If you still have any hope at all that anything of this nation can be salvaged...

Right now I find myself inclined to sit out next year's election, unless something amazing happens, like Jeff Gardner deciding to run against Scott Garrett (my I Was a Teabagger Before It Was Cool Congressman who voted No on the debt deal because it didn't make draconian cuts to Social Security and Medicare), or there's an actual alternative to the hacks and cronies who will be running to keep their council seats in my town.

I loves me some Randi Rhodes, but listening to her this week really HAS been listening to a leftist equivalent of Fox and Friends, because she's been twisting herself into pretzels in some alternate universe in which Barack Obama is the winner of this debt ceiling battle. It's the 11-dimensional chess theory run amok and it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. At what point do we recognize that the guy who managed to get guys into Pakistan and finally kill Osama Bin Laden is, in fact, doing exactly what he wants to do, and what we elected in 2008 was a Wall Street Republican?

So if we assume that Obama really does want to cut entitlements and despite his rhetoric, is just fine with the wealthiest people in this country not having to share in the shared sacrifice being demanded of everyone else, then what reason is there to vote next year?

Well, there are a couple of reasons if you live in one of the Congressional districts that is featuring actual progressive candidates. And The Blue America People Who Ignore This Blog But Are Still Doing Great Work have assembled them in one place so that if you are so inclined, and if you still have a job, you can toss a few shekels to these candidates (and yes, one of them is Alan Grayson), who really DO offer an alternative to the wussy, gutless wonders who currently populate Democratic Washington.

If you're so inclined, check them out here.

Before you get optimistic over those job numbers...

I have no doubt that the Obama administration will start crowing about the job creation numbers under its watch. The reality, however, is that the jobs being created are not the kind of support-a-family, keep-you-in-the-middle-class jobs. No, the new job market in the U.S. is a job market specifically designed to work everyone to death in their new status as working poor:

Did you hear the happy news? Dollar General stores will hire 6,000 people this year. Yes America, hiring is back!

Actually, curb the enthusiasm. This isn't the stuff that robust middle class recoveries are made of. According to Payscale.com, the Dollar General chain pays its assistant managers $9.22 an hour and store managers $11.51 an hour. Cashiers and sales associates make barely over minimum wage. We're talking about thousands of new jobs between $20,000 and $30,000 a year.

It's a sign of the times. Low-wage jobs, including everything from retail sales associates to home health aides, are the bread and butter of our employment boom, while middle income jobs are on the decline.

Among the top ten occupations projected to have the largest numerical growth in the next decade, seven pay median wages under $30,000 a year, including food preparers and servers earning $16,000, and retail and home care workers who make $20,000. Home aides and retail workers are expected to add about 1.4 million positions this decade while middle-class manufacturing jobs are projected to lose more than a million jobs.

This is not the kind of job swap you want to see in a world-leading economy. Peter Creticos, president and executive director for the Institute for Work and the Economy, calls it the "down waging" of American jobs, and he fears it has and will continue to hurt the economy, blunt innovation and impoverish society at large.

"We're not growing the middle, so people on the bottom have no where to go and we're putting downward pressure on good skilled jobs for those in the middle," he said. The individuals holding jobs paying near-poverty wages will be able to find work, he continued, but making ends meet will be a struggle for a growing segment of the working population. Nearly a third of working families are struggling to buy groceries and pay utility bills, according to a recent report by The Working Poor Families Project. Talk about making work not pay.

Low-wage jobs have always been part of the economic landscape, the same way every pyramid has a base. But in the last 30 years, wages at the bottom of the pyramid have barely budged but low wage jobs have grown. The Great Recession exacerbated this trend by creating a glut of needy workers who would accept even less money to get off unemployment, putting more downward pressure on lower wages.

How is the media handling this? Rather than ask how we can rescue tens of millions of underpaid workers, today's headlines pretend the real problem is greedy public sector workers. We are angry at teachers, government workers and autoworkers for the audacity of negotiating livable wages. (Remember the vitriol that spilled out against average, middle class autoworkers when the government was contemplating bailing out the auto industry? Even bankers didn't feel such rage from the public.) It's open season on teachers and government employees, especially those who are unionized and have been able to ensure a fair wage and benefits and actually live the American dream.

If you think the last three decades have been bad for unions, wait another three months. Across the country governors are trying to strip public employees of collective bargaining rights. John Kasich, the new Republican governor of Ohio, will try to take away a teacher's right to strike. "They've got good jobs, they've got high pay, they get good benefits, a great retirement. What are they striking for?" he said, as reported by the New York Times. To which, one must respond: What's wrong with fighting for high pay, good benefits and a great retirement?

Perhaps Dollar General's 6,000 new hires can take solace in a thin silver lining. At least they know politicians won't use their $20,000 salaries as political piñatas.

When I finally left my early "career" in "the exciting world of retail management" in 1980, I was making the princely sum of $12,500 a year. That was thirty years ago. In order to have the buying power that my salary in 1980 had, you would need a salary of $33,192.20 (calculated here). Today, a store manager of a Dollar General, if working 52 weeks a year and if he/she is an exempt employee (which as a manager is probably the case), that $11.51 an hour amounts to an annual salary of $23,940, or $9,015.67 in 1980 dollars. In other words, managing a Dollar General today pays even less -- about 25% less -- than I was paid in 1980 to manage the hosiery and costume jewelry departments at Bamberger's.

This is the reality today for Americans who are not bankers or corporate executives:

The decade just concluded is the first in which Americans, on average, have seen their incomes decline. Median household income increased by about $4,000 per decade in the 1980s and '90s: from $42,429 in 1980 to $46,049 in 1990 to $50,557 in 2000 (in 2007 dollars). In 2009, the most recent year for which we have figures, it had declined to $49,777 - but 2009, of course, was a year of deep recession. If we go back to the peak year of the last decade, 2007, we find that median household income was just $50,233- roughly $300 less than it had been in 2000.

