Mission (Almost) Accomplished

And no, it's not about the endiing of George W. Bush's My Dick Is Bigger Than Daddy's war in Iraq.

It's about the deliberate and systematic demolition of the American middle class.

They aren't quite there yet, but there is definitely significant progress:

Squeezed by rising living costs, a record number of Americans — nearly 1 in 2 — have fallen into poverty or are scraping by on earnings that classify them as low income.

The latest census data depict a middle class that's shrinking as unemployment stays high and the government's safety net frays. The new numbers follow years of stagnating wages for the middle class that have hurt millions of workers and families.

"Safety net programs such as food stamps and tax credits kept poverty from rising even higher in 2010, but for many low-income families with work-related and medical expenses, they are considered too 'rich' to qualify," said Sheldon Danziger, a University of Michigan public policy professor who specializes in poverty.

"The reality is that prospects for the poor and the near poor are dismal," he said. "If Congress and the states make further cuts, we can expect the number of poor and low-income families to rise for the next several years."

But don't worry. I'm sure a Kardashian is up to something, and there's a woman in a hijab at the Publix to worry about, and gee that Newt Gingrich sounds like a smart fella and he's from the south so I know we can trust him. And after all, the Rapture is coming and we good God-fearin' folk won't have to worry about poverty anyway, so let's just keep on keepin' on. And oh yeah, those dirty hippies protesting should just STFU.

Because poverty can't happen to those who love Jesus, right?

So what on earth makes anyone think that more tax cuts will cause the executives of these companies to "create jobs"?

This is what companies do when they have large cash reserves (NYT link):

at a time when the nation is looking for ways to battle unemployment, big companies are creating fewer jobs, and critics say they are neglecting to lay the foundation for future growth by expanding into new businesses or building new plants.

What is more, share buybacks have not fulfilled their stated purpose of rewarding investors over the last decade, experts say. “It’s a symptom of a deeper problem, which is a lack of investment in the long term,” said William W. George, a Harvard Business School professor and former chief executive of Medtronic, a medical technology company. “If we’re not investing in research, innovation and entrepreneurship, we’re going to be a slow-growth country for a decade.”

Liberal critics insist the trend is another example of top corporate executives raking in an inordinate share of the nation’s wealth, even as their employees suffer.

“It’s an extraordinarily unimaginative way to use money,” said Robert Reich, a former secretary of labor under President Clinton who now teaches public policy at the University of California, Berkeley. After diving in the wake of the financial crisis, buybacks have made a remarkable comeback in recent years, with $445 billion authorized this year, the most since 2007, when repurchases peaked at $914 billion.

But spending on capital investments like new plants and infrastructure has stagnated more broadly in corporate America, confounding efforts by the Obama administration to spur economic growth. Capital expenditures by companies on the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index are expected to total $546 billion in 2011, down from $560 billion in 2008, according to data compiled by Thomson Reuters Eikon.

The principle behind buybacks is simple. With fewer shares in circulation, earnings per share can rise smartly even if the company’s underlying growth is lackluster. In many cases, like that of the medical device maker Zimmer Holdings, executives are able to meet goals for profit growth and earn bigger bonuses despite poor stock performance.

“It’s clear there’s a conflict of interest,” said Charles M. Elson, director of the John L. Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware. “Unless earnings per share are adjusted to reflect the buyback, then to base a bonus on raw earnings per share is problematic. It doesn’t purely reflect performance.”

In addition, executives, who are often large shareholders, stand to benefit from even a small, short-term jump in stock prices.

When everything is about the stock price, and keeping the insatiable maw of Wall Street analysts happy, there's zero incentive to create actual growth by investing in products and services and plant, let alone investing in people.

The whole "public" ownership model has become a sham. The concept is that issuing stock allows companies access to more capital than they might be able to tap otherwise. But "public" (and I use the quotation marks deliberately) ownership isn't about returning actual value to shareholders, it's about keeping Wall Street happy.

Case in point: Apple.

On a recent flight back form Florida, I counted no fewer than ten iPads befre I had to get on the plane and stop counting. At least three others of them besides me were reading Steve Jobs on it. I would say that at least twenty percent of the people on that flight were listening to iPods. Another sizable number had iPhones. There are other tablets and music players and smartphones, but these names are becoming almost generic terms for all brands of their concepts, much the way "Kleenex" now means facial tissue, no matter who makes it.

On October 18, Apple announced its third-quarter results, which included sales of 17.07 million iPhones. Got that? OVER SEVENTEEN MILLION iPhones sold in three months. That's over five million a month or over a million a week. But the stock immediately lost five percent of its value, because the "Wall Street analysts" predicted sales of 20 million -- and it's been swooning ever since, closing yesterday at $369.01.

