Not My Fathers' Teabag

While I am amused to see that wingnuts are getting incensed about spending that was okay as long as it was abuse directed by one of their own, the tea party device of rousing bad feeling that's being hyped today by reps of the wingnut is too ironic.

Writing in the Louisville Courier-Journal, editorial writers today capture well the ludicrous aspect of the 'teabagger' proponents.

Protesting is as American as apple pie, and we support the right of all Americans to air their grievances.

But there's something a little too spleeny about the anti-tax set's tea party and teabag talk for today, which is, of course, Tax Day.

Yes, many Americans are uncomfortable with the high cost to taxpayers of the bailouts. Yes, many Americans feel the spending is out of control, and that they have little control over how national leaders are handling the economic crisis. We get that.

Question: Where was all this outrage when the nation's savings account was opened and the dollars were flying out, when the nation's credit card was being swiped again and again to pay for wars that weren't even showing up in the nation's budget? Suddenly, there's a new president and, boom, instant tea parties.

We also have a historical beef. At the heart of the Boston Tea Party, which has inspired today's tea motif, was the reality of taxation without representation; the colonists were being ripped off by the British government, not their own. We have representation. If enough of us feel they're ripping us off, we have the right to overturn them every couple of years, and we just did that.

There are 11 tea parties in Kentucky today, including one at Jefferson Square from 11 a.m.-1 p.m., and another 15 throughout Indiana. We'll pass. We're a little sour on this whole, stagy thing, which means we'll be taking lemon with our own tea today.

The wingnuts have been enraged by finding out they are disrespected by most of the public, and consequently are out to kill off any public interest. Much of the ranting indicates that a little killing would be a welcome diversion for many of their number.

Their efforts are worthy of scorn, not sympathy. It will be interesting to see media treatment of this day's events, and provide a standard for deciding which, like Faux, can be discarded from any future attention. The Courier-Journal has just shown it is worthy of a read.

That Deep Hole We Need Out Of

Grammar just wouldn't work for me this morning, so forgive the title, but it's what I want to post about. (There I go again.)

In watching stories giving a glow to the heroism of Cpt. Richard Phillips, for all of us who have been made aware of the source of Somalia's piracy there is a bad taste. We can admire a person's bravery in exchanging himself for his crew, while still wondering why we can't begin to redeem the harm our Western businesses have done to the country.

With many of you, I learned about the dumping in Somalian waters - that has led to piracy necessitated by the need to make a living - from The SideShow on January 11th. Avedon found and posted then about the hideous waste shoveled off on the failed nation.

Johann Hari says "You are being lied to about pirates: "In 1991, the government of Somalia collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since - and the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country's food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas. Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died. [...] At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia's seas of their greatest resource: seafood. [...] This is the context in which the "pirates" have emerged. Somalian fishermen took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least levy a "tax" on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia - and ordinary Somalis agree. The independent Somalian news site WardheerNews found 70 per cent 'strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defence'."

Over the past eight years of pro-business crimes from the maladministration just past, crimes were ignored as long as they were committed by the business interests. This went on all over the world, to our great detriment. This morning in the Dallas Morning News, Fareed Zakaria commented, in an interview, about the steps President Obama is taking toward regaining a place in the world's esteem.

President Barack Obama stirred a lot of controversy with his remarks in Turkey about religion in America. Did they backfire?

What Obama did was a much-needed corrective to a growing mixture of religion and politics in this country that has taken place over the last three decades, and that is wholly inconsistent with the American tradition. He is not saying that America is not a country with a majority of people of Christian [faith]. ... What he's saying is that America is not a Christian nation in the sense that it is not a nation-state whose politics is infused with Christianity. ... That was entirely the point of the founding fathers in their effort to separate religion from politics.

Why did a foreign audience need to hear this?

It would help them better understand America because what Obama said is true: We are a secular democracy and not a nation defined by religion. ... I think it would make it more difficult for the Osama bin Ladens of the world to claim that [Americans] are waging a crusade and that this is some kind of holy jihad because, rightly, the United States is not a religious symbol. It is a symbol of democracy.

What kind of influence do you think his trip will have?

I think Obama's trip, in general, both in Europe and in Turkey, is going to have a substantial effect in lessening the intense anti-Americanism that had been building across the world. In Turkey, in particular, which has gone in the past 10 years from being a staunch NATO ally with a very strong sentiment of pro-Americanism to almost Egyptian-Jordanian-Arab levels of anti-Americanism. I think this trip will dampen that. ... Turkey has a very complex problem. As Turkey has democratized over the years, it has also become more intensely Islamic – not in ways I think that are deeply dangerous or damaging to its constitutional fabric. But you are now seeing in Turkey a much more normal and natural expression of a devoutly religious country. In some ways, it resembles the debate we are having here.

The injustices of the war criminals who occupied our White House were extended in all directions. They have shown all too clearly the damage the promoters of business At All Costs are ready and willing to do.

It has been a lesson to us all, and to the world, in how badly we need to keep controls in place to preserve the health and safety of the world. When profit is the object of worship to our leaders, no crimes are beyond them. We are all in danger from unleashed greed and criminal inclinations.

Today we celebrate the Risen good impulses, and I like to acknowledge the planting/growth aspect of burial in the earth, rising in three days, like my magically fertile beans. It is great to have a redeemed good will toward men to celebrate today, as well.

What did you expect, chocolate bunnies?

Vast Rightwing Mendacity

Rep. Barney Frank did a number on the Big Lie being told by the right wing last night, and used the words of my title, Vast Rightwing Mendacity. It fit very well. There is yet another huge myth being promoted that blames Rep. Frank for the lack of regulation. and I am trying to get a link for it.

Of course, Rep. Frank was working for reasonable regulation throughout the last eight years of rightwing deregulation. With its usual disregard for truth, the minions of the kleptocrats are accusing the very public servants who fought them to protect the country for the disaster they brought about. Of course, anyone with an ounce of sense would already know where the responsibility lies for the economic meltdown, so there is no reason for the wingnuts to try appealing to those with good sense. That 20% is tightly wrapped in its unreality, and obviously only listens to those who reinforce their delusion.

The dominance of the media by the right wing has led to the mantra that libruls promoting homeownership by the poor caused the economic crisis, and Rep. Frank pointed out that he had sought more than a few times to ensure that affordable rental property be the emphasis rather than promotion of mortgages that the poor could not afford. He recalled a conversation with Hank Paulson in which Paulson was promoting ending rental subsidies to the poor after five years in order to push them into buying homes. Frank reports his response was to ask if Paulson then would be ensuring that after five years those renters were to get salaries enabling them to purchase those mortgages; as usual, good sense did not end the adopted belief in the wingers' own ideas.

