Florida, otherwise known as the Crazy State, has a governor who was elected despite having been at the helm of a company that pleaded guilty to the biggest Medicare fraud in history. Under the plea bargain settlement, Columbia-HCA agreed to pay $840 million in criminal and civil penalties.

Rick Scott said when he first ran for the governorship that his net worth was $218 million. At the time a blind trust statute apparently written specificaly to deal with hiding Scott's ill-gotten gains became law, he stated his end-of-2012 net worth was $84 million.

Like so many so-called fiscal conservatives, Scott made his millions stuffing his pockets with taxpayer cash. Now, no longer running a company that can bilk the government, unable to find a way to profit off of a federal expansion of Medicaid as a result of the Affordable Care Act, he is running seven points behind former governor Charlie Crist.

So what does Rick Scott do? Well, you can't fault the man's initiative in finding new ways to redirect taxpayer money into his own pockets. On Thursday, Scott did a photo-op at 21st Century Oncology, a cancer treatment center in Fort Myers, promoting an increase of $30 million in the state's funding for cancer research and treatment over last year's $50 million:

The $60 million wouldn’t help companies such as 21st Century Oncology, which operates 179 treatment centers in 16 states and six foreign countries, but the $20 million in research grants could benefit smaller organizations not affiliated with universities.

"There’s something in this for us, and it’s not exactly the same as what’s in it for the University of Florida and other centers," said 21st Century Oncology Chief Medical Officer Constantine Mantz. "But to his credit, (Scott) has thought about some of the little guys in the state."

Mantz said most funding for its roughly 20-person research staff comes from drug companies and federal grants. He expects the company to "get in line" with research proposals, competing with others for a slice of the $20 million.

"We really have not had any ability to access state funds for any of our research activities, and so this is important for us," Mantz said.

But facilities like 21st Century Oncology will now, thanks to the sudden beneficence of Florida Governor Rick Scott, currently fighting for his political life in Florida.

Upon seeing this tremendously exciting development in cancer research in the Sunshine State, my cynical nose smelled a rat. Of course there was the obvious tactic of throwing around money in an election year, but the appearance not at a research hospital or university, but at a smallish for-profit health care facility, given Scott's history, made my spidey-sense go all a-tingle. What financial interest did Rick Scott have in this particular company?

And lo and behold, a two-minute Google search revealed this reprint from the Palm Beach Post from May 14, 2011:

On Friday, the ethics commission without comment accepted Executive Director Philip Claypool's recommended opinion, which confirmed that Scott would likely be shielded from potential violations of state ethics laws by creating the trust.

Scott's holdings are mostly in large, publicly traded companies, but attorneys for the governor also provided specific details of five other investments with clear Florida ties. Scott's most controversial investment, Solantic Corp., an urgent care company he founded in 2001, wasn't part of the panel's review.

Scott last month said he was selling the company after pushing back against criticism that the firm could profit from health care initiatives his administration was advancing. But Scott and Burgess said Friday that the sale hasn't happened yet.

"We're just waiting for regulatory approval," Scott said, adding that he expected the sale to be finalized within 30 days.

Burgess said Solantic's sale to minority investors in the firm has been delayed by difficulty in transferring a number of licenses held by Solantic. The move could take as long as 60 days, he said. Scott initially refused to sell Solantic, then moved it into a trust held by his wife, Ann, while refusing to restrict the firm from seeking business from the state. The ethics opinion Scott sought and received Friday made no mention of his wife's assets.

While Scott spent $73 million of his own money on last fall's race for governor, his wife steered $12.8 million from the F. Annette Scott Revocable Trust to her husband's campaign.

As questions lingered about Solantic's possible role in a state Medicaid overhaul or expanded employee drug testing sought by Scott, the governor last month announced the sale.

Scott has talked about putting his assets into a blind trust since the campaign. But it, too, is a lengthy process, Burgess said Friday.

Scott, though, insisted later, "It's formed."

Three of the companies detailed in Friday's request from Scott for an advisory opinion from the ethics panel are in the propane and natural gas transportation business. The fourth is Republic Services, the nation's second-largest waste-hauling company.

Scott also is a limited partner in a New York-based investment fund that has a controlling interest in 21st Century Oncology, which operates cancer radiation centers in Florida.

Now a limited partnership in the owner of the company at which this photo-op took place is not the same as being CEO of two major healthcare companies. But you have to almost admire Rick Scott's dogged determination to stuff his family coffers with as much public money as he can, while he can. It's the Republican way.

Labels: cancer, crooks, Greedy Republican Bastards, hypocrisy, Medicaid, Medicare, Rick Scott, What The Fuck Is It With Florida

It's pretty well known around these here parts that my colleague jurassicpork and I disagreed on voting in the last election. For me, the thought of President Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan in the #2 spot was just unthinkable. But then, I never deluded myself in 2008 that Barack Obama was any kind of progressive dreamboat either. At best he was alwaya a moderate Republican.

This awareness doesn't make it any less distressing to hear from Ezra Klein that the Democrats are about to cave on Medicare in exchange for a teeny-tiny increase on the top income tax rate for the top 1%:

Recall the core fight on taxes: Republicans say they’re open to more revenue, but they want to find it by closing deductions and loopholes. Democrats say that any deal needs to include more revenue, and they want to find it by letting the George W. Bush tax cuts expire for the wealthy, which would mean the top tax rate snaps back up to 39.6 percent.

But what if you do a bit of both?

REPORTER: Speaker, you did speak with the president earlier this week. Can you characterize that call? I mean, did he call — did he have any kind of counteroffer? And also, we understand that he’s just — is making clear that it’s got to be increase in rates for the wealthy or no deal. Are you willing to give a little bit, maybe just not all the way to 39.6 (percent)?

SPEAKER BOEHNER: It was — the phone call was pleasant but was just more of the same. Even the conversations that the staff had yesterday — just more of the same. It’s time for the president, if he’s serious, to come back to us with a counteroffer. That’s from Boehner’s press conference Friday. Notice what he doesn’t say: He doesn’t say that any increase in tax rates is off the table. And Boehner is not the only one who’s gotten this question:

REPORTER: Is there no deal at the end of the year if tax rates for the top 2 percent aren’t the Clinton tax rates, period? No ifs, ands or buts? Any room in negotiating on that specific aspect of the fiscal cliff?

THE PRESIDENT: …With respect to the tax rates, I just want to emphasize I am open to new ideas. If Republican counterparts or some Democrats have a great idea for us to raise revenue, maintain progressivity, make sure the middle class isn’t getting hit, reduces our deficit, encourages growth, I’m not going to just slam the door in their face. I want to hear ideas from everybody.

You see the deal that’s becoming clear here?

Talk to smart folks in Washington, and here’s what they think will happen: The final tax deal will raise rates a bit, giving Democrats a win, but not all the way back to 39.6 percent, giving Republicans a win. That won’t raise enough revenue on its own, so it will be combined with some policy to cap tax deductions, perhaps at $25,000 or $50,000, with a substantial phase-in and an exemption for charitable contributions.

If true, this is a terrible, terrible cave-in by the Democrats. Not only does an increase in the Medicare eligibility age screw over a great many people who have been promised eligibility at age 65 and now are being told they can't have it because God forbid Mitt Romney should have to pay a few thousand more in taxes, but it also creates an older, sicker Medicare pool, this RAISING Medicare costs, rather than lowering them. But the $25,000 cap on deductions is horrific on its own. For charities that rely on largesse by wealthy individuals, the incentive for giving is significantly reduced. This means less funding for the very charities that Republicans feel should take care of the poor. For states like the one I live in, it's a complete "Fuck You."

If someone buys a home in my town for, say, $350,000 (which will get you a 3 bedroom ranch or cape on a 75' x 100' lot that needs significant updating) and puts 20% down, that means a $280,000 mortgage. As I write this, Bankrate.com is citing an average rate on a 30 year mortgage of 3.36%. So let's do the math, shall we? That person will pay $9323.80 in interest in the first year. That house in my town will probably have property taxes of about $8500. That's almost $18,000 right there -- just $7000 under the proposed cap.

