If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed. -- Benjamin Franklin
Meet the new Truthers, led by GOP Rep. Paul Broun of Georgia.
BROUN: Our President he is utilizing this crisis of this oil spill to try to promote this energy tax. And I’ve had numerous people, all over the district, question whether his poor response to this oil spill was purposeful so that he could promote his energy tax. I don’t know, maybe.
And let's not forget GOP Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, who goes a step further.
RON PAUL: Well you forgot he can write executives orders and do anything they want. So, it is a real mess. If a state needs some manpower, generally they don’t have manpower that might be able to help out and that maybe be their National Guard unit, they’re out in Afghanistan and Iraq. […] But yes, I’m very suspicious of BP and our government is doing and even the Obama administration, and that’s why I’ve challenged the principle, this agreement they have to set up this fund, this 20 billion dollar fund. That sounds like a lot of money but I think it could be a lot of mischief, and that was done by executive order.
Can you imagine how quickly a sitting Member of Congress would have been impeached if they had publicly said that Bush caused 9/11 on purpose?
Why is it completely acceptable then to say Obama caused the Deepwater Horizon disaster? Obama Derangement Syndrome...catch it!
The reality is that right now there is no such thing as the recovery, or even the economy. There's our economy and there's their economy. Their economy is in recovery. Ours isn't -- not even close.
And he's absolutely right. Wall Street is hiring in anticipation of a recovery of Wall Street's economy, not Main Street. The Democrats just don't seem to get this, nor do they seem to care. And until the Democrats figure that out, they'll just keep handing the Republicans ammunition.
We are not now quite at a founding moment, or even a re-founding moment. But we have arrived at a genuine crisis, or a set of crises, and we may well be at a decisive moment for the country.
This sense of crisis is what animates the Tea Parties. I had the pleasure of attending the “Proud to be an American July 4th Tea Party” outside Independence Hall in Philadelphia. It featured patriotic songs and speeches, and expressions of support for our troops and praise for our country. Yet the mood of patriotic gratitude was mixed with expressions of alarm from my fellow Tea Partiers about the administration now in charge of our government. The combination of patriotic gratitude and urgent alarm produces a determination to act and a willingness to deal boldly with the crises in the economy, in foreign policy, and in self-government that the country faces.
In this respect, the Tea Parties are ahead of the two major parties. As established political parties are wont to do, both remain constricted in their views, attached to business as usual, and invested in established modes and orders—too much so to easily come to grips with a moment like the present.
Kristol throws not only the Democrats under the bus, but the Republican Party as well, and buys fully into the Second American Revolution nonsense. Not that Kristol had much common sense to begin with: after all, as one of the main cheerleaders for the costly and deadly wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as the Bush tax cuts and deregulation of everything, Kristol's batting zero on supporting "ideas that worked". Perhaps his embrace of the Tea Party shows just how completely bankrupt these guys are in the idea department.
But Kristol actually admits that himself towards the end of his rant.
I was telling a friend about the Philly Tea Party, noting a few eccentric proposals from some of its participants. He commented, “Well, that’s better than talking points.” He’s right. At this moment, bold and seemingly impolitic or impractical ideas are more useful than the diligent repetition of mostly sensible short-term critiques and proposals. At a moment like this, talking points are not enough.
In other words, not only does Kristol admit that the "conservative" policies he's called for over the last thirty years are nothing more than useless talking points, he then goes on to admit that he believes the only hope America has is to fully embrace the crazy of the Tea Party nihilism.
The Stupid isn't working. Let's go with the Stupid and Insane instead! To recap, everything Bush did to wreck our country was fine with these assholes for eight years, 18 months of Obama however requires a revolution.
I miss having two political parties in this country that weren't bugnuts.
Kristol wants change to come from one of the two major parties after all. But he wants the GOP to become the party of 'radical choice.' He doesn't actually express a single radical idea that the GOP should promote, probably because he considers them crazy or impractical. He starts out quoting Alexander Hamilton and telling us we need to basically redo the Constitution which is now as flawed as any Articles of Confederation. He ends by telling us that the GOP needs to be open to the fundamental reforms espoused by people he thinks are loons.
Any government program that would reduce unemployment has to make working more attractive for both employer and employee. Since late 2007 the federal government has spent somewhere around $3.6 trillion to stimulate the economy. That is a lot of money.