Until the housing and financial bubbles burst, of course, we enjoyed the illusion of prosperity through the days of wine and credit. Now we stand on unfamiliar terrain in which almost all the signs of long-term economic health point downward. Our private sector isn't creating jobs at a rate commensurate with our increasing population, much less at a level to significantly reduce unemployment. The share of our civilian population employed has dropped to 58.2 percent - the lowest level since the early '80s, when far fewer women had entered the workforce.

Those who believe our downturn is cyclical argue that job-creating public spending can restore us to prosperity, while those who believe it's structural - that we have too many carpenters, say, and not enough nurses - believe that we should leave things be while American workers acquire new skills and enter different lines of work. But there's a third way to look at the recession: that it's institutional, that it's the consequence of the decisions by leading banks and corporations to stop investing in the job-creating enterprises that were the key to broadly shared prosperity.

Our multinational companies still invest, of course - just not at home. A study by the Business Roundtable and the U.S. Council Foundation found that the share of the profits of U.S.-based multinationals that came from their foreign affiliates had increased from 17 percent in 1977 and 27 percent in 1994 to 48.6 percent in 2006. As the companies' revenue from abroad has increased, their dependence on American consumers has diminished. The equilibrium among production, wages and purchasing power - the equilibrium that Henry Ford famously recognized when he upped his workers' pay to an unheard-of $5 a day in 1913 so they could afford to buy the cars they made, the equilibrium that became the model for 20th-century American capitalism - has been shattered. Making and selling their goods abroad, U.S. multinationals can slash their workforces and reduce their wages at home while retaining their revenue and increasing their profits. And that's exactly what they've done.

Our economic woes, then, are not simply cyclical or structural. They are also - chiefly - institutional, the consequence of U.S. corporate behavior that has plunged us into a downward cycle of underinvestment, underemployment and under-consumption. Our solutions must be similarly institutional, requiring, for starters, the seating of public and worker representatives on corporate boards. Short of that, there will be no real prospects for reversing America's downward mobility.

What I would ask our Republican congresspeople, and those like Sharron Angle, who believes that Americans are "spoiled" for their heinous crime of wanting a job that pays a living wage, is this: How do you expect this country to be successful in the future when even those fortunate enough to be able to go to college are going to find themselves emerging into the job market with what is essentially a mortgage hanging over their heads and a job market that consists of low-wage service jobs that pay less than I was making during the Arab oil embargo and recession of the late 1970's? I'm sorry, but 1% of people who are preposterously wealthy do not spend enough money to keep an economy the size of this one afloat.

Last weekend we were watching a documentary called Made in Jamaica, about the rise of reggae as a musical expression of the pain and rage of being poor in a developing nation:

MADE IN JAMAICA: Movie Trailer. Watch more top selected videos about: MADE IN JAMAICA, Jerome Laperrousaz

What purports to be a celebration of the evolution of a nation's music has as its dark underbelly the reality of Jamaica -- a country in which great wealth exists alongside intractable poverty, with very little in between. I work with a Jamaican woman with whom I chat frequently about sociopolitical issues. She talks of the distrust Jamaicans have of their government, or their conviction that the government only serves the interests of the wealthy, of the reality that what middle class there is in Jamaica tends to come here, and of the pockets of no hope and no future that exist in the urban areas of Kingston. While watching Made in Jamaica, I noted to Mr. Brilliant, "This is America's future." Because we too are headed down the road of extreme wealth existing alongside grinding poverty, with nothing in between. We're headed in that direction, but most Americans don't know it yet. So they dance to Chris Christie's tune of "blame public unions and teachers" and new Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson and North Carolina Senator Richard Burr's rhythm section, who claim that the unemployed are "too lazy" to take jobs that pay less than I made thirty years ago. They don't bother to note that these are people whose jobs have been eliminated and either sent overseas or put on the shoulders of the still-employed, who are now working themselves to an early grave because of the increased workload, or as the financial community puts it, "productivity".

Our slide to third world nationhood is now inevitable, helped along by greedy Republicans, hapless Democrats too weak to put up a fight, or too willing to pocket the table scraps of corporate money left over after Republicans stuff themselves at the corporate cash groaning board, and a willfully ignorant and stupid population that thinks that greedy grifter Sarah Palin is just like them, that Chris Christie's bullying is actually "strength" and that they simply can't be bothered finding out how their leaders are slowly killing them because after all, Jersey Shore is on.

The return of debtor's prisons

Welcome to the GOP's Dickensian America, where missed credit card payments can get you thrown in jail:

It's not a crime to owe money, and debtors' prisons were abolished in the United States in the 19th century. But people are routinely being thrown in jail for failing to pay debts. In Minnesota, which has some of the most creditor-friendly laws in the country, the use of arrest warrants against debtors has jumped 60 percent over the past four years, with 845 cases in 2009, a Star Tribune analysis of state court data has found.

Not every warrant results in an arrest, but in Minnesota many debtors spend up to 48 hours in cells with criminals. Consumer attorneys say such arrests are increasing in many states, including Arkansas, Arizona and Washington, driven by a bad economy, high consumer debt and a growing industry that buys bad debts and employs every means available to collect.

Whether a debtor is locked up depends largely on where the person lives, because enforcement is inconsistent from state to state, and even county to county.

In Illinois and southwest Indiana, some judges jail debtors for missing court-ordered debt payments. In extreme cases, people stay in jail until they raise a minimum payment. In January, a judge sentenced a Kenney, Ill., man "to indefinite incarceration" until he came up with $300 toward a lumber yard debt.

[snip]

In Minnesota, judges have issued arrest warrants for people who owe as little as $85 -- less than half the cost of housing an inmate overnight. Debtors targeted for arrest owed a median of $3,512 in 2009, up from $2,201 five years ago.

Those jailed for debts may be the least able to pay.