Now let's say that person buys a little bigger house -- maybe a remodeled split on a slightly bigger lot. That'll run about $495K. Now let's assume again that the buyer puts 20% down or $99,000. That's a sizable chunk of change, but work with me here. So the mortgage is $396,000. In the first year, the interest on THAT puppy will be $13,186. The taxes on a house like that will be around $10,000. So the owner of this remodeled 3-bedroom split on a 100' x 100' lot will be close to the cap before deducting anything else. The owners of these houses are not wealthy people. These are contractors and electricians and computer graphics people and owners of surgical supply stores and nurses and pharmaceutical quality control people and programmers and network administrators. These are not the 1%, and these are the houses in the "low-rent" district of my town -- the ones NOT bordering the fancy town just west of here, or in the "lake community." And yet these people, buying a house in my town in 2013, will find themselves dangerously close to the deduction cap.

Yes, a cap of $25,000 is a huge "Fuck You" to middle class people in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and other states with high housing costs.

And the Democrats may very well be about to sign onto it.

And the worst thing is that this may very well be the best we're ever going to get. Franklin Delano Roosevelt is turning in his grave.

UPDATE: Also, too.

Labels: Democratic sellouts, Greedy Republican Bastards, Medicare, R.I.P. American Middle Class

Krugman nails the trap that President Obama has laid for the Republicans (NYT):

The point is that when you put Republicans on the spot and demand specifics about how they’re going to make good on their posturing about spending and deficits, they come up empty. There’s no there there.

And there never was. Republicans claim to be for much smaller government, but as a political matter they have always attacked government spending in the abstract, never coming clean with voters about the reality that big cuts in government spending can happen only if we sharply curtail very popular programs. In fact, less than a month ago the Romney/Ryan campaign was attacking Mr. Obama for, yes, cutting Medicare.

Now Republicans find themselves boxed in. With taxes scheduled to rise on Jan. 1 in the absence of an agreement, they can’t play their usual game of just saying no to tax increases and pretending that they have a deficit reduction plan. And the president, by refusing to help them out by proposing G.O.P.-friendly spending cuts, has deprived them of political cover. If Republicans really want to slash popular programs, they will have to propose those cuts themselves.

So while the fiscal cliff — still a bad name for the looming austerity bomb, but I guess we’re stuck with it — is a bad thing from an economic point of view, it has had at least one salutary political effect. For it has finally laid bare the con that has always been at the core of the G.O.P.’s political strategy.

Not a day goes by that I don't thank the Goddess that this country regained sufficient sanity to keep Willard Rmoney out of the White House, to put Paul Ryan back where he can do little damage in the face of other Congresscritters who can't get re-elected in two years if seniors and others turn on them, and to keep the Senate out of the hands of the Republicans.

For eight years, under George W. Bush, Republicans rubberstamped a 48.6 increase in Federal spending. Borrowed money paid for two simultaneous wars fought with little accountability at the same time that the wealthiest Americans enjoyed tax cuts. While government spending increased by 70%, revenue increased by only 25%. One would think that Republicans deliberately decided to drive the country into bankruptcy in order to end up right where we are now. Gone and forgotten is Dick Cheney's assertion that deficits don't matter. With a Democrat in the White House, Republicans decided that suddenly deficits DO matter -- especially during a recession, when austerity would be the worst thing to do to an economy in a fragile recovery. What is astonishing is that over 40% of Americans were unable to put this together during the last election and give the Republicans an even MORE serious drubbing. That kind of cynical hypocrisy should be punished more severely than it was.

That the Republican pearl-clutching about the deficit is really about protecting their billionaire masters should not be a surprise to anyone. What makes them so pathetic is that they honestly believe that their slavish devotion to the Koch brothers, Sheldon Adelson, and other less-profile people for whom no amount of money will fill the gaping hole in their souls would give them a place at the table with these men as a reward for leaving a scorched husk where a great nation used to be. They have no idea that they too will be tossed in the trash along with the detritus of the lives of those death-eaters.

Labels: deficits, Greedy Republican Bastards, hypocrisy, spending

Anyone who thinks Paul Ryan cares one iota about the unemployed should take a gander at this:

That man has no soul, and neither does Mitt Rmoney. I can't even imagine what it's like to go through life this greedy and mean-spirited.

Labels: arrogance, deeply disturbing shit, Greedy Republican Bastards, I Got Mine and Fuck You, Paul Ryan

"There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax...my job is is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives." -- Willard Rmoney, Republican nominee for the Presidency of the United States

Hello, everyone. You know me, sort of. You haven't seen much of me lately, because I've been working. My timesheet the last couple of weeks has contained numbers like 67 hours, 71 hours, 78 hours. You haven't read much of my writing because I haven't had a complete day off since July 6, not even weekends. And even during that July 4 week when I burned four vacation days (the very existence of which makes me a "taker", not a "maker"), I spent the equivalent of about 2-1/2 days working.

I work for a giant multinational corporation. I started there in 2008, a month after I was laid off from my previous job, where I was paid essentially through government research grants. So I guess during those eight years I really WAS just a sucker at the government teat, just like Willard says. But today I work for a giant multinational corporation.

They seem to think pretty well of me. I have a nice little lucite plaque that says "Special Recognition Award" on it, and affixed to this plaque are three little badges. One of them says "Teamwork", one says "Delivering results", and the third says "Overcoming complexity." Last year the word "Senior" was put in front of my title, which has nothing to do with age, but did have to do with a reasonably sizable raise and a better bonus target. (No, it is not a financial firm, so the bonus is take-a-nice-vacation or add-a-deck-to-the-house size, not put-a-down-payment-on-a-Hamptons-house size.) Part of the reason I am being worked to death on the most difficult projects is because they know I'll put in the effort and move mountains to get it done. I may not like having no life, but I do like the work that I do.

I get paid every two weeks. I have pretty good benefits too, because the company I work for is not headquartered in the US and the countries it operates in tend to have strong worker protections and generous benefits. I'm lucky, because I carried the box of eight years of stuff out to my car on August 30, 2008 -- barely a month before the entire economy landed in the crapper. Two weeks later I had an offer from the company I work for now. Like I said -- lucky. Without this, I would probably still be an over-55 Cold Fusion web developer, still looking for a job. Or maybe I'd be in the Proofread College Essay business. You never know. But instead I was lucky -- luckier than most people my age. I remind myself of this on days like the one last week when I nearly had a stress meltdown in the office and pleaded sick so I could go home and work there the rest of the day -- and I drove home 14 miles down a New Jersey highway, screaming at the top of my lungs at no one.

I don't have consumer debt at the moment. I pay the mortgage on time. I've been married to the same man for twenty-six years. I have no police record. I've never been arrested. I don't litter, I donate to charity, I try to pay my main writer, and I'm nice to elderly people and small children. I pay a higher percentage of my income in taxes than Willard Rmoney does.

But in Willard Rmoney's world, I am a loser, a parasite, a "taker", not a "maker". Why? Because I'm going to vote for Barack Obama in November. It's not that I think he's done a spectacular job. Like many others, including some who write on this very blog, I'm bitterly disappointed by him. But he's about the best we've got, and the thought of a Republican-dominated government with an entitled, condescending jackass like Willard Rmoney is just too appalling and frightening to even contemplate.

David Corn has the entire ugly video here. Send it to your friends who think their lives will be better if they just elect an entitled sociopath to the presidency.

Labels: And You Want To Give Power Back To These People?, assholes, Greedy Republican Bastards, It's a big club and you ain't in it, Mitt Romney

Melissa Harris-Perry rocks:



Monica Mehta is an asshole. And she deserved every fucking word of the smackdown that MHP gave her.

Labels: Greedy Republican Bastards, just another outrage, Melissa Harris-Perry, MSNBC, poverty

Today's honoree: Charlie Pierce, who could be named ANY day, but today in particular he's in rare form, as he introduces us to Paul Ryan: Murderer of Opportunity, Political Coward, Candidate for Vice President of the United States

Money quotes:

Willard has recaptured a good portion of the elite political media, which has been crushing on Ryan's "courage" to take on the "tough choices" — none of which, it should be pointed out, likely will affect Ryan, who's already got himself an education out of the social safety net he now intends to shred, and certainly will never affect the haircut at the top of the ticket, or his great-grandchildren, for all that — and the coverage of the pick in the middle of the night showed that many of our finer chattering heads are already practicing tying the stem of the cherry with their tongues in preparation for covering the new Republican ticket.

