I sure hope so, because God knows workers won't be able to, after corporations finish eviscerating the middle class:

With "no end in sight" for U.S. job losses amid a recession that could stretch into 2010, American workers will soon have to contend with another blow to their confidence: stagnant, or even falling wages.

Job seekers -- already coping with the highest unemployment rate in a quarter century, their savings mugged by a plunging stock market -- can also expect lower pay once they land a new job, labor market experts say, because the current downturn shows no signs of turning around anytime soon.

"There's no end in sight," said Tig Gilliam, chief executive of Adecco Group North America, the third-largest U.S. employer behind Wal-Mart Stores and the postal service.

[snip]

But while job openings remain, employers are increasingly able to keep a lid on wages, further stretching consumers. The latest jobs report showed wage growth slowed in January and February from its pace at the end of last year.

According to Adecco, many clients are looking to hire people at lower rates than in the past, with the biggest wage pressure at the lower end of the pay scale, he said, among people earning around $10 or $12 per hour.

[snip]

"Declining salaries make it easier for businesses to survive in the short term, but decreased consumer purchasing power is a recipe for disaster over the long term," said SurePayroll President Michael Alter. U.S. small business paychecks average $31,317, down about $1,300 over the past year.

Confidence in the stimulus among workers, by contrast, remains high, with nearly three-quarters telling an Adecco/Harris interactive survey they are optimistic the plan will boost jobs.

The outlook for job pay, however, is grim.

"Wages are going to take a hit," said Chad Sowash, vice president of the Direct Employers Association, a nonprofit that represents the interests of senior recruiters.

Sowash met Friday with Fortune 500 employers in the healthcare, IT and defense sectors, who told him anyone looking for a job now should expect to earn 10 percent to 20 percent less, depending on the position and the industry.

Labels: economic death watch

The DNC is putting up a billboard in Rush Limbaugh's hometown of West Palm Beach, Fl. They need a caption of ten words or less and they're taking submissions here.

The winning entry will get a tee shirt with their slogan on it. Yeah, "I insulted Rush Limbaugh and all I got was this lousy tee shirt."

It's tough coming up with a slogan when you don't even know what picture they'll use but if you go to the DNC's website and make a submission, share it with the rest of the class. Mine is "Let's Give Rush's Bums the Bum's Rush."

The Mean Kitty Song already has its own parody, so why shouldn't the infamous "Leave Britney Alone!" video have a spoof dedicated to Rush Limbaugh? And John Amato of Crooks and Liars is just the guy to do it:

Labels: bloggers

I have doubts about America moving forward without investigating what happened during the past 8 years and addressing it strongly through the laws of the land. I've long thought Bush and Cheney should have been impeached; pretty much from the start, and at least by now that some special prosecutor should be looking at what happened. The toothlessness of Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and the rest of them, was and is maddening with that old line about moving forward and not dwelling in the past; we wouldn't want to appear like we're dwelling on...er...laws, the constitution, or anything like that....it seems like they all swing between feeling some helplessness about being able to actually get the support they need to investigate fully, and the old forget-the-past-and-move-on line. I guess that with the media the way it is, we always stand the chance of being looked at as dwelling on something that's over and done with; now what are we gonna do?

Well, get with the program or get outta the way; these days I'm all about the blame, the ounce of flesh and rehashing the past, who pays and who slips past, who ends up in jail, at the Hague, or crudely hung while dirty Americans in bars pump their fists in the air. This is about creating a record so that future generations, hell the generation growing up now, see that no one is above the law and that America doesn't operate this way. Blindly moving forward just to create space between us and the crimes serves no one in the long run. It does maintain the status quo, which is more comfortable for alot of people, but isn't that what got us into this in the first place? The questions once asked in high school and college level civics and government classes have all fallen by the wayside in an educational system that is barely able to teach the 3 R's, and without the knowledge of how things are supposed to work, people expect less from their elected officials. Punishing those who break the law is less about a pound of flesh and more about preventing a repeat by looking hard at who we've become and who we want to be; how far have we strayed from the founder's ideals of who we might become. You don't get to erase the past 8 years....ignoring the past is guaranteeing that we will repeat it.

The news of interrogation tapes from Guantanamo being destroyed during the Bush years is no real surprise to me, but news of existing evidence being destroyed by the last vestiges of the CIA is troubling, to say the least. More scary are the newly released Bush memos detailing that what was supposedly the insane ramblings of conspiracy theorists were not so far from the truth. If Bush and Co. had their way, America could easily have been turned into a police state in which the president could order a lockdown of all citizens at any time, and a suspension of our rights. This is dangerous stuff, and if they ever were trying to deny that innocent people were seized and renditioned to other countries, held and tortured, well, these memos are the groundwork by which all Americans could lose any semblance of due process or privacy. The government would only have to decide that the country was in some sort of danger. It could happen in committees where top officials hold up vials of white powders and show tubes and maps...oh, wait a minute, that already happened.

This material is a smoking gun, and its not like its the only smoking gun out there...the Bush administration boldly went about their business above the law because they really believed that they were above the law. The question is, can a country of laws continue on any reasonable path towards healing if we skip over these criminals and the evidence right in front of us? Shouldn't we at least be afforded a special prosecutor to just go over things a little?
The shredders are whirring somewhere in the bowels of the gulags where shit went down....what are we going to do about it? Why hasn't Obama put this all in a state of investigation, frozen so that no more evidence could be destroyed? Where are the special prosecutors?

I'm waiting to see what the Obama line on this is gonna be, and I'm not all so positive about it. And so far he seems to be distancing himself from what the law folks are doing, which is neither here nor there. He did make the memos public without much fanfare, and it seems like any real lawbreaking will be responded to with an actual investigation rather than a pardon, but, I'm not sold. As much as I like his populist way of coming to the American people and laying it out on the table that we have a choice of who we want to be. This is a choice that we have to make and stand behind before our doors are kicked in and our treaties are canceled at our leader's discretion.

I love to see Obama speak, and its refreshing not to have to spit at the TV or run to turn down the sound of the voice of that sneering madman, but I can already feel the malaise of the thousands of people out of work or working 3 jobs and barely making it, just coalescing. It seems like we're in good hands and we're all so busy, so why not just let them try to handle it as best they can?

Regardless of how selfish we want to be in keeping more money in our own accounts, it must be clear that what the Bushies had in the works was the actual dismantling of our system in the guise of a tax break or a stim check. I've lost all faith in any politician actually standing by an idea as big as prosecuting an ex-President and an ex-Vice-President, but in my hopes and dreams I envision a world where a leader is bold enough to just say fuck it and throw politics to the winds to do whats right. Those sorts of leaders usually go down in history, but they don't necessarily have long lived careers (or lives for that matter.) There is a tremendous fear in the government that if we start prosecuting wrong doers, we may be knocking on alot of doors; but isn't it time?

This past weekend I turned on Sunday's This Week with George Snuffleupagus, and saw that no less than Karl Rove was on the panel. There he was sitting at the round table, spouting his beliefs and ideas, as if hes not a criminal and as if George and every other idiot there hasn't been masquerading as a news person at one time or another, or at least as a public servant. How does it work that this guy gets his great American second act before he even responds to the subpoena? How can news people sit on a round table with him as if nothing is wrong? Who are they inviting next, Bernie Madoff?

Even Arianna could not believe her eyes, and thank god in a way, for the netroots and all of my politically astute friends out there, because when this whole thing began, back in the dark days of Bush's first term, I felt so crazy and lost and alone. But with the gelling of the force there, I knew that as much as I was shaking my head and saying no-no, so were thousands across the country opening their laptops to begin the day..."today I saw a living nightmare commenting on my president's bailout package, as if he has anything to say to us ever again!"
As Arianna said, this is no way to keep your viewers at a time when TV is on the way o-u-t.

Just because Rove has a certain amount of expertise in advertising and the old bait and switch, does not mean that he should be given a platform. He sat at the right hand of someone who may be one of the worst criminals in history. Why is he being elevated like this? I guess that its because the punditocracy seems to want to normalize him and therefore lessen their own guilt, as well as keep their bridges to the bad guys because it's likely they will be in power again at some point...I don't know anymore; none of it makes any sense.

So, he gets to sit there all nice and social and give commentary on Obama's strategies? There is something wrong with that picture and I'd prefer to not have him on the screen when I turn on the TV on a bleary Sunday morning. They've had their say and they actually lost big time on the merits of whats happened. So its safe to say that the old Rovian terrorizing of the masses, until they cant think straight or look at evidence, is over. I have no interest in his ideas...not at all.

