Playing Chicken with Ideological Terrorists
As I have argued time and time again, it’s VERY difficult to win a game of chicken against someone that wants to crash. And, because the GOP’s ultimate goal – going on a century now – is to destroy the social contract and services (with their other ultimate goal to crash the economy and then blaming Obama for it), they certainly make a formidable enemy. What they are after is clear, be it eliminating unions, stripping the rights of class action suits, eliminating the minimum wage, or making college unaffordable to the masses: to turn our country into a fiefdom…with all power and wealth concentrated at the very top, with corporations playing the role of super citizens and kingmakers…with a huge, powerless, worker class…all with a heavy dose of theocracy.
Amazingly, they are succeeding in this endeavor, with no thanks to the President and a Democratic leadership that drinks out of largely the same corporate trough. To make matters worse, the President has COMPLETELY embraced the GOP “deficit/austerity” crisis frame instead of what should be a populist message focused on jobs, wealth disparity, and corporate accountability.
As I will detail later in this blog, while he SOUNDS like he’s striking a tougher stance, he’s actually arguing FOR perhaps one of the most right wing, criminal budgets in American history…and that’s whether he gets the revenue scraps he’s begging for or not.
Just to show you that I’m not the only one calling the GOP “terrorists” anymore (she calls them “ideological terrorists”), watch this excellent discussion with the Nation's Chris Hayes and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities Jared Bernstein and the Movement Vision Lab's Sally Kohn…because she nails it…negotiating with terrorists is getting us nowhere.
Or better, watch the GREAT Senator Bernie Sanders make the case to the President that the PEOPLE are behind him if he would just stand strong and not punish the middle class and the poor in order to benefit the rich.
Economic Realities and Spending Cut Insanity
With each new study, the case for more spending and increased taxes on corporations and the rich, not less, becomes greater. A report by economists at Northeastern University, found that while national income rose by $528 billion between mid-2009 and the end of 2010, 88% of that growth went to corporate profits and only 1% went to workers’ wages. What’s more, the share of income growth going to wages was far lower than in previous recoveries.
U.S. corporations had a record year in 2010. The Federal Reserve estimates that corporations are now sitting on $1.9 trillion in assets. Many corporate boards and Wall Street firms have resumed the good times of lavish executive bonuses that defined the pre-collapse years. The problem is, unemployment is hovering around 9%. And even more alarming, workers’ wages are actually going down, even as CEO bonuses skyrocket again.
A Government Accountability Office study released in 2008 found that 55 percent of United States companies paid no federal income taxes during at least one year in a seven-year period it studied. So with all that wealth in so few hands, and so much economic pain being felt by so many, one would think that in light of the 45th anniversary of the implementation of Medicare (July 1, 1966), the President and the Democrats would laugh House Republicans out of the capitol for voting almost unanimously to end the program in order to pay for tax more breaks for Big Oil, hedge fund billionaires, huge corporations, and corporate jet owners. Instead, the program is being used as a bargaining chip, and looks to be headed for some deep cuts (which is SUPPOSED TO be an untouchable program).
Here are some fast facts on Medicare…ask yourself why in the world would we be targeting it (Democrats that is):
47 MILLION…the number of Americans for whom Medicare provides comprehensive health care
51 PERCENT…the number of Americans 65 or older who did not have health care before Medicare was passed, while today virtually all elderly Americans have health care thanks to Medicare
30 PERCENT…the number of elderly Americans who lived in poverty before Medicare, a number now reduced to 7.5 PERCENT
72 PERCENT…the number of Americans in a recent poll who said that Medicare is “extremely” or “very” important to their retirement security
CEOs Get a 23 Percent Raise
But the delusion of cutting SUCCESSFUL programs right at a time people need them most in the face of an ever expanding oligarchy gets worse. As reported by the New York Times in a special report on skyrocketing CEO pay:
$10.8 MILLION…the median salary of a CEO in 2010 at 200 large companies
23 PERCENT…the increase in CEO salaries between 2009 and 2010
38 PERCENT…the increase in cash bonuses between 2009 and 2010
0.5 PERCENT…the increase in the average worker’s salary ($752 a week) during the same time period, which the New York Times dryly notes actually means a net decrease for workers once inflation is figured in.
Context and the Awful Budget “Deal”
Back to the FACTS regarding the budget the President is arguing for…because it ALREADY REPRESENTS A HUGE SELLOUT and DISASTER for the country. When Clinton was President, a corporate centrist in his own right, he bargained with the GOP to get 1 dollar of spending cuts for every 1 dollar of revenue increases. That’s a reasonable deal, even if there should be far more revenues than cuts, particularly when facing the kind of recession we are today.
