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.

Did anyone honestly believe this would turn out any differently?

I don't know why anyone thought that if you put an equal number of elected Democrats and Republicans in a room, they'd come up with anything different from what Republicans have been insisting on ever since the 2010 elections.

Now it seems that this so-called "supercommittee" will be similarly deadlocked, and the across-the-board cuts mandated by its failure will go into effect. Because the Republicans on the committee are adamant: No new revenues, all cuts, most of them in the social safety net:

It’s hard to see how the Super Committee can possibly reach a consensus by this time next week after Republican co-chair Jeb Hensarling’s appearance on CNBC Tuesday night. The short version is that he left the ball in Democrats court, and hinted that if the committee fails, Congress will spend the next year or so trying to change the terms of an automatic penalty to make sure that hundreds of billions of cuts to defense programs never take effect.

Hensarling claimed that if the committee recommended even a dollar of new net tax revenue — the kind of revenue Dems are demanding — it would constitute a step in the wrong direction. He said a GOP plan put forward by Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) — one which Republicans claim would raise revenues by nearly $300 billion over 10 years, but would also make the Bush tax cuts permanent — is as far as Republicans are willing to go on revenues. But that’s an offer Democrats flatly rejected as unserious. And unless one of the parties breaks cleanly with its publicly stated position, the committee will either fall well short of reducing the deficit by $1.2 trillion over 10 years as required by law, or will fail altogether.

“We have gone as far as we feel we can go,” Hensarling said. “We put $250 billion of what is known as static revenue on the table, but only if we can bring down rates [but] any penny of increased static revenue is a step in the wrong direction. We can only balance that with pro-growth reform and frankly the Democrats have never agreed to that…. if we can’t get any type of reforms in health care, which has helped drive the nation towards insolvency, then, no, there’s no reason to frankly put any static revenues on the table.”

When Hensarling says “static,” he means revenue that will actually, predictably come into the Treasury. Republicans claim in a Laffer-ite way that their preferred tax policy will create enough economic growth to raise revenues even if the math says it won’t. Democrats reject that kind of analysis.

Democrats reject this analysis because it's been shown over the last thirty years to be not true.

Yes, a low-tax policy DOES serve to make the rich richer, and that is the only group of Americans that matters to Republicans. But the "rising tide lifts all boats" doctrine that has governed Republican economic policy for the last thirty years has been shown to be false. And yet the Republicans insist on raising the tide for the wealthy over and over and over again, followed by finding a nice boogeyman for the middle class and the increasingly poor to point at instead of realizing just who is screwing them over.

The Democrats have blinked again and again in the face of Republican economic terrorism. What hasn't had much coverage is how the Democrats have put Social Security and Medicare on the table in their effort to appease these terrorists. But nothing short of scorched-earth obeisance to the Koch brothers and their ilk will suit these Republicans. And so we may very well soon see what the America of Republian dreams looks like.

Say goodbye to the life you've known, because when this happens, it's game over for the rest of us.

Proof that the Republicans think they'll be taken along when their corporate masters leave this country a rotting, smoking ruin

These Republicans (and the Democrats who similarly do the bidding of banks and corporate CEOs) are a funny lot. There are still the Bush dead-enders who still think that if they Just Work Hard Enough™, they'll be in the Rich Guys Club too someday, but an increasing number of us -- you know, those who watch that George Carlin video over and over again, know that the game was rigged thirty years ago when Ronald Reagan said that if you just give the rich enough money, the stuff that overflows from their stuffed pockets will "trickle down" to us. The saddest cases aren't the long-term unemployed who know they'll never work again and after Working Hard Enough their whole lives, now find themselves going to the church food pantry for some boxed macaroni and cheese. The saddest cases are people like the Peter Griffin soundalike who recently called Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren a "socialist whore":



This is someone who's a victim of The Big Club, but he's so invested in the Just Work Hard Enough meme that to realize that everything he believed in is a lie would probably destroy him. It's easy to forget that when these people send around e-mails of Obama with a bone in his nose, or take guns to Democratic candidate appearances, and vote again and again against their own self interest, choosing candidates who point their attention elsewhere so that the latter's corporate masters can steal the last few bucks out of the former's back pockets, they're operating out of fear -- a fear that the Big Club has spent thirty years tapping, and will continue to tap until we're all scrambling for scraps.

The politicians who do the bidding of the Big Club think they're part of it. They get invited to conclaves given by the Koch brothers and they receive the largesse that the Big Club gives them and they think that when the middle class has been successfully destroyed, they'll be on that Big Boat with the Big Club, swilling Dom Perignon from the cleavage of hookers. They don't realize that they'll be left behind too. And it doesn't matter that

And that explains why, now that they seem to have successfully stymied any attempt to rebuild the job base in this country, they're going after the unemployed (NYT editorial):

Tragically, the more entrenched the jobs shortage becomes, the more paralyzed Congress becomes, with Republicans committed to doing nothing in the hopes that the faltering economy will cost President Obama his job in 2012. Last week, for instance, Senate Republicans filibustered a $60 billion proposal by Mr. Obama to create jobs by repairing and upgrading the nation’s deteriorating infrastructure. They were outraged that the bill would have been paid for by a 0.7 percent surtax on people making more than $1 million.

Things may be about to get worse.

Federal unemployment benefits, which generally kick in after 26 weeks of state-provided benefits, are scheduled to expire at the end of the year. That would be a disaster for many of the estimated 3.5 million Americans who get by on extended benefits — an average of $295 a week. It would also be a blow to the economy, because it would reduce consumer spending by about $50 billion in 2012 — which would mean slower economic growth and 275,000 lost jobs. Unfortunately, given Republicans’ demonstrated willingness to ignore human needs and economic logic, it is more likely than not that jobless benefits will be a major battle in the months ahead.

There are no plausible arguments against an extension — in fact, Congress has never let federal benefits expire when the unemployment rate was higher than 7.2 percent. But there are many specious arguments, chief among them that providing benefits reduces the incentive to get a new job. The evidence says otherwise.

A recent paper by Jesse Rothstein, an economist at the National Bureau of Economic Research, shows that benefit extensions in early 2011 raised the jobless rate by about 0.1 to 0.5 percentage points, but most of that was due to benefit recipients staying in the labor force and actively looking for work during the time they are collecting benefits, rather than, say, dropping out in despair.

Unemployment benefits are the first line of defense against ruin from job loss that is beyond an individual’s control. In a time of historically elevated long-term unemployment, they are an important way to keep workers connected to the job-search market. They are also crucial to ensuring that the weak economy doesn’t weaken further.

The Republicans blocking an extension of unemployment benefits seem to WANT there to be mass despair and a complete elimination of the middle class. They seem to think that when everyone is poor except the Big Club and themselves, that somehow they'll benefit. But there's no way the Big Club can buy enough STUFF to keep an economy this size healthy, and that's really the point. The Big Club already has its sights set elsewhere. It could be China, it could be India, it could be the Philippines, it could be Indonesia. It could be the entire Middle East, for all we know. But if you finish a Big Bulp from 7-Eleven and you're still thirsty, you buy another Big Gulp. And as long as there's another Big Gulp to be had for the Big Club, they don't care about the giant, non-bio-degradable plastic cup they leave behind.

