When the strong are so weak...

Click image for full Doonesbury cartoon.

When I say conserfative

By conserfative, I mean one of those less-than-wealthy wingnut loyalists who stand up for the poor put-upon aristocrats of wealth in moronic support of policies that further enrich the fatcats and beggar the conserfatives. These moronic loyalists think of themselves as independent and clear-thinking, when in fact they yearn for a strongman and are the easiest sheeple to pull the wool over.

Just to clear that up, if it needed it...

Conserfatives

Timothy Egan nails the head-snapping misrepresentation of poor whites by their Teapublican overlords:

Among the 254 counties where food stamp use doubled during the economic collapse, Mitt Romney won 213 of them, Bloomberg News reported. Half of Owsley County, Ky., is receiving federal food aid. Half. 

You can’t get any more Team Red than Owsley County; it is 98 percent white, 81 percent Republican, per the 2012 presidential election. And that hardscrabble region has the distinction of being the poorest in the nation, with the lowest household income of any county in the United States, the Census Bureau found in 2010. 

Since nearly half of Owsley’s residents also live below the poverty line, it would seem logical that the congressman who represents the area, Hal Rogers, a Republican, would be interested in, say, boosting income for poor working folks. But Rogers joined every single Republican in the House earlier this year in voting down a plan to raise the minimum wage over the next two years to $10.10 an hour.

Instead of voting for their pocketbooks, poor whites have succumbed to a frankly tribal and bigoted appeal that finds fear and threats in blacks, immigrants, and anyone who's different. It's not an accident that the heart of this appeal to the basest of American traditions springs from the South, where it seeks to recapitulate Jim Crow. Never mind what the majority wants, suppress enough votes to keep the aristocracy in power.

The GOP can do this because they've changed the postwar social norm. After WWII, we all knew from the battlefield that we were one nation, all in this great cause of freedom and prosperity together. This made very threatening times for the lords of the manor. They might prosper even more under Democrats than under Republicans (look it up), but they needed greater income inequality to feel better about themselves.

So they took their financial resources and put them to work changing the social norm. Now, we have an entire right-wing media apparatus built for the purpose of convincing their racist teabagger serfs of a thousand things opposite the truth.

But the main new social norm for the conserfatives is the ardent faith that the government and organized labor are the source of their problems, when in fact they are the only counterbalance that exists to the plutocracy that has gluttonously gobbled up all the economic gains of the past thirty-five years and still cannot be sated short of neo-feudalism.

What’s at work here is the poison of ideology. Underlying the food assistance fight is the idea that the poor are lazy, and deserve their fate — the Ayn Rand philosophy. You don’t see this same reasoning applied to those Red State agricultural-industrialists living high off farm subsidies, and that’s why Republicans have separated the two major recipient groups of federal food aid. Subsidized cotton growers cannot possibly be equated with someone trying to stretch macaroni into three meals.

The saddest part: Those people in Owsley County who are made hungry by Republican fealty to the wealthy will continue to blame the government and the United Mine Workers. In a way, the fucking morons deserve to live in a company town. They've failed to live up to their self-image as self-reliant, independent yeoman Scotch-Irish sonsabitches. But the rest of us don't deserve that company town. And their children don't either.

Shareholder democracy

I.e., not real democracy, but the much more rewarding kleptomaniac plutocracy.

Who loses?  For the past three decades, it's always the 99% who lose.

Update (8/29): It's a pain in the ass that Blogger has become increasingly mercurial about saving posts that include videos.

Critique from the left

Chris Hedges is always provocative.

Of liberalism, too often bought off by conservative corporations:

Corporations write our legislation. They control our systems of information. They manage the political theater of electoral politics and impose our educational curriculum. They have turned the judiciary into one of their wholly owned subsidiaries. They have decimated labor unions and other independent mass organizations, as well as having bought off the Democratic Party, which once defended the rights of workers. With the evisceration of piecemeal and incremental reform — the primary role of liberal, democratic institutions — we are left defenseless against corporate power.

Of the current ugly capitalism itself, less restrained every day by anything moral:

A handful of corporate oligarchs around the globe have everything — wealth, power and privilege — and the rest of us struggle as part of a vast underclass, increasingly impoverished and ruthlessly repressed. There is one set of laws and regulations for us; there is another set of laws and regulations for a power elite that functions as a global mafia.

Between the lines, Hedges visibly calls for revolution. He doesn't call for violence the way so many Teabaggers do, but he has put my liberal program behind him for direct action and presumably peaceable rebellion.

