignorant and asinine contention that unions and public sector workers are to blame for deficits, poor productivity, and slow growth.  This is a nauseatingly stupid position, and it figures that teabaggers would get behind it. In reality, wage growth has never been a policy goal for most politicians. As Mishel writes, "The focus instead has been on policies that claimed to make consumers better off through lower prices: deregulation of industries, privatization of public services, the weakening of labor standards such as the minimum wage, erosion of the social safety net, expanding globalization, and the move toward fewer and weaker unions."

Below is a graph taken from Mishel's paper. It shows as much as any single graph could as to why so Americans are hurting, despite working longer hours even as they fall into debt. The benefits of all that toil, investment, education, and innovation are not accruing to the middle class, but to upper management and the investor class. (Interestingly enough, the graph shows a distinct, recent uptick in both private and public sectors, even as productivity continues to climb. When was that? After Obama took office. No wonder Republicans hate facts).

In a nutshell, the gap in recent decades means that working- and middle-class incomes have not kept up with corporate America's ability to pay them. Workers' incomes would be significantly higher, but our overclass is pocketing the difference. 

Those outsized bonuses gotta come from somewhere. 

The Party of Distraction

Bill Maher nails 'em again.

When you go down the list of useless distractions that make up the Republican party agenda -- public unions, Sharia law, anchor babies, the mosque at Ground Zero, ACORN, National Public Radio, the war on Christmas, the new Black Panthers, Planned Parenthood, Michelle Obama's war on dessert...you realize that the reason nothing gets done in America is that one of the political parties puts so much [energy] into fantasy problems than real ones...

Distractions indeed; Republicans have nothing to say about Wall Street recklessness, income inequalitiy, homelessness, jobs, our crumbling infrastructure, or any substantive improvement in our deeply dysfunctional health care system.

There's more, so watch the whole segment.






And if you think Repubicans want to get government off your back, have a look at what they want the IRS to do.

Deficits, Health Care, and Willful Ignorance

Paul Krugman recently published an article in the New York Times in which he bemoans the inane level of discourse on the budget deficit as well as our out of control health care system.

Krugman writes,

According to a column in Kaiser Health News, Republican staffers jeered at any and all proposals to use Medicare and Medicaid funds better. Spending money on prevention was no more than a 'slush fund.' Research on innovation was 'an oxymoron.' And there was no reason to pay for "so-called effectiveness research."

Damn; Republicans are no longer even trying. They say nothing, offer nothing, that even pretends to be serious.

But today’s Republicans just aren’t into rationality. They claim to care deeply about deficits — but they’ve spent the past two years putting cynical, demagogic attacks on any attempt to actually deal with long-run deficits at the heart of their campaign strategy.

Here’s a recent example. In his new book, Mike Huckabee — the current leader in polls asking Republicans whom they want to nominate in 2012 — attacks the Obama stimulus because it included funds for, yes, comparative effectiveness research: “The stimulus didn’t just waste your money; it planted the seeds from which the poisonous tree of death panels will grow.” Will others in the G.O.P. stand up and say that Mr. Huckabee is wrong, that Medicare needs to know which medical procedures actually work? Don’t hold your breath.

Note the reference to comparative effectiveness research. That means we spend a little to look closer at what other countries are doing, the ones that offer care that is better, universal, and less expensive. But this is what Mike Huckabee ridicules.

Really, Mike? Do your really want Americans to remain uninformed and not know just how dysfunctional our health care really is? Most analyses of health care that make it to our mainstream media are incredibly vapid. In particular, they almost never explore in any depth why universal health care in other countries works well, contains costs, and is so popular. Ask yourself why the public in Europe, Canada, or Japan does not demand their governments adopt the US system. 

I have embedded a PDF below that offers a comparative analysis of the US health care system and those of several other industrialized nations. This is just one of several. The others I will post in due time.



1400_Davis_Mirror_Mirror_on_the_wall_2010


I hope this link and embedded PDF stuff works OK. I am using docstoc.com for this. Seems to be working, hope it stays working. Readers can let me know if the above PDF does not work. Note the text is a bit small, but you can click to open to full screen.

Alternatively, you can click here to view via Google docs.

Public Pension Idiocy

There is lots of huff and puff about how unfunded public pension obligations will bankrupt us all. Funny how we always have the money for banks, war, and tax cuts for the wealthy, but funding retirement for civil servants? Well, they don't deserve it anyway.

It's all horseshit. Paul Krugman has addressed the "truth about pensions." He references an excellent pdf from Dean Baker:

Dean Baker has a deeply enlightening analysis of state pension shortfalls (pdf), containing a lot of stuff I didn’t know. The basic moral is that the official story these days — of years and years of huge giveaways to unions, resulting in gigantic, unpayable debts — is just wrong: to a very large extent, the pension shortfall has emerged just since 2007, thanks to the financial crisis, and even then it’s not nearly as big relative to future state incomes as widely imagined. Here’s a key figure:

It puts an entirely different light on the situation. Whaddya know, we’re being sold a bill of goods.

