'As Societies Grow Decadent, The Language Grows Decadent, Too'

That Gore Vidal quote, continued: "Words are used to disguise, not illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests."

Apt words if you believe what Republicans say about the deficit.

Here's Ezra Klein:

The new Republican line is that there's a “Democrat tax hike" on the way. And it's a big 'un: "An unprecedented $3.8 trillion increase" that will affect -- and this is their bold and underline, not mine -- "every American who pays income taxes!"

To understand what's going on here, you need to go back 10 years to the passage of the Bush tax cuts. In order to maximize the size of the cuts, Republicans had to minimize the influence of minority Democrats on the package. So they chose to run the bill through the reconciliation process.

But that posed some challenges. Budget reconciliation had never been used to increase the deficit. In fact, it specifically existed to decrease the deficit. That's why one of its rules was that you couldn't use it to increase the deficit outside the budget window. Republicans realized they could take that very literally: The budget window was 10 years. So if the tax cuts expired after 10 years, they wouldn't increase the deficit outside the budget window. They'd also have the added benefit of appearing less costly in the Congressional Budget Office's estimates, as the CBO duly scored them as expiring after 10 years, which kept the long-range budget picture from exploding.

But the plan was never to have the tax cuts expire. Instead, the idea was that people would get used to the new tax rates, and no future Congress would want to allow a big tax increase, so when the time came, either Republicans in office would extend the cuts or Republicans in the minority would hammer Democrats until they extended them. And that's where we are now: Democrats control the government, so Republicans are screaming about tax increases as a way to get Democrats to extend tax cuts.

It's really hard to know where to start with this one. It's not a tax increase passed into law by Democrats. It's a reversion to old tax rates passed into law by Republicans. It's not how law is supposed to work. It's the result of twisting a budget process meant to reduce the deficit so you could use it to massively increase the deficit. And as for the policy itself, it's a fiscal nightmare: No one who professes concern for short-term deficits can argue for the extension of these deficit-financed tax cuts and retain credibility on debt issues. This is a litmus test. It's not Democrats who are trying to pass the largest tax hike of all time, but Republicans who are calling for the largest increase in the deficit in memory.

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Mutiny On The Bounty

From Kevin Drum of Mother Jones:

Have I mentioned my favorite part of Obama's speech yesterday? Here it is:

America’s finances were in great shape by the year 2000. We went from deficit to surplus. America was actually on track to becoming completely debt free, and we were prepared for the retirement of the Baby Boomers.

But after Democrats and Republicans committed to fiscal discipline during the 1990s, we lost our way in the decade that followed. We increased spending dramatically for two wars and an expensive prescription drug program — but we didn’t pay for any of this new spending. Instead, we made the problem worse with trillions of dollars in unpaid-for tax cuts — tax cuts that went to every millionaire and billionaire in the country; tax cuts that will force us to borrow an average of $500 billion every year over the next decade.

To give you an idea of how much damage this caused to our nation’s checkbook, consider this: In the last decade, if we had simply found a way to pay for the tax cuts and the prescription drug benefit, our deficit would currently be at low historical levels in the coming years.

But that’s not what happened. And so, by the time I took office, we once again found ourselves deeply in debt and unprepared for a Baby Boom retirement that is now starting to take place. When I took office, our projected deficit, annually, was more than $1 trillion. On top of that, we faced a terrible financial crisis and a recession that, like most recessions, led us to temporarily borrow even more.

Translation: Fuck you, Republicans.

Hey, that's my line!

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Can Barack Come Out & Play?

So the government didn't shut down after all, like it did in the mid-90s. Seinfeld isn't on in primetime anymore, either. Ezra Klein reminds us that 2011 is not 1995:

The substance of this deal is bad. But the way Democrats are selling it makes it much, much worse.

The final compromise was $38.5 billion below 2010’s funding levels. That’s $78.5 billion below President Obama’s original budget proposal, which would’ve added $40 billion to 2010’s funding levels, and $6.5 billion below John Boehner’s original counteroffer, which would’ve subtracted $32 billion from 2010’s budget totals. In the end, the real negotiation was not between the Republicans and the Democrats, or even the Republicans and the White House. It was between John Boehner and the conservative wing of his party. And once that became clear, it turned out that Boehner’s original offer wasn’t even in the middle. It was slightly center-left.