Has anything really fundamentally changed at Apple since the stock surged to over $400/share in early November -- almost a month after Steve Jobs' death? The day after he died, 96% of Wall Street analysts gave the stock a "Buy" rating with a MEDIAN target price of $500/share. And now the price is $369, because some idiot in a suit pulled a number -- twenty million -- out of his ass, and because only a million and a half iPhones sold per week, the stock has been slammed.

And this is the system we're protecting? No wonder executives are buying back stock to artificially prop up the price rather than actually invest in something that might help their companies actually grow. Taking chances is punished by Wall Street.

We keep hearing about how we have to lower corporate taxes to eliminate "uncertainty". Is this what business has come to? Guaranteed results, every time? Business is all about uncertainty. Innovation is what generates growth in a business, and innovation THRIVES on uncertainty. A new car model may not go over well with buyers. A new drug compound may turn out to be ineffective and have to be scrapped. Buyers may be wary of a hi-def webcam because they don't want to have to dress up and put on makeup to talk to relatives. 3-D television may prove not to be perceived as having sufficient additional value to warrant the cost. The very nature of business is a crapshoot. It's full of uncertainty, and it always has been. But today business is governed by Wall Street, and Wall Street goes into a panic at the slightest bit of bad news. Today we hear news that Greece may default? The Dow will drop by almost 400 points. Tomorrow there are signs that an agreement may be reached? A 300-point surge. Day after tomorrow we'll hear bad news about Italy and it'll be another swoon.

Is this any way to run an economy? What happened to rewarding the risk-takers; those who take a chance that they may lose, but that they also may win? In an environment in which a risk that doesn't reward is punished out of all proportion to the supposed "offense", why take the chance?

There's a nice little company called Angie's List. The concept is simple: People who have used contractors and other professoinals rate them, so that if you need someone to, say, install insulation in your attic, you can read other people's unsolicited experiences with insulation contractors, rather on just relying on the references the contractor provides. It started with construction-related services, but has branched out into medical, veterinary, and other services. No anonymous reviews are allowed, only members are allowed to review companies, and while your name and contact information isn't published, Angie's List knows who you are. This also keeps contractors themselves from spamming their pages with bogus reviews. I'm a member, and I don't hire anyone without checking their reviews on Angie's List. The membership is about fifty bucks a year.

Angie's List is about to be ruined, because it's going public, with an initial IPO price of $13/share. Three venture capital companies are going to own 43% of he company. and as you can see, the analysts are already freaking out. My guess is that within three years, Angie's List will cease to exist and you'll be back to waiting until one of your neighbors has work done on his house to find a good contractor. All because Wall Street hates "uncertainty."

It's all part of today's "up is down" world, in which the biracial son of a single mother is said to have "grown up in a privileged way"; Republicans use veterans as political props to shore up their so-called defense cred and then vote against veterans' benefits; and yacht owners are the real victims of the recession.

It's no wonder our economy is in the crapper. It's run by a bunch of people who, like five-year-olds, want iron-clad guarantees of success before they'll take any chances at all -- like on hiring people, one of whom could very well have the Next Great Idea.

I'm starting to think we may have to eat the shit sandwich again after all

In case you thought that we might be able to survive four years of Mitt Romney:

Speaking at the Americans for Prosperity Foundation’s annual meeting, Mr. Romney said his plan would cap spending at 20 percent of gross domestic product by 2016, and would require $500 billion a year in spending cuts. To accomplish this, Mr. Romney explained, he would eliminate all nonessential government programs, including Amtrak, return federal programs like Medicaid entirely to the states and improve the productivity and efficiency of the federal government. He would also immediately cut all nonsecurity discretionary spending by 5 percent across the board.

Mr. Romney’s proposal for Medicare is similar to the hotly debated plan that Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, introduced in April. Mr. Ryan’s plan would replace Medicare and offer payments to older Americans to buy coverage from the private market.

Mr. Romney’s proposal would give beneficiaries the option of enrolling in private health care plans, using what he, like Mr. Ryan, called a “premium support system.” But unlike the Ryan plan, Mr. Romney’s would allow older people to keep traditional Medicare as an option. However, if the existing government program proved more expensive and charged higher premiums, the participants would be responsible for paying the difference.

He presented his plan as offering more choice — though younger Americans would need to be prepared to possibly pay more, for instance, depending on which plan they selected.

“Younger Americans today, when they turn 65, should have a choice between traditional Medicare and other private health care plans that provide at least the same level of benefits,” he said. “Competition will lower costs and increase the quality of health care.”

He concluded, “The future of Medicare should be marked by competition, by choice, and by innovation, rather than by bureaucracy, stagnation and bankruptcy.”

Yes, because health insurance companies are stumbling all over themselves to get your business, each one offering a better plan than the one before. And they're so innovative -- like the way they fight every claim just to see how long it'll take to wear you down before you stop fighting.