Private equity, public inequity

Why does it matter that Gabriel Gomez (R-private equity) took a $280,000 tax deduction on the facade of his home? Don't we all try to squeeze every last dime off our tax bills? Isn't that the good ole American way?

No, and here's why.

The Town of Cohasset values Gomez's property at a little more than $2,000,000. (Go here and search for parcel 27-094.  It's actually not his any more, as he sold it for $1 to his wife in 2008.) This value matches up with Zillow's current estimate, which makes Zillow's 2005 estimate of value credible. Zillow has tended to inflate the market anyway, which would work to Gomez's advantage.

Taking Zillow's 2005 number of $2.3 million, Gomez's tax deduction was over 12% of the total value of his property, pretty extreme. It gets worse when you realize he's valuing the appearance of the facade only, not the twelve bedrooms or the five bathrooms or the land.

Then, it turns out, as the Boston Globe reports, that Gomez's alteration of the facade was already restricted by a town bylaw and thus not his to donate.

One specialist in conservation easement law, Scott Knott, a tax partner in The Ferraro Law Firm in Washington, D.C., said that if easements mandated by local laws are already in place, homeowners have nothing to claim as a tax deduction.

“The key is the valuation of the easement and if there is already a restriction on the property, the value is not diminished by the easement,’’ said Knott. “The value of any easement that has the same restriction already in place is zero.’’

If you want to go all Fifth Amendment on me, you're too late to make the town's bylaw a taking. Gomez bought the house in 2004, well after the establishment of the Cohasset historical district in 1996. So Gomez bought the property with restrictions already on it, and those restrictions necessarily would have figured in the price he paid for it. (Of course, living in a historic district generally raises property values instead of lowering them.)

OK, Gomez's spokesman said, but now he can't sue for relief if the Cohasset Historical Commission won't let him make a change. Except, he can still seek relief in court.

Like Ann Romney's tax deductible horse hobby, this is an outrage of sharp abuse of the tax code. No legitimate public purpose is served by it, just the enriching of the already wealthy out of the public treasury.

This is who Gabriel Gomez became by descending into private equity. Don't the plutocrats already have enough people in Congress - especially in the Senate - whose avowed purpose is to help the wealthy grab even more of the nation's income?

We in Massachusetts took a brave step forward in electing Elizabeth Warren. Gabriel Gomez would work to destroy every single thing that Warren is accomplishing in Washington.

We simply must reject Gomez's candidacy and elect Ed Markey.

Capitalist paradise

In a perfect Ayn Rand world, Sohel Rana ought to go Galt if he's regulated by the little people of government. Far better to keep hands off job creators and let their workers decide whether a factory is a safe enough place to alienate their labor!

Authorities in Bangladesh now say the building was illegally constructed, with permits obtained through political influence. The owner, Sohel Rana, now in jail, was illegally adding upper floors to structure at the time the building collapsed, officials said.

If 1,000 people die because greedy bastards like Rana have bought off the government, for economic libertarians, that's just the occasional cost of freedom, collateral damage in a capitalist paradise.

When an industrialist exploiter corrupts government, that's a failure of government, no doubt. But it's a feature of the extreme form of capitalism that Randian libertarians advocate, in which everything is for sale and the "free" market corrects excesses.

Sometimes, the market mechanism takes lives of the proles. But who cares about them? Certainly not Rana Sohel.

The thing we comfortable, lazy Americans may not have noticed is that we live in a nation whose government has been thoroughly corrupted by the moneyed elites. Little by little and sometimes in big hunks, wealth has bought up every institution it could.

The plutocrats think their incipient fascism is by definition right and moral. Even if a few (thousand) have to die.

Rationalizing extremism

The Heritage Foundation doesn't exist to research credible conservative alternatives. It exists to provide pseudo-intellectual claptrap to paste a fig leaf over the nasty bits of wingnut prejudice. Heritage proposed Obamacare in the 1990s, only to go full metal jacket on it when a Democrat proposed it.

Same on immigration:

[T]he study, which comes out under the leadership of conservative former Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), is a sharp departure from a “Backgrounder” the Foundation published in 2006. Then, Heritage noted that “worker migration is a net plus economically.”

The wingnut bullshit artists are in charge, and they need to keep the rubes inflamed so that they don't notice it's the plutocracy who are screwing them.

Update: My man Paul Krugman agrees with me. Usually it's the other way around.

