It's My Birthday

Today is my 67th birthday.  Presents are not mandatory, but if you are fortunate enough to have some spare cash lying around, please feel free to hit the donate button.  No, I'm not about to be evicted or thrown into debtors' prison, but it would be nice to have a little walking-around money, enough cash to make my Medicare co-payments at the time of the doctor's visit and such like.

As I've said in the past, August 6 is an interesting date.  Orthodox Christians celebrate the Feast of the Transfiguration on this date, when Jesus went up on Mount Tabor to pray with his disciples and they saw him suddenly start glowing.  That's kind of ironic, given what else the date is famous for.

On this date in 1945, the US dropped in atomic bomb on the people of Hiroshima, causing a deadly glow of its own and ushering in the nuclear age.

And then in 2001, on August 6, President George W. Bush waved off a CIA officer trying to deliver his Presidential Daily Briefing warning that Al Qaeda was about to attack.  On September 11, they did just that and set in motion events which have essentially defined events since then.

With the post 9/11 attacks came the Patriot Acts which get renewed with great regularity.  Those acts made it possible, even justifiable for the massive spying program of the NSA, a program with no real oversight.  We are all now subject to having our emails, our regular mail, and, yes, our blog posts monitored by the government, First and Fourth Amendments be damned.

It's been a rough year for civil libertarians, especially progressive ones.  More time and effort has been spent on spying on us than dealing with very real problems like the economy and the environment. 

So it hasn't been a very good year for me, or the rest of the world for that matter.  I guess our charge is to keep plugging along and doing what we can to change things.  But I'm 67 and I'm getting worn out.

I'm counting on you folks to keep things moving.  That would be the best birthday present of all.

Out Of This World

David Horsey's very brief column doesn't quite capture the essence of his cartoon, which I think captures the situation involving the White House and Congress beautifully.

They do not seem to be on the same planet. While the White House forges ahead with implementation of the national healthcare plan, the House Republicans hold frequent votes to repeal the whole scheme. As the president tours the country touting his economic recovery proposals,  House Speaker John A. Boehner declares Obama is offering nothing new and, even if it is new, it isn’t going anywhere. Obama says toe-may-toe, the Republicans say toe-mah-toe.

While the House Republicans don't appear to be close to the planet we reside on, neither does President Obama.  He is as far away from our consensual reality as they are.

As I mentioned yesterday, Obama is playing defense.  His call for a "grand bargain" when it comes to tax cuts and the economy was rejected, just as he knew it would be.  He just wanted them on the record on the issue so the rest of us don't blame him for the sorry state of our economy.

Nice try, Mr. President, but you're still a long way from getting it done.

Playing Defense

(Editorial cartoon by Tom Toles and published 7/29/13 in the Washington Post.)

In his weekend column, Doyle McManus takes the position that President Obama is not using the 'bully pulpit' in his national tour of speeches, but is rather playing defense.  This is a distinction with a difference and is, I think, a good analysis.

"Repealing Obamacare and cutting spending is not an economic plan," Obama lectured his opponents. "You can't just be against something; you've got to be for something."

But is that true?

House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) doesn't seem to think so. When asked recently about the glacial pace of legislation in the House, he responded: "We should not be judged on how many new laws we create. We ought to be judged on how many laws that we repeal." ...

As one of his allies, Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), put it last week: "The only way Republicans will lose the House is to shut down the government or default on the debt. Shutting down the government is not in the best interests of the American people, and it makes you look politically irresponsible."

But Boehner doesn't always control the majority of his own caucus. Tea party radicals in both chambers of Congress are demanding a hard line, with some, including Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, promising to block any increase in the federal debt ceiling unless Obama's healthcare law is repealed — a proposal another Republican, Sen. Richard M. Burr of North Carolina, called "the dumbest idea I ever heard." ...

Obama is doing everything he can to cast the opposition as being obstructionist. But will his return to the campaign trail have any real effect on Congress?

The too-easy answer is no. He's given speeches like these before. He's got no new proposals to unveil. And the House members who stand in his way aren't worried about pressure from voters who support the president; they are more worried about primary challenges from even more conservative Republicans to their right. Speeches from the president aren't going to change their minds.

But that's not what Obama's campaign is about. On one level, it's about influencing votes in the Senate, not the House. And on another, it's about making sure that if this fall's budget battles do result in a government shutdown or, even worse, a financial crisis over the debt ceiling, the president and his party don't get blamed.  [Emphasis added]

This president just doesn't do bully pulpit.  If he did, maybe we wouldn't have gotten stuck with sequester, or the separation of food stamps from the farm aid bill, or the loss of Section 8 housing benefits.  We might have even had a public option in play during health care reform talks.

No, this president doesn't take it to the hoop for his constituents;  he is satisfied with just standing below the basket to try to swat away any egregious shots.

Or, to switch metaphors, he simply refuses to rock the boat.

Eight years wasted.

And Stay Out Of My Cab!

(Graphic found here.)


Ah, Little Tommy Friedman is at it again.  He has once again proven that he really earned the "One True Wanker of the Decade" award from Duncan Black.  He probably deserves a Granny Bird Award as well, but I don't want his chest to cave in from all the medals.

Here's part of what he said in his column yesterday:

Message: There is no doubt our economy is primarily being held back by the deleveraging and drop in demand that resulted from the 2008 financial crisis. But they are being reinforced today by uncertainty and worry that we do not have our political house in order and, therefore, our tax, regulatory, pension and entitlement frameworks are all in play. So businesses, investors and consumers all hold back just enough for us not to be able to move the growth and employment meters with any robust momentum. Sure, we’ll throw money into the stock market if the only alternative is zero interest from bonds or banks, but it is not being recirculated with confidence in the long term. It’s a tragedy. You can feel the economy wants to launch, but Washington is sitting on the national mood button. We the people still feel like children of permanently divorcing parents. ...