Dean Baker's work has also caught the attention of Mike Elk, who also cites the work of Keith Brainard, research director of the National Association of State Retirement Administrators (NASRA). Specifically, Brainard has debunked the meme, shamelessly promoted by teabaggers and other assorted Republicans, that we gotta gut those public unions 'cause America just can't afford a middle class.

GM Finally in the Black

I see that General Motors has posted an impressive $4.7 billion in profits for 2010. This was the first profitable year since 2004 and the highest profits in more than a decade. Not bad for a company that was comatose and out of options when Obama chose to act. You will recall that Republicans, more ideological than practical, said that government could not possibly help the situation and demanded that it be dismantled and left to die. They must have forgotten that Chrysler received government aid during Reagan's tenure.

You can see the full story at The New York Times, and The New Republic.

Yet another huge company going under, with thousands of lost jobs? Precisely what Republicans want to see happen on a Democrat's watch. Ain't gonna happen.

And now how about some ovedue credit to the Obama administration, which has so far proved its Republican naysayers wrong? That won't happen either.

Media Complicity in Wisconsin

Have you noticed how corporate interests always manage to get in front of the microphone when there is something they want? These links show how Republicans and our for-profit media help corporate America by controlling the narrative. If you don't take a little effort to learn the larger story, you might even believe the shit going down in Wisconsin is about the state's deficit.

Amanda Terkel writes how unions are being largely frozen out of the weekend talk shows. Republican governors? No problem.

Meanwhile, David Kay Johnston writes about some really bad reporting in Wisconsin.

Gov. Scott Walker says he wants state workers covered by collective bargaining agreements to "contribute more" to their pension and health insurance plans.

Accepting Gov. Walker' s assertions as fact, and failing to check, created the impression that somehow the workers are getting something extra, a gift from taxpayers. They are not.

Out of every dollar that funds Wisconsin' s pension and health insurance plans for state workers, 100 cents comes from the state workers.

How can that be? Because the "contributions" consist of money that employees chose to take as deferred wages – as pensions when they retire – rather than take immediately in cash. The same is true with the health care plan. If this were not so a serious crime would be taking place, the gift of public funds rather than payment for services.

The real story on taxes, who pays, and why we have deficits, is obvious to anyone with even a hint of scholarly self-respect. That leaves out Glenn Beck, but you can click here for one article from the Journal of Economic Perspectives showing how corporate America and the wealthy have shifted the tax burden towards the middle class.

As the authors say in the abstract: "The progressivity of the U.S. federal tax system at the top of the income distribution has declined dramatically since the 1960s. This dramatic drop in progressivity is due primarily to a drop in corporate taxes and in estate and gift taxes combined with a sharp change in the composition of top incomes away from capital income and toward labor income."

Willful Ignorance

Mike the Mad Biologist has an interesting post up at his blog. He is incredulous, as am I, at the number of Americans who have utilized government programs, but did not do not realize what they used was in fact, from the government.

I have reproduced the chart to which he refers. It is a little small; you may have better luck reading it at his site, which I linked above. Note that the original study is from Reconstituting the Submerged State: The Challenges of Social Policy Reform in the Obama Era (2009), which can be downloaded here (PDF). It is an academic study, so teabaggers won't read it, and Sarah Palin can't.

As Mad Mike observes: "Anyone who follows politics regularly is aware of the phenomenon of the voter who 'wants the government to stay out of my Medicare' (Medicare is a government program). But a huge fraction of recipients of government aid do not believe they have received government aid."

While the data are subject to different interpretations, I think Mike is spot-on when he says:

 

"This seems a case of willful ignorance by definition. Government aid is for lazy slackers, for 'welfare queens', and, in some people's minds, for those people. Decent, hard-working people don't receive government aid, even when they do. In other words, any program that helps middle-class people, people like themselves, is, by definition, not aid, because government aid is inherently pejorative."

 

Pervasive and willful ignorance of government's role is the legacy of Ronald Reagan, who assured us repeatedly that government was our biggest problem.  Republicans have continued to frame the debate over government's role, while Democrats have responded ineffectively. A generation of fantastically ill-informed voters is the result.

 

Let the Teacher Pushback Begin!

This is great.  MSNBC has an article on a teacher in Philly who dares to say what so many teachers feel: "A high school English teacher in suburban Philadelphia who was suspended for a profanity-laced blog in which she called her young charges "disengaged, lazy whiners" is driving a sensation by daring to ask: Why are today's students unmotivated — and what's wrong with calling them out?"

Nothing's wrong with calling them out, and their parents as well. One or more students, none of whom was ever identified by the teacher, had their feelings hurt, so naturally the teacher, Ms. Munroe, was suspended. That is what school administrators do best; cave in to loud and threatening students and their parents. 

That won't change the facts; Munroe's sentiments are shared by thousands of teachers. Their message is my message; far too many students are indeed lazy, unmotivated, rude, and indifferent to education and personal effort. And do they ever have a sense of entitlement.

A lot has changed in a generation. Veteran teachers are struck by the changes in student attitudes; many will not read, will not carry large books (too heavy, uncool, and won't read it anyway), expect a passing grade just for showing up, and spend absolutely minimal time on homework. Teacher authority has been undermined by social attitudes, demanding parents, and a constant stream of more interesting alternatives, such as social media. Video games are more fun than algebra.

