Skin Deep Thought Of The Moment

If the entire framework of political discussion in America has been dragged rightward by an increasingly extremist and influential right wing (and it most certainly has), that necessarily means self-described "centrists" have all become Republicans.

This is also a by product of a Democratic party enthralled by corporate considerations. As it drifts ever more toward the right, it pushes the center before it.



No?

Lies, Lies, Lies.

Tom Coburn is a lying sack of shit.

As Republican lies on health care go, this one's pretty despicable.
For one thing, Coburn doesn't understand what the Preventive Services Task Force said -- the mammogram recommendation had to do with research-based standards, not cost.

More important, though, the legislation's provision on a 5% tax on elective cosmetic surgery clearly excludes procedures for those with congenital abnormalities, disfiguring diseases, or traumatic injuries. Anyone requiring reconstructive surgery resulting from accidents or diseases would be exempt.

There is no "5% tax on the breast reconstruction surgery after they had a mastectomy." Coburn's making it up, hoping no one notices how offensive his lying really is.

There is no depth to which the Republican party will not stoop in defense of their corporate brethren in the parasitic health insurance industry.

Cover Of The Day

Goes to "Jailhouse Rock" as covered by the Jeff Beck Group on 1969's Beck-Ola. With the ever talented (but for decades since, musically useless) Rod Stewart growling and howling his way through the lyrics, the song is transformed into something truly dangerous. Beck's guitar wails, screams and roars all over the mix, often in the background, but no less spectacular for it. The sound and playing are incredible and almost out of control. At times I'm convinced the whole track is going to simply explode, taking my speakers with it.

Elvis covers are a dime a dozen, but this is one of the few that stands out for originality, performance, and sheer wildness.


Best played with the volume at 11.

Dilbert Spam

Well, this is new. I received a spam email from "Rick" sent through the Dilbert.com domain, replete with a cute Dilbert cartoon at the bottom of the page.

The text is the usual 419 phishing crap:

Your friend Rich wanted us to send you this from Dilbert.com.

Message from Rich:

From Richard
Dear one,

Permit me to inform you of my desire of going into business relationship with you, I got your contact from your country directory, please i need a trust-worthy person that will help me to transfer this money.

I am richard sanko, the only Son of late Mr and Mrs johnson Sanko My father was a very wealthy Gold Merchant in sierra leon the Capital of republic of sierra leon.

my father was poisoned by his business associates while my mother died when i am little and my father took me so special because I am his only son.

Before the death of my father on 14th Setember 2007 in a hospital in Cote D'ivoire, he secretly called me and told me that he has the sum of(USD $8 MILLION U.S DOLLARS )which he deposited in a bank Abroad.

He also made me understand that it was because of this money he was poisoned by his business associates while on a business trip with them and he instructed me to look for a foreign partner who will help me transfer this money out of Cote Divoire and invest it for me, my purpose of contacting you is for you to help transfer this money to your country before this people who kill my father will kill me too.

I'm now hiding in a local place and I will compensate you with 20% of this money if you help me to transfer the money to your account l hope you will not betray the trust i have on you because this money is my only hope in this life and you will also help me to come over to your country to continue my education while you will invest my own share of the money for me.

I can assure you there is No Risk involve the money is an inheritance from my late father.


If you are interested please furnish me with your.
1) Real Names
2) Phone/Fax numbers
3) Occupation
4) Residence address

I am waiting to hear from you,
thank you.
Richard Sanko

There is no doubt this was actually routed via the Dilbert.com domain, which means either someone is cutting and pasting this spiel and sending it to random or bought email addresses, or Dilbert has been hacked. I don't quite know enough about it to render a judgment. I did send the Dilbert.com administrator an email through their web site, and got an automated response. We'll see what happens.

Abominable Snowbunny Resigns

I've watched the entire 18+ minutes of her resignation announcement, and I have to say that it was off the charts weird, even for Sarah Palin. Jittery, nervous, nonsensical, the speech, if you can characterize it as such, rambled all over the map, in the end, failing to do what it was intended - give some sort of coherent rationale for leaving the governor's office well before her term ended. I read the first transcript before it was pulled from the Alaska government web site, and it was full of air quotes, fully capitalized words, and lots of exclamation marks, often bunched all together to keep warm.