Time Magazine isn't my favorite read. I tend to shy away from those weekly rags that encapsulate what they think you need to know of the news. They do, however, have something interesting online from time to time, and I caught something this week that I found so interesting that I had to...um...borrow a copy from the gym so I could read it in hard copy. Its the Faith Healing issue, and it has, by the way, a great little piece on how boomers are taking over FaceBook...kick ass!! (And if I hadn't un-friended my niece I would send that link to her, because she seems to think that the thing belongs to the college aged kids with no spending power....as if anyone has any anymore.) But, the piece that got me was about The 25 People to Blame for the Economic Mess We're In., and its lineup of the expected suspects, most of whom I won't go into here because you can follow the link over there if you're really interested in what Time thinks, (and I'm ultimately not).... its the attitude that gets me.

At Time they see fit to barely scratch the surface of the problem, and present it as a faux lineup, with heads crudely pasted on fake bodies or some such silly photoshop. There is Bush and a whole mess of movers and shakers that we may or may not know. And smack dab in the middle is YOU, the American Consumer; come on now, take your medicine! You got yourself into this and now that you cant get yourself out of it you're gonna complain and ask to be bailed out? Wait a minute!

I'm going to try to explain what I've had circling for days only to gel today in light of old Karl sitting there, and I'm gonna do it without slanting things towards my own socialist tendencies and without letting the American consumer off the hook:

Americans are bombarded with advertisements that imply that the American Dream is just a credit card away. We are offered cards upon checkout at every store from Target to Tiffany's, and promised 15% off our purchase that day if we sign up. Most of us have many of these cards, not realizing that they are mostly owned by a few big banks (aka Chase usually...Chase owns just about everything these days.) We've been fed a line and promised certain things that are explained in small print, too small to read, and we've signed up gladly because next week's paycheck will surely come and we'll surely pay that off. Of course the interest rate is 21% or more, and if we don't get the entire balance paid that month, or within the designated period, the 15% we saved is only an offset of that for the first month. Everything is like that these days; nothing is simple as things were even 20 years ago when I was putting things on layaway and not picking up the merchandise until I had paid it off!

The get-it-now, need-it-now culture has sprouted out of nowhere, but it couldn't have happened if the banking industry hadn't become more and more reliant on the consumer credit part of their business. It used to be hard to get a credit card, and then suddenly every kid was getting offers and you didn't have to have an income or a credit record. You can shake your finger at the people who signed up for mortgages they couldn't afford and didn't understand, and people who lost track of the money needed to support those plastic cards, but not without noting that deregulation has allowed for the biggest advertising schemes in history to dupe us all into believing that we could have it all! And more, that ALL was not good enough. If you had the house you needed the bigger house....if you had the bigger house you needed to win the lottery. The American Dream has become more, more, more; and I'm sorry, but that little secure job and comfy life on the cul-du-sac just wont cut it. That's because we are AMERICA!
Look comrade, at a point, you gotta decide whats the norm, and if what you aspire to, like the rest of us, is winning the lottery, well, chances are stronger that you'll get hit by lightening. So maybe its time to set out some basic norms, so that we aren't struggling to achieve what has been presented to us and what is unachievable.

All of American life has become predatory...how many of us can really make it on just our incomes without relying on credit from time to time, or all the time? Its not just that credit is an integral part of the capitalistic landscape, its that our culture has turned on itself and somehow we find ourselves in a situation where it matters little if the purchaser/borrower loses everything, so long as the predatory bank is bailed out.

Now, that predatory bank that I owe a certain amount to on a card has been sending out fliers. I often find some blowing down the street and they sit unread in garbage cans. Those fliers, it turns out, say that the cycle is being made smaller and the minimum payment is being raised. At that point, if like me, you have automatic payments set up from the bank and you're not checking all the time, you're screwed! The deal is this, you get called on the day you're late, and as you're saying that your payment isn't due till next week and rifling through the stack of bills, they offer you a deal to pay on the phone for a small fee of $14.95....then, since you're late, they charge $39 as a late fee. Oh, and that thing they used to do when you went over your limit where your card was denied? Most of 'em don't do that anymore; instead they allow you to go over your limit and then they charge you an overlimit fee!...oh, and by the way, in the other little flier with tiny letters that you may or may not have gotten in your junk mail there was mention of how they were lowering your limit....so chances are you don't know that a card that had $1000 on it actually now has half that! And one more thing, your card holder bank has just bought all the little banks and they now own all your store cards...and they've reported you to the credit bureau and in response to all of this your limits are raised, your minimum payment is raised, your credit is lowered and you cant get a consolidating loan to try to make sense of this because your score was lowered for any one of 3 or 4 reasons which range from just silly to insane! Welcome to my world!

Of course, the whole thing is stupid and we shoulda known, but how many of us are able to read the fine print legalese and fight the brainwashing....the brainwashing...yes, I said it! Besides that and more important is that many of us have been putting groceries and medical bills on these cards...forget about if there is an emergency and a huge hospital bill.
So, I take responsibility for my own credit, and Ive never paid late until they started to change the date regularly, but obviously Ive only paid a day or few late and I always paid much more than the minimum! Who stops them from from doing whatever they want? You know, you can refuse these changes but then they are gonna shut down all of your cards and call in the loans...and remember, they own all the little cards too! This is all AFTER we, the tax payers, bailed them out!...now they want more! You know what? why not let them fail to hell and see what happens?
Credit may be the cornerstone of business from the newspaper stand on the corner to the biggest banks, but there is no reason not to bail out the businesses that have a need to be guaranteed to their vendors or whatever. It sure would be cheaper, wouldn't it?

Meanwhile, back to my Sunday morning hate fest, and seething by now, Ive got to ask: Who is the king of brainwashing and deregulation? Karl Rove! The same Karl Rove who now gets to sit on a panel on Sunday morning and discuss Obama's bail-out stimulus plan! The same lying cheating neocon who so firmly believes in that odd somehow bigger "less government," privatization, and deregulation of everything, until the financial dealings of this country are more like the wild west than a civilized society. That's the same Rove who masterminded the terra threat and the go shopping to support your country lines. There has not been a time when Rove wasn't sitting at the right hand of the president, and therefore he doesn't deserve a place on the roundtable until hes cleared, even if its a kangaroo court set up just to smooth the transition. He has refused to answer a subpoena on many occasions, and now hes saying he will but there are always rules and things that cant be asked in the interest of national security. Well, I'm not feeling very secure, are you?

I'm also not so happy to note that he does not appear in Time's lineup of who to blame....how about looking at him as being criminally culpable in the government's disinformation campaign, causing the disassembly of how we had previously handled money in this country? Is it legal to lie and propagandize until there is little left of this house of cards? And is this someone who should be advising us on the quick progress of Obama, who is at least doing something; something that Rove didn't suggest that his buddies in the oval office do in the last few years.

This whole thing and who is to blame is really not so hard to figure out; just follow the money, pundit chairs and book deals. If the game was to loot the country and then hand the war and ruined economy over the the democrats, and then float that its Obama's problem and try to even tie it to Clinton, as if Bush had nothing to do with any of this, well then Rove is a fucking genius! The catch is that 80% of Americans believe that Obama inherited these problems from Bush, so its apparently gonna take a little more than what Rove has been trying to dish in the talking points, along with disgusting flunky "party leader" Limbaugh. So, maybe Americans are wising up and maybe, just maybe, we're sick to death of being lied to.

So, who is to blame? it seems to me that every damned bit of this economic crisis can be traced back to that day that Reagan was standing at a podium saying that large corporations don't need the government to police them! They don't need regulation; they can regulate themselves, by god!!I remember staring in disbelief at the man basically carrying out what had been planned for a long time, and what was the beginning of the end of the American Dream.

Government involvement or disinvolvement in how money has been handled in this country brings me to a very interesting piece on 60 Minutes last Sunday night. It seems that one Harry Markopolos figured out that Bernie Madoff was a fraud and he told the SEC quite a few times over many years, and they didn't investigate properly. It was quite straight forward actually, and the hedge funds in Greenwich that were making money hand over fist by putting client's money into Madoff's fund, should have realized something was amiss. Its impossible for a fund to not ebb and flow with the market, and its impossible that no one noticed that something was wrong. What seems clear is that those who were able to pull a profit from Madoff, kept raking it in in an impossible scenario that was as intoxicating as it was a ticking time bomb. Any money person could see the few things that Markopolos found, and the SEC should have looked. Madoff's neice had married an ex SEC man, and he was heard to say that he had ties with the officials. There are huge conflicts of interest in every area of this, and beyond that Madoff is such a sociopath that he is unable to even feel the pain of the not so rich people who thought they were secure only to end up having to go and work menial jobs to live day to day, its clear that lax enforcement puts a big piece of the blame on the government that we fund to police these things.

