February 25, 2008




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IMPEACH CHENEY



TELL ME A FREE MARKET STORY



You wonder if conservatives tell traditional fairy tales like "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" or "Jack and the Beanstalk." Maybe they opt instead for the story of the free market. You let business run free from regulation and all is right and good in the world, according to that fairy tale. We see once again how lack of government regulation has led to the housing meltdown. You don't have to be an economist to see the absolute lunacy of people getting mortgages that were almost certain to go bad in a few years. This article by Martin Crutsinger is at www.sfgate.com:




Sales of existing homes fell for the sixth straight month in January, dropping to the slowest sales pace on record. Median home prices were also down and many analysts predicted further price declines in the months ahead given high levels of unsold homes.



The National Association of Realtors said Monday that sales of single-family homes and condominiums dropped by 0.4 percent last month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.89 million units. That was the slowest sales pace, going back to 1999, and was seen as evidence that the steepest slump in housing in a quarter-century has yet to hit bottom.



The median price of a home sold in January slid to $201,100, a drop of 4.6 percent from a year ago. Particularly alarming, analysts said, was the fact that the inventory of unsold homes jumped to a 10.3 months' supply, meaning it would take that long to sell the 4.19 million homes on the market at the January sales pace.



That was up from 9.7 months in December and just below a two-decade high of 10.5 months hit in October. During the peak of the housing boom in 2005, the supply of homes relative to sales stood at 4.5 months.

February 24, 2008



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LEARN YOUR CLICHES


I was thinking about the great movie "Bull Durham." Veteran catcher Crash Davis is charged with preparing a rookie pitching sensation for "the Show" in the major leagues. Crash advises the young pitcher to "learn your cliches." It seems to me that right-wingers adopt that same philosophy. Any time negative information emerges about Republicans we can expect the old canard about the "liberal media."


That cliche was on display this week from the likes of Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh claimed that a story such as the one about McCain's meetings with a female lobbyist would never be published about Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. It seems to me The Times published all kinds of stories about the non-existent Whitewater scandal and that Monica dominated the media almost 24/7 in the late 1990's. The media are only believable, in right-wing land, when they furnish ammunition against politicians who aren't to the right of Mussolini.

February 23, 2008



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MCCAIN AND "INTEGRITY"


Senator John McCain, presumptive GOP presidential nominee, has advertised himself as a straight talker, ethical, and a man of integrity. His record belies that claim. McCain has been heavily involved with lobbyists. This story by Robert Parry is at www.consortiumnews.com:



John McCain must hope that Americans won’t read the entire New York Times story about his friendship with a female lobbyist, because if they do, they’ll realize that his statement - that he “has never violated the public trust, never done favors for special interests or lobbyists” - simply isn’t true.


Though the article focuses on the friendship between the 71-year-old Arizona senator and Vicky Iseman, an attractive 40-year-old lobbyist for telecommunications companies, it also recounts McCain’s complicated history as both a violator of congressional ethics and a champion for ethics reform.



WINGERS MAY REAP WHAT THEY HAVE SOWN


The New Deal reforms passed under the administrations of FDR and Harry Truman and expanded under presidents Kennedy and Johnson ushered in the most prosperous time in American history. Since 1972 things have been going in reverse. We've gone into full throttle reverse during the administration of George W. Bush. Growing inequality, growing government corruption, and a lack of faith in the political and economic systems have set the stage for major upheavals. This article by Sara Robinson is at www.alternet.org:



And here we are again: Conservative policies have opened the wealth gap to Depression levels; put workers at the total mercy of their employers; and deprived the working and middle classes of access to education, home ownership, health care, capital, legal redress, and their expectations of a better future for their kids.