I've had a pretty decent health plan for Mr. Brilliant and I the last few years. We get it through my employer, so we're "only" paying about $3600 of the annual premium. It's got a $20 co-pay for preventive care, a $250 per person deductible, and covers 90% of "usual and customary" after that. Now "usual and customary" seems to be based on medical fees back in the days when Don Draper was taking little Sally to the pediatrician, but this plan has worked out OK for us.

So of course 2012 is the last year we'll have it.

After 2012, we'll be offered two plans -- an 80% plan with a low deductible, 80% coverage in-network and only 60% outside; or an high-deductible plan with an HSA. The difference in employee premiums is about $2000, so perhaps if I put that $2000 into the HSA along with the $500 the company will kick in, it'll offset most of the $2700 deductible for two people...assuming of course that we could pay for all $225 of your standard office visit out of the HSA, rather than the sixty bucks that in Insurance Delusionland is "usual and customary."

This is the world into which Mitt Romney wants to spill all the elderly. Oh he's making noise now about how there'll be a choice, but what senior citizen in his right mind would choose to try to buy an individual insurance policy instead of Medicare?

Keep in mind that Mitt Romney is worth a quarter of a BILLION dollars, and a health insurance premium is like lunch money to him.

And yet he and his buddies just can't kick even one more nickel apiece. Good heavens, no. After all, Mitt Romney worked so hard to get his money -- working hard to buy up companies, dismantle them, and throw their employees in the trash can. And the Koch brothers certainly shouldn't be asked to kick in anything else. After all, they're billionaires, which means they worked harder than we do, right? And the fact that they inherited their business from their father means nothing, right? How about the Walton children? They have $87 billion. And they made it by starting out as greeters, right? Hardly -- they inherited it from old Sam Walton. But they can't kick any more, can they? Not without extreme hardship.

After all, America has to be kept safe for the Walton children, and Prescott Bush's children, and George Romney's son, and Fred Trump's son, and so on.

And if that means that the poor and the sick and the elderly have to lay down and die, so be it.

So where does that leave us? Do we hold our noses and vote again for a President who's already shown that his futile, quixotic quest to be liked by a bunch of greedy, racist bigots is more important than anything to him? Do we stick with a bunch of corporatist Democrats who give lip service to the middle and working class but behind the scenes know full well that it's all over, and they're going to get their piece of the pie before it all goes to shit and the rest of us start killing each other for cans of baked beans?

In the past we could rely on Democrats to at least be the guardians of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, even if they sold us out on everything else. But thanks to the so-called "supercommittee", and Obama's willingness to let mandatory cuts kick in if this small group of intransigent Republians and sellout Democrats can't come up with a compromise (as if that were even possible), and this tendency they have to learn all the wrong lessons when they get clobbered and move even further to the right, it's hard to have any faith in them either.

So we're left with a choice -- we either let it all go to shit now, or have a few more tolerable years before it's all Mad Max.

Hardly what we had in mind in 2008, is it?

You will not read about this in any newspaper in New Jersey

A tent city rises in Ocean County, New Jersey:

More than 50 homeless people have joined the community within New Jersey's forests as the economic crisis has wrecked their American dream.
And as politicians in Washington trade blows over their country's £8.8 trillion debt, the prospect of more souls joining this rag tag group grows by the day.

Building their own tarpaulin tents, Native American teepees and makeshift balsa wood homes, every one of the Tent City residents has lost their job.

Ravaged by the loss of their jobs and their homes, the residents of Tent City struggle to get by without day-to-day luxuries that we take for granted such as food on the table and a roof over their heads.

Ex-minister Steve Brigham, 50, runs Tent City, which consists of a dirt road running through a two-acre encampment which has flowerpots laid out front of proud tents and homes.
Functioning as near to a normal town as possible, Tent City is governed by democratic rules agreed by all the residents.

They all must agree to no fighting, to clean the camp, to volunteer their time when they have it, and to most importantly keep the noise down after 10pm

Please click through to the full article and look at how Americans who used to be middle-class are living.

I think perhaps these people should take Joan McCarter's suggestion and send their resumes, along with photographs of how they are living, and send them to Eric Cantor, who had this to say yesterday:

Let him find them a job.

You want to say we liberals are full of hate? For guys like Eric Cantor, you bet we are. And that smug little prick deserves every bit of our hatred.

The only Democrat I will give money to in this election cycle

And it sure looks like he's running:

Now who looks like the raving lunatic here? (Hint: It isn't Grayson.)

Since when does the desire to have a job make you an unreasonable money-grubber who wants a pony and a baseball team?

And there you have it

Paul Ryan thinks Social Security and Medicare are welfare programs:

Speaking in broad terms Monday before the Economic Club of Chicago, House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) defended his controversial proposals tohttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif slash entitlement spending and privatize Medicare.

