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.

January 30, 2008


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THE DISASTER OF CORPORATE RULE


Jesse Unruh once called money "the mother's milk of politics." We're seeing the hideous results of big money and its influence in our political system. Corporations have touted "free trade." Corporations have waged war against unions and the working class. Corporations have dragged their feet on global climate change. The war in Iraq is more about protecting corporate oil interests than it ever was about a "global war on terror." This article by Peter G. Cohen is at www.smirkingchimp.com:


In talking about the current recession and the Washington fix, economists are avoiding the subject of corporate responsibility. The reason that so many people are unable to pay their mortgages is that they are not making enough money and have no savings for an economic slowdown.


The government is limited in its ability to save the economy because an irresponsible Republican majority has supported 'endless' war for American corporate domination, which has been paid for by extensive borrowing. We are in danger of having to pay penalty rates on the debt or losing our national credit cards.


Henry Ford decided to pay $5 a day when most businesses were paying $2. His reason was that he wanted his workers to be able to afford to buy the cars they were making. Many of today's corporations have forgotten that lesson. They have made war on American workers by outsourcing the work to poor foreign peoples eager to work for less. The result is that we have greatly weakened the American consumer, who in turn relies upon credit - whether they can afford it or not.

January 28, 2008

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ROMNEY THE JOB SLASHER



In the recent primary campaign in Michigan you would have thought Mitt Romney was a guardian of working class people and working class jobs. Romney has touted himself as experienced in business and said he would bring that expertise to the White House. But the record is that Romney, in his role as businessman, slashed jobs. It's the Republican way to talk about job creation while doing everything possible to eliminate jobs and decent wages. This article by Robert Gavin is at www.boston.com:



In early 1995, as the Ampad paper plant in Marion, Ind., neared its shutdown following a bitter strike, Randy Johnson, a worker and union official, scrawled a personal letter to Mitt Romney, pouring out his disappointment that Romney, then chief executive of the investment firm that controlled Ampad, had not done enough to settle the strike and save some 200 jobs.


"We really thought you might help," Johnson said in the handwritten note, "but instead we heard excuses that were unacceptable from a man of your prominent position."


Romney, who had recently lost a Senate race in which the strike became a flashpoint, responded that he had "privately" urged a settlement, but was advised by lawyers not to intervene directly. His political interests, he explained, conflicted with his business responsibilities.


Now, Romney's decision to stay on the sidelines as his firm, Bain Capital, slashed jobs at the office supply manufacturer stands in marked contrast to his recent pledges to beleaguered auto workers in Michigan and textile workers in South Carolina to "fight to save every job."


IRAQ: TEMPLATE FOR A BAD WAR



John McCain is running as the most militaristic of the very militaristic Republican slate of candidates. McCain has his experience in Vietnam and as a prisoner of war to give him some veneer of credibility on military matters. But being a POW doesn't make you an expert on military strategy. This commentary by P. M. Carpenter talks about past military thinkers like Dwight D. Eisenhower and George Marshall and how they would have viewed this disaster in Iraq. The commentary is at pmcarpenter.blogs.com:



It so happened that when I read that I had just put down a marvelous new work on military history: Mark Perry's Partners in Command, an investigation into the working relationship between Generals George C. Marshall and Dwight D. Eisenhower. And the meticulously driven subtext of Perry's work is that both of these incisive military minds and, later, shapers of America's foreign policy, would have been appalled -- absolutely aghast -- at the United States' entry into Iraq.


Both would have left aside the question of apologies, because both, quite simply, would have found the intervention utterly inexcusable -- a betrayal of America's political culture, societal way of thinking, and even common sense.


Marshall and Eisenhower thought alike because in the 1920s they had both studied at the feet of a certain General Fox Conner, a military genius of unusual sociopolitical insight as well. And what Conner taught them -- what he hammered away at with singular emphasis -- was that, as Perry succinctly worded it, we were "Never [to] fight unless you have to, never fight alone, and never fight for long." (It was these lessons that Eisenhower had in mind, as president, when he pulled our sorry butts out of Korea's human meat-grinder.)