These politicians will find this out after it's too late.

They always whine when they see the pitchforks

It's hard to ignore the Occupy movement when protests are taking place worldwide. It's also hard to dismiss it as a bunch of dirty hippie anardhists when the granddaddy of them all, the one at Zuccoti Park in New York, has a functioning (if primitive) public communication system, a working if makeshift kitchen (NYT), a cleanup committee that on Thursday night mopped and wiped the park's hard surfaces cleaner than they've ever been, a functioning collective government in the form of a General Assembly, and now $300,000 in cash (and no, it's NOT from George Soros, so let the trolls be silent on THAT). And now there is a Demands Working Group at the New York site (NYT link), attempting to come up with specific policy demands to this country's financial community and government.

The financial titans of Wall Street still regard themselves as the Masters of the Universe portaryed in Tom Wolfe's 1987 book Bonfire of the Vanities. And why wouldn't they? They and their peers in the top 1% have 40% of the nation's wealth. Their interests are represented in Congress and in the Executive branch of our government, no matter WHICH party is in control, to the near exclusion of the interests of the American people who are given only a choice of which Wall Street tool for which to vote. They have 24-hour news stations touting their interests.

And yet these powerful titans, for all their wealth and power, have a gripe about the students so drowning in college debt that it will never be paid off and they will never be able to start families and buy a home; about the tech workers who had to train their offshore replacement and were then booted out of their jobs; about the people over fifty who can't find jobs because they've been told that despite the fact that they did their last one effectively for years, now in a different company they're told that the exact same job is "too fast-paced" for them. Why do the have-everythings whine about the have-nothings?

Because the vast unwashed for whom they have such contempt have the audacity to say mean things about them.

Krugman (NYT):

The modern lords of finance look at the protesters and ask, Don’t they understand what we’ve done for the U.S. economy?

The answer is: yes, many of the protesters do understand what Wall Street and more generally the nation’s economic elite have done for us. And that’s why they’re protesting.

On Saturday The Times reported what people in the financial industry are saying privately about the protests. My favorite quote came from an unnamed money manager who declared, “Financial services are one of the last things we do in this country and do it well. Let’s embrace it.”

This is deeply unfair to American workers, who are good at lots of things, and could be even better if we made adequate investments in education and infrastructure. But to the extent that America has lagged in everything except financial services, shouldn’t the question be why, and whether it’s a trend we want to continue?

For the financialization of America wasn’t dictated by the invisible hand of the market. What caused the financial industry to grow much faster than the rest of the economy starting around 1980 was a series of deliberate policy choices, in particular a process of deregulation that continued right up to the eve of the 2008 crisis.

Not coincidentally, the era of an ever-growing financial industry was also an era of ever-growing inequality of income and wealth. Wall Street made a large direct contribution to economic polarization, because soaring incomes in finance accounted for a significant fraction of the rising share of the top 1 percent (and the top 0.1 percent, which accounts for most of the top 1 percent’s gains) in the nation’s income. More broadly, the same political forces that promoted financial deregulation fostered overall inequality in a variety of ways, undermining organized labor, doing away with the “outrage constraint” that used to limit executive paychecks, and more.

Oh, and taxes on the wealthy were, of course, sharply reduced.

[snip]

And what about the current situation? Wall Street pay has rebounded even as ordinary workers continue to suffer from high unemployment and falling real wages. Yet it’s harder than ever to see what, if anything, financiers are doing to earn that money.

Why, then, does Wall Street expect anyone to take its whining seriously? That money manager claiming that finance is the only thing America does well also complained that New York’s two Democratic senators aren’t on his side, declaring that “They need to understand who their constituency is.” Actually, they surely know very well who their constituency is — and even in New York, 16 out of 17 workers are employed by nonfinancial industries.

But he wasn’t really talking about voters, of course. He was talking about the one thing Wall Street still has plenty of thanks to those bailouts, despite its total loss of credibility: money.

Money talks in American politics, and what the financial industry’s money has been saying lately is that it will punish any politician who dares to criticize that industry’s behavior, no matter how gently — as evidenced by the way Wall Street money has now abandoned President Obama in favor of Mitt Romney. And this explains the industry’s shock over recent events.

As the protests continue to grow, and they will, because you cannot throw 99% of your population in the garbage (and yes, you so-called 53%-ers, you are on their list too, you just don't know it yet) and expect them to sit meekly by. When one in five working-age Americans is out of work and the rest know that they are one bad quarter, or one merger, or one bad management decision away from joining them; when older people are being told that Social Security and Medicare are on the chopping block and they just have to work longer -- and then find that no one will hire them; when young people emerge from college with six figures of college debt and no job market; one of two things will happen. Either they will take to the streets with the contemporary equivalent of pitchforks and torches, or you will have to have your bought-and-paid for goons mow them all down in the streets. So far we have only seen the first. I hope to Goddess that we don't see the second one, but I fear we will. Because those "elite" for whom no amount of wealth is enough to fill the dark, empty hole in their souls will never stop trying to fill it, no matter what they need to do in order to keep trying.

My heart bleeds for them...

...Not:

Wall Street executives, facing demonstrators camped for a fourth week in New York’s financial district, say they’re anxious and angry for other reasons.

An era of decline and disappointment for bankers may not end for years, according to interviews with more than two dozen executives and investors. Blaming government interference and persecution, they say there isn’t enough global stability, leverage or risk appetite to triumph in the current slump.

“I don’t think it’s a time to make money -- this is a time to rig for survival,” said Charles Stevenson, 64, president of hedge fund Navigator Group Inc. and head of the co-op board at 740 Park Ave. The building, home to Blackstone Group LP Chairman Stephen Schwarzman and CIT Group Inc. Chief Executive Officer John Thain, was among those picketed by protesters yesterday. “The future is not going to be like a past we knew,” he said. “There’s no exit from this morass.”

An anemic global economy, the European sovereign debt crisis, U.S. unemployment stuck above 9 percent and swooning stock markets have sapped the euphoria that swept Wall Street in 2009 as it rebounded to record profits after the credit crisis. The benefits of a $700 billion taxpayer bailout and $1.2 trillion in emergency funding from the Federal Reserve have faded. Next week Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) may report its second quarterly loss per share since going public in 1999, according to the average estimate of 26 analysts surveyed by Bloomberg.


“They’re not going to make the kind of money they wanted,” said William Hambrecht, chairman of San Francisco- based WR Hambrecht & Co., who designed the Dutch auction of Google Inc.’s 2004 initial public offering. “I’m not sure people really have come to terms with the fact that what we had was a financial bubble.”

[snip]

Options Group’s Karp said he met last month over tea at the Gramercy Park Hotel in New York with a trader who made $500,000 last year at one of the six largest U.S. banks.

The trader, a 27-year-old Ivy League graduate, complained that he has worked harder this year and will be paid less. The headhunter told him to stay put and collect his bonus.

“This is very demoralizing to people,” Karp said. “Especially young guys who have gone to college and wanted to come onto the Street, having dreams of becoming millionaires.”