Though billed as an effort to revamp his widely criticized budget, Ryan avoided describing his health care plans in specific detail, eschewing even the friendly terms he and other Republicans have used to explain it since he first unveiled it earlier this year. Instead, Ryan reframed the entitlement cuts in his budget as "strengthen[ing] welfare for those who need it," and accused Democrats who have attacked his budget as engaging in class warfare.

Gee. Then what's the nearly two hundred thousand dollars I and my employers have paid into the system over the last nearly forty years that I've been working?

If you've had a suspicion that the right wants to kill public education, you're on to something

The Koch brothers are sucking up all the wingnut oxygen in the room, but there's another right-wing family whose agenda is not specifically to kill public-sector unions, but rather, to kill public education in America.

Rachel Tabachnick at Alternet introduces us to the DeVos family:

Vouchers have always been a staple of the right-wing agenda. Like previous efforts, this most recent push for vouchers is led by a network of conservative think tanks, PACs, Religious Right groups and wealthy conservative donors. But "school choice," as they euphemistically paint vouchers, is merely a means to an end. Their ultimate goal is the total elimination of our public education system.

The decades-long campaign to end public education is propelled by the super-wealthy, right-wing DeVos family. Betsy Prince DeVos is the sister of Erik Prince, founder of the notorious private military contractor Blackwater USA (now Xe), and wife of Dick DeVos, son of the co-founder of Amway, the multi-tiered home products business.

By now, you've surely heard of the Koch brothers, whose behind-the-scenes financing of right-wing causes has been widely documented in the past year. The DeVoses have remained largely under the radar, despite the fact that their stealth assault on America's schools has the potential to do away with public education as we know it.

[snip]

The DeVoses are top contributors to the Republican Party and have provided the funding for major Religious Right organizations. And they spent millions of their own fortune promoting the failed voucher initiative in Michigan in 2000, dramatically outspending their opposition. Sixty-eight percent of Michigan voters rejected the voucher scheme. Following this defeat, the DeVoses altered their strategy.

Instead of taking the issue directly to voters, they would support bills for vouchers in state legislatures. In 2002 Dick DeVos gave a speech on school choice at the Heritage Foundation. After an introduction by former Reagan Secretary of Education William Bennett, DeVos described a system of “rewards and consequences” to pressure state politicians to support vouchers. “That has got to be the battle. It will not be as visible,” stated DeVos. He described how his wife Betsy was putting these ideas into practice in their home state of Michigan and claimed this effort has reduced the number of anti-school choice Republicans from six to two. The millions raised from the wealthy pro-privatization contributors would be used to finance campaigns of voucher supporters and purchase ads attacking opposing candidates.

Media materials for Betsy DeVos’ group All Children Matter, formed in 2003, claimed the organization spent $7.6 million in its first year, “impacting state legislative elections in 10 targeted states” and a won/loss record of 121/60.

Dick DeVos also explained to his Heritage Foundation audience that they should no http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.giflonger use the term public schools, but instead start calling them “government schools.” He noted that the role of wealthy conservatives would have to be obscured. “We need to be cautious about talking too much about these activities,” said DeVos, and pointed to the need to “cut across a lot of historic boundaries, be they partisan, ethnic, or otherwise.”

Go read the whole thing, especially if you live in New Jersey, or in Wisconsin, or any of the other states (like all 50 of them) targeted by this bunch of Christian Dominionists. Public education has been the one thing in this country that has allowed for upward mobility. We already know that the wealthiest people in this country do not want a thriving middle class. Their vision is of an American utopia, dominated by a twisted, perverted, pseudo-Christian ideology that recasts Jesus as an Ayn Rand objectivist, in which the wealthy are that way because they are anointed by God, and the rest of us only serve to do their bidding until we have outlived our usefulness to them.

We are the only ones who can stop them.

Race to the bottom

I know I keep hammering away at this image of a ladder where the guys at the top are exhorting you to look a few rungs down at their demon-du-jour -- Medicaid queen at the CVS drive-thru in a BMW/immigrant/teacher while they take the last few twenties out of your wallet and stuff them in their already-bulging pockets, but every day it's clearer that this is the right-wing agenda for America -- a few preoposterously rich guys and everyone else scrambling for scraps.

I recently found myself enjoying the PBS production of Downtown Abbey, one of those classy period British soapy things with impeccable acting, costume and set design all inatended to make you forget that you're essentially watching a soap opera. Downton is essentially Upstairs Downstairs for a new audience (though I understand that the original series is being remade for some strange reason), but I'm a great deal older than I was in the 1970's. When you look at a series like this from the perspective of America 2011, watching its upper class that takes for granted its wealth and position, and its working class where the older servants delude themselves that spending your life in service to people who can't fathom being in any state of want that doesn't involve lust is perfectly OK, and younger servants find themselves with doors slammed in their faces if they dare dream of a better future, it's hard not to see the BEST scenario for the future we face.