My suggestion would have been to take all $3.6 trillion and declare a federal tax holiday for 18 months. No income tax, no corporate profits tax, no capital gains tax, no estate tax, no payroll tax (FICA) either employee or employer, no Medicare or Medicaid taxes, no federal excise taxes, no tariffs, no federal taxes at all, which would have reduced federal revenues by $2.4 trillion annually. Can you imagine where employment would be today? How does a 2.5% unemployment rate sound?
That's fiscal responsibility right there. Sure, people will immediately hire more workers and buy all kinds of useless crap instead of drastically slashing wages in order to give the same employees the same take-home pay under the new tax scheme and pocketing the difference on both ends or anything, while employees see nothing from this, they could see a one-time boost from income taxes, but that of course will be banked and not spent, or used to pay off debt.
In other words, what we'd have here is a $3 trillion or so plus transfer of wealth to the richest Americans and business owners, while the poorest Americans get...nothing. Oh, and $3.6 trillion more in national debt, which of course will be paid for, right?
I wonder what the Tea Party fiscal faithful would make of Laffer's plan. Because that's what Republicans want to do. They give even less of a damn about balancing the budget than Democrats do.
The United States may still be in the Afghanistan and Iraq region for another ten years, according to Gen. George Casey.
“The types of conflict that we are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, and I think are likely to be fighting here for a decade or so, are focused on the people,” Casey, the army's Chief of Staff, said Friday night at the Aspen Institute's Ideas Festival.
“We are not going to succeed in either place by military means alone. You are only going to succeed when the people perceive there is a government represented by their interests, when there is an economy that can give them a job to support their families, when there are educational systems that can educate their family. All those things are essential to the long term success of the military operation.”
Regarding the larger war against “a global extremist network,” Casey also said America has another "decade or so of persistent conflict."
“States, non-states and individual actors who are increasingly willing to use violence” are not going away in the short-term. Casey added, “We believe this is a long term ideological struggle.”
Nine years down in Afghanistan, almost. Another ten to go. One has to ask themselves where our country would be without these costly, deadly wars. If we couldn't solve the problem after 9 years of bombs and guns, what's another ten years going to accomplish?
Complaints of harassment by debt collectors surged 50% to 67,550 in 2009, according to the Federal Trade Commission. And they are on track to jump 13% this year, based on the number of FTC complaints filed in the first six months.
The No. 1 complaint is repeated calls, and it is not uncommon for collectors to bombard consumers with back-to-back calls for days, weeks, months and even years.
When debt collectors finally get someone on the other end of the phone, they are more likely to use nastier language. Complaints of debt collectors using obscene or abusive language spiked 35% last year.
A 55-year old New York woman, who asked to remain anonymous, said a collection agent called her home repeatedly, personally attacking her and her husband. When she refused to answer the phone, the collector called her estranged sister, an ex-boyfriend and her husband's ex-wife's mother.
"This guy was out of his mind and he kept calling and calling, telling me 'you better talk to me, you deadbeat,'" she said. "He was very threatening and the whole thing was just really unsettling -- it made you wonder who was going to show up at your door."
She had reason to worry, since complaints of debt collectors threatening -- or actually using -- violence more than doubled last year, to 2,517.
Keary Floyd, an attorney who represents consumers at the Floyd Legal Firm in Atlanta, said that while most of his debt collection cases involve excessive phone calls, one of his recent clients recorded a disturbing phone conversation where a debt collector threatened that he or someone else would come to the client's house to get the money in any way that he could.
"I heard it, and if any phone call was going to worry someone, it would be that one," said Floyd.
Other aggressive tactics that are becoming more common are debt collectors calling before 8 a.m. or after 9 p.m., demanding more money than what is owed, revealing a consumer's debt to a third party or threatening "dire consequences" like prosecution, jail time, property seizure or job loss.
These practices are not just inappropriate, but they are illegal under the FTC's Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, which has been around since 1977.
A friend of mine did this job for a while, and he's told me stories of how much of an utterly dehumanizing experience it is for both the agent and the debtor. The agent is paid to get results, not to ask nicely. The debtor often owes more than just the collection agency too. It's not a fun, pleasant job for anyone involved, and yeah, tempers and nerves get frayed and bad things can happen.
But frankly, as our consumer economy continues to grind down the spiral ramp to deflationary hell, you're going to see a lot more of this happening. Creditors want their money now, not years from now...because the creditors owe other creditors money, and they want to collect too. It's a nasty spiral and eventually somebody's going to default...and if enough of that happens the whole system breaks down.
