Their insane world is now our world. And we’d better deal with it.

Like it, dislike it (as I do), but you can’t deny it, and to his credit, neither does Michael Tomasky:

I think the notion of impeachment is industrial-strength insane. There is utterly no proof that the President Obama even knew anything directly about the shifting Benghazi responses, let alone did something about them (yes, folks; under the Constitution, the President must do something). And as for the Internal Revenue Service story, from what we now know, those transgressions were committed by IRS staffers in Cincinnati who have never been closer to Obama than their television sets. … [T]he idea that Obama has any direct culpability in either of these matters is, given what we know today, utter madness. Okay?

But this is my point: utter madness is what today’s Republicans do. You can present to me every logical argument you desire. Benghazi at the end of the day was a terrible tragedy in which mistakes, bad mistakes, were certainly made, and in which confusion and the CYA reflex led to some bad information going out to the public initially, but none of this remotely rises to the level of high crime. The IRS cock-up was just that, a mistake by a regional office. I get all this, and I agree with you.

But what we think doesn’t matter. I can assure you that already in the Pavlovian swamps of the nutso right, the glands are swelling. Theirs is a different planet from the one you and I inhabit. …

At this point some of you may be protesting: but at least Clinton did commit a crime, however lame a crime it was. Obama has done no such thing. Again, in reality-land, no, he hasn’t. In their land, however, he has committed a string of them; he just hasn’t been caught yet. And that’s what Darrell Issa and his committee are there to unearth. Besides, he need commit no conventional crime. A high crime or misdemeanor is whatever the House majority decides it is. Remember, in January 1998, impeachment talk started before Clinton [allegedly] had perjured himself. …

Okay, but surely, you say, if facts don’t matter, then public opinion does? Think again, my friend. In 1998, support for impeachment of Bill Clinton was rarely above 30 percent. Here’s a little sampling of surveys from August and September of that year, during the heat of battle—the release of Clinton’s grand-jury testimony and of the Starr Report. Levels of support for impeachment were 26 percent, 25, 18, 27, 17, and so on. There was one poll where it hit 40 percent, but most were far lower. And remember, in political terms, 40 is the butt end of a massive landslide. The public hated the idea.

Did that stop anyone? No. And it won’t stop them now. They do their base’s bidding, not America’s. How many times do you need to see them do this before you accept that it is the reality? And now there’s an added element. They want to gin up turnout among their base for next year’s elections. And if they gin it up enough, and the Democratic base stays home, they could end up holding the House and taking the Senate. And if they have both houses, meaning that the vote in the House would not be certain to hit a Senate dead-end, well, look out.

I hope the White House knows this. I hope they understand, I hope the President himself understands, that the fever has not broken and will not break. … If my worst fears are never realized—well, good, obviously. But it will only be because they couldn’t identify even a flimsy pretext on which to proceed. Never put the most extreme behavior past them. It is who they are, and it is what they do.

It’s not just the White House that needs to understand this. It’s every American who thinks a majority of batshit-crazy Republicans in both houses of Congress would be a bad idea. Here’s why. A lot of Democrats and independents, butthurt over what was or was not in the Affordable Care Act or else just plain lazy, stayed home and didn’t vote in 2010. As a direct consequence of that little fit of temper and/or laziness, the lunatics are running the U.S. House asylum as well as turning my state of North Carolina into Mississippi with (for now) more teeth.

Look, never mind that Benghazi was a bad and tragic mistake and not a political/criminal conspiracy (except the part where it might have been a Republican conspiracy). And never mind that whatever a bunch of IRS functionaries in Cincinnati might have done, the IRS did much worse to liberal groups under Bush and the Republicans never said a word. These people are not rational. They’re not even sane. If they take the Senate next year, I’m even more confident than Tomasky that they will find some pretext, any pretext, on which to base multiple articles of impeachment. They will fling as much feces against the wall as they can, knowing that in a GOP-held Senate, at least some of it likely will stick. And the strong likelihood that either an incumbent President Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton running as the Democratic nominee in 2016 would drink their blood for it will not matter in the slightest.

Robert Jensen on pro journalism’s next, last mission

The collapse of pro journalism parallels the collapse of the planet, he argues, and journalism shouldn’t treat or respond to the phenomenon as a coincidence:

For those who believe that a robust public-affairs journalism is essential for a society striving to be democratic, the 21st century has been characterized by bad news that keeps getting worse.

Whatever one’s evaluation of traditional advertising-supported news media (and I have been among its critics; more on that later), the unraveling of that business model has left us with fewer professional journalists who are being paid a living wage to do original reporting. It’s unrealistic to imagine that journalism can flourish without journalists who have the time and resources to do journalism.

For those who care about a robust human presence on the planet, the 21st century has been characterized by really bad news that keeps getting really, really worse.

Whatever one’s evaluation of high-energy/high-technology civilization (and I have been among its critics; more on that later), it’s now clear that we are hitting physical limits; we cannot expect to maintain contemporary levels of consumption that draw down the ecological capital of the planet at rates dramatically beyond replacement levels. It unrealistic to imagine that we can go on treating the planet as nothing more than a mine from which we extract and a landfill into which we dump.

We have no choice but to deal with the collapse of journalism, but we also should recognize the need for a journalism of collapse. Everyone understands that economic changes are forcing a refashioning of the journalism profession. It’s long past time for everyone to pay attention to how multiple, cascading ecological crises should be changing professional journalism’s mission in even more dramatic fashion.

It’s time for an apocalyptic journalism (that takes some explaining; a lot more on that later).

It’s a bit of a long read, and well worth the time even if you don’t much care for or about mainstream journalism, unless you’ve got a spare planet somewhere that you can go live on.

Which leads to why I call this pro journalism’s next, last mission: because I believe that global environmental degradation (largely anthropogenic) is the biggest story on the planet right now and will continue to be for at least a couple more generations, and because I believe that that degradation already is too far gone for us to prevent widespread death and destruction within my children’s lifetimes. Only global thermonuclear war, impact with a sizable comet or asteroid, or invasion by hostile space aliens risk greater damage, and none is anywhere near as likely as harm from environmental damage.

If you, a journalist, want to be relevant, you can put start by putting variations of that story on your front page every day. I don’t care if you’re The New York Times or the Podunk Daily Bugle, there’s an angle you can work. If your downtown were being destroyed, you’d cover it. The fact that the damage is in slow motion or that you can’t see it from your office window doesn’t mean the damage to your home planet is any less real or any less of a story.