In 2003, PBS dipped its toe into the waters of reality TV with a group of series in which they took contemporary people and put them in vintage settings, including the mores and social class structure of the time. The best of these, Manor House, showed its cast actually living this kind of socioeconomic divide. It's worth the time to go over to the show's site and poke around, because there's a wealth of information about actual life during a time of this kind of class divide and income inequality.

Yesterday we saw some improving job numbers, and the "official" unemployment rate finally dropped below 9%. But as Robert Reich points out, these numbers don't tell the real story:

Overall, the number of unemployed Americans – 13.7 million – is about the same as it was last month. The number working part time who’d rather be working full time – 8.3 million – is also about the same.

But to get to the most important trend you have to dig under the job numbers and look at what kind of new jobs are being created. That’s where the big problem lies.

The National Employment Law Project did just that. Its new data brief shows that most of the new jobs created since February 2010 (about 1.26 million) pay significantly lower wages than the jobs lost (8.4 million) between January 2008 and February 2010.

While the biggest losses were higher-wage jobs paying an average of $19.05 to $31.40 an hour, the biggest gains have been lower-wage jobs paying an average of $9.03 to $12.91 an hour.

In other words, the big news isn’t jobs. It’s wages.

For several years now, conservative economists have blamed high unemployment on the purported fact that many Americans have priced themselves out of the global/high-tech jobs market.

So if we want more jobs, they say, we’ll need to take pay and benefit cuts.

And that’s exactly what Americans have been doing.

Employers have demanded wage and benefit concessions from their unionized workers and often got them. Detroit is creating auto jobs again — but new hires are getting about half the pay that auto workers were getting before. Airline workers are taking home 30 to 50 percent less than they did years ago. And so on.

Conservatives say it’s not enough. That’s why unions have to be busted – and why some governors are seeking to abolish laws requiring workers to become dues-paying union members in order to get certain jobs. Hence, the fights brewing in the Midwest.

Meanwhile, millions of non-union workers have accepted cuts in pay and benefits just to keep their jobs. Health benefits have been slashed, pension contributions from employers dramatically cut, wages dropped or “frozen.”

Millions of private-sector workers have been fired and then re-hired as contract workers to do almost exactly what they were doing before, but without any benefits or job security.

The current attack on public-sector workers should be seen in this light. The charge is they now take home more generous pay and benefit packages than private-sector workers. It’s not true on the wage side if you control for level of education, but it wasn’t even true on the benefits side until private-sector benefits fell off a cliff. Meanwhile, across America, public-sector workers have been “furloughed,” which is a nice word for not collecting any pay for weeks at a time.

At this rate, the unemployment rate will continue to decline. But so will the pay and benefits of most Americans.

And that is the reason for the finger-pointing at union workers. These people are the canaries in the coal mine, only because they are vocal and organized. People like the long-distance truck driver now working as a dishwasher at a Red Lobster aren't heard from, but while they work minimum-wage jobs where the hours are kept just low enough that they don't have benefits are understandably going to be resentful of those who still earn a living wage and have benefits and a defined retirement benefit. The problem is that stripping these things away from unions is not going to solve the problem. Because if your new job that you finally find after being unemployed for a year pays ten bucks an hour, so your take-home is around $350 a week, where are you going to even find a place that's habitable to live, let alone pay for groceries and an old jalopy to get yourself to that job? Yet this the source of the "job growth" for which Barack Obama was patting himself on the back yesteerday. And Americans are getting tired of pundits like Thomas Friedman and David Brooks, whose jobs are never going to be outsourced or eliminated, telling the people who go to "the Applebee's salad bar" that they have to suck it up because The World is Flat or that older people (presumably excepting Brooks himself) are going to just have to shut the fuck up and die already.

I'm currently involved in a rather spirited discussion at my local Patch site with people who simply refuse to give me a decent answer about why "shared sacrifice" simply cannot involve even one penny more paid in taxes by billionaires. First, these people challenge me on "What do you regard as 'rich'?" This, for those who do not live in the New York metropolitan area, is designed to Get The Liberal To Cite What Is A Middle Class Salary Here. If the mortgage on a POS cape cod like mine is $2000/month, and you're paying ten grand a year in property taxes, and you have three kids, two of whom are in college, $150,000 or even $200,000 a year in salary doesn't make you "rich". So you cite a figure like $10 million per year, which I think we all can agree makes you "rich". So then they cite people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett and their foundations. First of all, voluntarily setting up a foundation to do good works may mean you're not the kind of rich scumbag that, say, Dick Fuld is, but somehow I don't think that Bill Gates' lifestyle has suffered one iota since diverting a good chunk of his money towards his foundation. It's not really a "sacrifice" if you don't feel it.