But you would’ve never known it from President Obama’s encomium to the agreement. Obama bragged about “making the largest annual spending cut in our history.” Harry Reid joined him, repeatedly calling the cuts “historic.” It fell to Boehner to give a clipped, businesslike statement on the deal. If you were just tuning in, you might’ve thought Boehner had been arguing for moderation, while both Obama and Reid sought to cut deeper. You would never have known that Democrats had spent months resisting these “historic” cuts, warning that they’d cost jobs and slow the recovery...

...The Obama White House is looking toward the Clinton model. After all, Clinton also suffered a major setback in his first midterm, Clinton also faced down a hardline Republican Congress, Clinton also suffered major policy defeats, and yet Clinton, as the story goes, managed to co-opt the conservative agenda and remake himself into a successful centrist. The Obama administration has even hired many of Clinton’s top aides to help them recapture that late-90s magic.

The piece is here.

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That Rathole The Economy's In? It's Really Just A Loophole...

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Zero + Zero = Zero: The Logic Of Tim Pawlenty

News item: Too many ginormous corporations--like Bank of America--pay no taxes. Likely Republican presidential robot Tim Pawlenty still thinks it's too much.

From ThinkProgress:

TP: You think zero is too high with Bank of America paying nothing?

PAWLENTY: We have the highest corporate tax rate, or one of them, in the world...

Conservative Economics 101.

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'Everything's F#cked Up, And Nobody Goes To Jail'

While a jackass governor in Wisconsin is busy blaming his fat cat tax cut deficit on his state's workers, let's not forget the epic scumbaggery on Wall Street, where the crooks still run wild, no doubt busily planning a new scam.

From Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone:

Nobody goes to jail. This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era, one that saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed hundreds of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world's wealth — and nobody went to jail. Nobody, that is, except Bernie Madoff, a flamboyant and pathological celebrity con artist, whose victims happened to be other rich and famous people.

The rest of them, all of them, got off. Not a single executive who ran the companies that cooked up and cashed in on the phony financial boom — an industrywide scam that involved the mass sale of mismarked, fraudulent mortgage-backed securities — has ever been convicted. Their names by now are familiar to even the most casual Middle American news consumer: companies like AIG, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. Most of these firms were directly involved in elaborate fraud and theft. Lehman Brothers hid billions in loans from its investors. Bank of America lied about billions in bonuses. Goldman Sachs failed to tell clients how it put together the born-to-lose toxic mortgage deals it was selling. What's more, many of these companies had corporate chieftains whose actions cost investors billions — from AIG derivatives chief Joe Cassano, who assured investors they would not lose even "one dollar" just months before his unit imploded, to the $263 million in compensation that former Lehman chief Dick "The Gorilla" Fuld conveniently failed to disclose. Yet not one of them has faced time behind bars.

More here.

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Bernie Sanders: Working Class Hero

From Andrew Leonard on Salon.com, who wrote this while Bernie Sanders' full-throated wail was in progress:

On CSPAN, six hours after first taking the podium to filibuster against the tax cut deal at around 10:25 Friday morning, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., is still talking. The CSPAN subtitle is "U.S. Senate: Tax Cuts & Unemployment Benefits," but for the last few minutes he has been blasting trade polices that disadvantage American workers.

But that's fine. His epic rant -- perhaps one of the most extraordinary critiques of how the American economy has been managed over the last several decades delivered in living memory -- is an endless sequence of connecting the dots from one outrage to another. Even as I wrote this paragraph, he segued effortlessly from trade policy to Wall Street.

"But it is not just a disastrous trade policy that has brought us where we are today. The immediate cause of this crisis, and it gets me just sick talking about it ... is what the crooks on Wall Street have done to the American people."

Sanders then delivers a capsule history of deregulation, blasts Alan Greenspan, notes that in the late '90s he had predicted everything that ultimately happened, but failed to rally legislative support to stop the runaway train -- "and the rest is, unfortunately, history."

From there, a class warfare sideswipe: "Understand, that in this country when you are a CEO on Wall Street -- you can do pretty much anything you want and get away it."

"And what they did to the American people is so horrible."

On to the bailout! His scorn is so caustic it could disintegrate an aircraft carrier: "We bailed these guys out because they were too big to fail, and now three of the four largest banks are now even larger. "

As Sanders' great oration enters its seventh hour, it is, by its very nature, impossible to summarize. It is a ramble, a rant, a critique, a cry of rage, a wail of despair, and a call to action. And it is amazing. I've heard stories of filibusters in which senators read phone books. And I've watched with disgust as for years Republicans have merely threatened to filibuster, without ever actually being forced to exercise their vocal cords. But here is Bernie Sanders, seven hours in, calling for the biggest banks to be broken up, voice still hale and hearty, and looking like he could easily go another seven hours.

