Baiting the Switch

Krugman detests the results of the the Laureate's catfood commission.

...We’ve known for a long time, then, that nothing good would come from the commission. But on Wednesday, when the co-chairmen released a PowerPoint outlining their proposal, it was even worse than the cynics expected.

Start with the declaration of “Our Guiding Principles and Values.” Among them is, “Cap revenue at or below 21% of G.D.P.” This is a guiding principle? And why is a commission charged with finding every possible route to a balanced budget setting an upper (but not lower) limit on revenue?

Matters become clearer once you reach the section on tax reform. The goals of reform, as Mr. Bowles and Mr. Simpson see them, are presented in the form of seven bullet points. “Lower Rates” is the first point; “Reduce the Deficit” is the seventh.

So how, exactly, did a deficit-cutting commission become a commission whose first priority is cutting tax rates, with deficit reduction literally at the bottom of the list?

Actually, though, what the co-chairmen are proposing is a mixture of tax cuts and tax increases — tax cuts for the wealthy, tax increases for the middle class. They suggest eliminating tax breaks that, whatever you think of them, matter a lot to middle-class Americans — the deductibility of health benefits and mortgage interest — and using much of the revenue gained thereby, not to reduce the deficit, but to allow sharp reductions in both the top marginal tax rate and in the corporate tax rate.

It will take time to crunch the numbers here, but this proposal clearly represents a major transfer of income upward, from the middle class to a small minority of wealthy Americans. And what does any of this have to do with deficit reduction?

Krugman is no liberal. What you have to remember is once again an effective response to the economic crisis is the FDR liberal one. An effective response to reality creates a liberal bias, but the catfood commission clearly has a Company one. Krugman's Carlyle-affiliated editors at The New York Pravda are trying to rally support for the bipartisan commission in spirit, which should make for some interesting discussions with Krugthulhu.

This is evidenced by a front page "news" piece that lumps liberal opposition to the findings of the catfood commission with the tea party, glorifying the bipartisan plunderers in the middle.

starstuff

we are

The Laureate Switch

Peacekeeping is now set to go on at least until 2014.

Politically correct leaders like Kissinger and Obama win the dynamite prize, simply so they won't have peace-making nukes flyin'. Kissinger talked Nixon into taking his hand off the button. Obama got Cheney away from the football. One supposes that's worth something.

But maybe a prison cell in the Netherlands with a view would be a better reward for war crimes.

Of course, it's never to late to fry. But for you home boys and girls it's the slow deep frier. No Social Security or Medicare for you, or tax cuts for the wealthy, count on it.

Why Destroy the RIng of Power?

So says the voice and the moustache of Sauron.

Why, indeed.



After all, it's in the interests of national security to destroy every last one in the sunlit world.

nothing to see here

"it wasn't our missile"



nothing you need to worry about

we have it- and you- all under control



move along, move along

one dream to rule them all

...one dream to find them
one dream to catch them all
forever more to bind them

[with apologies to a certain author who felt if the real world paralleled his, the Allies would have destroyed their Ring of Power]

Bob Herbert keeps almost figuring it out:

...People traveling in the real world understand that the federal budget deficits are sky high because of the Bush-era tax cuts, the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the spending that was needed to keep the Great Recession from spiraling into another Great Depression.

Even if deficit reduction right now were a good idea — which it is not, given the sorry state of the economy and the vast legions of the unemployed — the deficit zealots have no viable plan for getting their misguided mission accomplished.

What’s needed now is the same thing that has been needed for the past two years and more, a bold plan to put millions of Americans back to work and paying taxes, and a careful, thoughtful, strategic but unequivocal withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan and Iraq.

If we don’t engage these two issues effectively, there is little hope of getting to the other enormous challenges facing the country, including the metastasizing presence of poverty, the worsening problems facing already chronically underperforming public schools, and the deteriorating economic and social conditions that have drained the vitality of so many cities, rust-belt communities and rural areas.

The golden doors of opportunity are closing on America’s young. The United States, once the world’s leader in the percentage of young people with college degrees, is now a sorry 12th among 36 developed nations, according to the College Board.

As a society, we’ve lost our way, and there is no chance of getting reoriented if we can’t find the courage to make some really tough decisions about warfare, taxes, public investment, the crying need to educate all young people, and the paramount importance of gainful employment as the cornerstone of a revitalized America.

