‘Let Them Eat Cheesecake’
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On Wall Street this morning protests continue as a now-major force in the news cycle, making folks pay attention to one of the great scams of world history.
And today is for the future — Kids Speak Out Day — as the swelling demonstrations starts its 24th outing to put the spotlight on the horrors of modern finance, and the most-incredible income disparity amongst civilized peoples.
(Illustration found here).
These protests, which have now spread across the county — Occupy Denver, Occupy San Francisco, and points in between — started off just about in the dark as the media (lovers of high finance) decided to black the demonstrations out until they grew to such a size they were hard to cover up.
The movement’s motto: “We are the 99 percent that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1 percent.”
A take on the enormous financial gulf between rich and poor and the arrogance it embraces.
Do the math:
In the United States, wealth is highly concentrated in a relatively few hands.
As of 2007, the top 1 percent of households (the upper class) owned 34.6 percent of all privately held wealth, and the next 19 percent (the managerial, professional, and small business stratum) had 50.5 percent, which means that just 20 percent of the people owned a remarkable 85 percent, leaving only 15 percent of the wealth for the bottom 80 percent (wage and salary workers).
In terms of financial wealth (total net worth minus the value of one’s home), the top 1 percent of households had an even greater share: 42.7 percent.
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Edward Wolff, the economist we draw upon the most in this document, concludes that there has been an “astounding” 36.1 percent drop in the wealth (marketable assets) of the median household since the peak of the housing bubble in 2007.
By contrast, the wealth of the top 1 percent of households dropped by far less: just 11.1 percent.
So as of April 2010, it looks like the wealth distribution is even more unequal than it was in 2007.
And to make matters worse, US household incomes declined more in the two years after the recession ended than it did during the recession itself.
There’s no winning, so hence people are in the streets.
Anyone with any moral, financial sense knows the problem — even Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke, from the very bowels of one those protest points, does indeed have a clue.
Last week, during a congressional hearing, Bernanke let it slip out:
“Like everyone else, I’m dissatisfied with what the economy’s doing right now.
They blame, with some justification, the problems in the financial sector for getting us into this mess, and they’re dissatisfied with the policy response here in Washington.
And at some level, I can’t blame them.”
You know what level, Ben, don’t be shitting us.
After the crowds swelled, and some innocent-looking, pretty young girls were pepper sprayed by a nutcase New York cop, the movement gained the lede on network nightly news and people started commenting on the situation — Michael Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, Penn Badgley, among a host other big names threw in their support.
One such voice (via the modern mode of protests/revolutions): Yoko Ono voiced her support on Twitter: “I love #OccupyWallStreet. As John said, ‘One hero cannot do it. Each one of us have to be heroes.’ And you are. Thank you.”
The movement is moving right along.
However…
Those with their nose up the ass of Wall Street have come out slinging nasty.
One of the great jerks/assholes of our time, Republican Rep. Peter King lashed out not only at those Wall Street protestors, but at US history, and in doing so, defined the fear of the rich:
“It’s really important for us not to give any legitimacy to these people in the streets,” said King on Laura Ingraham’s radio show Friday evening.
“I remember what happened in the 1960s when the left-wing took to the streets and somehow the media glorified them and it ended up shaping policy.
We can’t allow that to happen.”
And pure nit-twit Paul Ryan: “I think this divisive rhetoric is fairly–is divisive. I think it’s troubling. Sowing class envy and social unrest is not what we do in America.”
Paul, Paul, Paul — oh, such hypocrisy, such tripe from someone who has been doing that sort of thing for nearly three years now.
Paul Krugman in his column this morning in the New York Times takes to task all those clowns and discovers these people are scared shitless.
Some bits:
And this reaction tells you something important — namely, that the extremists threatening American values are what F.D.R. called “economic royalists,” not the people camping in Zuccotti Park.
Consider first how Republican politicians have portrayed the modest-sized if growing demonstrations, which have involved some confrontations with the police — confrontations that seem to have involved a lot of police overreaction — but nothing one could call a riot.
And there has in fact been nothing so far to match the behavior of Tea Party crowds in the summer of 2009.