Along the way, many parents have adopted an attitude of their own: if my kid is not learning, it must be the teacher's fault. And while many parents remain supportive, Republicans seen an opportunity to chip away at yet another public institution. Their constant hectoring reveals an almost pathological contempt against teachers and especially their unions.

My advice to right-wing loudmouths, pseudo-experts, and other assorted assholes: If you have not taught in a US public school in recent years, you have no idea what teachers have to go through and the blame-teachers-for-everything attitude that eats away at their morale.

Is it any wonder that teacher turnover is so high?

Blowjobs in Perspective

This is why Republicans (and too many Democrats) like their voters ignorant, and why so many in the media willingly oblige. Ratigan might have added that the Republican-dominated witchhunt investigation of Whitewater cost $80 million; you know, the one Republicans were able to drag out for nearly all of Clinton's eight years, that turned up no evidence of wrong-doing, but our idiot media still calls a "scandal."





So let's see, $80 mil for Whitewater, another $40 mil for Lewinsky. Too bad for Republicans the Lewinsky incident happened late in Clinton's second term; they didn't get the chance to drag it out any longer. And that's the only reason they stopped at $40 million.

They Want Your Social Security

This is excellent. In the video below, Cenk Uygur again states the facts about social security and comes to the unavoidable conclusion that Republicans, and a few blue dogs as well, are absolutely lying about social security.

Republicans say we must cut back benefits because they are hurting the deficit, but social security does not add to the deficit or debt. It continues to pay for itself and then some; roughly $2.5 trillion in surplus. Cenk notes that the surplus has been "borrowed," which points more to Congressional thievery, and not to any shortcomings with SS.

Cenk lays all of this out very well. It is a fantastic spectacle to see conservative politicians insist the working class must work even harder, and sacrifice even more, after extending tax cuts to the wealthiest two percent. It is all incredibly blatant, almost like a clumsy parody. I never thought I would see such a brazen and concerted effort to turn over ever more wealth and power to the financial elite.

I agree with Cenk that Republicans want to privatize social security for the benefit of Wall Street. And they are indeed lying when they say we must cut back now so as to ensure social security's future. Their long-term goal is undoubtedly to gut social security and privatize retirement. But their short-term goal is reduce benefits so that SS will begin running up an even greater surplus, one they can continue to borrow from, just as they, Republicans and Democrats alike, have been doing for years. They will take whatever surplus is created and spend it on war and tax cuts. They don't give a shit about fixing social security, and they don't want to pay back the trillions they have already borrowed. But if they want SS to be the perpetual golden goose, they have to convince you that it is a failure and that we cannot afford it. Republicans won't raise taxes, but they can get the same result by slashing benefits to middle class retirees. They have no problem doing that.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Pushing Back Against Reagan Mythmaking

The 100th anniversary of Ronald Reagan's birthday is almost upon us and the myth makers on the American right are gearing up for his beatification. Although you won't see much of it from our for-profit media, many are determined to push back and present a more realistic view of our 40th president and the legacy he created.  

For example, in Ronald Reagan, Enemy of the American Worker, Dick Meister relates how stridently anti-labor Reagan was. In a blatant display of institutional capture, Reagan turned over control of the National Labor Relations Board to anti-labor hacks who, indifferent to the NLRB's mandate, stonewalled efforts by labor to seek relief for workers illegally dismissed for attempting to organize unions. 

In The Reagan Ruins, Robert Borosage explores the peculiar disconnect between the myth of Reagan today and the reality of his presidency. The man expanded government, raised taxes multiple times (remember revenue enhancements?) oversaw a dramatic increase in our trade deficit, and turned the US from the world's largest creditor to the world's largest debtor. On the other hand, he did give rich people tax breaks, greatly increased military spending, gutted consumer protection laws, and began the turn towards an economy dominated by Wall Street. And that, apparently, is what conservatives want.

And finally, Will Bunch has an article over at Daily Kos that details the coming hoopla to which we are going to be subjected. Millions of dollars are being poured into an extravaganza meant to sear an image of Reagan-as-god into the fact-challenged, the wavering, and those too young to remember the guy.

Bunch reminds us that social security is strong today because Reagan saw fit to increase payroll taxes (after giving tax cuts to the rich), ensuring a multi-trillion dollar social security surplus, and the continued success of a popular program.

Bunch is the author of  Tear Down This Myth: The Right-Wing Distortion of the Reagan Legacy.

Privatizing Elections: A Republican Wet Dream

Last week I reported that House Republicans intended to end the Presidential Election Campaign Fund, the Watergate-era law that created a role for public financing of elections. This latest effort to give the wealthy ever more control over our democratic institutions passed an important hurdle on Wednesday by a 239-160 vote margin. As with virtually all substantive legislation, the vote fell sharply on party lines.

Republican leaders never fail to give reason for loathing. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor claimed the bill was a "no-brainer." Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, introduced the bill into the Senate, claiming, “In a time of exploding deficits and record debt, the last thing the American people want right now is to provide what amounts to welfare for politicians.”