Yet, to demonstrate just how DRASTICALLY far right our country has moved, the so called deal Obama is pushing for will enact $1.6 trillion in spending cuts and $400 billion in revenue increases, through closing loopholes, not increases in tax rates. That’s a 4:1 ratio of spending to revenue; some say it’s more likely to be 5:1. And this is what Republicans rejected, even though it looks substantially similar to their initial proposal on a spending to revenue ratio.
So we are left with three choices: a horrible budget being advocated by Obama, a debt ceiling crisis that could plunge us into an even deeper recession or even more concessions to the GOP…which would also be catastrophic to the lives of millions of Americans.
This is why I was so opposed to giving in to GOP extortion on the extension of the Bush tax cuts last year…they know the President and the Democrats will buckle…and, they aren’t confined by things like integrity, empathy or rationality. The sad fact is, just as Bill Clinton, a Democratic President, helped deregulate Wall Street and signed NAFTA, two landmark "conservative" end games, another corporate Democrat is about to sign off on DRASTIC cuts to the social safety net in response to a crisis caused by Wall Street, tax cuts and wars.
Let’s remember, we know what works (remember Hoover v. FDR??)…in fact, the 2009 Recovery Act saved or created as much as 3.6 million jobs so far, and in the first quarter of 2011 increased GDP by 2.3 to 3.2%. Because GDP in Q1 was only 1.9%, this means that government stimulus was the only thing between us and a recession that would still be going over three years after it began. Any reasonable analysis of that fact would say that more stimulus is needed to increase economic growth and bring down the unemployment rate.
Don’t get me wrong, the tax loopholes the White House is asking to have closed are important ones…the point is, they represent a pittance of what's needed...and we're giving up too much in return (that's if he even gets GOP support):
• Closing a corporate jet tax break: $3 billion (which is almost nothing, so that and some other tax breaks that sound bad are clearly part of a populist ploy to paint Republicans in a bad light)
• Changing carried interest so investment fund managers pay the same tax rate on their income as everyone else: $19 billion
• Ending fossil fuel subsidies for the oil and gas industry: $45 billion
• Ending the LIFO (last in/first out) accounting loophole for businesses: $60 billion
• Capping itemized deductions for individuals who make over $200,000 a year or families who make over $250,000: $290 billion
• Changing carried interest so investment fund managers pay the same tax rate on their income as everyone else: $19 billion
• Ending fossil fuel subsidies for the oil and gas industry: $45 billion
• Ending the LIFO (last in/first out) accounting loophole for businesses: $60 billion
• Capping itemized deductions for individuals who make over $200,000 a year or families who make over $250,000: $290 billion
But, in exchange there are $1 trillion in discretionary spending cuts, including $200 billion in cuts to Medicare and Medicaid. Now, you could make up that $200 billion simply by allowing Medicare to bargain for prescription drugs – or course, that’s too logical and fair, and something Obama gave away during the health care debate for pharmaceutical industry silence on the bill.
Social Security, something that doesn’t add a dime to the deficit, is also on the chopping block. One of the more insidious possibilities in a debt limit deal is the use of something called “chained CPI,” which would result in changes to how the government calculates the annual cost of living adjustment. IN other words, it would get a whole lot harder to make ends meet for future seniors, particularly if, and when, inflation starts to rise.
According to Social Security’s chief actuary, beneficiaries who retire at age 65 and receive the average benefit would get roughly $500 less in their annual benefit at age 75, and $1,000 less at age 85. The benefit cut compounds over time, as the COLA adjustment reduces every year. As this would take effect immediately, it also represents a benefit cut for current retirees.
If the president folds on basic, fundamental principles and programs like these, then he will go down as the President that signaled the beginning of the end of the New Deal and Great Society. What we need is a line in the sand: No deal without the rich and big corporations sharing in the sacrifice. No deal that takes more out of the programs for middle income and poor Americans than it takes from tax breaks, loopholes and havens for the rich and the big corporations. Stand up to the extortionists, do not accept their terms.
Nuclear Power Abomination
In addition to ALL the reasons nuclear energy is an absurd option, from the dire threat it poses to present and future human health, to the environmental challenges of containing and storing it, to the exorbitant costs to the taxpayer and the liability for disasters put completely on the public (because no investors will touch it), to the national security threat, there's also the fact that currently only 15 percent of California's electricity comes from nuclear power. So don’t buy the line about we “must have” nuclear energy, because we don’t…in fact, we can’t afford TO HAVE IT.