He does not have the raw balls to explain to the country that, no, he does not believe in government — not the federal government, anyway, and not as it was originally conceived, as the fundamental expression of a political commonwealth. He's grandfathered his plan to chloroform Medicare so that, despite the deficit that he considers such an urgent problem, nobody alive today who might vote against him will be affected by it. For the same reason, he will not specify the cuts that he will make or the tax "loopholes" —coughMortgageInterestDeductioncough — that he will close. In any way that will come to matter to the people whose lives his policies will make harder and more miserable, Paul Ryan is still the high-school kid living off Social Security survivor benefits and reading Ayn Rand by flashlight under the sheets. Instead, he's a guy pretending to be something he's not, and doing so back in Janesville in a very swell Georgian mansion, which just happens to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

I'd lay in a supply of popcorn to watch it all go to shit when the Kochs and Sheldon Adelson succeed in putting this demonic pair into the White House, if I wasn't going to be living in an 11-year-old Civic like everyone else who isn't a billionaire.

Labels: Greedy Republican Bastards, Paul Ryan, pure evil, sociopathy, We Are So Screwed

Rick Scott had better get cracking on that disenfranchisement, because this pick may very well just have delivered Florida to Obama.

Read all about the Randian Ghoul Who Would Be VP here. Or a short summary here.

Labels: 2012 election, Greedy Republican Bastards, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, social Darwinism

Despite the President's six point lead in the most recent poll, Republicans must feel pretty confident that between vote suppression, Secretaries of State in their own party rigging vote counts, and stiffing minority neighborhoods on voting machines, they can steal the November election, even if only by a squeak. How else to explain the fact that they're not even TRYING to pretend that they have any interest in anything other than taking what little bit of wealth in this country that still sits outside of the pockets of Willard Rmoney and his billionaire backers and funnel it to them? Because they're not even pretending anymore (NYT link):

Senate Republicans will press this week to extend tax cuts for affluent families scheduled to expire Jan. 1, but the same Republican tax plan would allow a series of tax cuts for the working poor and the middle class to end next year.

Republicans say the tax breaks for lower-income families - passed with little notice in the extensive 2009 economic stimulus law - were always supposed to be temporary. But President Obama had made them a priority in 2009 and demanded their extension in 2010 as a price for extending the Bush-era tax cuts for two years, and both the White House and Senate Democrats are determined to extend them again.

That sets up a potentially tricky issue for Republicans. They have said they do not want taxes to go up on anyone while the economy struggles to gain altitude, but under their plan, written by Senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, the senior Republican on the Finance Committee, about 13 million families would see their tax refunds reduced, and some would see their taxes increase.

"Senator Hatch's amendment would extend tax breaks for the top 2 percent of Americans," Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, who leads the Senate's Democratic majority, said this month. "But it fails to extend a number of tax cuts that help middle-class families get by in a tough economy."

The tax showdown is set for Wednesday, when the Senate will vote on whether to take up Democratic legislation to extend Bush-era middle-class tax cuts through 2013. The motion will need 60 votes to pass, and only if it gets those votes will Republicans be given a chance to vote on their alternative tax plan. The House will vote next week on a similar Republican plan that also allows the 2009 stimulus cuts to lapse.

"The president said if you pass the stimulus, unemployment would never go above 8 percent," said Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the No. 3 House Republican. "We've had a 41-month experience that that is not true and hasn't been effective. One thing Republicans have always said is that they want a form of accountability."

Under the Democratic plan, tax rates on earnings over $250,000 would snap back to 36 percent and 39.6 percent, the rates paid during the Clinton presidency, from 33 percent and 35 percent. It would also allow the estate tax rate to jump to 55 percent on the value of inheritances over $1 million per individual, $2 million per couple. The current rate is 35 percent on estates over $5 million, $10 million a couple.

The Senate Democratic plan for the estate tax actually takes a bigger piece of qualifying estates than the proposal by President Obama, who wanted a 45 percent rate on inheritances of about $3.5 million, or $7 million per couple. It could cause as many political headaches for some moderate Democrats as the income tax expirations.

Between the income tax expirations, the estate tax provision and a business investment provision that Democrats would limit to small businesses, the Democratic plan would raise almost $82 billion more in taxes in 2013 than the Republican version. But the Democrats' claim to fiscal prudence may be undermined by their decision to maintain the stimulus law's tax breaks, which would cut those savings down to $55 billion. Republican tax aides say the vast majority of the benefits Democrats are seeking to preserve are not tax cuts but checks written by the Internal Revenue Service and sent to the working poor. Given the huge increase in government aid, like food stamps and unemployment benefits, letting some assistance lapse makes sense, they say.

Because in a nation with ready access to guns, it makes sense to take a bunch of white males who have been out of work for four years because corporations demand something that has never, ever existed in business -- certainty -- and yank the rug out from under them. Yeah, that'll work. Take food away from their kids and those lazy white guys (and yes, those are the very people who are planning to vote these people into completely unchecked power), give them guns, grab the popcorn, and watch the fun.

And that's the most disheartening part of this whole election charade we're going through this year -- that even when the Republicans toss off their pretense that their policies, such as they are, will benefit the middle class, there are enough voters who so loathe the idea of a black man in the White House that they'll hand over power to the very people who are now pledging to take for themselves what little these people have left.

Labels: Greedy Republican Bastards, taxes

Is this about Jeb Bush being Willard's running mate, or are the wheels starting to turn by the GOP Money Guys^™ to edge Rmoney out of the race in favor of the guy they REALLY want?

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, rumored to be among those considered for Mitt Romney's running mate, will travel to Hamilton, Ohio on Wednesday to appear at his first official campaign event for the presumptive GOP presidential nominee.

His appearance comes the same day Romney holds an event about 200 miles away in Bowling Green in the northwest part of the state.

[snip]

The former governor has previously said "under no circumstances" would he accept an offer to be Romney's running mate. Furthermore, his son, George P. Bush, said on CNN last week that Jeb Bush is not being vetted by the Romney campaign.

Labels: Greedy Republican Bastards, Jeb Bus, Mitt Romney, The Fix Is In

Someone needs to tell Willard that in 1978, even God changed His mind about black people.

Pam links to this article at Mediaite, which quotes Willard's remarks after he was soundly booed at the NAACP convention when he vowed to eliminate "Obamacare" (emphasis mine):

“By the way, I had the privelege of speaking today at the NAACP convention in Houston and I gave them the same speech I am giving you. I don’t give different speeches to different audiences alright. I gave them the same speech. When I mentioned I am going to get rid of Obamacare they weren’t happy, I didn’t get the same response. That’s ok, I want people to know what I stand for and if I don’t stand for what they want, go vote for someone else, that’s just fine. But I hope people understand this, your friends who like Obamacare, you remind them of this, if they want more stuff from government tell them to go vote for the other guy-more free stuff. But don’t forget nothing is really free. it has to paid for by people in the private sector creating goods and services, and if people want jobs more than they want free stuff from government, then they are going to have to get government to be smaller. And if they don’t want to repeal Obamacare they are going to have to give me some other stuff they are thinking about cutting, but my list takes Obamacare off first and I have a lot of other things I am thinking of cutting.”

Just....wow. He's basically saying that that bunch of n----- he just talked to only want free stuff -- to take money from "job creators" like himself. Funny how he paints the ACA as welfare, when it requires people to buy insurance from for-profit insurance companies. Those who can't afford the cost of paying the $15.1 million compensation for the CEO of Cigna, or the $13.9 million compensation for the CEO of Met Life, or the $10.8 million paid to the CEO of United Health will receive government subsidies to help them BUY insurance -- but it's hardly "free stuff" -- unless you are a well-connected oligarch with a house that could fit the Music Hall of Williamsburg inside, a dressage horse on which you take a $70,000 tax deduction, and a bunch of offshore tax haven accounts.

I used to think that Willard Rmoney was just another craven, power-mad Republican. But the more we see of him, and his hysterical rantings about tax increases on job creators, the more I see him as just greedy -- yet another Republican with a hole in his soul so deep that no amount of money or houses or dressage horses will ever fill -- but that won't stop him from continuing to amass as much as he can, even pillaging an entire nation once he gains some control over it, in his vain attempt to feel human.

Labels: Greedy Republican Bastards, Mitt Romney, racism

In this video, a young man who's supposed to be one of the people Congressman Bill Young's constituents, asks him to support an increase in the minimum wage:



Bill Young is a Republican representing Florida's 10th district. He served in the Florida State Senate from 1961 to 1970, during the early years of which his specialty was conducting investigations of "homosexuals, communists and others thought to be subversive" as a member of the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee.

He was elected to the House of Representatives in 1970, where he continues to serve today.