Give credit to the citizens of Vermont, who know how to elect someone not afraid of speaking truth to power.

Here's one of my favorite passages from ABCNews.com:

“How can I get by on one house?” Sanders said. “I need five houses, ten houses! I need three jet planes to take me all over the world! Sorry, American people. We've got the money, we've got the power, we've got the lobbyists here and on Wall Street. Tough luck. That's the world, get used to it. Rich get richer. Middle class shrinks.”

The South Bay's Gloomy Summer Continues (UPDATED)

From the L.A. Times, the AVP gets stuffed:

The AVP Tour has canceled the rest of its beach volleyball season, including next weekend's Manhattan Beach Open, because it has run out of money and was unable to find new investors.
Last month, The Times broke the news that the tour was in financial trouble.
“On behalf of AVP staff we want to express our sincere gratitude to fans, players, partners and sponsors,” Jason Hodell, the tour's chief executive, said in a statement. “Words cannot express our profound disappointment."
In a separate statement, AVP Commissioner Mike Dodd said, “Through the course of this investor search we have encountered individuals and groups with intelligence, common sense and a passion for the game of beach volleyball. Unfortunately, the time constraints were such that pulling the trigger on the amount of money necessary to salvage this season were too great. Ironically this sad news comes as we approach the 50th anniversary of the Manhattan Open, our sport’s crown jewel and the one event that showed us all we could dream big. The Open has seen its ups and downs over the years and always persevered. I’m sure our sport will do the same.”
Created in 1983 as a players' association, the first AVP Tour was held in 1988.

UPDATE: The Open will happen, and it'll go old-school:

The Times has more:

The most storied tournament in beach volleyball was in jeopardy on Friday — but only for a few hours.
Less than a week before play was set to begin at the 50th Manhattan Beach Open, the Assn. of Volleyball Professionals announced that it is no longer financially viable and canceled the rest of the season.
The timing of the AVP announcement meant little time for the city of Manhattan Beach and the California Beach Volleyball Assn. to save the tournament.
"I think the most important information to get out to everybody is that the tournament will happen," CBVA President Chris Brown said. "Unfortunately, the details are a little hazy."
He said the tournament will run from Friday to Sunday as planned and would return to its roots — no stadium seating, no grandstands. "No bells or whistles," Brown said.

Nobody's Home

A shady street on a quiet block,
He got up early, punched a clock.
Got a wife, two kids and a scrawny little cat,
Went out on the town in a trilby hat.

Worked his way up, he'd been there for years,
His wife sold jewelry 'cross town at Sears.
Babysitter played kickball with the kids in the park,
'Til Mom and Dad got home, well past dark.

They had a sign on the porch sayin' "Welcome Friend--
You've stayed away too long, it's good to see you again."
Sometimes on Sundays they'd fire up the grill,
Burgers and beer and they'd pick up the bill.

But things went south fast down at the job,
Profits disappeared just like they'd been robbed.
Stuck in a kiosk selling baubles in an empty mall,
It was gettin' hard to afford much of anything at all.

The paper had a report, said his company was goin' broke,
Retirement money gone, a pig in a poke.
Then she got laid off and times, they got tougher,
Bills kept comin', payin' 'em got rougher.

The bottom fell out, it was a few months I suppose,
No sign left on the porch; on the lawn it said, "Foreclosed."
It felt like their house, but it was nothin' 'cept a loan,
And it's just an empty shell when nobody's home.

(For B&D...)

...And How YOU Doin'?