TO have any effect, though, the president can’t just say he is ready for “tough” decisions. He has to lead with his chin and put a concrete, comprehensive package on the table, encompassing three areas. First, new investments that would combine immediate jobs in infrastructure with some long-term growth-enablers like a massive build-out in the nation’s high-speed broadband capabilities. That would have to be married with a long-term fiscal restructuring, written into law, that slows the growth of both Social Security and Medicare entitlements, along with individual and corporate tax reform. ...

...We can’t protect both generations in full anymore, but we must not sacrifice one for the other — favoring nursing homes over nursery schools — and that’s what we’re on track to do.   [Emphasis added]

Of course we can, you moron.  That is the whole point of government, to promote the general welfare, not just the rich.  There is a reason Social Security and Medicare are called entitlements:  we are freakin' entitled to them after paying into them for nearly 40 years.  You can't tell me we can't afford protecting our elders and our children but we can afford bankster bailouts and tanks that the military doesn't even want. 

All it would take to shore up Social Security is to raise the payroll tax ceiling a bit.  All it would take to shore up Medicare (and Medicaid) would be to enforce cuts in duplicative testing and the other scams run by clinics and hospitals and to emphasize wellness programs.  Not  hard, Tommy.

And for those companies who have parked their money and their jobs overseas, and who are sitting on bundles of cash because they can, find a way to tax the hell out of them as well.

It's our turn now, and you can "Suck On That."

H2 Uh-Oh

Poor Marco Rubio.  The shining light of the GOP, the one many hope will lead the party out of the desert, didn't fare so well in his delivery of the Republican response to President Obama's State of the Union address.  And for good reason (as David Horsey pointed out):  he was stuck of the old rhetoric, the one that cost them the 2012 election.

It is no wonder Florida Sen. Marco Rubio needed to grab a bottle of water in the middle of delivering the Republican response to President Obama’s State of the Union address. The speech he was given to recite was like a hunk of stale, dry sourdough and it surely caught in his throat.

For 30 years, Republican aspirants to the presidency have been giving variations of the same speech. It sounded fresh and bold when Ronald Reagan first spoke the words as a candidate in 1980. At that point, the liberal era that began with Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 had pretty much run out of gas. Democrats had grown too comfortable with their seemingly permanent lock on the House of Representatives, while their ideas about the creative use of government had devolved into a system of doling out federal dollars to clamoring interest groups.

Reagan declared that government was the problem, not the solution, and that taxes were too high and regulations on business too onerous. It was a winning message and helped bring blue-collar men and the South firmly into the Republican fold.

Rubio spoke the same language on Tuesday night but it sounded like a talking-points memo left over from Mitt Romney’s losing campaign. Rather than looking like a young man with new ideas, Rubio looked like a novice with no thoughts of his own.   [Emphasis added]

As Horsey pointed out in the rest of his column, the country has changed since Reagan in all sorts of ways.  And the economy has changed in drastic and disheartening ways.  The problems and issues we face are real, yet the GOP is still quoting Reagan, and, sadly enough, the failed candidate Mitt Romney.

It's like I said earlier in the week.  The GOP is going with the "Lipstick On A Pig" approach.  That can't work much longer, even in the South.

Another Economist Weighs In

(Copped from Facebook.)

House Speaker Boehner's bluff didn't work.  He couldn't get the votes in his own conference to pass "Plan B," which was intended to put more pressure on President Obama.  He pulled the proposal without a vote.  The result, of course, was to put Obama and the Democrats in a much stronger position.  The GOP doesn't really want to go over the "fiscal cliff," a cliff of their own making, because it would remove all of the Bush tax cuts.  So what does the president do?  He continues negotiating.

Presumably he is negotiating not only on tax cuts but also on spending.  Programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and other safety nets are apparently still on the line.  He apparently has drunk the kool-aid of deficit reduction and it must have tasted mighty sweet to him.  Such foolishness from a man who is supposed to be bright is confounding.

Nobel Prize Winning economist Paul Krugman of the New York Times has been writing for four years as to why this is exactly the wrong approach.  Instead of cutting government spending, the government should be increasing it to put people back to work and to put some cash in their pockets.   And he isn't the only one.  A recent op-ed piece by Stephanie Kelton, an associate professor of economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and the founder and editor of New Economic Perspectives, makes the same point and demonstrates the case with some historical facts.

Look, up in the sky! It's a "fiscal cliff." It's a slope. It's an obstacle course.

The truth is, it doesn't really matter what we call it. It only matters what it is: a lamebrained package of economic depressants bearing down on a lame-duck Congress. ...

... The question everyone's asking is this: On whose backs should we balance the federal budget? One side wants higher taxes; the other wants spending cuts. And while that debate rages, the right question is being ignored: Why are we worried about balancing the federal budget at all? ...

History tells the tale. The federal government has achieved fiscal balance (even surpluses) in just seven periods since 1776, bringing in enough revenue to cover all of its spending during 1817-21, 1823-36, 1852-57, 1867-73, 1880-93, 1920-30 and 1998-2001. We have also experienced six depressions. They began in 1819, 1837, 1857, 1873, 1893 and 1929. ...

Why does something that sounds like good economics — balancing the budget and paying down debt — end up harming the economy? The answers may surprise you.

Spending is the lifeblood of our economy. Without it, there would be no sales, and without sales, no profits and no reason for any private firm to produce anything for the marketplace. We tend to forget that one person's spending becomes another person's income. At its most basic level, macroeconomics teaches that spending creates income, income creates sales and sales create jobs.

And creating jobs is what we need to do. Until the fiscal cliff distracted us, we all understood that. Today, we have roughly 3.4 people competing for every available job in America. The unemployment rate is like a macroeconomic thermometer — when it registers a high rate, it's an indication that the deficit is too small. ...