The former presidential candidate said the treaty would "impede missile defense" and "gives far more to the Russians than to the United States."
Lugar, ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a proponent of the treaty, issued a lengthy statement today rebutting Romney's arguments.
"Governor Mitt Romney's hyperbolic attack on the New START Treaty in the July 6 edition of The Washington Post repeats discredited objections and appears unaware of arms control history and context," Lugar said.
"In advancing these arguments, he rejects the Treaty's unequivocal endorsement by the Defense Department led by Secretary Robert Gates and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Indiana Republican continued. "He also distances himself from prominent Republican national security leaders, including Jim Schlesinger, Henry Kissinger, James Baker, and Brent Scowcroft, who have backed the Treaty after thoughtful analysis."
Why it almost seems like Lugar is determined to actually vote for something Obama did. Any Republican Senator not from Maine or not named Lindsey is actually news if they do it. Of course, it looks more like Lugar is covering his own ass as ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Romney may have drawn first blood, but Lugar is going to be under a lot of pressure to scuttle this treaty, or at least delay it for as long as possible.
Republicans will not give Obama any more success stories between now and November. Count on that.
Vice President Joe Biden had to convince a skeptical Jay Leno on Friday that the United States didn't get a raw deal from Russia in the biggest spy swap since the Cold War.
Leno asked Biden during a taping of "The Tonight Show" why the U.S. was sending 10 accused spies back to Russia while getting only four in return.
"That doesn't seem fair," Leno said.
"We got back four really good ones," Biden reassured Leno. "And the 10, they've been here a long time, but they hadn't done much."
Leno then showed a sultry photo of alleged Russian agent Anna Chapman and asked: "Are our spies this hot?"
Biden's reply, in a mock-serious tone: "Let me be clear. It was not my idea to send her back."
The vice president also said he had one more suggestion for the deal that was ignored.
"I thought they'd take Rush Limbaugh," he said.
Hey, don't knock it. I think Rush would love the new hyper-oligarchy super-capitalism that modern Russia has devolved into. He'd fit right in....especially the "expensive divorce" part.
And speaking of misogyny, South Africa simply assumed the World Cup tourist influx would lead to all kinds of increases in business for sex workers in the country. Only it turns out if your the kind of person who can travel to South Africa for a World Cup jaunt in this economy, you can afford the actual tourist attractions as well.
The influx of thousands of soccer fans would increase demand on South African sex workers; at least that was the belief of a leading expert prior to the start of the 2010 World Cup.
But it seems fans of the beautiful game that traveled to the Rainbow Nation have created a flop in sex-worker business -- leaving prostitutes out-of-pocket and out of work -- in favor of more high-brow pursuits.
"The World Cup has been devastating. We thought it was going to be a cash cow but it's chased a lot of the business away. It's been the worst month in my company's history," the owner and founder of one of Johannesburg's most exclusive escort companies told CNN.
"No one is interested in sex at the moment. I think we've had three customers who traveled here for the World Cup which has seen my group's business drop by 80 percent. I enjoyed watching the games, but I can't wait for everyone to just go home now!" the madam, who works under the alias of "Tori," added.
The behavior of fans in South Africa has run contrary to what was predicted prior to the start of the tournament after David Bayever told World Cup organizers in March it was feared that up to 40,000 extra prostitutes could converge in the host nation to meet the expected demand.
Bayever, deputy chairperson of South Africa's Central Drug Authority (CDA) that advises on drug abuse but also works with prostitutes, warned: "Forty-thousand new prostitutes. As if we do not have enough people of our own, we have to import them to ensure our visitors are entertained."
But the tournament in 2010, if anything, has seen the modern-day soccer fan attracted to art galleries and museums over brothels.
I could have told you this was coming. That's simple economics. If you've got the resources to travel all the way out to South Africa to see a game of "footy" during a massive global recession, then you've got other things on your mind besides prostitutes and you can afford other diversions.
Mel Gibson is allegedly heard using a racial epithet and calling his ex-girlfriend a "whore" in a recording released by a celebrity news website Friday.
The two-minute recording posted by RadarOnline.com includes segments in which a voice sounding distinctively like the Academy Award-winner is heard telling his then-girlfriend, Oksana Grigorieva, that she is dressing too provocatively and that it would be her fault if she were raped. He uses the N-word at one point, and the recording is laced with his profanity.
I mean you get the double whammy here, racism and misogyny. Surely an actor of Gibson's caliber could have worked in a shot at religion, too.