You can only get away with blaming this on gays and Mexicans for so long before people get wise to the game. And as the primaries are making clear: Americans are getting wise.Our current plutocratic nobility may soon face the same stark choice its English, French, and Russian predecessors did. They can keep their heads and take proactive steps to close the gap between themselves and the common folk (choosing evolution over revolution, as JFK counsels above). Or they can keep insisting stubbornly on their elite prerogatives, until that gap widens to the point where the revolution comes -- and they will lose their heads entirely.

February 21, 2008


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IMPEACH CHENEY


MCCAIN: NOT STRAIGHT TALK


Mr. "Straight Talk" has advertised himself as an opponent of money from special interests, but his entire Congressional career has been heavily influenced by special interest money. This article by Edward T. Pound is at www.usnews.com:


McCain has positioned himself as a die-hard opponent of special-interest influence. But a U.S. News analysis of his 25-year legislative career shows he has been an avid seeker of special-interest money to support his campaigns and initiatives. The pattern goes all the way back to his first House race in 1982. Moreover, as the boss or No. 2 member of the Senate Commerce Committee, he has drawn heavy support from pacs and individuals associated with industries overseen by that committee—especially telecommunications, media, and technology firms.


Between 1997 and June 2006, he collected nearly $2.6 million from such interests, according to the Center for Public Integrity, an independent watchdog group in Washington. In some cases, the review showed, McCain's positions mirrored those of his biggest supporters.


Big corporate donors also have given hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Reform Institute, a tax-exempt organization—once closely affiliated with McCain—that was established to promote campaign finance reform.


CONTRACTORS LOVE THE IRAQ WAR


While American military men and women get wounded or die in Iraq military contractors are doing very well by ripping off American taxpayers. As I've said before, there's nothing lower than a war profiteer, someone who makes money from death and destruction and misery. This war isn't about fighting terrorism or bringing democracy to the Middle East. It's about enriching filthy war profiteers and establishing U. S. control over the oil reserves. This article by David Jackson and Jason Grotto is at www.chicagotribune.com:


Inside the stout federal courthouse of this Mississippi River town, the dirty secrets of Iraq war profiteering keep pouring out.

Hundreds of pages of recently unsealed court records detail how kickbacks shaped the war's largest troop support contract months before the first wave of U.S. soldiers plunged their boots into Iraqi sand.


The graft continued well beyond the 2004 congressional hearings that first called attention to it. And the massive fraud endangered the health of American soldiers even as it lined contractors' pockets, records show.

February 20, 2008


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THE CONSTITUTION BUSH STYLE

I'm not expect in Constitutional law, but I wonder how many Constitutional scholars ever seriously considered the concepts of the "unitary executive," signing statements, or preemptive wars without Declarations of War before George W. Bush slithered into the White House. This is a rewording of the Constitution as it stands under Bush. The article by David Swanson is at www.smirkingchimp.com:

We the people of the Homeland, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, kill the terrorists, lock up the immigrants, and honor our Commander in Chief, do promise to vote, and shop, and watch the television news sometimes, and definitely to vote. Details follow.

Article I

Section 1. All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Unitary Executive of the United States, attended by a royal court which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.

Section 2. The House of Representatives shall be composed of members chosen every second year by the private election corporations hired by the several states. There shall be no election day, but rather an Election Year, thus limiting the work of members to the odd-numbers years of Our Lord.

No person shall be a Representative who shall not profess absolute loyalty to either the Republican or Democrat Party, or both, and God.



BUSH HAS WEAKENED THE MILITARY

If the intent of Bush's adventure in Iraq was to make us more secure, Bush has been a major failure. After years of an unnecessary war in Iraq, our treasury has been depleted and our military has been weakened, much in the way our military suffered from the Vietnam war. We're hearing arguments now similar to the ones we heard about Vietnam. Withdrawal from Iraq would be a calamity, we're told, just as we were told that Southeast Asia would fall to the Communists and represent a dire threat to our security. This article is at theboard.blogs.nytimes.com:

Two Washington-based think tanks, the Center for a New American Security and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, through its Foreign Policy magazine, have done the nation a huge service by surveying more than 3,400 current and former military officers, one of the few comprehensive polls of this segment of the population in the last 50 years.