While it's a short version of a wonderful spiel, some of Rep. Frank's major points appear in an interview published yesterday in The Daily Beast. I want to add that Rep. Frank verbally last night made a wonderful aside about how the rightwing loves to bring up his gay lifestyle and evidently finds it very titillating. He also mentioned that an article in the Wall Street Journal that blamed Rep. Frank for acting to keep regulation from being applied to Fannie and Freddie had totally been a lie, and his letter refuting it with facts was refused.

Q: You’ve been chairman now for two years and two months. What’s that been like?

A: Well, I stress that, if you’re listening to the Republican critique, I was apparently the chairman without knowing it for 15 years because they complained about all these things that didn’t happen during the period they were in power, from 1995 to 2007.

Q: You've been implicated by some opponents as being responsible for the failures of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

A: When in fact they were in power and didn’t pass the bill. I became chairman on January 31, 2007. The committee passed the bill in March, and the House in May. I was very happy about it, particularly because one of my great passions has been affordable rental housing. One of my big fights with the Republicans was, they were killing the programs to build rental housing for people. They were the ones pushing them into homeownership. I was critical of that and said you’re not doing anyone a favor if you get them to buy a house they can’t afford and can’t keep.

Q: Since you're a celebrity in Congress, people are interested in your life, and your opponents have claimed that [Frank’s ex-boyfriend] Herb Moses was working in a high position for Fannie.

A: How do you think it’s a high position? They’re lying.

Q: What’s the truth of the matter?

A: Herb Moses was a man I lived with from 1987 until 1998. He went to business school and graduated from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth in 1990 at the age of 31. He got a kind of entry-level position in mortgages with Fannie Mae, wasn’t a high executive, wasn’t a president, a vice president, a senior assistant vice president. I doubt he was in the top 200 or 300 employees or even much more than that, and he worked there until 1998. We split up, he quit and left for California, long before I was the senior Democrat on the committee. I was like the fourth-senior Democrat. That’s an example of the lies.

Q: What’s that like, being such a lightning rod?

A: What troubles me is not so much personally because people hear the facts and it’s OK. The problem is it’s a concerted effort by the right wing to avoid regulation. We’re in a terrible situation now because of the absence of financial regulation. The fundamentalists philosophically worry about regulations coming. They see this, I think correctly, as being like the New Deal, like Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, where the public sector steps in to put some rules in to govern the excesses of the private sector while still keeping the value of what they do. They’ve come up with an alternative explanation, because they want to avoid new regulations on hedge funds, on credit-default swaps, on collateralized debt obligations. They’re saying, you liberals help the poor people too much, you wouldn’t let Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac get regulated. And the argument now is, “Oh the Democrats stopped them.” I have to tell you, if I could stop them, there wouldn’t be an impeachment of Bill Clinton, the war in Iraq, the Terry Schiavo case, tax cuts for the very wealthy. But what troubles me is that it’s being used, for policy reasons, to prevent us from taking the kind of regulatory steps that we have to take.
(snip)
Q: How about the legacy of Alan Greenspan?

A: Oh, I think it’s a disaster. Well, I think two things. On macroeconomic policy, I think Alan was unfairly criticized. People said he should’ve deflated the bubble. What they meant was he should’ve caused high unemployment. Greenspan successfully resisted what even a lot of liberals said. It was this whole view, something called the NAIRU—the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment. That said, even the New York Times’ financial pages bought into it. If unemployment dropped below 5.5 percent, it would be inherently inflationary. Greenspan says, no look, we’ve got new productivity, that’s not the case. Unemployment got down to 3.9 percent without being inflationary, and Greenspan resisted a lot of liberals, and I give Alan credit because he said no—and he also acknowledged in hearings that we had too much inequality in the society. I also remember when a Republican asked him if he thought it was possible to cut taxes and increase revenue, and he said theoretically it’s possible but it’s never happened in my lifetime. He was, at the time, 80. But he made a terrible mistake in his opposition of regulation. In particular, his failure to use the power Congress gave him in 1994, to limit subprime lending, gives him heavy responsibility for this crisis. And Bernanke to his credit, used exactly the authority Greenspan refused to use to ban the wrong kind of subprime lending.

During his floor speech last night, Rep. Frank produced documentation of his votes and his positions on issues that have been misrepresented, lied about, and blamed for the opposite of his actual activity. I will be trying to get a copy of the entire speech, but much of it was inspired. There are few more offensive things the kleptocracy has achieved than its promotion of destructive lies, often repeated by the media as if they were fact.

The refusal to allow the lies to stand is a duty the bloggers must be firm about. Promoting facts and truth is the impetus behind the left leaning blogs, and a good part of the reason they have become a force.

The truth should be able to stand alone, but the wingers have chosen blatant lies as their methodology, because it is the only way to promote failed ideology. We have to counter that constant lying with facts.

Dysfunctional

While listening to smug lies from the Gang of Nope, it's hard to believe that they can keep claiming we need the policy that has driven us into the ground economically for the length of time they held the government in their deadly grip. I admit that hearing Rep. Paul Ryan (Wis.) talk about the evils of 'Them' in the government - as opposed to taxpayers - I hear truly mad separation from reality. This is like watching kindergarteners' inventiveness when they know they have no excuse for their actions, so make things up as fast as they can and depend on mom's forgiveness.

One way of putting it:
For those who wanted to stop thinking about politics and responsibility and morality and science and all that stuff, the advent of Reagan-era market fundamentalism was a godsend, and anything that threatens to disrupt it is an identity-challenging tilt of the psychic pinball machine.

Sadly, all the lies won't help the working people in this country, whose jobs have disappeared because they didn't make enough to support the businesses depending on their consumer power. What the wingnuts like to call consumer confidence was an illusion that has come to an end.

The number of U.S. workers filing new claims for jobless benefits unexpectedly rose to its highest level in over 26 years last week and so-called continued claims jumped to a record high in March, according to data that underscored the labor market deterioration.

The Labor Department said on Thursday initial claims for state unemployment insurance benefits rose 12,000 to a seasonally adjusted 669,000 in the week ended March 28, the highest since the week ending October 2, 1982, from an upwardly revised 657,000 the week before.

Analysts polled by Reuters had forecast 650,000 new claims versus a previously reported count of 652,000 the prior week.

The number of people staying on the benefits roll after collecting an initial week of aid surged 161,000 to 5.73 million in the week ended March 21, the latest week for which the data is available, from 5.57 million the previous week.

This was the highest on record and lifted the insured unemployment rate to 4.3 percent, the highest since a matching 4.3 percent in the week ending May 21, 1983.

The budget they brought out for April Fools' Day would do for another term what was already demonstrated to be a flop.

Amid claims that the public would be taxed and spent into disaster comes too late, that has been done ... and their taxes were given to corporations without regulation, and to contractors without supervision.

Now watch this drive....

Nappies Hustled

Get your attention? The title may bring a smile, but what has happened near here is disturbing. How desperate do you have to be to steal diapers?