Charlie Pierce bashes gun nuts AND points out a double standard so that I don’t have to (thanks, Charlie)

On the 5-year-old who was given a real rifle by his parents and shot his 2-year-old sister to death:

If your “way of life” involves handing deadly weapons to five-year-olds, your way of life is completely screwed up and you should change it immediately because it is stupid and wrong. (And, again, also, too: goddammit, “learning to use and respect a gun” means at least knowing that the fking thing is loaded when it’s sitting in the corner of the parlor like it’s a damn umbrella stand or something, and we should talk about that part, too.) It is not in any way “normal” to hand a kindergartner a firearm. If a mother from the inner-city of, say, Philadelphia did that, and the kid subsequently shot his sister to death, Fox News never would stop yelling about the crisis in African American communities and the Culture Of Death, and rap music, too. If your culture is telling you that children who have only recently emerged from toddlerhood should have their own guns, then your culture is deadly and dangerous and that should concern you, too. If your culture demands that, in the face of a general national outrage over the killing of other children, your politics work to loosen the gun laws you have, as they apparently did in Kentucky, then your culture is making your politics stupid and wrong and you should change them, too. I do not have to understand these people any more, and it is way too early in the day to be drinking this much.

Actually, as I post this, it is not at all too early to be drinking this much.

Quote of the day, why-Mistermix-is-a-better-political-analyst-than-you-will-ever-be edition

Because he nails it:

The Presidency is important, but it’s the state legislatures, the rural Senate, and the gerrymandered House districts that are kicking our asses. And I predict that we won’t get much help from “big data” or whatever the latest buzzword for “putting stuff in a database and pumping it out with pretty graphs and maps” because that problem is what we trained Computer Scientists call “hard”. It requires a lot of what the kids are calling “time” and “effort”, and the underlying data is not available in an Excel spreadsheet for easy download and manipulation. The map I want to see isn’t one showing me how the browns are going to vote for President, it’s what needs to change in Congress to close Gitmo or pass gun safety legislation.

If the last five years have shown us anything, it’s that a determined minority rules this country, not a majority, and having the Presidency is a necessary but by no means sufficient condition for passing one’s agenda. Yet the amount of time spent on Presidential reporting by the political press dwarfs all else. The explanation is simple, and it’s the same reason that local papers publish the police blotter: it’s a good way to fill space with easy-to-find information.

Driftglass summarizes “Hubris” for you because I had to study

This is just a taste. And I am grateful to him for the service (which was live-tweeted, thus the weird diction/syntax in places; also, I did a quick search-and-replace on some of the more vapors-inducing participial adjectives):

• Remember David Brooks’ column calling people who opposed Wolfowitz antisemitic? No? That’s the firetrucking problem.
• Remember David Brooks’ columns mocking Liberals who opposed Iraq war as deluded Bush-deranged posers? No? That’s the firetrucking problem
• Remember David Brooks calling people cynical assholes who objected to Dubya’s flightsuit tango? No? That’s the firetrucking problem.
• Remember when the collaborators at the NYT gave a firetrucking weekly column to Bloody Bill Kristol? No? That’s the firetrucking problem.
• Remember when David Brooks leveraged his Liberal bashing tripe into a column-for-life at the NYT? No? That’s the firetrucking problem.
• Remember Steve Gilliard? No? That’s the firetrucking problem.
• Remember when the wingnutosphere went nuts trying to discredit every alarming report out of Iraq? No? That’s the firetrucking problem.
• Remember when palette-trucks of shrink- wrapped taxpayer cash just firetrucking vanished into Iraq? No? That’s the firetrucking problem.
• Remember when everything that is now settled history was America-hating surrender-monkey treason? No? That’s the firetrucking problem.
• Remember when a gay hooker Conservative “reporter” w/ a fake name sat 100 ft away from Dubya for 2 yrs? No? That’s the firetrucking problem
• Remember when Halliburton made $$ selling American soldiers in Iraq toilet water? No? That’s the firetrucking problem.
• Remember when the GOP made “[Forget] Reality” into American national policy? No? That’s the firetrucking problem.
• Remember when Phil Donahue got fired for telling the truth and Conservatives got promoted for lying? No? That’s the firetrucking problem.
• Remember how the Cheney clans got really, really rich sending kids off to die for their lies? No? That’s the firetrucking problem.
• Remember when 60 million Americans re-elected these deficit-creating war criminals? No? That’s the firetrucking problem.
• Remember the incompetent children of GOP campaign contributors were put in charge of governing Iraq? No? That’s the firetrucking problem.
• Remember when Fox News told soldiers rolling into battle to look into the camera and say “Fox Rocks!” No? That’s the firetrucking problem.

You know, I stack this list up against the whining from Politico reporters that I mentioned below, and I think perhaps I should call Mike Allen or Jim Vandehei at Politico and tell them, “There are better ways you could be spending your time, and some pseudonymous blogger in flyover country has just handed you a double fistful of them for free, so pack a lunch and get busy.“

That, also, is the polite version. Too. Here’s kind of what I really feel like saying.

What’s at stake in the State of the Union

Outsourced to Charlie Pierce:

In any event, thanks to Ezra Klein’s invaluable House Of Wonks, we discover that all the howling about The Deficit has obscured the fact that, whatever real problems with the deficit are, they’re actually being slowly solved. This is a good thing to remember since it’s better than 6-5 that almost all the commentary after the president’s speech tonight is going to carry the theme that he didn’t do enough to address The Deficit. Here is something else to remember — given that chart, anyone who still argues for austerity in any form — and this means you, Dancin’ Dave [Gregory, of NBC -- Lex] — is doing so because they want government to hurt people, or they don’t give a damn whether it does or not. There’s no third alternative.

We don’t need deficit-fixin’. We need hirin’. Lots of it. Now.

Quote of the Day

From Steve M. at No More Mr. Nice Blog:

… we think we live in a democracy, but mostly we just watch the rich fight. We just get lucky when a few of them fight on our side.

What the next generation of maps is telling us that we don’t want to hear

As I think I’ve mentioned a time or three, I’m a map geek. Old, new, paper, digital, real, fictional, silent or talkative, I love ‘em. (I do mute the talkative ones sometimes, but still.)

So I was tickled that James Fallows at The Atlantic did a Q&A with Michael Jones of Google, one of the people who helped create Google Earth (now installed on a billion computers worldwide). And he talked about how mapping apps on smartphones are becoming even more personal because they can use info the phone already has gathered about your locations, likes, and so on to craft maps that not only show how to get from here to there but also tell you potentially interesting things about some of the places you’ll pass along the way, or the places around where you are right now. (One manifestation is Google’s new Android app, Field Trip, coming soon for iOS as well.

Then Fallows asks what I think is both a creative and perceptive question. He points out that some of the first photos of the Earth from space, such as the iconic Christmas Eve 1968 photo shot by Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders, “created a different kind of environmental consciousness.” (The American nature photographer Galen Rowell has described this image as “the most influential environmental photograph ever taken.” I was in the third grade at the time, and even now I can recall what that “different kind of environmental consciousness” meant: We — all of us — share one single planet, a planet that amounts to a speck in the vastness of space, and it’s the only planet we’re going to get. I think the first Earth Day and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, among other developments, are attributable in significant part to that photo.)