My personal feeling is this was prompted by several things - boredom with her job, harsh criticism of her job performance and from the presidential campaign, a desire to cash in on her name, and likely a way of minimizing some sort of incoming ethics scandal, presumably one rather serious as she has been wildly successful at utilizing the organs of the state of Alaska to exonerate herself from wrongdoing in all previous complaints against her. That last may prove the killing blow, but we'll have to wait and see.

And the presidency? Never rule it out. Rachel asked me after I told her Palin was resigning if I thought she could still run and win in 2012 against an incumbent Obama. And I paused, because my gut answer - "shit no!" - isn't all that clear. The country is in deep shit, and so far, despite the talk of "green shoots" there are no concrete signs of recovery. Imagine things are this bad when Republican primaries get set to jump off, and she could conceivably not only become the nominee, but win if conditions remain poor or get worse.

Know-nothing populism can be a very powerful force to people caught in the midst of a gigantic shit storm apparently without an end in sight. The electorate would eventually regret handing someone so clearly unfit for high office that much power, but the damage she could wreak while she held the reigns is almost unimaginable. Her gleeful, prideful ignorance is awesomely dangerous when hitched to the power of the presidency.

In the short term, expect to see her on the Wingnut Welfare circuit, giving talks for 10-20k a pop, getting her book published, making all sorts of appearances as a way to position herself for 2012, even if she ultimately decides not to run.

She is addicted to exposure, fame, and the idea of power.

So What's The Punishment?

If abortion is to be illegal, what sort of punishment for women who obtain illegal abortions should there be?

To my astonishment, anti-abortion movement members who will take their cause to the streets haven't even thought about it. This is a fascinating video (embedding was turned off, so follow the link):

Video

Context

In a comment following a post by hilzoy, aimai casts the murder of Dr. Tiller in a stark light:

Lets get real here. There is one and only one doctor left in this country to whom a desperate woman and her family can resort if they require a late term abortion. One. That isn't an accident and its not a bug. Its a feature of a right wing campaign of violent harassment.

I've been pregnant, twice, and was lucky enough not to need an abortion. But I asked my ob-gyn, the woman I was trusting with my life and health and with that of my unborn child, whether if I ended up needing an abortion or, say, currettage if the fetus died in the womb, I could continue to rely on her care. She said, bluntly, "no." And that I would have to find myself some kind of "clinic" to care for me.

This is not some abstract problem for naughty women. Its a problem for *families*, for men and women, for fathers and mothers, and siblings and children. Because the "choice" that women are faced with in late term abortions is between death for themselves or death for themselves and the fetus.

In killing this compassionate man the right wing--yes, all of the hysterics and the anti choicers and the nice people who get squicked out by abortion but who don't get squicked out by the gunning down of an elderly doctor--have put adult women's lives at risk. And for what? The fetuses that are terminated in late abortions are almost uniformly fetuses that will not survive outside the womb.

The anti abortion movement turned poor Dr. Tiller and his patients into a caricature and into targets in order to intimidate other doctors and women from gaining access to lawful medical care. What they could not gain politically, or legally in a court of law, they chose to try to gain through out and out terrorism and int intimidation. There is simply no question about that.

Whether individual posters like x, or y, support that level of intimidation, or why they prefer violent and non violent intimidation over (say) rational discourse and polite political action, is not for me to say. I don't even really care. They have said they see nothing wrong with stalking and harassing medical professionals, and they have refused to condemn the murder. That says enough about them as people and there's nothing any of the other posters need say.

Well Said

Lacking anything coherent or useful to say at the moment about the murder of Dr. Tiller and the disingenuous response of the anti-abortion zealots, I'll let someone not similarly blocked take it away:

For eight fucking years anybody to the left of Pinochet had to kick back and watch while sensible centrists and the Coalition of the Involuntarily Committable got together and raped the country and fucked up the whole world. For eight fucking years we were told that marching in the streets with giant puppets was the most horrific form of treason imaginable, was demoralizing our troops and hurting the debate and making the baby Pope Benedict cry. Not once did I ever in that time hear Megan McArdle or any of her other sensible friends discuss how maybe, just maybe, President Bush and his administration had PUSHED us to the edge, where we HAD to make those puppets because we felt the political process was closed to us.