January 27, 2008




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DANGER AND OPPORTUNITY



Troubled economies can produce opportunities, but also present dangers. Adolf Hitler was able to galvanize Germany because the Weimar Republic was suffering hyperinflation. Money was almost worthless. The awful policies of the Bush administration have made our own dollar decline against other currencies like the Euro. We're seeing huge spikes in costs for energy, food, and health care. Many of our good jobs have been sent offshore in the name of globalization and free trade. Like the time of the Great Depression, we have an opportunity to restructure the United States economy. We can get single payer health care, we can rebuild our infrastructure, we can do something meaningful with our education system, and we can make sure working people earn decent wages and benefits. Or we can allow the vultures to privatize everything and reduce most of us to a state of peonage. This column by Naomi Klein is at www.latimes.com:



More than a decade ago, economist Dani Rodrik, then at Columbia University, studied the circumstances in which governments adopted free-trade policies. His findings were striking: "No significant case of trade reform in a developing country in the 1980s took place outside the context of a serious economic crisis." The 1990s proved him right in dramatic fashion. In Russia, an economic meltdown set the stage for fire-sale privatizations. Next, the Asian crisis in 1997-98 cracked open the "Asian tigers" to a frenzy of foreign takeovers, a process the New York Times dubbed "the world's biggest going-out-of-business sale."



To be sure, desperate countries will generally do what it takes to get a bailout. An atmosphere of panic also frees the hands of politicians to quickly push through radical changes that would otherwise be too unpopular, such as privatization of essential services, weakening of worker protections and free-trade deals. In a crisis, debate and democratic process can be handily dismissed as unaffordable luxuries.



Do the free-market policies packaged as emergency cures actually fix the crises at hand? For the ideologues involved, that has mattered little. What matters is that, as a political tactic, disaster capitalism works. It was the late free-market economist Milton Friedman, writing in the preface to the 1982 reissue of his manifesto, "Capitalism and Freedom," who articulated the strategy most succinctly. "Only a crisis -- actual or perceived -- produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable."



DEBAUCHING ADAM SMITH


Adam Smith is the Enlightenment economist whose ideas created a framework for modern day capitalism. Right-wingers like to invoke Adam Smith, ideas about the free market, and the "invisible hand" of the market to suggest that business should be unfettered. But Adam Smith did not believe in the godliness of businessmen. This article by Scott Horton is at www.harpers.org:


One of the idiocies I see trotted out every day in the financial industry’s press is the suggestion that Adam Smith and other great thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment–who furnished the basic framework for our current understanding of industrial and post-industrial economics–had limitless faith in entrepreneurs. It is true that they had confidence in the entrepreneurial spirit as a creative engine. But their Calvinist inclinations were anything but unstinting in praise of entrepreneurs as individuals or as a class. Smith notes that the individual businessman will always seek the expansion of his own wealth and power at the cost of others and of society as a whole. So Smith would have fully anticipated, and deplored, the consequences of seven years of Bush’s government of by and for the plutocrats. Socialistic experimentation is not the answer for this. But a sound concept of social fairness in the allocation of the burdens of society certainly is. Government should not unduly burden the entrepreneurial class. But neither should it become a vehicle for transfer of wealth to those who already have the most, while leaving a heavy debt to be borne by those who follow in their wake.

January 25, 2008




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GOP AND RECESSION TAG TEAM


I have argued for some time that GOP administrations and bad economies go together. It's no coincidence that every time the GOP is in power the economy takes a major hit. From the time of Herbert Hoover the pattern is clear. You can count on inequality rising, on more poverty, on declining wages, and recessions when Republican policies are in place This article by John Dean is at www.smirkingchimp.com:


As the stock market gyrated wildly this week, given the precarious state of the American economy, the New York Times published a table relating to anti-recession efforts in times past . In scanning it, I could not help but notice that among the last eight recessions, all but the first, in 1948, occurred during Republican presidencies. (The first occurred when Republicans controlled Congress.)


Here are the recessions and their Republican presidents: August 1957 to April 1958 (Eisenhower), April 1960 to February 1961 (Eisenhower), December 1969 to November 1970 (Nixon), November 1973 to March 1975 (Nixon and Ford), July 1981 to November 1982 (Reagan), July 1990 to March 1991 (Reagan), and March 2001 to November 2001 (Bush II).


As we all have watched the stock market this week, thoughts of past major crashes have no doubt popped into the minds of many. Republican presidents oversaw them. Herbert Hoover, of course, was president when the great crash of 1929 occurred, and Ronald Reagan was president with the most recent serious crash - Black Monday in 1987.


The Republican Party has long been the favorite of the business world. But when one steps back to look at the facts objectively - as business leaders who want to remain in business must do, and now seem to be doing - the question must be asked: Is a Republican bias actually good business?


