Tag Archives: economy

Political Rants

Money wins.

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So Scott Walker held on to his job in Wisconsin. Not a huge surprise. The polling has been in his favor for weeks. Plus the recall effort has kind of had the stench of failure about it as we approached the actual vote; people hedging and putting on the brave face. Sorry to see so many working people disappointed in that way. I’ve never been a big fan of the recall concept, personally, but I understand how they came to that point. If nothing else, the effort did give them motivation to do what actually needs to be done in Wisconsin and elsewhere – organize. It’s not just about voting. It’s more about standing up for your rights and fighting back against the torrent of corporate money swamping our politics.

John Dewey had it about right when he said that politics is the shadow cast on society by big business. I suppose in his day it wasn’t very different – the wealthy have always pressed their advantage. Perhaps the period from World War II through the 1970s will be seen as unique in American history in the sense that workers had some influence on the economic life of the nation. There was a social contract between the rich and the not-rich that provided the latter with a modest share of the wealth they themselves were creating through their labor. That model has been under attack for decades now, and it is crumbling.

Now we are in a small-d depression, limping along in a globalized economy in which the American worker/consumer is no longer the primary focus of business. (India’s middle class is now larger than the entire population of the U.S.) The rampant financial speculation spawned by deregulatory legislation over the past two decades (most notably Graham-Leech-Bliley in 1999, which overturned Glass-Steagall) drove us into the 2008 financial crisis, prompting a massive bailout of the enormous financial institutions that were themselves the product of deregulation. So naturally, now, when it comes time to pay the bills, it’s workers who are being told to eat it, to sacrifice their pensions, to do without health benefits, etc. Similar deal in Europe. The people who benefited massively from wild derivative trading and mortgage-backed securities are not the same people being asked to sacrifice.

Money may have won in Wisconsin this week. But that’s no reason to stop fighting. Elections aren’t the only means of effecting change. Passive resistance is another – let’s exercise it.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

To the bottom.

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Through the course of the average day during this politically charged season (and, as you know, we are in the midst of a permanent campaign, no end in sight), you are likely to hear all kinds of wild economic claims and predictions. Among the most impressive, in my humble opinion, is Gingrich’s $2.50-a-gallon gas promise. We expect no less from the once and future King of the Moon People. A big idea man. The thing about big ideas is that they can also be bad ideas. In the case of the $2.50 gas, though, we’re talking more about excessive blowhardism and the usual type of empty pandering you see from seasoned politicians like Gingrich. Last presidential election, it was drill, baby, drill! This time, it’s pappy cheap-gas. Also, pappy tax cut, as always – that one never gets old.

This is where the faulty economic theory part comes in. Take pretty much any one of the Republican candidates’ tax plans, to the extent that they’ve been articulated thus far. Romney, for instance, is touting a 20% across-the-board tax cut. What he’s actually talking about is raising taxes on the bottom third of wage earners, which the G.O.P. field has for several months been describing as woefully undertaxed. Meanwhile, at the top end, the richest of the rich (i.e. the parents of kids too rich to want to hang around with Richy Rich), folks will be seeing an extra $400K or so in their yearly income. All well and good, right? These are the “job creators”, right? The folks who fired your ass so they could afford a second Bentley. They were the ones paying too much, as George W. Bush lamented back in 2000 (which he later fixed with his massive tax cuts).

All right, except that at the same time they argue for a balanced budget, fiscal discipline, etc. – a trope that has grown more insistent by half since the White House changed hands in 2009. Bush’s tax cuts blew a hole in the federal budget you could drive the Nimitz through; in fact, they planned for it to expire after a decade and put a lot of the cost in the out years so as to bring down the impact. But they – meaning Bush, Cheney, budget director Mitch Daniels, and others – certainly knew that the sunset provision would be meaningless, simply because of the politics of “raising” taxes (e.g. letting cuts expire). Romney’s plan would add to that deficit in spades, prompting massive cuts in social services, infrastructure spending, aid to states, you name it. That would put us in a Greece-like downward spiral – cuts that lead to economic contraction, which negatively affects tax revenues, opening a wider budget gap, which brings on more cuts, etc. Rinse and repeat.