Great sacrifices will have to be made if the U.S. is to get its act together, and those sacrifices will have to be shared. We can start now, or we can wait and continue to fantasize about an eventual triumph in Afghanistan, or about cutting budgets with some magic cleaver until they’re finally balanced and all’s right with the world, or whatever other impossible dream is floated by the chronically dissembling political class to blind us to the real world.

Well, yes, the operative term in this being if the U.S. is to get its act together. Given his level of insight, I suspect even Mr. Herbert is beginning to realize getting the act together is the last thing the money behind it all really wants. Many more widely read people are beginning to call what's really being sought for what it is: neofeudalism.

The author mentioned in the opening would recognize this situation too.

After a respite, the Shadow always grows from another shape...

Just a Mystery

The Preznitial Commission investigating why the oil rig exploded just can't imagine why it happened:

WASHINGTON — The lead investigator for the presidential panel delving into the BP oil spill said on Monday that he had found no evidence that anyone involved in drilling the doomed well had taken safety shortcuts to save money.



Fred H. Bartlit Jr., a prominent trial lawyer hired to lead the panel’s inquiry, disputed the findings of other investigators, including plaintiffs’ lawyers and members of Congress, who have charged that BP and its main partners, Transocean and Halliburton, had cut corners to speed completion of the well, which cost $1.5 million a day to drill.

“To date we have not seen a single instance where a human being made a conscious decision to favor dollars over safety,” Mr. Bartlit said...

He indicated that a number of the contributing causes of the explosion might remain a mystery...

No evidence whatsoever, and for that matter, he's not sure it ever really happened.

Hope and Changeling, Tea Party Style

Rand Paul, that maverick libertarian who thinks B.P. should bring as much oil as it wants to dump to your shores, does the old bait-and-switcheroo before they can even swear him in:

...Senator-elect Rand Paul (R-KY), jumped on the anti-earmark bandwagon early, making “a ban on wasteful earmark spending in Washington D.C. one of the key points of his campaign” in March. Lambasting lawmakers who opt for “photo-ops with oversized fake cardboard checks,” Paul vowed to “dismantle the culture of professional politicians” even if he “ruffled a lot of establishment feathers” while doing it.

But after joining the GOP flock on Election Day, Paul is singing a different tune. In a Wall Street Journal profile this weekend, Paul signaled an about-face on his earmark position, committing to “fight for Kentucky’s share of earmarks and federal pork...”

Now that's a Congresscritter that's going places, but probably not before they catch him in bed with a dead girl or a live boy.

The Triangulation of Changeling

The One is talking about beating the Republicans by being worse than the Republicans.

Again.

...the test is gonna be what happens over the next several years, when it’s not just an abstraction, but we have to start making serious choices. I’ve got a deficit commission that I’ve put forward that is gonna be releasing recommendations for how we can start reducing the deficit. And I don’t know yet what they’re gonna say, but I do know what the federal budget looks like. And if you eliminate all the earmarks. If you eliminate all the foreign aid. If you eliminate all the waste and abuse that people, you know, talk about eliminating — you’re still confronted with a fact that the vast majority of the federal budget are things that people really think are important. Like Social Security and Medicare and defense.

And so, you then have to start making some tough decisions about how do we pay for those things that we think are important? And you know, we’re not gonna be able to balance the budget just by slashing the National Parks budget, even if you didn’t think that was a proper function of government. We’re not gonna be able to balance the budget by, you know, eliminating the National Weather Service.

I mean, we’re gonna have to, you know, tackle some big issues like entitlements that, you know, when you listen to the Tea Party or you listen to Republican candidates they promise we’re not gonna touch...

Yes, the Republicans have always wanted to can Social Security, but they're not stupid brave enough to override the wishes of the American people and an eliminate a government program that more or less works.

Not the One though! The Changeling-in-Chief's got the Mendacity of Hope that carries him through your darkest hours.

breakfast of chumpians

Like there's a choice.

Rescind all the Bu$h era tax cuts. Use that $4 trillion on rebuilding infrastructure, on the environment, on green energy, and on health related research. I didn't notice a cure for Alzheimer's, cancer, or cardiovascular disease exactly on the shelves of the drugstore yet.