Nonetheless, Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, has denounced “mobs” and “the pitting of Americans against Americans.”
The G.O.P. presidential candidates have weighed in, with Mitt Romney accusing the protesters of waging “class warfare,” while Herman Cain calls them “anti-American.”
My favorite, however, is Senator Rand Paul, who for some reason worries that the protesters will start seizing iPads, because they believe rich people don’t deserve to have them.
Michael Bloomberg, New York’s mayor and a financial-industry titan in his own right, was a bit more moderate, but still accused the protesters of trying to “take the jobs away from people working in this city,” a statement that bears no resemblance to the movement’s actual goals.
And if you were listening to talking heads on CNBC, you learned that the protesters “let their freak flags fly,” and are “aligned with Lenin.”
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What’s going on here?
The answer, surely, is that Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe realize, deep down, how morally indefensible their position is.
They’re not John Galt; they’re not even Steve Jobs.
They’re people who got rich by peddling complex financial schemes that, far from delivering clear benefits to the American people, helped push us into a crisis whose aftereffects continue to blight the lives of tens of millions of their fellow citizens.
Yet they have paid no price…
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This special treatment can’t bear close scrutiny — and therefore, as they see it, there must be no close scrutiny.
Anyone who points out the obvious, no matter how calmly and moderately, must be demonized and driven from the stage.
In fact, the more reasonable and moderate a critic sounds, the more urgently he or she must be demonized, hence the frantic sliming of Elizabeth Warren.
So who’s really being un-American here?
Not the protesters, who are simply trying to get their voices heard.
No, the real extremists here are America’s oligarchs, who want to suppress any criticism of the sources of their wealth.
Hear, hear — and as I’ve said it before, those 99 percenters are 100 percent correct.
Horrifying CWM — ‘The calls are coming from inside the House’
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One standing cliche of horror movies is the old trope of the menaced babysitter being scared out of her most-beautiful wits by a killer via telephone calls, which as turns out, are being made “from inside the house.”
The just concluded debt ceiling slasher/torture porn production in DC conjures up that same bromide as the killers are not from some far land, or calling from a telephone booth miles away, but instead are deeply-breathing with big, scary knifes right inside the house — except in this case, they’re not hidden away or in closets, but right smack in our most-beautiful collective faces.
Screaming hysterically, though, won’t help at all.
(Illustration found here).
Years ago, I was endowed with Maureen Dowd of the New York Times — back in her W days — and even kind of hot a decade ago.
Lately, however, she’s been through too much fluff.
In her column yesterday, though, she compared the debt ceiling fiasco with slasher/horror movies and has some decent/humorous words on the subject.
A couple of snips:
Most of the audience staggered away from this slasher flick still shuddering.
We continue to be paranoid, gripped by fear of the unknown, shocked by our own helplessness, stunned by how swiftly one world can turn into a darker one where everything can seem familiar yet foreign.
“Rosemary’s Tea Party,” an online commenter called it.
If the scariest thing in the world is something you can’t understand, then Americans are scared out of their minds about what is happening in America.
…
Tea Party budget-slashers didn’t sport the black capes with blood-red lining beloved by the campy Vincent Price or wield the tinglers deployed by William Castle.
But in their feral attack on Washington, in their talent for raising goose bumps from Wall Street to Westminster, this strange, compelling and uncompromising new force epitomized “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” and evoked comparisons to our most mythic creatures of the night.
They were like cannibals, eating their own party and leaders alive.
They were like vampires, draining the country’s reputation, credit rating and compassion.
They were like zombies, relentlessly and mindlessly coming back again and again to assault their unnerved victims, Boehner and President Obama.
They were like the metallic beasts in “Alien” flashing mouths of teeth inside other mouths of teeth, bursting out of Boehner’s stomach every time he came to a bouquet of microphones.
(Conjuring that last image on Monday, Vladimir Putin described America as “a parasite.”)
Yes, indeed.
The Tea Party peoples really have no understanding beyond touch, taste, feel and then kill.
And one must also remember the Tea Party is made up of CWM — Conservative White Men (and Women).
Not another color among them — all white.