Bill young has been receiving a government paycheck over a half a century. Not for one day has he worked in the private sector in that time. Here are a few highlights from Young's record:

• From 2007-2008, Young's district received $167,000,000 in earmarks.
• He has supported earmarks to companies which employ or employed his sons.
• In 2011, he favored pouring $1.2 billion into the Pentagon's Humvee program, even after Defense Secretary Robert Gates stated that the government was not buying any more Humvees and wanted the funding moved elsewhere. Young had received 80,000 in campaign contributions from AM General, manufacturer of the Humvee.
• He supports the Paul Ryan plan to gut Social Security and Medicare.

Why should he worry? He is guaranteed a pension. Bill Young makes $174,000 a year as a Congressman. Part of his pension benefits (PDF) are paid by taxpayers. He will receive this pension under the Civil Employees Retirement System. In 2002, this benefit would have paid him over $84,000 a year assuming the then-Congressional salary of $153,000. Today, the formula for CERS (assuming he is still in that program and did not switch over to the Federal Employees Retirement System in 1984, which was an option available to him), his pension based on his salary today would be $92,500.

I'd retire today if I were guaranteed $92,500 a year, wouldn't you?

The Federal Benefits Program (PDF) available to him also includes a wide variety of health insurance plans, flexible spending, dental and vision plans, group life insurance, and a federal long term care insurance program that does not have an ever-increasing premium. This is a benefit that must no doubt be of particular interest to someone Young's age. Because Young is from Florida, he is also eligible for a "Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan" under his federal benefits program, which will come in handy when he and his cronies and their chosen leader Willard Rmoney decide to get rid of the Affordable Care Act. Young's health benefits continue even after he is retired because he has "served" longer than five years. The government, that is, YOU (and the young man in the video, who contrary to Young's assumption, IS employed) pays 72-75% of the premiums for his health insurance.

All told, Bill Young has a pretty sweet deal, nearly all paid for by you and me, for the last fifty years.

And here he is telling someone he's supposed to represent, someone who is employed and is just looking for a wage he can live on, to "get a job". Unfortunately, Young is opposed this year by Jessica Ehrlich, whose endorsement by the New Democrat Coalition, about which Howie Klein notes:

They're pretty much Republicans with blue T-shirts. Problem there, of course, is all the anti-Choice, anti-gay and... well, the Blue Dog caucus is really extreme and barely even part of the Democratic Party at all. That leaves... a group that's kind of like the Blue Dogs but without the white sheets and hoods: the New Democratic Coalition.

The New Dems was founded in 1997 as the House affiliate of the corporatist shills at Joe Lieberman's DLC. It is financed by Big Business and corrupt K Street lobbyists with an anti-worker/anti-consumer agenda. It specializes in "free trade" policies. Most of the leadership has been made up of conservative Democrats with a nose for big money, like Rahm Emanuel, Chamber of Commerce ex-Rep. Melissa Bean, and corporatists Joe Crowley, Ron Kind, Ellen Tauscher, Harold Ford and Allyson Schwartz.

Some conservative Democrats, like Steve Israel and Debbie Wasserman Schultz, seeking to hide their true colors have officially dropped out of the New Dem Coalition in the hope of winning wider leadership positions in the whole party. A number of Blue Dogs-- Adam Schiff (CA), Loretta Sanchez (CA), John Barrow (GA), David Scott (GA), Mike McIntyre (NC), Kurt Schrader (OR) and Jason Altmire (PA)-- are members of both right-wing groups.

In other words, these are "Democrats" who are reliable Republican votes. The only question is whether Ehrlich too would tell an $8.50 an hour working man to "get a job" once she's on the government teat as well.

Labels: assholes, Blue Dog Democrats, Greedy Republican Bastards, heartlessness

Willard Rmoney and George W. Bush are in one respect two peas in a pod.

George W. Bush on the links and on the tennis court, as recounted by Gail Sheehy in 2000:

Even if he loses, his friends say, he doesn't lose. He'll just change the score, or change the rules, or make his opponent play until he can beat him. "If you were playing basketball and you were playing to 11 and he was down, you went to 15," says Hannah, now a Dallas insurance executive. "If he wasn't winning, he would quit. He would just walk off.… It's what we called Bush Effort: If I don't like the game, I take my ball and go home. Very few people can get away with that." So why could George get away with it? "He was just too easygoing and too pleasant."
Another fast friend, Roland Betts, acknowledges that it is the same in tennis. In November 1992, Bush and Betts were in Santa Fe to host a dinner party, but they had just enough time for one set of doubles. The former Yale classmates were on opposite sides of the net. "There was only one problem—my side won the first set," recalls Betts. "O.K., then we're going two out of three," Bush decreed. Bush's side takes the next set. But Betts's side is winning the third set when it starts to snow. Hard, fat flakes. The catering truck pulls up. But Bush won't let anybody quit. "He's pissed. George runs his mouth constantly," says Betts indulgently. "He's making fun of your last shot, mocking you, needling you, goading you—he never shuts up!" They continued to play tennis through a driving snowstorm.

It is something of an in-joke with Bush's friends and family. "In reality we all know who won, but George wants to go further to see what happens," says an old family friend, venture capitalist and former MGM chairman Louis "Bo" Polk Jr. "George would say, 'Play that one over,' or 'I wasn't quite ready.' The overtimes are what's fun, so you make your own. When you go that extra mile or that extra point … you go to a whole new level."

Willard Rmoney, with his own family, as recounted by Philip Rucker in the Washington Post, last weekend:

The Romneys, 30 in all these days, spend their time away from the stresses of everyday life — like, say, wrapping up the Republican nomination for president — by following a highly orchestrated, highly competitive regimen of sports and games known as the “Romney Olympics.”

The Romney Olympics have long included a mini-triathlon of biking, swimming and running that pits Mitt and his five sons and their wives against one another. But after Mitt once nearly finished last, behind a daughter-in-law who had given birth to her second child a couple of months earlier, the ultra-competitive and self-described unathletic patriarch expanded the games to give himself a better shot.

How much of a dick do you have to be to change the rules of what's supposed to be a friendly family sports competition (never mind how pathological it is for a family to be this hypercompetitive with each other) so you can have a better shot at winning over younger people? How much of a core of self-loathing do you have to have where finishing a race behind your daughter-in-law drives you to change the rules?

It could be argued that these kinds of leisure activities are trivial, but after what we saw from eight years of a president chock-full of unresolved daddy issues, I think this account of how the Romneys spend their summer vacation ought to set of massive alarms in Americans' heads as to what they can expect under a Rmoney regime.

(h/t: TBogg)

Labels: assholes, George W. Bush, Greedy Republican Bastards, Mitt Romney, nickel psychology, sociopathy

I know that the Republicans are doing whatever they can to get rid of the latter, at least for their campaign contributors, but this idea of "Business Must Have Certainty" is the biggest load of horsepuckey that a party which has elevated horsepuckey to something approaching art has ever come up with.

Via David Atkins comes this moronic quote from one Linda Parks, a Republican candidate for California's 26th Congressional district:

Congress needs to stop the brinkmanship politics and work together to balance our nation’s budget and restore our bond rating. This will give businesses the certainty they need to invest in capital projects and expand their workforce. This in turn will create demand for goods and services that will buoy our economy. If Congress can't pass a budget on time, they shouldn't be paid.

Efforts should be made towards restoring our nation’s bond rating which will reduce costs for needed infrastructure such as roads, bridges, levies and water conveyance. These projects will also create jobs and stimulate the economy. Additionally, offering tax incentives to encourage business start-ups and new hires, providing job training and education in growing sectors of the economy, and supporting existing businesses so they can grow are all part of the solution.

I'll leave it to Paul Krugman to explain why this is, well, horsepuckey. But you don't have to be an economist to realize that what Parks is saying is just a bunch of Republican talking points strung together. As Krugman notes in the linked interview, the bond markets are willing to lend the Federal government funds at 1.7%. Even if you want to think of government as a business, if you own a business and you've been waiting to upgrade your network infrastructure so that you aren't pushing an elephant through a snake to the point that it takes twenty minutes to open a spreadsheet, you're going to look at that 1.7% rate and decide that now is the time. You'd figure you'd deferred an upgrade long enough. You're not going to sit around and wait to see if the rate will go to 1.5%.