Here are some results from the survey, which is being released today:

* 60 percent of the officers surveyed say the military is weaker today than five years ago, largely because of Iraq, Afghanistan and the punishing rate of troop deployments.
* More than half say the military is weaker than it was 10 or 15 years ago.
* Some 88 percent say the demands of the Iraq war have stretched the military “dangerously thin.”
* The officers rate their confidence in Mr. Bush — who was hugely popular with the military in the 2000 election — at a mere 5.5 on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the best.

February 19, 2008



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THE SINGLE LIFE


To hear conservatives tell it, the nuclear family consisting of the working husband, the stay at home wife, and two children is the way things were meant to be. Former Vice President Dan Quayle made a big thing about "family values," which became a staple of Republican rhetoric. To be single, especially by choice, is a terrible thing to such people. The nuclear family is supposed to offer societal stability, whereas we singles are a threat of some kind. Laws, including tax laws, are designed to discriminate against single people. This article by Bella M. DePaulo is at www.alternet.org:



I'm fifty-four years old and I have always been single. I love my single life. But for a long time I rarely said that out loud. I thought I was the only happy single person.



I didn't love everything about my single life. I didn't like that "poor thing" look I'd get when others first learned that I was single. I didn't like their assumption that I must be miserable and lonely and pining for a partner.



There were other things I didn't like that I thought I could pin on my single status, but I wasn't really sure. For example, sometimes at work colleagues with partners would assume that I could cover the tasks that no one else wanted. Maybe they presumed that since I was single, I didn't have a life and so had nothing better to do with my time. Socially, I was invited to lunch with my coupled colleagues during the week but not to their dinner and movie outings over the weekends.

February 15, 2008



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REPREHENSIBLE BUSH


George W. Bush has no sense of shame, so maybe it's no surprise he took one of the worst moments in our history and used it for political advantage. September 11 was not a time for reflection, or sadness, for Bush. It was an excuse to lie us into a war with Iraq. It was an excuse to shred the Bill of Rights. It was an excuse to ram through tax cuts for his rich friends and dole our tax payer money to war profiteers. He has been shameless about weakening our military, about getting thousands of men and women in our military killed or wounded, and killing hundreds of thousands of civilians. He has been shameless about torture. This article is at www.lastchancedemocracycafe.com:


“American citizens must understand, clearly understand that there’s still a threat on the homeland. There’s still an enemy which would like to do us harm,” Bush said. “We’ve got to give our professionals the tools they need, to be able to figure out what the enemy is up to so we can stop it.”


“By blocking this piece of legislation, our country is more in danger of an attack,” he said.


Every word of this is a lie, of course . Delaying (or even withholding altogether) adoption of the FISA legislation won’t put America at risk. US intelligence agencies have all of the authority they need to conduct necessary surveillance without the statute. And as others have noted, even if there were some increased risk, the blame would rest squarely on Bush’s shoulders for holding the bill hostage to his demands for retroactive immunity for the telecommunications companies.

February 11, 2008




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CONSERVATISM IS A CANCER


Let's not equivocate. Conservatism is a rotten political philosophy that puts the interests of the few above the interests of the many. It's a philosophy that finds rationales for hating people who are different, whether they be gay, African-American, or some other minority. It's a philosophy that puts short-term profits above the long-term interests of the country and the planet. It's a philosophy that seeks to call superstition science and that constantly seeks to revise history because history is not to its liking. This article by Alicia Morgan is at www.smirkingchimp.com:



Bush is the symptom; conservatism is the disease.