Could the current mapping revolution, Fallows asks Jones, have the same effect? Jones’s answer was both hopeful and heartbreaking:

My father is in his 80s. He wanted to know more about what I do, so I recently showed him Google’s underwater Street View. [This is an aspect of Google Earth that shows reefs, seamounts, and other underwater features in the oceans.] We dove in the water and we were basically swimming along. We stopped and zoomed in, looked at turtles, looked at fish. We went down under a big reef and we could see a tunnel in there, and there were fish resting in the tunnel.

After a while he said, “Son, this is so beautiful.” He’s never been scuba diving, but he said, “This is so beautiful. I just can’t believe how beautiful this is.” And I said, “Well, Dad, we chose beautiful places because most of the corals near islands around the world are already dead. They look like old concrete. No fish, just dead.”

He almost cried. He stared at me with a “What has the world come to?” kind of look, and we talked for a while about that. And so he was brought to an awareness of the grotesque damage that’s happening worldwide due to the ocean acidification that follows from the externalities of the way we live as a human race right now. It was powerful for him because he could personally experience the ocean in a way that, with his mobility challenges, he’s never going to see by scuba diving. Yet he felt what people who have experienced the sea know to be true and care about.

I believe that only this kind of understanding leads to activism, whether it’s a passive activism of a vote or an active activism of changing your lifestyle to protect the world.

The problem is that although this kind of activism is, as Jones observes, necessary, it is not sufficient. At current prices, there is something like $27 trillion worth of combustible carbon — coal, oil, gas and fuel wood — still in the ground. The industries that extract those resources will not willingly relinquish the opportunity to do so, and they have largely achieved a stranglehold on any other force that could force them to do so.

The way we live is killing the only planet we’ve got. The process has been proceeding even faster than we thought, so fast that my children, now adolescents, may well live to see global disruption and human suffering on a scale worse than that of World War II, with no country, no matter how geographically isolated or politically nonaligned, left unaffected.

No map, no matter how cool, is going to stop that. In fact, I don’t know that anything will.

On today’s Connecticut massacre; or, PARTS of the Constitution are a suicide pact

Commenter Kurt Weldon at Pierce’s place:

When the Patriot Act was thumbing its nose at the First Amendment, we were told “the Constitution is not a suicide pact.” And yet, when the Second Amendment is discussed, the Constitution is very much a suicide pact. The First Amendment is phrased as an absolute. We treat [it] as conditional. The Second is phrased conditionally. We treat it as an absolute.

Words matter, and history’s greatest clusterflocks are, to a one, tagged with the shattered remains of people who believed otherwise, the destruction not distinguishing in many cases between the merely ignorant and the guilty as sin. Are we really going to continue to treat as rational actors the kinds of public figures who argue, in effect, that if we give each kindergartner her own Glock, this crap won’t ever happen again?

However, lest I be accused of looking at the world only through shit-colored glasses, let me pass on, via commenter Patrick Myers on the same thread linked above, an observation — and, perhaps, instructions for you if you’re wondering what to tell your kids about what happened today — from Fred Rogers. Yeah, that Fred Rogers:

When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” To this day, especially in times of “disaster,” I remember my mother’s words and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers – so many caring people in this world.

Among those helpers today were cops, firefighters and public school teachers — the same cops, firefighters and public school teachers the Republican Party and its sponsors, the Koch Brothers and ALEC, have been demonizing so loudly and publicly for so long. Bad as today was, but for some of those teachers it could have been far worse.

My aunt is a retired public school teacher in Connecticut. Her older daughter’s husband is one today.

No, I don’t believe in banning individual gun ownership. But I also don’t believe for a goddamn second that the American people currently constitute a well-regulated militia, and anyone who claims otherwise, including a majority of the current Supreme Court, apparently, is batshit insane. I believe in the Constitution, but I have never signed a suicide pact and I don’t know another soul in America who has. Maybe I just need to get out more.

Welcome to the jungle, baby. You’re gonna die.

You know, sometimes I wish evolution actually weren’t a thing:

We’ve got your disease.

Ahh. Order is restored in the intellectual-property court. Plus, we got to fire a bright 24-year-old and keep your drugs expensive. Cool!

Back around Thanksgiving, I wrote about Derek Khanna, a 24-year-old staffer for the House Republican Study Committee who had the unmitigated gall to point that American intellectual property law is not the cognitive nirvana that a lot of Republicans like to think it is. (I, myself, have long referred to American IP law as “where creativity goes to die™.”)

Before the weekend was out, the report had been retracted, ostensibly because it had not been subjected to “adequate review.” (Insert your own euphemism here.) And not long afterward, Khanna was fired.

The Washington Examiner elaborates:

The reason [for the retraction], according to two Republicans within the RSC: angry objections from Rep. Marsha Blackburn, whose district abuts Nashville, Tenn. [Nashville is home to the country-music industry, for those of y'all not from around here -- Lex.] In winning a fifth term earlier in the month, Blackburn received more money from the music industry than any other Republican congressional candidate, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

The American Conservative helpfully notes:

Needless to say, members weighing in on staffing decisions is very unusual. Also, Blackburn isn’t just on the industry’s take. Her chief of staff is a former RIAA [Recording Industry Association of America] lobbyist.

The Examiner’s Timothy P. Carney summarizes the sad hypocrisy of the GOP in all matters IP:

Republicans are surprisingly close to the entertainment industry. For instance, Mitch Glazier, as a Republican House Judiciary Committee staffer in the late 1990s, played a key role in drafting GOP bills expanding copyright before cashing out to the industry. He now runs the [RIAA], a $4 million-a-year lobby operation that fights for more government protection of record labels.

So Republican politicians, with their sensitivities to K Street and their general pro-big-business tendencies, are not eager to roll back the extraordinary government protection for Hollywood and Nashville. But free-market think tanks and writers are banging the drum.

Jerry Brito, a scholar at the Mercatus Center, has just published “Copyright Unbalanced: From Incentive to Excess,” an entire book of essays critiquing current copyright law from a free-market perspective, and the Cato Institute is hosting a panel on the book Thursday.

Brito’s incisive book tells tale after tale of government kowtowing to copyright holders. An egregious example is Mickey Mouse. “Each time the copyright … was about to expire, and the happy rodent was about to become a shared cultural icon like Santa Claus, Hamlet, and Uncle Sam, Congress has extended the copyright term,” Brito explains.

This is not at all what the founders had in mind when they authorized Congress “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries. … “

Retroactively extending the copyright on a work produced long ago cannot promote useful arts and sciences. It just enriches the copyright holder and denies access to everyone else — which is exactly the point, if you’re an industry lobbyist.

Once again, big business is aligned with big government and against open competition. So far, the party of free markets is on the wrong side.