"It's just one more blow for people who are already struggling," said Beverly Yang, a Land of Lincoln Legal Assistance Foundation staff attorney who has represented three Illinois debtors arrested in the past two months. "They don't like being in court. They don't have cars. And if they had money to pay these collectors, they would."

The laws allowing for the arrest of someone for an unpaid debt are not new.

What is new is the rise of well-funded, aggressive and centralized collection firms, in many cases run by attorneys, that buy up unpaid debt and use the courts to collect.

And as soon as the legal system gets involved, it's all over.

It's hard to believe that this is about collecting a debt, for a destitute person cannot do much to earn a living to pay off a debt while in jail. And as the middle class is further and further eviscerated by the GOP with the help of spineless Democrats, you're going to see this country get more Dickensian by the day.

This is why the GOP's success in convincing voters with a perilous toehold in the middle class that they are the ones on the side of "ordinary Americans" is so dangerous. These voters are collaborators with the very same people whose agenda is to push them down into the ranks of the poor and take away even the little bit of power they once had.

A new study shows that Americans are Idiots

Remember how Democrats always refuse to fight back against smears because "The American people are too smart to fall for that"?

No, they aren't. In fact, Americans are no longer capable of arriving at opinions through actual thought:

Americans have a more negative view of government today than they did a decade ago, or even a few years ago. Most say it focuses on the wrong things and lack confidence that it can solve big domestic problems; this general anti-Washington sentiment is helping to fuel a potential Republican takeover of Congress next month.

But ask people what they expect the government to do for themselves and their families, and a more complicated picture emerges.

A new study by The Washington Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University shows that most Americans who say they want more limited government also call Social Security and Medicare "very important." They want Washington to be involved in schools and to help reduce poverty. Nearly half want the government to maintain a role in regulating health care.

So let's see...they like Social Security and Medicare, but they want spending cut to the bone. They want Washington to be involved in schools, but they want Washington out of their schools. They want Washington to help reduce poverty, but they don't want social programs for "Those People."

Take this woman, for example:

"I think the less the government governs us, the better we do," Norma Osuna, 48, said in a follow-up interview to the survey. A stay-at-home mother, she sees the country as going in a "socialistic" direction.

Did anyone think to ask her what her evidence was for her view that the country is going in a "socialistic" direction? Has she thought about it, or is she just parroting Glenn Beck? Do any of the journalists who talk to these people actually ask them to explain their views or how they got there?

Or how about this nitwit:

For Scottie Church, 39, of Winder, Ga., the answer is simple: "It's time to get back to basics. It's time for [the federal government] to get out of the way and let the private sector do its job."

And what, pray tell, is the private sector's job? Does Scottie Church even know? Has anyone thought to ask? If Scottie Church is talking about "capitalism", well, capitalism's job is to maximize profit. Not create jobs, maximize profit. And if maximizing profit means poisoning an entire community with toxic sludge or crude oil or benzene; if it means sending all the jobs to Asia in a never-ending chase for the most exploitable workers; if it means screwing over every man, woman and child in America, well, that's immaterial to the goals of capitalism. Capitalism is about profit, and ONLY profit. So I'd like someone to ask Scottie Church if that's what he/she means.

We are a profoundly ignorant. People don't know anything about their own religions. We know little of our own history, let alone our history in context with the rest of the world. We worship sports heroes who torture dogs, but we point at scientists and laugh. A profoundly messed-up woman like Christine O'Donnell can run on a platform of "See? I can't manage my finances either. I'm you." We had eight years of a dry drunk as president because people thought he was the guy they'd want to have a beer with -- as if that were ever going to happen. Now there are people who would vote to give the nuclear codes to an aging high school mean girl because they'd like to fuck her -- as if that's ever going to happen. Smart people are regarded with scorn as "elites." Ignorance is regarded as a virtue.

This is how an empire dies. And we are going to be around to see it.

And where are all these middle-aged people supposed to work?

Barack Obama and his bought-and-paid-for allies in Congress must be so proud at the way he's going to make people work until they drop dead in yet another vain effort to make Republicans happy:

Is there a new, bipartisan consensus forming on Capitol Hill about whether (and how) to scale back Social Security benefits? A surprising number of signs point to "yes" -- and that has many progressives looking ahead a few months to what they believe could become a serious fight.

Several of the most powerful members of the House -- Republicans and Democrats -- have recently voiced real support for the idea of raising the retirement age for people middle-aged and younger as part of a larger plan to reduce long-term deficits, inching closer to what not too long ago was the third rail of American politics.

The strongest backer of this plan is House Minority Leader John Boehner, who recently told a Pennsylvania newspaper, "I think raising the retirement age going out 20 years so you're not affecting anyone close to retirement, and eventually getting the retirement age to 70 is a step that needs to be taken."

There's no big surprise there. The Republican minority in the House doesn't have a lot of power, but if Boehner had his druthers, he might well take things quite a bit further. He's the one, after all, who won't take Social Security privatization off the table if Republicans retake the House.

It's the Democrats who have progressives feeling queasy.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer explicitly put the idea on the table as well in a speech last month. "We should consider a higher retirement age or one pegged to lifespan," Hoyer said.

He echoed House Majority Whip James Clyburn, who put it this way: "With minor changes to the program such as raising the salary cap and raising the retirement age by one month every year, the program could become solvent for the next 75 years." One month a year may not sound like much, but if you're 30 years away from retirement, that adds up to almost three years.

In the House, though, Nancy Pelosi is the linchpin, and she's not nearly as enthusiastic as her colleagues. But, notwithstanding the enthusiasm gap, she also left the possibility of raising the retirement age on the table. When asked about it by TPMDC at her press conference last week, she criticized the plan, but mainly to say she disagrees with putting Social Security on the chopping block ahead of other measures. "Why they would start talking about a place that could be harmful to our seniors -- 70 is a relative age," Pelosi said. "Around here, there's not a lot of outdoor work or heavy lifting. But for some people it is, and 70 means something different to them. So in any event let's talk about growth, lets talk about how we can reduce spending, lets put everything, those initiatives: promoting growth, tightening the belt, looking at entitlements. But let's not start on the backs of our seniors."