The crime story near my house is about a man who had a need big enough to risk prison for some diapers. As I have worked in charities before, I know that sometimes people can't afford diapers when their babies have to have one. I've gone into a church nursery and taken a stack of diapers for some one in need, myself. This news item shouldn't come as a surprise.

In tough times some are stealing it seems out of necessity. Before Thanksgiving a woman was accused of stealing a turkey from a local grocery store. More recently a man stole two packs of diapers from a Dollar General in Sherman.

Those desperate in this economy are taking desperate measures. Athough no one can prove a motive for stealing, it seems more items of necessity are disappearing from store shelves. This is not the first time an incident like this has happened. Advice? If your on a tight budget shop around. Some stores are keeping prices low for residents.

Joy Ashby, DME Coordinator for TMC Medical Supplies says, "We just don't do much of a markup. We are trying to help keep prices low for the community."

If you are looking for low priced items such as diapers, a 20 pack at TMC is only $3 while other stores prices range from $5 to $11 a pack.

This isn't a local crime wave. It seems that similar events are occurring in other places as well.

I was at a Walgreens store in an upscale Nashville neighborhood buying shaving razors. Like most stores, this place keeps the shaving stuff behind lock and key. The difference is that managers also alarmed their display case, so that when the door is unlocked a little alarm goes off that grows increasingly louder—and more annoying—until the case is locked again.

I remarked to the woman helping me that it seemed odd to keep shaving supplies behind an alarmed door. She told me that as the economy deteriorates, they're having a much bigger problem with shoplifting.

"It's gotten much worse just in the last month," she said. "We've even taken to locking up some of the diapers. That's how desperate people are getting."

She paused, looked over her shoulder and said in a low tone, "But if someone is in such bad shape that they need to steal diapers for their kids, it's hard for me to not want to just give them to them."

Good for you, saleslady. This reminds me of a Fish and Wildlife officer who confided that if they knew people were shooting geese to feed the family, as long as the hunter wasn't killing really endangered wildlife, the officers looked the other way.

A fatality of our cut-throat economy is that too many working people feel more threatened than sympathetic. The economic meltdown may be a time to take another look at our own habits of giving.

The crime in our area isn't huge, it's rural and in a place where people generally know each other there are a lot of very good reasons to keep your act clean. Sadly, that doesn't mean you can't be required to work without pay to keep a position. The work without pay is called 'working off the book', and I have heard from fellow workers at a few places that they'd been able to hang onto a needed job only by doing it for managers who in turn were required to show really good profits to keep their jobs.

In other words, you can rob people secure in keeping a record of good behavior, but stealing to take care of your children will get you in trouble.

We're growing extra rows in our gardens for folks who need to eat. Today I have a closet to clean out. There are a bunch of cleanliness-related products I will probably never use, and might help some one out if I make a trip to the local shelter. I just may have to pick up some diapers on the way.

You're invited.

*****************************************************

Update: Good grief, the diapers I found were more like $8 for 24. I would definitely be boiling the cloth kind in a washtub in the back yard, if I had little fellas to care for right about now.

Future Forecasting by Business School Method

Happy vernal equinox, what a nice time to be out on the streets. And I have another treat for you, some business school thinking. In Diane's honor, we'll call it Tentcitying©.

Any fool knows that a business making money is the ideal economic gain for the whole economy, right? Okay, leading off with any fool was the hint that we are business forecasting - something that economists know is pure tomfoolery. For your business community, however, forecasting has been manipulative only. The very concept of 'consumer confidence' tells us that. If properly stoked up, the consumer will be a fool and make the choice you have told him/her is the right one. At bottom, knowing that it is the choice that is right for your particular business interest, the consumer accept the view that what is good for you is good for him/her.

Time for a little reverse psychology. Instead of sticking to facts which us nerds tend to do, trying to tell the financial whizzes that if you kill the means of consumers, you kill the geese laying the golden eggs. No, let's give them a ruler they can swallow. Yes, that's a killer image for me, too.

Taking jobs overseas has meant cheap salaries. That meant a profit boost for companies, one that may have meant jobless consumers but of course the assumption passed off in the 70's was that we in the U.S. would move up to technologically advanced jobs, weeding out the service level of workers into purely low-wage jobs where we knew they would be comfortable. These are the Randian assumption of inevitable failures who just aren't up to an ideal society - the ruthless on top and the incapable of ruthlessness on the bottom.

Since weeding out our manufacturing class has been so good for business - oh hush, we're looking at profits from wage and benefit savings, not sales - maybe we can move on to other spheres of success.

Outsourcing firms have been a growing business community and are developing whole factories of technologically advanced workers for peanuts in 'developing' countries. There's new territory to plow there.

The FP branches are suffering from all these attacks, and hiding in the closet from the threat writers presented by Ed Liddy who are talking piano wire. No reason that financial planning can't be done in factories abroad, say, in Indonesia. It's all the same to the business if the work is done under banana trees instead of in the Maple Lanes of traditional America. And you are surely following me? The wage savings would be immense.

It certainly doesn't take even speaking English as a first language to think up toxic bundles that suck in bad debts, hiring a ratings firm that will tell potential investors the bundles are pure gold, and hiring brokers who will sell anything for a commission level that is sure to numb the conscience. That's basic human nature, if you're a devotee of Randian, I mean, business science reasoning.

What was your question? Oh, right, what about the sales pitch we've been putting out about the perpetrators of the economic crimes being essential personnel that need great retention benefits to stay on? Nothing could be more simple. We've taken the public's feelings into consideration and ... retrained those essential personnel for other work. We're coming out with a line of mobile stock carts, to be deployed onto the highways and byways. Coming soon to a street near you.

Treat them kindly. If you can't spring for the stock, buy the apples.

The fact that sending salaries offshore is going to further damage our consumer economy hasn't penetrated yet, so why should it now? And in the words of Alan Greenspan, the effects will be widely dispersed. Don't listen to those creaking sounds, they're gears turning, not collapse.

This is copyrighted, it's too functional for government work.

A Class Of Its Own

When General Motors begged for bailout funds, the federal government demanded that the company get its house in order first. So GM went to its unions and renegotiated key elements of the labor contracts, including pay scales and benefits such as health care for its retirees.

When the city of Sacramento faced an unsustainable budget shortfall, it went to its police union and renegotiated that labor contract, resulting in the union agreeing to waive the pay raises that were coming due so that there would be no officer layoffs.

When AIG came back to the feds for a brazillion more dollars to stay afloat, the government cheerfully complied, and at least $150 million dollars in bonuses were paid to the executives who caused the very problems that put the international insurance company on the brink of bankruptcy, and, this time, the feds did nothing, citing the sanctity of contracts.

The "center-left" editorial board of the Los Angeles Times noticed the disparity and published an editorial today that mostly got it right when it came to the Obama administration's handling of the matter.