Young twerps in fancy suits who thought they'd get out of college, go to Wall Street, and be able to buy as much hookers 'n' blow as they could ever want within a year are hardly sympathetic figures. But perhaps what's more disturbing than the greed still exhibited by the Wall Street crowd is its the cluelessness still exhibited by those who think that just because they have a job today, they'll have one tomorrow, and those who still believe that these very same Wall Street guys are not trying to make damn sure that the American Dream becomes out of reach for all but a select few.

Wingnut "journalist" Erick Erickson has created the "We are the 53%" web site (to which I will not link) in response to the "We are the 99%" slogan that has fortunately coalesced as the slogan of the Occupy movement. It's designed to foster resentment of what conservatives claim are the "47% who pay no taxes", not taking into account the Social Security and Medicare withholdings and state and local taxes that those who earn so little that after taking the same personal exemptions and standard deduction that the hapless dupes buying into Erickson's movement take, they owe no Federal income tax. I once had a time-wasting exchange on my local Patch site with someone who actually said he might be inclined to trade in his high-paying job for one paying only $26,000 so he wouldn't have to pay taxes. Now that, my friends, is just stupidity in action. But what Erickson is doing is what has made Republicans successful for a generation -- making sure that the attention of working Americans is so focused on people "down the ladder" who might be getting something they aren't getting that they can't see the guys above them lifting the last two bucks from their wallets out of their back pockets.

Max Udargo over at the Great Orange Satan has something to say to one of these guys:

So, if you think being a liberal means that I don’t value hard work or a strong work ethic, you’re wrong. I think everyone appreciates the industry and dedication a person like you displays. I’m sure you’re a great employee, and if you have entrepreneurial ambitions, I’m sure these qualities will serve you there too. I’ll wish you the best of luck, even though a guy like you will probably need luck less than most.

I understand your pride in what you’ve accomplished, but I want to ask you something.

Do you really want the bar set this high? Do you really want to live in a society where just getting by requires a person to hold down two jobs and work 60 to 70 hours a week? Is that your idea of the American Dream?

Do you really want to spend the rest of your life working two jobs and 60 to 70 hours a week? Do you think you can? Because, let me tell you, kid, that’s not going to be as easy when you’re 50 as it was when you were 20.

And what happens if you get sick? You say you don’t have health insurance, but since you’re a veteran I assume you have some government-provided health care through the VA system. I know my father, a Vietnam-era veteran of the Air Force, still gets most of his medical needs met through the VA, but I don’t know what your situation is. But even if you have access to health care, it doesn’t mean disease or injury might not interfere with your ability to put in those 60- to 70-hour work weeks.

Do you plan to get married, have kids? Do you think your wife is going to be happy with you working those long hours year after year without a vacation? Is it going to be fair to her? Is it going to be fair to your kids? Is it going to be fair to you?

Look, you’re a tough kid. And you have a right to be proud of that. But not everybody is as tough as you, or as strong, or as young. Does pride in what you’ve accomplish mean that you have contempt for anybody who can’t keep up with you? Does it mean that the single mother who can’t work on her feet longer than 50 hours a week doesn’t deserve a good life? Does it mean the older man who struggles with modern technology and can’t seem to keep up with the pace set by younger workers should just go throw himself off a cliff?

And, believe it or not, there are people out there even tougher than you. Why don’t we let them set the bar, instead of you? Are you ready to work 80 hours a week? 100 hours? Can you hold down four jobs? Can you do it when you’re 40? When you’re 50? When you’re 60? Can you do it with arthritis? Can you do it with one arm? Can you do it when you’re being treated for prostate cancer?

And is this really your idea of what life should be like in the greatest country on Earth?

And that is the question that people like Erick Erickson and the 27-year-old Ivy League graduate who was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple want to make sure that the do not ask.

(h/t for the Wall Street article)

From the "Figure that out all by yourself, Einstein?" file

You don't have to be a genius to realize this:

The U.S. economy is limping along with the help of modest business investment in new equipment, some exports to parts of the world that are growing and the last few dollars from the government's 2009 stimulus spending program.

For the time being, it looks like American consumers are AWOL. And until they come back, don't expect to see any real recovery in economic growth and the job market. Consumer spending typically accounts for roughly 70 percent of the U.S. economy.

Fresh data from the government Friday confirmed that American consumers are tapped out. Consumer spending in dollar terms rose 0.2 percent in August. But those extra dollars went to cover higher prices for food and gasoline; when adjusted for inflation, spending was flat.

Wages, meanwhile, slipped 0.1 percent -- the first decline in nearly two years. To make up the difference, American households had to dip into savings: the savings rate in August fell to its lowest level since late 2009.

"What you're basically getting is a scene where consumers are losing momentum, they're losing momentum on income and as a result of that they're slowing down on spending," said Steven Ricchiuto, U.S. chief economist at Mizuho Securities in New York.
That spending slowdown has rippled through the economy, creating one of the biggest drags on an already weak recovery.

The part that the greedy didn't realize in their plans to take ALL of the wealth in this country, is that not even the most conspicuous consumers can keep an economy of this size going. They may be trying to push the middle class down into poverty and the poor into living on the streets, but if only 1% of the population has any money to spend, they're going to find that what they have isn't worth all that much.

Hell, I'm willing to destroy a once-great company for a THIRD of that.

A week ago I wrote about how the crony boardroom appointment of the loathsome Meg Whitman to the CEO chair at Hewlett-Packard demonstrates everything that's wrong with American corporations and their business practice of being of the Board of Directors, by the Board of Directors, and for the Board of Directors.

But that picture wasn't quite complete. Now it is (NYT link):

Just last week, Léo Apotheker was shown the door after a tumultuous 11-month run atop Hewlett-Packard. His reward? $13.2 million in cash and stock severance, in addition to a sign-on package worth about $10 million, according to a corporate filing on Thursday.

But Apotheker isn't the only one cashing out big-time after doing a shitty job:

At the end of August, Robert P. Kelly was handed severance worth $17.2 million in cash and stock when he was ousted as chief executive of Bank of New York Mellon after clashing with board members and senior managers. A few days later, Carol A. Bartz took home nearly $10 million from Yahoo after being fired from the troubled search giant.

A hallmark of the gilded era of just a few short years ago, the eye-popping severance package continues to thrive in spite of the measures put in place in the wake of the financial crisis to crack down on excessive pay.

Critics have long complained about outsize compensation packages that dwarf ordinary workers’ paychecks, but they voice particular ire over pay-for-failure. Much of Wall Street and corporate America has shifted a bigger portion of pay into longer-term stock awards and established policies to claw back bonuses. And while fuller disclosure of exit packages several years ago has helped ratchet down the size of the biggest severance deals, efforts by shareholders and regulators to further restrict payouts have had less success.

“We repeatedly see companies’ assets go out the door to reward failure,” said Scott Zdrazil, the director of corporate governance for Amalgamated Bank’s $11 billion Longview Fund, a labor-affiliated investment fund that sought to tighten the restrictions on severance plans at three oil companies last year. “Investors are frustrated that boards haven’t prevented such windfalls.”

Investors are chumps too, just like the rest of us. They think that because they own stock, that the meme about "maximizing shareholder value" applies to their holdings. The only shareholders that matter to these boards are themselves.

Fear and terror and angry speeches, oh my!