Another thing you won't do, at least if you're not in the business of actually running your business, is wait for "certainty". Because one thing about business is that "certainty" never comes. It's funny how Republicans want to try to talk Americans into replacing Social Security with self-directed investment in the stock market, which is about as uncertain a move as you can find, instead of having the "certainty" of a guaranteed income in our old age. Uncertainty is fine for individuals, but when it comes to business, it's perfectly OK to demand certainty. Did Thomas Edison demand "certainty" before creating the Edison Company? Did Henry Ford insist on "certainty" before recognizing that an automobile that his own employees could afford would be more profitable in the long run? Did Thomas Watson demand "certainty" before underwriting Harvard scientist Howard Aiken's idea to build the Mark I digital calculating machine in 1938? Until 1980, television news was something that took place during the dinner hour. Did Ted Turner insist on "certainty" before flying in the face of conventional wisdom and creating the first 24-hour news network in CNN? Everyone loves to trot out Steve Jobs. Did Steve Jobs refuse to work with Steve Wozniak in the garage until there was "certainty" that they'd make money? For that matter, let's trot out Mark Zuckerberg. Did he demand "certainty" before he'd bang out even one line of code?

I could go on and on, but I think the point is made. Only businesses that are run solely to enrich the Board of Directors by propping up a share price (*cough* HP *cough*) need certainty. The innovators, the risk-takers that Republicans worship so -- not one of these people demands "certainty" before investing in an idea.

When Willard Rmoney tells college kids to borrow money from their parents and start a business, how does he reconcile this exhortation to take a risk with the idea that businesses won't invest unless they are guaranteed success?

And why should businesses demand such a guarantee? Why should Republicans embrace the idea that they should be? These are the people who screech about "equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome". If you are a black kid from a tough inner city neighborhood, you're told that you have the same opportunity to succeed as the white kid in the wealthy town, even though you have to dodge bullets on your way home from school and the only computers your school has are from 1996. And yet, the same Republicans who think this is perfectly all right are demanding equality of outcome for businesses.

Every candidate that spouts nonsense like this should be laughed off the national stage. But instead, the punditocracy parrots the "certainty" meme is if it made all the sense in the world.

Labels: Greedy Republican Bastards, nothing is certain except death and taxes, utter horseshit

We've heard a lot over the last decade about how the federal government should be "run like a business". It's that particular meme that now has 58% of "financially struggling whites" believing that Willard Rmoney (sic) will do more to advance the economic interests of their families than Barack Obama would. How much of this is because these people believe that if they Just Work Hard Enough™ they will be allowed into the Rich Guys Club, how much of it is a residual sense among some in this group that "Democrats give everything to the lazy ni---rs" (a sentiment held by Mr. Brilliant's own father until late in his life when his frequent hospitalizations and resulting care by black nurses made him change his tune somewhat), and how much of it is buy-into this notion of "He will run government like a business, I don't know. But the notion of "government-as-business" is as ridiculous as "the federal budget should be run the way you run your own budget."

So what are some of the things businesses do these days, anyway?

Well, for one thing, the raison d'être for a business is to generate profits to be distributed to shareholders. (Note: It is NOT to generate jobs.) These shareholders might be the owners, or a small group of executives, or stockholders of publicly-held companies. Of course these days, profits of even publicly-held companies are largely distributed to a small group of executives through stock-heavy compensation plans, but I digress.

When capacity is insufficient to meet demand, businesses expand by investing in plant and equipment. Somehow, when Republicans like Mitt Rmoney talk about running the government like a business, they leave out this investment part. If government were run like a business, it SHOULD invest in roads, railroads, bridges, education, nutrition programs for children, and other things that are the government equivalent of plant and equipment. But instead, they advocate running a kind of business where your employees are still developing new applications in COBOL on IBM mainframes running DOS-VSE because you're not yet "certain" that this desktop computing thing is going to take off.

When there aren't enough employees to meet demand, companies have a couple of options. You can either hire people, or work the ones you have even harder. When all of your fellow business owners are choosing the latter, your own employees will go along with it because they can't do better anyone else. Of course after about sixty hours a week the law of diminishing returns kicks in, but at least the cost part of your ledger doesn't increase (especially if you've given your employees titles which allow them to be paid a fixed salary as exempt employees). What DO "demand and supply" mean when you run government "like a business"?

Now what happens when business slows down and you don't need as many employees as you have? You COULD cut hours temporarily. You could say that you'll pay 80% of salary for a 32-hour week. But in the US, most companies just get rid of people through layoff. If government is run like a business, what does this "laying people off" look like? Is it ending all government programs to help them and their families? Or does it mean lining them up against the wall and shooting them? What does "downsizing" or "right-sizing" government look like where its "employees" (i.e. citizens) are deemed to be superfluous?

Somewhere along the line, the Republicans forgot just who is the employer and who is the employee in our system of government. If they're going to "run government like a business", they ought to remember that. The problem is that we have a media that is all too happy to regurgitate six-word sound bites like "run government like a business" over and over and over again without explaining what that looks like.

All those financially struggling white people who think government should be run like a business should take a good, close look at Willard Rmoney's "business" career. It's one in which good-paying jobs with pensions are replaced by minimum-wage jobs without benefits -- just before the companies go into bankruptcy, but not before Mitt Romney and his Bain Capital peers shovel a bunch of money in fees into their pockets.

Rmoney likes to trot out Staples as an example of his acumen in creating jobs, even though most of Staples' growth occurred after he resigned from the company's board to run for Massachusetts governor in 1994. Here are some better examples of Mitt Romney's business record, from a Vanity Fair excerpt from The Real Romney, by Michael Kranish and Scott Helman:

Romney had come to Drexel to obtain financing for the $300 million purchase of two Texas department-store chains, Bealls and Palais Royal, to form Specialty Retailers, Inc. On September 7, 1988, two months after Bain hired Drexel to issue junk bonds to finance the deal, the S.E.C. filed a complaint against Drexel and Milken for insider trading. Romney had to decide whether to close a deal with a company ensnared in a growing clash with regulators. The old Romney might well have backed off; the newly assertive, emboldened Mitt decided to press ahead.

Romney’s deal with Drexel turned out well for both him and Bain Capital, which put $10 million into the retailer and financed most of the rest of the $300 million deal with junk bonds. The newly constituted company, later known as Stage Stores, refocused in 1989 on its small-town, small-department-store roots. Seven years later, in October 1996, the company successfully sold shares to the public at $16 a share. By the following year, the stock had climbed to a high of nearly $53, and Bain Capital and a number of its officers and directors sold a large part of their holdings. Bain made a $175 million gain by 1997. It was one of the most profitable leveraged buyouts of the era.

Romney sold at just the right time. Shares plunged in value the next year amid declining sales at the stores. The department-store company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2000, struggling with $600 million in debt, and a reorganized company emerged the following year. So ended the story of a deal that Romney would not be likely to cite on the campaign trail: the highly leveraged purchase, financed with junk bonds from a firm that became infamous for its financial practices, of a department-store company that had subsequently gone into bankruptcy. But on the Bain balance sheet, and on Romney’s, it was a huge win.

Not every deal worked out so well for Romney and his investors. Bain invested $4 million in a company called Handbag Holdings, which sold pocketbooks and other accessories. When a major customer stopped buying, the company failed and 200 jobs were lost. Bain invested $2.1 million in a bathroom-fixtures company called PPM and lost nearly all of it. An investment in a company called Mothercare Stores also didn’t pan out; the firm had eliminated a hundred jobs by the time Bain dumped it. Fellow Bain partner Robert White said Bain lost its $1 million and blamed “a difficult retail environment.”

In some cases, Bain Capital’s alternative strategy of buying into companies also ended in trouble. In 1993, Bain bought GST Steel, a maker of steel-wire rods, and later more than doubled its $24 million investment. The company borrowed heavily to modernize plants in Kansas City and North Carolina—and to pay out dividends to Bain. But foreign competition increased and steel prices fell. GST Steel filed for bankruptcy and shut down its money-losing Kansas City plant, throwing some 750 employees out of work. Union workers there blamed Bain, then and now, for ruining the company, upending their lives, and devastating the community.

Then, in 1994, Bain invested $27 million as part of a deal with other firms to acquire Dade International, a medical-diagnostics-equipment firm, from its parent company, Baxter International. Bain ultimately made nearly 10 times its money, getting back $230 million. But Dade wound up laying off more than 1,600 people and filed for bankruptcy protection in 2002, amid crushing debt and rising interest rates. The company, with Bain in charge, had borrowed heavily to do acquisitions, accumulating $1.6 billion in debt by 2000. The company cut benefits for some workers at the acquired firms and laid off others. When it merged with Behring Diagnostics, a German company, Dade shut down three U.S. plants. At the same time, Dade paid out $421 million to Bain Capital’s investors and investing partners.