The effort to balance the books that's at the heart of the fiscal cliff is simply misguided. Instead of butting heads over whose taxes to raise and which programs to cut, lawmakers should be haggling over how to use the tool of a federal deficit to boost incomes, employment and growth. That's the balancing act we need.

Why is that so hard for the politicians in Washington to understand?  Is it that they don't want to understand?  I'm beginning to think that just might be the case.

It's The Economy, Stupid

(Editorial cartoon by Jim Morin / Miami Herald (September 5, 2012) and featured at McClatchy DC. Click on image to enlarge and then be so kind as to return.)

So the Democratic Convention has opened, and eyes are focused on Charlotte. Tuesday's activities and speechifying were refreshing, I must admit, and I don't much like conventions in their present form. I liked them better when there were some real issues to be resolved, like who would be the nominee and who would be tapped for the VP slot. Most of the real issues are now decided before the gavel falls to open the convention and there really aren't any surprises. National party conventions have become mostly pep rallies with a soupcon of showcases of up-and-comers.

But the Democrats have shown some moxie in the first day and evening of their convention, something I've really appreciated. They haven't run away from their heritage (via Eschaton, which you should also check out for Atrios' pithy comment).

Stop us if you’ve heard this one: A major political party, trying to rekindle the flame of enthusiasm that died down to the embers after a presidential term that didn’t live up to expectations is turning to social issues — and fear of radical social change — to rally its base back to the polls.

No, it’s not the Republican Party of 2004. It’s the Democrats in 2012. With the establishment GOP and its nominee, Mitt Romney, trying to keep a lid on its social views, Democrats see a window of opportunity on same-sex marriage and abortion rights. And on the first night of their convention here, they hammered away at social messaging in a way that the conservative right could only dream about last week in Tampa. ...

In speech after speech, Democratic heavyweights took the stage to laud their party for backing marriage equality and slam the other side for continuing to oppose it — all to wild enthusiasm from the crowd. In the stands in the convention hall and the streets in the city around it, same sex marriage has become a rallying cry for Democrats and something they’re ready to put right out in front during a closely contested election. ...

Abortion got mentioned on the Tampa stage, but the GOP clearly wanted to talk about something else. Not true for Democrats, who proudly put the president of NARAL, Nancy Keenan, before a roaring crowd in Charlotte.

“We believe in funding family planning because it helps to prevent unintended pregnancy. We believe that a woman considering an abortion should not be forced to have an ultrasound against her will,” she said. “We believe that rape is rape. We believe that a woman should make health care decisions with her family, her doctor, and her God. And we believe that there’s no place in that room for politicians — especially politicians who don’t know how women’s bodies work.”

To which I say a hearty "YES!".

But let's get back to reality. Yes, the Democratic Party has got to get the attention of people like me, but it also has got to get the attention of the rest of the electorate, and, frankly, gay marriage and abortion rights are not at the top of most people's agenda. The economy is. And rightly so. What the Democrats, especially Barach Obama and Joe Biden, have to do is assure the electorate that they in fact recognize the problems of the 99% and they will do something about it.

David Horsey's column of 9/5/12 deals with just that issue.

Republicans not only have to compete with the star power of Michelle Obama, it just may be that they have set a trap for themselves by making the central question of the 2012 presidential campaign, "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?" At their convention in Charlotte, N.C., this week, the Democrats, from the first lady on down, are responding to that question with some pretty sharp answers.

Here's the most succinct one: "GM is alive and Osama bin Laden is dead."...

Of course, the question is posed in a personal, not a collective way. Are you better off than you were? Though many people are doing just fine and have sailed easily through the economic doldrums, those who have lost jobs, have not found new jobs or have taken work that pays less are likely to answer no. That is no small number of people.

Still, I am reminded of something a Republican congressman told me years ago during another election when unemployment was a big issue. Yes, 8% unemployment is high, he said, but that means 92% of the people have jobs. So, the real question is whether a big number among those 92% are feeling like they might be next on the layoff list. In other words, it is not so much the anguish of the jobless that drives an election, it is the extent to which the employed majority feels secure or insecure about the future.

For a lot of folks who have seen their incomes stagnate for years while doing more and more work, the sense that something is wrong is nothing new. The beleaguered middle class has been treading water for two decades or more. For them, the question is not whether things are worse than four years ago, times have been tough for much longer than that. They cannot blame Obama for their predicament, but they can ask what he has done to lift them out of their economic rut in his first term and what he intends to do if given a second chance to run the country. [Emphasis added]

To which I again say "YES!".

And both nominees and the party have to spell out exactly what they intend to do and why they weren't able to do that since 2008. They must point to Mitch McConnell's now famous pronouncement that the goal of the GOP after Obama's election was to make sure he didn't get re-elected, and the ways in which the Republicans in Congress obstructed more than just appointments to the federal bench. And, more importantly, they must be specific, detailing what the goals are and how the Democrats intend to achieve them. That in itself will draw a stark line between the two parties, which will give people some sense that at least one party is paying attention to reality.

Having Bill Clinton ("It's the economy, stupid") as the main speaker on Wednesday will hopefully set things up. I don't have television, so I'm going to have wait to see what the MSM and utube have to say later this morning as far as his speech goes. But with luck, he'll do the job.

And that just might make me appreciate the new form of conventions.

Talk Talk

(Click on image to enlarge and then return.)

David Horsey raises a very valid point in May 2 column: neither of the two current candidates for president are talking meaningfully on the one issue that most concerns the electorate, the economy.

A political campaign is about the worst time to have a discussion about economic realities. The party that is out will speak of nothing but looming disaster while the party that is in will be singing nothing but “Happy Days Are Here Again.” And, since our current political system is in a permanent campaign mode, economics never escapes the warp of politics.

The truth is, it is easy for politicians to pick and choose among the facts to support whatever best serves their campaigns because economic news can be good and bad at the same time. ...