All of that would make jobs, increase manufacturing, clean the world, and end most of the problems of our own making.

Of course, ending the Endless War would help with all that, too.

Of course, none of that will be done, because either ending the tax cuts, financing a Recovery, or ending the Endless War would halt the 50-year plan to make us a post-industrial, neo-feudal society, and that won't be done.

"...- like 1850s America, when a strange vacuum of thought occupied the heart of political life"

-James Howard Kuntsler

... It's really too late for both parties. They're unreformable. They've squandered their legitimacy just as the US enters the fat heart of the long emergency. Neither of them have a plan, or even a single idea that isn't a dodge or a grift. Both parties tout a "recovery" that is just a cover story for accounting chicanery and statistical lies aimed at concealing the criminally-engineered national bankruptcy that they presided over in split shifts. Both parties are overwhelmingly made up of bagmen for the companies that looted America.
Alas, the damage is now so pervasive in money matters that the federal government could be toast as a viable enterprise, even if a new party or two spontaneously rose up out of the ruins of a plundered democracy. Anyway, one of them will not be the Tea Party, with its incoherent agenda and moron cadres who seek to put Jesus back in the US constitution, where he never was in the first place - though they don't know that.
Nor is there any party on the left or even in the center with a clue or a moral compass. Its just one of those tragic moments in history - like 1850s America, when a strange vacuum of thought occupied the heart of political life, and the scene was cluttered up with mere place-holders like Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan. (Can you state a single idea or position, these political ciphers advanced?)
Where we stand now is on the cusp of another giant step into the abyss, since the latest storm of Foreclosure-Gate suggests pretty strongly that mega-tons of mortgage-backed securities are assured of blowing up, as well as the sundry derivatives of these things (CDOs, CDOs-squared, plus the massive fetid matter infesting the alternative cosmos of credit default swaps). If you follow the media-of-record like The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, you would have to conclude that there is no extant plausible notion among financial leaders as to how the fiasco of botched mortgage-and-title documentation can be resolved. After three weeks of emerging events around this debacle, the consensus among the power brokers is to pretend that there's no problem, that the issue of missing, forged, post-dated, trashed, or non-existent paper related to claims on property can just be put aside, brushed under the rug, glossed over, ignored...

Something wicked this way comes, and like Mr. Kuntsler, I suspect it will involve generals and violence as those who professionally ignore reality have the reality of ignorance handed back to them.

"...There are no rich. There are no middle class. There are no poor..."

There is no factual basis for your words, either, Rand boyo.

Although, it's nice some have some appreciation of what they're plundering and what they're willing to do to feed their needs, and others have an appreciation of why they're plundering it.

Of course, the older, more experienced, hedge fund manager types have their trophy wives, their bloodlines, and pious lifestyles to consider... these all help them make even more money to feed their more mature vices.

Mustn't tell the kids...

And if you vocally don't appreciate the plunder? Why, at the very least you'll end up like Olbermann, hammered by his bosses for giving to the Democrats a fraction of what they gave to the Republicans. But you have to understand: our betters don't have to obey the same rules we do.

sunny weather

via

biting the hand that feeds us to the sharks

I have to disagree with Athenae. Krugman recapitulates the capitulation today, too but also attributes it to the wrong motivation, I think.

...Mr. Obama’s problem wasn’t lack of focus; it was lack of audacity. At the start of his administration he settled for an economic plan that was far too weak. He compounded this original sin both by pretending that everything was on track and by adopting the rhetoric of his enemies.

The aftermath of major financial crises is almost always terrible: severe crises are typically followed by multiple years of very high unemployment. And when Mr. Obama took office, America had just suffered its worst financial crisis since the 1930s. What the nation needed, given this grim prospect, was a really ambitious recovery plan.

Could Mr. Obama actually have offered such a plan? He might not have been able to get a big plan through Congress, or at least not without using extraordinary political tactics. Still, he could have chosen to be bold — to make Plan A the passage of a truly adequate economic plan, with Plan B being to place blame for the economy’s troubles on Republicans if they succeeded in blocking such a plan.

But he chose a seemingly safer course: a medium-size stimulus package that was clearly not up to the task. And that’s not 20/20 hindsight. In early 2009, many economists, yours truly included, were more or less frantically warning that the administration’s proposals were nowhere near bold enough.