Current excess capacity in California greatly exceeds that nuclear contribution (in realm of 40 percent excess). Within a matter of weeks during the state's energy crisis, rather mild efforts by Gov. Davis brought down state consumption of electricity by upwards of 10 percent. In other words, conservation/efficiency alone could fill the gap - easily (in addition to an acceleration of renewable sources of energy through increased investment).
The question isn't whether we could shut these California plants down, or whether its eminently logical and responsible (obviously it is), its whether there's the political will to overcome both public ignorance and the nuclear energy lobby (and for that matter, the fossil fuels lobby too). The fact is, our nuclear plants are old and dangerous, and new plants can take decades to get online. Add to that all the carbon that IS BURNED in the building of the plants, the storing and transporting of the toxic waste, its not even "clean" like advertised by those that want to convince people that legitimately care about climate change.
Watch Maddow detail the multipronged, weather related nuclear crises we’re fighting across the United States (and of course Japan)…truly disturbing…this should end any and all debate over whether nuclear power is a smart investment or source of future energy...every dollar we are spending on these plants should be going to clean energy and technologies.
Let’s also contrast what other countries are doing in reaction to the latest catastrophes exposing just how dangerous these plants are…esp. in the days of extreme weather…Germany, at the end of last month, is instituting a COMPLETE reversal of policy — moving to shut down nuclear power instead of trying to expand it. The decision to immediately close eight German nuclear power plants and shut the rest by 2022 came in a country that had been getting 23 percent of its electricity from nukes. A host of other countries, including Japan, are now also realizing the folly of "nuclear safety" delusions.
Harvey Wasserman provides some more details about the astonishing challenges nuclear plants are posing around the world right now:
Fukushima: The bad news continues to bleed from Japan with no end in sight. The “light at the end of the tunnel” is an out-of-control radioactive freight train, headed to the core of an endangered planet. Widespread internal radioactive contamination among Japanese citizens around Fukushima has now been confirmed. Two whales caught some 650 kilometers from the melting reactors have shown intense radiation. Plutonium, the deadliest substance known to our species, has been found dangerously far from the site.
SNIP
Los Alamos: A massive wildfire has swept at least to the outskirts of the national laboratory that was at the core of the program that built the Atomic Bomb. The first explosion irradiated a nearby valley on July 16, 1945. Then came the two that obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There are significant quantities of stored radioactive material in and around Los Alamos. How much there is, where it is, how badly it is threatened, how much (if any) has already been engulfed in flames remains to be seen. Evacuations are underway.
SNIP
Vermont Yankee: Entergy, owner of the one reactor in Vermont, has sued to shred a solemn public contract. The one thing certain here is the company’s contempt for the sanctity of its own word. Years ago Entergy sought official permits at VY. It promised in return that the state could choose to shut the reactor on March 21, 2012, which it’s now done. In recent years VY has spewed tritium into groundwater and the Connecticut River, in some cases from underground pipes whose existence the company denied. A cooling tower has collapsed.
SNIP
Nebraska: The flooding Missouri River continues to threaten at least two heartland reactors. Late reports indicate Cooper may still be running, with public assurances it could be shut very quickly. What might happen if the operators are a little bit late has not been explained.Nor is there much to go on about the impacts of flooded cores and fuel cooling ponds on the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers or the eco-systems along the way to a Gulf of Mexico still reeling from BP’s toxic dose.
SNIP
Populations have vastly increased at virtually all US reactor sites since TMI. And the ugly realities that define the so-called “Peaceful Atom” are still making themselves all too apparent.
Whether the US will now turn with Germany, Japan, Italy, Switzerland, Israel and others away from atomic power and toward a green-powered Earth is up to us. The Solartopian technologies of wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, ocean thermal, bio-fuels, increased efficiency and conservation are now demonstrably cheaper, safer, cleaner, more reliable, more job-producing and quicker to install than anything atomic energy can promise. A $36 billion loan guarantee give-away still mars the proposed 2012 federal budget. Constant pressure on Congress and the White House can kill that, and any other proposed funding for still more of these nightmares.
The stream of reactor disasters spewing from this dying industry is certain to escalate. The toll rises with each leak at Fukushima, every flame at Los Alamos, each legal brief at Vermont Yankee, every foot of Nebraska floodwater. The need to stop the madness grows more desperate every day.