The truth is that Heritage has never been in the business of doing economic analysis; it’s just a propaganda agency posing as a think tank.

What Krugman doesn't say

For Paul Krugman, the role of Cassandra has to weigh like a curse he didn't earn.

look at the predictions the two sides in this debate have made. People like me predicted right from the start that large budget deficits would have little effect on interest rates, that large-scale “money printing” by the Fed (not a good description of actual Fed policy, but never mind) wouldn’t be inflationary, that austerity policies would lead to terrible economic downturns. The other side jeered, insisting that interest rates would skyrocket and that austerity would actually lead to economic expansion. Ask bond traders, or the suffering populations of Spain, Portugal and so on, how it actually turned out.

Of course, Cassandra didn't earn hers, either.

The people who oppose stimulus aren't all ignoramuses. Sure, they've bought the fealty of the Republican Party, and it's filled with ignoramuses who are so unprincipled they'll say anything to keep the Koch up their nose. But the billionaires aren't foolish men.

It's clear that a stimulated economy is a bigger economy. The plutocrats don't care. They have plenty, and they want more, but there's something they want more than larger fortunes.

They want a docile, servile, and inexpensive workforce (that's us) whom they can dispose of on whim. They want to run everything.

Extreme inequality of income and wealth is not an accidental outcome of their policy preferences. It's their underlying goal. With the rest of us in penury or afraid of it, their lives become much simpler. That's what they want.

Compare your tax bill

We simply cannot have a healthy economy when nearly all the rewards flow to the few.

Then, too, there's the immorality of a society that privileges greed above all else.

Please, sir, I want some more

The plutocrats' (and Republicans') vision is to reduce us all to penury.

Pure blame-shifting

It really shouldn't surprise anyone with two brain cells to rub together that the House teabaggers have zero sincere interest in a deal to forestall the sequester. John Boehner (R-no) is on record as having gotten 98% of what he wanted in the original deal, and even allowing for a bit of hyperbole in that number, he knows he's not going to get a better deal, especially now that President Obama has found his spine.

Instead, what Boehner wants to do is shift the blame for the cuts onto Obama and the Democrats. He and his party of mercenary bastards really do believe that perception is reality. Thus the only thing that matters to him in the sequestration fight is to win the battle of perception.

Never mind whether these cuts hurt people. Republicans don't care about anyone who's vulnerable.

Never mind whether these cuts hurt the economy. Republicans have shown for years that the size of the economic pie doesn't matter to them. They in fact support economic inequality as a desirable goal, not merely a side effect of their desire to drown the government in the bathtub. When the economy hurts the middle class (and the forgotten poor), it also hurts the wealthy, but the wealthy recover their losses and attain even greater plutocratic power over the rest of us. And that's what Republicans support.

Never mind whether these cuts hurt the military, even. Since the voters no longer trust Republicans more than Democrats on the military, blame-shifting this is the GOP's way of trying to get that trust back. Obviously, an undeserving way.

Fortunately, Boehner seems to be failing to convince Americans that his lies are true. This must come as a surprise to him, since he and the Republicans have been so often successful at that in the past.

Update (3/1): Yep:

Amid clamoring from his more conservative members, Mr. Boehner eventually reaffirmed his own conservative principles, abandoning even the pretense of reaching a bipartisan solution on the spending cuts. He argued that the president had gotten his desired tax increases in the earlier showdown. And he promised no more one-on-one negotiating sessions meetings with Mr. Obama.

Consistent Republican agenda

The Republican Party favors this above all else: Increasing income inequality.

This is John Kasich's proposal for Ohio - and he's supposed to be one of the reasonable Republicans!

The GOP is about making nearly everyone poorer while they make the rich richer.

Any questions?

The wealthy and their corporations whip middle class wingnuts into a frenzy of claims that America is disappearing into a dim socialist future, yet:

The capital gains rate has been steadily eroded since President Ronald Reagan taxed such income equal to wages in the 1980s, and the result has been rising income inequality. A January 2012 study found that low capital gains rates were the biggest driver of American income inequality, which now rivals the levels seen in countries like Ivory Coast and Pakistan. In 2010, the capital gains preference helped the richest 1 percent capture 93 percent of all income gains.

In fact, we're disappearing into a dim plutocratic future, in which life for all but the very top is never secure from privation.

There is no visible limit to the greed of the wealthy to slurp up an ever-larger share of the national economy. They don't earn it. They simply have so much already that they can take what they want.

