Killing the golden goose

Democrats have gotten pretty good at raising small dollar contributions via email. This will not last because they are drowning their supporters in spam.

Especially at the end of every reporting period, I get scores of emails from people I'd like to contribute to - and a few from Democrats I won't contribute to, such as John Tierney, unless he found himself in the unlikely position of being vote 218 for Nancy Pelosi as Speaker. Then, I suppose I could hold my nose. Till it bled.

Tierney's emailing me daily, as if I were an ardent supporter whose absence from his list of contributors must be an oversight - or I'm a slacker who needs a reminder to change my underwear. When did it become permissible to spread email addresses to everyone?

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee was emailing me on multiple addresses, demanding to know why I haven't renewed my "membership." The day I got five separate emails on each address, I started unsubscribing, and I let them know in no uncertain terms why:

I'm tired of the insulting and manipulative spam. You're destroying a potent Democratic advantage by promiscuously sharing my addresses. Stop it! I get 50 emails per day, and the ones that cast me as a deadbeat piss me the hell off.

The DCCC took me mostly off their list. But I suddenly found myself subscribed to the Democratic Majority PAC's list. It's not as frequent, but I'm not mollified.

Because of this abuse, more and more contributors who can't give to everyone (e.g. me), are going to opt out.

Maybe they're trying to cull their lists. As if.

Really, I think their email contractors are abusing the lists because that's where their incentives lie. If so, Democrats need to learn to write better contracts - or pull their operations back in house.

The alternative: Republicans will still have the Koch brothers and a long line of oligarchs. What will the Dems still have?

Blame the unions!

They made too many wage concessions:

In 1988, the income of an average American taxpayer was $33,400, adjusted for inflation. Fast forward 20 years, and not much had changed: The average income was still just $33,000 in 2008, according to IRS data.

Meanwhile, the richest 1% of Americans -- those making $380,000 or more -- have seen their incomes grow 33% over the last 20 years, leaving average Americans in the dust.

Say this for the teabaggers:  They know they're getting screwed.  But they blame exactly the wrong people.

Thumb on the scale

CNN and Money tout a consensus of economists in favor of leaving the rich their huge tax cuts so that the middle class can continue with its usual crumbs. That settles it, right? They aren't teabaggers. We have to listen to the experts...

But.

Like big media everywhere, Money has stacked its lineup of thirty-one economists. Bank-owned economists are well represented. Investment and insurance have their guys in the list. Even real estate and retail are there. These people work for institutions who utterly and completely failed to foresee the current crisis.

These are also people whose paychecks depend on how well they serve the interests of wealth. It's not surprising to find that they find brave new ways to rationalize even more trickle down economics.

Has trickle-down abjectly failed for the past thirty years? No problem, they can find more rationalizations that sound good. It's only coincidental that they're defending policies that help their clients. They're really doing it for small businesses that are too marginal to have bothered to incorporate. I shit you not:

The 'why' behind extending tax benefits - The reason for this idea is to shield small business from tax hikes. Many small businesses are not incorporated so their owners pay the personal tax rate. This means that if the personal tax rate goes up, the tax on business goes up and that will restrict activity. Congress has known about this for some time and has done nothing to solve the problem. It’s back! A tax hike on high wage earners is one thing; a tax on business is something else. That is what is really at stake and Mr Summers wants to hide that and prefers to sell policy on the basis of ideas rooted in class warfare which can never be good but do get the blood flowing.

This Ph.D. moron, Robert Brusca, is calling Larry Summers a class warrior! And he's serious about it - or pretends to be. So much for the intellectual honesty he finds lacking in Summers. (I do too, but for completely different reasons. Can we please get Summers out of any institution that matters to the common weal!)

Money salts the list with a few academics, four by my count. But even three of them are business economists. Three of the four teach at small California colleges that I had never heard of before - Cal. State Channel Islands?

Any Nobelists? Anyone paid by a labor union? Any balance whatsoever? I know the business press doesn't have any balance in its Rolodex. Isn't it time to do a little research?

Evidently not. Better to let CNN run with the bullshit that makes all its owners and upper management happy...

Still, the totally scary news is that these business economists predict a jobless recovery through the end of 2011, despite raging unemployment between 8 and 10 percent. To prove their complete bias, most of them oppose any further help for the unemployed.

In summary, CNN/Money, through their bias says, Hurting? Fuck you. Rich. Free money!

Assholes.

Vanishing people

This bears repeating for anyone who's complacent about unemployment.

How can all three of these facts be true at the same time?

1. The rate of unemployment held steady in February (at the awful rate of 9.7%).
2. 36,000 net jobs were lost.
3. Approximately 150,000 people would be expected to join the workforce in an average month.