The problem is also that what ails us is something neither candidate wants to talk about. The world has changed so much in the last twenty years that the glib promises don't make sense anymore, even if they do reassure nervous voters. The steel mills that closed in Ohio are not going to reopen because other countries can make steel cheaper and free-trade agreements preclude any kind of subsidies by the government. Technology has increased productivity so that fewer workers are needed to do the jobs their parents did. Even with additional skill training, there just aren't the same number of jobs, and laid-off people in their fifties have discovered that painful fact.

Reality is a more complicated thing. The nimble, productive, high-profit dynamo that Daniel Gross describes as America’s new economic model is making plenty of people rich. Nevertheless, it is different from the old economy. It requires fewer workers. Those who are lucky enough to have jobs often do not have the benefits, job security and solid middle-class salaries that were more plentiful in the old economy. Older workers may never find a place in this new system. Young people with only a high school education can expect a life of underemployment. Those who have gone deep into debt borrowing to pay for a college education may spend years after graduation waiting tables or making lattes before they find a job that matches their skills.

Meanwhile, most politicians, including the two presidential contenders, pretend we can return to something akin to the old system because they know that is what voters want to believe.

A more worthy debate would be one in which both candidates acknowledge the true facts of the situation and each one then laid out their vision on how to meet the challenges of the new world in a fair and equitable fashion to all people, not just the 1%.

Sadly, I doubt that will happen in my life time.

KTHNXBAI

Nothing much grabbed me at Watching America yesterday. I attribute that to the holiday doldrums engulfing us all. One article worth noting, however, came from the UK's Economist. It's a timely piece, especially given the formal ending of the war in Iraq when seen against the backdrop of the US economy.

Around 800,000 veterans are jobless, 1.4m live below the poverty line, and one in every three homeless adult men in America is a veteran. Though the overall unemployment rate among America’s 21m veterans in November (7.4%) was lower than the national rate (8.6%), for veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan it was 11.1%. And for veterans between the ages of 18 and 24, it was a staggering 37.9%, up from 30.4% just a month earlier.

If demography is indeed destiny, perhaps this figure should not be surprising. More soldiers are male than female, and the male jobless rate exceeds women’s. Since so many soldiers lack a college degree, the fact that the recession has been particularly hard on the less educated hits veterans disproportionately. Large numbers of young veterans work—or worked—in stricken industries such as manufacturing and construction. Whatever the cause, this bleak trend is occurring as the last American troops leave Iraq at the end of this year, and as more than 1m new veterans are expected to join the civilian labour force over the next four years.

And of course it is also occurring in fiscally straitened times, though it looks as though this will affect veterans’ services less than other parts of the federal government. Though there have been some small fee increases for veterans covered by Tricare, the military health-insurance programme, significant cuts to veterans’ benefits are unlikely, and for good reason. Military pay is far from generous, and the benefits are comprehensive but hardly gold-plated or easy to navigate. Not for nothing is a popular online forum for veterans wending their way through the bureaucracy of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) called HadIt.com.

Those numbers are staggering, yet hardly surprising. Many of these young men and young women don't have post-high school educations, nor did they receive transferable skills while in service. There have been some moves to ease the transition, most notably the recent passage of one sliver of the president's jobs bill that gives employers tax credits for hiring unemployed or disabled veterans. Unfortunately, one of the unintended consequences of the necessary highlighting of the psychological scars soldiers returning from combat carry has been to make employers somewhat leery of hiring the veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq because they just might be walking time bombs. Tax credits may not offset that concern.

The biggest obstacle, however, is the economy. Joblessness overall remains stubbornly high and likely will continue into at least the next few years unless Congress and the White House "pivot" and start pumping money into programs that will benefit the 99% instead of the banksters. That hardly seems likely, given the contentious attitudes in Washington during an election year. The prevailing mantra is "cut the budget", which makes government spending to prime the pump out of the question.

As a result, veterans are returning home to little more than a handshake and some well-wishes, which neither feed nor house them and their families. That's cold comfort at any time of year, but especially so during the holiday season.

Bought And Paid For

One of the best discoveries I've made this year is Open Secrets, a site which follows the money when it comes to our elected officials. I make regular visits and during my latest one I found this brief article posted on the Supercommittee and the lobbyists who are undoubtedly swarming all over the members of that august body.

After the short introduction, a gallery of photos of the members follows. I knew there was only one woman and only one African American on the committee, but I was still shocked by the reminder. I guess only white guys know how to deal with deficits.

What follows is just as shocking, and very, very illuminating. Two interactive charts are provided. The first one breaks down campaign contributions to the members, listing the contributors and how much each gave by party from 1989 to 2011. It starts with the top 25, but can show the top 100. It will also show just one party, or both. The reader can make the adjustment.

The second chart shows donation by sector to each of the committee members for the same period. One can select the sector and scope out who got how much, and how that ranked in the candidates total donations. That one is a shocker as will. For example, the money given by Agribusinesses pretty much assures that farm subsidies are not going to be cut by the committee. Same-same for the financial industry and the insurance industry. Click on over and play around with the charts.

Is it any wonder that the Supercommittee is working in secret?

I am not optimistic.

Downgraded President

The committee that gave Barack Obama the Novel Peace Price at the start of his presidency must be having second thoughts, even ninth or tenth thoughts. It was clear that the award was made not on past achievements, the usual basis, but rather on the hope that he would earn it. He has not, of course. He has upgraded the war in Afghanistan, pushed further into Pakistan, and now is sending drones to Libya and other countries. He has not proven to be a peacemaker, at least in foreign policy.

World leaders have also pulled back from the joy and relief that the Americans had elected someone who would undo all the mischief of the Bush years, someone who would lead the lone superpower and its allies into a new world of sanity and stability. Instead of stability, the world is awash with economic and political turmoil, much of which can be linked to the unstable American economy. The past month has been especially tumultuous as Congress grappled with the debt ceiling and then was rewarded for its efforts by a credit downgrade by Standard & Poor.