Owing our soul to the Bain Company store

Mitt Rmoney is exactly wrong for a democratic America, and nominating him was an act of supreme hubris. Why won't Democrats make the Republicans pay?  Robert Reich explains:

Romney is the only casino capitalist who is running for president, at the very time in our nation’s history when these views and practices are a clear and present danger to the well-being of the rest of us—just as they were more than a century ago. Romney says he’s a job-creating businessman, but in truth he’s just another financial dealmaker in the age of the financial deal, a fat cat in an era of excessively corpulent felines, a plutocrat in this new epoch of plutocrats. That the GOP has made him its standard-bearer at this point in American history is astonishing.

[W]hy don’t Democrats connect these dots? ... Part of the answer, surely, is that elected Democrats are still almost as beholden to the wealthy for campaign funds as the Republicans, and don’t want to bite the hand that feeds them. Wall Street can give most of its largesse to Romney this year and still have enough left over to tame many influential Democrats (look at the outcry from some of them when the White House took on Bain Capital). But I suspect a deeper reason for their reticence is that if they connect the dots and reveal Romney for what he is—the epitome of what’s fundamentally wrong with our economy—they’ll be admitting how serious our economic problems really are. They would have to acknowledge that the economic catastrophe that continues to cause us so much suffering is, at its root, a product of the gross inequality of income, wealth and political power in America’s new Gilded Age, as well as the perverse incentives of casino capitalism. 

I've been working this theme for a while:

Democrats gave up their [class] unity voluntarily as a result of the marketplace, not of ideas, but of campaign contributions. They passed post-Watergate reforms in reaction to the financial abuses of Nixon's Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP), but they ran afoul of unintended consequences.

Democrats could no longer raise large chunks of money from wealthyideological sources; they now had to spread their fundraising to wealthy business interests who were much more likely to play the access game.

Go and listen to Reich, as well.

Hair to the throne

Click image for full J.D. Crowe/Mobile Register cartoon.

The proper role of envy is to make the unemployed dream of being the chauffeur, not to dream of government making a better life for them.

There is no deficit

Republicans gave it all to the rich. All of it. Not the slightly rich, the very very very rich. Trillions of dollars. They still have it, spoils of their completely successful class war against the rest of us.

The staggering economic inequality that has led Americans across the country to take to the streets in protest is no accident. It has been fueled to a large extent by the GOP's all-out war on behalf of the rich. Since Republicans rededicated themselves to slashing taxes for the wealthy in 1997, the average annual income of the 400 richest Americans has more than tripled, to $345 million – while their share of the tax burden has plunged by 40 percent. Today, a billionaire in the top 400 pays less than 17 percent of his income in taxes – five percentage points less than a bus driver earning $26,000 a year. "Most Americans got none of the growth of the preceding dozen years," says Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist. "All the gains went to the top percentage points."

The rich didn't use it for anything the Republicans promised. They didn't create jobs. They didn't invest in anything hard, only in the Wall Street casino. They didn't even trickle it down on us.

The stimulus argument was lousy economics. The previous two decades, after all, had demonstrated that "trickle-down" tax cuts don't juice the economy – they create bubbles and balloon deficits. Proponents pointed to Reagan's original tax cut in 1981, claiming it had spurred economic growth. But that is nothing more than "urban legend," [David] Stockman says. The economy "did recover after 1982," he says, "but mainly because the Federal Reserve defeated inflation."

When money is involved, every single Republican legislative action for many years has had as its purpose the enrichment of the already rich. They want plutocracy.

The deal privileged gambling on stocks over working for a living: The tax rate the richest pay on their long-term capital gains was slashed by 25 percent, while their rate on dividends fell by almost 60 percent. The move not only fueled speculation of Wall Street, it further widened the considerable gap between rich and poor. "It was a very destructive combination to have a national economic policy that stimulated debt-financed capital gains and then taxed the windfall at the lowest rate imaginable," says Stockman. "That contributed, clearly, to the growing imbalance in household income and wealth."

And it's a complete and total lie that beggaring the middle class to stimulate the wealthy provides any benefits whatsoever to the economy as a whole or to the beggared - and buggered - middle class.

As with the offshore profits, the banks used the money to line the pockets of executives and investors – while doing little to speed the recovery of Main Street. "We gave an enormous subsidy to these financial institutions, and they have not returned it to the American people," said Warren. "The administration could have said, 'All right, take this and multiply it throughout the economy.' But Paulson never made that a condition of taking the money."