SHORT TERM STIMULUS VS. PERMANENT CURE



The news is abuzz about a forthcoming stimulus package to spark the sagging U. S. economy. But we need more than a brief injection of money into the system. The current system is seriously flawed and there are some basic things we can do to fix it. One of the first is to have a universal health care system. Our current system is a disgrace. Millions of Americans have no insurance at all. Millions more of us have inadequate insurance. A health care crisis means financial ruin. We need a minimum wage that adjusts with inflation. It's astonishing that the federal minimum wage remained at a miserly $5.15 an hour for years while CEO salaries went into the millions of dollars. If education is an answer, as we've been told, it should be easier and more affordable to get an education. College is becoming the province of the rich. We need to end predatory lending practices. Credit card companies and banks are getting away with financial murder. This article by Nomi Prins is at www.alternet.org:


The rhetoric surrounding George W. Bush's economic stimulus package, as boastfully "bi-partisan" as it is (we are, after all, in an election year), indicates a complete lack of comprehension of the difference between this 'national' economy and the 'people's' economy, and the extent of the gap between the two.

The unveiling of his plan was classic Bush: state something ambiguous about a $140 billion adrenaline shot, then have your cronies act as wingmen. Hence, at last Friday's press conference, Treasury Secretary and former Goldman Sachs CEO, Hank Paulson was left fending off uncomfortable questions like: would the plan help "elderly people on fixed incomes?" His answer: "The Christmas season has come and gone."

The national economy, as measured by large scale figures simply does not represent individual citizens' economic circumstances. That's why debate over whether we are in a recession or not misses the point of everyday financial realities for most of the population. According to the standard definition of recession (two quarters or more of a decline in GDP), we're not there. In which case, Bush and Paulson are technically right in saying the economy is simply 'slow'.

January 24, 2008




IMPEACH BUSH



IMPEACH CHENEY



BUSH ADMINISTRATION: OVER 900 LIES TO WAR



It's no real surprise to most of us. We have known for some time that the Bush administration constructed a mountain of lies to justify a war with Iraq. But for the sake of history it's important that a new study has documented over 900 lies told by the administration. Bush himself has been documented with over 200 lies. This is no small matter when you consider the carnage rained on Iraq, the deaths and wounding of our own military, the raid on our treasury, and the destruction of our credibility. This article by Frank J. Ranelli is at www.smirkingchimp.com:


A nonprofit collaboration of two independent, non-governmental organizations has concluded that President Bush used at least 532 misleading and deceptively false statements to justify military action against Iraq. In all, the Bush administration as a whole used a mind-numbing 935 false statements to goad America into war with Iraq. Calling their findings “an orchestrated deception on the path to war,” the partnership report may very well be the first fully comprehensive investigation that incontrovertibly proves the Bush administration lied this nation into an unfounded war.


The Center for Public Integrity and the Fund for Independence in Journalism determined, through a collective study and breakdown of Bush administration speeches, press briefings and interviews, that Bush and other top officials “led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous information.”


According to the report, Bush alone lied more than 259 times, including 232 false statements “about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq” and “28 about Iraq's links to al-Qaida.” Quoting Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith of the Fund for Independence in Journalism, “It is now beyond dispute that Iraq did not possess any weapons of mass destruction or have meaningful ties to al-Qaida.” Furthermore, the shared study noted, “the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.”


ABOUT A YEAR TO GO


The countdown is on in this country and around the world for George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to go. I only hope the country isn't suckered into electing another Republican like John McCain or Mitt Romney. The damage the current administration has done will take decades to repair. Some of it can never be undone. Let's hope that we've learned some things. For starters, the man who wins the most votes should win the election. Abolish the Electoral College. Second, we need campaign finance reform. Big donors and corporations shouldn't get to be kingmakers. Third, we need major reform in the media. The media acted as cheerleaders for this atrocity in Iraq. There are countless other reforms we need, but those would be a good start. This column by Patt Morrison is at www.latimes.com:



One year from this very moment, someone other than George Bush will be sliding behind that antique desk in the Oval Office. In embassies and outposts that fly the Stars and Stripes, photographs of a face other than Bush's will be going up on the walls.


At long, long last. It is seven years since Bush plopped down behind that desk, seven years when hope and honor and good faith and goodwill died a little for me, for many other heartsick Americans who love this country, and for millions around the world who looked up to this country.


I say "died," and I mean that. The psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross laid out the basic stages of grief and coming to terms with loss. And Kubler-Ross' five stages track almost perfectly the arc of how we've grappled and grieved over the sickening power crusade of the Bush administration against the nation for these last seven years.