There was one election year in which Mr. Brilliant and I were so fed up with electroal politics that we planned a Jamaican vacation for that week. Oh, we finally succumbed and watched a little bit of the election returns on our tiny TV while ensconced in a beachfront room at the old and alas now defunct T-Water Beach Hotel in Negril, but we managed to escape most of it.

I kind of feel that way about the approaching anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, but unfortunately I'm stuck here in New Jersey. It almost seems as if politicians and the nation's security apparatus are happy about this opportunity to once again fan the flames of fear and war once again. Yesterday we heard rumblings of, and today lots of mediaflogging about an "unconfirmed credible threat" against New York City bridges and tunnels this weekend, accompanied by the same footage we see over and over again of guys wrapped in what look like rags, "training" on children's monkeybars. It's astounding that after a decade and over a trillion dollars spent on wars that we were told were an integral part of the so-called "war on terror", we're still in a situation where a bunch of bewildered-looking cops with rifles are going to be posted all around the city looking for...what, exactly? Unless we're prepared to stop and search every vehicle using every bridge and tunnel in the city, how do you stop something?

And again -- a bunch of guys in rags training on monkeybars are going to be whipping people into a panic.

It probably won't be the denizens of the city itself. After all, they don't have the luxury of being afraid. What we ARE going to see, I suspect, is another rush of rhetoric in the flyover states and the south against sharia law, and probably a few anti-Muslim hate crimes as well. But in some ways, these dead-enders who still insist that Barack Obama is a Muslim terrorist and that the few hundred Muslims in their state are somehow going to turn their entire state into a caliphate, aren't all that different from the terrorists they fear. The world to which they want to return, the world symbolized by the conspicuous and radical Christianity of Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann, is gone and can never return. It won't be long before every suburban neighborhood has a gay couple raising their children and a house co-owned by five young people who aren't coupled off and a multigenerational immigarnt family living in it. They can promise to return us to their never-existed TV vision of the 1950's, but unless a Rick Perry is prepared to run the entire country by executive order of forced conversion and incarceration/massacre of those who do not conform (and I'm not saying he wouldn't), the forces of a freedom that isn't represented only to corporate greed are already in play.

Andrew Sullivan has a long essay in Newsweek this week that's part of his ongoing mea culpa about having been such an ardent Bushflogger in the early days after the 9/11 attacks. We can grant him his absolution or not as we please, but one tiny excerpt struck me:

From the streets of Tehran to Cairo, it appears that the young Muslim generation does not want to withdraw from the modern world into a cultural and intellectual blind alley forever. They are too busy on Twitter.

There have always been mass movements. Tiananmen Square took place in 1989, long before anyone even thought of something like Twitter. But social networking has certainly made it easy, and the things we viddy on a computer or iPad screen are a window to a different kind of world. In 2001, the web was still largely a "push" medium; today it's participatory and immediate. When young people can see a different world in front of them, it becomes more difficult to talk them into sacrificing themselves for a vague promise of 72 virgins after death. The terrorist dead-enders are still out there, but if we as a nation can just keep from fucking it up, it's just possible that we might be able to help the protesters and fighters in Egypt and Libya and Yemen and every other country that's trying to shake off the despots we've tolerated in the name of oil to pull their nations, kicking and screaming if necessary, into the present. And then our task will be to keep our own from slding back to the past.

I'm not going to be opining much about the 9/11 anniversary, other than just a comparatively dispassionate piece I'll put up on Sunday about my own experiences on that day, because frankly, after a decade of living in a nation governed by one party that is willing to use fear and terror to further its own agenda and another so terrified of that party that it refues to call the sky blue if the other one says it's yellow, I just don't want to relive the last decade. And while New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg has taken a lot of crap for limiting the invited guests to Sunday's memorial to the families of those lost, Sunday really should be for them, not for those of us who only had to watch it on TV and then get on with our lives.

And in the midst of all this, President Please-Like-Me was on the teevee again last night, doing another one of his quasi-populist bellowings in front of a Congress that predictably either sat on its hands of applauded furiously depending on which party they represent. The aforementioned Andrew Sullivan is so far into penitence mode that he actually used the name "Harry Truman" in his critique of the speech, so desperate is he to find something strong and resolute in this president. This was Obama's time to say, "You guys fucked this up, I've spent three years trying to fix it, and you've blocked me every step of the way. I'm sick of dealing with you, now here's what we're going to do." But instead he patronized the crowded under-bus crowd with a few crumb-words like "union" and "polluters" while talking about starving Social Security with "payroll tax cuts" (the better to gut it later in his quest to be Nixon in China) and making sure that already highly-skilled unemployed Americans have NO time to go on interviews for jobs that might pay a living wage by making them work for private companies for the pittance that unemployment pays. But hey, at least American companies will have access to cheap labor....and we'll see how many of them actually hire these people at even one penny more than unemployment pays.

Sullivan isn't the only one sold on the speech, but we know this guy gives good speechifying. But as Digby notes, after a bit of lip service paid to liberal ideals, the rest of it was all about cutting spending, making Medicare unavailable to people between the ages of 65 and 67, and tax cuts that are unlikely to get enough fuel into the demand side of the economy to get this stalled-out engine going again.

Happy Friday, everyone.

Just wonderin', is all

Let me see if I have this right: investors are fleeing stocks because Standard & Poors downgraded U.S. debt, and they're moving their money into....U.S. Treasury bonds.



And these are the people to whom we trust our retirement savings?

Fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy day

As I write this, S&P futures are down 25.50 or 2.13%. The NASDAQ is down 41 (1.87%). The Dow is down 192 (1.68%). This is on top of last week's bloodbath.

Let's just for the sake of argument say that you still have a job, one that pays a living salary, offers health insurance, and even still has a 401(k) match. You've been taking advantage of that match, putting as much as you can into that 401(k), with a good balance of stocks and bonds for your age. You are somewhere between 45 and 57 years old. Let's say you have a house, and you're not underwater because you bought between 1992 and 2004, maybe even earlier. Your house has lost some of its value, but you're still breaking even on it and even have a little equity, becuase when you bought it, you didn't buy more house than you could afford, and whatever updates you've done have been done without equity loans and you've done as much yourself as you could. Maybe you took a small loan right before your oldest graduated high school so you could take your family on a really nice family vacation for the last time, but you paid it back quickly. You drive an older car, get the oil changed regularly, and when something goes wrong you fix it, instead of buying or leasing a new one. Your kids are going to state colleges, or maybe they're starting out at a community college to avoid graduating with a debt the size of a mortgage. When your oldest graduated high school, you managed to find a 10-year-old Civic with 100,000 miles on it that got a clean bill of health from the local mechanic who does your car repairs at a lower cost than the dealer. You've tried, and largely succeeded in living a good middle class life and weathered some rough economic times. You and your kids didn't get everything you wanted when you wanted it, but you live pretty well, you're self-sufficient, and you thought you were prepared for whatever the future held.

Politically, you regard yourself as an independent. If someone asks, you say you vote for the candidate, not the party. But for the most part, you don't pay a lot of attention to politics. You're just too busy working and running around all over the place for your kids that are still at home. You have a vague sense that the system isn't working but you really don't have time to care all that much.
You've been a responsible adult, one who lives pretty well but also prepares for unforseen circumstances -- the baseball that the kids hit through your front window, the water heater that blew on a Sunday, the fender-bender in the supermarket parking lot, the trip to the emergency room when your youngest got bitten by a feral kitten he'd been playing with.