Even as liberals debate conservatives, we cede them the ‘rightness’ of their basic tenets, which I think is a mistake. I hope to show that conservatism – both social and economic – is detrimental to a democratic society. By ‘conservatism’ I do not mean prudence and moderation - which is what many people take conservatism to mean – but the political and social meaning which includes the myth of the ‘free market’, the elimination of as much regulation and taxes as can be gotten away with, the myth that privatization is the best way to deal with society’s needs, and that government is in itself a bad thing. The (usually) unspoken corollary to this is the ‘Conservative Golden Rule’ – he who has the gold makes the rules. In other words, the people with money and power are the best and most deserving – simply because they have the money and power! This is a strongly-held belief of many people, but it is not acceptable to say in so many words, so there are many euphemisms to describe it - ‘meritocracy’, ‘pulling yourself up by your bootstraps’, ‘reverse discrimination’, and so on. Conservatism’s message is connected to some very powerful societal myths that resonate deeply in the subconscious mind, making it easier to believe in the myths than the facts.

February 09, 2008




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THE BEST STIMULUS PACKAGE



The chickens are coming home to roost again thanks to right wing economics. The economy has slowed almost to a stall and even retailers like Wal-Mart are concerned. People are redeeming gift cards for necessities. Congress has just passed an economic "stimulus" package to pump money into the economy, but the stimulus is likely to be a temporary fix. The best stimulus of all is to get rid of right wing economic policies. Let's do some basic things like raise the minimum wage. Let's get universal health care insurance. Let's stop these insane trade policies that export good paying jobs to other countries. Let's reverse Bush's tax cuts for the rich. Let's have a full throttled move to stop the use of fossil fuels and have a planet-friendly energy policy. This article by the Associated Press is at www.usatoday.com:



While consumers have had to contend with rising gas and food prices and a slumping housing market, there are signs that the job market is becoming a concern as well. On Friday, the Labor Department reported that U.S. employers sliced payrolls by 17,000 , the first decline in more than four years. And on Thursday, the department said jobless claims fell last week by 22,000 , but the decline was smaller than expected.


"In this environment, simply cutting back on hiring will not be enough for companies to maintain earnings as demand slows; jobs will have to be cut too," said Ian Shepherdson, chief U.S. economist for High Frequency Economics in Valhalla, N.Y.


And while investors are hoping the Federal Reserve can avert a recession with a series of rate cuts, some economists say the moves may be too little, too late. Analysts also say that while the government's proposed economic stimulus package, which offers rebate checks for more than 100 million Americans, could help reignite spending, the lift would only be temporary.


As Perkins said, if the job market continues to deteriorate, "all bets are off."


Janet Hoffman, managing partner of the North American retail division of the consulting firm Accenture, agreed, noting she expects "some relief" but nothing "radical."



MIDDLE CLASS NO LONGER COPING



The most prosperous time in American history was from the end of the Second World War to about 1970 Since then, working class Americans have been losing ground. People have tried various coping mechanisms to compensate for the failure of wages to keep up. First, women entered the workforce in droves to provide a second income. In the 1990's people took out home equity loans because housing prices were rising and gave them enough equity to borrow against. Now, with the subprime mortgage disaster that option is no longer available. Then people began using credit to keep up. Credit is drying up now. This article by Robert Reich is at www.truthoutorg:


The fact is, middle-class families have exhausted the coping mechanisms they have used for more than three decades to get by on median wages that are barely higher than they were in 1970, adjusted for inflation. Male wages today are in fact lower than they were then: the income of a young man in his 30s is now 12 per cent below that of a man his age three decades ago. Yet for years now, America's middle class has lived beyond its pay cheque. Middle-class lifestyles have flourished even though median wages have barely budged. That is ending and Americans are beginning to feel the consequences.

The first coping mechanism was moving more women into paid work. The percentage of American working mothers with school-age children has almost doubled since 1970 - from 38 per cent to close to 70 per cent. Some parents are now even doing 24-hour shifts, one on child duty while the other works. These families are known as Dins: double income, no sex.