The amount of money now being earned at Bain Capital was skyrocketing, and much of it came from a handful of giant deals. During Romney’s 15 years there, the firm invested about $260 million in its 10 top deals and reaped a nearly $3 billion return. That was about three-quarters of its overall profit on roughly 100 transactions during Romney’s tenure. In one of his most specific explanations of how he made his fortune, in his autobiography, Turnaround, Romney wrote that most of the companies he invested in were ones that “no one has heard of—TRW’s credit services, the Yellow Pages of Italy.” Those weren’t just any two deals. They were two of the most lucrative of Romney’s career, and luck played a big part in both. A mere seven weeks after buying TRW, Romney and his partners flipped the company. Bain’s $100 million investment returned at least $300 million. The second deal cited by Romney took longer but involved even more good timing and luck. It began with a renowned Italian investor named Phil Cuneo, who had the idea of buying the Italian version of the Yellow Pages. It seemed a solid investment in a firm with a staid and stable business model. But mere months after closing the deal, Cuneo and his Bain associates realized that they had acquired a company that might benefit from the surging interest in dot-com businesses; the Yellow Pages company owned a Web-based directory that had the potential to be the Italian version of America Online or Yahoo. In just under three years, in September 2000, the partners sold the investment, earning a windfall that far exceeded anyone’s initial expectations. Bain’s $51.3 million investment in the Italian Yellow Pages returned at least $1.17 billion, according to a Romney associate familiar with the deal. There is no public documentation of how the profits were distributed, but at that time at least 20 percent of the return would have gone to Bain Capital. Of that, Romney’s typical payout was then 5 to 10 percent. That means this one obscure deal would have given him a profit of $11 million to $22 million. If Romney made a side investment in the deal, as was standard among Bain partners, he would have made even larger gains. One Romney associate said Romney’s total profit could have been as much as $40 million. (A Romney spokesman did not respond to questions about the deal.)

It was those kinds of deals that enabled Bain Capital to report the highest returns in the business in the 1990s. Romney’s own net worth would grow to at least $250 million, and maybe much more, a trove that would enable him to foot a large part of the bill for his 2008 presidential campaign. Asked about a report that his wealth at one point reached as high as $1 billion, Romney said, “I’m not going to get into my net worth. No estimates whatsoever.”

I almost can't wait to see what these "financially struggling whites" are going to do when they find out exactly what Willard has in store for them.

Labels: American Idiots, delusion, disaster capitalism, Greedy Republican Bastards, Mitt Romney, shock doctrine

Sorry about no posting this week. I've been working like a fiend and I'm totally spent at the end of the day. And yes, the parade of daily fresh horrors has been kind of overwhelming. How do you write about what the right-wing vision of this country is without losing one's sanity, anyway?

I had started two posts earlier this week -- one about the Mets, the other about the Mommy Wars. But the Mets have reverted to Mets form, and the Mommy Wars are already a spent force (or so we can hope). You snooze, you lose, as they say.

But I have been paying attention, and one of the things I've been paying attention to is what Mitt Romney has been saying. It's hard to imagine that after eight years of watching the mean-spirited scion of a political family whose sense of entitlement has him thinking he hit a triple when he was born on third base, this country would be willing to endure another, greedier one with an even greater sense of entitlement and a wife who's already measuring the drapes in the East Room.

Does this guy have anything to say about what this country under Mitt Romney would look like? I'll admit that I've had only so much time to pay attention this week, but from what I've heard, Romney wants to cut HUD and the Department of education, or maybe he doesn't. He's been saying for a year that President Obama has made the recession worse, then said he didin't. He's said he'd get rid of Planned Parenthood, or maybe he wouldn't. He spouts what he thinks the base wants to hear, and then his people backtrack. His aides can't say whether he supports the Lilly Ledbetter equal pay act.

What we DO know is that he's an adherent to the Ayn Rand fantasies of Eddie Munster Paul Ryan, whose draconian plans for the economy would probably consign millions of elderly and children to an early death and dramatically change this country to provide even MORE benefit to guys like Mitt Romney -- guys who fancy themselves to be real-life Francisco D'Anconias who get to fuck real-life Dagny Taggarts (except that these guys couldn't handle a real-life Dagny Taggart, choosing instead docile helpmeets who will give them many, many heirs). I wonder how many Americans have actually thought about what a Romney/Ryan Randian utopia would look like.

It doesn't seem to matter, though, because in this nation of American Idiots, people smell a New York Prime strip steak grilling in the kitchen and their mouths are watering. But it's not quite ready yet and they're hungry. They currently have in front of them a plate of calves' liver and plate with a pile of dogshit. They've already tasted the calves' liver and they don't like the taste enough to let it ease their hunger. And they refuse to wait for the steak. So they've decided that since they didn't like the taste of the calves' liver, the dogshit MUST be an improvement ( NYT link):

A rising number of Americans see improvement in the economy, but a persistent wariness about their own financial circumstances is allowing Mitt Romney to persuade voters that he could improve their economic prospects more than President Obama, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

Even as the nation rebounds from the recession, its lingering effects are reflected in the adversities facing families. Nearly two-thirds of people are concerned about paying for their housing, the poll found, and one in five people with mortgages say they are underwater.

Four in 10 parents say they have had to alter expectations for the type of college they can afford for their children. And more than one-third of respondents said high gas prices had created serious financial hardships.

The general election match between Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney is opening with evidence that economic conditions are providing ammunition for both candidates. For Mr. Obama, there is a gradually growing perception that the general outlook is turning brighter, and for Mr. Romney, there are those individuals who still do not feel substantial improvement in their own lives.

The poll found that the two men are locked in a tight race, with each gathering 46 percent of the support. Nearly an equal number of voters say they are as confident in Mr. Romney’s ability to make the right decisions on the economy and to be commander in chief as express confidence in Mr. Obama.

As many voters thought they would do better under Mr. Romney as under Mr. Obama, but slightly more said they would do worse if the president was re-elected.

I'd love to know on what basis people are saying that they'd do better under Mitt Romney. Do they think that the guys with whom Mitt pals around -- the NASCAR team owners and the horsey set and owners of NFL teams and other guys with more money than they can spend in 100 lifetimes -- are somehow going to magically create jobs when Mitt Romney lowers their taxes yet again? Do they think that the thirty major corporations who pay no taxes, some of whom get REFUNDS BACK from the government every year, are going to magically "create jobs" out of the goodness of their hearts if their taxes are cut just a little bit more? Is this the corollary of the Just Work Hard Enough doctrine -- that if you Just Give Rich Guys enough, they'll share?

Think about the elementary school bully you knew. Picture you're in a kindergarten class with him. Now envision a cake -- a big, rich, gooey chocolate cake. With lots of butter cream flowers on it. There's plenty of cake for everyone in the class. But this bully has pulled a knife on the teacher once already, and the administration has done nothing about this kid. (Let's forget for a moment that there are schools where six-year-olds who act up are led out in handcuffs.) The teacher cuts half the cake -- the half with ALL the butter cream roses on it, and gives it to the bully. Do you honestly believe that a bully of this magnitude is going to be content with half the cake when he sees that the othr kids get even a sliver of cake? Hardly. He's going to beat the crap out of those other kids just to get the rest. Even if he vomits it all up afterwards, He. Is. Going. To. Get. All. The. Cake. Because it's his due. Because he bestrides the world like a colossus.

That bully is Mitt Romney's compatriots in the one percent. And dammit, they are going to get all that cake.

So just what do these people think Mitt Romney is going to do to make his friends decide they really do have enough cake? Do they really think the dogshit will taste better? One person quoted in in the above-excerpted article seems to think so:

“I want to give the business guy a chance,” said Craig Lemoine, 47, a Republican from Las Vegas who drives a U.P.S. truck. “No one wants to put the C.E.O. in there. Everyone thinks he’ll just make the rich people richer and the poor people poorer. “But how do you know if you don’t give him a chance?”

Lucy, Charlie Brown, football, etc.

Labels: American Idiots, Greedy Republican Bastards, Mitt Romney, The Right Wing War on the Middle Class

It shouldn't be news to anyone that the Republicans' primary order of business over the last three years has been to make sure that Barack Obama is not a successful president. I'm quite sure that a good part of the reason they're going off the deep end about contraception (and I'll have more on that as soon as I can organize my thoughts on their motivatin and mindset and what it all means) is because the money guys are looking at their candidates, realizing that they're going to have to draft Jeb Bush, and wondering what they're going to do if he won't consent to such a draft.