The best they can offer is a race to the bottom. That’s why we have to push back. If they gain control of the budget process again, Greece is the word, my friends.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Moral hazard, part II.

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Know what I hate? Well, I’m going to tell you. It’s when people intrude upon your deepest personal life, and then when you object, they accuse you of denying their right to – I don’t know – have everything exactly their way, I guess. That’s how I see the hyper-religious crowd who have been complaining about the mandate in the Affordable Care Act requiring employer-provided health insurance to cover contraception. Obama carved out an exception that should satisfy anyone – one that goes way beyond any necessary relief from what’s required, in my view. And still they are crowing about it, comparing it to religious persecution, even Nazi-ism in the more extreme cases.

The latest round has been in state legislatures from Georgia to New Hampshire, where the crackpot tea-party majority has proposed a “conscience” exception so broad it practically guarantees legal challenge. (These are the freaks who insisted, bizarrely, that all legislation be rooted in the Magna Carta, even though few of them have ever read the document in its entirety. Next, they’ll demand all proposed laws draw on neolithic cave paintings.) Then there are the fetal “personhood” statute and vaginal ultrasound bill in Virginia, scaled back in the face of massive protests by women in that divided state. This … from the party that was all about jobs, jobs, jobs during the 2010 election. See what happens when you trust them?

It should surprise no one that Republicans used the economy as a trojan horse to conceal their deeply unpopular, highly regressive right-wing social agenda. It was, after all, GOP-driven policies (aided, of course, by watery Democrats) that blew a massive hole in the federal budget back in 2001, expanding it in subsequent years with undeclared wars and unwarranted tax cuts for the wealthiest people in the country. Those tax cuts were supposed to have expired by now, but as every politician knows, that ain’t gonna’ happen … because no one has the spine to allow it. Meanwhile, we all pay the price. My city in upstate New York is starved for funds largely because the Feds are starving the States, and the States are passing the cuts along to municipalities. That and inaction on health and retirement reform (not privatization, but the kind that would work) is resulting in massive tax hikes at the local level – close to 20% for the coming fiscal year. This just to spare the Romneys of the world a return to the favorable income tax rates of the 1990s, when they gained plenty enough wealth, thank you very much.

The Republicans have nothing to offer on the economy. And unless we push them, neither will the Democrats.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Wingnut rodeo.

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Florida has voted, though not in such high numbers as primary season 2008. One wonders if people are getting tired of the new normal of multi-million dollar negative ad buys. Romney has his victory, much sought after, though the contest is obviously not over yet. Perhaps people are getting the sense that none of these creatures has a strong grasp of what is wrong with our economy and how to set it straight. Perhaps they are looking at the republicans and at Obama and thinking, who amongst this lot is going to do what needs to be done to pull the vast majority of Americans out of this ditch?

Mind you, I’m not a total agnostic on this. There is a difference between the parties. I wish it were a bigger difference, but there’s no point in denying that it’s there. Obama hasn’t done anywhere near what he would need to do to restart this economy and get it going in a more sustainable direction. I don’t know that he’s particularly inclined towards making any bold steps forward on that front – he’s Captain Cautious in that respect. I have a lot of problems with his policies pretty much across the board, but there’s no doubt in my mind that Romney, Gingrich, and Santorum represent a boatload more trouble for all of us than another four years of Obama would.

The simple fact is this: presidential elections always boil down to a choice between two people. It’s a zero-sum proposition. One of those two people is going to be president. Presidential elections, in my view, represent the smallest part of what an engaged citizen should do to move the country forward, but we ignore them at our own peril. If progressives, the unemployed, the poor, the overworked…. the 99% sit out this election, we essentially consign ourselves to a permanent Bush administration. Whatever the outcome of the current wingnut rodeo, I can assure you that the next republican presidency will be Bush III: The Vengeance, featuring denizens of an increasingly radicalized republican establishment and all your favorite neocons. It will be 2001 all over again.

Just remember: these are the people who drove us into the ditch. Whatever else we do – organize, occupy, push for change, or just complain loudly – we have to keep them out of the driver’s seat.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Thoughts, etc.