But let’s say you’ve never written a book or composed a country song or created a bankable cartoon character like Mickey Mouse. Why should you care?

Simple. Do you use any kind of non-generic prescription drug or medication? If so, the odds are good that because of this same legal structure, you’re paying more for it than you need to be and than a free market would require. That fact, in turn, contributes enormously to the fact that the U.S. pays far more per capita for health care than do other advanced countries. And that fact — not Social Security, not Medicare, not Medicaid, not welfare — is one of the biggest reasons why we have the deficits that we have.

(h/t: Fred)

A short explanation of why Samuel Alito is too farking stupid to be on the Supreme Court

He doesn’t understand the difference between creating speech and buying an audience:

Alito said the real issue is whether free speech rights “should be limited to certain preferred corporations, namely those media organizations.” And with the proliferation of the Internet and social media, the line is getting more blurry between individuals and media, he said.

Give Sam credit: No conservative has ever gone broke bashing the media, particularly in front of audiences like the Federalist Society. Nonetheless, I’ll try to help Sam out here.

My local newspaper or USA Today or the Huffington Post or whoever does not have a monopoly on free-speech rights. Nowhere in this dimension are free speeech rights “limited to certain preferred corporations, namely those media organizations.” Any corporation except for certain tax-exempt ones can create a website, buy or rent hosting, and endorse or attack any candidate it chooses, just as media organizations do. (And if the tax-exempt corporations decide they want to, then they should just give up their tax exemptions and go buck-wild. Yeah, Roman Catholic church, I’m looking at you.)

What Alito’s vote in the Citizens United case made it possible for corporations to do, and what “media organizations” as he defined them do NOT do, is to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the creation and dissemination of advertising for or against candidates. (It also made it possible for corporations to try to tell their employees how to vote; fortunately, most Americans still don’t negotiate with terrorists.) That’s a pretty simple and very obvious distinction, not to mention a clear and present danger to continuing our form of representative government.

OK, I take it back. Maybe Alito isn’t stupid. Maybe he just thinks you and I are.

Also, if you don’t want to repeat after me, kids, repeat after economist Dean Baker: The deficit problem is not an entitlements problem.

Listen to the man before you go giving away your — and my — Social Security and Medicare:

The gang for gutting Social Security and Medicare (aka “The Campaign to Fix the Debt”) are running in high gear. During the long election campaign they gathered dollars, corporate CEOs and washed up politicians for a full-fledged push in the final months of the year. They are hoping that the hype around the budget standoff (aka “fiscal cliff”) can be used for a grand bargain that eviscerates the country’s two most important social programs, Social Security and Medicare.

They made a point of keeping this plan out of election year politics because they know it is a huge loser with the electorate. People across the political and ideological spectrums strongly support these programs and are opposed to cuts. Politicians who advocated cuts would have been likely losers on Election Day. But now that the voters are out of the way, the Wall Street gang and the CEOs see their opportunity.

It is especially important that they act now, because one of the pillars of their deficit horror story could be collapsing. Due to a sharp slowing in the rise of health care costs over the last four years, the assumption that exploding health care costs would lead to unfathomable deficits may no longer be plausible even to people in high level policy positions.

As we all know, the large budget deficits of the last four years are entirely due to the economic downturn caused by the collapse of the housing bubble. The budget deficit was slightly over 1.0 percent of GDP in 2007 and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projections showed it remaining low for the near-term future. The origin of the large deficits of the last few years is not a debatable point among serious people, even though talk of “trillion dollar deficits, with a ‘t’” is very good for scaring the children.

However, the big stick for the deficit hawks was their story of huge deficits in the longer term. They attributed these to the rising cost of “entitlements,” which are known to the rest of us as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

While they like to push the notion that the aging of the population threatened to impose an unbearable burden on future generations, the reality is that most of the horror story of huge deficits was driven by projections of exploding private sector health care costs. Since Medicare and Medicaid mostly pay for private sector health care, an explosion in private sector health care costs would eventually make these programs unaffordable.

As some of us have long pointedout, there are serious grounds for questioning the plausibility of projections that the health care sector would rise to 30 or 40 percent of GDP over the rest of the century. Recently a paper from the Federal Reserve Boarddocumented this argument in considerable detail.

Even more important than the professional argument over health care cost projections is the recent trend in health care costs. While the CBO projections assume that age-adjusted health care costs rise considerably more rapidly than per capita income, in the last four years they have been roughly keeping pace with per capita income.

In fact, in the last year nominal spending on health care services, the sector that comprises almost two-thirds of health care costs, rose by just 1.7 percent. This is far below the rate of nominal GDP growth over this period, which was more than 4.0 percent. While at least some of this slowing in health care costs is undoubtedly due to the downturn, it is hard to believe that it is not at least partially attributable to a slower underlying rate of health care cost growth.

CBO and other budget forecasters can ignore economic reality for a period of time (they ignored the housing bubble until after its collapse wrecked the economy), but if it continues, at some point they will have to incorporate the trend of slower health care cost growth into their projections. When this happens, the really scary long-term deficit numbers will disappear.

A projection that assumes that health care costs will only rise as a result of the aging of the population, and otherwise move in step with per capita income, will lop tens of trillions of dollars off the most commonly cited long-term deficit projections. It would cost some deficit hawks, like National Public Radio, more than $100 trillion of their long-term deficit story. This would be a real disaster for the deficit hawk industry.

This is why the Campaign to Fix the Debt and the rest of the deficit hawk industry will be operating at full speed at least until a budget deal is reached over the current impasse. If CBO adjusts its long-term health care cost projections downward then their whole rationale for gutting Social Security and Medicare will disappear. Now that is really a crisis.

And in light of today’s horrid front-page News & Record article on the so-called fiscal cliff, here’s a question for Greensboro peeps: Would it really be too much trouble to get Jeff Gauger and his crew at the N&R to introduce some fact-based economic coverage? The voters last week seemed to indicate a taste for that kind of thing.

Repeat after me, kids: There. Is. No. Fiscal. Cliff.

The Washington Post continues to lie, and economist Dean Baker, bless him, continues to call them out on it. Logic having failed, he now turns to mockery:

The Washington Post is throwing all journalistic norms aside in its drive to cut Social Security and Medicare. It continues to hype the budget standoff as an ominous “fiscal cliff” and tells readers on the front page of its web site that it could provide a “magic moment” in which Social Security and Medicare can be cut. The piece begins by telling readers:

“Two years ago this month, the leaders of a presidential commission rolled out a startling plan to dig the nation out of debt. After decades of stagnating incomes, they said, Washington must tell people to work longer, pay higher taxes and expect less in retirement.”

Okay I tricked you, this is the Washington Post which doesn’t acknowledge economic realities like stagnating income. The piece actually began:

“Two years ago this month, the leaders of a presidential commission rolled out a startling plan to dig the nation out of debt. After decades of profligacy, they said, Washington must tell people to work longer, pay higher taxes and expect less in retirement (emphasis added).”