New York Magazine has a great article on Madoff as The Monster Mensch, which is telling in its dissection of the making of someone so removed from what he has become, and one who clearly is a sociopath. But what interested me was the depiction of Madoff as an climber, an outsider, who upon achieving the dream and being in a position to hold court with some of the most influential people in the world of finance, still was the scrappy boy from the streets. He retained a sort of anger at the people for whom he had made fortunes, and felt "ennobled" that he had worked his way up and enabled these people to have such fine lives. Maybe the resentment was a necessary first step in the break from ethical reality, in that things would go south or had already gone south, and so a bit of anger and resentment made it all the easier to fabricate his detailed statements and lie so convincingly, while acting like he cared for his clients and employees so much. As an outsider, he created an exclusive club that people were so happy to be in that they didnt question. It reminds me of Stevie Rubell standing at the velvet ropes of Studio 54, a little balding guy who never really fit in, controlling who would get in and who wouldnt; always there was that underbelly of resentment for people not of whatever the code was for that night....the shoes wrong, the chains wrong, the party mix wrong....and regardless of the law breaking that went on inside, once you were in, you werent gonna rock the boat.

Madoff is in the lineup of Time's 25 people to blame for the financial crisis, you see, along with Chris Cox, who was the Chief of the SEC, and who didn't investigate the allegations of wrongdoing in the Madoff case. Even as Cox claims to have lacked the authority to do much, as if his hands were tied by deregulation, he still didn't stand up and blow the whistle....There were reports of wrongdoing all over the place, not just in Madoff's case, but the SEC lacked authority to investigate? It seems to me that a few people were blowing whistles and the masters of the universe who were running these supposed "regulatory" agencies lacked the balls rather than the authority. It seems that the concern over and over these days is in one's own career and future rather than ethics and logical decision making.

The money in many of these cases has disappeared, but yesterday the paper noted that Switzerland holds some 147,000 American accounts where money has been stashed tax free. Of those they will only divulge a few in current hearings amongst a particular 52,000. How can that be ethical? You know what? UBS is one of the biggest businesses in my town, having gotten huge tax breaks to build its headquarters here, and I dont see why they should be given such a huge footprint in the US if they are harboring the money of tax cheats and criminals. It has to do with Swiss law not allowing Swiss employees of the banks to implicate themselves in crimes, but shouldnt foreign companies operating in the US have to follow our laws and not be screwing us over offshore? I say shut them out of America until they pony up the names of all of the cheats. I think we might see many familiar names on those accounts, and we might recover some of the missing Madoff money as well. Oh, and those big financial operations that make Stamford the second largest trading floor in the country; operating on tax breaks meant to bring jobs to the area. Those operations are laying off thousands of people in little bursts. So, what are we getting and who is protecting our citizens?

This country is rife with really sick people. It seems that no sooner have the laws been softened than the movers and shakers begin some descent into a convenient madness that is really just a form of what happens when the Freudian id loses its social restraints. I have long marveled at the human brain's ability to twist situations to a point where it makes perfect sense to resent and blame the victim as you steal them blind. The unfettered id is not a good thing, but it is a pretty transparent thing, just like the accounts that cant possibly make the return they are making. It is the thing that we, as human animals, have been working against, towards a more ordered and kinder society. It is the animal urge to fight for resources as if they were limited in this forum where the people in question have more than any group could ever need. Either we just admit that we migrate and kill each other for resources, or we try to keep up this facade of the good churchgoing populace...the seedy underside is always there no matter what part of history you look at. The common thread is always that we strive to be better and to end violence and unfair tactics that leave part of the population out in the cold in a way that is well removed from the Darwinism of yesterday, before the decks were stacked against certain groups from the getgo.

And who are the leaders in the unfettered department; the inability to understand your effect on others, and to see how big of a footprint you have, or the air that you suck out of a room? The most ill of them all? Rush Limbaugh is claiming that prize proudly as he opens another button on his shirt because its s-e-x-y! In the following clip Janeane Garafalo and Keith Olbermann discuss the incredible pathos there, and what is great is that its just so clear that Limbaugh is a lonely, ugly, guy who is out of the loop, abhorrent, self loathing, and so even in the middle of adoring fans, he finds a way to hate, and a way to soak up the bucks; while also furthering the cause that allows him to profit off of the misfortune of our country. Rush just serves as an example of the the other half that I have struggled to understand for so many years.
Its the Rovian hook and lie, the hate in their eyes that gives permission to all of the writhing ids, barely held in check out there, to go for it. Its a devilish wink and nod that lets the underbelly of our society know that its OK to take what your instinct tells you are resources, and not to feel much empathy for anyone.
The fascinating thing is that with these Bush neocons, the KKK hood is off. They boldly display themsleves so that their employers will know where to send the checks. hate sells in this culture...and maybe it would be about time to ask ourselves why? Let them throw back the freedom of speech argument at us all they want. At some point we have to stop trying to be so politically correct and call a spade a spade.




Christian religions are based on the all-men-are-born-bad model, which seems to allow for alot of straying and repenting, with forgiveness by the ultimate authority a given bonus, even for the worst crimes. Darwinists see the prehensile tail and layers of pre-reptilian brain telling the human man to survive and to excel, and whats so wrong with that? Its understandable and it allows for a certain acceptance of the crimes committed in the service of resources and land. Its a hard cruel world out there in the animal kingdom, and as much as you can dress up a chimp or the human race for that matter, eventually their instincts take over. Its very hard to tell a billionaire that he has enough money, because its not about money anymore; its about pounding your chest and peeing on the edges of your territory.

Fundamentalist religion seems to be about one angle or another that allows a group to be exclusive of those who might otherwise be welcomed as a brother; meantime denying the survival of the fittest and espousing the survival of the one that follows the convenient word....and of course if you stray there is the forgiveness as well....but the whole thing seems to end in a fiery pit anyway, with a heaven goal, so all bets are off. Strange that so many of the other 50% have embraced the fringe of the fundamentalist creed.

The deregulated government and waning culture seems to ultimately free the barely contained id usually contained by the weak vessels of theory proven wrong, to wreak havoc on those who might trust in the logical and empathetic order of things. You would thinkthat in absence of some superego, a social structure might come forward to keep this all in line so that no one gets hurt. Where is the superego or even a little regulation? When did it become OK and even just part of business to state that you screwed people over but it was lawful? If the conflict of interest is between the patient in the hospital and the shareholders....when does it stop? when you've denied care because your first responsibility is to the business dealings of the shareholders? The answer is that it doesn't stop, and it may signal the end of the cycle of pure unfettered capitalism...which might mean a sharp turn back with a new administration or possibly that a tipping point has been reached and the whole thing is gonna come crashing down.

We live in whats left of the shell of a country looking over the fallout of the last 8 years, while those who are not served whatsoever by espousing the neocon ideas of yesterday, continue on in what is the cognitive dissonance of the conscious colliding with whats gone on, or just plain old-fashioned denial. Its sick and it appears sick, even to regular old conservatives looking at what has become of their party. I dont want to play games anymore; I'm tired. There is no status quo in this ever changing landscape of the spotty history of our country. There is only us deciding who we want to be and shutting down the bad influences out there. Bad begets bad, and anger begets hate and blame.... Short of using our laws, damn the torpedos, we return to the gutter that we barely have emerged from.

Who's to blame? You tell me...


Time's 25 people to blame for the financial crisis Vote on their level of guilt



c/p RIP Coco

Labels: bank bailout, credit card industry, crime, Karl Rove, liars

That's a very simple concept that Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner don't seem to be able to understand.

You'd think that these guys, who are supposed to be the top money guys in the country, would understand this simple fact of Economics 101 better than, say, the builder of the unfinished McMansion three blocks away from my kitchen window, who has been trying to sell his unfinished spec house for over a year now, dropping the price from $1.5 million to $1.35 million to $1.249 million -- and no more -- while similar bash-and build houses in the neighborhood languish on the market for $849K. But you'd be wrong, as Paul Krugman points out today:

Why do officials keep offering plans that nobody else finds credible? Because somehow, top officials in the Obama administration and at the Federal Reserve have convinced themselves that troubled assets, often referred to these days as “toxic waste,” are really worth much more than anyone is actually willing to pay for them — and that if these assets were properly priced, all our troubles would go away.

Thus, in a recent interview Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary, tried to make a distinction between the “basic inherent economic value” of troubled assets and the “artificially depressed value” that those assets command right now. In recent transactions, even AAA-rated mortgage-backed securities have sold for less than 40 cents on the dollar, but Mr. Geithner seems to think they’re worth much, much more.

And the government’s job, he declared, is to “provide the financing to help get those markets working,” pushing the price of toxic waste up to where it ought to be.

What’s more, officials seem to believe that getting toxic waste properly priced would cure the ills of all our major financial institutions. Earlier this week, Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, was asked about the problem of “zombies” — financial institutions that are effectively bankrupt but are being kept alive by government aid. “I don’t know of any large zombie institutions in the U.S. financial system,” he declared, and went on to specifically deny that A.I.G. — A.I.G.! — is a zombie.

This is the same A.I.G. that, unable to honor its promises to pay off other financial institutions when bonds default, has already received $150 billion in aid and just got a commitment for $30 billion more.