Worse, there was no Plan B. By late 2009, it was already obvious that the worriers had been right, that the program was much too small. Mr. Obama could have gone to the nation and said, “My predecessor left the economy in even worse shape than we realized, and we need further action.” But he didn’t. Instead, he and his officials continued to claim that their original plan was just right, damaging their credibility even further as the economy continued to fall short.

Meanwhile, the administration’s bank-friendly policies and rhetoric — dictated by fear of hurting financial confidence — ended up fueling populist anger, to the benefit of even more bank-friendly Republicans. Mr. Obama added to his problems by effectively conceding the argument over the role of government in a depressed economy.

I felt a sense of despair during Mr. Obama’s first State of the Union address, in which he declared that “families across the country are tightening their belts and making tough decisions. The federal government should do the same.” Not only was this bad economics — right now the government must spend, because the private sector can’t or won’t — it was almost a verbatim repeat of what John Boehner, the soon-to-be House speaker, said when attacking the original stimulus. If the president won’t speak up for his own economic philosophy, who will?

So where, in this story, does “focus” come in? Lack of nerve? Yes. Lack of courage in one’s own convictions? Definitely. Lack of focus? No...

The problem was and is not a lack of courage in one's own convictions among the Democrats, the problem is a lack of real convictions.

Democrats weren't cowards, they were and are owned by a lot of the same people that own the Republicans.

Goldman-Sachs, beotches. So does $electing an ex-faculty member of the University of Chicago mean anything to you? This administration was designed to fail. Heckuva job, Larry.

And this sanity meme, really, now who owns Jon Stewart these days? One hears he's getting love letters from Timmeh Geithner. Or something.

So the One just goes belly-up and compromises more, for the next couple years. We will all be told by our DINOcrat betters how unSerious and how childish we are for bitching every time the One capitulates, because after all Resistance is Futile, right?

After all, if we let the Serious have their way, everything goes so Right. Take Iraq, where combat operations have ended, with an untold number of mercenaries still fighting in non-combat roles, our soldiers guarding the bases guarding the oil-fields, and billions going to bribe the Sunni not to fight us. Or Afghanistan, where we bankroll the warlords producing the opium that makes the heroin addicting more and more kids on the street.

But it's all our fault, us moonbats, because we refused to praise the wire that garrottes us.

No, the Democratic leadership believes in the real Progressive values it's constantly going on about in the same way the Republican leadership believes in the real Christian values it's constantly going on about.

That is, not at all.

Heckuva job, Larry

Mission accomplished, and the One is ready to compromise.

Of course, he started compromising before they'd even sworn him in...

Chris Floyd:

...History gives this proof: in almost every national election for the past two decades, we have seen a change in control of either one or both houses of Congress or the White House. This has happened in 1992, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2002, 2006, 2008, and now again in 2010. The pattern is very clear. And it is not because Americans “prefer divided government,” as the dim chewers of Beltway cud like to tell us; it’s because they can’t get anyone in the system to address their concerns.

Yet with every turnover in factional control, we see a rush of earnest, serious analysis telling us how the results represent a vast sea change in America’s politics, culture, society, soul, etc. But somehow, two years later, these momentously meaningful tidal waves ripple into nothing on the empty shore. And again, that’s because they don’t actually signify anything beyond the by-now perennial unease and dissatisfaction.

What is less heartening, of course, is the fact that the American electorate never quite grasps the obvious, glaring, brutal fact that neither of these factions is ever going to change the system one iota if they can help it; they are the system, they are its servants, its enablers, its enactors. Then again, we are dealing with, to borrow Gore Vidal’s deathless phrase, the United States of Amnesia, where history doesn’t exist (except in the form of feverishly distorted self-righteous myths about America’s eternal super-duper specialness), and every election is a tabula rasa . The only flickering historical awareness that seems to exist in the American electorate is a vague sense that the gang they voted in two years ago hasn’t changed anything; better try the other gang again … forgetting this is the same gang they threw out the time four years ago, for the same reason...