After decrying the stumbling response of the Obama team to the outcry over those bonuses, the editorial points to just why people are so angry:

There are at least two lessons in this episode for policymakers. First, when Washington saves a company from bankruptcy, it interrupts the painful but necessary process of restructuring a failing firm. Had Washington allowed AIG to slide into bankruptcy in September, a federal judge would have been empowered to cancel the bonuses regardless of contracts. ...

And second, although it's good for firms to pay employees based on their performance, AIG and many other financial industry players rewarded short-term successes with no regard for the long-term outcome. ... [Emphasis added]

What both the prior and the current administration have done is accept the notion that financial executives are more important than the little people who work under their supervision, i.e., the rest of of us, so much more important that rules do not apply to them. Those executives are entitled, as the editorial put it, to their "heads-I-win, tails-I've-already-banked-my-bonus mentality." We are entitled only to offer up whatever benefits we do have so that we can retain our jobs.

And, while the rest of us are fired for egregious mistakes, financial executives are entitled to shrug and then cash their bonus checks because for a brief period of time, their shenanigans made the quarterly earnings report look rosy.

I noticed that several of the national papers are reporting that AIG has increased security at some of their buildings. That just might be one of their few good ideas.

Victims in Class Warfare

The news treats homeless families springing up all across the country as if it were a sudden development, but it's something that has been in the making since Reagan's term. By taking away living wages from working people, then letting industries like oil raise prices inordinately, the creation of homelessness is just another byproduct.

Last night's report from Sacramento showed a growing encampment of homeless people there, as racymind posted today. As she remarked, this is hardly confined to California's capitol.

In Texas, we have the highest number of homeless children, a product directly related to the 'Right to Work' laws which give employers the right to keep the workforce intimidated and underpaid.

The study by the National Center on Family Homelessness in Newton Centre, Mass., ranks Texas at the bottom of a state-by-state report card on child homelessness.

Texas had 337,105 homeless children as of 2006, including Hurricane Katrina evacuees, according to the report.

Ellen Bassuk, president of the National Center on Family Homelessness, said Texas lacks long-term planning to aid them.

"Homeless children are invisible. You don't see them. You don't see them walking around the streets. People don't talk about them," she said.

The report did not indicate how North Texas by itself shapes up on child homelessness.

But local experts say the numbers have risen because of the economy. A 2008 count found that there were 1,273 homeless children on any given night in Dallas County, and officials expect that figure to rise due to job losses and foreclosures.

Area schools already have reported dramatic increases in the number of homeless students.

"Women and children are the fastest growing population of homeless nationally and in the Dallas area," said Mike Faenza, president and chief executive officer of the Metro Dallas Homeless Alliance. He said the agency has a subcommittee working on a plan to address the issue.

Some local shelters also have seen more homeless families in recent months.

Even wingers can't say that children have earned their sufferings. When they are deprived of care, of education, and of stability, though, the whole society suffers as well.

We are at the end of eight years of the most reckless maltreatment of our working people that has occurred since feudalism. We have a lot of losses - but the children's is the worst.

The adults are back in charge. We never can tolerate this destruction of society, of viable working conditions, again. It is not enough to hope; we have to work for this rational government to succeed, and continue to keep the controls set for public interest policies.

War Stats

New statistics from the Class War this morning show that victims number 12.5 million. The unemployment numbers grow, the numbers that represent wounded and out of action in our economy.

There are growing numbers of the economically wounded, and those numbers represent losses to the whole 'real' economy. The effects of unemployment spread to everyone who's looking to those workers to contribute to their financial picture, from the mortgage lenders to the IRS, from the grocer to the oil companies.

The unemployment rate rose to 8.1% from 7.6% in January. It was the highest reading since December 1983 and higher than economists' projections of 7.9%.

The survey of households found 12.5 million people are now unemployed, the most since records started being kept in 1940.

"It's a dismal report. We thought we'd have another month like this, and I think we have a couple of more coming," said Tig Gilliam, chief executive of Adecco Group North America, a unit of the world's largest employment firm. "We've got a lot of layoffs being announced that haven't been implemented."

Gilliam said he expects the unemployment rate to rise to 9% within the next few months.

Other economists echoed Gilliam's view that the battered labor market has yet to hit bottom. John Silvia, chief economist at Wachovia, pointed to the weekly initial jobless claims, which are still above 600,000 a week, and the large increase in the number of people working part time when they'd prefer full-time work as signs of more job losses to come.

"I'd love to believe this is the worst, but I suspect we'll continue to lose jobs for months to come," he said. "All we can hope is that the pace would slow down."
Underemployment rate keeps rising as well

The number of workers with part-time jobs who either can't find full-time positions or have had their hours cut jumped by 787,000 in February to 8.6 million.

Counting those part-time workers, along with discouraged job seekers no longer counted as unemployed by the government, the so-called underemployment rate hit 14.8% in February, up from 13.9% in January. This was the fifth straight record high for that reading, which has been calculated since 1994.

These are not feckless and reckless types, throwing away their time and money during the spring and then begging for shelter when winter comes, the famous grasshopper image. These are you and me, and many members of our family. These are the people who have worked, like Uncle Smokes, nine years or so, daily doing the job they were hired for and duly spending their income to support themselves and now they've been cut. Without those steady employed numbers, our economy is in huge trouble. Simple enough to see, without consumers, there is no consumer economy.

The right wing deludes itself, and lies to the credulous, that what we really need is more tax cuts. The shovel digging us into this hole just needs to keep digging, they inveigh. This morning I heard from the floor that the soundness of the economy depends on credit. Yep. I walked back to the teebee set to see what idiot had said this, but too late to see. Hard to credit that anyone can be this blind, deaf and dumb, but about 20% seems always to meet that criteria.

This morning, a refreshingly enlightened post on tax cuts that President Obama is proposing comes from Providence, RI.

The president wants to raise the top tax rate to 39.9 percent starting in 2011 (when the economy is presumably on the road to recovery). That was the highest marginal rate at the end of the Clinton administration. From all the garment-rending, you'd think that the top rate was being hiked up to 90 percent, which is where that famous socialist Dwight D. Eisenhower left it.

One of the tax-a-phobes' favorite tactics is to reference John F. Kennedy's tax cut. They hail it once an hour. But they always neglect to note what the sainted JFK lowered the top rate to. He lowered it to 50 percent, which is 10 points above the tax rate Obama proposes.

A stronger argument might focus on Obama's plan to limit income tax deductions for high-earning families – including for charitable contributions. That's problematic.

Obama talks of raising the capital-gains tax rate to 20 percent from the current 15 percent for families making $250,000 or more a year. A "War on Prosperity," some declare.

Well, there you go again. Ronald Reagan inherited a 20 percent capital-gains tax rate, then raised it to an effective rate of 28 percent for high-earners.

The thinking went as follows: The top rate was being slashed to 28 percent from 50 percent. Well-off Americans should not get yet another tax break on their investments. Thus, capital gains would be taxed as ordinary income.