And these guys/gals are not only destroying a country’s government, but also are intent on allowing the entire planet to be destroyed.
CWM are the prime climate change deniers.
From DeSmogBlog and a new study of this repugnant phenomenon.
First, the stats:
– 14 percent of the general public doesn’t worry about climate change at all, but among CWMs the percentage jumps to 39 percent.
— 32 percent of adults deny there is a scientific consensus on climate change, but 59 percent of CWMs deny what the overwhelming majority of the world’s scientists have said.
— 3 adults in 10 don’t believe recent global temperature increases are primarily caused by human activity. Twice that many — 6 CWMs out of every ten – feel that way.
And why:
Motivated reasoning suggests that men who have “hierarchical” values—resisting reforms to increase economic or social equality, believing that some people should be running things and some should be taking orders, or that it’s perfectly okay and normal that some will succeed and some will fail—will be more inclined defend a social system that’s structured in this way.
Such a tendency has been used in the past to explain the “white male effect”: White men tend to downplay all manner of risks, especially environmental ones, but also risks posed by things like the vast proliferation of guns in America.
This, presumably, is both because they’re less harmed by such risks overall (the burden often falls more on the disadvantaged), but also because they have trouble personally conceiving of the reality of these risks (they don’t see the current state of things as being very bad or objectionable).
But why do men downplay climate risks in particular? Here’s where “system justification” theory comes in: If climate change is real and human caused, it potentially threatens the whole economic order and those who have built it and benefited from it.
It is the most inconvenient of truths.
So the idea is that the men who benefit from the fossil-fuel based energy system will rationalize and defend that system from challenge—and the science of climate change is, in some ways, the ultimate challenge. (More on this here.)
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Honestly, while we’re cranking out all these theories, I am surprised the authors didn’t bring up what may be the most biologically grounded of them: “social dominance orientation,” or SDO.
This refers to a particular personality type— — usually male and right wing — who wants to dominate others, who sees the world as a harsh place (metaphorically, a “jungle”) where it’s either eat or be eaten, and who tends to really believe in a Machiavellian way of things.
Fundamentally, this identity is all about testosterone firing and being an alpha male.
SDOs are fine with inequality and in favor of hierarchy because frankly, they think some people (e.g., them) are just better than others, and therefore destined to get ahead.
So here we are trapped in a big, rambling house with a crazed CWM toting a huge, ugly axe, seeking to slash our beautiful collective throats, and then rolling us up into a giant loose-leaf tea bag.
And hollering like a wounded banshee won’t help — In the dark no one can hear you scream.
Ceiling Wax
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Despite that most-heralded, most-joyous news from President Obama last night on a debt ceiling compromise deal, US peoples shouldn’t be so happy, in fact, they should have an attack of great financial fright.
Obama helped create a monster even in the eyes of his own: “This deal does not even attempt to strike a balance between more cuts for the working people of America and a fairer contribution from millionaires and corporations,” Representative Raul Grijalva, the Arizona Democrat who leads the Progressive Caucus, said in a statement. “I will not be a part of it.”
In reality, the US peoples shouldn’t be a part of it, either.
(Illustration found here).
Obama seemed to reflect the bigwigs of the Democratic Party — spineless.
According to the LA Times, the proposed $900 billion debt-ceiling increase deal would raise the debt roof through the end of 2012 with spending cuts coming in two stages; first, more than $900 billion in domestic cuts will be made across the federal government over the next 10 years, the big chunk coming later, and relatively small cuts this year and next.
In the second stage, a bipartisan congressional committee would be established to recommend by late November $1.5 trillion in further cuts.
And one must remember — no tax hikes, no new revenue sources, just all cuts.
Biggest debt doubt came from Obama’s own party.
From the New York Times:
“Americans will not stand for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefit cuts–not now, and not six months from now,” said Justin Ruben, Executive Director of MoveOn.org.
“We can not and should not ask seniors and the middle class to bear the burden of the debt deal.”
Stephanie Taylor, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, said in a statement that “seeing a Democratic president take taxing the rich off the table and instead set the stage for cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid benefits is like entering a bizarre parallel universe — one with horrific consequences for middle-class families.”