As Norman Solomon recently noted, “Such inherent dangers are all too close to home here in California, where the state's two nuclear power plants — Diablo Canyon at San Luis Obispo and San Onofre farther south — are both located on major earthquake faults along the coast. The overall record of Diablo Canyon's owner and operator — PG&E — hardly inspires confidence. And recent events in Japan showed that official assurances can become worthless after a big quake and tsunami.
Continuing radioactive leaks from Fukushima are extensive and multifaceted. The authoritative journal Nature reported in late May that "some scientists are simply floating the idea of turning Fukushima into a nuclear graveyard" — but "given the plant's location on the coast, storing the waste there for millennia may be unrealistic."
As Karl Grossman writes, “for many years, the [nuclear] industry vigorously defended the nuclear power program as being essentialy risk-free. Nuclear power was claimed to be perfectly safe. It was said that no serious accidents would ever happen...Such a position was of course necessary to promote the acceptance of nuclear power by the general public. It has not been until just recently that the proponents of nuclear energy have admitted that accidents can and will happen, and the public should prepare itself for such eventualities.”
...
That cannot be. Nuclear power can never be 100 percent safe. And it must be. That is why it should not be. And, instead, we must get rid of it and fully implement the clean, renewable technologies such as solar, wind and others now available which can provide, as major studies in the last several years have shown, all the energy we need and are safe.
Add to ALL THAT, the safety record at San Onofre is abysmal - five spills of sulfuric acid and other toxic chemicals in just over two years. And now a new report finds that San Onofre is among at least 48 of 65 American nuclear power plants to have leaked radioactive tritium. In the case of San Onofre, the radioactive form of hydrogen leaked into the local groundwater in 2006 and again showed up in the ocean water just off the coast from the facility in 2009.
VIDEO SECTION
Olbermann’s Worst Persons…
Chris Hayes (who’s awesome!) on the media’s disgusting coverage of the Casey Anthony Trial:
ABC's Jimmy Kimmel shows a mock historical documentary by presidential candidate Michele Bachmann…good stuff…
A good Democracy Now piece on the disastrous austerity measures being pursued in Greece (which are all about appeasing bankers NOT helping countries), and how instructive they are for America…but of course, we are following the austerity route too…
A FEW CLIPS:
What haunts the Obama administration is what still haunts the country: the stunning lack of accountability for the greed and misdeeds that brought America to its gravest financial crisis since the Great Depression. There has been no legal, moral, or financial reckoning for the most powerful wrongdoers. Nor have there been meaningful reforms that might prevent a repeat catastrophe. Time may heal most wounds, but not these. Chronic unemployment remains a constant, painful reminder of the havoc inflicted on the bust’s innocent victims. As the ghost of Hamlet’s father might have it, America will be stalked by its foul and unresolved crimes until they “are burnt and purged away.”
SNIP
Those in executive suites at the top of that chain have long since fled the scene with the proceeds, while bleeding shareholders, investors, homeowners, and cashiered employees were left with the bills. The weak Dodd-Frank financial-reform law that rose from the ruins remains largely inoperative, since the actual rule-writing was delegated to understaffed agencies now under siege by banking lobbyists and their well-greased congressional overlords. The administration’s much-hyped Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is being sabotaged by Washington Republicans intent on blocking any White House nominee, whether Elizabeth Warren or some malleable hack, to lead it. “We can’t let special interests win this fight,” said Obama when he proposed the agency in October 2009. Well, he missed his moment to fight for both it and Warren, and the special interests won without breaking a sweat.
Rather than purge the crash’s crimes, Wall Street’s leaders are sticking to their alibi: Everyone was guilty of fomenting this “perfect storm,” and so no one is. Too-big-to-fail banks are bigger than ever, and Masters of the Universe swagger is back. Even Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, about the only bank chief not to be caught with a suspect balance sheet or a $1,400 office trash can, has taken to channeling Schwarzman. In June, he publicly challenged Ben Bernanke about the intolerable burdens of potential regulation—this despite a 67 percent surge in JPMorgan’s first-quarter profits and a 1,500 percent raise in his own compensation from 2009 to 2010. As good times roar back for corporate America, it’s bad enough that CEOs are collectively sitting on some $1.9 trillion in cash—much of it parked out of the IRS’s reach overseas—instead of hiring. (How many jobs can you buy for $1.9 trillion? America’s total expenditure on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars over a decade has been $1.3 trillion.) But what’s most galling is how many of these executives are sore winners, crying all the way to Palm Beach while raking in record profits and paying some of the lowest tax rates over the past 50 years.