This departure from reality gives you the gist of the story. The piece continues:

“Lawmakers recoiled from the blunt prescriptions of Democrat Erskine Bowles and Republican Alan K. Simpson. But their plan has since been heralded by both parties as a model of clear-eyed sacrifice, and policymakers say the moment has come to live up to its promise.”

Well, yes people have praised their plan. They have also ridiculed it. For example it proposes immediate cuts in Social Security benefits that would be a larger share of the income of the typical beneficiary than President Obama’s proposed tax increases on the top 2 percent would be for most of the affected taxpayers. It also proposes increasing the age for Medicare eligibility, even though this would add tens of billions to the country’s health care costs over the next decade. And, it proposed a minimum Social Security benefit for low wage earners that few low wage earners would actually qualify for due to the number of working years required to qualify.

You  know what the worst thing will be to happen immediately if we don’t have a new deal by Jan. 1? Very rich people will start having to pay a little more in income taxes. Quelle horror.

Also, everyone just needs to shut up about Erskine Bowles being some kind of selfless patriot and/or competent leader. As White House chief of staff, he made Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky possible (not that Clinton wasn’t a Grade A horndog, but you don’t give people like that lots of free time if you expect them to lead the nation without embarrassment). The guy’s an investment banker. He personally will profit a great deal from any kind of austerity deal, as will the investment bank on whose board he sits. Also? Obama is expected to get 60 votes in the Senate to get anything done, a situation the Framers never intended, and Bowles couldn’t even get 14 votes for his own plan from a committee that was named after him. I think that tells you just about all you need to know.

Summing up

Outsourced to Pierce:

It is vitally important that the Republican party be kept away from as much power as possible until the party regains its senses again. It is not just important to the advance of progressive goals, though it is. It is not just important to maintain the modicum of social justice that it has taken eighty years to build into the institutions of our government, though it is. It is important, too, that that you vote for one of these men based on whom else, exactly, he owes. Who is it that’s going to come with the fiddler to collect when you get what you’ve bargained for?

Barack Obama owes more than I’d like him to owe to the Wall Street crowd. He probably at this point owes a little more than I’d like him to owe to the military. The rest he owes to the millions of people who elected him in 2008 — especially to those people whose enthusiasm I neither shared nor really understood — and he will owe them even more if they come out and pull his chestnuts out of the fire for him this time around. He may sell them out — and, yes, I understand if you wanted to add “again” to that statement — but they are not likely to revenge themselves against the country if he does and, even if they decided to, they don’t have the power to do much but yell at the right buildings.

On the other hand, Willard Romney owes even more to the Wall Street crowd, and he owes even more to the military, but he also owes everything he is politically to the snake-handlers and the Bible-bangers, to the Creationist morons and to the people who stalk doctors and glue their heads to the clinic doors, to the reckless plutocrats and to the vote-suppressors, to the Randian fantasts and libertarian fakers, to the closeted and not-so-closeted racists who have been so empowered by the party that has given them a home, to the enemies of science and to the enemies of reason, to the devil’s bargain of obvious tactical deceit and to the devil’s honoraria of dark, anonymous money, and, ultimately, to those shadowy places in himself wherein Romney sold out who he might actually be to his overweening ambition. It is a fearsome bill to come due for any man, let alone one as mendaciously malleable as the Republican nominee. Obama owes the disgruntled. Romney owes the crazy. And that makes all the difference.

I expect Pat McCrory to be elected governor tomorrow and for his coattails to bring this state’s electoral votes back into the red column. And I expect McCrory to spend the next four years signing every damn-fool piece of lunacy the teabaggers in the General Assembly send his way, because that’s the GOP base in this state now, and McCrory has ambitions. And the damage from this dynamic will be significant. Make no mistake. If we’re not careful, by 2016 we’ll be well on the way to making Mississippi look good.

But, if honest ballots are counted honestly, Barack Obama will win re-election with a minimum of 300 electoral votes. And given issues ranging from Iran to global warming, that might be the difference between life and death, both here and abroad, to millions of people. Me? I’ve already voted. I am disgruntled, very much so. But I am not crazy.

A final word to my friends in deep-blue states who aren’t totally happy with Obama’s record and are thinking about casting a protest vote for Jill Stein or Roger Rabbit or whomever: I hear you. But know this: Those crazy folks I mentioned above intend, if Obama wins the electoral vote but not the popular vote, to claim that Obama is not a “legitimate” president. They will go through every hare-brained legal exercise they can find to try to prevent him from returning to the White House, and there are at least four Supreme Court justices who will nod and smile at any damn-fool argument these crazy people try to make. Yes, yes, George Bush lost the popular vote in 2000.  But expecting logical consistency from crazy people, although not necessarily crazy itself, is a fool’s errand. Let’s just erase this contingency by giving Obama a popular-vote margin not even well-organized, well-funded crazy people can steal.

Quote of the Day, One Week After Sandy Edition

“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”

– Theoretical physicist Richard Feynman, a member of the commission that investigated the cause of the 1986 explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, in his appendix to the commission report.

Quote of the Day, Athenae on Sandy and the Govt. Edition

What it boils down to is: What kind of country are we going to be — the kind people want to live in, or not?

When a disaster strikes I want big government, small government, medium-sized government. I want all the government ever. I want the neighbors and the charities and the churches and the families and the friends, too. Every crack in the plaster needs to be patched and every problem needs to be solved, and I want as many people putting that puzzle together as possible. All hands on the [expletive] deck. Here’s a bucket. Start bailing the water out.

I want everybody to be figuring out how to do more, instead of fighting over the best way to do less without looking like too much of an [expletive] about it.

And you know, I think the majority of Americans want this, too. It’s just that for the past 40 years we’ve had this constant drumbeat of no we can’t, it’s too hard, we can’t afford it, everybody fends for themselves, there’s no help for anybody, let’s all just go home and if you have to step over a homeless dude to get to your car then do it because that’s the price of doing business. People deserve to have their homes submerged and their shops wiped out and their lives ruined because of where they live or what they do or who they are, and there’s nothing anybody can do about it, because only government is big enough to solve this problem and we all know government isn’t the answer to anything anymore.

But deep down we’ve still got that nagging feeling that somebody somewhere ought to be on top of [stuff] that most of the time people don’t deserve what they get (and thank God for that, by the way, she says while conducting the express train to hell), that we are better and bigger and stronger than this, and we’re just straining against the goddamn harness to do something. And disaster preparedness and emergency management are some of the most basic things government can do to prevent us from tearing ourselves apart when something [awful] happens, to take that instinct and direct it outward instead of inward.

To make us help, rather than letting us hurt.