What I've told these people is that if I had to pay, for example, $2000 more a year in federal taxes at my income level, but within five years our nation's economy would be on a sound footing, I'd do that in a heartbeat. And I don't even have children who are going to need a nation that doesn't look like a Mad Max movie. If I had to pay more in state taxes to get my state back on even keel within five years, I'd do it. And those numbers really WOULD make a difference to what I take home. So why is it such anathema to ask the wealthiest Americans to pay a few thousand more a year?

(Bonus read: Paul Farrell.

Get Christie Love. (Please.)

The Washington gasbag circuit has been all but fellating New Jersey governor Chris Christie on national television ever since the horizontally-challenged bully was elected and immediately set the stage for guys like Scott Walker by deciding that the state's entire problem was caused by the New Jersey Education Association. The insiders are desperately looking for a non-crazy Republican to prop up for the 2012 race, and the pickings are pretty lean. The GOP loves its authoritarian daddy figures even more than it loves its aging high school mean girls, and for sheer Because-I-Said-So bombast, nobody beats Chris Christie.

Today's New York Times focuses on the GOP flavor-of-the-month, New Jersey governor Chris Christie, and gets past the bombast to the actual record:

Yet his agenda of balancing the budget, rescuing a pension fund that could go broke within a decade and curtailing rising property taxes — the holy grail of politics in his heavily suburban state — is far from achieved. And he still could face the wrath of voters who discover that the costs of government have merely been shifted onto their local tax bills.

“People have heard the tough talk, but they haven’t felt the full effect of what he’s done,” said Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute. “That may happen in the next year. And voters tell us that if their property taxes don’t go down, they will hold him responsible.”

In his first year, Governor Christie closed a yawning budget deficit that he estimated at almost $11 billion, though in part by skipping a $3 billion payment to the pension system. At $29.4 billion, spending is down more than $5 billion from its peak two years earlier.

In proposing his budget on Tuesday, the governor is expected to call for more cuts to close another huge deficit. With major union contracts set to expire in June, he is calling for a wage freeze, which polls show the public supports.

But the state will still be deeply in debt, and facing a growing shortfall in its pension fund — $54 billion and counting — that helped spur a downgrade of the state’s bonds.

[snip]

Mr. Christie’s record has not been unblemished. He botched an application for $400 million in federal education money at a time when he was cutting twice that amount.

And in December, Mr. Christie was at Disney World during a blizzard that paralyzed the state. He refused to apologize, saying he had kept in touch with the acting governor, Mr. Sweeney — but Mr. Sweeney said they never spoke.

Yet such gaffes have not transcended the state’s borders, while Mr. Christie’s YouTube rants against teachers and their union leaders have become widespread. Mr. Christie is less popular in New Jersey than with national Republicans: polls show that only about 50 percent of residents approve of his performance.

Where his poll numbers head now may depend on whether Mr. Christie can begin to show success in solving seemingly intractable problems like high property taxes before voters start to hold him responsible.

“When you cut billions of dollars from local government, you can’t turn around and say ‘It’s the mayor’s fault’ — you’re the one who did it,” Mr. Sweeney said. “In Chris Christie’s New Jersey, class sizes are going up, and crime is going through the roof in our inner cities. Eventually, people are going to realize, ‘I’m paying a lot more now, and I have a lot less.’ The people have not realized it yet. But he’s the governor, and the music’s going to stop.”

The question is what this state will look like by the time he gets done with it, and people realize that the reason for a good chunk of his spending cuts is that he has continued the noble tradition started by that OTHER Christie, Christine Todd Whitman, of stiffing the state pension fund for other purposes. In Whitman's case it was for income tax cuts, from which the pension fund has never recovered, and in Christie's case it's for cooking the books.

Last week I hired an appraiser for the purpose of a property tax appeal. The value of my house has dropped over $100,000 since the last town revaluation in 2005. I'm not upset about that; after all, in no sane universe is a dormered Cape Cod with a 1970's kitchen and an original black-and-mint-green 1950's bathroom worth almost a half-million dollars. But the taxes on my little POS in one of the less prestigious towns in the county are upwards of $8000 a year -- and that's lower than many surrounding towns, where taxes on a house like mine can run into the five figures. This is just insane, and it's going to get even MORE insane when the full brunt of Christie's budgets start to hit municipalities. Because anyone familiar with local governments in New Jersey knows that no matter what the political affiliation of those running the town, it's all about cronyism, patronage, and no-bid contracts.

My town, which saw the first contested election in thirty years back in 2009, proceeded to elect the same people who had been on the council for that whole time -- and is now outraged that they're doing exactly what they've done for decades -- spend like drunken sailors, hire their friends for no-show municipal jobs, and give contracts to their friends. One councilman is attempting to have himself also named the town attorney so that he can get taxpayer-paid health insurance for his family. The school district is about to spend $3 million on enhancements to the high school football field. When you shift expenses and taxes to towns, and these towns elect corrupt people because there are no options on the ballot, you aren't addressing the biggest problem about which people complain.