Linda Beale, a tax expert at Wayne State University Law School in Detroit, prefers Reagan's base-broadening approach. "It eliminated loopholes, lowered rates and removed the preferential rate on capital gains," she told me.

By the way, Obama is not actually raising taxes. He's letting George W. Bush's tax cuts expire. Bush and Congress could have made them permanent but did not. The legislation purposely canceled the cuts after 10 years to hide their enormous long-term cost.

That factual analysis belies much that has been thrown out by right wing commentaries this week. Listening in to Congress this week you could hear the Rep. Virginia Foxx and Rep. Jeb Hensarling faction insisting that only making big tax cuts could save our deeply troubled economy. They will harp on formulae condemning the 'big spending' ways of their opponents endlessly, ignoring what they have wrought.

It is a sad reflection of politically safe seats in areas where facts are fearsome things, they contradict the ideology of the right. The congress needs to ride over the Big Lie purveyors, something Diane pointed out this a.m., and get on with the business of rescuing the victims of their class wars.

Class Warfare; Who's For Dinner?

The number of jobs being lost is an astonishing number, especially because what it represents is households faced with sudden, alarming, economic disasters. Each job lost represents a tilt into desperation. When a household makes a decision to buy something, a car or a house, or even the inevitable refrigerator or lawnmower, the decision involves the amount of money coming in. When that is shut off suddenly, the purchase becomes a huge problem.

This has happened to increasing numbers of us. It's a growing disaster.

Much of the attention in this economic downturn has focused on the growing legions of men and women who are officially counted as unemployed. There are now more than 11 million of them.

But a better picture of the economic distress related to employment emerges when the number of jobless Americans is combined with two other categories of workers: the underemployed (those who are working part time, for example, because they can’t find full-time work) and the so-called labor force reserve, workers who have abandoned their job searches but who would work if employment became available.

This total pool of underutilized labor has now risen above 24 million, according to researchers at the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston. That total will only grow in the coming months.

The Obama administration has more than enough on its plate at the moment, but before long it will likely have to consider a range of additional strategies, beyond the recently passed stimulus package, for putting jobless Americans to work.

A comparison of the number of people being thrown out of work in this recession with that of the severe recession of 1981-82 will indicate why. The peak unemployment rate was higher in that earlier recession than today’s 7.6 percent, largely because the last big wave of the baby-boom generation was entering the job market in the early ’80s. Those boomers who couldn’t find work were officially counted as unemployed.

What is different and more frightening about the current downturn is the number of people actually losing their jobs — being laid off or fired. That number is dramatically, dangerously higher.

We are a consumer economy. Without consumers, there is not much of an economy left for the country to depend on.

Flipping burgers is a travesty as a job, but without anyone to buy the burgers, even that sort of job is a boon.

Rich and comfortable sorts like to blame irresponsibility for the desperation of losing a home or getting into credit card debt that can't be managed. It's hardly the major element for working people who have had gas for the car, then groceries, and everything that has to be transported, go out of their range within a matter of months. The jobs that are evaporating has pushed huge numbers of us over the edge, into financial disaster. The blame isn't a good thing to throw at the desperate in their plight.

*************************************************************

Of course, in the struggle to keep an audience of the worried bigtime earners, CNN Money has a reflection on the plight of those being hit by increases in taxation after years of having their taxes cut.

The burden will indeed go far higher than in the Clinton years via a technicality -- one that will come as a rude shock even to the taxpayers already braced for a soaking.

The group that's hit hardest are the taxpayers I call the HENRYs, for "High Earners Not Rich Yet." The HENRYs are families who make between $250,000 and $500,000 a year.
(snip)
Here's how the HENRYs will get hammered. Say a family earns $300,000 a year, and pays $50,000 a year in mortgage interest; the family also contributes $5,000 to Boy Scouts, Red Cross and other charities. Under the AMT's top effective tax rate of 35%, they benefit from savings of $19,250 on those deductions.

But under Obama's new plan, the share of that $55,000 that HENRYs can deduct is no longer 35%. It's capped at 28%. Hence, their tax bill rises by almost $4,000. That's a jump in their marginal tax rate, the crucial share of an extra dollar of income they get to keep, from 35% to over 37%.

If you aren't crying yet, it may be because you are well aware that we are all able to cut a few corners and it isn't beyond belief that even those who earn large salaries can make that effort.

Our friend Dr. Professor Wombat also read and marveled at the above article, and made the following great observations;

Its thrust is, essentially, that they'll have a harder time getting rich under new tax burdens, that they were entitled to become rich by dint of hard work and productivity and, by implication, possessed of virtues that others who work hard for far less money don't exhibit.

The 'hammering' the article points to is in the amount of $4000. I would guess just about anybody earning, say, $75,000 a year, could look at the way just about anybody earning $250k lives, and effortlessly point out discretionary spending far greater than that.

But I know some of these $250K types. You start adding up house payments, real estate taxes, insurance, cars, tuitions, student loans, professional fees, heat, medical and dental expenses, drugs, the meter runs. And you don't think, as a first step, that you really don't need that 5000 sq ft house or that 6-series BMW, or that the excellent public schools in your comfortable suburb are an option for your kids, or, in general, that you could change the way you live with little if any serious impact on your quality of life. You think you're paying too much in taxes, that the government wastes it, or uses it to hire featherbedders or timeservers or hacks, or gives it to people who don't work as hard as you do or don't deserve it, or who are illegal immigrants sucking our revenues dry.

Much of this arises from plain old selfishness or greed. But much, too, arises from these folks' isolation from others. Many of them have far more contact with, and empathy for, professionals of their ilk ten thousand miles from here than they do with the people who cut their meat, or sell them books, or plow their streets, or cut their grass, or fix their plumbing.

The social contract desperately needs reweaving in this country, and the world. And it's hard to imagine it being done without a serious jolt to self-justifying complacency. Too bad.
ProfWombat | 02.28.09 - 7:55 am | #

The saddest part of our society has to be those who just can't see the public interest as their own interest. With that kind of blinders on, they vote in class warriors against the less fortunate, and the present financial meltdown results.

Try it, one more time, with feeling. Without consumers, the consumer economy falls apart.

Governors Refuse Possibility of Success

Governor Perry in TX is still claiming he may well refuse stimulus unemployment payments because it will mean adding part time workers to the unemployment benefits paid. He joins Gov. Sanford, Gov. Jindal, Gov. Barbour and a few others whose interests are not served by ending the economic meltdown. In two years, they claim, when the funds are finished from this particular legislation, that would add to their states' expenses.

Do I hear rational readers asking about why refuse added income now because something might possibly happen in two years? That seems pretty farfetched to anyone who looks back over the past two years and sees that the same right wing refuseniks were saying up until about four months ago that the 'fundamentals were sound', and praising the great job growth that the last eight years had brought about. What will happen two years from now is no more likely to look like what these poor prognosticators predicted than anything from two years back.