I made the mistake earlier today of getting into an argument on Facebook with a couple of wingnuts. They argued that “compulsory charity” — which, for reasons that escape logic and which they declined to explain, they defined strictly as “government” charity; guys, go tell it to the LDS Church — is always wrong. (They also argued that abortion is the biggest sin there is, but then consistency is seldom a hallmark of wingnuts.)

Jesus said to render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, and to God that which is God’s. The implication, often offered up by wingnuts as stone fact, is that the two differ. And certainly they frequently do. But there’s no practical or metaphysical reason why the two couldn’t overlap from time to time, as in, say, stopping the Nazi genocide machine.

Or helping our fellow Americans, our family, our friends, our neighbors to get their lives back in order after an unparalleled natural disaster.

No one with a lick of sense will claim that he knows what Mitt Romney believes, but it is a matter of public record that Romney has said that private interests ought to be responsible for disaster recovery. Given that mutant weather alone is likely to become an important aspect of our new normal in this century, that claim alone disqualifies him from any role in government. And yet somewhere around 50 percent of Americans say they are ready and willing to make him president, as if, in this “Christian” nation, the Golden Rule and the Second Great Commandment were tiny codicils in the articles of incorporation for a company that Bain Capital long ago acquired, stripped of its assets and steered into Chapter 7.

Buyer’s remorse, Zombie Election edition

To probably no one’s surprise, I voted for Obama. But this ad from film director Joss Whedon makes me think maybe that wasn’t such a hot idea.

U.S. Journalism Fail

The fall of the mainstream media has had many causes, but speaking as someone who spent a quarter-century working in it, I think few have been more damaging than the adherence to narratives that were either no longer operative or never true in the first place. And nowhere has this adherence been more in evidence than in how the MSM, your so-called liberal media, has behaved toward the Republican Party. Yes, journalists tend toward the middle of the political spectrum (there are almost no true leftists anymore), but 45 years of working the refs has had such an all-encompassing  effect that no one is mentioning the elephant defecating in the room. Steve M. at No More Mr. Nice Blog summarizes:

But the press had a story. It’s a great, multi-threaded story, really, even though nobody in the press thinks it is. It’s a story the press could have been telling us for years, but never wanted to bother: the story of a major American political party going absolutely stark raving mad, while having the power and persuasive ability to potentially take the country with it. It’s a party that flirted with nominating barking lunatics such as Donald Trump, Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Santorum before settling on a guy who was able to mollify supporters of those lunatics by faking (or imbibing) madness himself, by being a pathological liar, and by spending millions of dollars — because this party is crazy about the rich, and has persuaded much of the country to want to coddle the rich even after the rich nearly destroyed the world.

The party lurches from superstitious belief to superstitious belief (in the phoniness of climate change, in the existence of massive Democratic voter fraud, in the imminence of sharia law in the U.S., in the socialist/Muslim leanings of the centrist Christian in the White House, and so on). The rich guy at its head flirted with some of those beliefs and gave aid and comfort to firm believers in them.

If the party were a celebrity or a historical figure, it would be Charlie Sheen or Caligula, and everyone would want to tell the story. But nobody wants to tell this story. Nobody wants to write that the GOP is insane. Nobody wants to write that a great country can’t survive with crazy zillionaires selling conspiracy theories to angry white people via 24/7 media, just so they can get somewhat lower tax rates.

The story is there, guys. It wasn’t good enough for you, I guess.

Or, as Driftglass puts it:

And yet the MSM continues to prop up the rotting carcass of the GOP like the corpse in ”Weekend at Bernie’s”, and waltz it lovingly across the national stage year after year after year, protecting it as ferociously as they would their own children even as it goes raving mad, putrefies and crumbles to reek and maggots in their arms.

If a guy commits a crime and you help him, you’re guilty of a crime yourself — aiding and abetting, at the least. So when you aid and abet the journey to insanity of one of the country’s two major parties, and perhaps the entire country along with it, what does that make you?

“I’m a great person, but don’t look in my basement, ‘kay?”*

Rajat Gupta, a former director of Goldman Sachs, is getting two years in prison and being fined $5 million for his role in providing insider information to  Galleon Group hedge-fund manager Raj Rajaratnam.

The max he was looking at was 25 years, but the max generally isn’t a real number. The government was recommending 10 years, which sounds about right; Rajaratnam got 11. But Gupta got off with two after lots of people testified about what a nice guy he was and his daughter testified about how she’d been harassed at school after his arrest. I’m sorry for his daughter, but that has no bearing on Daddy’s sentence. The guy was walking directly out of Goldman Sachs board meetings to telephone Rajaratnam; that’s pretty brazen.

Unlike homicide, a crime often committed in the heat of the moment and with a less than clear head, it takes a fair bit of premeditation and deliberation to engage profitably in insider trading. That’s exactly the kind of crime that stiffer sentences really will deter. Frog marching the banksters around in orange jumpsuits on live TV probably would also help, I think.

But getting sentenced for insider trading is so 1980s. How ’bout we start sentencing people for blowing up the economy? We wouldn’t want Gupta to be lonely in prison, missing all his friends at Goldman Sachs, would we?

*hed h/t commenter rgqueen

Learning from the (not-so-ancient) Greeks

Thereisnospoon (@DavidOAtkins), writing at Digby’s Hullabaloo:

It turns that when you throw a proud people who have lived a relatively decent lifestyle with modest provisions for the middle class into the desperate grinder of austerity economics, fascist movements start to develop. That’s pretty much how it happened in Germany in the first place, which is why the the rest of the world learned from its Post-WWI mistake to implement the Marshall Plan after the Second War. When people start to lose everything, it’s easy to blame immigrants and the dispossessed. Those people start to become scapegoats for the sorts of scoundrels who use jingoistic xenophobia for career advancement in the guise of patriotism.

It’s no surprise that the ascendance of the far right in the United States tracks alongside the erosion of the middle class. Fortunately, America has been spared the full force of austerity. So far.

But the rise of a Golden Dawn [Greece's fascist neo-nazi movement, now polling at 14% there -- Lex] in the U.S. isn’t at all unthinkable. All that need happen is for the Very Serious People to get their way in voucherizing Medicare and Social Security, destroying the safety net, and remaking society in Ayn Rand’s image.

History repeats itself, and sometimes, if it doesn’t feel like you heard it the first time, it shouts.

 

The moral and intellectual bankruptcy of David Brooks, Green Energy Edition

… outsourced to Steve M. at No More Mr. Nice Blog:

Brooks tells us in this column that green subsidies are evil because they often don’t pay off and because they make Al Gore fat — er, rich, because he’s so heavily invested in green tech. Subsidies are immoral! The people who support them are immoral! But it’s not immoral to demagogue the issue altogether, or to block any other approach. The Brooks finger gets wagged only one way.