It is against such a backdrop that I found this article from Germany's Stern at Watching America. It's subtitle truly reflects its contents: "The Downgraded President."

...make no mistake, the ex-messiah Obama finds himself in a free fall. He lost his messianic magic a long time ago and has used up all his credit with voters. This past week was disastrous. First the Tea Party hounded him into a bad compromise on the debt battle. At the same time, the unemployment rate (of 9.1 percent) and meager growth prospects nurtured fear of a renewed recession. Then came the slap in the face from S&P, and 30 U.S. soldiers died in Afghanistan in one fell swoop on Saturday, more than ever before on this mission. Obama’s America seems to be socially divided, politically torn, economically at the abyss and militarily leached. “Yes, we can.” Anything but. Obama is now recording the worst poll ratings of his term in office.

And who is to blame for this misery? The Tea Party freaks? The legacy of the financial crisis? Certainly, all play a little part. Above all, however, it is the president himself. There is a jarring dissonance between Obama’s promises and reality ...

That last sentence quoted should have sounded familiar because it is an allusion to a Maureen Dowd column. Even she gets it right. Obama's promised changes and renewed hope were just campaign talk. Either because he lacks nerve, or imagination, or will, his administration has thus far been a disaster with only a few bright spots to keep some sense of sanity alive.

Now, with elections looming next year, he's begun his campaign for re-election. This weekend he kicked off a bus tour through rural America to talk about jobs. I suppose we should be grateful that he at last recognizes that the economy will not be improved until people get back to work, but I have yet to see any evidence that he is ready to propose a meaningful program to accomplish that.

In other words, he's in campaign mode and this is just more talk.

Unneighborly

[Note: I'm heading off to Milwaukee for a few days, so there probably won't be any posting until after Saturday.]


As the Iowa straw poll looms, the GOP race for the 2012 presidential nomination is beginning to heat up. Tim Pawlenty, stuck near the bottom of the list, has even taken to dissing fellow Minnesotan Michele Bachman to bolster his chances. His claim? She's too inexperienced.

Adding some fire to his rivalry with his home-state colleague, former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty said Tuesday that Michele Bachmann did not have the requisite executive experience to be elected president in 2012. ...

After taking questions from Iowa voters in Marshalltown on Tuesday, Pawlenty directly questioned Bachmann’s credentials -- stating that experience running “a large enterprise under difficult and challenging circumstances with a public component to it and driving it to results” was “a necessary prerequisite” to being president of the United States.

“She doesn’t have it,” Pawlenty said of that experience, speaking to reporters at the Marshalltown Public Library in the midst of his “Road to Results” RV tour through Iowa.

Now, that's kind of an interesting tack. Pawlenty's home state legislature just went through a government shut down because it couldn't come to grips with a budget which would staunch looming deficits caused by Pawlenty's smoke and mirrors budgets during his terms as governor. That's not exactly the kind of experience fiscal conservatives should be looking for.

And the last former governor to reach the White House, George W. Bush had executive experience, yet managed to run the nation's economy into the ground with two unnecessary wars (both financed "off-budget") and tax cuts for the wealthy. He came into power with a budget surplus and magically turned that into a huge deficit. Fiscal conservatives certainly shouldn't want a replay of that kind of experience.

T-Paw just might be better off examining other ways of making his case to the voters in Iowa.

Target Practice

I had planned to take today off from the internet. I have a cold which has settled in my chest and I've about had it with the weather phenomenon in SoCal known as "June Gloom," in which the skies are cloudy until late in the afternoon. I'm tired of the unending and banal stupidity emanating from Washington DC and most state capitols. I just wanted to go back to bed and pull the covers over my head for what would hopefully be more than three hours of sleep at a time.

I would have done it, too, if my interest in the GOP campaign for 2012 hadn't overcome my indulgent self-pity. There's something about that cast of characters that sucks me in every time. Today's edition comes courtesy of Michael Gerson of the Washington Post, who takes a look at pizza magnate Herman Cain, a political rookie, and his promise to do things a little differently when selecting his cabinet.

On the issue of Muslims serving in public office, every explanation by presidential candidate Herman Cain becomes a complication. In three instances Cain affirmed that Muslims would not be allowed to serve in his Cabinet or administration. “Many of the Muslims,” he explained, “they’re not totally dedicated to this country.” Cain then amended his remarks to say that, while Muslims would be allowed to serve, they should be subject to “extra precautions” not applied to Catholics or Mormons.

Gerson dispenses with this nonsense by going to the source which is supposed to be an authority of some magnitude in the country, the US Constitution:

The Constitution addresses this matter directly. Article VI requires legislative, judicial and executive officials to take a loyalty oath to the Constitution. It continues: “No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” After Charles Pinckney of South Carolina proposed this language at the Constitutional Convention, a delegate to North Carolina’s ratifying convention objected that it would allow “pagans, deists and Mahometans” to seek office. It was ratified anyway — even though many state constitutions at the time contained religious tests. In urging ratification, James Madison dismissed these state restrictions as “less carefully and properly defined” than the federal document. Government service, he argued, should be “open to merit of every description, whether native or adoptive, whether young or old, and without regard to poverty or wealth, or to any particular profession of religious faith."

Gerson is right, of course, but he fails to point out just what is going on here. Cain is clearly waving red meat at the Republican faithful. Muslims! Sharia law! And (of course) 9/11! 9/11! 9/11! The now traditional enemy of all right-thinking (and I do mean RIGHT thinking) Americans.

The problem is that 9/11 happened nearly ten years ago and the boogie man who led the attack is now dead. The real enemy of the people is not the Muslim religion, it is the religion of the latest iteration of capitalists, the Herman Cains, if you will.