The truth is that the Bernanke-Geithner plan — the plan the administration keeps floating, in slightly different versions — isn’t going to fly.

[snip]

So why has this zombie idea — it keeps being killed, but it keeps coming back — taken such a powerful grip? The answer, I fear, is that officials still aren’t willing to face the facts. They don’t want to face up to the dire state of major financial institutions because it’s very hard to rescue an essentially insolvent bank without, at least temporarily, taking it over. And temporary nationalization is still, apparently, considered unthinkable.

And why is it unthinkable? Because Republican politicians who are still fighting the Cold War and the same cable news idiots that Jon Stewart and the Daily Show writers so masterfully skewered the other night will scream "SOCIALISM!!!"

This knee-jerk wingnut terror of "the S word" is why we don't have universal health care in this country, with over half of the low-income unemployed without coverage already. And out here in the real world, almost three-quarters of Americans want Federal involvement in the health care distribution system to reduce costs and increase access and six in ten favor think it's the government's responsibility to provide such coverage and access. When the price of laissez-faire subsidize-the-rich corporatism starts to hit home in the form of unemployment and loss of health care coverage, Americans begin to realize the human cost of unfettered Objectivist capitalism, and they don't much care for it.

So while Bernanke and Geithner don't dare take the bols step of nationalization, instead making the absurd claim that toxic assets are "undervalued", they've forgotten the very basic principle that no asset is worth a plug nickel unless someone is willing to pony up the bucks for it.

Labels: economic death watch, Paul Krugman

The WARN Act requires companies to give 60 days notice to employees that a layoff is coming. This isn't 60 days notice to those being laid off, but a blanket warning so that EVERYONE can live in utter, abject terror for the next 60 days. Still, that's better than being blindsided, which is what companies can do under circumstances not covered by the WARN Act.

In a New York Times article today, the deeper truth about American corporations is buried in an article focusing specifically on IBM, whose CEO, Samuel Polisano, announced strong January quarterly profits and told employees in a newsletter at the time, “Most importantly, we will invest in our people.” Of course he didn't say which people, because he then turned around and laid off 1400 of his company's employees. (For the record, Polisano made a cool $24.35 million in 2008. No, he's not running IBM into the ground the way other highly-paid executives are doing to the companies they run, but it's somewhat disingenuous for an executive to talk about investing in his employees and then axing over a thousand of them.)

But IBM IS hiring -- just not for well-paid jobs and not entirely in the US:

In January, for example, it said it would open a call center in Dubuque, Iowa, for corporate customers. It is to employ up to 1,300 people. And Mr. MacDonald, the human resources executive, said I.B.M. was hiring analysts and engineers to work on Internet software, health technology and smart electrical grids.

But I.B.M.’s American employment has declined steadily, down to 29 percent of its worldwide payroll of 398,445 at the end of 2008. The cuts have also come sooner and deeper in North America this year than in recent years.

As part of a government filing last week, I.B.M. said its work force in Brazil, Russia, India and China had climbed to 113,000. These are markets with faster growth than the United States, and less expensive skilled labor.

In interviews, I.B.M. workers whose jobs are being eliminated were mainly chagrined that the undisclosed cuts, and the timing, seemed to contradict the company’s public statements.

Rick Clark, 50, an engineer in East Fishkill, N.Y., had worked for I.B.M. for 11 years. He said he was disappointed in I.B.M. this time because the job cuts were deep and spread across so many businesses and came at a time when I.B.M. has been proclaiming its success. “I do think I.B.M., like other companies, has used this recession as an excuse to lay people off,” he said.

But the important fact to keep in mind is this, as Ross Eisenbrey of the Economic Policy Institute says at the end of the article:

“All our multinational companies are increasingly less American, except when they are asking for tax breaks and increased government spending in their industries,”

Labels: corporatism, globalization, unemployment

Meet HopingForFailure.com, the site that exposes those who would rather see this country enter into a Great Depression that would make the 1930's look like a cakewalk than to see Barack Obama's policies work and expose their "stuff the pockets of the wealthy with cash and the hell with everyone else" doctrine for the miserable failure that we've already seen it to be.

Labels: bloggers

I realize the news that Karl Rove and Harriet Miers are going to testify about the Bush Administration's politicized firing of U.S. attorneys unwilling to trump up charges of "voter fraud" is supposed to be a Very Big Deal, especially when both have been allowed to ignore Congressional subpoenas with absolutely no fear of consequences in the past. But you'll have to forgive me if my response to this is a very big yawn, because I suspect that this Momentous Event™ is going to insist of a lot of stonewalling and/or outright lying on the part of Rove and Miers and an equal amount of gasbaggery from members of the House Judiciary Committee.

Here's why I think it's all so much grandstanding:

Lawmakers will not ask Rove or Miers about privileged conversations they had with members of the Bush White House legal team, and they will not be able to see "four pages of particularly sensitive privileged material" to be described by a Bush representative, the agreement said.

So forgive me if I don't jump up and down and scream "Justice DOES triumph!" at all this. Because until Karl Rove is led off to jail, it's all bullshit.

Labels: Karl Rove

I can't believe I'm going to link to Joan Walsh here. After all, Walsh was one of the chief mainstream spokespeople for the Oh Poor Hillary movement (as opposed to the PUMAs, which were utterly batshit crazy) and is usually the poster child for ineffectual liberals on cable news. But in this piece about the Limbaugh foofarah, she's spot on.

Money quote:

The GOP is in free fall, and it just keeps eating its young. Sarah Palin was the first sacrificial lamb, nominated for vice-president before she was ready (if she'll ever be) and then slaughtered (for the time being, at least) by McCain campaign leaders. Bobby Jindal was trotted out to almost certain failure after Obama's speech last weekend. Now Limbaugh has emasculated the brand-new RNC chair, Michael Steele. I'm sure it's an accident all three represented a possible future of the party that wasn't white and male.

So for now the future of the party is an admitted Oxycontin addict who plea-bargained his way out of a drug conviction, who mocks children and Parkinson's sufferers, who exhibits strange sexual fears about our first black president (why is he worried about "grabbing his ankles?"), who was famously detained on a Dominican Republic vacation for carrying Viagra without a prescription? I wouldn't mention that last little issue, except it helps me agree with Tom DeLay that he's a role model for Republicans: Clearly a party that is afraid to stand up to a bully like Limbaugh needs some kind of political Viagra, immediately. It would be nice to see a Republican whose bouts of integrity and courage lasted more than four hours.

Labels: liberalism, Rush Limbaugh

In the New York Times today, Ken Belson and Richard Sandomir try to make us forget that in just about a month, the Mets, Johan Santana's sore elbow, and Mike Pelfrey's devastated finances (he got caught up in the Stanford Financial disaster), will begin playing baseball in a park named for a bank that's only hanging on by its fingernails thanks to the American taxpayers:

The Mets’ new park, which will open its doors for a Georgetown-St. John’s baseball game March 29, is far more intimate than Shea and corrects some of Shea’s worst faults.

Citi Field will hold about 42,000 fans, 15,000 fewer than Shea. The park is enclosed and many seats wrap around the outfield, so it feels much cozier than Shea’s open-ended bowl, which favored watching football.

During an extensive tour of Citi Field on Tuesday, Jeff Wilpon, the team’s chief operating officer, spoke in the Acela Club, a restaurant in left field that will have 550 seats, table service, a bar and wine cabinets for frequent patrons.

“There’s all this light and air, and then you’re looking back at the field,” Wilpon said. “We want to make people feel they’re in a living room.”

A really, really, really EXPENSIVE living room. (So why not just stay home and watch it in your OWN living room?)

Citi Field has many nooks and crannies that are nothing like Shea’s tired symmetry.

To hold the melted butter?

The grandstand that hangs over right field, for instance, was inspired by the old Tiger Stadium, which Wilpon visited with his grandparents as a child.

To add to that "Frankenstadium" feel.

Citi Field’s exterior is a splendid architectural response to the dullness of Shea, while the inner bowl is muted. Shea’s candy-colored plastic seats are gone (along with generations of chipped paint on the handrails) in favor of dark green seats everywhere.

“Dark green is the color of a classic ballpark,” said Dave Howard, the team’s executive vice president for business operations, as he stood ankle deep in snow. “And we thought the other team in town would use blue.”

I think perhaps "bowl" is an unfortunate word to use to describe a home for the Mets, with its echoes of cleaning a commode.

And then the article quotes team owner Fred Wilpon on what the reality is about professional baseball today:

Everything has a new name, as well. There’s the Ebbets Club, the Delta Sky360 Club and the Caesars Club. Seaver, Hodges and Stengel have their names on three of the five party suites. The name game is not done, either.

“In this economy, you don’t turn down sponsors,” Wilpon said. “Anyone who’s willing to pay. ...”

Even if it's a zombie bank eating up taxpayer money that won the naming rights to the place based on bogus accounting.