The obvious expressions of these facts:

jobsFeb = jobsJan - 36000
workforceFeb = workforceJan + 150000
jobsJan/workforceJan = jobsFeb/workforceFeb = 0.097, thus
jobsJan/workforceJan = (jJ - 36000)/(wJ + 150000) = 0.097

Only problem is that this last equation has no solution. The unemployment rate should have gone up a tenth of a point.

The problem with this arithmetic is that workforceFeb = workforceJan + 150000 isn't true. People who need jobs, who want jobs, are giving up, falling off the count.

Unemployment, as officially measured, held steady. That is only true because the Bureau of Labor Statistics stopped counting a bunch of the actually unemployed. How many? Since there are about 138,000,000 people working in the U.S., about 190,000 people had to give up in the single month of February to make the ratio stay constant.

Fifteen million people are out of work. Involuntarily. Not counting people who are working parttime but would like a fulltime job. Not counting people working shit jobs just to keep body and soul together. Not counting people who have given up, more than one percent of all unemployed in last month alone.

In ordinary times, this would be considered a crisis.

Try harder

Democrats are claiming that there's not much they can do about the AIG bonuses, which are tantamount to theft. Bullshit. They need to try harder, and Ch. 7 is an option with the appointment of a trustee.

In every other circumstance, employees are the last people to be taken care of by a bankrupt corporation. Usually, that's unjust. In this case, though, the very same people who are still profiting wildly are the people who made and managed the stupid investments that brough AIG to bankruptcy and bailout. Instead of ruin and a return to the middle class of people who have to work, they're still somehow entitled to $165 million.

By the way, if you were still dense enough to think that executive compensation is about results, these bonuses and all the bonuses that Wall Street is still milking out of illiquid companies prove once and for all that that is bullshit. Executive compensation plans are a huge case of mutual masturbation with no connection to real performance. The mess is all over us, and that pisses me off.

How many seats

If we as a nation own more than a third of Citigroup, it should go without saying that we get to appoint the board chair. The question I have is how many other seats do we get on the board? And, no, Robert Rubin doesn't count.

I'm not happy with strictly proportional allocation, which understates the importance of our capital infusions. I'm looking for one less than a majority, thus chair plus six other seats on the board of 15.

Who should be kicked off? Start with the inside directors, Win Bischoff, Vikram Pandit, Richard Parsons, and Bob Rubin. They royally screwed up; this is known in my plebeian circles as accountability. But no:

Under the deal, a majority of Citigroup's independent directors will be replaced. Pandit and Chairman Richard Parsons will retain their positions.

The idiots in charge of the asylum are not in the mood for justice. They and their diluted (deluded, too) investors still feel entitled:

"Will Citigroup be run for the shareholders, or is Citigroup going to be run for public policy goals or some other purpose?" asked Michael Mayo of Deutsche Bank.

Uh, dipshit, we are the shareholders.

The truth is that these guys couldn't find their well-fed asses with both hands. (Don't they have people for that?)

"We do not think [the Citi brand has] been permanently damaged. We still have a very strong brand globally," [Ned Kelly, head of global banking for Citigroup,] said. "Clearly when you're in the spotlight, there's going to be some negative impact. But it's had no economic impact."

They're still dithering about their brand, when anyone with two brain cells to rub together can tell that the bank's survival is what's at stake.

They still think these times are normal, that their membership in the elite will protect them from justice. Self-perpetuating and mutually defending elites are a big part of what's wrong with the economy, the media, the government, and America in general. My proverbial pitchfork says they're wrong.

Exceptional executives

And I mean exceptional in the sense that used to be a euphemism (and may still be) for the hardest special ed cases.

Donald Trump can't make money from gambling. Either that, or someone's skimming. I guess he is exceptional enough to have his own TV show alongside so many other blowhard, self-important jerks (Glenn Beck, anyone? How about Chris Matthews?).

In the category of that explains a lot:

[Las Vegas economic woes] led to a 10% decline in gaming revenues for Las Vegas casinos in 2008. (This year might not be much better either, especially if big banks receiving TARP money stop flying loan officers to Las Vegas for "annual recognition events.")

No wonder they all wanted in on the high-risk securitized mortgage market! Owww. (Atrios would add, "The stupid, it burns.")

Update: "You know the economy is bad when you can't count on gambling and hookers." --David Letterman

Strip the Republican crap out in conference

When the stimulus passes the Senate, the Democrats should make sure it has been significantly amended. The bill that comes out of conference committee for final passage should lose all the sweeteners that the Republicans in the House asked for.

I used to be too nice to hold a grudge. Now I say hurt those assholes. I would really love to see some Chicago politics applied to them. They need to understand that there's a severe political price that they'll have to pay for such obstructionism.