These, of course, are the same people who continue to vote for various corporate subsidies, allow corporations to avoid taxes through sweetheart legislation, happily line their pockets with corporate donations, oversee the monstrous and lucrative defense contracts that put billions of taxpayers' dollars into corporate coffers, and voted to extend tax cuts to America's richest.

What the budget deficit does is allow Republicans to chip away at any number of programs, however valuable, in the guise of attacking the deficit. The actual budgetary impact of many of the programs they insist must end is quite modest; $20 million here, $50 million there. Seems like a lot until you realize the total amount doesn't pay for a single B-1 bomber.

Republican presidential candidates know they personally will have no trouble raising huge sums of cash for future elections because they do corporate America's bidding. Progressive politicians who try to rein in the march to oligarchy will have a much tougher time raising money. And that disproportionate impact is why Republicans would love to end public financing. Obama's great fund-raising success in 2008, which did not rely on public funds, will be tough to repeat, and thanks to Citizens United, will likely be overshadowed as corporations and the super-wealthy reassert and extend their traditional dominance.

The bill still has to pass the Senate, which seems unlikely, and then be signed into law by the President, which is even more unlikely. I would feel better about this were it not for the Democrats' proven ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. 

See BusinessWeek for more details.

Dow Jones Surges Under Obama

The table below reveals that President Obama's first two years mark the biggest two-year increase in the Dow Jones Industrial Average since FDR. Obviously, the increase has much to do with the shit pile Bush handed to Obama, just as the huge increase under FDR had much to do with cleaning up after another reckless Republican. Some of the increase was inevitable and would have happened regardless of who was in the White House.

Yet even if people have different views on how much Obama should be credited for the surge, the least credible argument that conservatives can make is that he has been bad for business. Naturally, that is the one they try to make. If a Republican had presided over this stock market recovery, the conservative press would have insisted that everyone tattoo words to that effect on their arm. They would have repeated it on Fox News until it became an article of faith.

 

The problem, of course, is that the stock market is but one indicator of our economic health. The Dow Jones is not terribly relevant, its rise not very helpful, to those unable to invest. Yet the conservative investor class was very happy when stocks went up under Bush the Lesser. They were quick to suggest it was because markets trusted Republicans. Many financial elites, the same ones who bitched endlessly that Obama would ruin us all, have benefited enormously under two years of Obama, having got back most or all of what they lost after their toxic shit hit the middle class fan during Bush's last year.

Yeah, I know; there was a bunch of neo-liberals like Rahm Emanuel, Peter Orszag, Larry Summers, Robert Rubin, and others who were in on it as well. Democrats mostly, they worked in the Clinton Administration, the Obama Administration; some in both. They have mostly moved on to enormously enrich themselves on Wall Street. They promoted Wall Street's perverse dominance with the worst of the Republicans.

Good riddance to all.

Republicans Push for More Corporate Dominance

The march towards oligarchy continues. Republicans, in the guise of spending cuts, have announced they want to abolish campaign matching funds. As David Espo at MSNBC writes:

WASHINGTON — The House will vote next week on legislation to end the system of financing presidential candidates and national party conventions with federal matching funds, Majority Leader Eric Cantor announced Thursday. He put the estimated savings at $520 million over a decade if the legislation passes Congress and is signed into law.

Cantor, R-Va., said the vote would be a response to a pre-election project in which Republicans invited the public to vote on proposals for reductions in federal spending.

"While some have argued that providing even more taxpayer funding for this program might entice more candidates to participate, eliminating the program altogether would save taxpayers $520 million over 10 years and would require candidates and political parties to rely on private donations rather than tax dollars," read a description on Cantor's website.

That last sentence is the kicker: Cantor and his fellow Republicans, rolling in cash ever since the Supremes, at least five of them, handed them Citizens United a year ago, now want to more thoroughly privatize elections than ever before by outlawing even the modest role played by legislation passed in response to multiple election-related abuses by the Nixon Administration.

That legislation was specifically designed to prevent undue reliance on special interest groups, or more specifically the richest and best-connected interest groups. If it is repealed, a big if at this point, there will be even less separating corporate America from dominance, legal dominance, mind you, of the electoral process and government itself.

All this to "save" $520 million over 10 years. We spend that much on Afghanistan in a matter of days.

Citizens United

A couple of videos to recognize the one year anniversary of the asinine Citizens United decision. Note to conservatives: these videos contain parody. And a happy MLK Day to all.




She's learning fast, but thanks to a perverse combination of Wall Street money and teabagger ignorance, her generation will grow up thinking that corporate dominance is the norm.



Not too sure about that time and a half thing. That's subversive pro-human talk. No red-blooded American corporation favors it.

BTW: How can you tell she is a pre-teen?   She's ordering Zinfandel.

Corporate Communism

Dylan Ratigan has a good rant in the video below. Free market pain and adjustment for most of us; socialism, subsidies, and protection for those at the top. 