Shea Stadium was famous for its various "ethnic nights." Sounds like Wilpon has his own vision of "Negro Day" in mind:

Wilpon said the team had not decided who would throw out the first pitch on opening day April 13. But he said it would be great if President Obama did it on Jackie Robinson Day two nights later.

This puff piece sounds like nothing so much as the franchisee of a new Bahama Breeze waxing rhapsodic about his new "Caribbean-inspired" restaurant that has absolutely nothing to do with any kind of recognizable Caribbean food.

Labels: New York Mets, unintentional hilarity

I don't know about you, but I've found The Daily Show to be funnier than ever in the last month -- heartbreakingly so. I have no idea how they do it, but these days they make me laugh so hard that tears streak down my cheeks. And that's BEFORE I look at my retirement money statements.

Labels: The Daily Show

Aside from the fact that John Cole is one of our favorite bloggers, he's also a perfect example of a Republican who was willing to embrace consensus reality, even though it meant everything he knew at the time was wrong. So while conservatives scream that questioning the legitimacy of a president who was installed by the Supreme Court and questioning that of a president who received 54% of the vote and 335 electoral votes are EXACTLY TEH SAME THING, John shares his memories of George W. Bush's first 100 days:

Most of you won’t understand it, but the Republican base was just as convinced the Democrats were screwing them as the Democratic base was convinced the Republicans were stealing the election. Both sides were equally convinced the other was up to no good.

I also remember the aftermath, and I do remember a lot of anger. I remember the “Selected, not Elected” stuff, I remember protests and a sullied inauguration, I remember a lot of anger. People are just pretending if they say there were not a lot of angry people on the left. It was there, and it was real. Democrats who try to deny that today are full of it (and in fairness, I see very few people who deny that there was a lot of anger). I don’t remember it among the mainstream of the minority in Congress- they sort of seemed resigned to the fact that Bush was President and mouthed stuff about working with him.

[snip]

Other than that, the big issue was the tax cuts. Our surplus was going to be too big, and we had to return the money to the people. I remember Alan Greenspan concern trolling the country about too much government ownership of private companies. I know, I know. We got the government ownership of companies anyway, Alan, and this all sounds like the history of an alien universe considering the mess we are in right now. And I remember a lot of Democrats were really opposed to the tax cuts, and called them irresponsible and said they would lead to real financial problems (how did that prediction work out?) and that we had a lot of stuff to pay for (like the national debt). I remember them repeatedly saying it was bad policy and it should be stopped.

But here is what I don’t remember. I don’t remember one single Democrat standing up on national television and loudly proclaiming “I hope George Bush fails.” I simply do not remember it happening at all.

So until Michael Scherer and others can show me the clips or transcripts of Democrats sitting around rooting for Bush and this country to fail, I think he and everyone else defending the Republicans and Limbaugh, who are explicitly stating they want President Obama to fail and stating it at a time of FAR greater consequence than we had in 2001, can quite simply just shut up.

Go read the rest. Because conservatives are great at equivocation of things that really are different. Right here in the comments, we have Barry, who I know is an intelligent fellow who rescues dogs and is, in fact, capable of a coherent and even cordial conversation with people with whom he disagrees, claiming that pointing out that Republicans are a bunch of whiny-ass titty babies who lost the election but are threatening to filibuster all of Obama's judicial nominations if he doesn't nominate whom they tell hiim to when Bill Frist used to threaten the nuclear option on the rare occasions that the Democrats tried to use the filibuster when they were the minority, is trying to silence dissent. I know he knows better, and so do the people who think that reluctantly saying that we might not like Bush but the country was attacked and while he's not much he's all we've got is EXACTLY THE SAME as saying "I want him to fail." Unlike these froth-mouthed dittoheads who constitute today's conservative movement, we are adults who recognize that we don't get our way on everything.

John Cole woke up and realized that everything he knew was wrong, and changed his mind BASED ON NEW INFORMATION. It's just a shame that so many other conservatives are so tethered to their wingnut religion that they simply can't change, no matter what happens.

Talk about getting money from a stone:

Dozens of specially trained agents work on the third floor of DCM Services here, calling up the dear departed’s next of kin and kindly asking if they want to settle the balance on a credit card or bank loan, or perhaps make that final utility bill or cellphone payment.

The people on the other end of the line often have no legal obligation to assume the debt of a spouse, sibling or parent. But they take responsibility for it anyway.

“I am out of work now, to be honest with you, and money is very tight for us,” one man declared on a recent phone call after he was apprised of his late mother-in-law’s $280 credit card bill. He promised to pay $15 a month.

Dead people are the newest frontier in debt collecting, and one of the healthiest parts of the industry. Those who dun the living say that people are so scared and so broke it is difficult to get them to cough up even token payments.

Collecting from the dead, however, is expanding. Improved database technology is making it easier to discover when estates are opened in the country’s 3,000 probate courts, giving collectors an opportunity to file timely claims. But if there is no formal estate and thus nothing to file against, the human touch comes into play.

New hires at DCM train for three weeks in what the company calls “empathic active listening,” which mixes the comforting air of a funeral director with the nonjudgmental tones of a friend. The new employees learn to use such anger-deflecting phrases as “If I hear you correctly, you’d like...”

“You get to be the person who cares,” the training manager, Autumn Boomgaarden, told a class of four new hires.

For some relatives, paying is pragmatic. The law varies from state to state, but generally survivors are not required to pay a dead relative’s bills from their own assets. In theory, however, collection agencies could go after any property inherited from the deceased.

But sentiment also plays a large role, the agencies say. Some relatives are loyal to the credit card or bank in question. Some feel a strong sense of morality, that all debts should be paid. Most of all, people feel they are honoring the wishes of their loved ones.

This is almost enough to make me want to rack up a bunch of debt so that if Mr. Brilliant outlives me, he can tell these people to go fuck themselves. Of course then I'd be as big an idiot as the lawyer from Lafayette, Louisiana who doesn't want to earn more because she may have to pay an additional $300 in taxes on incremental $10,000 in income.

Labels: corporatism, icepick meet forehead, You can't make this shit up

Perhaps the executives at Countrywide weren't incompetent after all. Perhaps they realized that they stood to gain more by wrecking the country's economy than by doing business the right way:

Fairly or not, Countrywide Financial and its top executives would be on most lists of those who share blame for the nation’s economic crisis. After all, the banking behemoth made risky loans to tens of thousands of Americans, helping set off a chain of events that has the economy staggering.

So it may come as a surprise that a dozen former top Countrywide executives now stand to make millions from the home mortgage mess.

Stanford L. Kurland, Countrywide’s former president, and his team have been buying up delinquent home mortgages that the government took over from other failed banks, sometimes for pennies on the dollar. They get a piece of what they can collect.

“It has been very successful — very strong,” John Lawrence, the company’s head of loan servicing, told Mr. Kurland one recent morning in a glass-walled boardroom here at PennyMac’s spacious headquarters, opened last year in the same Los Angeles suburb where Countrywide once flourished.

“In fact, it’s off-the-charts good,” he told Mr. Kurland, who was leaning back comfortably in his leather boardroom chair, even as the financial markets in New York were plunging.

[snip]

It is quite evident that their efforts are, in fact, helping many distressed homeowners.

“Literally, their assistance saved my family’s home,” said Robert Robinson, of Felton, Pa., whose interest rate was cut by more than half, making his mortgage affordable again.

But to some, it is disturbing to see former Countrywide executives in the industry again. “It is sort of like the arsonist who sets fire to the house and then buys up the charred remains and resells it,” said Margot Saunders, a lawyer with the National Consumer Law Center, which for years has sought to place limits on what it calls abusive lending practices by Countrywide and other companies.

So are we supposed to give these guys a fucking medal for putting people in this position in the first place?

Labels: corruption, greed, You can't make this shit up

Every day I become more convinced that Blazing Saddles may be the most important movie in the history of film, because not a day goes by that people who think anything to the left of Rush Limbaugh is Communist don't remind me of the "simple farmers...people of the land...the common clay of the new west....you know....MORONS" described by Gene Wilder as the Waco Kid to the town's new black sheriff.

This little gem was found over at Pandagon, where Jesse Taylor's triumphant return is almost enough to redeem him from his time in exile as an intern working on Jerry Springer's political campaign:

President Barack Obama's tax proposal -- which promises to increase taxes for those families with incomes of $250,000 or more -- has some Americans brainstorming ways to decrease their pay in an attempt to avoid paying higher taxes on every dollar they earn over the quarter million dollar mark.

A 63-year-old attorney based in Lafayette, La., who asked not to be named, told ABCNews.com that she plans to cut back on her business to get her annual income under the quarter million mark should the Obama tax plan be passed by Congress and become law.

"We are going to try to figure out how to make our income $249,999.00," she said.

"We have to find a way out where we can make just what we need to just under the line so we can benefit from Obama's tax plan," she added. "Why kill yourself working if you're going to give it all away to people who aren't working as hard?"