You're hoping to be able to keep your job until you retire, and you've figured that if you can do that, you should be reasonably well set. You don't think much about Social Security because you've been hearing for three decades of its imminent demise so you've worked your savings plan around the possibility that it won't be there. You haven't put away as much as you should, but you think you'll be OK when the time comes -- when you even think about it, which isn't very often.

What you didn't prepare for was for the government of this country to be taken up by a bunch if moronic, ignorant, lickspittle fanatics. You didn't prepare for the 46" flatscreen TV that waited till the price came down to buy feeding out into the ether a constant drumbeat of Tea Party nonsense being presented by so-called sober news people as being a viewpoint equal to demonstrable fact. You didn't prepare for the greed that you always knew was part of the executive suite to complete devour the entire economy. And with everything you've heard about a diversified portfolio of stocks and bonds that usually return around 6-10% a year, you've figured that the money you put into your 401(k) would only grow.

Welcome to your rude awakening, folks, because thanks to our Tea Party friends, you're going tp send the next week watching your best-laid plans disappear.

Oh, wait. Since I started writing this, the futures have changed. Dow futures are now down 280 (2.46%), the S&P is down 31.70, and the NASDAQ is down 56.

People like the one I've described above have been laboring under the delusion that because THEY haven't made the same mistakes that have driven others out of the middle class into poverty, it can't happen to them. They can't understand why Verizon workers went on strike yesterday against a company that made $2.5 billion in profits last year and whose CEO scored a cool $18.1 million in compensation to try to save their benefits. After all, who of us even HAS a defined benefit pension anymore? And while our theoretical middle-class person above is busy shaking his head at teachers and firefighters and the IBEW, the life he's built has been slowly being pulled out from under him. And by the way, the "secure" job our theoretical middle class person has is going to be at risk the minute his employer, reeling from the drop in the company's stock as part of this bloodbath, decides to jettison a few tens of thousands of people in order to cut costs.

I could post that George Carlin video again, but what would be the point? Those who already get what is happening to the middle class in this country don't need to see it again, and the ones who don't, who are still blaming liberals and gays and abortion and the New Deal and blacks and poor people aren't reading this blog anyway.

So fasten your seat belts, folks...because even though S&P made a $2 trillion error in calculating long-term deficits, its decision to side with the teabaggers means that you and your long-term future are totally and utterly screwed.

Someone in the mainstream media actually gets it right

After the nauseating spectacle of John Harwood playing the "Both Sides Are At Fault" game on, of all things, Rachel Maddow's show last night, I was heartened to see this from Yahoo News, by Daniel Gross:

S&P, which covered itself in a substance other than glory during the mortgage crisis, may have a poor record and strange methodology when it comes to sovereign ratings. France, which has a far higher debt per capita ratio than the U.S., still enjoys a AAA rating. And a downgrade, alone, doesn't mean U.S. interest rates will spike -- on Monday or at any time in the future. Japan's credit rating was downgraded several years ago, when the interest rates its government paid on bonds was already extremely low, and they've generally trended lower in the years since.

Market conditions, the trajectory of economic growth and relative value can play as big -- if not a bigger -- of a role in determining interest rates than a rating.

But that doesn't mean we should ignore S&P's Friday evening shot across the bow. In downgrading the U.S.'s credit rating, S&P points out what has long been obvious: Washington's inability to come to an agreement on how to close the large fiscal gaps that have emerged since the recession began is troubling. Recent events have sapped the agency's confidence that the government can and will do what is necessary to align revenues with spending commitments. And it's difficult to escape the conclusion that America's credit rating was intentionally sabotaged by Congressional Republicans.

It has long been obvious to all observers -- to economists, to politicians, to anti-deficit groups, to the ratings agencies -- that closing fiscal gaps will require tax increases, or the closure of big tax loopholes, or significant tax reform that will raise significantly larger sums of tax revenue than the system does now. Today, taxes as a percentage of GDP are at historic lows. Marginal rates on income and investments are at historic lows. Corporate tax receipts as a percentage of GDP are at historic lows. Perhaps taxes don't need to rise this year or next, but they do need to go up in the future.

Otherwise, the math of deficit reduction simply doesn't work. And that's how the deficit reduction deals signed off on by Republican presidents like Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush came about.

Yet the action in Washington in the past year has all gone in the opposite direction. President Obama deserves some of the blame. Several months ago, he struck a deal with Congress to make the fiscal situation worse -- extending the Bush tax cuts for two more years and enacting a temporary cut in the payroll tax.

But Congressional Republicans deserve much more of the blame. For this calamity was entirely man-made -- even intentional. The contemporary Republican Party is fixated on taxes. It possesses an iron-clad belief that the existing tax rates should never go up, that loopholes shouldn't be closed unless they're offset by other tax reductions, that the fact that hedge fund managers pay lower tax rates than school teachers makes complete sense, that a reversion to the tax rates of the prosperous 1990's or 1980's would be unacceptable.

In the past two years, this attitude has combined with a general hostility to playing ball with Democrats on large legislative issues, a near-blanket refusal to conduct business with President Obama, and, since the arrival of the raucous Tea Party freshman, a cavalier attitude toward the nation's obligations. It was common to hear duly elected legislators argue that it wouldn't be a big deal if the government were to pierce the debt ceiling and default on its debts.

For decades we've heard that Democrats and liberals are Communists, terrorist sympathizers, traitors, and threats to all that is Good and Holy in America. But what could be more traitorous then deliberately trying to tank the economy and cause global economic collapse out of nothing other than petty vindictiveness and lust for power?

(via)

Eric Cantor shows that George Carlin was right.

I want you to bookmark this post, in which I once again note what George Carlin said back in 2005, barely three years before he decided he'd had enough of this Goddess-forsaken level of reality and checked out of this mortal coil. Bookmark it and watch it every single day for the rest of your life, just to make sure that you're not surprised when the social safety net is completely eliminated because we have to shovel more and more and more and more and more and more and more cash into the pockets of people who already have more than they can spend in 1000 lifetimes. At the very least, watch it every single fucking day until the 2012 eletion, just in case you're ever inclined to believe it again when Barack Obama says he's fighting for you, or Nancy Pelosi says NEXT time we'll draw a line in the sand. You can donate to Blue America candidates if you want, like I did yesterday because I wanted a shot at winning a Green Day-autographed Fender Stratocaster for Mr. Brilliant that he didn't even want because he has a Fernandes electric guitar that he insists is a nicer guitar than today's Strats, but that I figured we could sell and donate the proceeds to some worthy cause because while I adore my colleague whose 12-year-old loves Green Day, I'm not giving a 12-year-old a Stratocaster.