Of course, if you worked at the Wall Street Journal, you would be accepting that prediction of dire effects as gospel truth. That's what you get paid to do.

Debt-laden state governments were supposed to be the big winners from the $787 billion economic stimulus bill. But at least five Republican Governors are saying thanks but no thanks to some of the $150 billion of "free" money doled out to states, because it could make their budget headaches much worse down the line. And they're right. (Emphasis added.)

The possibility, two years from now, that the emergency will still exists presumes success of the wingers' efforts to stave off economic recovery. Just as they predicted success of McCain/Palin in the last election, this requires a reading of events that ignores facts, and demands irrational behavior by the rest of the country as well.

The writer goes sailing merrily on as if no reader might at this point be saying 'give us a break'. Perhaps the readership has been culled of anyone intelligent enough at this point to see that governors grandstanding against the elected president of all the people might just be making ridiculous and unlikely predictions so that they can excuse their own actions against their states' and the nation's interest.

The governor makes the point for the WSJ writer, however; Mr. Perry sent a letter to President Obama last week warning that Texas may refuse certain stimulus funds. "If this money expands entitlements, we will not accept it. This is exactly how addicts get hooked on drugs," he says.

That wicked entitlement getting kicked down the road will of course be picked up by the state legislature under a provision written in by a cagey Rep. Clyburn, who slipped a little-noticed provision into the stimulus bill giving state legislatures the power to overrule Governors and spend the money "by means of the adoption of a concurrent resolution." Most state legislatures are versions of Congress; they can't say no to new spending. Note that the WSJ writer assumes you are every bit as unwilling to see benefits going to those not in the top .01% of the wealthy as he and the recalcitrant governors are.

As Diane and I have both been pointing out, the 'entitlement' mantra has become the cry off class warriors fighting against the stimulus plan that proposes to bring some of the vanquished prosperity back into our economy by giving consumers the wherewithal to consume. The wicked effects of letting working people life is earnestly being opposed by the marshalled forces of the right wing.

If the stimulus plan fails, we have the recidivists who oppose living wages to thank. If it succeeds, they will be sure to scramble to the front of the line grappling for entitlements for themselves, and credit for success.

Equity Job Choices

Nice to know that in some corporations, the heads that have to roll aren't all on the shoulders that do the work. Loss of construction work has trickled down to the manufacturers of construction equipment, and Caterpillar is getting the effects of that weakening. In announcing they will have to cut back, the company is including the management/executive sector in the cuts.

Caterpillar, the world's largest maker of heavy construction and mining equipment, is to cut white-collar pay by as much as 50 per cent.

The company, based in Illinois, said it would slash executive compensation, particularly its incentive and equity-based schemes, the Wall Street Journal reported.

It has also introduced a freeze on recruitment and plans to suspend merit pay increases for managers and support employees.

Caterpillar said executive compensation would be cut by as much as 50 per cent, and it will reduce compensation for senior managers by 5 per cent to 35 per cent in 2009.

Other management and support staff face a reduction of as much as 15 per cent, the Journal reported.

Caterpillar follows a number of other American companies which have begun to institute salary freezes and reductions instead of redundancies, because the cost of hiring and firing can be significant when looking to rebuild a work force after a downturn.

Management pay has been a particular focus of cuts.

While no one wants to see anyone lose, that isn't possible in the present business climate. Spreading the losses around is commendable.

If the heads of the financial institutions that committed the huge errors that got us into this mess were in any way threatened, we would all be better off. The massive indifference to the consequences would not have occurred if these executives hadn't known they were safe from any effect on their personal wealth. Even those few cuts occurring now in salaries is not aimed at reducing stock and benefit guarantees for those errant executives.

Our 'bailout' funds have made it possible for the CEO's to avoid any consequences from their mistakes. We get all the pain, they get all the gain.

Caterpillar has shown good sense in its approach to taking losses. Can we make them into a bank too?

The Market Munched Bobo and Buds

As I posted recently, there is a convenient right wing revision of history making the talkshow rounds. FDR really was not responsible for recovery from the Great Depression, according to the wingers. George Will has cruised all his venues parroting the theme of failure. According to Will and Brooks, FDR's New Deal made it worse. The fact that jobs got unemployed workers out of the cities and made great strides in putting in infrastructure rings like a death knell to the perpetrators of horribly wrong, failed, trickle down economics.

Last night listening to David Brooks comment that the nation was hurt not when the stock market crash, then depression, but when 'the New Deal hit' is hardly surprising. He clings passionately to the story that tax cuts will eventually make us prosperous. Of course, tax cuts were made in 2001 that had been promised by the worst administration ever because there was a surplus. When the cuts were made, there was a deficit. No matter. The excuses are just decoration, dragged out to justify wrongheaded and increasingly insane policies.

When Brooks later went on to protest that giving the public stimulus checks of some hundreds, maybe even a thousand, dollars would only mean they would put it away and save it, not spend it, further goes against any pretense to reality-based thought. The figures that had just been reported are of a country where one in ten mortgage holders are either behind or are in foreclosure proceedings. Of course, the self-proclaimed conservative thinkers are totally in favor of throwing taxpayer money into banks that actually have socked it away instead of putting it into circulation. Therefore, the $700 Billion so far dedicated to pulling the economy out of its plunge has done no good so far. I suppose the likes of Brooks want to pretend that the consumer is still just holding onto his fat wallet like the financial community. That simply isn't true, but it has become the viewpoint the wingers insist on when they report.

According to the Wall Street vision, we have the money out here in the real economy and are depriving the rest of them by keeping it in our pockets. Starting with false premises like that, of course the Maria Bartiromo's and Brookses are free to fantasize that all we need is consumer confidence, and all will be peachy again. Their job, if that were true, seems in their minds to be to lie like a rug to get us back spending again, and, of course, in more debt to keep the financial community operative.

The inability to accept that the boom was a myth stems from the long euphoria of the boom. Right wing financiers enjoyed blissfully that the price of houses went up and up and then up some more, debt was piled on top of debt, and the investment community bought those tottering debts. The ponzi nature of the boom time was obvious to Krugman, to Roubini, and to many of us on the left. That made it all the more necessary for the 'conservatives' to believe in their own creation, a paradise of endless commentator roles for the prophets of the boom. The bust that has resulted hasn't convinced the deeply deluded that we were right and they were wrong. It has just made them mad. Instead of being able to learn the lessons of the economic disaster they had created, they are trying to strike at the very means to combat that disaster with tried and true methods. Ending joblessness just offends the sensibilities of free market promoters. Their vision of the world that they so recently owned, full of greed and abuse, was perfect in their eyes. This dreary one where workers get paid a living wage and start buying just doesn't work for the dethroned advocates of Eat The Poor.