It's hard to know where to start with a statement of such mindboggling stupidity, one which if she had allowed herself to be named would make me want to warn everyone in Louisiana to stay far, far away from this person because she is an idiot and incapable of finding her own ass. Obviously, this "attorney" doesn't understand that a) graduated tax rates mean that the increased rate would only apply to the amount of TAXABLE (not GROSS) income over $250,000; and b) it still isn't taxing ALL her money. Never mind that $250,000 buys you a very nice lifestyle in Louisiana, even in Lafayette, which appears to be a tonier area of Bobby Jindal's America. And of course there's c), which is the fallacious notion that in this country, working hard means you earn more; a notion which one look at banking executives ought to put to rest.

As Jesse says:

I one day hope to earn enough money to consider acting like an irrational asshole and having it become national news....What’s funny about this is that it’s the dumbest thing a human being has ever said about their own money. Having said this immediately means that in the event of a Marxist revolution, you deserve to have any money in your possession taken from you and spent on every single thing you hate until your children have gay abortions.

The version of the article I've linked above clarifies how the U.S. tax system works, for the many idiots who think that if you're in a particular tax bracket, and you make $100,000, that you pay that percentage off the entire amount. Perhaps this is in response to some of the commentary on it that Steve Benen rounds up here. The discouraging aspect to all this is not that an idiot like the lawyer quoted in the article isn't above putting the gun to her own head and saying "Nobody move or the immature Objectivist gets it", but that there are still far too many Americans who just don't understand what a tax bracket is. I broke it down a bit last year in a post about why the McCain/Palin "health care proposal" was a bad deal for the middle class.

I remember thinking when I was a kid that a house with a concrete patio was the next level up from my family's income, and a pool was the next level up from that. My parents used to dream of "moving up" from a $25,000 house to a $35,000 house. The assumption then was that at a certain income level, you lived a certain way, and that there were certain trappings that went with the various levels up the ladder. A patio. A pool. A second full bathroom. I've been thinking lately that this society built in this country over the last decade, in which everyone feels entitled to the trappings of the wealthy all started with automobile leasing, which allowed working- and middle-class people to drive luxury cars they couldn't afford to actually buy. This of course led us inexorably down the path to 6000-square-foot McMansions on 7500-foot lots, built 8 feet from the property line of crappy fake stucco and particleboard, but with crown moldings, "bridal staircases", closets the size of yesterday's living rooms, and granite countertops and Jenn-Air ranges for all. There's no better example of this change than right in my own neighborhood, in which a tiny 1950's ranch house in which a family raised two perfectly healthy and normal children was knocked down a few years ago and replaced with one of these monstrosities, in which a family of today feels they need all these gewgaws in order to raise two children.

This sense of entitlement to the trappings of the wealthy has made the middle class feel more closely allied to the top of the ladder than the bottom, which is why the current hemorrhage of jobs from our economy has been met with such a state of culture shock -- people have forgotten that the guys at the top; the ones they've been trying so hard to emulate with their plastic crown moldings and leased Escalades, hold all the aces.

But in answer to the question about why the wealthy should pay more, I turn to Mr. Brilliant, who notes that those who use more of the social contract SHOULD pay more. If you want to say that the social contract is the system of services that forms an organized society -- police, fire departments, roads and bridges, the tech guys who keep the international banking system going, the contractors who build the home theatres and koi ponds for their mansions -- it's clear that the wealthy utilize more of this social contract. So why shouldn't they pay more for it? If someone breaks into my house, it would be frightening, but there just isn't anything of real value that they're likely to take, because I don't own any valuable jewelry or anything else of significant monetary worth on the secondary market. So shouldn't the wealthy, who have more to lose in the event of burglary or complete social breakdown, pay more to keep the whole thing going?

Labels: greed, idiocy

When George W. Bush was president, the Republicans wanted swift capitulation by Democrats in confirming any nutjob that Bush wanted to put on the Federal bench. Now that a Democrat is in the White House, they're demanding veto power for themselves over all judicial nominees:

A letter signed by all 41 Senate Republicans was sent to the White House and Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Patrick Leahy yesterday in which the GOP demanded inclusion in, and ultimately veto power over, the confirmation of the president's judicial nominees.

The demand was a sharp turn-around for Republicans, who had for the past eight years been calling for the swift confirmation of then-President George W. Bush's appointees.

The letter is couched in historical language, which notes that "our Democratic colleagues have emphasized [senate involvement in appointments] for several years" and "the principle of senatorial consultation (or senatorial courtesy) is rooted in this special responsibility, and its application dates to the Administration of George Washington." But the GOP's request for veto power of nominees before the judiciary even debates a particular appointment is far from the norm.

The letter gives lip service to themes of bipartisanship, saying they "look forward to working with" the president and that "the judicial appointments process has become needlessly acrimonious." However, what they demand is nothing short of minority control. The letter states that if Republicans "are not consulted on, and approve of, a nominee from our states" they will "not support moving forward," presumably threatening a filibuster.

The phrase "senatorial courtesy" may sound better than "threat of filibuster," but as Politico points out, "the letter is an opening salvo in what could be a partisan battle in the Obama years." The public perception of the use of filibusters is perhaps reflected in this language of bipartisanship that insists upon senatorial courtesy "regardless of party affiliation." The letter emphasizes the idea of working together, when the true intent is more threat than peace offering.

The GOP's determination to oppose Obama's judicial appointments became clear a little more than a week after the 44th president was elected. As we reported back in November, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) pledged to get his colleagues onboard an aggressive filibuster campaign against what he termed "radical leftist" nominees he feared would come out of this new White House.

Yet, back in 2005, Kyl was firmly on the opposite side of this argument:

"This is strictly about whether or not a minority of senators is going to prevent the president from being able to name and get confirmed judges that he chooses after he's been elected by the American people."

In fact, the recent past offers many instances in which conservatives attempted to shame Democrats into abandoning filibuster rights in judicial appointments. The "senatorial consultation" referred to in the letter, also known as the "advice and consent" clause in the Constitution, was argued by supporters of Bush to mean that the Senate's role was to confirm or deny appointees, not offer advice. For a comprehensive run-down on the hypocrisy of GOP lawmakers and activists regarding this argument, see this blog entry at Right Wing Watch

How much of this is the delusional nature of Republicans and how much is a response to Barack Obama's attempts at bipartisanship when Republicans sense any attempts at consensus as weakness is anyone's guess. But the sheer chutzpah that they continue to demonstrate is simply breathtaking.

Labels: chutzpah, Greedy Republican Bastards, WATBs

As I continue to read about the extent to which the Bush Administration was prepared to use the 9/11 attacks to destroy everything this country stands for, I keep being reminded of the line that Cate Blanchett as Elizabeth I says about 1:30 into this final scene from the 1998 film Elizabeth:

There will always be voices who say that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are gone, and that we should not look back but look forward. But just as in this version of the fall of Lord Robert Dudley, Elizabeth keeps him around as a reminder of the treachery that she will always face, so must we never, ever forget just how close George W. Bush, who said on March 18, 2002 that we were attacked because "they hate our freedom", was prepared to take away more of our freedom than terrorists could ever dream possible:

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the Justice Department secretly gave the green light for the U.S. military to attack apartment buildings and office complexes inside the United States, deploy high-tech surveillance against U.S. citizens and potentially suspend First Amendment freedom-of-the-press rights in order to combat the terror threat, according to a memo released Monday.

Many of the actions discussed in the Oct. 23, 2001, memo to then White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's chief lawyer, William Haynes, were never actually taken.

But the memo from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel—along with others made public for the first time Monday—illustrates with new details the extraordinary post-9/11 powers asserted by Bush administration lawyers. Those assertions ultimately led to such controversial policies as allowing the waterboarding of terror suspects and permitting warrantless wiretapping of U.S. citizens—steps that remain the subject of ongoing investigations by Congress and the Justice Department. The memo was co-written by John Yoo, at the time a deputy attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel. Yoo, now a professor at the Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, has emerged as one of the central figures in those ongoing investigations.

In perhaps the most surprising assertion, the Oct. 23, 2001, memo suggested the president could even suspend press freedoms if he concluded it was necessary to wage the war on terror. "First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully," Yoo wrote in the memo entitled "Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activity Within the United States."

This claim was viewed as so extreme that it was essentially (and secretly) revoked—but not until October of last year, seven years after the memo was written and with barely three and a half months left in the Bush administration.

I suppose George Bush was still holding out hope that we would be attacked again and he could become the dictator he so clearly wanted to be. And once it became clear that any attack would be viewed as a false flag operation by a sizable number of Americans, he had to revoke these rules rather than pass them on to be used by anyone else -- perhaps the one remotely redemptive thing his Administration did, even if their reasons for doing so were self-serving.