From Mother Jones:

The housing market is still a mess; foreclosures are mounting; unemployment hovers near 10 percent; and, as Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said just today, "Our economy is still going through an incredibly difficult period." All of this stems from one of the worst financial crises in US history, a meltdown of epic proportions from which the country and the world has yet to fully recover.
That is, unless you're really, really rich. Bloomberg reports today that the super wealthy's riches have all but returned to their swollen, pre-meltdown levels, according to a report by Capgemini SA and Merrill Lynch. Of the 10 million people globally with $1 million or more to invest in whatever they want, their wealth rose nearly 19 percent in 2009, to $39 trillion. In 2007, just before the train sped off the cliff, that wealth was $40.7 trillion spread among 10.1 million really rich people. (Let's not mention 2008—these 10 million people's wealth amounted to only $32.8 trillion. A down year, there.)
Here's more from Bloomberg:
The U.S. had 2.87 million millionaires, more than triple second-ranked Germany with 861,500, the report said. The number of millionaires in China soared 31 percent to 477,400, keeping the country ahead of the U.K. with 448,100.
Ultra-high net worth individuals with more than $30 million to invest saw their wealth rise by 21.5 percent in 2009, faster than other millionaires, according to the report, which attributed the gain to a "more effective re-allocation of assets."

Huzzah! Now here's a recovery you can believe in.

More Bang Bang For Your Buck.

From the AP via HuffPo:

The Senate easily passed an almost $60 billion war funding bill Thursday, but anxiety over out-of-control budget deficits led House leaders to drop tens of billions of dollars in spending from a separate catchall bill anchored by an extension of jobless benefits.
Confronted with a rebellion by Democratic moderates, House leaders planned to dump overboard $24 billion in aid to states and allow generous health insurance subsidies for laid-off workers to expire. The changes were an effort to round up votes to extend unemployment benefits and renew more than 50 popular tax breaks that expired last year.
Help for doctors facing a big cut in Medicare reimbursements would also be dropped from the measure, aides and lobbyists said, and is unlikely to be resurrected by a vote on Friday.

So if you're unemployed and struggling, tough shit; borrow some bootstraps from someone and pull yourself up. But if you want to continue to feed a bloated defense budget, we'll wire you a big, fat check.

This is your country.

Bet Against The American Dream: You Can Take That To The Bank.

Bet Against the American Dream from Alexander Hotz on Vimeo

Music & lyrics: Robert Lopez

Ooops!

Well, I'm glad we've got that straightened out...
Excerpted from ABC News:

"On derivatives, yeah I think they were wrong and I think I was wrong to take [their advice] because the argument on derivatives was that these things are expensive and sophisticated and only a handful of investors will buy them and they don’t need any extra protection, and any extra transparency. The money they’re putting up guarantees them transparency,” (Bill) Clinton told (Jack Tapper.)
“And the flaw in that argument,” Clinton added, “was that first of all sometimes people with a lot of money make stupid decisions and make it without transparency.”
The former President also said he was also wrong about understanding the consequences if the derivatives market tanked. “The most important flaw was even if less than 1 percent of the total investment community is involved in derivative exchanges, so much money was involved that if they went bad, they could affect a 100 percent of the investments, and indeed a 100 percent of the citizens in countries, not investors, and I was wrong about that.”

Today? The stock market is smokin' again.

(Jeez, that worked out so well last time...)

The Real Criminal Got Away.

They always frame the black guy in Teabag Nation.

From TheAtlantic.com:

Thursday's annual Census Bureau report on income, poverty and access to health care-the Bureau's principal report card on the well-being of average Americans-closes the books on the economic record of George W. Bush.

It's not a record many Republicans are likely to point to with pride.

On every major measurement, the Census Bureau report shows that the country lost ground during Bush's two terms. While Bush was in office, the median household income declined, poverty increased, childhood poverty increased even more, and the number of Americans without health insurance spiked. By contrast, the country's condition improved on each of those measures during Bill Clinton's two terms, often substantially.

The Census' final report card on Bush's record presents an intriguing backdrop to today's economic debate. Bush built his economic strategy around tax cuts, passing large reductions both in 2001 and 2003. Congressional Republicans are insisting that a similar agenda focused on tax cuts offers better prospects of reviving the economy than President Obama's combination of some tax cuts with heavy government spending. But the bleak economic results from Bush's two terms, tarnish, to put it mildly, the idea that tax cuts represent an economic silver bullet...

Of course, following the Census Bureau's severance of its association with conservative arch-enemy ACORN, the feckless, factless Obama-haters on the right will probably dismiss anything the Census Bureau reports as a left-wing smear. After all, facts really fuck up their fantasies.

What Those Two Guys Who Still Have Jobs Say To Each Other On Their Way To The Office.

Money Doesn't Talk, It Swears.*

* From It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding.)

A Glimmer Of Hope Amid Simmering Anger.