Rather than purge the crash’s crimes, Wall Street’s leaders are sticking to their alibi: Everyone was guilty of fomenting this “perfect storm,” and so no one is. Too-big-to-fail banks are bigger than ever, and Masters of the Universe swagger is back. Even Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, about the only bank chief not to be caught with a suspect balance sheet or a $1,400 office trash can, has taken to channeling Schwarzman. In June, he publicly challenged Ben Bernanke about the intolerable burdens of potential regulation—this despite a 67 percent surge in JPMorgan’s first-quarter profits and a 1,500 percent raise in his own compensation from 2009 to 2010. As good times roar back for corporate America, it’s bad enough that CEOs are collectively sitting on some $1.9 trillion in cash—much of it parked out of the IRS’s reach overseas—instead of hiring. (How many jobs can you buy for $1.9 trillion? America’s total expenditure on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars over a decade has been $1.3 trillion.) But what’s most galling is how many of these executives are sore winners, crying all the way to Palm Beach while raking in record profits and paying some of the lowest tax rates over the past 50 years.
SNIP
Obama soon retreated into the tea-party mantra of fiscal austerity. Short-term spending cuts when spending is needed to create jobs make no sense economically. But they also make no sense politically. The deficit has never been a top voter priority, no matter how loudly the right claims it is. At Obama’s inaugural, Gallup found that 11 percent of voters ranked unemployment as their top priority while only 2 percent did the deficit. Unemployment has remained a stable public priority over the deficit ever since, usually by at least a 2-to-1 ratio. In a CBS poll immediately after the Democrats’ “shellacking” of last November—a debacle supposedly precipitated by the tea party’s debt jihad—the question “What should Congress concentrate on in January?” yielded 56 percent for “economy/jobs” and 4 percent for “deficit reduction.”
Geithner has pushed deficit reduction as a priority since before the inauguration, the Washington Post recently reported in an article greeted as a smoking gun by liberal bloggers. But Obama is the chief executive. It’s his fault, no one else’s, that he seems diffident about the unemployed. Each time there’s a jolt in the jobless numbers, he and his surrogates compound that profile by farcically reshuffling the same clichés, from “stuck in a ditch” to “headwinds” (first used by Geithner in March 2009—retire it already!) to “bumps in the road.” It’s true the administration has caught few breaks and the headwinds have been strong, but voters have long since tuned out this monotonous apologia. The White House’s repeated argument that the stimulus saved as many as 3 million jobs, accurate though it may be, is another nonstarter when 14 million Americans are looking for work.
Torture Crimes Officially, Permanently Shielded, by Glenn Greenwald
A FEW CLIPS:
In August, 2009, Attorney General Eric Holder -- under continuous, aggressive prodding by the Obama White House -- announced that three categories of individuals responsible for Bush-era torture crimes would be fully immunized from any form of criminal investigation and prosecution: (1) Bush officials who ordered the torture (Bush, Cheney, Rice, Powell, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld); (2) Bush lawyers who legally approved it (Yoo, Bybee, Levin), and (3) those in the CIA and the military who tortured within the confines of the permission slips they were given by those officials and lawyers (i.e., "good-faith" torturers). The one exception to this sweeping immunity was that low-level CIA agents and servicemembers who went so far beyond the torture permission slips as to basically commit brutal, unauthorized murder would be subject to a "preliminary review" to determine if a full investigation was warranted -- in other words, the Abu Ghraib model of justice was being applied, where only low-ranking scapegoats would be subject to possible punishment while high-level officials would be protected.
Yesterday, it was announced that this "preliminary review" by the prosecutor assigned to conduct it, U.S. Attorney John Durham, is now complete, and -- exactly as one would expect -- even this category of criminals has been almost entirely protected, meaning a total legal whitewash for the Bush torture regime...
SNIP
Thanks to the Obama DOJ, that is no longer in question. The answer is resoundingly clear: American war criminals, responsible for some of the most shameful and inexcusable crimes in the nation's history -- the systematic, deliberate legalization of a worldwide torture regime -- will be fully immunized for those crimes. And, of course, the Obama administration has spent years just as aggressively shielding those war criminals from all other forms of accountability beyond the criminal realm: invoking secrecy and immunity doctrines to prevent their victims from imposing civil liability, exploiting their party's control of Congress to suppress formal inquiries, and pressuring and coercing other nations not to investigate their own citizens' torture at American hands.
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