And today, while Rush Limbaugh freaks out on national television and Freepers become ever more irrational about Barack Obama every day, attributing to him the sinister motivations that we now know for certain motivated the previous Administration, we too must always keep George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and their nefarious deeds at the front of our minds, to always remind us of how close we came to danger.

Labels: Bush Administration, dictatorship, totalitarianism

Here's how the SEC defines a pump-and-dump scheme:

"Pump and dump" schemes, also known as "hype and dump manipulation," involve the touting of a company's stock (typically microcap companies) through false and misleading statements to the marketplace. After pumping the stock, fraudsters make huge profits by selling their cheap stock into the market.

Pump and dump schemes often occur on the Internet where it is common to see messages posted that urge readers to buy a stock quickly or to sell before the price goes down, or a telemarketer will call using the same sort of pitch. Often the promoters will claim to have "inside" information about an impending development or to use an "infallible" combination of economic and stock market data to pick stocks. In reality, they may be company insiders or paid promoters who stand to gain by selling their shares after the stock price is "pumped" up by the buying frenzy they create. Once these fraudsters "dump" their shares and stop hyping the stock, the price typically falls, and investors lose their money.

The U.S. economy has been nothing but a pump-and-dump scheme for nearly 30 years. I remember when I started working at Standard & Poor's in 1983 for the princely sum of $19,000/year, having decided that continuing to toil away in what was basically secretarial positions at companies in glamor industries was going to reap me nothing but a life of ever-less-genteel poverty. It was the beginning of the move away from defined-benefit pensions and into 401(k) plans, which were sold as a way of not just controlling your own money, but as an opportunity to earn more returns through investments, and therefore have MORE money in retirement, than you would with a traditional pension. It isn't as if we were given a choice between a pension and a 401(k), companies just decided to eliminate pensions and substitute them with 401(k) plans. If you wanted the company match, you had to participate.

And now, here we are, with the Dow closing at half its peak value. It isn't that baby boomers are all at once taking their money out of the stock market, because only those born in the first year after WWII are even starting to retire, and those would be early retirees at 62 or 63. No, it seems as if the people who run the financial system of this country wanted to make sure that they stole everything we put in before we had a chance to take it out.

This commenter at the New Jersey Real Estate blog nails it:

In the 80’s, it was a time when the boomers were just getting full swing into working in the real economy.

They were told, work hard, and invest all your mony into 401k & pension funds, so you can “retire”.

That was the pump. The boomers funneled so much money onto Wall St, via planned consolidation.

aka: The pump

Now, as the booms are approaching the retirement age, and will be wanting to start tapping that so called “saved” or “invested retirement accounts”, they will find its empty. The money is gone.

Its been moved offshore, or into the hands of a few. Thanks to the boomers.
and now, they are being left with nothing as they haved served their purposes, to give Wall St consolidation mogels your lifetimes earnings.

aka: The dump

Yes, America, it wasn't just Madoff robbing people blind. The entire financial system of this country was built to do it. And now the same guys who helped drive the getaway car are contining to make sure that we're all living on subway grates in our old age.

Labels: greed

Shorter Rush Limbaugh: Respect Mah Authoritah!

Labels: idiocy, Republicans, South Park

For the last four years, until January 20, I frequently expressed concern about the dictatorial ambitions of George W. Bush. Many people thought me paranoid, or crazy. After all, no American president would so brazenly flout the very Constitution he'd pledged to uphold, would he?

Well, yes, he would have. Given another terrorist attack, or perhaps even another natural disaster on a par with Hurricane Katrina, and he might have:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. military could have kicked in doors to raid a suspected terrorist cell in the United States without a warrant under a Bush-era legal memo the Justice Department made public on Monday.

The memo, from October 23, 2001, also said constitutional free-speech protections and a prohibition on unreasonable search and seizure could take a back seat to military needs in fighting terrorism inside the country.

It was one of nine previously undisclosed memos and legal opinions which shed light on former U.S. President George W. Bush's legal guidance as he launched a war against terrorism after the September 11 attacks.

They depict an administration apparently determined to expand the president's power after the shock of September 11, and add fuel to critics' charges that fundamental constitutional protections were threatened in the process.

"The current campaign against terrorism may require even broader exercises of federal power domestically," Justice Department officials John Yoo and Robert Delahunty wrote White House counsel Alberto Gonzales in the October 23 memo.

"We do not think that a military commander carrying out a raid on a terrorist cell would be required to demonstrate probable cause or to obtain a (search) warrant," they said.

The U.S. Supreme Court has held that the Constitution's Fourth Amendment ordinarily requires a probable cause and a warrant to execute a search. However, the memo said those requirements "are unsuited to the demands of wartime."

Furthermore, it said, "First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully."

When we think of all the "You're with us or you're with the terrorists" rhetoric, and the way antiwar nuns were put on the no-fly list, and Quaker peace groups were infiltrated and put under surveillance, and then you read this, it's hard not to become aware of just how close we came to the dictatorship that Bush had so often expressed he'd like to head.

Labels: dictatorship, George W. Bush

This morning the lead stories on the major networks' morning shows were as follows: CBS' The Early Show has an exclusive interview with the frighteningly Botoxed Vicki Iseman, who mysteriously disappeared last year after the New York Times published a report indicating that her relationship with John McCain was at the very least "inappropriate." Considering that McCain lost and everyone's forgotten about her, her reappearance at this time is baffling. Meanwhile, Today is leading with the vitally important story about Caylee Anthony's mother, and Good Morning America leads with whether Rhianna and Chris Brown are still together.

And you wonder why Not-Joe Not-a-Plumber is a Republican hero?

Meanwhile, CNN still has Rush Limbaugh's unhinged rant from CPAC in heavy rotation, and Pat Buchanan's head is exploding over on Morning Schmeggegge about Barack Obama's declared war on conservatism.

But amidst all the lunacy is a tidbit of good news, brought to us via Blue Girl:

(Washington, DC) The Vice President today commended the new owners of Republic Windows and Doors, a Chicago window manufacturing plant that was shuttered late last year, resulting in the lay-off of its 250 union workers. Republic was purchased in bankruptcy court last week by Serious Materials, a California-based company that makes energy efficient windows. Serious Materials has announced plans to reopen the Republic factory and to eventually rehire all 250 of its laid-off workers at their former pay levels. Serious Materials said it purchased Republic because the Recovery Act will increase demand for its products.

"The reopening of this factory and the rehiring of these workers provide an excellent example of how the money in the Recovery Act is targeted to spur job creation quickly," said Vice President Biden. "These workers will not only earn a paycheck again; they will go back to work creating products that will benefit America's long-term economic future."

At the request of President Obama, Vice President Biden is overseeing the implementation of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, working with federal, state and local officials to ensure that money moves quickly and is spent appropriately so that the President's goal of saving or creating 3.5 million jobs is achieved.

"When Republic shut its doors in December, the jobs Illinois lost were not only good paying jobs, they were good for the environment too," said Senator Durbin. "Those are the very jobs we need to preserve in order to put our economy back on track. The economic recovery package has recreated a market for energy efficient materials that virtually disappeared as our economic crisis deepened. With $16 billion available for weatherization programs, companies like Republic will be able to reopen their doors and put people back to work."

Last Friday the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the U.S. Department of Energy announced an historic partnership to streamline and better coordinate federal weatherization efforts to make it much easier for families to weatherize their homes and spur a new home energy efficiency industry that could create tens of thousands of jobs.

HUD and DOE have created a high level interagency task force to coordinate home weatherization efforts under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and to leverage those funds to build a home energy efficiency industry in the U.S. that will: create or retain tens of thousands of jobs, lower energy costs of vulnerable low-income households, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. HUD and DOE will allocate $16 billion in economic recovery funds to retrofit existing homes.

If this is what war against conservatism looks like, I say bring it.

Labels: economic stimulus, Obama Administration, renewable energy

I've never been under any delusion that a politician is going to go to Washington and serve anyone other than his corporate masters. After all, there's only so much that $25 donations from ordinary people will do. But do we really have to kowtow to Wall Street to THIS degree -- to the point that we're talking about a system of "workplace pensions" that are not pensions at all, but that would involve your employer withholding money from your paycheck and putting it into a direct-deposit IRA account:

Obama is proposing a 4.7 percent increase in the Labor Department’s budget to $13.3 billion for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1. That’s an increase from an estimated $12.7 billion in the current fiscal year and $11.8 billion in 2008, according to a budget outline submitted to Congress today.

The budget “lays the groundwork for future establishment of a system of automatic workplace pensions, to operate alongside Social Security, that is expected to dramatically increase” retirement and personal savings, Obama’s Office of Management and Budget said in its outline, without giving details on the costs.

The plan would force employers that don’t offer retirement plans to enroll employees in a “direct-deposit IRA account,” with the option for workers themselves to opt out. Currently, 75 million working Americans, or about half the workforce, lacks employer-based retirement plans, according to the administration.