There's one catch, though. Last week, Democrats included a rider to the supplemental war spending bill that will likely force the House to vote on a forthcoming fiscal reform plan, if the Senate passes it first. That package is being put together by President Obama's deficit and debt commission, and will be ready to go after the midterms. Pelosi had already pledged to give the package a vote, so perhaps nothing has really changed. But in a way, she also tied her own hands: if the Senate passes a broad tax-and-entitlement reform package at the end of this Congress and her own caucus is willing, she'll be hard-pressed to stop the Social Security reforms she thinks should come last.

There's just one problem with this: Where are all these people in their fifties and sixties who have been downsized supposed to be working until age 70? Dave Johnson reports at Campaign for America's Future:

Here is a fact: There. Are. No. Jobs. I'm in Silicon Valley where the official unemployment rate dipped in May to 11.2%. This dip was, of course, because of so many people just giving up trying to get a job, certainly not because of some wave of hiring. The underemployed figure, known as "U-6," is 21.7% in California, 16.7% nationally.

You have to know someone to get a humiliating job standing on a corner waving a sign. And if you are over 40, things are even worse than that. Don't give me any conservative Rush Limbaugh-Ayn Rand dehumanizing nonsense about parasitic lazy people who won't look—there are no jobs.

I know so many people here who are over 40, were laid off in the 2000-era dot com crash, still haven't found a regular job and aren't going to. They have had occasional "contract" positions—which means no benefits, no security, a 15% "self-employment" tax and no unemployment check when the job ends. And now, 10 years later they're a lot over 40 and are not going to find a job because so many employers here won't hire people over 40.

And now there are so many more who lost their jobs in the mass layoffs of 2008-2009 and can't find a job. So many of them are also over 40. In fact, many were laid off in obvious purges of over-40 workers, offered a small severance that they could only receive if they promised to take no age-discrimination action against the employer. (I don't say "company" because some of these worked at nonprofits.)

Most of these people will not find another job, but are too young for Medicare and Social Security.

One Person's Story

I ran into a friend this weekend who I hadn't seen for a couple of years. He had been a computer engineer who had been making 6 figures in the dot-com years. Laid off in the 2000 crash, he moved in with his parents back in the Midwest and worked in a bakery. He came back out here when things picked up a bit and worked in one "contract" job after another. (Contracting is just a scam to get around employment laws—but the government doesn't enforce the rules.) But now he just can't find anything. He managed to get unemployment but now that is running out. He has no health insurance. He can't afford a place to live; he "house sits" for people or visits friends, and doesn't know what he is going to do even two days from now.

What is he going to do? Can you tell me? He has gotten a few interviews, and when they are computer-related is always told he is way overqualified, doesn't seem energetic, probably won't be willing to work 20 hours a day, doesn't look like he is up to date on things that are happening with computers, etc. (How many ways can you say "too old?") He's about 45. If things pick up he will get another job. But people just a few years older will not.

And from the comments in response to that post:

I'm 56, and trying to find work OUT of the Los Angeles area. I'd like to move to Kentucky, where my fiancee is.

Nothing.

Nada.

Not so much as a call back, and I've got 30 years of experience in copy editing, publication design, advertising design and speaking/presentation training. I've been doing web design since '94, when we had to optimize everything for dial-up modems.

I'm "too old".

I -was- told plainly by one recruiter that his employer client wouldn't consider me because health insurance for me would be too expensive, Fred. It seems experience and talent are no longer valued.

I live in Missouri and lost my 13 year job with a municipality 16 months ago because of a political turnover. Previous to this position, I was with another municipality for 18 years. Management in both positions, first as Finance, then in Human Resources. I am 56, with a Master's Degree and 31 years of municipal management experience. And - I can't get a job, to save my soul - or my house! I am either under-qualified or over-qualified or just plain don't even warrant a response at all!

If I get a response to an application or resume at all, it is that they received many applications from highly qualified people and I am not being considered. A recent submission was to a City almost the same size and budget as my previous position, doing exactly what I had been doing, and I wasn't highly qualified enough to even get an interview. Give me a break!

I lost my computer programming job in February this year.

It was nothing more than simply not having the new skill set the company required and feeling that with my workload the company would look askance at doing any on the job training. So I'm out of work and most likely out of luck.

I've had one interview since then with a local company who stated that they wanted someone who could do the work immediately without further training and who would be around for the long term. This from a company that was looking for a programmer after laying off people due to the bad economy.

Lora W., California:

I have been unemployed since 2008. I have fought to keep my home and pay the bills. I look for jobs 10 hours daily. I have filled out applications that ask if you’re under 40 or over 40. I didn’t know that was a legal question to ask. I am over 40 and I believe that is one of the reasons I do not have a job offer. I have had few interviews with one call back to say I did not get the job and another said I had the job but when I called back to inquire about my application; He said they filled the position from within the company. I cannot believe this! Where am I to go? If I cannot pay the mortgage, no home, cannot pay the phone bill, no phone, cannot pay the internet, no internet. I am at an all time low. I have always worked; you do not know how this makes me feel that I cannot support my family. How would you feel if you had to face your family with no job? I am trying but that is not good enough!

Donna K., Ohio:

I have been unemployed since Feb. 2009. It is now July 2010. I live in Highland Co., Ohio. It now has the 2nd highest unemployment rate in the state. When DHL in Clinton Co. went out of business, half of the people in Highland Co were also thrown out of work. So how can you find a job with that many people out of work. When one job opened up at a factory , 3000 people applied to it!!!! How to you compete with that many people hunting for work. All I want is to keep a roof over my head and buy groceries. There are no JOBS in my area. The stimulus that was for creating jobs has only helped those that do road work. Great for them, but what about me? I got laid off from a BANK. How ironic that is.