Anyway, if you're like me, you kept checking the bloodbath on Wall Street yesterday, wondering just how much less your retirement savings were going to be worth by the end of the day. I'm not going to say I've done everything right financially in my life. If I had back the money I spent on clothes I bought because they were on sale and never wore and eventually took over to the Caring About the Strays thrift shop I'd probably have at least a few thousand dollars to show for it. Seriously -- I've sold at least 36 pairs of leggings at garage sales for a buck a pair and still kept a few for working out. At one time I thought those were the only pants I'd ever be able to wear, so I bought them whenever they were ten bucks in the Newport News catalog. Then there's the small collection of antique cloche hats that I bought during my Roaring Twenties phase, and the Edwardian costume hats I bought during my Gilded Age phase, and all kinds of other assorted crap I didn't need. But while I didn't start putting any real money into 401(k) plans (yes, Gen-Xers, I came along too late for defined benefit pensions) until I was well into my thirties, I've been diligent ever since and lucky enough to work for employers for the last decade who also kicked in a fair amount. You see, I've always assumed that Social Secrity wouldn't be there for me, because Republicans have been making noise for the last thirty years that they want to get rid of it.

What I didn't bank on is that they also wanted us to get sick and die quickly once we reached a certain age. I know now that it was silly to think that way, especially since I knew that Republicans, blinded with greed as they are, HAVE no souls and HAVE no empathy with those who are poor, or elderly, or disabled. But would they be monsters enough to pull the rug out from the Federal health care system that provides medical care for those who could never possibly buy insurance on the open market, either because they are too sick already or because the actuarial tables don't favor them as profitable?

Well, now we know the answer. Yes they would. And that shandeh far di goyim Eric Cantor is leading the charge:

If you, like me, are over 55, do NOT take any comfort in Cantor's statement that you will be "indemnified" from being cast out on the street. The only thing that Cantor wants to "indemnify" is the Republican Party against a wholesale rejection by every single person in this country who is over 55. Because what Cantor is doing here is not just trying to shore up Republican support among the elderly and soon-to-be-elderly, but also to foment generational warfare. I mean, Gen X would line up all baby boomers against a wall and shoot us TODAY if they thought they could get away with it. What do you think is going to happen in the near-term future, as more Marco Rubios enter Congress, and the now-elderly boomers, having seen our retirement savings collapse and can't even vote anymore because we are now living on the streets, no longer have ANY political clout? If you're already on Social Security and Medicare today, they'll leave you alone because not even David Brooks would tolerate them yanking your benefits from you. But if you are NOT yet in the system, if you are age 61 or under, heed George Carlin's words: They're coming for your Social Security. If you are age 64 or under heed his larger point: they're coming for your Medicare. And the Democrats have proven with this debt ceiling cave-in that they will do absolutely nothing to stop them.

Another columnist uses the "T" word

It's too bad guys like Fareed Zakaria and Joe Nocera, the latter of whom is the latest pundit to recognize out loud that the Tea Party members of Congress are nothing but economic terrorists bent on the destruction of this country in their lust for power, weren't talking like this two years ago, when a very small but vocal minority of Americans, whipped into a frenzy by Rick Santelli and the Koch Brothers, went to rallies dressed up in 18th century costumes spouting nonsense about a Constitution they didn't understand and about keeping the government's hands off their Medicare. The Tea Party was loud and shrill and "colorful", so the media elevated an ignorant fringe to the status of Major National Movement, and now here we are. While I'm glad it isn't just Krugman anymore, there does seem to be an element of closing the barn door after the horse has escaped to Nocera's column today (NYT link):

These last few months, much of the country has watched in horror as the Tea Party Republicans have waged jihad on the American people. Their intransigent demands for deep spending cuts, coupled with their almost gleeful willingness to destroy one of America’s most invaluable assets, its full faith and credit, were incredibly irresponsible. But they didn’t care. Their goal, they believed, was worth blowing up the country for, if that’s what it took.

Like ideologues everywhere, they scorned compromise. When John Boehner, the House speaker, tried to cut a deal with President Obama that included some modest revenue increases, they humiliated him. After this latest agreement was finally struck on Sunday night — amounting to a near-complete capitulation by Obama — Tea Party members went on Fox News to complain that it only called for $2.4 trillion in cuts, instead of $4 trillion. It was head-spinning.

All day Monday, the blogosphere and the talk shows mused about which party would come out ahead politically. Honestly, who cares? What ought to matter is not how these spending cuts will affect our politicians, but how they’ll affect the country. And I’m not even talking about the terrible toll $2.4 trillion in cuts will take on the poor and the middle class. I am talking about their effect on America’s still-ailing economy.

America’s real crisis is not a debt crisis. It’s an unemployment crisis. Yet this agreement not only doesn’t address unemployment, it’s guaranteed to make it worse. (Incredibly, the Democrats even abandoned their demand for extended unemployment benefits as part of the deal.) As Mohamed El-Erian, the chief executive of the bond investment firm Pimco, told me, fiscal policy includes both a numerator and a denominator. “The numerator is debt,” he said. “But the denominator is growth.” He added, “What we have done is accelerate forward, in a self-inflicted manner, the numerator. And, in the process, we have undermined the denominator.” Economic growth could have gone a long way toward shrinking the deficit, while helping put people to work. The spending cuts will shrink growth and raise the likelihood of pushing the country back into recession.

Last night we heard that Obama WAS willing to play the 14th Amendment card if no deal was reached. How true that is, I don't know, because apparently this came from Joe Biden rather than out of the mouth of a president whom I have become convinced has wanted draconian cuts of benefits to the elderly and the poor all along, the better to ingratiate himself with the Wall Street masters who will offer him a nice chunk of change and a cushy job when he leaves office. Because after all, what must seem more appealing right now, an eight-figure Wall Street job or enduring another four years of this? Because at this point, there's nothing to do but paraphrase Walter Mondale and the 1984 Democratic Convention again (for the second time this week): The Republicans will screw you over and so will the Democrats. The Democrats won't tell you. The Republicans will. At least with the Republicans we know what we're getting, while Nancy Pelosi makes pretty speeches and then votes "Yes" on cutting Medicare.

Yesterday I received the most disgusting piece of political mail that the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has ever sent. It has Al Franken's name on it, which I guess is designed to target the "professional left" for whom the party has such contempt, and it exhorts me to "stop the radical right." Contained in the letter are the following postcards:



Who the hell do they think they're kidding?

Raising the Medicare eligibility age is stupid and counterproductive

It's like making everyone who doesn't live in a a flood plain or hurricane-prone area wait 2 years to get homeowners insurance while taking all comers in Florida right away. The whole thing with insurance is that is spreads the risk. If Barack Obama is ready to bargain away Medicare kick-in at 65, he's capitulating to Teh Stupid for no reason at all.

Rick Ungar explains:

Not surprisingly, younger participants in Medicare spend a lot less of the government’s money than older beneficiaries simply because they don’t get sick as often as the older folks. By cutting out the youngest in the Medicare program – those who are 65 to 67 – the government would be kicking out the very beneficiaries whose monthly payments are most likely to stay in the system where their money helps to pay for the care of older participants. Why? Because these younger payers are less likely to require the government to make payouts on their own behalf.

In the meantime, the burden of insuring those who would be denied Medicare for a few years would fall to employers – assuming those over 65 can still be employed – where things can get pretty expensive when having to insure someone who is now in the very oldest employee demographic.

As for those who are no longer employed, it would get very scary as purchasing insurance at 65 can be an ugly adventure – even with the benefit of Obamacare.