What ails America right now is joblessness and poverty in the midst of unparalleled prosperity for those who run the economy game. Businesses which refuse to hire and to pay appropriate wages because of "regulatory uncertainty" are sitting on trillions of dollars worth of cash, some of which is doled out to the CEOs who increase that treasure for the benefit of shareholders. Instead of addressing that crucial issue, Cain and his compatriots are waving shiny keys labeled "Muslim!" at the rest of us, urging us to vote for them so that they can finally do away with the biggest menace to the American Way Of Life.

Sadly, there are many who will buy what Herman Cain and Michele Bachman and Mitt Romney are selling, even as their own private economies go swirling down the bathtub drain along with the federal government.

Now I'll go back to bed.

It's Elementary

I suggested yesterday that the Tea Partiers and their friends essentially want to starve the federal government by ending all taxation. That isn't as far-fetched a conclusion as it might seem, as I discovered during my weekly visit to Watching America. One of the major themes this week is the world-wide financial turmoil and the source of much of it.

Most directly on point with the argument I was making yesterday was this opinion piece by Diane Francis in the financial section of Canada's National Post. Ms. Francis notes that the US and Greece have deficit problems for the same reason: the two governments don't collect enough taxes for the programs their citizens insist on.

Essentially, the two are frighteningly similar. The Greeks, with their tear gas and Molotov cocktails, refuse to give up entitlements or pay for them through taxation and are simply a violent version of the havoc that the US Congress is wreaking. But the US anti-taxers do “violence” against people by allowing those making $250,000 a year or more to pay less tax, through Bush loopholes, than does a single parent mother in Baltimore or a soldier in Afghanistan. ...

...The United States sputters in large measure because its politicians have lousy credit ratings which impedes job creation and activity and helps explain the lack of investment, credit or the inability to finance the building of infrastructure through private-public partnerships. American governments are lousy bets because they don’t or cannot collect enough taxes to pay their bills.

I think that states the problems both countries face quite nicely. The Tea Party contingent wants government to quit spending money, yet many showed up at town hall meetings after the passage of the health care reform bill astride their Medicare provided scooters. The GOP wants corporate taxes lowered to stimulate the economy and to create jobs even though that tactic hasn't ever worked and certainly won't this time as the multinationals are outsourcing everything they can to other countries.

Austerity, the new mantra of the tax cutters, takes away the purchasing power of the citizenry, which takes out the need for more employees to build the goods or provide the services that otherwise would have been bought. By starving the beast, the Tea Party contingent would destroy the economic underpinnings of the country it pretends to revere.

Morons. Evil and ignorant morons, every last one of them.

And The Hits Just Keep Coming

It's going to be a rainy week for California, but it's water that's coming, not jobs. The November jobless report just came out and California continues to be higher than the national average:

Unemployment in the state stalled at 12.4 percent in November for the third straight month, the Employment Development Department said Friday.

A major culprit: weak holiday hiring by retailers despite strong sales reports.

It's even worse than that at the state's capitol, Sacramento, and for the same reason:

The Sacramento area's unemployment rate jumped six-tenths of a point in November, to 12.6 percent, with the region losing 2,800 jobs. A single devastating layoff at a North Highlands loan center was a key reason. But Sacramento, like the rest of the state, was also hurt by lackluster hiring by retailers.

While sales figures were higher than anticipated, retailers, worried that it was just a "blip", extended the working hours of current employees rather than hire seasonal help to save money. That might make sense in the short term as retailers take a wait-and-see stance, but in the long run, it's the wrong choice. There will be fewer people able to buy and less money in circulation to enable major purchases. The retailers' short-sightedness is just adding to the problem.

And that problem is being aggravated at the state level. Fewer purchases means less sales tax being paid. Fewer employees means less income tax being paid. The state budget, still in crisis, will have less money to work with.

This vicious circle isn't going to be broken until employers of all kinds, including the retailers, stop sitting on their mounds of cash and start hiring. They are running out of excuses.

California Prospects

Here we are, well into August, and the top two candidates for governor still haven't provided voters with any kind of detailed road map for pulling the state out of the swamp. The American Prospect's Harold Meyerson, doing a temporary stint for the Los Angeles Times, has an op-ed piece which offers the candidates a clue as to how bringing the state back could be accomplished.

Both Whitman and Brown understand that loss of manufacturing is a key factor in the state's economic decline, and they have put forth economic plans to address it. But neither of their strategies does enough to restore the state to its onetime industrial preeminence.

Whitman seeks to remedy the problem through classic Republican policies: reducing taxes and regulations on businesses. Some of her targeted tax cuts make sense, like increasing the R&D tax credit and creating a tax credit for factory equipment. But the massive cuts she proposes to state services will only further the decline of California's aging infrastructure and harm a public education system that badly needs improvement.

Brown also favors tax reductions for factory equipment, and outlines other incentives to boost manufacturing. He also commits himself to major infrastructure upgrades, and he singles out the clean-energy sector as the industry the state should do most to help. Unlike Whitman's plan, his clean-energy program has a demand as well as a supply side: By mandating that 33% of the state's electricity come from renewable sources, his plan would create a larger market for the industry it seeks to boost.

Brown's ideas are good as far as they go, but they don't go far enough in one key particular: identifying the revenue sources for the improvement of our infrastructure and the rebirth of our manufacturing. ...

How can the state, in its sadly depleted condition, make that kind of investment now? One possibility might be a state infrastructure bank of the type proposed on a national level by Connecticut Democratic Rep. Rosa L. DeLauro. As DeLauro has sketched it out, such a bank, by committing $25 billion in public funds, could generate close to $600 billion in public-private funds going to build or improve rails, roads, bridges, airports and the like. Another possibility could be a state innovations bank, which could fund some of the clean-energy activities that Brown has proposed, and could help innovative new companies scale up to mass production here rather than go abroad. Former Intel CEO Andy Grove has identified this stateside scaling-up issue as crucial to America's economic future. If California has any of the ingenuity and gumption it used to have, surely the state can play a role in helping innovative companies thrive here.