Last night I filled up the Civic. I paid $3.63. A few weeks ago, at the same station, I was paying just over $3.00. I know the guy who runs the place. He works on my car, and he's as honest as you'll find anywhere. It's not just him. Look at the posted price of gasoline anywhere in the country. It's ridiculous. (And let's not even TALK about heating oil....)

Perhaps some of it is attributable to fears over what is going to happen with Iran. Oil to rise in price if anyone in the Fertile Crescent twitches an eyelash. But Rick Ungar thinks there's more to it than that:

I’ve never been much of a conspiracy theorist as it is not my inclination to see evil lurking behind every bush (no pun intended.) More times than not, things are—for the most part—pretty much as they appear to be.

However, there is a strange anomaly occurring on the highways of America and in the boardrooms of some of our largest investment institutions that has caused me to consider whether a plan is afoot that, if successful, could represent the best possible strategy for ending the presidency of Barack Obama.

According to the Automobile Club of America, gasoline prices have risen, on average, 13.1 cents in the past month—despite the fact that gas prices traditionally fall in the month of February as people drive fewer miles during the wintery month.

What’s more, virtually every projection out there suggests that gas prices are about to make a dramatic rise to, potentially, record levels with some suggesting that $5.00 a gallon gas or more —double the prices of just a few months ago—could very well be in our future.

This becomes a particularly odd statistic when one considers that Americans are using less gasoline than it has at any time in the last fifteen years. Currently, we burn up 8 percent less gas than we did during the peak year of 2006 while most experts expect the trend to continue to where we will be using 20 percent less gasoline by 2030.

[snip]

While Wall Street’s ‘priority one’ is to make money, it is clear that, for this year, priority two is the destruction of Barack Obama’s presidency. Accordingly, from a Wall Street point of view, it certainly is a happy coincidence that that priority one, making big money on oil speculation, could directly lead to accomplishing their second highest mission.

I am left to wonder whether this is a happy Wall Street coincidence or a clever strategy that could pay off big-time come November.

Gasoline prices have a ‘real time’ impact on middle-class voters. Can you imagine a better way to make voters good and angry than to insure that they are paying five bucks a gallon for the gasoline that will be powering them to the voting booth in November? And if you subscribe to the theory that the President’s opponents would like to keep economic growth down until the election is over, what better way to accomplish such a goal than to force a precipitous rise in gas prices?

Rick, I'll take your Wall Street and raise you two Koch brothers.

Labels: conspiracies, Greedy Republican Bastards, Middle East, oil, tinfoil

Let's not kid ourselves that the GOP nominee will be the To Know Him Is To Like Him Less Mitt Romney, the insane Rick Santorum, or the evil Newt Gingrich. The Money Wing of the Republican Party is many things, but stupid isn't one of them.

It will not surprise me one bit if this is how it pans out:

A prominent Republican senator just told me that if Romney can’t win in Michigan, the Republican Party needs to go back to the drawing board and convince somebody new to get into the race.

“If Romney cannot win Michigan, we need a new candidate,” said the senator, who has not endorsed anyone and requested anonymity.

The senator believes Romney will ultimately win in Michigan but says he will publicly call for the party to find a new candidate if he does not.

[snip]

It would have to be somebody else, the senator said. Who?

“Jeb Bush,” the former Florida governor.

Labels: dynastic politics, Greedy Republican Bastards, money

When I was a kid, we always lived in what I remember my mother calling "the $25,000 house." The $25,000 house had three bedrooms and a bath and a half. Her dream was to be able to live in "the $30,000 house" that was the next level up. That house would have two full baths and a family room with sliding glass doors to a patio. The $35,000 house would maybe have a pool. That was about as far as I remember the aspirations going. It wasn't that my parents didn't work hard and didn't want more for their children. My mother worked part-time as a legal secretary at a time when it was scandalous for women to work outside the home. My father's ambition was to find the cure for cancer -- that's hardly thinking small.

While in college, I dated a guy whose father was a doctor. Their house wasn't all that much bigger than ours was. Yes, the furnishings were more expensive, and his father drove a Cadillac (which was the prestige vehicle nameplate for the nouveau-riche at that time). But they didn't live in a mansion with a bridal staircase and palladian windows and tray ceilings in the bedroom and a home theatre. The guy I was dating may have had top-of-the-line audio equipment in his room, but it was still a 10 x 10 bedroom in a suburban house. And he didn't have his own bathroom.

I don't know when this business about being rich started. Perhaps it was when cash-strapped states in the 1970's started legalizing lotteries, where all you needed was "a dollar and a dream." Or perhaps it was 1984, when a shaggy-haired guy named Steve Jobs emerged out of a middle-class neighborhood in California to unveil the Macintosh; and Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous began to air, bringing "champagne wishes and caviar dreams" into living rooms of the middle class seemingly every single night. It was important that the middle class start seeing these lifestyles every night, and regarding them as something to which they should aspire, despite the fact that most of the people profiled on the show made their money in the ferociously competitive maw of the entertainment industry, where luck plays as much of a role, if not more, than talent:





What's interesting about these two clips from the show is how ordinary these "lifestyles" look today. Micky Dolenz' English mansion resembles from the front about half the McMansions built in Bergen County during the last decade. A kitchen like that shown in the 1980s as being part and parcel of the life of the toffs was regarded on real estate programs on HGTV during the last decade as mandatory in even the most modest POS cape cod if you wanted to be able to sell your house. Places like Bobbie Brown's "luxury vacation spot in Arizona" are now all-inclusive resorts like the Sandals/Beaches chain, visited by the kind of people you surely know who take their kids out of school for a family vacation at a posh resort.

It isn't that there wasn't interest in celebrities before Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Photoplay and Motion Picture Story were founded in 1911, and People had been around since 1974. But the effect of Lifestyles was to start people thinking "I could live like that," especially with the kind of money Wall Streeters were making at the time.

Somewhere along the line, just living "a good life" wasn't enough anymore, and it seems to have coincided with the ramping up of income inequality right around the heyday of Lifestyles, when Ronald Reagan first cut taxes on investment income -- a practice continued with enthusiasm under Presidents George H.W. Bush and, yes, even Bill Clinton. A great deal of money was made by a few during the Reagan era, and even more made by a few during the dot-com bubble. But for average workers -- people like my parents for whom sliding doors to a patio was a big deal -- the pie was growing ever-smaller. So if the entertainment industry that had spawned Ronald Reagan could dangle enough shiny in front of ordinary Americans and get them longing for stone mansions with French country kitchens, they might not notice how the lifestyle they were actually living was in danger.

And so we came to the 1990's, when guys in blue jeans and T-shirts became multimillionaires and even those who weren't wanted to live like them. So the POS capes and ranches started coming down, and huge ersatz country houses with bridal staircases and designer French country kitchens and crown molding in every room and teensy-tiny windows on three vinyl-sided sides of the house allowed people who were not celebrities to "live the good life", even if only on a 75 x 100 lot instead of seven rolling acres in the English countryside. Car leases allowed entry-level programmers to drive BMWs. A middle-class family could go to a "posh" resort like Beaches ("Luxury included® Resorts for Everyone").

And then it all came crashing down in 2008.

It gets harder to dangle the shiny of fancy cars and luxury homes to a guy whose job ws sent overseas and now finds that his entire industry has. It's hard to sell "If You Just Work Hard Enough" to a guy who hasn't worked in two years and can't even get a job at Wendys because as a skilled machinist, or PC tech, he's "overqualified." It's hard to sell champagne wishes and caviar dreams to a couple who really did try to look at the numbers the mortgage broker was showing them to "prove" they could afford their house with the French Country kitchen and tray ceilings , but now they find the house is worth half of what they owe on it and they're both out of work and scrambling to find a rental that will take two unemployed people, their kids, and their dog.

Mitt Romney is out there talking about his father's humble beginnings, moving ever-closer to declaring himself as having been born a poor black child. When confronted about his net worth, he tosses off comments that he wants EVERONE to be rich. This is red meat to guys like Gene Marks, who thinks every small business owner wakes up every day dreaming of the day he too can be like Mitt Romney. I used to work for one of those small business owners. He's about as Republican as they come. His wife and co-owner had an autographed photo of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney on the wall in her office the way tween girls have Justin Bieber posters. He's an unrepentant supply-sider. But I know that most days, he's not dreaming of being able to expand a fancy house in La Jolla. He'd be just as happy to be able to keep his business going. I think he works pretty hard, trying to drum up business, but he's not Mitt Romney. And I have to wonder just how hard Romney had to work. I mean, how difficult is it, really, to buy up companies and wreck them?