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As always, a bit pressed this week, so I’ll keep my comment brief. Moving right along…

The uncertainty principle. It can be said that the uncertainty principle is a major talking point on the center-right particularly, but certainly present across the political spectrum. Why is the U.S. job market so weak? Uncertainty. Why are global stock markets in turmoil? Uncertainty. Why does gravity hold down large rocks and trees? You know the answer. I hear this all the time – uncertainty is keeping businesses from investing in new capacity, new labor, etc. The operative question is, though, what is certainty? Since when do investors expect certainty? Don’t we all deal with uncertainty every moment of every day, particularly on the margins of society where one’s very existence is subject to it? When has that ever not been the case for either individuals or organizations? Invoking uncertainty is merely an attempt to shout down any thought of raising taxes on rich people, on profitable corporations, and so on.

Primary numbers. Cousin Rick Perry seems to have a lot of trouble with ordinal lists, even with Ron Paul trying to throw him a bone. (Note to Rick: when someone gives you an easy out, take it.) He somehow managed to draw attention away from Herman Cain’s various troubles for a large portion of a news cycle, and not in a good way. Given cousin Perry’s seemingly drunken performance in New Hampshire last week and his puzzling lapse this week, one has to wonder if he really wants that Washington job. Cain, on the other hand, seems to want it badly enough to hire legal counsel to threaten women with litigation if any one of them dares step forward with yet another allegation against the pizza king.  Now that’s the kind of message we want to send women, right? Spoken like a true CEO.

Field goal. Anyone who reads this blog knows I never, ever, ever talk about sports. This Penn State thing, though, is about as disgusting a story as I’ve heard in this vein since the Catholic Church scandal broke. Aside from the damage this has done to the victims, the most disturbing aspect of this is the culture of complicity that made it possible. Groupthink is a dangerous thing, and ordinary people are capable of doing extraordinarily beastly things, as Stanley Milgram demonstrated decades ago. 

Three modest pieces of advice to those fans of Joe Paterno who flipped cars after seeing their coach fired: 1) Don’t conform. 2) Don’t conform. 3) Don’t conform.

Great war. It’s Veteran’s day. Don’t just thank a veteran. Apologize to them for being so clueless as to let them spend the last ten years in two pointless wars we civilians would neither fight nor pay for.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Occupayback.

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Can’t call me a cynic quite yet. The Occupy Wall Street movement seems a very positive development to my jaundiced eye. Hell, there were reportedly 400 people at the rally in Utica. When we brought out more than 200 for the big demo on the eve of the Iraq war, that seemed amazing for a place like this. 400 is practically unheard of. There is a strong undercurrent of resentment about the financial crisis and the fact that virtually none of the large institutions that caused the meltdown have been held to account, just as no executive in any of those firms has faced the threat of prosecution. Nay, they have continued to receive obscene bonuses, showboating their excess as if to flaunt their immunity from the restrictions of either the law or the marketplace. Like Dick Cheney bragging about his support for torture, they seem to be daring us to do something – anything – about their transgressions. You can’t touch me, they laugh.

Well…. maybe we can. There seems to be an overwhelming desire to do so. Not surprising. We’ve seen the result of not holding people accountable. Cheney’s a good example – still on the loose, influencing policy in some fashion. Karl Rove is another one, out raising millions for another crop of right-wing nut jobs. If course, no one has been held to account for the Iraq War, a needless conflict that tore a swath of destruction through an entire nation as well as the military families in America, draining our treasury and putting us at greater risk of attack. Ask any conservative – if you fail to adequately punish lawbreakers, you encourage others to break the law. We have certainly emboldened future presidents to march into any country they care to invade. In fact, Obama already has, without much fanfare or protest.

Some have complained that the Occupy Wall Street movement is too diffuse and disjointed. In a sense, though, that is its strength. There is a general thrust that society is divided between the stark minority with all of the money and the vast majority with financial problems. Within that lies many topics relating to economics, war and peace, freedom of speech, tax justice, etc. Flat, leaderless movements have a kind of strength that the traditional top-down model lacks: it’s easy to corrupt a handful of top dogs. But if the entire nation of Bolivia or Argentina or Greece is out in the street, banging on pots, clogging up the works, it won’t be easily co-opted.

Like the tea party, they’ve gotten their agenda in front of the people. Let’s see if they can keep it there.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Eight is enough.