Meanwhile, the reptile they could not frogmarch is gloating to his ba$e:

...“Climate is gone,” said Rove, the keynote speaker on the opening day of a two-day shale-gas conference sponsored by Hart Energy Publishing L.L.P. And Rove told the trade show, “I don’t think you need to worry” the new Congress will consider proposed legislation to put the controversial practice of hydraulic fracturing under federal rather than state regulation. The procedure, known as “fracking,” is responsible for the dramatic growth of shale-gas drilling in formations such as Pennsylvania’s vast Marcellus Shale...

And if you're presiding over the greatest mass extinction since the Mesozoic era, why not go all the way and recapitulate the Mesozoic?

the more things Change, the more they stay the strange

Chris Hedges on the Phantom Left:

The American left is a phantom. It is conjured up by the right wing to tag Barack Obama as a socialist and used by the liberal class to justify its complacency and lethargy. It diverts attention from corporate power. It perpetuates the myth of a democratic system that is influenced by the votes of citizens, political platforms and the work of legislators. It keeps the world neatly divided into a left and a right. The phantom left functions as a convenient scapegoat. The right wing blames it for moral degeneration and fiscal chaos. The liberal class uses it to call for “moderation.” And while we waste our time talking nonsense, the engines of corporate power—masked, ruthless and unexamined—happily devour the state.

The loss of a radical left in American politics has been catastrophic. The left once harbored militant anarchist and communist labor unions, an independent, alternative press, social movements and politicians not tethered to corporate benefactors. But its disappearance, the result of long witch hunts for communists, post-industrialization and the silencing of those who did not sign on for the utopian vision of globalization, means that there is no counterforce to halt our slide into corporate neofeudalism. This harsh reality, however, is not palatable. So the corporations that control mass communications conjure up the phantom of a left. They blame the phantom for our debacle. And they get us to speak in absurdities.

The phantom left took a central role on the mall this weekend in Washington. It had performed admirably for Glenn Beck, who used it in his own rally as a lightning rod to instill anger and fear. And the phantom left proved equally useful for the comics Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, who spoke to the crowd wearing red-white-and-blue costumes. The two comics evoked the phantom left, as the liberal class always does, in defense of moderation, which might better be described as apathy. If the right wing is crazy and if the left wing is crazy, the argument goes, then we moderates will be reasonable. We will be nice. Exxon and Goldman Sachs, along with predatory banks and the arms industry, may be ripping the guts out of the country, our rights—including habeas corpus—may have been revoked, but don’t get mad. Don’t be shrill. Don’t be like the crazies on the left.

“Why would you work with Marxists actively subverting our Constitution or racists and homophobes who see no one’s humanity but their own?” Stewart asked. “We hear every damn day about how fragile our country is—on the brink of catastrophe—torn by polarizing hate, and how it’s a shame that we can’t work together to get things done. But the truth is we do. We work together to get things done every damn day. The only place we don’t is here [in Washington] or on cable TV.”

The rally delivered a political message devoid of reality or content. The corruption of electoral politics by corporate funds and lobbyists, the naive belief that we can somehow vote ourselves back to democracy, was ignored for emotional catharsis. The right hates. The liberals laugh. And the country is taken hostage.

Fox News’ Beck and his allies on the far right can use hatred as a mobilizing force because there are tens of millions of Americans who have very good reason to hate. They have been betrayed by the elite who run the corporate state, by the two main political parties and by the liberal apologists, including those given public platforms on television, who keep counseling moderation as jobs disappear, wages drop and unemployment insurance runs out. As long as the liberal class speaks in the dead voice of moderation it will continue to fuel the right-wing backlash. Only when it appropriates this rage as its own, only when it stands up to established systems of power, including the Democratic Party, will we have any hope of holding off the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party.

Wall Street’s looting of the Treasury, the curtailing of our civil liberties, the millions of fraudulent foreclosures, the long-term unemployment, the bankruptcies from medical bills, the endless wars in the Middle East and the amassing of trillions in debt that can never be repaid are pushing us toward a Hobbesian world of internal collapse. Being nice and moderate will not help. These are corporate forces that are intent on reconfiguring the United States into a system of neofeudalism. These corporate forces will not be halted by funny signs, comics dressed up like Captain America or nice words...

Besides, the Tony Starks co-opted that Captain America schtick a long time ago.

what is this "compromise" of which they speak?

Kinda hard to triangulate when the other side's trying to send you to the slammer before they even take their seats.