While roving bands of angry, misinformed Americans are spending August making spectacles of themselves by screaming like caged banshees about health care reform at town hall meetings across the country, there is a glimmer of hope today. Still, times are tough and it's not time to turn cartwheels of joy just yet.

From the New York Times:

The economy lost significantly fewer jobs in July than expected. Forecasters were predicting a loss of about 325,000 jobs in June. The actual loss was 247,000 — the smallest since August 2008.

The average hourly pay of rank-and-file workers, which had been flat in June, rose 3 cents in July, to $18.56 an hour. That wage is up 2.5 percent over the past year, while inflation has been roughly zero. So the average person who’s still employed has actually received a raise in the last year.

The average private-sector workweek increased by one-tenth of an hour, to 33.1. It was the first increase since last summer.

And the government said that the economy had shed somewhat fewer jobs in May and June than previously estimated.

The one thing that doesn’t deserve much excitement is what will probably garner many of the headlines: the drop in the unemployment rate. It happened only because more people stopped looking for work and were thus ineligible to be counted as officially unemployed. The share of adults with jobs actually fell: to 59.4 percent, from 59.5 percent.

So we shed fewer jobs than we have in almost a year and wages made a modest gain. At the same time, more people dropped out of the job market altogether and 14,000 people lose health care every day. Millions more are a pink slip away from losing their coverage and many are under-insured and may not even know it.

Meanwhile, the ignorance of those town hall jammers is on full display, as they howl in full-throated support of a broken status quo.

Reaganomic Utopia.

Home Is Where The Heart Is.

I met a couple today who lost their house this week. They seemed strong; spirit, resolute.

I mentioned that I had written something about people being upside down, and they asked me if I could throw it back on the blog so they could check it out later from a coffee shop, where the Internet is free.

If you see this, guys, I wish you much good luck and good cheer:

A shady street on a quiet block,

He got up early, punched a clock.

Got a wife, two kids and a scrawny little cat,

Went out on the town in a trilby hat.

Worked his way up, he'd been there for years,

His wife sold jewelry 'cross town at Sears.

Babysitter played kickball with the kids in the park,

'Til Mom and Dad got home, well past dark.

They had a sign on the porch sayin' "Welcome Friend--

You've stayed away too long, it's good to see you again."

Sometimes on Sundays they'd fire up the grill,

Burgers and beer and they'd pick up the bill.

But things went south fast down at the job,

Profits disappeared just like they'd been robbed.

And jewels became a luxury, it was quiet at the mall,

It was gettin' hard to afford much of anything at all.

The paper had a report, said his company was goin' broke,

Retirement money gone, a pig in a poke.

Then she got laid off and times, they got tougher,

Bills kept comin', payin' 'em got rougher.

The bottom fell out, it was a few months I suppose,

No sign left on the porch; on the lawn it said, "Foreclosed."

It felt just like their house, but it was really just a loan,

And it's just an empty shell when nobody's home.

Surfin' USA Becomes Cali I.O.U.

I've written about California's economic and legislative messes previously. The ridiculous over-use of ballot initiatives and the necessity for a two-thirds majority in the state legislature have us on our knees.

California's broke.

From Salon.com:

The immediate source of California's financial problems is a lethal combination of ideology and rules. It is deeply politically divided, and its governmental mechanisms are completely broken. Bay Area leftists stare at Orange County conservatives across an unbridgeable abyss; a large and potent group of anti-government libertarians faces off against an equally powerful group of pro-tax, proactive government liberals. If California, like most states, required only a simple majority to pass its budget, the disagreements between these camps could be worked out; after all, the Democrats control the Legislature. But California requires a two-thirds majority, which gives the GOP, now dominated by anti-government, anti-tax ideologues, veto power over the process. The result is deadlock.

Compounding this problem is California's notorious initiative process, which allows voters to bypass the Legislature and place initiatives directly on the ballot simply by gathering enough signatures. The initiative process was originally passed by voters in 1911 to circumvent the power of the oligarchic railroad trusts by restoring direct democracy. And it still offers citizens a chance to take control of important issues. But it has gone out of control, abused by powerful interests who hire people to collect signatures and ram through bills that no ordinary citizen can be expected to comprehend. By sidelining elected officials, it achieves the worst of both worlds: It gives ordinary citizens, who lack requisite expertise, institutional memory and accountability, too much power, and then forces legislators to clean up their mess -- except that because of ideological gridlock and the supermajority requirement, they can't.

Right now, the Golden State is more like plated brass.

More here.