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Though I didn’t intend to do so, I did in fact watch part of the Republican debate at the Reagan Library on Wednesday night. At the outset, I have to say that this election season is front-loaded beyond all comprehension. For chrissake – no one has actually voted in any real sense, and yet we’ve already seen a major candidate – T-Paw – drop out, seen others alternately being accorded front-runner status, seen the declaration of a “two-man race” for the G.O.P. nomination, etc. What the hell… it’s bad enough that we are now in perpetual election mode (i.e. all of last year and much of 2009 was taken up with the mid-terms; all of this year with 2012). Can we just let the voters sort this out?

Having said that, on to the debate. The moderator’s attention first trained on THE NEXT NEW THING: RICK PERRY, who is, in fact, a very old thing. Perry (no relation) has gotten a lot of pop-culture credit for job creation. Every time I hear this, I think of an Onion headline from back when a previous Texan was in the White House – the headline went something like “Bush to U.S. Businesses: Create Millions of Shitty Jobs.”  I think it’s kind of a Texas thing, because many of those great Texas jobs that are not either in government or in the extractive industries are of the low-wage, no benefits, no security type. Anyway, here is what the governor had to say:

You want to create jobs in America? You free the American entrepreneur to do what he or she does, which is risk their capital, and I’ll guarantee you, the entrepreneur in America, the small businessman and woman, they’re looking for a president that will say we’re going to lower the tax burden on you and we’re going to lower the regulation impact on you, and free them to do what they do best: create jobs.

This is the kind of trope you hear from all of the G.O.P. these days. It’s those job-killing (low to non-existent) taxes and those job-killing (incredibly lax) regulations that are killing those jobs! Hokum. I have to think these people are just garden-variety liars, because they all look old enough to remember some substantial portion of recent history. If they think for five minutes, they’ll realize that the reason we have high-tech industry and something we call the internet is because public investments were made over the course of decades, mostly through the Pentagon system. I don’t know why these people can’t simply admit that the Federal government, with its enormous buying power, can play a significant role in prompting the development of new technologies and new industries, and has a history of allowing the privatization of innovations that the government paid to procure.

It’s not rocket science. Wait… actually, it is. That was funded by the government, too. More on these clowns later.

luv u,

jp

Uncategorized

Thinking small.

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President Obama is on vacation this week, sort of. Him and about a thousand other people, bringing him information, taking his orders, blah, blah. I don’t know why he bothers, but… he does. With that job, you may as well assume that you’re going to be working straight for four to eight years. Even so, every American president since Carter has been determined not to seem like he’s barricaded in to the White House, manning his vigil in vain. So Obama, like his predecessors, takes a ceremonial vacation, and his detractors take aim. Of course, they would anyway. He has locked himself into Washington! He’s out of touch with (white) America! they would cry if he were to cancel his outing. May as well go, Barry.

Frankly, if he were to come back from the Vineyard with a Jobs / Recovery Act proposal that involves bold efforts to fund infrastructure projects, incentivize hiring, raise taxes on the rich, and so on, I would be the first to say that the man has earned his rest. But that is an extremely unlikely scenario. Obama, smart as he is, does not want to have to walk back every statement he has made about the debt since last year. That’s my best take on that. My worst is that he really believes that cutting spending, basic social safety net programs, and government investment in the short term will, as his Republican opponents believe, create jobs. If he doesn’t know they’re smoking crack on that one, we could be in for Japan in the 1990s.

Speaking of smoking crack, Texas Governor Rick Perry has launched himself headlong into the race to defeat Obama, entering amid a flurry of wild claims and random threats against the Chairman of the Federal Reserve. Here’s a guy who has publicly referred to Social Security and Medicare as “ponzi schemes.” Seriously? This should not be hard to beat. Honestly, if Obama had just done what he needed to do, none of these freaks would stand a chance of winning. That it’s a race at all speaks to the weakness of his policies, not the strength of theirs…. because clearly, they’ve got nothing except tax cuts, tax cuts, and more tax cuts. And that’s nothing.

Will the president suggest a solution that is on the same grand scale as the problem, or is it small-bore policy all the way from here on out? We shall see.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Year 10.