No, back then it was "elections have consequences" and "you lost" and "look upon my works, ye mighty, and fuck off," and anytime anybody had the temerity to say, "erm, dude, if you don't mind I'll be over here with this sign on a stick" they might as well have been plotting to shoe-bomb Air Force One the way the whiners in the nuttersphere howled and shrieked. There was none of this, "you just don't know how hard it is to be on the losing end of everything including your soul" back then. Just them, partying with Free Republic on the White House lawn, waving their big foam fingers in our faces going "nyah nyah nyah."

Now that they're out of power, natch, what choice do they have but to go shoot up church lobbies in the hopes of bagging abortion doctors for their trophy wall of American apostates? Really, what else could they do? It's not like they could vote, or convince other people to listen to them, or organize, or do any of the damn things I feel like we've been doing since before there was dirt in order to get a not-entirely-crazy in-another-life-he'd-be-a-moderate-Republican dude finally elected so a third of the country could act like Satan just put his feet up on their mother's white-clothed dinner table. It's not like they could do anything else, right? They had to start shooting.

Right?

Comment Of The Week

Been rather distracted of late, with good reason. Some day maybe I'll go into it in detail.

Until then, a rather straightforward comment on a post by John Cole at Balloon Juice about bondholders and the looming GM bankruptcy:

Not to be to obtuse about this, but this is the bargain you make buying bonds. You get paid higher than the risk free rate in returns because you assume the risk that issuer could default. Bonds carry risk and if you buy bonds in a shitty company, you get paid higher than average returns because you assume a higher than average risk that the shitty company could default. I think it has been pretty evident to anyone paying even a little bit of attention over the last 10 years that GM’s position was unsustainable.

Investing is not a game where everyone wins all of the time. You make a bad bet and you lose. That’s the price you pay for an extra 5% on your money. The problem is that for the last 20 years, nobody has explained this to most Americans.

No shit.

Just don't tell anyone, in case we decide to slit our own throats and privatize Social Security sometime down the road...

Dual Translation?

So I'm listening to an interview with Idris Elba, the British actor who so brilliantly played Stringer Bell on The Wire. A few minutes into it, as I listen to him speak in his native accent (which I'd never heard before), I'm prompted to reflect that there are a lot of British actors who make a good living playing Americans in TV and film, but are there any Americans playing Brit roles appearing consistently in film and TV across the pond?

None come immediately to mind...

More On Haircuts

John Nichols in the Nation has a good post about the recent government firing of GM CEO Wagoner.

Wagoner needed to go. He thought the only way to repair an industry he and his compatriots broke was to break unions, cut wages and shutter plants.

Despite the fact that the United Auto Workers union called more than 30 years ago for a retooling the industry to produce smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles, despite the fact that union members have accepted deeper cuts in pay and benefits than their foreign counterparts, Wagoner kept trying to balance his books by discharging his most skilled employees and devastating communities in Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan and other states.

As such, he was a lousy, visionless CEO.

If it took a shove from the Obama administrion to make Wagoner leap with his golden parachute, then more power to the president.

But when will this administration get as tough with Wall Street as it has with Main Street? Didn't they screw up in far more dramatic, and damaging, ways than did Rick Wagoner?

Will this president ever tell brokers and bankers that they are going to feel more pain than just the paper cuts from opening envelopes containing their bailout checks and bonuses?

This is the rub. It is fair to say that bailing out the banks is crucial lest the entire economy basically implode under the pressure from all of those ginormous gambling debts Wall Street racked up. That doesn't preclude the necessity of making those responsible for said gambling debts feel the financial and professional repercussions of their actions.

Here we go:

A senior administration official, briefing reporters late Sunday night on the condition of anonymity in order to speak freely, said Obama will call for more sacrifice from carmakers, their investors and automotive unions.

Fascinating. Unions, which have made incredible concessions already in an effort to help GM and Chrysler stay in business, are being ordered by the federal government to concede even more. Yet the dickheads who obscenely profited from wrecking the world financial system remain in their offices, forced only by public shame to forgo bonuses they haven't earned. The same federal government treated these high criminals with kid gloves, saying publicly they feared being sued by the likes of AIG if they attempted to force repayment of unearned bonuses or prevent future ones being paid out.

