Let them eat cake

Republican House Labor Committee chair John Kline (R-oligarchy)...

Kline also supports extending the Bush tax cuts for the rich. So in his world, $830 billion to finance tax cuts for the wealthy is fine, but $12.5 billion to extend unemployment benefits for three months is too expensive.

You could extend unemployment benefits forever at the same cost as making the plutocrats' tax cut permanent. Forever.

But that's not what liberals are asking. We want to extend benefits only so long as there's a large imbalance between available jobs and the unemployed. Now? There's record long-term unemployment not seen since before unemployment insurance existed - the Great Depression:

Where's the pro in all the con?

The optimistic view:

[T]he inadequacy of the administration’s initial economic plan has landed it — and the nation — in a political trap. More stimulus is desperately needed, but in the public’s eyes the failure of the initial program to deliver a convincing recovery has discredited government action to create jobs.

In short, welcome to 1938.

Then there's the pessimistic view:

There is one big difference between today and the 1930s, however. Once there was a political party in America - the one that did the New Deal and the Great Society - that stood up a bit for the middle class and the poor. But Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have led the Democrats down a different path. Now the party stands for a slightly weaker version of the GOP's plutocracy protection service. And, seemingly, for getting its face bitch-slapped bright red at every possible juncture.

We may have a long, hard slog of privation and national diminishment ahead of us. Democrats, who are merely disappointing, are taking the blame. Republicans, who offer nothing more than "you're not rich, screw you" - and who really are to blame - stand to regain power.

Fairness doesn't enter into it remotely. Or maybe, as David Michael Green says, this bitter outcome is just what we've earned by being repeatedly stupid.

Nostalgia for past economies

From Wikipedia, lightly edited in a highly prejudicial fashion:

During that time, the Great Depression reached its low point. In line with conservative economic theory that less government spending would spur economic growth, [Republicans] drastically cut state expenditures, including in the social sector. He expected and accepted that the economic crisis would, for a while, deteriorate before things would improve. Among others, the [conservatives] completely halted all public grants to the obligatory unemployment insurance ..., which resulted in higher contributions by the workers and fewer benefits for the unemployed.

GOP fetishes

Tim Pawlenty sticks with failed Republican fetishized positions. Of course, Republicans think a tax cut can solve any problem.

But that's old news. The funny part is the constant refrain of small business this, small business that. Republicans don't really care about small business. They use it for protection from the true accusation that they are in the pocket of big business - and have been for many decades.

This is a case of a Democratic formula backfiring. Sometime around the 1970s, Dems wanted to reassure voters that they were in fact in favor of a strong economy, but they had been hammering big business so hard since the Great Depression that they had to make a distinction about which businesses deserved their help and advocacy.

Republicans quickly saw the advantages of this market positioning. After all, only a narrow niche of voters would ever find big business to be warm and fuzzy, and they already knew the GOP was buttering their bread.

Elite media loved and love this formula, too. Every economic downturn brings out formulaic stories about how many jobs small business creates. The better studies, though, show that small business does not create net jobs at anything like the scale of big business.

What you'll notice if you look closely at actual policy, as opposed to dishonest GOP marketing, is that Republican goals always help big business and leave a few crumbs for small business, much as their tax cut policies do for the very wealthy vs. the middle class.

At bottom, the Republicans' single most important policy position is tax cuts. The rest is just marketing. They don't really care whether a tax cut will solve a problem, economic or otherwise. They only care to lower their patrons' taxes.

In the end, we're back to the old news. The chant of "small business" is only about helping big business.

A bonus for this man

Poignant instead of funny, but too well-done to miss.

Click image to see full Dwayne Booth drawing. Do it soon, as the link may expire.

Spitting into your Mitt

I wasn't fast to sour on Mitt Romney. Not that I'd vote for him, of course, but he didn't seem as awful as the typical Republican. Many of my friends were more perceptive.

When he ran for governor of Massachusetts in 2002, I could tell he was lying about his views of abortion. But it didn't seem so terrible when he won narrowly, in part by making an issue of Shannon O'Brien's proposal to align the age of consent to sex with the age of consent to abortion. The 2008 Presidential campaign came, and Romney made his infamously expedient conversion to hard right views in ardent favor of a blastocyst-to-birth welfare state (and police state, too). That proved my 2002 belief correct.

This is a man who will say anything to win an election. He's running on a marketing plan, not on his own convictions. (It's not that I believe he lacks convictions; I think he does have true convictions of his own, but I suspect that they're too wingnutty and extreme and downright weird to ever win.)

The problem for Romney is that even Republicans, who desperately wanted to believe him, could tell that he's as smarmily insincere as politicians come. And, man, that's saying a lot. Sarah Palin, for instance, is about as self-promoting as they come, but she still from time to time lets slip some really outlandish bullshit out of her core convictions, however inchoate they are.

So, when Mitt offers up his ass to be kissed by the habitual ass-kisser Larry King, he of course says that Obama is "learning on the fly." Yep, Romney pretends that he would of course know exactly what to do about an episode in the economy that has no analogy dating back seventy years to a time when the organization of the economy was much different, much more local, and moved much more slowly. Romney says this with the same smug arrogance of the "masters of the universe" on Wall Street for the simple reason that he's one of them. His recipe for fixing this would not be so different from Tim Geithner (minus points for Obama), although it would be much more pitched to allowing disastrous failures. Romney would wind us all up in penury.