The bottom line is that not everyone is going to be rich. If a company employs 100,000 people, only one is going to be be the CEO. Most people are going to make less, and that's OK, as long as they can actually find work and earn a living. I think people are starting to realize that not everyone needs a 6000 square foot house with a French country kitchen, tray ceilings, and a bridal staircase. They're scaling back their aspiration, not because they want to be lazy (though I do think people are getting sick of working 80-hour weeks and foregoing vacations to "prove their dedication to the company", then finding themselves shitcanned anyway in favor of someone overseas who'll work for a dollar a day), but because the cost of pretending to be one of the toffs is just too high.

For Mitt Romney to get up there and say that further tax cuts for the already rich are a step towards everyone being rich is ridiculous on its face. Not everyone is going to be rich, and I think most people know this. All most people want is just a fighting chance.

Labels: Greedy Republican Bastards, rant, social Darwinism, supply-side economics

So here we are again, back where we've been so often during the last thirty years, with Republican politicians grandstanding about dirty whores who won't keep their legs closed and be nice, docile brood mares the way Jeebus intended; and about how Christians are being persecuted right here in Amurrica, oh my; and about how if everyone would just stop having sex unless they wanted babies like that nice man Rick Santorum all our societal problems would just go away. It's amazing to me that anyone still responds to this particular dogwhistle.

Black Americans, particularly the urban poor, made a convenient scapegoat for many years, and that image so deftly crafted by Republicans of the lazy, shiftless black man on the public dole lingers to this day. The reality that those urban men living in poverty found doors slammed in their faces when they tried to find employment was immaterial. "They" looked different from "us", and so it was easy to paint them as completely different, with values that were antithetical to those of the white blue-collar class that elected the worst bigots and racists in our country to higher office.

When I was in my early twenties, I lived in an apartment around the corner from the Ford automobile assembly plant in Linden, New Jersey. Ever day I'd drive past that plant on my way to my underpaid-department-manager job at Bamberger's in the Menlo Park Mall and see the assembly-line workers heading into the plant. Those workers made decent money. They too had houses in the suburbs and color TVs and their kids went to decent schools. They might not have been the brightest people in the world, and most of them were first-generation native-born Americans, but they were able to have their share of the American dream.

But over the last thirty years, that all changed. The jobs went away, and so did the opportunities. Many of these men got their kids through college, and their kids are now the parents of today's twenty-somethings. And those grandchildren of the Ford plant workers are finding a job market that has nothing for them. Some of those men had children who didn't get to college, and they're finding themeselves now retiring without the many benefits their fathers got. Their kids are having an even worse time of it, as the manufacturing jobs their grandfathers had, which gave them job security and benefits and a pension, are gone. For decades, they were told that "the blacks" were at fault for their own plight because they didn't want to work. But now, they themselves find a workplace that's closed to them. They're told that "retraining" is necessary, so they spent money they didn't have and took a tech school course to "retrain" themselves and still find no opportunities. If they're married, their marriages are suffering because their wives, if they can find work, are having to foot the entire bill for the family. They feel useless and their wives feel resentful. The kids are growing fast and need new clothes and it's hard to support a family on one meager paycheck.

And yet they have clung to the belief that if they Just Work Hard Enough, they too will be able to join the ranks of the rich someday, because they've been told that rich guys like Donald Trump and Mitt Romney got where they are because they worked harder than anyone else. It frustrates them that they're not being given the chance to even show how willing they are to work hard.

And still they vote Republican. They vote Republican because they want to believe that their plight is the fault of black people, or of the very women in the workplace who are keeping a roof over their heads because for some reason, female unemployment is less. They want to believe their plight is the fault of illegal immigrants who they think took their jobs from them by being willing to work for peanuts. They want to believe that if those hippies had just kept their mouths shut in the sixties, the world would be like it was for their grandfathers, who worked eight hours in the plant, were home at five o'clock for dinner, had steak once a week for Sunday dinner, and then retired with a full pension and paid retiree medical insurance. They want to believe that this isn't as good as it's ever going to be again. Because the dream dies hard.

For decades, Republicans have been able to play these guys by blamemongering others. But the Republicans are now preparing to nominate a guy for President who was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple, but has been reduced to referring to his automobile company president / Nixon cabinet member / presidential candidate father as a humble carpenter (presumably just like supply-side Jesus...). But lo there have been rumblings in the land about income inequality as these displaced white American guys find it ever more difficult to sustain the illusion that hard work will get them a key to the country club washroom.

This must be stopped.

Herman Cain tried to stop it by suggesting that those who are not rich should blame themselves. Republicans have blamed low-income homeowners for the 2008 financial collapse and blamed the unemployed for being unemployed. The illusion must be kept at all costs.

Except that the costs are high, and now the lives of those guys whose fathers regarded the bigoted TV character Archie Bunker as a hero are finding that their own lives are starting to resemble those of the people Archie and their own fathers decried.

Krugman, NYT today:

something is clearly happening to the traditional working-class family. The question is what. And it is, frankly, amazing how quickly and blithely conservatives dismiss the seemingly obvious answer: A drastic reduction in the work opportunities available to less-educated men.

Most of the numbers you see about income trends in America focus on households rather than individuals, which makes sense for some purposes. But when you see a modest rise in incomes for the lower tiers of the income distribution, you have to realize that all — yes, all — of this rise comes from the women, both because more women are in the paid labor force and because women’s wages aren’t as much below male wages as they used to be.

For lower-education working men, however, it has been all negative. Adjusted for inflation, entry-level wages of male high school graduates have fallen 23 percent since 1973. Meanwhile, employment benefits have collapsed. In 1980, 65 percent of recent high-school graduates working in the private sector had health benefits, but, by 2009, that was down to 29 percent.

So we have become a society in which less-educated men have great difficulty finding jobs with decent wages and good benefits. Yet somehow we’re supposed to be surprised that such men have become less likely to participate in the work force or get married, and conclude that there must have been some mysterious moral collapse caused by snooty liberals. And Mr. Murray also tells us that working-class marriages, when they do happen, have become less happy; strange to say, money problems will do that.

One more thought: The real winner in this controversy is the distinguished sociologist William Julius Wilson.

Back in 1996, the same year Ms. Himmelfarb was lamenting our moral collapse, Mr. Wilson published “When Work Disappears: The New World of the Urban Poor,” in which he argued that much of the social disruption among African-Americans popularly attributed to collapsing values was actually caused by a lack of blue-collar jobs in urban areas. If he was right, you would expect something similar to happen if another social group — say, working-class whites — experienced a comparable loss of economic opportunity. And so it has.

Eighteen years after Charles Murray decided that black people are simply not as intelligent as white people, Murray is at it again, now branding the sons of the people who believed Murray was right in The Bell Curve as being unemployed because they are lazy.

Murray, quoted from David Frum:

Put yourself in the place of a [working-class white] man who is at the bottom of the labor market, qualified only for low-skill jobs. You may wish you could make as much as your grandfather made working on a General Motors assembly line in the 1970s. You may be depressed because you've been trying to find a job and failed. But if a job driving a delivery truck, or being a carpenter's helper, or working on a cleaning crew for an office building opens up, why would a bad labor market for blue-collar jobs keep you from taking it? As of 2009, a very bad year economically, the median hourly wage for drivers of delivery trucks was $13.84; for carpenter's helpers, $12.63; for building cleaners, $13.37. That means $505 to $554 for a forty-hour week, or $25,260 to $27,680 for a fifty-week year. Those are not great incomes, but they are enough to be able to live a decent existence - almost twice the poverty level even if you are married and your wife doesn't work. So why would you not work if a job opening landed in your lap? Why would you not work a full forty hours if the hours were available? Why not work more than forty hours?

Only someone who is paid a handsome salary by the American Enterprise Institute can say with a straight face that $27,860 is enough to live "a decent existence" when $22,350 is the federal poverty level for a family of four.

I wonder how Charles Murray would explain why it is that the wealthiest American individuals and CEOs need even more tax cuts to incentivize them to "create jobs" but low-income workers are supposed to be incentivized by ever-decreasing wages and ever-disappearing benefits.

Labels: Greedy Republican Bastards, just another outrage, The Right Wing War on the Middle Class