Oh, the blue dogs? Offices in the basement and assignment to the basket-weaving committees.

Conservictionary on 'bipartisan'

In the alternate universe of the conservative brain, bipartisan still means "do it our way, or we'll negotiate in bad and still spite you by not supporting our own compromise."

"This Democrat bill won't stimulate anything but more government and more debt," said Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., on Tuesday. "House Democrats [will] use a time of national crisis to fund big government priorities under the guise of stimulating the economy."

Imagine! A Republican flaying Democrats for his own party's constant sin.

Hypocrisy, it's what they do.

Capital

... doesn't come cheap. If I'm providing it, I want equity.

What Paulson and the Bushists may actually intend by offering Congress their poison pill of a bill: Either they get a $700 billion slush fund to bail out Republican businesses, or they pin the blame on Democrats for the whole deregulatory debacle because in this one week, the didn't act fast enough, meekly enough, nor deferentially enough.

What about their packages?

How can CNN/Money report these Fannie Mae resignations without asking how much the four executives are taking out with them in severance? Shouldn't that be the first goddamn question that any cub reporter with half a brain would ask? Oh, right, it's an AP story.

I'm really dying for a media in which the first weed-out qualification is an extreme distaste for kissing ass. Because right now our journalists are waaay too polite any time they're not probing into blow jobs, prostitution, or wide stances.

(And, as you may have noticed, I'm feeling even less polite than usual today.)

C'mon, just trust us

Don't remember that we've fucked up everything we've touched. Give us a $700 billion line of credit to spend as we see fit. Pleeze! We've only moved the line up 40% since yesterday.

No Congress worth a sou would give any Executive, much less this particular disaster of an Executive, this sort of unchecked, unsupervised, and expensive authority. I don't care if Henry Paulson leaves his balls as collateral.

Of course, our Congress is probably not worth a sou.

Bushist economy

People in the middle class don't need an explanation from an economist of the pro-wealthy bias of the Bushist economy:

Adjusted for inflation, median household income dropped by $1,175 between 2000 and 2007, said Elizabeth Warren, professor at Harvard Law School, in written testimony before the Joint Economic Committee.

At the same time, the average family is spending $4,655 more on basic expenses, such as gas, housing, food and health insurance.

But it's good to have one anyway.

A friend of mine likes to ask, "Are you better off than you were eight years ago?"

Well, are ya, punk?

Billion buys a lot of CNN

... but Ross, nobody out here among the non-billionaires gives a shit what you think even if you're right.

How did this guy get to be a media darling? Money.

CNN, a bum rap?

Lobbyists, we report, you decide. Poor lobbyists! They're people, too. They have feelings. And some of them (a very small proportion) look thanklessly after the public interest instead of the usual run of special pleadings for moneyed interests. Those moneyed interests are not in the business of bribery; their business is to fall just short of bribery.

Of course, blood 'n' guts McCain gets a prominent mention as a reformer of lobbying. Ha! At least CNN notices that he's on both side of this, too - strongly worded statements in bed with the very behavior they decry.

Then:

Watchdog groups say lobbying gets a bad rap because success in the profession is often heavily influenced by wealth and who wields it.

Duh!

Duhbya lies about his taxes again

This is a lie:

Allowing the cuts to expire would add $1,900 to the tax bill of a family of four with an annual income of $60,000, Bush said.

There might be one family somewhere that matches these numbers, but the clear intent is, as usual, deceit.

This is the typical Bushist bullshit that lies with the word average:

All told, he added, 43 million families with kids would have to pay an average tax increase of $2,323.

It's really helpful that Bill Gates has kids, but Duhbya is probably also counting Paris Hilton and Warren Buffett's adult "kids".

Note also that CNN/Money reports these bogus numbers with complete abject credulity. After eating seven years of bullshit, you'd think they would have learned how stupid that is.

Uneasy?

Notice that not one of these failed CEOs is hurting from his failure at all. The head that wears the crown lies pretty easy.

Double standard

Relatively minor Democratic bullshit gets prominent play, while John McCain's typical Republican budget bullshit gets tacked on as a $4 trillion afterthought. And most of even that scant, belated coverage is the McCain campaign's captious spin in response to the complete fiscal irresponsibility of his proposals. IOKIYAR!

Another elitist calls Obama elitist

Mitt Romney has enough money that he thought he could buy the common touch. Maybe he still does.

Not in a million ... years.

White House clears brush in Texas

Does anyone else find this headline weird?

White House to veto foreclosure bill

Last I looked, the veto power was solely granted by the (former) Constitution to the President. And 'President' has fewer letters than 'White House' anyway.