As expected, the main$tream and the DLC/ DNC are crying about how this means Obama's taken things too far left, when the real problem is he has only made baby steps that couldn't possibly have worked the way he claimed.

The real problem is that he's mostly been yet another bank$ter owned president. The bank$ters have turned against him because he wasn't quite a member of the club, University of Chicago faculty and Harvard education aside. Of course, that's the kind of thing the boys don't talk about outside the clubhouse.

The bank$ters aren't exactly fond of the too tea-partied either. Rand Paul won his race, but let's face it, any Southerner willing to say BP has the right to dump all the oil it wants into the Gulf isn't too tea'd off for the old boys.

A word to the wise, Barry: dump those CIA killers who think they give you the orders, hire some real brothers and sisters to cover you, and do a Roosevelt. People respect you for the kind of enemies you make. Make enemies of Goldman-Sachs. Prosecute some bank$ter butt, even if you can't survive prosecuting Poppy's boy.

If the Congresscritters throw a subpoena at you, throw 'em right back. They are on the average at least as dirty as you are, you likely know where the bodies are buried, and you have the advantage.

Use it, or lose it, sir.

the lunatics own more of the asylum

They haven't made off with it all, but you bet they're going to act like they did.

The $enate? Not the worst case scenario, but almost as bad: Reid the spineless casino shill remains in charge. Better than the asshat in charge of the House, better than the corrupt, sociopathic, psychotic and obtuse Angle, but corrupt and weak nonetheless.

Robert Scheer:

...Barack Obama deserved the rebuke he received at the polls for a failed economic policy that consisted of throwing trillions at Wall Street but getting nothing in return. His amen chorus in the media is quick to blame everyone but the president for his sharp reversal of fortunes. But it is not the fault of tea party Republicans that they responded to the rage out there over lost jobs and homes while the president remained indifferent to the many who are suffering.


At a time when, as a Washington Post poll reported last week, 53 percent of Americans fear they can’t make next month’s mortgage or rent payment, the president chirped inanely to Jon Stewart that his top economics adviser, Lawrence Summers, who was paid $8 million by Wall Street firms while advising candidate Obama, had done a “heckuva job” in helping avoid another Great Depression. What kind of consolation is that for the 50 million Americans who have lost their homes or are struggling to pay off mortgages that are “underwater”? The banks have been made whole by the Fed, providing virtually interest-free money while purchasing trillions of dollars of the banks’ toxic assets. Yet the financial industry response has been what Paul Volcker has called a “liquidity trap”—denying loans for business investment or the refinancing necessary to keep people in their homes...

While the One deserved the rebuke, we certainly don't deserve the asshat(s) now running Congress. You can only hope Barry O. resolves to show a little backbone- because otherwise Social Security is a gone. Unless, of course, that was an anticipated move in the n-dimensional chess game he's obsessed with, while Wall Street plays poker with your mortgage.

a clear choice

The choice is between a corrupt sociopathic government and a corrupt sociopathic government run by psychopaths.

I voted straight Democratic. Like there is a choice.

taking the long term view on the day of the dead

What happens to a world in Endless War?



Is it just part of the script?

Got yer Hope and Change right here

...Rather than us selecting who we want, they sense what we're going to want, and they provide it to us in the form of an imposter, an actor, someone who plays the part of what we want.

Then they write the script, telling us how we're feeling, what we want, and OH WOW LOOK here comes a guy who fits the bill. This guy remarkably finds the obstacles to office dissolving at his approach, then he's in.

We've done it!

Right now, the script is that Obama is bogged down, Americans are unhappy, they're gonna vote pretty much anybody into office as long as they're not the incumbent, and the Dems will control one branch, the Repubs the other.

That will take care of the stagnation, and no need for anyone to explain any more why nothing's really getting done (considering the Dems have majorities in both, and a Dem President). Now they can just say "well, it's gridlocked".

For two years there they really didn't have much of an excuse except Obama saying "gosh it's so HARD" and blaming the "Republican'ts".

A new script is being written right now, behind the scenes, and we will be presented with new false choices in 2012. And everybody will get all fired up about it, ridiculously emotional about it (considering the utter lack of power all of us actually have with our little "votes") and the script will be produced. The plan will be in place, as it has been for generations now....