As Atrios keeps reminding us, "With interest rates this low it's stupid for the government not to borrow absurd amounts of money to spend on things like rebuilding crumbling bridges and redoing water/sewage systems." There's nothing wrong with borrowing the money (except for California's dismal rating from the Wall Street types) or from pounding down the door of the federal government to push Rep. DeLauro's good idea into actual law.

California has pulled itself up in the past (as Mr. Meyerson reminds us), particularly under former Governor Pat Brown (the current candidate's father), whom Mr. Meyerson calls "California's greatest governor." Funding a state bank for the purposes of shoring up our educational system, our infrastructure, and our fledgling energy businesses was talked about in the past, but the idea never took hold. I think the time for that idea to take hold is now.

The trick is getting the candidates to talk in specific terms about such an approach. Neither seems willing to take that risk at this stage, which is unfortunate. California voters are desperate for some kind of answer to the problems we face.

There's still time for such a frank discussion, but November is drawing close. Hopefully Jerry Brown will start campaigning more vigorously by talking in the specific terms the electorate is thirsting for.

What Michael Said

Michael Hiltzig, business columnist for the Los Angeles Times, like Paul Krugman, who occupies a similar chair at the New York Times, is dismayed by the sudden and disastrously timed push for fiscal austerity by the federal government. Both fear that the move away from stimulus policies is a recipe for not just the prolongation of economic recovery but also for its death.

Hiltzig's most recent column was written after he and other colleagues from LAT met with Lawrence H. Summers, director of President Obama's National Economic Council. He came away with some depressing news.

Gross domestic product is rising, but the annual growth rate in the first quarter of this year, 2.7%, is slower than that of the previous quarter (5.6%). It's also slower than the rate needed for job growth to keep pace with population growth (3%) or the 5% needed to bring down the unemployment rate, which is 9.7%.

The economy has added jobs since the beginning of the year, but employment in May was still below the level of May 2009. ...

Long-term unemployment has become "a particularly disturbing feature of this recession," Summers says.

"There is evidence that people who have been out of work for a year tend to have a difficult time returning and often drop out of the labor force," he says. "That is going to cast a shadow for some significant interval."

It is the effect of this jobless "recovery" on the public that clearly worries Mr. Hiltzig most, as well it should. It should worry all of us because of the way it is playing out:

Nor has there been a reversal in the trend toward increasing income inequality in the United States. In 1979, the top 1% of U.S. households earned eight times as much as the middle 20% and 23 times as much as the bottom fifth; by 2005, the Congressional Budget Office found, the upper crust touched 21 times as much as the middle class and 70 times as much as the bottom.

This phenomenon "has a broadly corrosive social impact in terms of our not being one America," said Summers, echoing the economist Benjamin M. Friedman, who observed in 2006 that the 1950s and '60s, when median family income doubled, brought us such progressive social developments as the civil rights movement.

Over the succeeding decades the social fabric has frayed, Friedman wrote. Public opinion has turned sharply against immigration and affirmative action, and attacks on welfare recipients display "a vindictive spirit that was highly uncharacteristic of the United States in the postwar era."

This "corrosive social impact" has surged over the past two years. Other states are threatening to join Arizona in its unconstitutional drive against immigrants. Alleged Democrats such as Dianne Feinstein of California recently expressed the view that the unemployed should just get a job rather than count on the extension of benefits. Tea Partiers are rallying not against a federal government which bailed out the banksters but against a federal government which passed a health care bill that would extend health care to those who can't now easily afford it.

Yet the White House and other world leaders continue to push for fiscal austerity. All apparently believe that joblessness means less tax revenues so governments must stop spending money, rather than realize that if joblessness were reduced tax revenues would rise and offset deficits.

As a result, Mr. Hiltzig fears things will not only not get better, but will in fact get considerably worse:

The deficit-cutting craze of the modern day threatens another such double dip. Its promoters say they're out to protect long-term economic prospects, but without a short-term recovery there may not be a long term to protect. If they get their way, we may not feel the consequences of their error before it's too late to fix.

And that is a scenario I do not want to contemplate.

Another New Deal

Over at Watching America there are still some articles on BP's Gulf spill and the fallout from that. The G20 meetings are still going on, so there isn't too much reported at this point. There is, however, an interesting article from Rumania's Curierul National written by Marcel Răduţ Seliste, which compares the last depression and this one and comes to the conclusion that apparently the world has learned nothing from that historical period.

The effects of the current crisis are much more serious not only in content, but especially in their reproduction by state institutions that would normally have been required to correctly identify and counteract them. The U.S. and the capitalist countries of the European Union responded to the first wave of bankruptcies and financial bottlenecks by allocating immense sums from national reserves for the recovery of the economic entities guilty of triggering the crisis in the first place, i.e., banks, insurance agents, mortgage companies and major corporations. In a damaging and futile gesture, pearls were cast before swine. The outrage and indignation provoked in American public opinion made history when in November 2008, executives from General Motors, Ford and Chrysler went to Washington in private luxury planes to ask the government for billions of dollars of aid to refinance the companies they run. [Emphasis added]

It is at this point that Mr. Seliste zeroes in on what the world, particularly the US should be doing but isn't. He reminds us that FDR pulled the US out of the Great Depression by implementing programs that put a choke chain on Wall Street and other financial entities and that put Americans back to work:

The New Deal represents a set of socio-economic measures adopted by the American legislature and implemented by the government at the initiative of President Roosevelt. Among the most important we find the establishment of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, an entity through which liquidity was provided to the financial system; the adoption of the Securities Exchange Act, through which stock market transactions were drastically regulated and which established a legal framework for loans that banks could provide for such transactions; and the adoption of the Glass-Steagal Act, which separated investment banks from commercial ones, disciplining the capital market. Faced with terrifying rates of unemployment, the U.S. government established the Civilian Conservation Corps, which employed young people between 18 and 25 years of age in community work (land improvement, construction of roads and highways, etc.). Approximately 2 million Americans were enrolled in this program, and hundreds of national development sites were established. [Emphasis added]

And it worked.