Hard to imagine this is the same Obama guy from 2008.
Democrats originally wanted no strings attached to a debt limit increase that would enable the country pay its bills and insisted if deficit reduction was going to be linked to the debt limit, then closing loopholes and raising taxes on the rich had to be part of the deal — they lost both.
And House Republicans managed to pull the entire deal further and further to the right, even inserting a requirement into the agreement for a vote on a balanced budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Losers.
Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.), the leader of the Congressional Black Caucus, called the debt deal a “sugar-coated Satan sandwich,” and added this at the end of the day: “If I were a Republican, I would be dancing in the streets,” he said. “I don’t have any idea what the Republicans wanted that they didn’t get. And I can’t tell you anything that Democrats got out of this deal, except that we’re probably going to prevent the nation from crashing.”
The problem in the long run is no one is going to care about that last item.
A disaster halting a disaster, via piss-poor politics: Obama “let the momentum die,” said David Gergen, director of Harvard University’s Center for Public Leadership in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and an adviser to Presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton. “There’s shared blame. Everybody’s fingerprints are on this mess. This will be a case study one day for college students on failed politics.”
In the long term, however, it’s the ordinary guy on the street that will really, really suffer.
The burden has been firmly placed on the shoulders of the middle class and the poor and anybody who’s not a Republican.
Paul Krugman, who’s been more right than wrong on this ‘Great Recession‘ bullshit, chimed in this morning that Obama blew it big time:
For the deal itself, given the available information, is a disaster, and not just for President Obama and his party.
It will damage an already depressed economy; it will probably make America’s long-run deficit problem worse, not better; and most important, by demonstrating that raw extortion works and carries no political cost, it will take America a long way down the road to banana-republic status.
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In fact, Republicans will surely be emboldened by the way Mr. Obama keeps folding in the face of their threats.
He surrendered last December, extending all the Bush tax cuts; he surrendered in the spring when they threatened to shut down the government; and he has now surrendered on a grand scale to raw extortion over the debt ceiling.
Maybe it’s just me, but I see a pattern here.
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Make no mistake about it, what we’re witnessing here is a catastrophe on multiple levels.
It is, of course, a political catastrophe for Democrats, who just a few weeks ago seemed to have Republicans on the run over their plan to dismantle Medicare; now Mr. Obama has thrown all that away.
And the damage isn’t over: there will be more choke points where Republicans can threaten to create a crisis unless the president surrenders, and they can now act with the confident expectation that he will.
In the long run, however, Democrats won’t be the only losers.
What Republicans have just gotten away with calls our whole system of government into question.
After all, how can American democracy work if whichever party is most prepared to be ruthless, to threaten the nation’s economic security, gets to dictate policy?
And the answer is, maybe it can’t.
Ross Douthat, also at the NYT, wrote yesterday the bottom line to the whole horrible mess: First, that we’re living through yet another failed presidency. And second, that there’s nobody waiting in the wings who’s up to the task either.
And US peoples will start to dance on the ceiling.
USA — RIP
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“It is an unfortunate human failing that a full pocketbook often groans more loudly than an empty stomach.”
– Franklin Delano Roosevelt
(Illustration found here).
Early Sunday and deep, wet fog here on California’s north coast, but unlike a lot of other shit going on right now, my natural environment will get better, much better: The fog will burn off in a couple of hours revealing a sunshine-bright environment — even our Alaska-bred wind, usually twirling up cold and sharp in the afternoon, has been the last few days most agreeable, friendly and warm.
A nice, possibly-good day coming.
Not so for a whole-lot of other stuff.
Especially for this most-ridiculous, but yet apparently most-Titanic-the-ship situation in US financial history, the debt ceiling.
Despite what’s been considered a near-mundane point of economic government — this same item done some 78 times since 1960 (49 times under Republican presidents), President Obama himself has already raised the debt ceiling three times, the last in February 2010, and absolutely no nasty shit-storm about none of it.
This time, however, there’s the insanely-strong influence off people-full-of shit — the so-called Tea Party.