Nancy Ikeda's story:

After working for eight and a half years at IBM, Nancy Ikeda, 55, lost her job 13 months ago. She had lived in Binghamton, N.Y., since her daughters were in high school, but after spending most of the year looking in vain for another job, Ikeda decided she couldn’t stay any longer.

[snip]

Unskilled workers undoubtedly have the hardest time finding jobs today: many of the manufacturing jobs that fueled the engine of prosperity in the decades following World War II no longer exist in the U.S.: they have moved to Asia and Latin America. Unions have grown weaker and so are no longer able to protect workers as they once did. The corporate focus on the bottom line mandates efficiency at the expense of workers: whenever possible, expensive manpower is replaced by machinery, and even white-collar work is moved overseas, where wages are lower. In the past decade alone, 5.6 million manufacturing jobs have been lost to automation, Goodman reports.

But Ikeda has an M.B.A. “You’d think I’d be employable,” she says.

You’d think—but Ikeda belongs to the cohort of women 45 to 64 years old, and they have been hit particularly hard in this recession.

Meanwhile, here's what the people who are deciding that you and I will have to keep working, whether we can find jobs or not, until we drop dead, have to look forward to for their own retirement:

Members of Congress are not eligible for a pension until they reach the age of 50, but only if they've completed 20 years of service. Members are eligible at any age after completing 25 years of service or after they reach the age of 62. Please also note that Members of Congress have to serve at least 5 years to even receive a pension.

The amount of a congressperson's pension depends on the years of service and the average of the highest 3 years of his or her salary. By law, the starting amount of a Member's retirement annuity may not exceed 80% of his or her final salary.

According to the Congressional Research Service, 413 retired Members of Congress were receiving federal pensions based fully or in part on their congressional service as of Oct. 1, 2006. Of this number, 290 had retired under CSRS and were receiving an average annual pension of $60,972. A total of 123 Members had retired with service under both CSRS and FERS or with service under FERS only. Their average annual pension was $35,952 in 2006.

Got that? Congresspeople receive a PENSION. This is guaranteed money, not subject to the vicissitudes of the financial markets.

And here's what Barack Obama has to look forward to, even if after only four years (and not including speaking fees):

Under the Former Presidents Act, each former president is paid a lifetime, taxable pension that is equal to the annual rate of basic pay for the head of an executive federal department -- $193,400 in 2009 – the same annual salary paid to secretaries of the Cabinet agencies.

Each former president and vice president may also take advantage of funds allocated by Congress to help facilitate their transition to private life. These funds are used to provide suitable office space, staff compensation, communications services, and printing and postage associated with the transition.

But YOU have to work until you are seventy.

It's one thing to be Ringo Starr, and to tour the world doing what you love with your friends. It's quite another to be subject to management whims and moods, bad acquisitions, personality conflicts, the need to post numbers Wall Street will like every quarter, and the reality of being jettisoned simply because we are no longer young.

It would be better for them to just line us all up against the wall and give us a merciful bullet to the head. Of course that would require things like empathy and humanity -- and acknowledgement that they don't give a shit about actual people. But instead they will starve us out of our jobs and our homes until we die, unknown and forgotten, on the street.

THAT is Congress' and Barack Obama's American Dream.

Head, meet oven

Life is too short to spend Sunday mornings watching the Sabbath Gasbag shows. Digby explains why:

In case you were wondering, the consensus on all the Sunday gasbag shows is that Obama is an abject failure because of his radical leftist ideology and that his only hope of even maintaining the presidency, much less winning a second term is to take a sharp turn to the right and enact the Republican agenda. Several commentators, including such luminaries as political cross dresser Matthew Dowd on ABC, insisted that the first thing the president has to do is pick a huge fight with the Democrats to show the country that he isn't one of them. Cokie said he should have asked John McCain from the beginning what he was allowed to do.

The historians and expert political observers on Fareed Zakaria's CNN show all agreed that Obama is no Reagan, a president who never governed ideologically and always worked across party lines. Oh, and he needs to be a president or a prime minister, but nobody could agree on exactly what that means except that he should try to be more like Scott Brown, the white Barack Obama, except without all the liberalism.

Oddly, the Republicans weren't mentioned, although Robert Caro did note that Obama inherited something of a mess. Peggy Noonan said he ran to win not to govern and they all agreed that was a brilliant observation. Zakaria did point out that Obama had a higher approval rating at this stage than both Reagan and Clinton and that the two Bush's were higher at this point because of wars and they all stared for a moment and then went on about centrism and prime ministers again.

The Village has officially turned. I'm guessing they'll be calling for his resignation by July.

I don't think it's even going to take that long. My guess is that by the end of March they'll all be congratulating themselves at how the turned a promising Democratic president into a weakass Republican one. But a Republican is what they wanted all along. Chris Matthews' fickle thrill-leg threw them off for a while.

The Republicans will attempt to rewrite history. Will Americans buy it?

This morning Rudy Giuliani, who sold himself for eight years as the Saint of 9/11, said on two separate morning shows that no terrorist attacks occurred during the Bush years.

First he said it on Morning Schmoe until Mike Brzezinski reminded him about 9/11, then he said it on Good Morning America:

And that hack cable news whore Stephanopoulos said nothing. He didn't confront him, he didn't do anything. He has since acknowledged his "mistake" on his blog, but the damage is done, because the "low-information voters" who are susceptible to short memories are the ones watching the morning shows while they make the kids' lunches. They are not going to read a retraction on Stephanopoulos' blog.

But this is now a pattern with ex-Bushies. The tally is now Dana Perino, Mary Matalin, and Rudy Giuliani, ALL claiming that there were no terrorist attacks under the Bush Administration. Even when they clarify later on that they mean "...after 9.11", that isn't true either. We had the anthrax attacks, the shoe bomber, the DC snipers, the guy who plowed into a group of students in Chapel Hill in the name of Mohammed Atta....and that's just what I can think of. And the reality is that if the Bushistas were so successful in their so-called "war on terror", why are we still in this mess?