Recap: Those who work and make something real and useful in order to earn their pay will be further punished by the very same government that has coddled those who play with paper and imaginary numbers and reap unparalleled financial reward for their "toil". The latter are on the hook for many multiples the amounts of the loans the auto industry is seeking, and have given up almost nothing in exchange for, in many cases, essentially free cash.

This is so utterly fucked. It is also the clearest indicator yet that nothing will substantively change in the financial services sector, rendering real the possibility this will all happen again, and the perpetrators will get away with it.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

Getting lost in the details of the financial meltdown can have the perverse effect of diffusing righteous anger directed toward those who set this entire destructive wave in motion.

Matt Taibbi delves back into those details and reminds us why we should be "mad as hell" and not take this lying down.

People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they're not pissed off enough. The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d'état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.

The crisis was the coup de grâce: Given virtually free rein over the economy, these same insiders first wrecked the financial world, then cunningly granted themselves nearly unlimited emergency powers to clean up their own mess. And so the gambling-addict leaders of companies like AIG end up not penniless and in jail, but with an Alien-style death grip on the Treasury and the Federal Reserve — "our partners in the government," as Liddy put it with a shockingly casual matter-of-factness after the most recent bailout.

The mistake most people make in looking at the financial crisis is thinking of it in terms of money, a habit that might lead you to look at the unfolding mess as a huge bonus-killing downer for the Wall Street class. But if you look at it in purely Machiavellian terms, what you see is a colossal power grab that threatens to turn the federal government into a kind of giant Enron — a huge, impenetrable black box filled with self-dealing insiders whose scheme is the securing of individual profits at the expense of an ocean of unwitting involuntary shareholders, previously known as taxpayers.

The conservative fantasy that everyone in the financial services sector, or anyone in the entire corporate world, for that matter, are rational actors who behave reasonably and cautiously has, at last, been utterly exposed as a grand lie. The only correct solution is to break the backs of these oversize, overly powerful giants and regulate the living shit out of them in future. Banks, brokerages, and insurance companies all made handsome profits prior to the frantic deregulation fetish of the late 1990s. Given how destructive their greed can be for the rest of us, strict regulation is the only rational response.

Paper Pitchforks

Class warfare is traditionally a top down affair. The recent outrage over the AIG bonuses has been pretty amusing - millionaire congresscritters bleating about how awful it is that masters of the universe at AIG's financial products division want to pay themselves fat gobs of cash after wrecking the world economy. Left out of their faux-populism is the fact they are complicit in the looting that has been conducted by the wealthy in our country for thirty years, and which was virulently accelerated in the 1990s.

And as much as I take perverse pleasure in watching CEOs squirm a bit, this "tax the bonuses back" is just stupid policy. Paul Krugman is on the case:

I’ll leave to others the question of who knew or should have known that the bonus firestorm was coming; but it’s part of a pattern. At every stage, Geithner et al have made it clear that they still have faith in the people who created the financial crisis — that they believe that all we have is a liquidity crisis that can be undone with a bit of financial engineering, that “governments do a bad job of running banks” (as opposed, presumably, to the wonderful job the private bankers have done), that financial bailouts and guarantees should come with no strings attached.

Better dead than...unionized?

Quite probably.

Behold Matthew Yglesias:

I’m probably not breaking any news if I tell you that American business really hates unions and, thus, really hates the Employee Free Choice Act. Thus, even though John Boehner is trying to destroy the American economy, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is squarely focusing its fire on pro-EFCA Democrats. Your typical business executive would rather let the world burn, or see his children fed to a pack of wild boars, then see a union form at his firm. And it makes a certain amount of sense—businessmen appreciate the value of class solidarity. If you run your company into the ground, you get a nice severance package and another job at another company. But if you let your company be unionized, you’d be dead to your brethren. An attack on one is an attack on all, and they all stand together on this point.

Bear this in mind as you watch the fight against EFCA play out in the coming weeks/months. The battle over stimulus wasn't even a warm up by comparison to the scorched earth tactics now being deployed. And it will get much worse.