From The Australian posted online down yonder, where right now it’s already tomorrow:
With Barack Obama facing the greatest crisis of his presidency, the Republican Party torn asunder and the US on the verge of its first default, a small group of novice congressmen was celebrating a stunning political coup at the weekend.
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What most of the world sees as a deadlock and a crisis, the Tea Party sees as victory, its members having done exactly what they had said they would do when they were voted in at the mid-term elections.
“Last November I told my constituents (in Minnesota) that I’m a numbers guy,” explained Republican congressman Chip Cravaack, after voting against his own party’s bill on Friday night.
“I gave them my promise that if the numbers don’t add up, I’m not voting for it.”
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Since then, they have become increasingly unco-operative, leading some to refer to them as the “Tea Party Taliban”. Over the past few days they have left the leadership of both parties reeling at their readiness to play brinkmanship with the country’s credit rating.
“There’s an old JFK line: those who ride the back of the tiger often end up inside it,” said veteran Democratic strategist Bob Shrum.
“What we’re seeing is one-fifth of the House of Representatives trying to run the country.
It’s a constitutional coup d’etat.”
Mark Meckler, national co-ordinator for the Tea Party Patriots, hailed their action as a success. “The Tea Party is already victorious,” Meckler said.
“What we were looking to do was change the terms of national debate and we’ve completely changed it.”
Yeah right.
Along with all that bullshit, stir in the long-time creep, conservative strategist Grover Norquist and his half-crazed tax pledges, and you’ve got a recipe of pure disaster not yet seen by US peoples, who are in for a bad-ass, shit-kicking, slap-in-the-face.
One thing for sure: We as a peoples are wading around in a living, breathing train wreck.
A poll from CNN last week found that not only do 84 percent of Americans feel the economy is bad, a majority 59 percent are gloomy about the country’s economic future: “That’s a very significant, and very discouraging change in public attitudes toward the economy,” CNN Polling Director Keating Holland said. “It’s unclear what caused this newfound pessimism. The length of the current economic downturn and concerns over the chances that the debt ceiling will go unresolved are probably contributing factors.”
And since then, the whole DC/economic scenario has gotten worse.
Just on Friday, a report the US is not only not gaining any recovery traction, the whole ‘Great Recession‘ shebang was/is more severe that first thought: To adopt the president’s favorite metaphor of the ditch and the driver: The ditch was a 33 percent deeper than we thought. And we’re driving 33 percent slower than we hoped.
Sweet.
Paul Krugman waxing on the terrible ‘no light at the end of this tunnel‘ routine this morning on ABC News (via Raw Story):
“From the perspective of a rational person, we shouldn’t even be talking about spending cuts at all now,” Krugman told ABC’s Christiane Amanpour.
“We have nine percent unemployment.
These spending cuts are going to worsen unemployment… If you have a situation in which you are permanently going to raise the unemployment rate — which is what this is going to do — that’s actually going to reduce future revenues.”
“These spending cuts are even going to hurt the long-run fiscal position, let alone cause lots of misery. Then on top of that, we’ve got these budget cuts, which are entirely — basically the Republicans [saying], ‘We’ll blow up the world economy unless you give us exactly what you want’ and the president said, ‘Okay.’ That’s what happened.”
“We used to talk about the Japanese and their lost decade.
We’re going to look to them as a role model.
They did better than we’re doing,” he added.
“There is no light at the end of this tunnel.
We’re having a debate in Washington which is all about, ‘Gee, we’re going to make this economy worse, but are we going to make it worse on 90 percent the Republicans’ terms or 100 percent the Republicans’ terms?’ The answer is 100 percent.”
And real reality of this debt ceiling drama is it created an open showcase for US peoples to witness the screwed-up mess of government as it strangles itself and dies.
Truss the Trust
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As the financial clock ticks away on this Friday morn, the political platoons playing pitter-pat in DC and losing the hope of US peoples in our current form of government — if you want to call what’s happening now as government.
Why and how were these assholes elected?
(Illustration found here).