The Republicans are doing no less than attempting to rewrite history. They know how inattentive Americans are. They know what short memories Americans have. Republicans have always known how to play to American stupidity and willful ignorance. While the Democrats have always taken the high road and claimed that "Americans are too smart to believe....." -- Republicans know that they will believe anything if it's claimed often enough. That's how we had the Swift Boat Liars turning George Bush into a war hero and John Kerry into a chickenshit traitor. That's how we have a majority of Republicans buying into the birther nonsense. It may be cynicism, but Republicans understand this about a population that's easily distracted by reality television and their own dwindling prospects. And in four years, a majority of Americans really WILL believe that 9/11 happened on either Bill Clinton's or Barack Obama's watch. Just wait.

UPDATE: More at Scholars and Rogues, including a list of terrorist attacks that took place on US soil between September 11, 2001, and the day George W. Bush left office.

Perhaps this is why Barack Obama was allowed to win

The more we see of Barack Obama as president, the more we realize that he in no way represents change we can believe in. There is no chess game, there is no Special Barack Mojo that we just can't see yet. What there is, yet again, is a Washington outsider who doesn't understand how the game is played; who doesn't understand that Washington is run by Sally Quinn and Maureen Dowd and Little Luke Russert and Big David Gregory and Sweaty Chris Matthews -- and that even though they don't know jack shit, what they say and what they want happens. The Desiree Rogers fracas is Travel Office II: Electric Bugaloo. Gays in the military is, well, gays in the military. And health care is once again health care. If it feels to you like the Clinton era with all the media scandalmongering and none of the prosperity, you're not alone.

It's not all his fault. He came to office in a clusterfuck, and in a nation full of people whose most important issue is who is going to win American Idol, he wasn't going to have enough time to fix what ails this country. But the degree to which the WAshington Villagers want him to fail is truly spectacular. This morning I was watching The Chris Matthews Show for about five minutes and wanted to shoot myself in the face. "If he doesn't get health care, his presidency is ruined", opined one of the hackocracy on the panel. It's amazing just how much the Village wants Barack Obama to fail. It isn't just for Republicans anymore.

I'll tell you a secret. On September 12, 2001, I didn't want George W. Bush to fail. We were in a crisis, and I wanted a president who knew what the hell he was doing. We didn't have one, of course, and he didn't know what the hell he was doing, but not for one minute did I wish his failure. I don't wish Chris Christie's failure either, for all that I didn't vote for him for governor. If he can somehow manage to get New Jersey out of its fiscal mess that's all to the good.

But Barack Obama doesn't "belong", so he must be ruined. And therefore, the Washington social set has decided that if Barack Obama doesn't get health care "reform" passed, the rest of his presidency is just a waste of time.

I'm ready to say that if it DOES pass his presidency may very well be ruined.

Here's why:

The public option in the Senate bill, it should be emphasized, is a compromise of a compromise already. The first compromise was to have the public plan negotiate its rates directly with providers, rather than set them based on Medicare’s rates. This compromise meant that the Congressional Budget Office was unlikely to score the public plan as producing the huge savings that it projected for a plan that used Medicare-based rates. Whether CBO was right in discounting the negotiated-rate plan’s savings is another matter--as I have written on this site, it’s likely underestimating the cost-containment potential--but the CBO’s numbers rule on Capitol Hill.

The second compromise was to allow states that did not want to have the public plan operating within their borders to “opt out” with the passage of a state law. How many states will take advantage of this option is unclear, but it’s certain to reduce the impact of the public plan even further. Indeed, the CBO is now projecting—again, pessimistically in my view--that only a few million Americans will enroll in the public plan. Yet none of this has apparently appeased the handful of hold-outs. Emboldened by the White House’s lack of clarity and pressure on the issue, they are digging in their heels and spewing false claims about the public plan (for example, that it’s a budget buster when there are no special government subsidies for it and the CBO projects it will exert downward pressure on private premiums, thus lowering the price tag of reform). Hence the new push to find some kind of middle road.

The problem is that the “middle-ground” ideas that are currently flying around aren’t in the middle at all.

[snip]

In short, the new compromise proposals are anything but. They represent calls for advocates of the public plan to eat their crumbs and be happy. But a majority of Senators support the public plan. At least two--Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont and Senator Burris of Illinois--have said having a real public plan in the legislation is a precondition for their support. Those who believe in the public plan—and, more important, who believe in the principle it embodies: that no American who lacks access to good insurance should be forced to buy coverage from the private plans that got us into our present mess--should stand firm in the face of these non-compromises.

This includes President Obama. He made the public plan part of his promise of change in 2008. Now he needs to put his weight and influence behind the public plan and its essential goals, rather than allow them to be gutted. This is in our nation’s interest. It is also in his and his party’s political interest. A bill that forces people to take private insurance but doesn’t create competition or a public benchmark is a prescription for unaffordable coverage, runaway costs, and political backlash. The “middle ground” is nowhere to stand if it’s going to crumble beneath you.

Amen to that.

An American Ending

SC man died hungry, solo in tent, baffling friends

ANDERSON, S.C. — Friends of a 39-year-old South Carolina man are trying to figure out why he never reached out for help before dying broke and alone in a zipped-up tent on the banks of a lake.

Bright but reclusive Civil War buff David Condon lost his job at a local museum and fell behind on his rent.

Sometime in early July he disappeared. On Labor Day weekend, a group of college kids vacationing at a condo complex a few hundred yards from his tent peeked inside and found his body. The local coroner says he died of pneumonia, made worse by malnutrition. He was dehydrated and had lost 50 pounds in a few months.

His best friend, Craig Drennon, saw no sign Condon was having money problems or spiraling into despair when the two got together nearly every week to drink beers and play backgammon.