If you read the comments section in this article, you'll see that all the Christie Love is coming from outside of New Jersey. Here, where we're actually SEEING what these policies do, it's a different story:

The people in my very Republican town are furious with him for what he is doing to our school district. He decided that he had to reduce the state funding of education, but rather than deciding on a district-by-district basis what cuts should be made, he simply chopped the state funds provided to districts across the board as a fixed percentage of their general operating budgets. This reduction did not take into account whether districts had been spending way below the state average per pupil or way above. My district had always managed its finances well and spent well under the average, while maintaining an exceptionally high-quality program. For that we were rewarded by having 82% of our already small state funding yanked from us. To add to the problem, he also reduced the amount by which local taxes could be raised. There is no way to make up the shortfall, and we are now being forced to make very painful program cuts.

What I would have wanted from this governor would have been a far more nuanced approach to the education cuts. He is, however, all about bluster and bullying, but deep thought about the fairness and impact of his actions escapes him. He is like a blindfolded man with a chainsaw who is trying to trim the shrubs - loud, unseeing, dangerous, and indiscriminate.

I'll close with the words of one of those demonized state workers, who nails it on where residents SHOULD be pointing their fingers:

I am a NJ state worker and have been for more than 25 years. I have consistently cared about my work and about doing a good job. I have never lost sight of the fact that as a public sector worker I am responsible to my fellow citizens and to the consumers of my agency's services. I am at this moment in time solidly middle class and do not live lavishly in any way.

I am watching with alarm what's going on in our country, something that's been going on for a while now, and that's the systematic turning of people's minds against workers like me, as if our salaries will destroy our neighbors' futures. This is the result of a frighteningly effective information campaign launched against public sector workers in every state in the union, so successful that it has caused people to totally forget about who the real destroyers are -- the bankers who, through a diabolical criminal conspiracy, took the hundreds of billions of dollars out of all of our pockets and laughed as they did it, and laughed as they gave themselves bonuses to celebrate their success.

Folks, it's not your own working neighbors who have set about dismantling the security that was once inherent in our way of life -- go see the film "Inside Job" and read Matt Taibbi's article in the current issue of Rolling Stone magazine. There are obscenely wealthy criminals out there who deserve prosecution (although there are perhaps no prosecutors left who can or will take them on), but your neighbors who pay taxes and mortgages, and who shop in local stores and dine at local restaurants and get their cars repaired in local garages -- your neighbors are not the problem. Please seriously consider rejecting the manipulations of the politicians who are doing the work of the wealthy ones who don't want you to notice that they took all the money away from all of us.

Around the blogroll and elsewhere: Divide and Conquer edition

Because as long as the Koch brothers and their bought-and-paid-for lapdog in the Governor's mansion in Wisconsin can keep the middle class sniping at each other, they won't notice just how much the kind of life said middle class is so terrified of losing is being taken away from them by guys like the Koch brothers.

Robert Reich on the Republican Strategy. If you read nothing else linked in this post, read this one. Money quote: "They pit average working Americans against one another, distract attention from the almost unprecedented concentration of wealth and power at the top, and conceal Republican plans to further enlarge and entrench that wealth and power."

The war on the middle class isn't just about public sector unions (though that's a sizable part of it). The GOP's war on women is also part of the master plan to eviscerate the middle class. Amanda writes about the GOP's increasing radicalization about contraception.

Driftglass doesn't want to hear a single Republican talk about shared sacrifice ever again (and explains why you shouldn't either).

Paul Siegel on how the Republicans don't give a rat's ass about the deficit.

Matt Taibbi with a reminder of just who we should be pointing fingers at instead of demanding that public sector workers get screwed just as much as everyone else.

Brendan calls for Obama to cut funding to every state represented by a Republican. Give those idiots what they want.

SanFranLefty has more speeches by Democratic wimmenz kicking ass and taking names.

Speaking of kicking ass, this post is a bit long in the tooth, but Helen Philpot did a good job of slipping the shiv to guys who think it's GOOD for women to be forced to hear a fetal heartbeat.

Godamighty, I've missed Lower Manhattanite.

From karoli at C&L, Barney:

And from LJSearles at My Mental Dumping Ground, Bernie:

Monday Big Blue Smurf Blogging: What They Said

Today's honoree: Yellow Dog, for The Great State Bankruptcy Con Game.

Money quote (repeat this to your wingnut friends over and over until it sinks in):

Because the real goal is not balancing state budgets: the goal is demonizing public employees in order to eliminate the largest remaining source of decent-paying middle-class jobs.

If you envy public employees whose jobs seem more secure and better-paying with better benefits than your job, destroying those jobs won't improve your situation by a dime.