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Wtf, what a year, eh? At least those of us who made it through… made it through. Just a few closing thoughts before that ludicrously pointless ball of Christmas tree lights falls, signaling the arbitrary beginning to another great year.

Economy. At the end of a tumultuous year, we are still at nearly 10% unemployment as it is currently calculated, meaning that it’s probably closer to 16% in real terms, maybe higher. I can tell you that, of the family members and close friends who have lost a job in the past year to 18 months, 2 out of 3 are still looking for work. This is probably a familiar story across the country. And yet, some seem to be doing quite well. American businesses – and I mean BIG businesses – have amassed huge piles of cash over the past year. The stock market – and therefore, investors – are doing better. And on Wall Street, the bonuses were fatter than a Christmas goose once again. (They’ve got a tax cut on the way, too.) Even with all that, they managed to take a swipe at Obama, who has done little more than wag a finger at them. There’s gratitude for you.  

War. Our glorious victory in Afghanistan was about nine years ago, one of the darkest winters I can recall, and the start of a long, bloody chapter in the history of American empire. Anything like the bloodiest ever? Likely not. It is just as well that we remember how many lives were lost in Korea in the early 1950s, in Vietnam in the 1960s and ’70s, in Central America and southern Africa in the 1980s, and elsewhere. Even individually, they make Iraq and Afghanistan seem like relatively minor catastrophes, though either of our most recent wars would put  us into Milosevic territory (and probably beyond). Still, Afghanistan has the distinction of being our longest war, as well as one we should have known better than to ignite (happy as we were to help strand the Soviets there during the 1980s).

Social Programs. Despite (and partially because of) the new health insurance reform bill, this has not been a good year for the social safety net. Political players are positioning themselves to implement massive cuts in Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid over the coming two years. They’ve ginned up fear of the deficit, sapped the federal budget with Obama’s tax compromise, and set up the hurdles in advance, the first being the continuing budget resolution that will run out in March. Watch – that’s when they will bring out the long knives. We’d best be ready for them.  Read Dean Baker’s excellent blog as well as Ezra Klein’s interview with James Galbraith, and start talking to your friends about this … yesterday.

Here’s to a better year next time around.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Turning Japanese.

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Looks like we all drive with Boehner. And perhaps swim with Aqua Buddha.

Okay, so… here’s the irony of this mid-term election. Admittedly Obama isn’t the most “outside of the box” thinker imaginable, but when he came into office two years ago, he had a relatively ambitious agenda that included a major stimulus package. The original version included infrastructure spending that would have put some fuel into this sluggish recovery. The Republicans had decided, of course, to vote no on everything, including cloture for all Senate bills, making the bar for passage of anything more than sixty votes. The stimulus got watered down with tax cuts – 30% or so was tax cuts – to bring along people like Arlen Specter, who was a Republican then.

Of course, that spending package worked by all measures… but only so well, as tax cuts have always been a pretty poor method for stimulating the economy. The G.O.P. then tag the dems with the “failed stimulus”, even though its lack of broader effectiveness was largely due to their stonewalling. Now the voters, in their understandable anger at this failure, have put the Dems out and, by extension, House Republicans back in charge, so any correction of this is extremely unlikely. So… it looks like we’re headed for Japan in the 1990s – a zombie economy, staggering along for the next decade, suffering from our unwillingness to take bold action. The deficit hawks have gained the upper hand for the nonce, and that is not good news for the rest of us.

Not that the G.O.P. House will seriously move to cut the deficit. As of yet, they have been unable to name even a few billion dollars worth of cuts they would be willing to make. Not to mention the fact that they seem determined to continue boring the hole through the treasury that Bush started with his tax cuts for the rich and famous. If they do that and succeed in repealing the health care legislation, we’re effectively talking about another $1.7 trillion in debt added on to what they claim is a staggering total already. Does that sound serious to you? Perhaps they’ll try to resurrect Dubya’s Social Security privatization plan to underwrite such largesse to the wealthy. (Since their successful House campaigns were floated by post-Citizens United corporate cash, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.)

Here’s my suggestion, Mr. President. Take that $700 billion tax cut they want to give to the wealthy and propose adding it to the cuts for the bottom 97%. Let them vote against that one.

luv u,

jp