It should be so blatantly obvious that financial interests have captured our economy and government. I hold special contempt for teabaggers who had ample opportunity to see who the real perpetrators have been. Just to be clear on this; the evidence is pretty freakin obvious that the Republican establishment created the teabagger movement. The money, and there was lots of it, came from various sources, but mostly from Wall Street. And the teabaggers themselves have been too stupid, too misinformed, and so ideologically blind that they not only offer completely incoherent, contradictory, and intellectually infantile demands, they have also completely missed the overwhelming role that Wall Street, conservative economic doctrine, and Republican politicians have played.

Yet teabaggers and other shallow voters have become angry with America's difficulties only since Obama took office. Tip to the clueless; it ain't the unions, the public sector, teachers, Muslims, or Obama's black friends that have put the US and the middle class in the current bind.  Do your brain a favor and read some economic history.

Take a look at the chart below the video. If I had to choose one data set to show what has happened to the US in recent decades, this would be it.




This chart indirectly reveals how nearly all growth since about 1980 has gone to corporations. The data directly show that for a generation, corporate America has had the ability to pay much higher wages, but instead has pocketed nearly all productivity gains. Corporate profits are at record levels, but the American middle class is hurting not because taxes are too high, but because our wages are too low.

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.

Whitewater, Part II

Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks is spot-on in this clip. He makes almost all the points I myself try to make about the recent Republican accusations of corruption in the White House (no wonder I like him!). Note especially the almost comical position of Congressman Issa, who acknowledges that Bush signed TARP into law, but all that money must surely be corrupting the Obama Administration, so naturally one starts off with well-publicized accusations. The lack of evidence is apparently beside the point. Cenk also speaks of the $ billions that went unaccounted for in Iraq; a fact, not an accusation, of which Issa has nothing to say. 

Readers should note the real reason for Issa's aggressiveness. Republicans are going to do the same thing to Obama that they did to Clinton; endless investigations along with the accusations, the circus atmosphere, and the ample opportunities to implant in the minds of voters that Obama must be stopped. Republicans were able to drag out Whitewater for almost the entire eight years and never found anything. Their objective was to destroy Clinton. Failing that, to embarrass him, undermine his administration, and suggest to voters that the man was tainted, as if mere accusations meant scandals. 

Far more officials in the administrations of Bush the Elder and Reagan went to prison than those under Clinton, a fact almost completely forgotten by voters and our feckless media. But a generation of Americans will forever link Clinton to Whitewater. That, of course, was an objective. To be sure, Clinton created his own mess with Monica Lewinsky, but that was after almost everything else had run its course.

Republicans have shown a determination to set the narrative on Obama through every means possible, and that now includes subpoena and investigatory power. They spent years trying to destroy Bill Clinton, with limited success. They are set to do it again with Obama. They sense weakness, and the political and social climate has become dysfunctional, so the outcome may be different this time.  As Cenk says, "they're coming after you."

Rich Narcissists Still Whining

I wrote an earlier post about hypocrites on Wall Street on August 31. The key take-away for me, other than the enormity of their plunder, was the extent to which Wall Streeters, especially the banks, felt put upon because President Obama has dared to scold them for ruining the economy with the most reckless and breathtaking display of greed and irresponsibility in the history of capitalism. And yet they are still walking around, rich and unindicted, while Obama bailed out their collective and undeserving ass, poured billions into the economy, oversaw a stock market recovery, which disproportionately benefited these same bankers and other wealthy elites, passed a luke warm financial reform bill that won't reform much of anything, and thus does little to slow down Wall Street's dominance, and then agreed to extend tax breaks to America's richest.

And still they whine. Many bankers got behind Republicans in '10, as is customary, after supporting Obama in '08, an especially ironic choice given that Wall Street has done very well under Democratic administrations. They just can't shake that unsupported belief that Republicans are somehow better for business than Democrats. As with so much in our modern political economy, and ever more so in what is becoming a post-factual society, identity trumps evidence.

The President met with a small group of CEOs recently, and none of the banking honchos was invited. So now they are having a snit about it. Ben White at Politico has a good take on a level of animosity towards Obama that, in view of banking's profits and privileges, is irrational and bizzarre.

John Amato, referencing Ben White's article, has his take on it as well.  As Amato says, "You can see how deluded these fat cat CEO's are. I mean a few words will make them cry. As I said, even though the President gave these Masters of Destruction virtually a free pass they will now go back to pumping their millions in the GOP."

Finally, watch the video of Sam Seder's interview with Matt Taibbi.




As Taibbi says, the attitudes of the bank CEOs are "unbelievably obnoxious."

Rick Scott Set to Descend on Florida

I had forgotten the extent to which Rick Scott had masterminded the teabaggers' Town Hall riots back in the summer of 2009. OK, I knew he threw a lot of his own money into the health care debate, such as it was, and I certainly knew he wanted to stop any reform that would undermine the healthcare industry's profits. But Scott has been a one-man wrecking crew.

You remember Rick Scott, yes? In a post on September 20, I wondered, as did others, what Scott's appeal was, given his extremely dubious past as a CEO of a demonstrably fraudulent health care insurer. It was all very public information, and yet he had the inside track as Florida's next governor.

He, of course, won the election and so he will be that state's next CEO come January 4th (what is it about people who think CEOs make good politicians? The jobs are so similar, don't you know?)