In sum, Mitt Romney is:

• smarmy
• insincere
• smug
• arrogant
• the exact wrong doctor for the economy
• and won't countenance the destruction of blastocysts in research that might help his wife Ann, who suffers from multiple schlerosis - and he reached this epiphany for craven political reasons

The ipecac candidate! But of course - of course - he's running in 2012, his non-denial denial notwithstanding. Otherwise, he'd have better things to do than show up on CNN.

Viagra for the Confederacy

Because the two bestest times of all time were the Civil War and the Great Depression, a couple of Confederate/Republican golden oldies are sweeping the nation. Well, not exactly the nation, but the Republican back benches in those citadels of enlightenment, Montana, Oklahoma, and South Carolina.

Some dipshit two-bit Oklahoman would be happy to condemn his fellow citizens to become Okies.

From Montana to South Carolina, lawmakers in mostly red states have pushed ahead with measures calling for state sovereignty under the Tenth Amendment, saying the federal government has overstepped its bounds with the stimulus package. The states are calling for the right to ignore laws they deem unconstitutional.

This is what gets them excited. I hope there's not little blue pill for it, although they are trying to deal with their political impotence.

Look, we settled this in 1865 after killing and maiming hundreds of thousands of loyal Americans and people whose children would once again be loyal Americans. Some of the latter were my relatives.

You states rights idiots don't have the power to unilaterally declare a federal law unconstitutional, as if you can even spell it. It doesn't matter what bullshit law you pass in Oklahoma or South Carolina (perversely proud home of Fort Sumter) or Montana or at your local militia meeting.

Of course, I guess we thought we had this settled even before the Civil War, when in the 1780s we ditched the Articles of Confederation in favor of the stronger government in the Constitution.

Why is CNN covering this fake and bullshit-filled trend? You don't think Lauren Kornreich called up Republicans in every state legislator, do you? The Republican press machine must have issued a release, which she dutifully typed up.

Porketty-pork-pork-pork

Woo-hoo! Why would you want a new New Deal when we're always here to trickle down onto you?

Click image to see full Mark Fiore animation.

The sins of the Republicans

... are visited upon the Democrats. Because Duhbya and Henry Paulson were completely irresponsible with the bailout money, the GOP will screw Obama.

The ultimate destruction of the Republican Party would benefit America, as long as it was replaced by something better. If you read the comments on any news story that's vaguely political, it's tough to be sure the replacement would be an improvement.

We're in deep shit, America. Obama wants to use a Keynesian stimulus to paddle out of it - with way too much bullshit tax cutting to try to mollify the congenitally irresponsible Republican caucus. The Republicans, of course, reward him by flinging poo at him. They're a bunch of two-year-olds, so what did Obama expect?

Don't be optimistic about a short recession. It doesn't make any sense. Between actively evil Republicans and lily-livered Democrats who aren't nearly tough enough, I see another Great Depression coming. Whether any of these political institutions survive, including the United States itself, will be an open question if a depression happens.

I'm going to learn brewing, wine-making, and distilling. Those are depression-proof industries, and I have a family history of bootlegging. (No, I'm not an arriviste Kennedy. My people were most recently making their own whiskey way before Prohibition.)

Meanwhile, the masters of the universe

... are in a pool of shit so deep that they're drowning in droves. There is no reason not to be deeply worried about the threat of another depression. Even Paul Krugman is worried, and he's usually a calming voice despite his harsh (and just) critiques of systemic financial shenanigans.

If a depression happens, the fault will lie squarely with those whose mania for deregulation led the smart guys to be able to hide risk in a wild and deceptive market. That includes almost all Republicans and most Democrats, especially those who turned to Wall St. for campaign contributions over the past thirty years.

The upshot: It's dangerous to go to bed with a service industry that has its eye on your wallet - in either direction. Problem is, everyone gets screwed.

If we do suffer a depression, America and our position in the world will never be the same. That may be true without one, but a depression would make it a certainty.

Vicious circle of financial contraction

Paul Krugman didn't just now say this for the first time. He has been making the point of our willful forgetting for years.

I made it, too, last week and also not for the first time.

American economic power is already under threat. The consequences of a deep worldwide recession - or a bona fide depression - are too unpredictable to be sure of, but the Great Depression did these things:

• Stoked extreme ideologies on the left and the right
• Led to WWII
• Killed people with poverty
• Moved the economic center of the world (from Europe to the U.S.)

I'd venture a guess that we in the U.S. don't want any of these things to happen again, but we haven't acted that way since the 1970s.

Image in the public domain.

Nuts, no rotting vegetables handy

I'm sitting in the Orlando Barnes & Noble and the PA touts the book-signing to come later in the afternoon of Newt Gingrich. Ah, so that's why the two dopes at adjacent tables just segued from tsk-tsking about affirmative action to the saintly wonders of free market capitalism. Did you know that the market fixed the economic damage of the Great Depression? Neither did they, but they think they know it. As it happens, they also mistook Michigan State for the University of Michigan when they bemoaned affirmative action, but what's a few mere facts among conservatives.

That Newtie could title a book Real Change and not be laughed into a low-rent whorehouse suggests how faith-based our national conversation is. He's pretending to be a rational seeker of the right hard choices irrespective of ideology. Yeah, right. Still, his fans think he's great. After all, they agree with his sclerotic, faux intellectual, reactionary nostrums.

I left before the two Republicans got fully wound up into the perils of Medicare, but I did hear one describe how some group he was in would always call an ambulance rather than the EMTs because of better reimbursement. So, one perverse incentive vitiates an entire program! Or that's the reasoning of conservatives.