Empowerment that the long boom provided to the scions of The Market, giving it all their respect and devotion, is impossible for the advocates of market ideology to part with. We will keep hearing about the New Deal failures, because Jobs Program and Civilian Conservation Corps successes are desperately needed to return buying power to the working people. That isn't making the market ideologues happy at all, and they will not take it lying down - though lying will certainly continue to be a big part of their creed.

It's past time for any show that pretends to present the news to stop shuffling out the deluded; Brooks and Wills have shown that they are not able to see, and not going to tell, the obvious. Trickle down economics was not what they want to insist it was, delightfully successful. They can't bring themselves to say they were wrong all that time. It's time for those who were right, and have been resoundingly proved right, to replaced those delusional remnants that get dragged out over and over. Reality has intruded with a really big bang.

The market has worked, but in a way that free marketeers said didn't happen. It smacked them down.

They've seen the ending. Deregulation fails and living wages succeeds. The free market ideologists all get munched. They hate that.

Free Trade Web Tangles

The push to get through a free trade agreement with Colombia fortunately was put aside by the Congress. Now it turns out that this partner that the maladministration keeps praising for its anti-drug cooperation with the U.S. is involved in outright murder of civilians. Those figures that were making the army look so effective appear to have been pumped up by random murders of innocents, to grow the body count.

Our friends need to be looked over very carefully by the incoming administration. War criminality in our White House has attracted and condoned really rotten officials in power elsewhere.

The head of Colombia's army abruptly resigned on Tuesday in a widening human-rights scandal in which the military allegedly killed civilians to inflate body counts in its decades-long conflict with guerrillas.

Gen. Mario Montoya is the highest-profile officer to lose his job amid an investigation that last week led President Álvaro Uribe to purge 20 army officers, including three generals.

Members of Colombia's army allegedly lured poor Bogotá residents to the countryside, murdered the men and disguised the corpses as those of guerrillas.

The scandal comes even though Colombia's military is riding a wave of public approval as a result of its success in beating back the 9,000-strong Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, Latin America's oldest and largest insurgent army.

The results of the military's investigation have been turned over to civilian judicial authorities. Analysts say many questions remain about the affair and other accusations against the military of killing civilians.

The scandal could threaten the U.S.'s continuing support of Colombia's antinarcotics and counterinsurgency efforts, known as Plan Colombia. Since 2000, the U.S. has contributed more than $5 billion to help train and equip the country's armed forces and police in their efforts against the FARC and other violent groups. The FARC funds itself mostly through drug trafficking, kidnapping and extortion, and is considered a terrorist group by the U.S. and the European Union.

The scandal could also fuel U.S. congressional opposition to a proposed free trade agreement which has languished in Washington. Democrats have refused to act on the treaty until Colombia shows significant progress in human rights, in particular by cracking down on the murders of union leaders.

The banana republic nature of the right wing in Latin America, like that type of behavior in our own White House, has caused an upsurge in popular movements for obvious reasons. A long tradition that began with Spanish takeovers of native populations, to serve the European conquistadores and their interests, has not created an environment friendly to the abusive government that are the remnant of that piece of history.

Killing off the native populations worked for the dominant government in the U.S., but it left a bad taste in the mouth of the native populations elsewhere. It would be very nice to see the incoming administration adopt policies in Latin America that would help us to relate to the growing popular movements there.

Bush In Pumps

Naomi Wolf's essay in The Sydney Morning Herald makes an interesting case that there was some logic behind Sen. McCain's selection of Sarah Palin as a running mate. Apparently the idea was to reach out not only to the religious base, but also to the legions of women not fortunate enough to have reached the pinnacles of success that Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice have. Those women with young children and stuck in pink collar service jobs would identify with Gov. Palin. To be honest, it looks like it worked, but only for a couple of weeks.

The selection of Sarah Palin as John McCain's running mate hit the United States like an electric storm. To her legions of lipstick-waving fans on the right, Palin is a down-to-earth, God-fearing "hockey mom" whose moose hunting, evangelical faith, and even chaotic family life, are all evidence that she is a real, typical American.

To her equally frantic detractors on the left - and increasingly in the centre - she is a frightening harbinger of a theocratic America, a mafia-style executrix of state business who lies about the connection of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to Iraq, mocks Barack Obama for his opposition to torturing prisoners, and defies subpoenas. Think of her as George Bush II, but in designer pumps. ...

Just about any woman who was not born into privilege, has small children at home, and is not a cannibal or a satanist would elicit initial roars of approval from women in general, and surely from a group that has been silenced and trivialised for so long. When you've been making the coffee forever, it's nice to imagine leading the free world.

That said, Palin's sinking approval ratings show that, while such women thrill to symbolic validation, they are not fools. They have begun to notice how Palin is trotted out like a model at an auto show to be introduced to heads of state as if they are local car dealers, and how the media are allowed to take pictures but not ask questions ("That's me with Henry Kissinger!"). They also notice that the economy is imploding, while Iraq is calming down only because the US is paying insurgents and al-Qaeda sympathisers the equivalent of a monthly car payment per person not to kill its soldiers.

Moreover, as Palin's political persona takes shape, it looks increasingly alarming. The problem is not just that the McCain campaign has surrounded her with veterans of the Bush-Cheney cabal (Karl Rove's acolytes and operatives now write her speeches and manage her every move). It's also that she believes that God set her legislative agenda in Alaska, and that she has failed to venture much beyond the Discovery Channel when it comes to foreign travel.

Her "folksy charm" and parenting credentials in and of themselves do not qualify her for the job of Vice President, especially since the would-be President is 72 and has health issues. While Gov. Palin might not be real clear on what the Vice President actually does, the rest of the country has watched the office grow in responsibilities beyond the traditional one of attending state funerals. The current Vice President has made certain of that, usually to the detriment of fundamental American ideals.

Additionally, the Alaskan investigation into her handling of a state employee who just happened to be divorcing her sister means that she is carrying some hefty baggage into the last stages of the campaign. It doesn't take a Ph.D. in Russian history to see that.

Most women, regardless of their class and formal education, have seen through the cynical ploy, and did so rather quickly. Most women are now left to consider just what kind of judgment John McCain showed by selecting Gov. Palin.

Sidelight

Watching last night's round of speakers, I was struck by a simple message from Bob Casey, that the Democratic party is about the nation's strength relying on the opportunity for everyone in it. There is a massive failure in our system because of the inability of the right wing to see that. When each of us can reach prosperity, health and enlightenment, the whole nation is improved by each incremental rise to his/her highest possibility. It works, and that's what has been proved over and over as Democrats replace Rethuglican failed regimes over and over.

As Avedon has expressed very well, this convention is going off the balance beam by trying to make this campaign about the individual candidate, Obama. While I think more of him as a candidate than many of you do, I can see that it's going to take a whole lot of dedicated service from a whole lot of realtime public servants to repair the rents in our nation's fabric from all those who have been ripping out their own piece of the pie. The damage is not irreperable, but it is large.