Madfloridan has an excellent post excoriating the press for recently raising a few good questions about Slick Rick, now that the election is over. He cites three sources.

One is The St. Petersburg Times, which writes, "Incoming Gov. Rick Scott's disdain for government regulation appears to be absolute — and absolutely irresponsible. The Times quotes Scott who declares, "What's the benefit of a regulation, other than delay?"

Yikes, and this after deregulation ran amuck on Wall Street. And the St Petes Times concern about this? As Madfloridian says, "So now they worry." At least the Times bothered to explain the value of regulation.

Meanwhile, Time magazine asks, "Is Florida ready for Governor Rick Scott?" As Time writes:

Florida has some of the broadest open-government laws in the country. So when Governor-elect Rick Scott held a number of behind-closed-doors meetings with business leaders earlier this month during a five-day jobs tour, many political observers fretted that he might not fully appreciate the Sunshine State's sunshine rules. "It would have been a nice gesture on his part to hold those meetings more in the open," says Ben Wilcox, Florida director of the government watchdog group Common Cause. "But Florida's sunshine laws are going to take some getting used to on his part, since just about all he's known is the corporate world."

The Miami Herald quotes a Scott advisor who doubts that Florida needs public hospitals. That's pretty rich. Scott says it's all about improving efficiency, which sounds reasonable. But he is part and parcel of the conservative obsession with privatizing everything in sight, an idea wrapped with the wholly-unsupported insistence that the private sector is inherently and always more effective than the public sector. What that ideology really means is that by privatizing, profit becomes the central focus. And that is precisely why health care in the US is so inadequate. For other industrialized countries, universal health care is first and foremost a public health care issue. For the US, health care is a profit center. The primary fiduciary duty of US corporations, including those in health, is to their shareholders, not their customers. The insurance industry's big pushback on President Obama's health care plan was not because it would not work. It was because they knew a public option would end their ability to continue gouging the American people. 

So I feel for Madfloridian, who says, "I fear for our state the next few years. This guy makes Jeb look saintly." That, of course, is Jeb, as in Jeb Bush.

Orszag Cashes In

Obama said he was going to change the way Washington works. Like more bipartisanship. OK, so he has tried to get along with Republicans who publicly admit they intend to obstruct everything they can. It's like trying to pet a rabid dog and constantly having your hand bit. Republicans have gnawed Obama's hand down to the wrist, but he keeps sticking it out there.

But other things in the current White House are far too familiar. The President loaded up his administration with neoliberals--the heart of the financial establishment--people whose interests, efforts, and expertise are devoted to Wall Street. These guys have Obama's ear just like they had Bush's and Clinton's. And those that moved on after serving in government almost always went to, or back to, Wall Street, where they invariably enriched themselves.

So it not really a surprise that White Houe Budget Director Peter Orszag has departed and is now at Citigroup as Vice Chairman of Global Banking. He had brief stints as a Distinguished Fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations and as a contributing columnist for the New York Times. Those positions were just a prelude, a decent interval, to the position at Citigroup, one for which he had been auditioning since day one at OMB.

Hey, he earned it. He may have headed OMB, but on occasion looked more like a Citigroup lobbyist, working to ensure that Citigroup received taxpayers largesse. In return, Orszag now has a plum job reportedly worth several million per year. Not bad for a few months of government work.

James Fallows wants to know why there is so little backlash on this. Conflict of interest anyone? Featherbedding? He knows, of course, and so do the rest of us. Society now accepts this kind of corrupt "descent from heaven," as the Japanese call it. American scolds will still shake their head and wag their fingers when they see it in China, or with some tin-pot dictator in Africa, but shrug their shoulders when it happens at home.

America has become irretrievably corrupt.

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 on Wage Theft

On November 15, I wrote about the growing problem of wage theft. Others are also trying to raise media awareness on a practice that is illegal, immoral, and pervasive. You won't hear much about wage theft if you expect our corporate-owned media to tell the story.

David Love is hitting this story. In a blog post called Wage Theft: Thou Shall Not Steal From Your Workers, he references Interfaith Worker Justice (IWJ), a non-profit I noted in November was taking the lead on fighting wage theft. Among the depressing facts IWJ has uncovered, the average worker loses $2600 in unpaid wages every year. About 75% of low-wage workers who work 40+ hours per week are not receiving overtime pay, as federal law requires. And a great many people are incorrectly classified as independent contractors instead of employees because their employers avoid FICA, or payroll taxes, as well as minimum wage and overtime requirements. Avoiding FICA means the employer stiffs social security.
 
Kudos to Interfaith Worker Justice for caring enough to actually do something, and to David Love for raising awareness. Why does IWJ even have to fight this? It should be enough that IWJ points out a few infractions. Where are the government officials swooping in to stop this practice?

Where is our media? Isn't cheating workers out of their wages a sufficiently scandalous story? 