January 22, 2008


IMPEACH BUSH



IMPEACH CHENEY



THE RESULTS OF DEREGULATION



Right-wingers tell us that the path to the promised land lies in the "free market." You leave the "market" alone and everything works itself out. The biggest gripes right-wingers have voiced about "big government" deal with taxes paid by the rich and with regulation. The Big Bad Government just stifles business, we're told, with too much regulation. As we see the havoc being created by subprime mortgages, we can see the results of too little regulation. The effects are being felt throughout the United States economy and around the world. This article by Robert Weissman is at www.commondreams.org:



The current crisis is the predictable (and predicted) result of a massive U.S. housing bubble, which itself can be traced in part to global economic imbalances that could have been prevented.


At least five distinct regulatory failures led to the current crisis.
Regulatory Failure Number One: Failure to Manage the U.S. Trade Deficit. The housing bubble (as well as the surge in leveraged buyouts of publicly traded companies (”private equity”)) was fueled by cheap credit — low interest rates. One reason for the cheap credit was an influx of capital into the United States from China. China’s capital surplus was the mirror image of the U.S. trade deficit — U.S. corporations were sending lots of dollars to China in exchange for the cheap stuff sold to U.S. consumers.


Regulatory Failure Number Two: Failure to Intervene to Pop the Housing Bubble. Along with an influx of capital, Federal Reserve policy kept interest rates very low. There were good reasons for the Fed Policy, but that did not mean the Fed was helpless to prevent the housing bubble. As economists Dean Baker and Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research insisted at the time, Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan simply by identifying the bubble — and adjusting public perception of the future of the housing market — could have prevented or at least contained the bubble. He declined, and even denied the existence of a bubble.

January 21, 2008




IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY


MOURNING IN AMERICA


Since Ronald Reagan left the White House right-wingers have been busily engaged in revisionist history. Supposedly, Reagan's policies created a dynamic economy that created millions of jobs. Reagan, we're told, ended the Cold War because he stood toe-to-toe with the Soviet Union. Reagan supposedly brought back optimism to the country after the depressing 1970's. But facts remain facts. Reagan created massive deficits, enriched the already wealthy, widened the gap between rich and poor, had one of the most corrupt administrations in our history, and presided over massive human rights violations in Central America with his support of the Contras. The real Reagan record isn't pretty. This column by Paul Krugman is at www.nytimes.com:


The Reagan economy was a one-hit wonder. Yes, there was a boom in the mid-1980s, as the economy recovered from a severe recession. But while the rich got much richer, there was little sustained economic improvement for most Americans. By the late 1980s, middle-class incomes were barely higher than they had been a decade before — and the poverty rate had actually risen.


When the inevitable recession arrived, people felt betrayed — a sense of betrayal that Mr. Clinton was able to ride into the White House.



Given that reality, what was Mr. Obama talking about? Some good things did eventually happen to the U.S. economy — but not on Reagan’s watch.

January 20, 2008


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY


OBAMA SHOULD LOOK AT THE REAL REAGAN


If he wins the Democratic nomination, I will support Barack Obama for president. But I found it disturbing that he made remarks about Ronald Reagan that could be interpreted as praising Reagan. It was Reagan's administration that set us on the path we are now. We've had a murderous and bloody foreign policy that has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. In Reagan's time it was a supposed fight against Communism. We've had domestic policies that have smothered the middle class and enriched the already wealthy and corporations. We've ignored problems like global warming and AIDS because Reagan, Bush, and others think they're somehow favored by God and they don't have to take action because the "end times" are here. We haven't taken the obvious necessary and prudent step of creating a health system that protects all our citizens. We have despicable trade policies that have sent countless jobs to other countries in the name of "free trade" and the "free market." This article by Katherine Harris at dandelionsalad.wordpress.com:


Senator Obama, are you tragically uninformed, trying to contrive “unity” by pandering to right-wingers or legitimizing their idol from conviction? Surely we can rule out option one, because you’re entirely too smart to speak and write about matters you haven’t studied seriously. Yes, when Reagan started spouting his political vitriol, you were a child. So was I, a somewhat bigger kid, but his words and deeds are well-documented from the mid-1960s onward. Thus, everything I know about him, you must also know.


For instance, while governor of California, he dehumanized welfare recipients, calling the needy “bums”, “cheats” and “a faceless mass waiting for a handout.” He’d campaigned on cutting funds for the poor, saying, “The time has come to stop being our brother’s keeper”. (Some “Christian” sentiment from one who soon styled himself a righteous Bible-thumper, huh?)