Casey's speech, eagerly anticipated by Pennsylvania delegates, offered one of the harshest critiques of McCain so far this week. Decrying the fact that McCain, he said, wanted to continue Bush's policies for four more years, he repeatedly said "not four more years, four more months." Soon, the crowd was roused to chants of "four more months!"

"The people of Pennsylvania can't afford four more years of Bush-Cheney economics, because you know what, with John McCain, that's exactly what we get."

Saying McCain had voted with Bush 90 percent of the time, he snapped: That's not a maverick, that's a sidekick."

Four more months. That will be hard to repair, but it's a goal worth working for, hard. It's the only one that makes any sense in view of the past nearly eight years.

***************************************************

Congratulations to Senator Clinton for a strength of character, that has developed from so much dedication to the admirably high principles of the Democratic party. She did us proud.

Keeping Our Heads Above Water

While listening to us lefties venting about Obama today, I ran into a comment at Dave Neiwert's post, Orcinus, that reminded me that we can take too much comfort from the rational minds we surround ourselves with. Mostly, I stay with leftwing blogs, although I make sure to read the Dallas Morning News to keep in touch with what goes on out there. I see some reflection of rightwing thought in other blogs. I also listen to House debate and only when it's completely little black lies do I turn it off - which with the energy falsifications is rather more often the past few days.

Today Dave reminds me that there is a large bloc of those who treasure up their violence and throw it out in hopes it will make them fearsome. They are all around us, they just don't usually make it too plain because people will avoid them. Oh, people like us, who are not the majority in some circles.

The crazies and Obama
Saturday, June 14, 2008
-- by Dave
If there is a President Obama come next Jan. 20, normal folks better brace for what the right-wing crazies have in mind. Because it's becoming clear that they are winding themselves up now for a fresh spate of violence if Obama wins.

You can find the signs in the things they're saying now, both on Internet forums and in the things they say when they think no one is listening. For instance, read some of the details emerging from that militia bust in Pennsylvania that the media have been studiously ignoring. To wit:

Bradley T. Kahle, 60, of Troutville, was one of five people arrested in last weekend's sweep. He told undercover agents he hoped Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton or Barack Obama would be killed if they were elected president, and that he would shoot judicial and law enforcement officials if he became terminally ill, according to an affidavit of probable cause made public Tuesday.

"Kahle said words to the effect of, that 'if Hillary Clinton, or Barack Obama, get elected, hopefully they will get assassinated, if not they will disarm the country and we will have a civil war,'" the affidavit stated.

The same man also told authorities he planned to visit Pittsburgh so he could get on top of a high rise and start shooting black people. And of course, the judge let him go on bail. Would I be crazy to suspect that if he were a Muslim talking about shooting white people from a high rise and hoping John McCain would get killed, no judge on earth would let him go?

You remember these people from the jeers at those who were labeled brainiacs, the back of the gym during the pep rallies, in the parking lot when they were supposed to be in class. I know, I know, then they got control of the executive branch.

The past eight years probably made them feel like they had been empowered. They are going to be very, very bitter.

This is not going to be easy.

Talking Trash

My father was Polish, so I've always been very sensitive about Polack jokes. As a result, I've always tried to avoid racial and ethnic jokes in general. That said, however, I must admit that I have, on occasion, indulged in some wise cracks against poor white trash, usually of the "uncle-daddy" variety. You can well imagine my chagrin when I learned that I shared that indulgence with Vice President Richard Cheney. Gregory Rodriguez had some very interesting things to say about Mr. Cheney's recent comment and what in fact lies behind such humor in his column in today's Los Angeles Times.

Things are getting complicated. In the same week that a black man clinched the Democratic nomination for president, the current white, Republican vice president was forced to apologize for making a crack that played on the myth that poor white folks like having sex with their cousins.

It probably wouldn't have been a big deal had Dick Cheney not singled out West Virginia, the bluest of the red states. He was talking about having Cheneys on both sides of his family and, he said, "we don't even live in West Virginia." As director John Waters said in 1994, talking trash about "white trash" is "the last racist thing you can say and get away with." ...

It turns out that West Virginia officials did protest the vice president's remarks. Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd lamented Cheney's evident "contempt and astounding ignorance toward his own countrymen." But he and other politicians were clearly more offended by the targeting of their state than with the fact that Cheney was propagating the old canard that poor white Southerners were biologically tainted by inbreeding. That a generally humorless vice president would dare make such a joke in an election year shows how acceptable it really is to disparage lower-class whites from the South and beyond. But why?

Rodriguez then proceeds to give a brief history of the term and what it actually reflects.

The term "white trash" seems to have emerged in the 1820s in Baltimore. It was slang, used by both free and enslaved blacks, to put down the poor whites with whom they sometimes found themselves in economic competition. Middle-class and elite whites then borrowed and popularized the term for their own purposes, one of which was to solidify their racial dominance. ...

In other words, in order to maintain the idea of white supremacy, white elites had to de-racialize their poor -- remove them from the group. They were "white" in skin color only. Just as the one-drop rule -- which held that any person with any amount of African blood would be considered black -- kept the white racial category "pure," so did the creation and disowning of "inferior" whites. "The term 'white trash' gave a name to people who were giving 'whiteness' a bad name," said Matt Wray, a Temple University sociologist and the author of "Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness." "It meant that they were behaving in ways that didn't suggest that they were the master race."

The linkage between the pejorative "poor white trash" and racism certainly does make sense in light of this history, but I think there is something else going on, something this country still hasn't had the courage to face. Mr. Rodriguez agrees, and points it out in his conclusion:

Cheney was probably not fully aware of the whole sordid history he conjured. But his casual joke suggests not only that political correctness does not apply to all groups equally but that there are corrosive, nonracial social divisions in this nation that are easily ignored and even tolerated. For too long, we've spoken of social tensions almost exclusively in terms of race. Perhaps the nomination of a black man for president will let that story line fade so that we can finally focus on the ever-present, easy-to-miss issues of class. [Emphasis added]

Almost from the start this country has been guided by the tenets of the Protestant Ethic, which stated that those who worked hard would prosper. Those who didn't prosper were obviously not working hard enough, and therefore were defective, were less valuable members of the community. This is also the unstated proposition behind the move to 'reform' welfare and to limit it so drastically that it helps no one, and behind the reluctance to extend unemployment benefits beyond 26 weeks, even when the economy is in such a slump that joblessness increases by the month.

That such as Dick Cheney would find nothing wrong with his throwaway statement and the premise which underlies it is certainly not surprising. However, when such assumptions guide national policy and people suffer as a result, then the issue has to be confronted, even if the Cheneys of the nation call out the accusation of class warfare.

In the meantime, no more cheap and easy "uncle-daddy" jokes from me.