News of the microcosm

News of the World displays almost every feature of the business environment that robber barons, plutocrats, and teabaggers want:

• Disposable employees pitted against each other
• Almost all power and reward at the top
• No accountability at the top for anything but money
• Management by fear
• The right to be completely arbitrary, chiseling, and ruthless
• Relationships dominated by force
• Money the only value

This is what they want for all of us. No unions, no labor law, double standards for the rich, in short a return to Dickens.

Ayn Rand wouldn't have helped

This 2008 ESPN video has been coming 'round on the git-tar again:



I saw this on Facebook.  Actually, I saw a similar vidlet on something called Godvine, edited to hide its origin.  Google helped me find this version, which at least is clear about its origin.  I'd embed something from ESPN itself, but all it has is this print story.

I can see why Godvine would want to claim the story, even though none of the fine sportswomen mention God, at least on air.  It is a heartwarming story of virtue and altruism, just the sort of values that Jesus honored.  Those who aspire to godliness should want to set a social norm of generosity and helpfulness toward their fellow humans.

The radical capitalists don't live this way.  They don't put their character before their profits.  Wall Street defends its profits as deserved, even as it denies that deserving matters.  The very accrual of wealth is self-justifying to the moral midgets of the plutocratic right wing.

They'd look at the young women who helped their opponent to their own detriment as willing losers.  They'd scoff at their sacrifice, at altruism in any sense.  They'd deny even the possibility of altruism and assert that Mallory Holtman and Liz Wallace must have derived value from their act, even though they lost the chance to reach the playoffs because of it.  Of course, the selfish, Rand-inspired capitalists would also sneer at anyone so naive as to put sportsmanship above profit.  Those softball players need a good capitalist re-education camp to learn the value of having no values other than mercenary ones.

This contrast between wealth and Christianity is a tension among conservatives.  They've tried to spackle the fault line with the prosperity gospel, a totally ahistorical and patently laughable attempt to claim the divine right of wealth.  If those people are going to heaven, it's hard to see the meaning of Jesus' ministry to the poor and powerless.

In Congress and state legislatures around America, wealth is attacking anyone who is weaker.  The social consensus that this bleak greed is ugly and wrong seems to have died in our age of selfishness and bullshit.  But there may come a reckoning for the wealthy class warriors, when at last people understand that Republicans will take food from the disabled so that their kleptocrat corporate cronies can sneak a hundred more Havana cigars across the Gulf of Mexico for their smoking parties.

Another bullshit Republican crisis

We've all heard how desperately underfunded state pension funds are.  It's a scandal!  A trillion dollars those lazy, entitled, gold-plated, union leeches want out of your long-suffering, tax-paying hide!

No, actually, it's another zombie lie of the Republican Party and the Blue Dawgs (PDF), eagerly abetted by the elite media:

Most of the [$1 trillion] pension shortfall using the current methodology is attributable to the plunge in the stock market in the years 2007-2009. If pension funds had earned returns just equal to the interest rate on 30-year Treasury bonds in the three years since 2007, their assets would be more than $850 billion greater than they are today. This is by far the major cause of pension funding shortfalls. While there are certainly cases of pensions that had been underfunded even before the market plunge, prior years of under-funding is not the main reason that pensions face difficulties now. Another $80 billion of the shortfall is the result of the fact that states have cutback their contributions as a result of the downturn.

Leaving $70 billion to make up nationwide, in addition to the $80 billion in deferred contributions.

Why would conservatives get their undies in a twist about this?  It's what they do.  More to the point, though, they're opposed to all domestic expenditures with the possible exception of law enforcement.  They don't care if their public rationale to cut spending on people is a lie, only that it works.

But the most important reason is probably the plutocratic one:

[I]f pension funds stop investing in equities, as some have advocated, this would imply higher taxes and/or lower benefits for public employees. It would also mean that other investors could expect to see higher future returns on their stock holdings.

Without the pension funds chasing high rates of return in equities markets, Republican fat cats' capital will be scarcer, thus more valuable and due higher returns.  There is no better outcome for GOP politicos than to sucker a Democratic constituency at the same time it succors a Republican constituency.

(h/t the estimable Paul Krugman)

(Massachusetts, truth be told, is not very good on pension funding.  Our unfunded liability is larger than it should be.  Not a crisis, as GOP Chicken Littles would have you believe, but a debt that should be handled responsibly.)