Our terrible, horrible, no-good, very-bad news media and the deficit; or, Don’t point that gun unless …

Economist Dean Baker:

In the middle of a steep recession, any measure that reduces the deficit will cost jobs. That is because it will reduce demand. If anyone wants to see a lower deficit in 2013 (certainly the Post does), then they want to throw people out of work.

This is sort of like pulling the trigger on a gun pointed at someone’s head. Presumably this is not done unless the desire is to see the person dead.

 

Quote of the Day, “What the GOP is good at’ edition

Commenter Roy Webb at Charlie Pierce’s blog:

… it isn’t governing, it isn’t the economy, it isn’t fighting wars, it isn’t “promoting the general welfare,” it isn’t anything relating to the normal functions one would assign to a government. What they are good at is making up inflammatory names for normal processes, and scaring the less-informed into voting against their own best interests. At that, they are masters.

Quote of the day

“You want to know what taking something off the able looks like? It looks like a congresswoman being shot in the head by a lunatic and her political party celebrating when she recovers enough to lead the pledge of allegiance at their convention — but never even mentioning gun control. That’s what taking an issue off the table looks like.” — Digby, http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2012/09/obamas-army-of-dead-voters-and-welfare.html

John Cusack, Jonathan Turley and our ConLaw-Prof-in-Chief; or, “We used to have some lines we wouldn’t cross [but] whoever stops fighting first loses.”

Shannyn Moore was kind enough to post the transcript of a telephone conversation that actor John Cusack, who has a certain interest in politics, had with constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley. If you care at all about the Constitution, they raise some very troubling questions, particularly the very practical question of what someone who cares about the Constitution is supposed to do in November with his presidential ballot.

Put simply, in the real world, where torture and other war crimes appear to have strong bipartisan support, there are no good choices. A vote for Barack Obama is a vote for a man who has taken the executive branch’s extrajudicial fight against “terrorism” even farther than Bush did (and Bush took it far enough to merit a date with a Netherlands noose). A vote for Mitt Romney is a vote for a guy who almost certainly cares as little as Obama for constitutional rights and, more broadly, the accountability of power AND who is beyond likely to nominate more constitutional sociopaths to the Supreme Court. And with all due respect to my Libertarian friends, a vote for Gary Johnson is, effectively, a vote for Obama.

What’s a voter to do?

Turley: We appear to be in a sort of a free-fall. We have what used to be called an “imperial presidency.”

Cusack: Obama is far more of an imperial president than Bush in many ways, wouldn’t you say?

Turley: Oh, President Obama has created an imperial presidency that would have made Richard Nixon blush. It is unbelievable.

Cusack: And to say these things, most of the liberal community or the progressive community would say, “Turley and Cusack have lost their minds. What do they want? They want Mitt Romney to come in?”

Turley: The question is, “What has all of your relativistic voting and support done for you?” That is, certainly there are many people who believe –

Cusack: Well, some of the people will say the bread-and-butter issues, “I got healthcare coverage, I got expanded healthcare coverage.”

Turley: See, that’s what I find really interesting. When I talk to people who support the administration, they usually agree with me that torture is a war crime and that the administration has blocked the investigation of alleged war crimes.

Then I ask them, “Then, morally, are you comfortable with saying, ‘I know the administration is concealing war crimes, but they’re really good on healthcare?’” That is what it comes down to.
The question for people to struggle with is how we ever hope to regain our moral standing and our high ground unless citizens are prepared to say, “Enough.” And this is really the election where that might actually carry some weight — if people said, “Enough. We’re not going to blindly support the president and be played anymore according to this blue state/red state paradigm. We’re going to reconstruct instead of replicate.” It might not even be a reinvented Democratic Party in the end that is a viable option. Civil libertarians are going to stand apart so that people like Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama and others know that there are certain Rubicon issues that you cannot cross, and one of them happens to be civil liberty.

Cusack: Yeah, because most people reading this will sort of say, “Okay, this is all fine and good, but I’ve got to get to work and I’ve got to do this stuff, and I don’t know what these f—— guys are talking about. I don’t really care.”

Both Turley and Cusack seem to lean against voting for Obama’s re-election, on the grounds that they would be supporting a serial war criminal and violator of the Constitution, even though, by his own admission, Romney would embrace many of the same policies. But neither flatly says that’s what he intends to do. And that’s where we find ourselves: We have no good choices. And the reason we have good choices is that We, the People, brought this shit on ourselves by letting it go on before — now just with Bush 43, when we soiled our drawers on 9/11 and have spent the better part of the ensuing decade running around like decapitated chickens, but also with all sorts of crime dating at least as far back as our propping up banana republics in the 1930s for the greater good of Chiquita.

I’ve already called for Obama’s impeachment on just this issue and petitioned my federal elected officials accordingly. Obviously, that isn’t going to happen. I know that the long-term solution is to start electing officials at the local level who demonstrate a decent respect for the rule of law and holding the powerful accountable and hope that in 20 or 25 years, one of them can work his/her way to the White House. But that’s only a long-term solution (and I won’t even get into the obstacles). We need an answer to a short-term question: How does one cast a ballot for president in November in a way that honors and protects the Bill of Rights?

I got nothin’. You?

American suffering as morality play for our so-called journalists

Sir Charles on the great American sport of granny-starving, as applauded by The Village:

Someday someone is going to do a study on the psychological attitudes of the worthless media elite of our time and their obsession with making life more miserable for large swaths of their fellow Americans. The degree to which Saletan, Dancin’ Dave Gregory, David Brooks, and virtually the entirety of Fred Hiatt’s funny pages (save Eugene Robinson, Harold Meyerson, and E.J. Dionne), get tumescent over granny having to move in with the kids because she can’t afford to live on her own is really like nothing I’ve ever seen. It’s gratuitous cruelty at the hands of people who have far more than they deserve and confuse this status with wisdom

.

Threat assessment, right-wing Caucasian edition

Conservatives like to claim that America is a conservative country. There’s a certain amount of truth in the claim … and not to the country’s benefit.

For example, Conor Friedersdorf at the Atlantic makes an observation:

There is, however, another factor that likely explains some of the reticence of some Americans, including professional commentators, to focus very much attention on the Oak Creek massacre.

Their disinclination to grapple with it has less to do with the victims than the gunman. The key factor isn’t that they’re Sikhs; it’s that the apparent homegrown terrorist — a term virtually no one would object to had a murderous Muslim burst into the Sikh temple — was perpetrated by a white guy.

Hold the victims constant and give the perpetrator the last name Mohammed. Does anyone think for a moment that such an attack wouldn’t still be the most discussed story at Fox News and National Review? And at various network news shows and unaffiliated newspapers for that matter?

Instead Wade Michael Page was the gunman.