Mission Accomplished

The Wall Street/Washington battle to restore the Gilded Age and do away with a thriving middle class is almost complete:

In Massachusetts, Kevin Cronan, who lost his $150,000-a-year job as a money manager in early 2009, is now frothing cappuccinos at a Starbucks for $8.85 an hour.

In Wisconsin, Dale Szabo, a former manufacturing manager with two master's degrees, has been searching years for a job comparable to the one he lost in 2003. He's now a school janitor.

They are among the lucky. There are 14.5 million people on the unemployment rolls, including 6.4 million who have been jobless for more than six months.

But the decline in their fortunes points to a signature outcome of the long downturn in the labor market. Even at times of high unemployment in the past, wages have been very slow to fall; economists describe them as "sticky." To an extent rarely seen in recessions since the Great Depression, wages for a swath of the labor force this time have taken a sharp and swift fall.

The only other downturn since the Depression to see similarly large wage cuts was the 1981-82 recession. But the latest downturn is already eclipsing that one. Unemployment has stood above 9% for 20 straight months—longer than the early 1980s stretch—and is likely to remain above that level for most of 2011, putting downward pressure on wages.

Many laid-off workers who have found new jobs are taking pay cuts or settling for part-time work when they get new ones, sometimes taking jobs far below their skill levels.

Economists had wondered how far this dynamic would go in this recession, and now the numbers are starting to show it: Between 2007 and 2009, more than half the full-time workers who lost jobs that they had held for at least three years and then found new full-time work by early last year reported wage declines, according to the Labor Department. Thirty-six percent reported the new job paid at least 20% less than the one they lost.

The severity of the latest downturn makes it likely that many of the unemployed who get rehired will take wage cuts, and that it will be years, if ever, before many of their wages return to pre-recession levels, says Columbia University labor economist Till von Wachter. "The deeper the recession, the lower the wage you're going to get in the next job and the lower the quality of your next job," he says.

If you want to know who Washington believes it needs to help, it isn't you.

Eat the poor

Literally. That's the wingnut answer to unemployment. I kid you not:

Fox News tells Unemployed 99ers to: try Cannibalism to see you through ... like our forefathers did (if they did not freeze to death before - that is)

Charles Payne Fox Business Network contributor for the show Varney & Co. basically told the 99ers to tough it out, when responding to a question from 99ers Union Co-founder Gregg Rosen on todays show.

Gregg asked “So you’re telling me, people would rather go hungry and homeless than to get a job? Does that make sense?”

To which Payne responded: “Faced with going hungry or homeless they will find a job..they will create a job...they will create opportunities because..Guess what? cuz [sic] when the first Americans landed here...there was nothing. Some of them froze to death, some of them resorted to cannibalism ... but they made it...”

I'm looking forward to watching Sarah Palin field-dress an unemployed person on her reality show. She'll then look at the camera and talk about the rugged individualism and opportunity creation of hardworking people in Alaska.

(via)

Saturday Big Blue Smurf Blogging: What They Said

Today's honoree: our very own Tata, for pointing out what Chris Christie's jihad against teachers and public service unions, which is being adopted by Republicans everywhere, is really all about.

Money quote:

Every Sunday morning on the political talk shows you can hear politicians positively crowing about how they manipulate Americans of all stripes into voting and protesting against their own interests. If you do not have the sense to realize middle class people have more in common with the poor than the rich you are being manipulated by the rich, who own the media and simultaneously sweet-talk and slander the rest of us constantly.

[snip]

Your fellow worker has too much health care. Your fellow worker doesn’t deserve vacation time. Your fellow worker should retire later. Your fellow worker is a greedy slacker for joining a collective bargaining unit to bargain for better wages and a safer workplace. These are not problems. These messages should make men and women stand up and shout, “Good for my fellow worker! I will forge a collective bargaining unit and negotiate for better wages and benefits.” I don’t have to tell you all the old truisms you’ve known all your life but seem to have forgotten:

“There is strength in numbers.”
“The army makes a brave general.”
“Many hands make light work.”
“Two heads are better than one.”
Even “United we stand, divided we fall.”

All the same truth your grandparents knew: alone, we may survive, but working together, we can thrive. And yet, whenever some group of politicians or church group or think tank demonizes a group of our neighbors, friends and relatives, Americans fall for it. Right after 9/11, when the American flags went up everywhere and the flag-waving began, I knew because it has been true all my life that when Americans have waved flags bombs fell on the heads of brown people. Sure enough, that is what happened. There was never any reason to set anyone on fire, except that that’s what an angry mob does.

You can see the demands for groupthink and group behavior regularly on Facebook, if only for example. A few of my friends have recently re-posted statuses demanding supposed patriotic statements or gestures. That’s not patriotism. It’s a demand for conformity. Fuck that noise. My dissent is patriotic, and those demands are bullshit. Once again, if you don’t get that, you have been manipulated by someone who gains by your misunderstanding.

Word. Rock on, sistah.