The people calling themselves Condon's "friends," he probably - & more accurately - considered "acquaintances." His disappearance alarmed no one enough to go looking for him. They ought to ask themselves exactly what they could have & would have done for the man. Passed the hat? Treated him to lunch at Burger King? Stored his possessions for him when he was evicted? Suggested he work part-time at Walmart so he could make his car payments & sleep in the backseat? Urged him to seek more help from government & nonprofit agencies? Condon knew he was up shit creek without a paddle, putting up a false front for as long as he could, then withdrawing into his humiliation & sparing others his personal misery. They ought to thank him for not interrupting their backgammon to beg for spare change.

What happened to Condon is about as authentically American an ending in 2009 as one can have, dying homeless, hungry, & mentally & physically wasted at the edge of a wealthy society that extolls self-reliance over all other personal qualities, advertises "a dollar & a dream," begrudges providing basic health care to all its citizens & won't even crack down on a financial industry that rewards failure with multi-million dollar bonuses.

I wouldn't be surprised if Condon had a useless Blackberry with no wireless service & a dead battery in his pocket.

Would somebody please remind Barack Obama that he won?

I really wanted to be wrong about this one. God knows I was wrong about John Edwards, and it is to my everlasting shame that I was. But when I just couldn't bring myself to get on the Obama bandwagon back when I was choosing a breakout session at Yearly Kos 2007, it was because of what I saw as a troubling tendency to capitulate to bullies in the name of "changing the tone." I wouldn't mind if he were simply a centrist, because given the media mouthpieces we have in this country and a peculiar American tendency towards willful ignorance, I'm not sure that even a speaker of his gifts and charisma would be able to sell a truly progressive agenda to a bunch of people who think that a song called "Barack the Magic Negro" is a lighthearted joke. But whether it's the malevolent influence of Joe Lieberman as his early mentor, an unwillingness to admit to himself that the kind of politics the Republicans play in Washington is a far cry from what they're able to get away with in predominantly Democratic Chicago, or if he just plain is a Republican in disguise, it's looking more every day like his idea of bipartisanship is less oriented towards persuasion and more the Harry Reid style of letting them take his lunch money and thanking them for doing it.

Because the Obama Economic Plan is starting to look awfully Republican to me -- and to Paul Krugman:

Let’s lay out the basics here. Other things equal, public investment is a much better way to provide economic stimulus than tax cuts, for two reasons. First, if the government spends money, that money is spent, helping support demand, whereas tax cuts may be largely saved. So public investment offers more bang for the buck. Second, public investment leaves something of value behind when the stimulus is over.

That said, there’s a problem with a public-investment-only stimulus plan, namely timing. We need stimulus fast, and there’s a limited supply of “shovel-ready” projects that can be started soon enough to deliver an economic boost any time soon. You can bulk up stimulus through other forms of spending, mainly aid to Americans in distress — unemployment benefits, food stamps, etc.. And you can also provide aid to state and local governments so that they don’t have to cut spending — avoiding anti-stimulus is a fast way to achieve net stimulus. But everything I’ve heard says that even with all these things it’s hard to come up with enough spending to provide all the aid the economy needs in 2009.

What this says is that there’s a reasonable economic case for including a significant amount of tax cuts in the package, mainly in year one.

But the numbers being reported — 40 percent of the whole, two-year plan — sound high. And all the news reports say that the high tax-cut share is intended to assuage Republicans; what this presumably means is that this was the message the off-the-record Obamanauts were told to convey.

And that’s bad news.

Look, Republicans are not going to come on board. Make 40% of the package tax cuts, they’ll demand 100%. Then they’ll start the thing about how you can’t cut taxes on people who don’t pay taxes (with only income taxes counting, of course) and demand that the plan focus on the affluent. Then they’ll demand cuts in corporate taxes. And Mitch McConnell is already saying that state and local governments should get loans, not aid — which would undermine that part of the plan, too.

OK, maybe this is just a head fake from the Obama people — they think they can win the PR battle by making bipartisan noises, then accusing the GOP of being obstructionist. But I’m really worried that they’re sending off signals of weakness right from the beginning, and that they’re just going to embolden the opposition.

Bingo. Perhaps "compromise" worked in Chicago, but it isn't going to work with Washington Republicans. Remember, these are the guys who sent paid Congressional thugs to Florida in 2000 to threaten the people who were simply trying to count all the votes. These are the guys who decided that since Ross Perot's run in 1992 meant that Bill Clinton didn't get 50% of the vote, his presidency wasn't legitimate, and they set out to first stonewall him, and then destroy his presidency -- simply because they saw ALL the power in this country as theirs by birthright. These are the guys who painted a blithering idiot as some kind of military hero and ran against a legitimate one in 2004 by painting that one as some kind of cowardly wuss.

What the hell does it take for these people to realize that You Simply Cannot Do Business With Republicans? How stubborn or naive do you have to be to watch this happen for nearly thirty years and not have it sink into your head that there is no such thing as compromise with these people?

UPDATE: Josh Marshall, as usual, nails it:

First, there seems to be a decent consensus that the tax rebates from last year had little stimulative effect on the economy. So while it's a good thing for families on the margin to get another $500 or $1,000, it's not clear how much bang for the buck you'll get for the money spent in terms of creating demand/consumer spending in the economy.

Second, the amount of the bill that comes in tax cuts leaves the spending side of the bill really small -- judged by the standards of what most economists seem to think is necessary, like $400 billion over two years. So it's not just the logic of the tax cuts on their own merits but the degree they're beggaring the spending side of the ledger. (A lot of this just comes down to whether or not you buy into the Keynesian premise of the whole exercise, of course. But let me note for the record that there does seem to be a decent rationale for significant tax cuts in year one of the bill, since you need to get money into the economy rapidly and there may not be enough projects that can be started quickly. That leaves the question of why so much of it is also included in year two. I fear that may be the 'tell'.)