European Dismay

In my last post I referred to Tom Friedman's article on how badly the US is polarized and how deeply it has affected our ability to function on even a basic level. Thanks in no small measure to Republican obfuscation, we have become a bizarre parody of ourselves. It is almost like a skit on Saturday Night Live, to which Republicans would whine about how they are being unfairly stereotyped as being in the pockets of the rich. "We will not try to balance the budget on the backs of the poor," I can hear them say.  Except that they are. Slash social security and threaten to shut down the government if Dems don't give tax breaks to the rich? They want that too. How painfully obvious does it have to get before we realize today's Republicans are no longer the party of Eisenhower?

Unfortunately, there are too many Democratics who seem either resigned to events, and are not fighting back, or are actively assisting our transition to oligarchy.

Americans don't take foreign opinion into proper account account very well. As a result, too many Americans have increasingly indefensible views on our international role and rank. And thanks to our deeply compromised media, few Americans are hearing what others think about us and our government, and why it should matter.  

Our recent elections, a giveaway to corporate America disguised as economic populism, has dismayed many in Europe just as it did many progressives here.  How can it be, they ask, that Americans can be so narrow and forgetful as to vote back into power the same corrupt party that helped put the economy in the ditch just before Obama's term began in January 2009?

Europeans, the same people who have national health care of one sort or another, and pay less for it, have no desire to adopt America's for-profit, pay-through-the-nose model designed to enrich the insurance industry. Europeans get more for less, and they know it. They see our recent protracted effort to adopt universal health coverage as symptomatic of American ineptitude. They could see, just we could, at least those of us who didn't watch Fox News, that very high majorities of us wanted a public option.

Yet we couldn't get it done, despite public opinion and Democratic control of the House, the Senate, and the Presidency. Support declined only when it became clear that we would end up with an unworkable compromise that enabled insurance companies to continue dominating the process.

Steven Hill has written more on the European reaction. In a recent post at Alternet, Hill relates his own experience:

"While participating in a conference in Budapest in September, where prominent conservative leaders and thinkers were in attendance, including the president of the European Parliament and two prime ministers, some of the most eye-opening comments had to do with new perceptions about America. One speaker, Christian Stoffaes, who is chairman of the Center for International Prospective Studies based in Paris, stated the “United States is in disarray, extremely polarized. It is practically a civil war there, and you can’t count on it.” This theme was echoed by others speakers, who went even further. One said “We need to shift our emphasis eastward (towards Asia) and not wait for the Obama administration.” I found these statements to be surprising, and even vaguely alarming, given the importance of the transatlantic relationship in the post-World War II era. But there was a widespread view that the US is being consumed by the severity of the Great Recession, brought on by a broken Wall Street capitalism, as well as by the quagmires of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, and an inability to change course."

 Regarding the failed Copenhagen Summit on climate change, Europeans saw that the US was not serious about climate change. Calling it a real wakeup call for the Europeans, Hill notes a sudden European epiphany:

...it wasn’t George W. Bush who was the problem, but something more profound about America’s broken political system that prevents any leader, even one as talented as Obama, from delivering.  That political system is marinated in money, is paralyzed by a “filibuster-gone-wild” Senate that has allowed a minority of Senators to obstruct all legislation, and is hamstrung by a sclerotic, winner-take-all, two-party electoral system that has left voters poorly represented and deeply frustrated." 

Ain't it just swell? Hill captures one more quotation that I must share here because it is a sentiment that many progressives share, including myself. German Finance Minister, Wolfgang Schauble, says "...The USA lived off credit for too long, inflated its financial sector massively and neglected its industrial base."

Exactly.

Bear in mind this is the same Germany that has higher taxes and more regulations, higher wages and higher unionization, and health care for everyone. It has paid vacations for all, generous maternity leave, more generous pensions, and much greater job security. And wealth is much more evenly distributed because of taxes. All socialist programs.

Just what Republicans insist would destroy the US. Yet Germany has generally better demographics, such as lower homelessness, lower crime, higher literacy, and longer life expectancy.  

Germany also has a massive trade surplus. And It does not owe $ trillions to China.

Republicans have their arguments completely backwards. But at least we have more billionnaires.

Our Government is Paralyzed and Polarized

I don't always agree with Tom Friedman. He has, for example, been far too enthusiastic about the benefits of globalization. But I think he is spot-on in his recent rant in the New York Times. Taking a page from the recent Wikileaks dustup, Friedman imagines he is sharing with us a cable, intercepted if you will, between Beijing and the Chinese embassy in Washington, D.C. (You can read the whole article here).

The tone is one of satisfaction, even relief, because America is demonstrating a contemptible inability to face up to its challenges, especially those posed by China.  Here are some excerpts.

"Things are going well here for China. America remains a deeply politically polarized country, which is certainly helpful for our goal of overtaking the U.S. as the world’s most powerful economy and nation." 

"...There is a willful self-destructiveness in the air here as if America has all the time and money in the world for petty politics. They fight over things like — we are not making this up — how and where an airport security officer can touch them. They are fighting — we are happy to report — over the latest nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia. It seems as if the Republicans are so interested in weakening President Obama that they are going to scuttle a treaty that would have fostered closer U.S.-Russian cooperation on issues like Iran. And since anything that brings Russia and America closer could end up isolating us, we are grateful to Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona for putting our interests ahead of America’s and blocking Senate ratification of the treaty...."