More On Citi Shenanigans

From Jane Hamsher:

Citi held a private conference call on Wednesday, hosted by a lobbyist for the US Chamber of Commerce, to "build opposition to the Employee Free Choice Act" according to the Huffington Post's Sam Stein. During the call, Weinswig cited dubious research funded by an astroturf front group for the Chamber to make the claim that the bill's passage would increase the following year's unemployment rate by 1%. (In 2006 the OCED did an exhaustive analysis and concluded that there was no correlation between unionization and unemployment rates.)

Citi Uses Your Money To Wage War On...You!

Citicorp, on the heels of downgrading Walmart because EFCA might pass (though Walmart has remained profitable during the economic disaster, in which, btw, Citi has a central role), is using taxpayer bailout funds not only to stay afloat, but to run an aggressive and dishonest campaign against EFCA. The same analyst who performed the downgrade on Walmart stock leads the conference call.

Matt Yglesias tells the tale:

This, it seems, is capitalism. First you manage your business so catastrophically badly that your company not only becomes worthless, but that it threatens to destroy the livelihoods of billions of people around the planet. Second, you get the taxpayer to keep you in business. And third, you turn around and warn that higher wages for workers might destroy the world economy! As I’ve said before I don’t think we want congress meddling with the details of business decisions at major companies, even companies that are receiving taxpayer support. But there’s a fairly clear case to be made that firms on the public dole shouldn’t be engaged in lobbying or political activities.

These fuckers ought to, as the kids say, "die in a fire". A really hot fucking gasoline-liberally-sprinkled-with-napalm fire. Nationalize them, all of them, and throw the bastards out. Let the shareholders eat it. Sell them off, bit by bit, making them small enough to fail next time around. This has to end.

Simon Johnson on Fresh Air

Great listen.

Notice his comments about the strategy Treasury has been pursuing with the financial sector (about 17:00 in). This guy knows what he is talking about.

Ezra Checks EFCA

And makes a salient point not often visible in the recklessly dishonest discussion about EFCA.

The more impressive strike came, however, earlier this morning, when Citibank downgraded Wal-Mart's stock from a "buy" to a "hold" on fears that passage of EFCA could force the company to unionize which would in turn decrease shareholder profits as more of the company's worth was distributed to employees.

There are two things worth saying on this. The first is that it's a useful moment when the interests of the stock market and the broader economy diverge. Citigroup's analyst is right to worry that shareholders would see smaller gains if Wal-Mart were unionized. Conversely, it would probably be a stimulative thing for the economy if Wal-Mart's massive low wage workforce suddenly enjoyed a quick boost in take-home pay. The interests of shareholders are not the same as the interests of workers, and the various sides in the argument would happily talk your ear off about how the interests of the broader economy align.

The second is that it's hard to recall another time when an analyst actually downgraded a stock on fears of legislation that few expect to pass. Indeed, many on the Left are arguing that this is more about generating a controlled stock market panic that will convince wavering senators to vote against EFCA than about accurately pricing Wal-Mart's stock. "When I see upgrades to the stocks of Wal-Mart's already-unionized competitors (grocery stores like Safeway who will gain back market share if easier unionization results in higher Wal-Mart labor costs) specifically pegged to the specter of EFCA, then I'll admit that Citi is engaged in good-faith prognosticating here," e-mails Josh Bivens at the Economic Policy Institute. "Otherwise, not so much."

This is going to be a fight to the death, one I expect cannot get past the Senate and those self-described Democratic "moderates", whose sole function it seems is to hamstring their party's president and enable the foaming-a- the-mouth rabid dogs of the right, as they have for decades.

Why Nationalize?

Paul Krugman gets right to it.

The benefits from nationalization come from (a) giving taxpayers a share of the upside rather than just a share of the downside, which is where we are now (b) ending the gaming of the system, even looting, that is encouraged by the current system of implicit guarantees (Simon Johnson has been very good on that) (c) making it politically and fiscally feasible to put in enough capital to revitalize the system. These advantages are there whatever you decide to do with junior bank debt.

And finally:

What’s clear, however, is that the current system, of implicit maybe-kinda guarantees on bank liabilities — call it wink-wink-nudge-nudge-say-no-more banking policy — is failing badly.