Condemning help for working people who lost their jobs, he sneered, “Unemployment insurance is a pre-paid vacation for freeloaders,” and he dismissed upholding minority rights with this argument: “It doesn’t do good to open doors for someone who doesn’t have the price to get in. If he has the price, he may not need the laws. There is no law saying the Negro has to live in Harlem or Watts.”


DESTRUCTIVE RIGHT-WING ECONOMICS

The dire warnings about the economy are everywhere, so much so that even George W. Bush is pushing for a "stimulus package" to rev up the moribund economy. Why should any of this be a surprise? The Republican administrations of Reagan, Bush, and Bush II have deliberately pursued policies meant to crush working people. Bill Clinton, who some call the best Republican president ever, also pursued policies that hurt working people. We have trade policies that are guaranteed to send jobs to other countries and leave poor-paying service sector jobs in their wake. We have tax policies that were guaranteed to cause massive deficits and consequent cuts to programs that work for working class people. We've seen a deliberate assault on unions and the ability of workers to organize for better wages and benefits. We've seen massive concentration of wealth in a few hands, leaving the rest of us struggling to even survive, even though workers in the United States are the world's most productive. This column by Bob Herbert is at www.nytimes.com:


From 1980 to 2005 the national economy, adjusted for inflation, more than doubled. (Because of population growth, the actual increase per capita was about 66 percent.) But the average income for the vast majority of Americans actually declined during that period. The standard of living for the average family has improved not because incomes have grown, but because women have gone into the workplace in droves.


The peak income year for the bottom 90 percent of Americans was way back in 1973 — when the average income per taxpayer (adjusted for inflation) was $33,001. That is nearly $4,000 higher than the average in 2005.


It’s incredible but true: 90 percent of the population missed out on the income gains during that long period.

January 19, 2008


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY


PAY ATTENTION TO THE WORKING CLASS


You can categorize the population of the United States in lots of ways. You can divide us by race, by gender, by ethnicity, by sexual orientation, by martial status, by religious affiliation and so on. But one thing the most of us share is that we are working class. Economics matter. I hope that Democratic candidates will not focus so much on "identity politics" that they lose sight of the working class. This article by E. J. Dionne is at www.washingtonpost.com:

Still, there will be inexorable pressure on both candidates to use identity politics for their own purposes. Gender solidarity was important to Clinton's campaign-saving victory in New Hampshire, and it could help her again. African American support will be valuable to Obama, especially in the Democrats' South Carolina primary on Jan. 26.


But the long term is another matter. To build a majority this fall and make history, both candidates would need a lot of help from a group with its own reasons to be discontented: the white working class.


"Working class" seems an antique term, but the people it describes still exist, more now in the service industries than in manufacturing. Demographers often use education levels as a surrogate for class position, and the past three decades have not been kind to Americans who are not college graduates.


BAD ECONOMICS 101

The Bush administration and Republican administrations in general demonstrate how not to run an economy. We've seen trickle down economics in various forms in all Republican administrations. In the Reagan and two Bush administrations we've seen trickle down economics on steroids. The country has been transformed from the largest creditor nation to the largest debtor nation. We've seen our manufacturing sector mostly disassembled and sent abroad. We've seen a growing middle class under attack and starting to disappear. We've seen stability in our financial sector undermined. This article by Larry Beinhart is at www.smirkingchimp.com:


The idea under which Bushenomics was sold is this:
The rich are the investor class.
If the rich have more money, they will invest more.
Their investments will create more business.
Those businesses will create more wealth, thus improving everyone's lives and making the nation stronger. They will also create new and better jobs.
Whether or not the people who say such things truly believe them, I cannot say. But that's their pitch, and the media certainly seems to buy it, as do most of the establishment economists.

A more realistic -- and less idealistic -- view of Bushenomics is that the Bush administration and its cronies came at the economy with the attitude of oilmen.
They inherited a vastly wealth country.

They looked at it like the oil under the Alaskan wilderness. They craved to pump it out, turn it into cash and grab as much of that cash as possible.

Wherever possible, they literally sold off the assets. This was called privatization. Our biggest asset -- in terms of size -- is, of course, our defense establishment. With privatization, one dollar out of every three for direct military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan goes to private contractors like Halliburton and Blackwater. So when someone says, "Support the troops!" with budget appropriations, they should really yell, "Two-thirds support to the troops! One third support to Halliburton, et al.!"