"...Americans just had what they call an 'election.' Best we could tell it involved one congressman trying to raise more money than the other (all from businesses they are supposed to be regulating) so he could tell bigger lies on TV more often about the other guy before the other guy could do it to him. This leaves us relieved. It means America will do nothing serious to fix its structural problems: a ballooning deficit, declining educational performance, crumbling infrastructure and diminished immigration of new talent."

"But the Americans are oblivious. They travel abroad so rarely that they don’t see how far they are falling behind... In foreign policy, we see no chance of Obama extricating U.S. forces from Afghanistan. He knows the Republicans will call him a wimp if he does, so America will keep hemorrhaging $190 million a day there."

"Most of the Republicans just elected to Congress do not believe what their scientists tell them about man-made climate change. America’s politicians are mostly lawyers — not engineers or scientists like ours — so they’ll just say crazy things about science and nobody calls them on it. It’s good. It means they will not support any bill to spur clean energy innovation, which is central to our next five-year plan. And this ensures that our efforts to dominate the wind, solar, nuclear and electric car industries will not be challenged by America."

...Thank goodness the Americans can’t read our diplomatic cables."

And that does not address what the Europeans think about us, our broken government, and our downward spiral to oligarchy. That will be another post.

Policy Preferences and Democratic Weakness

On Wednesday I shared a small taste of Bill Maher's skeptical attitude about American voters' understanding of issues and policies. He, of course, is not the only one who notes a wide and long-standing anti-scientific, anti-intellectual streak in this country.

Is it getting worse? It would seem so, in part because of a new level of right-wing aggressiveness, much of it associated with Sarah Palin and teabaggers. Palin sneers at those pointy-headed intellectuals, and the teabaggers eat it up. In her crowd, anti-science has become fashionable and, perversely, is viewed as virtuous.

And yet...  

RJ Eskow, a Senior Fellow with The Campaign for America's Future, cites many reasons to feel good about the wisdom of Americans, at least a majority of us. He has collected some impressive polling data, complete with compelling pie charts that show clear majorities of Americans prefer progressive legislation and policy choices. To wit:

     1.  A large majority opposes cuts to social security;

     2.  Seven in ten oppose raising the retirement age;

     3.  A plurality says to raise taxes on the wealthy;

     4.  Nearly 4 in 5 are against cuts in Medicare;

     5.  Nearly 2 in 3 oppose cuts in lending for college tuition;

     6.  About 6 in 10 say to do more to assist unemployed workers

     7.  4 in 5 say to do more to reduce poverty
     8.  Seven in 10 favor more regulation on Wall Street

Such clear preferences do not demonstrate that people actually understand the details or implications of their choices (3 in 10 don't favor Wall Street regulation?); but they do show that most people want government to help them, not get out of the way, as Republicans since Reagan have claimed. 

As I have posted before, it is essential that we understand the role of political identity. The polls Eskow cites suggest most American prefer, wait for it -- socialism -- a strong dollop of the European model, complete with much more equitable income distribution (say it ain't so Ayn Rand). Many gravitate towards Republicans because it suits their personalities. They want to see politicians project strength, conviction, and detemination. Republicans may have an unusual obsession with swagger, symbolism, and simplistic interpretations of complex issues, but nobody likes to see weakness in their elected officials. And that is what we have mostly seen in the last two years with Dems in the White House and Senate.

People want the Democrats to win, but they have no patience with any party that says it stands for the middle class and then repeatedly squanders its opportunities. Many Americans may be uninformed, many have short memories, and many are impatient, not realizing how long it takes to turn our economy around. Those are faults of the electorate that complicate governing in the US. But nobody is making Democratic politicians look weak except themselves.

Republicans write the script only because Dems let them.

Dogs And Teabaggers Sense Fear

Here is a video I meant to put up earlier. Bill Maher and Michael Moore capture much of the essence of teabagger mentality, and for that matter, much of what studies on authoritarian personalities have demonstrated long before anyone heard of teabaggers, Palin, or Glenn Beck.

Maher makes the point that many Americans are like dogs. That will get the right wing's assortment of serial resenters frothing, but he makes a cringe-worthy and accurate assertion that so many Americans are like dogs because they don't really understand what is being said; they look for voice inflection, style, symbolism, and attitude.

Ok, so dogs don't get symbolism, but Maher is right to emphasize fear as a motivator for dogs and teabaggers alike. Millions let their gut feelings be their guide, which is why, as Maher notes, so many seem impervious to rational discourse. On numerous issues wonkish progressives hold dear, teabaggers do not simply disagree with progressives, and offer a reasoned counter argument; they do not understand the issue in the first place. 

But listen carefully to Moore. He stresses a point you have heard me say before: Dems lost seats in November because the 18-24 crowd didn't bother to vote, while their parent and grandparents did. Moore says 70% of the 18-24 demographic voted for Obama, which sounds about right. However, while 23 million of them voted in '08, only 9 million did so in 2010. Yet Republicans only garnered 5 million more votes in 2010.

Do the math: it's all about voter turnout.

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