What we got, on the other hand, was a half-vast stimulus package, much of the money for which is still being held onto by the states as their leaders squabble on how to spend it. We found trillions to bail out the banksters, but we couldn't find any money to stop foreclosures. Now, we can't even extend the unemployment benefits of those out of work since the start of the economic disaster because Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats are wringing their hands over deficits.

None of this is, of course, "new" news: such luminaries as Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman have been ranting about this for 18 months at least (see here for one example).

No one in Washington or in Toronto are listening, however, nor are they apt to until things get so bad that the mood of the commoners shifts from depressed to furious and the mob-mentality takes over. I figure that just might happen long about the first Tuesday in November, if we're lucky.

An Unusual Defense

Generally, when grocery stores have a glut of a particular foodstuff, say asparagus, they lower the price to move the product out the door. Department stores do the same thing. When a particular line of clothing just isn't selling, the store holds a sale. When oil companies find a drop in sales at the pump, however, they close refineries and push the price per gallon upward, which is what they are doing right now. The "center-left" editorial board of the Los Angeles Times thinks that's just dandy, as they made clear in this editorial.

High gas prices spark more public outrage than price hikes in any other commodity, even food. Although electric car technology is improving, consumers have few transportation alternatives, so it's tough to respond quickly to higher prices by changing behavior. Expensive gas hits low-income people particularly hard and is a key driver of inflation, which hurts everybody. So the anger directed at oil companies is understandable. It's just that the political responses are usually wrongheaded.

Today's problem isn't so much high prices, which have fallen since 2008. It's that actions by oil companies may be preventing them from dropping as much as they should. The combination of the recession and improved fuel efficiency has greatly reduced demand, and major refiners are considering cutbacks, according to a report by Times staff writer Ronald D. White. Some refineries already have been closed, such as a Delaware facility owned by Valero Energy and a New Jersey plant owned by Sunoco. Industry analysts say there is little choice because of excess capacity, but consumer advocates such as Public Citizen and Santa Monica-based Consumer Watchdog think refiners are just trying to keep the price of gas artificially high by constraining supplies. Some advocates are calling on regulators to probe whether the companies are violating antitrust laws. ...

Every business makes cutbacks when demand for its products or services falls. We could avoid such market responses from oil companies by nationalizing them or subsidizing gasoline, but that hasn't worked well in the countries that have tried it. Rather than getting mad at the oil giants for exhibiting rational behavior, we should focus on being less reliant on them.

Oh, please.

Of course the oil companies are being "rational." They need to keep the quarterly profit high, preferably setting new records each time they file their reports. The only way they can do that is punish the public which is buying less of the product because of improved gas mileage in the smaller cars which they are buying, rather than the gas-guzzling behemoths that once were so popular, by raising the price of gas. The fact that they do so by manipulating the market is still outrageous.

As outrageous as the Times defense of the practice.

The Road To Hell

It took a year, but the Obama adulation has pretty much ended, if the world press reports listed at Watching America are any gauge. Now the rest of the world is engaging in some solid critical assessments, many of which are quite accurate. One such article was somewhat of a mixed bag. The writer didn't get the American congressional system as it is presently constituted quite right, but he did have something very perceptive to say about President Obama.

From Spain's ABC.es:

It is impossible to explain how the dizzying loss of affection on Obama's part was possible without mentioning the key aspects of his politics: his option for a pacifying message in foreign affairs and his determination to carry out health care reform. Many of the Independent voters who supported him in November 2008 have started to abandon him, fearful of a program that moves North American standards to leftist radicalism. The hand extended to those who see it stained with blood has not served to eliminate the threat that free societies face, and the European-style project of Social Security is not as popular in the U.S. as we imagine from this side of the Atlantic. Many leaders like Obama — and Zapatero has shared the sentiment many times — think that good intentions are enough to change reality, when the opposite happens nearly every time. [Emphasis added]

Many of us on the left have been disappointed, even outraged at the White House failure to move its signature project, health care reform, into reality. For a few months we cut the president some slack because he was dealing with an economic crisis the likes of which hadn't been seen since the Great Depression which faced President Roosevelt. But he even screwed that up, pouring billions into banks and insurance companies to save the very entities that caused the crisis, feeling, apparently, that they had learned their lesson and now would become good citizens. As bold as he was with the institutions "too big to fail," he was positively timid when it came to bailing out those who lost their jobs and those who lost their homes.

As a result, when it came to health care reform, real health care reform, the die was cast. He felt it only fair to listen to those who have been cheerfully ripping us off for decades and to only mildly rebuke them, extracting promises from them that they would try to do better if only he would include a mandate requiring each citizen to get health insurance and would take that nonsensical single payer/public option out of the picture.

And then he sat back, speaking softly to Congress about playing nice together so that the reform would make everyone happy and leaving them to do the job, even though most of "them" were on the receiving end of millions of dollars of campaign contributions from the insurance companies and health care providers.

I really believe that he meant well, that his intentions were good, that he believed decent people could and would work together to develop a system that would benefit everyone in the nation. As a graduate of Chicago Politics, he should have known better. Nice words are, well, nice. So is civility. But it takes more. It takes action and hard work. It takes leaning on people and threatening to remove their finger nails one at a time to get any real movement. It takes inviting everyone to the table, but excusing those who chew with their mouths open.

Good intentions are not enough. A willingness to do the heavy lifting to bring those intentions into the real world is required. President Obama didn't show any inclination for that kind of work and he's about to lose his majority in Congress in November of this year and his job in November, 2012 as a consequence. Has he figured that out yet?

His recent speeches seem to indicate a more muscular approach, but unless those words are backed up with real action, it's going to be a long and fruitless three years.