Third, and in some ways this is the most troubling. It would be far better on many counts to bring in substantial Republican support for this bill. And I don't just mean that in the BS sense in which President Bush usually meant it, which was to say essentially, 'Of course we'd like you to vote for exactly what we want. More the merrier. But if you don't want to vote for our ideal bill, tough luck.' No, I think there's a real logic in not going the 51 votes model President Bush followed. But Obama seems to be telegraphing that to a significant degree the fundamental structure of the legislation is being built around accommodating the concerns of Republicans -- members of a political party that are about as unpopular and weak as you can get at the moment. And that sounds a lot like he's negotiating with himself, something that will embolden opposition and invite Republicans to up the ante even further.

Perhaps Mr. Obama has forgotten that when people don't have jobs, they don't have any income to pay taxes on, and if they don't have income on which to pay taxes, tax cuts do them no good whatsoever.

Did Tom Brokaw admit to knowing that Ohio was fixed in 2004?

If so, then we know why John McCain is spending so much time and money in Pennsylvania when it would seem to be futile.

In June of this year, I linked to this Mark Halperin blurb in which he cites John McCain telling voters in Pipersville, PA that "the state will pick the winner in November -- and he will be behind until right before the polls close."

I wondered at the time if McCain was allowing slip that the fix is in, and after watching this remark from Tom Brokaw on Press the Meat yesterday, I think it is.

MR. BROKAW: Four years ago I interviewed President Bush at a time when it looked like he may be in trouble against John Kerry, final weekend of the campaign. I showed him a map. He said, "Oh, I just don't do that. Karl Rove does that." As soon as the interview was over, he said, "I'll win here," and pointed to southeastern Ohio. Where will you win if you win?

And Karl Rove, on Fox News Sunday:

"In order for McCain to win, he's got a very steep hill to climb. He's got to win all of the toss-up states. ... Then he needs to strip away Ohio and Indiana. ... And then he needs to either win Colorado and Virginia ... or win one of them plus Pennsylvania. ... It's a steep uphill climb."

But not if the fix is in. Not if the apparatus is in place in one of those states plus Pennsylvania to cage enough voters and flip enough votes and shortchange enough machines in inner city Philadelphia to flip it for McCain.

And that, MY FRIENDS, is why John McCain is spending so much time in Pennsylvania, and why the conservative pundits are so willing and eager to chalk this election up to being over while the more mainstream pundits are falling all over themselves to try and come up with a plausible McCain victory scenario.

And this is how we wake up on November 5 to find that John McCain's herculean efforts in Pennsylvania came to fruition and brought him victory.

Because the fix is in.

And it always was.

Many more really ominous signs here.

Not with a bang but with a whimper

And so it ends, this Great Experiment of ours, this free nation forged by a bunch of hemp-smokers and womanizers who dared say no to a king and founded a nation that not so long ago was not just the most powerful nation on earth, but one admired and emulated by the rest of the world.

No more.

No longer does the rule of law take precedence over the insanity of a despotic leader. No longer does the document in which the laws that make this country what it was mean anything. It's all about perception, and not the perception of the voters, but perception of the media talking heads with their marching orders by their corporate masters to ensure that only those who would consolidate as much wealth as possible into the hands of the few, who would yoke the unwashed, impoverished masses unto themselves in a state of permanent indentured servitude, grateful for the scraps fed to them like dogs after the CEOs and board chairmen get done stuffing themselves to stupefaction, make it to the finish line.

It didn't all die today, of course. This country has been an aspirated corpse on a ventilator, a Terri Schiavo of nations, if you will, ever since the USA PATRIOT Act was passed by a House and Senate full of cowards who were too lazy to explain to the American people that turning this country into East Germany circa 1965 is not the way we defend freedom against attack.

And Barack Obama -- our party's nominee, the guy who told a generation of young people too young to remember how they killed our prophets while we stand aside and look, the guy who for a few brief moments made us think that perhaps -- just perhaps -- he might be even one iota different, succumbed to the siren song of unfettered power and said "Want. Srsly." -- as he pushed the "Yes" button when voting today.

A president completely discredited by three-quarters of the American people still has the power to cow 535 representatives into submission simply by threatening them. Whether it's threatening them with exposure of misdeeds, or threatening them with terrorist attacks for which he will hold them responsible (when he knows exactly when and where they will take place because he will allow them to happen, just as he did last time because he wanted the war and he wanted the power and he wanted Americans to be willing to give up their freedom so he could try to fill the empty hole in his soul with more money and more power), or whether it's all a sham and they're all on the same team -- the result is the same.

The rule of law only applies to us -- the citizens of what used to be the United States. And the government will be watching us for any transgression, no matter how slight. One out of every six Americans serving prison time today are in for nonviolent marijuana offenses. In some states, a felony conviction means your right to vote is rescinded forever. A president was impeached for lying about a blowjob in a civil case that had no right even being heard at that time. But today, thanks to Nancy Pelosi, who upon becoming Speaker of the House in 2007, declared herself to be George W. Bush's protector against impeachment, and Harry Reid, with his sternly worded statements with no teeth, and a bunch of venal, greedy cowards who inhabit the People's House, our elected officials, the people who long ago forgot that THEY work for US -- are no longer bound by the rule of law.

The flag for which generations of American boys have died was spat on today in the Senate -- defiled beyond recognition in a conflagration that dwarfs any protest by an irate citizen. Some of the same Senators who felt it so important to protect the flag that they would have voted for a Constitutional amendment to protect it, no longer think the Constitution is even relevant. They would protect the flag against one person trying to make a statement, but they won't protect it against an insane president and sixty-nine corrupt, craven Senators who have zero understanding of what the flag really means. It's not a cheap Chinese-made trinket to put on your lapel at election time in a display of faux-patriotism. It's not something to grandstand about when it's politically expedient. That flag stands for the document that the Senate defecated on today. The flag stands for the Great Experiment which has now irrevocably failed. Or at least it used to.

And the damnedest thing is that those sixty-nine Senators didn't even have the balls to set the damn thing aflame.