I remember when 401(k) plans started to come into play; how they were sold as a way for employees to control their own retirement funding and "make more in the stock market" than they would have had from a traditional defined-benefit pension. How's YOUR 401(k) balance these days? I know I was on the way to if not an easy retirement, at least a sort-of manageable one, but that notion is gone now, probably forever. How many employers do you think will continue to offer 401(k) plans with a match once these plans are in effect? And what happens if you don't have an employer because your job and any other job you could conceivably do has disappeared, either to outsourcing or because the company went under due to greed and mismanagement?

It's all well and good to encouraging saving, but the notion of an employer withholding the pay of, say, a home health aide making seven bucks an hour while her agency pockets twenty-five, into what they can call a "workplace pension" is just laughable. Low-wage workers often don't have anything left to save after putting food on the table and a roof over their heads. And just how much of a pension is putting away five bucks a week going to provide in someone's old age, especially after Big Wall Street gets through taking their cut and "investing" it in stocks of companies that cook the books?

As Lambert notes over at Corrente:

Why are there only two options?

Right now the proposal is:

[ ] Private plan
[ ] Opt out

but why isn't it:

[ ] Social Security
[ ] Private plan
[ ] Opt out

Suppose I accept the implicit argument that Americans don't save enough, and more retirement money is good. Why are they forcing me to give Big Money a second chance at vaporizing my money with an IRA instead of a 401(k)? Seems to me that for many, Social Security would be the better option because it's safer.

And isn't the argument here exactly the same as with health care? Force the private sector to compete with government and the public will get a better deal?

As it is, this just looks like a scam to generate more fees for Big Money to manage my account. But I don't want it managed. I want it safe.

I realize that the Obama Administration's economic team consists of the many of the same clowns who allowed us to get into this mess, with people who might represent actual CONSTRUCTIVE change like Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz and Nouriel Roubini forced to sit on the sidelines and watch. But if the President thinks that handing more employee money to Wall Street is going to make Rush Limbaugh shut up, he'd better guess again.

Labels: economic death watch

Yesterday afternoon I had the privilege of accompanying the official B@B Broadway Zen Master, ModFab, to the last preview matinee of the new Des McAnuff-helmed revival of Guys and Dolls. It's a mark of the state of Broadway today that the Great White Way has decided that a million high school drama clubs can't be wrong, and that Frank Loesser's musical masterpiece is as close to a sure thing as you're going to get this year. That certainty isn't based on the idea of packing the cast with the kind of movie-audience-bait stars on which Broadway seems to rely these days, because other than Lauren Graham, the MILF from The Gilmore Girls, you have to be either a Broadway buff or an aficionado of indie character actors to recognize the rest of the cast. But I would guess that one in five Americans has either at one time or another been at least peripherally associated with one of the tens of thousands of school and amateur productions of Guys and Dolls, or has seen the terrific 1992 revival in which Nathan Lane put Frank Sinatra's Nathan Detroit out of its miscast misery forever and Faith Prince snatched the role of Adelaide away from Vivian Blaine forever.

Not even a generation has passed since Broadway last saw a revival of this show, and perhaps it's just too soon for another one, because even though they're nowhere to be seen, Nathan Lane and Faith Prince hang over this production the way the ghost of Ronald Reagan haunts the lost Republican Party. It isn't that this production is bad; after all, if tens of thousands of middle and high schools can't ruin this show, it just isn't wreckable.

But when you're planning to sell tickets at over a hundred bucks a pop, you don't want to have people like me, with seventeen-year-old memories of the last revival, and worse, 35-year-old memories of their own high school productions still fresh, shaking their heads and thinking, "No...NO! 'Nu?' is not supposed to be SUNG! It's Yiddish, dammit! Let Nathan and Faith show you how it's done..."

Oh, this production is pleasant enough, but it doesn't sing the way it's supposed to. I thought the ongepotchket neon signs all over the theatre were stolen from Baz Luhrmann's La Boheme of a few years ago, but ModFab tells me that almost identical signage can be seen ten blocks uptown at the August Wilson Theatre, where McAnuff's other show, Jersey Boys, is still playing. He says McAnuff is in love with scenery rather than actors, and in this production it shows. For some reason, the show is moved back in time to the 1930's milieu of Damon Runyon's original stories, which does give the show a certain depressing, and I hope unintentional, timeliness, but it also allows McAnuff to do things with giant hulking pieces of Art Deco buildings that look like extra pieces left over from Tim Burton's Gotham City -- a kind of Depression-era Stonehenge. Some of it is effective, but there's only so much you can do with a revolving door, and the sheer size of these pieces doesn't give the actors much room to breathe.

I had thought Oliver Platt to be an inspired piece of casting as Nathan Detroit, but he just doesn't know what to do with this role -- an astounding idea, given how hard it is to imagine any working actor not having been in one of those many high school productions of this show. I'm not old enough to have seen Sam Levene in this role, but I've heard the original soundtrack from 1955, and Platt is more like what I imagine Levene must have been -- a kind of rumpled, sad sack ne'er-do-well instead of the cartoon that Nathan Lane wrought in 1992. This is all well and good, but Platt doesn't have the comic chops to time his character's best lines properly, and throws away what makes this character appealing, leaving just a fat, unpleasant, zhlub for whom you can't imagine a sparkly creature like Lauren Graham waiting fourteen years.

I was surprised at how much I enjoyed Lauren Graham as Adelaide, though even though she's older than Faith Prince was in 1992, still looks too girlish, and therefore lacks the kind of aging-bimbo pathos that Faith Prince brought to the role. She's cute as a button, she sings reasonably well and looks to be having far too good a time to be the unhappy and frustrated "well-known fiancée".

Craig Bierko is a somewhat smarmy Sky Masterson, which I found a refreshing take on what is often a thankless, colorless leading-man role, but Kate Jennings Grant, with a distracting facial resemblance to Kristin Scott-Thomas, is somewhat colorless in the often thankless ingenue role as Sarah Brown. The Sky/Sarah romance has always seemed to me to be the least interesting and fun part of Guys and Dolls, seemingly having walked in from something by Rogers and Hammerstein, and while neither of this pair sets the stage on fire, they're certainly adequate, and Bierko's "Jake Gyllenhaal by way of Andrew Dice Clay" mannerisms take on Masterson feels fresher than just about anything else here.

The head-scratching thing about Guys and Dolls is that composer and lyricist Frank Loesser doesn't give the best songs to any of the four leads. I know this is the "hum the songs on the way out of the theatre" show to end all "hum the songs on the way out of the theatre" shows, with one great song after another (and unfortunately, the unsingable "My Time of Day" plunked right down like a giant honking turd right in the middle). But it's the Fifth Banana role of Nicely-Nicely Johnson who not only has most of the show's funniest lines, but also the best songs. So it was a little odd to see this show's Nicely, Tituss Burgess, swallowing his vocals in "Fugue for Tinhorns" and the first half of the "Sit Down You're Rocking the Boat". Burgess clearly doesn't feel the whole Runyon thing, and at times his performance veered dangerously close to eye-rolling Chris Tuckerish broad racial stereotype. But when he opens up his pipes in the second half of the Big Showstopper (its gospel influence finally brought out from under the table), you wonder where the hell this guy has been for the last two hours.

Far better among the guys is Steve Rosen, who as his name would indicate, understands the undercurrent of Yiddish theatre that pervades Abe Burrows' book and in perhaps a first, it's he who "fronts" the aforementioned "Fugue for Tinhorns", which for my money is the best damn opening song in Broadway history. But for sheer scene-stealing goodness, you can't beat the spectacular Mary Testa, who carries the entire stage on her shoulders as the formidable General Cartwright. I always have a soft spot for the women who play this role, because this was the role I was "stuck" with as a snarky misfit teenager who could never appreciate how much more fun the battle-axe roles are than the sexpot or ingenue roles I coveted at the time. But as good as Testa is in her few scenes, and as hilarious and utterly Runyonesque as Rosen is, they can't compensate for the show's glum leading man, its hulking sets, and amateurish choreography by Sergio Trujillo, which put breakdance moves in a 1930's setting and made the dance numbers seem endless when they should be energizing.

But in the end it's Guys and Dolls, so how bad can it be? The question is whether it's worth a hundred bucks a pop, and the answer is that you might be better served by going to YouTube, typing in the show's title, and checking out some of the charming excerpts from the many amateur productions of this show produced every year. Like this one:


Or, you could do what Mr. Brilliant and I are doing next weekend, and support Broadway by taking in Avenue Q again. Or you could take in ModFab's latest production, Not Her (and other exiles on March 10 and 11 at Dixon Place.

(UPDATE: In keeping with the title of this review, Benjamin Ivry in the Forward has a must-read perspective, with a title I wish I'd thought of, for all GAD-ophiles on the snark behind Frank Loesser's music, and on the Jewishness of the Runyon milieu.)

Labels: arts, pop culture