Attacks like his are disconcerting to some white Americans for a seldom acknowledged reason. Since 9/11, many Americans have conflated terrorism with Muslims; and having done so, they’ve tolerated or supported counterterrorism policies safe in the presumption that people unlike them would bear their brunt. (If Mayor Bloomberg and the NYPD sent officers beyond the boundaries of New York City to secretly spy on evangelical Christian students or Israeli students or students who own handguns the national backlash would be swift, brutal, and decisive. The revelation of secret spying on Muslim American students was mostly defended or ignored.)

In the name of counterterrorism, many Americans have given their assent to indefinite detention, the criminalization of gifts to certain charities, the extrajudicial assassination of American citizens, and a sprawling, opaque homeland security bureaucracy; many have also advocated policies like torture or racial profiling that are not presently part of official anti-terror policy.

What if white Americans were as likely as Muslims to be victimized by those policies? What if the sprawling national security bureaucracy we’ve created starts directing attention not just to Muslims and their schools and charities, but to right-wing militias and left-wing environmental groups (or folks falsely accused of being in those groups because they seem like the sort who would be)? There are already dossiers on non-Muslim extremist groups. In a post-9/11 world, Islamic terrorism has nevertheless been the overwhelming priority for law enforcement, and insofar as innocents have suffered, Muslims have been affected far more than any other identifiable group, because the bulk of the paradigm shift in law enforcement hasn’t spread beyond them.

Would that still be true if the next terrorist attack on American soil looks like Oklahoma City? How would President Obama or President Romney wield their unprecedented executive power in the aftermath of such an attack? Who would find that they’d been put on no fly lists? Whose cell phone conversations and email exchanges would be monitored without their ever knowing about it?

Steve at No More Mister Nice Blog has an answer, and it’s depressingly likely that he is correct:

We might have a serious counterterrorism crackdown against whites in the near future, but we absolutely won’t have a serious counterterrorism crackdown against right-wing whites. If a future large terrorist attack is conducted by a Weathermen-like group, the hammer will come down on lefties; by contrast, if the next big attack is like Oklahoma City, the reaction will be … well, like the reaction to Oklahoma City: there’ll be no crackdown on like-minded people, no significantly stepped-up surveillance, no nationwide cloud of suspicion, no wave of new laws. That’s for non-whites and lefties only.

The key factor isn’t just skin color — the ’60s and ’70s leftists who were tracked by law enforcement were mostly white. The key factor is that right-wing extremists share a lot of beliefs with the mainstream right — they’re anti-cultural elite, anti-urbane, distrustful of government, unswervingly opposed to gun control, and fed up with programs meant to help non-whites, the poor, women, and gay people. That’s the resemblance that matters in this society, not skin color; that’s why we’ll never consider a serious crackdown on right-wing extremism, however organized and violent right-wing extremist groups become. No liberal or left-centrist president would dare challenge the pro-”regular American” bias that protects right-wing extremists, and no Republican would even dream of cracking down on the far right.

I don’t generally predict the future, but I will say that I would not be surprised if the next large-scale terrorist action to take place on U.S. soil were the work of the home-grown right-wing fringe rather than Islamists.

 

Child abuse

Economist Dean Baker:

Yes, on this great day when we hear the unemployment rate is 8.3 percent, NYT columnist Bill Keller is still pressing on the need to curb Social Security and Medicare spending and calling on his fellow baby boomers to rise to the occasion. He has even brought in Jim Kessler, the senior vice-president for policy at Third Way, to help him make the case.

I’m sure that Keller and Kessler would consider my mention of the 8.3 percent unemployment rate to be rude, after all what does that have to do with the need to cut Social Security and Medicare? There is a simple answer to that. The 8.3 percent unemployment rate should be seen as comparable to a school fire where the children are still inside the building. Tens of millions of people are seeing their lives ruined.

This is not a short-term story. Many of the families that will break up under the stress of high unemployment or the loss of their home will not get back together when the unemployment rate falls back to a more normal level. Similarly, the kids who have their school lives disrupted because their parents lose their homes or must move in search of jobs and/or family break up will not have the damage repaired later. This is why 8.3 percent unemployment should be problems #1, #2, and #3.

And yes, we do know how to fix this. Spending money puts people to work. Contrary to a bizare cult in policy circles, it does not matter whether money comes from the private sector or public sector –dollars will get people to work. And the people who get those dollars will spend them and put other people to work. If Keller and Kessler want to be responsible baby boomers they will do everything in their power to try to get us back to full employment quickly so that so many children do not have to grow up in families that are troubled by unemployment. The next generation will thank them for their efforts, I assure them.

UPDATE: Link added. H/t to Beau for alerting me to the omission.

UPDATE: Greensboro folks, this Keller piece appears on the front of today’s Ideas section in the News & Record.

Rigged game, part MMXII; or, Too much is never enough

If you want proof that America’s economics and finances are in the hands of people who couldn’t give less of a shit about the common good, look no further than Caterpillar, the maker of bulldozers and other heavy equipment.

The company made $4.9 billion in profits last year — about $39,000 per employee — and projects an even better 2012.  So how is it rewarding its workers? By insisting that they agree to a six-year wage freeze and a freeze on pensions as well, and demanding that they contribute up to $1,900 per year more for health care than they already are. This move comes, the Times reports, as the company netted almost $1.6 billion in the first quarter of this year and “has significantly raised its executives’ compensation because of its strong profits.”

The workers said, in effect, “[Bleep] this noise,” and went on strike. Good for them.

The company argues that its wages make it less competitive in the marketplace, but the boost in compensation for its executives gives that game away. Its top six executives alone got cash and stock worth almost $40 million last year. Sure, you can make a case that Caterpillar is a well-managed company and they should be properly compensated. But the U.S. wage market has been artificially distorted in the past few decades to overcompensate a few at the top for outcomes that, when favorable, are as much the work of their much-lower-paid minions as of themselves. There’s a strong argument that reversing that trend would benefit the economy as a whole, which, other than plain selfishness, might well be part of the reason why these sociopaths oppose it.

Rose Bain, a striker, grows impatient with such arguments [that Caterpillar's demands are fair]. Earning $15 an hour after two years, she said she could not afford a six-year freeze and did not trust Caterpillar to follow through with [a] hinted raise for lower-paid workers.

“We’re the people who busted our butts to help them make record profits,” she said. “We shouldn’t be treated like this.”

Exactly. And the fact that we’re even having to have this conversation shows how incredibly out of touch with reality our Galtian overlords have gotten. Worse, some of the same kinds of people who run Caterpillar want us to run the country the same way. I think Charlie Pierce speaks for anyone who has a lick of sense:

Jesus God, is there anyone — A-N-Y-O-N-E — out there beyond the Beltway who still believes that the CEO’s of American corporations have any inclination to act in the general national interest? Is there anyone — A-N-Y-O-N-E — out there beyond the Beltway who’d still trust [J.P. Morgan Chase CEO] Jamie Dimon to park his car? … I never thought I’d see the living definition of bleeding a country with leeches, but this comes awfully close.

UPDATE: Missing words restored 7/25.