But we reached the limit to how many mothers could maintain paying jobs. What to do? We turned to a second coping mechanism. When families could not paddle any harder, they started paddling longer. The typical American now works two weeks more each year than 30 years ago. Compared with any other advanced nation we are veritable workaholics, putting in 350 more hours a year than the average European, more even than the notoriously industrious Japanese.


But there is also a limit to how long we can work. As the tide of economic necessity continued to rise, we turned to the third coping mechanism. We began to borrow, big time. With housing prices rising briskly through the 1990s and even faster between 2002 and 2006, we turned our homes into piggy banks through home equity loans. Americans got nearly $250bn worth of home equity every quarter in second mortgages and refinancings. That is nearly 10 per cent of disposable income. With credit cards raining down like manna, we bought plasma television sets, new appliances, vacations.

February 05, 2008

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A "WAL-MART" ECONOMY DOESN'T WORK



Wal-Mart has probably been the model for greedy capitalists everywhere. Keep those wages low! Keep unions out! Don't provide any benefits to your employees! But a Wal-Mart style economy is catching up even with Wal-Mart. As more and more of us slide out of the middle class, we don't have the means to buy the things that keep the economy moving. We of the working class have been subsidizing the wealthy for years with low wages and high productivity, but things are changing. This article by Barbara Ehrenreich is at www.commondreams.org:



Consider how we got into the current credit crisis in the first place, through defaults on subprime mortgages. These went to plenty of affluent folks and have wreaked havoc in gated communities. But overall, subprime loans were designed for, and snapped up by, the poor. According to a recent study from United for a Fair Economy, 55 percent of subprime loans went to African Americans and 17 percent to whites. Among whites, they went far more frequently to low-income people than to the wealthy — 39 percent compared with 24 percent. Hence the subprime industry’s noble boasts about providing the opportunity for home ownership to people who might otherwise have been excluded from it.



And why were so many Americans poor enough to turn to subprime mortgages and other dodgy credit schemes? The chief reasons are low wages and job insecurity. Chronically low wages afflict about 25 to 30 percent of the population — more than twice the 12 percent the federal government counts as “poor.” And even earnings in the six-figure range can be canceled overnight when an employer downsizes or outsources, leaving a family without income or health insurance.



For years now, we’ve had a solution, or at least a substitute, for low wages and unreliable jobs: easy credit. Payday loans, rent-to-buy furniture and exorbitant credit card interest rates for the poor were just the beginning. In its May cover story on “The Poverty Business,” BusinessWeek documented the stampede to lend money to the people who could least afford to pay the interest on it: Buy your dream home! Refinance your house! Financiamos a todos! It wasn’t just the bottom-feeders that joined the unseemly frenzy to lend to the poor; big companies, such as Wells Fargo and Countrywide Financial , plunged right in. But somehow, no one bothered to figure out where the poor were going to get the money to pay for all the money they were borrowing.

February 01, 2008



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BUSH LEAVING A MESS



George W. Bush is the personification of the Peter Principle. It says that people rise to the level of their incompetence. Bush probably did that long before he stole the White House. If not born into privilege, Bush would be lucky to run a mini-mart somewhere. He will leave a bloody quagmire in Iraq, hatred around the world for the United States, massive environmental issues unaddressed, and gargantuan deficits. This article by Helen Thomas is at www.commondreams.org:


Bush is going out with a whimper, and leaving a stash of unfinished business.


Of course, you wouldn’t have known it from the boisterous welcome he received Monday night from star-struck members of Congress. Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle fell all over themselves to shake his hand and get his autograph.


He delivered his remarks in a defiant manner — sometimes dripping with sarcasm — such as his comments during Congress to make his tax cuts permanent.

“Others have said they would be personally happy to pay higher taxes,” he said with a smile. “I welcome their enthusiasm, and I am pleased to report that the IRS accepts both checks and money orders.”He was rewarded for that jibe with a big laugh from the crowd.


Bush, who once styled himself a “compassionate conservative,” did not tell the nation he is leaving behind a $9 trillion national debt — something for future generations to deal with.