I support the President in his willingness to make the hard decisions to get the country back on a sound financial footing. I’m even willing to consider changes in programs I very much believe in, such as Medicare, if those changes will preserve the program’s finances going forward.

But is it asking too much that if cuts are to be undertaken that the changes actually do something rather than simply appear to do something?

You'd think, wouldn't you? But when what we have is government-by-kabuki, the old rules no longer apply.

You can never post this enough times

Best. Idea. Ever.

This sounds like a great way to get karmic brownie points (from Digby):

I have a business idea. Who wants to incorporate and and sell themselves to jobless people as their "current job" for resume purposes? You could just charge a little fee if the person gets the job. Why not? It's no more immoral than saying people shouldn't be allowed to work if they aren't already working.

This business about not being willing to hire the unemployed is reprehensible. I was laid off from a job three years ago not through any fault of my own, but because the grant money ran out and I had less seniority than my peer who stayed (there were two of us and they could only afford to pay one). I managed to get my current job during a very small window when anyone with even passing familiarity with the job function could get hired, but then I set my mind to essentially starting from scratch. Yes, it required a lot of effort, but if a person can learn, that person can get up to speed quickly.

Mr. Brilliant is currently working at a contract job that pays significantly less than he was making before he was one of at least six people over the age of fifty let go from his last job, and has nothing to do with what his skills are, but at least he can tell people who might have "permanent" jobs available that he's working.

If you had any doubt that there is a systematic attempt underfoot to completely eliminate the middle class, here it is. Those who have lost their jobs have a head start on the road down to grinding poverty, and those in a position to hire (you know, those "job creators" that John Boehner always talks about) want to make damn sure they stay that way. Meanwhile, those of us who DO still have good-paying jobs burn out, then try to take some much-needed vacation time and spend it with gnawing anxiety about whether they'll still be seen as valuable after taking a few days off.

The Republicans, particularly the Tea Party wing, has been masterful at taking jobs as an issue out of the public consciousness entirely because of this debt issue. Remember when the Republicans ran on job creation? Where are the jobs? And what does John Boehner expect the "99ers" to do now? Die in the street?

Around the Blogroll and Elsewhere

I've been scrambling like mad lately, and even though in theory I have a few days off, I have to get some things done around this house or else we might as well bulldoze the whole place and start from scratch.

So take a tour of those who are far more disciplined than I:

Karen Garcia reads David Brooks and wishes she hadn't.

Jess finds her inner nerd. (I link to this because it reminds me of when Mr. Brilliant introduced me to reggae and afropop music back in 1983...and we're celebrating our 25th wedding anniversary in September. Make whatever connections there that you like.)

Tom Degan on the (unfortunately largely successful, though the Democrats don't seem to realize it yet) efforts by Republicans to make sure anyone who wants to vote them out of office doesn't get to vote.

On the day after yet more conciliatory bullshit from President Kiss Republican Ass, I'm linking to The New York Crank's speech he WISHES Obama would give.

Legal Schnauzer wonders why Karl Rove is going to an event in a backwater town in Alabama.

Kyle Leighton demonstrates that the when Boehner talks about Social Security and Medicare being the biggest contributors to our debt, it's because our biggest debtor isn't China, it's ourselves. Boehner's owners went on a bender using that money and now don't want to have to pay it back to elderly, disabled, and sick people who can either pay the rent this month or eat, but not both.

At Mother Jones, an article about the epidemic of teen suicide in Michele Bachmann's district.

At Balloon Juice, ABL notes that Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, having instituted voter ID laws, is now trying to make sure that people in Democratic areas will be unable to obtain the necessary ID.

When ideology and lust for power trumps EVERYTHING

We are already starting to see what happens when a political party is hijacked by people who are crazy AND stupid (NYT link):

Even though many on Wall Street believe that a default remains unlikely, the financial markets are starting to become agitated. Volatility in stocks has soared, and some investors say stock prices are falling because a United States default could severely raise companies’ costs of doing business.

In the Treasury market, investors are starting to sell, fearing that the government will not make good on some interest payments that will be due next month. And complex financial instruments that will pay out if the United States defaults have become twice as expensive to buy as they were at the start of the year.

Analysts say the signs of panic are small for now.

“The metaphor is a pile of sand,” said Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. “You keep putting one piece of sand on the pile, nothing happens, and then, all of the sudden it just caves.”

Several traders and bankers, including Mr. Zandi, said the imminence of a possible default was already damaging the United States’ standing as the most creditworthy country in the world. The tarnished reputation may linger, even if the government reaches a deal, and especially if the country’s financial books remain unbalanced.

“Our aura is diminished. You know people really view the U.S. as the AAA, the gold standard, and I think we’re tarnishing that,” Mr. Zandi said.

The government began preparing for much tougher borrowing conditions in the years since the financial crisis, shifting toward issuing longer-term debt. This was especially needed because much of the debt issued to cover the financial crisis of 2008 was short-term debt.

The United States still enjoys low borrowing costs — below 3 percent on a 10-year-note — but there is fear that the theatrics around the current debate will increase those costs. Low national borrowing costs translate into lower borrowing costs for American corporations and individuals.

You'd think the crazies that have hijacked the Republican party would listen to their deity, Ronald Reagan:

These reactionaries who control the Republican Party now like to talk about how the Federal budget is just like a household one. But when someone running a household finds himself $20,000 in credit card debt, he doesn't stop paying the mortgage and tell his child who has cystic fibrosis that he can't afford her treatment anymore and tell his boss he can't come to work because he can't buy gasoline and instead has to send all that money to Capital One so that he can pay off $25,000 by the end of next month. What he does is cut out luxuries -- the lattes he buys on his way to work, his gym membership, the weekly dinners at Enzo's Casa La Expensive. He decides what he really needs and comes up with a plan to pay off his debt over the long haul. And he considers taking a second job on weekends or setting up a small business to bring in some extra money. Perhaps his wife decides that now that the sick child seems to be doing OK, she can go back to work. Because if it's important to him to pay off that debt, he's going to go at it from both the spending and the revenue side.

But for today's Republicans, it all has to be from the spending side. And it all has to be taken from the elderly and the poor, which is like the fictional guy I cited above deciding that he has to pay off his debt by stopping his child's treatments and medications because he simply can't wake up without a Starbuck's venti latte with an extra shot of espresso every morning and working out at home is for wusses.

Yesterday I posted about freshman Republicans who are still bringing home the bacon to their home states because one state's pork is another state's vital project. They refuse to cut their own projects. They refuse to cut the military, despite the trillions being spent on two pointless wars and military actions that always threaten to become a third. They refuse to ask the population equivalent of the guy for whom a thermos of coffee from home isn't good enough because he's rather sacrifice his kid's lifesaving meds than give up his Starbuck's to do without the latte and kick in a few more pennies. If this country is like a household, and it's like the family I created for illustration purposes, then the Republicans and their rich donors are like the father in this fictional family if his attitude were "If the kid dies, she dies. She costs me too much money anyway. And oh, Mom? We can't afford to have you live here anymore. Your stuff will be out by the curb tomorrow."

Now here's something to look forward to

It's almost enough to make you think maybe this should happen while Republicans are running things:

Weakening economic conditions will come together in 2013 and create a "perfect storm" of global weakness, economist Nouriel Roubini told CNBC.