As John ‘The Boner” Boehner’s great and daring debt ceiling plan collapsed late Thursday, the whole process stinks of pure stupid — even upchucking, clueless mush-faced Mitch McConnell blubbering and whinning that “Democrats are playing with fire here. It’s hard to conclude that they’re doing it for any other reason than politics,” he said.
Talk about a double dose of double-standard bullshit — a butt-hole calling the ass an asshole!
From Time magazine’s Joe Klein:
Let us not put too fine a point on it: Thursday’s House vote on Speaker John Boehner’s debt ceiling proposal is a joke.
If it passes the House, Harry Reid has said it is dead on arrival in the Senate.
If it somehow passes the Senate, which it won’t, President Obama will veto it.
It is, therefore, a symbolic act that is wasting precious time.
It follows last week’s Republican theatrics, the passage of the Cut and Demolish Act (or whatever they called it), which also was a waste of time.
These are the actions of a party that has completely lost track of reality — and of a leader, John Boehner, who has lost the support of his party.
Reality pretty-much in a nutshell.
And US peoples are also pretty-much fed up with all this.
After President Obama asked for citizens to call Congress earlier this week, they responded: A spokesman for the office of the chief administrative officer said that at the peak, House offices received a combined 40,000 calls in an hour — twice the typical volume. Some callers got a busy signal, but the number was not significant, spokesman Dan Weiser said.
The entire situation is a shame — and no matter what the outcome this self-created crisis will vibrate the stock market, overseas economies and the average Joe on a US street way on down the financial road of ruin.
This debt limit showcase has been around since 1917 and has had its share of political fights over the years, but nothing like this go-around.
President Dwight Eisenhower was the first to encounter trouble with the ceiling — in July 1953, Ike asked the Republican-controlled Congress to raise the debt limit from $275 billion to $290 billion, but it took a year and the bottom line was lower than Eisenhower asked.
In 1995, a big blow-out let the government shut down, but time moved on.
However, there’s nothing like this particular episode:
Yet in one sense the latest showdown is different from all the others.
The gulf between the White House and Congress is wider than ever — not only because of a huge ideological chasm but also because the nation’s debt is growing so dangerously fast.
It’s now set to top $14.3 trillion.
“I’d say this is the worst debt-ceiling crisis in U.S. history because it is linked to the most serious fiscal crisis since the Civil War, and the debt ceiling is, of course, a 20th-century concoction,” said economist historian Robert Wright of Augustana College in South Dakota.
Trust in government is about shot.
And it’s this economics of trust that keeps the US afloat and operating, though, and this debt ceiling madness doesn’t really help the public gain this trust at all.
A study of trust, however, reveals there’s self-centered greed involved.
From Wired magazine:
Instead, I think the current breakdown in Washington highlights the fragility of a human capability we’ve long taken for granted: trust.
While economists have begun focusing on trust as a crucial factor in economic development — a country without trust can’t build the institutions that make growth possible — trust is also an essential component of effective politics.
Democracies, after all, depend on compromise. And compromise requires trust.
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The moral is that trust is ultimately about the expectation of rewards.
We see trust as such a noble trait, but it’s ultimately rooted in a greedy calculation, emanating from our primal dopaminergic circuitry.
In other words, we don’t trust people because they seem nice or virtuous or trustworthy, whatever those adjectives mean.
We trust them because they get us the good stuff, delivering what Montague refers to as the “social juice” of reciprocity.
When we say we trust someone, what we’re really saying is that they’re a reliable source of what we want. I scratch your back, you scratch mine.
And this returns us to the present dysfunction in Washington.
If trust is about the distribution of rewards — about learning to expect bonuses from others — then it’s going to be a lot harder to share those rewards in an age of scarcity and deficits.
For the first time in decades, congresspeople aren’t trading pork barrel projects and tax breaks — they’re negotiating steep budget cuts.
Those cuts might be necessary, but they’re aren’t going to excite the caudate or generate that requisite burst of “social juice.”
The traditional means of developing trust among Congresspeople have disappeared.
And how this effects the future (and the 2012 elections) will have to be seen, but I can tell you, I wouldn’t trust The Boner as far as I could throw him, which ain’t far.
Trust is for puppies.