Known for his generally dour outlook that helped him see the financial crisis before it hit in 2008, Roubini said the US, European nations and others have become adept enough at forestalling their problems that a true crisis won't hit until 2013.

But when it does, the effects are likely to be painful.

"My prediction for the perfect storm is not this year or next year but 2013, because everybody is kicking the can down the road," he said in a live interview. "We now have a problem in the US after the election if we don't resolve our fiscal problems. China is overheating...eventually it's going to have a hard landing."

In the nearer term, Roubini sees slow but steady growth in the US, with gross domestic product likely to be a bit above 2 percent, with unemployment and housing continuing to hold back the economy.

From there, recovery will be difficult as the government cuts spending and raises taxes to ease pressure from the bulging debt and deficit issues.

At the same time, euro zone periphery nations like Greece, Portugal and Spain will continue to wrestle with their own debt problems, and China will act to prevent inflation from getting out of control.

Then the storm hits, he said.

If Bernie Sanders is right and the corporations and banks have already written off America once they finish sucking everything they can out of it, the global economic collapse they're so busy architecting may result in the emerging countries they're counting on not having anything left for them to suck either.

I think we all know how this is going to play out

In 2003, we saw a president who wanted to prove something to his father to resolve his childhood conflict take us into a completely unnecessary war, one which has cost us trillions in national wealth and thousands of lives.

Today we have a president so invested in proving he is no threat to the mainstream that he is going to inevitably allow the nation to succumb to a renewed recession -- or worse, simply because of his own need to belief that he can somehow transcend deep-seated differences.

Krugman, in the New York Times today:

The federal debt limit is a strange quirk of U.S. budget law: since debt is the consequence of decisions about taxing and spending, and Congress already makes those taxing and spending decisions, why require an additional vote on debt? And traditionally the debt limit has been treated as a minor detail. During the administration of former President George W. Bush — who added more than $4 trillion to the national debt — Congress, with little fanfare, voted to raise the debt ceiling no less than seven times.

So the use of the debt ceiling to extort political concessions is something new in American politics. And it seems to have come as a complete surprise to Mr. Obama.

Last December, after Mr. Obama agreed to extend the Bush tax cuts — a move that many people, myself included, viewed as in effect a concession to Republican blackmail — Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic asked why the deal hadn’t included a rise in the debt limit, so as to forestall another hostage situation (my words, not Mr. Ambinder’s).

The president’s response seemed clueless even then. He asserted that “nobody, Democrat or Republican, is willing to see the full faith and credit of the United States government collapse,” and that he was sure that John Boehner, as speaker of the House, would accept his “responsibilities to govern.”

Well, we’ve seen how that worked out.

Now, Mr. Obama was right about the dangers of failing to raise the debt limit. In fact, he understated the case, by focusing only on financial confidence.

Not that the confidence issue is trivial. Failure to raise the debt limit — which would, among other things, disrupt payments on existing debt — could convince investors that the United States is no longer a serious, responsible country, with nasty consequences. Furthermore, nobody knows what a U.S. default would do to the world financial system, which is built on the presumption that U.S. government debt is the ultimate safe asset.

But confidence isn’t the only thing at stake. Failure to raise the debt limit would also force the U.S. government to make drastic, immediate spending cuts, on a scale that would dwarf the austerity currently being imposed on Greece. And don’t believe the nonsense about the benefits of spending cuts that has taken over much of our public discourse: slashing spending at a time when the economy is deeply depressed would destroy hundreds of thousands and quite possibly millions of jobs.

So failure to reach a debt deal would have very bad consequences. But here’s the thing: Mr. Obama must be prepared to face those consequences if he wants his presidency to survive.

Bear in mind that G.O.P. leaders don’t actually care about the level of debt. Instead, they’re using the threat of a debt crisis to impose an ideological agenda. If you had any doubt about that, last week’s tantrum should have convinced you. Democrats engaged in debt negotiations argued that since we’re supposedly in dire fiscal straits, we should talk about limiting tax breaks for corporate jets and hedge-fund managers as well as slashing aid to the poor and unlucky. And Republicans, in response, walked out of the talks.

So what’s really going on is extortion pure and simple. As Mike Konczal of the Roosevelt Institute puts it, the G.O.P. has, in effect, come around with baseball bats and declared, “Nice economy you have here. A real shame if something happened to it.”

And the reason Republicans are doing this is because they must believe that it will work: Mr. Obama caved in over tax cuts, and they expect him to cave again. They believe that they have the upper hand, because the public will blame the president for the economic crisis they’re threatening to create. In fact, it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that G.O.P. leaders actually want the economy to perform badly.

This fits nicely into what Bernie Sanders was saying on the Randi Rhodes Show the other day -- that the moneyed interests that have taken over our government really do not care what is left behind after their pillage, because they are already looking ahead to China and India. The notion that if the U.S. defaults on its debt, Wall Street will suffer too has been held up as a talisman against the assured destruction being held over our heads by the Republicans. Believe me, the big investors have already taken care of this in regard to their own interests...and investors who have less than billions of dollars don't even figure into this equation. Your 401(k)? Of no importance to these people whatsoever. Families being tossed into the streets? Old people dying in the gutters? Trivial. Because when people are as evil as those who currently dominate the Republican Party and their billionaire masters, it's impossible to fight them until you at least recgnize them.

In his 1983 book People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil, the late M. Scott Peck referred to scapegoating as the primary manifesation of evil:

A predominant characteristic, however, of those I call evil is scapegoating. Because they consider themselves beyond reproach, they must lash out at anyone who does reproach them. They sacrifice others to serve their self-image of perfection.

It's easy to see why people like this take Ayn Rand as their political guru, for Randian Objectivism reinforces their sense of "specialness."

Peck goes on:

Since the evil, deep down, feel themselves to be faultless, it is inevitable that when they are in conflict with the world they will invariably perceive the conflict as the world's fault.

[...]

Evil, then, is most often committed in order to scapegoat...

Look at the the Koch Republican Party's scapegoats are: Women, especially women who want reproductive autonomy. Immigrants. Liberals. Black people. George Soros. Gays. The list goes on and on. This is the Peck model made real -- evil people scapegoating others so as to pass the "hot potato" of evil onto someone else.

What Peck didn't address in his analysis was greed. The book's primary example of evil is the Vietnam-era My Lai massacre, so he thinks of evil primarily in terms of war. He presumably would make the same connection of evil with the atrocities at Abu Ghraib. But the kind of evil that would deliberately destroy the economy of a once-great nation purely out of greed, because there's another emerging market just across the sea that is just waiting for exploitation is something of which even Peck never dreamed.

Nor, apparently, has Barack Obama.

Even in his speech the other day, the one that prompted the hacktacular Mark Halperin to call him a dick, Obama still remained hopeful that the Republicans would ultimately step back from the brink and compromise. When one is simply misguided, but not evil, it's impossible to fathom party leaders who would destroy an entire country at the behest of the people who finance their campaigns. But that is what Barack Obama is dealing with, and that is why if he doesn't recognize pretty damn soon that what he is dealing with is not simple political differences, but a particularly vile form of evil, then we are all completely fucked.

I think we know already how this will play out.