Grigorieva recorded the actor-director because she was afraid he might harm her, the website reported. The actor is heard on the recording harshly criticizing Grigorieva for the way she dresses. He accuses her of lying to him about having breast implants.
"They just look stupid," Gibson tells her at one point in the recording. "Keep them if you want to. They look like a Vegas b----, a Vegas w----."
"You look like a (expletive) b---- in heat, and if you get raped by a pack of (N-word), it will be your fault," Gibson is heard telling Grigorieva. "You provoked it. You are provocatively dressed."
All I have to say is if you don't think people talk like this when they think nobody important is listening, then welcome to "post-racial, post-feminist America". It's good to be reminded that we've come a long way...but we still have a very, very long way to go.
The NY Times has an interesting story on the Obama administration's method of enforcing work laws on undocumented immigrants: the "silent raid".
The Obama administration has replaced immigration raids at factories and farms with a quieter enforcement strategy: sending federal agents to scour companies’ records for illegal immigrant workers.
While the sweeps of the past commonly led to the deportation of such workers, the “silent raids,” as employers call the audits, usually result in the workers being fired, but in many cases they are not deported.
Over the past year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has conducted audits of employee files at more than 2,900 companies. The agency has levied a record $3 million in civil fines so far this year on businesses that hired unauthorized immigrants, according to official figures. Thousands of those workers have been fired, immigrant groups estimate.
Employers say the audits reach more companies than the work-site roundups of the administration of President George W. Bush. The audits force businesses to fire every suspected illegal immigrant on the payroll— not just those who happened to be on duty at the time of a raid — and make it much harder to hire other unauthorized workers as replacements. Auditing is “a far more effective enforcement tool,” said Mike Gempler, executive director of the Washington Growers League, which includes many worried fruit growers.
Immigration inspectors who pored over the records of one of those growers, Gebbers Farms, found evidence that more than 500 of its workers, mostly immigrants from Mexico, were in the country illegally. In December, Gebbers Farms, based in this Washington orchard town, fired the workers.
“Instead of hundreds of agents going after one company, now one agent can go after hundreds of companies,” said Mark K. Reed, president of Border Management Strategies, a consulting firm in Tucson that advises companies across the country on immigration law. “And there is no drama, no trauma, no families being torn apart, no handcuffs.”
Surely the right will complain that Obama is failing here because ICE is not rounding up these fired workers and deporting them en masse like prisoners...and yet this approach is far more effective than Bush's well-publicized workplace raids. An agent goes in, quietly checks all the employee paperwork, and anyone who doesn't pass gets fired and most importantly, the businesses who hire them are fined significantly.
Word is starting to get out about these silent raids, and it's the fairest example of enforcement I've seen. I'm not cheering ICE on here, nobody is "winning" here, but...law enforcement is law enforcement.
Our old friend Minnesota Republican Tom "Waitresses make $100k a year!" Emmer has apparently taken a lot of heat for his idiotic comments last weekend about how Minnesota should cut base wages on servers to $2.13 and credit them for tips, since apparently they make six figures a year. This of course pissed off pretty much the entire state, and now Emmer is in full spin mode trying to get out of this hole he's in. TPM's Eric Kleefeld:
Whatever the economic merits of the policy might be, what really got Emmer in trouble was this quote, the substance of which he attributed to a restaurateur who was hosting the event in question: "With the tips that they get to take home, there are some people earning over $100,000 a year. More than the very people providing the jobs and investing not only their life savings but their families' future." Emmer's claim that wait staff were making six-figure salaries did not play well in the media.
Emmer tried to backtrack by posting a statement on his website, declaring that his proposal would not actually affect workers' wages at all: "I want the wait staff at a restaurant to be successful and make as much as they can, and a recent study published in Applied Economics Letters shows that tip credits have essentially no negative impact on wages for tipped employees. So contrary to what some people are saying, I have no interest in 'cutting wages.'"
The Star Tribune published an editorial with the fitting title, "Tip to Emmer: Drop gratuity idea." Of his insistence that economic forces would result in workers' pay remaining the same, they said: "The result is a contradictory message with a cynical aftertaste. Emmer appears to be telling business owners that he wants to do them a favor at their workers' expense. Then he tells those same workers: Don't worry. Your employers will discover they can't really lower your pay, no matter what state law says."
Meanwhile, the restaurant owner involved said that he had received hateful phone calls over the matter. He also insisted that he never actually told Emmer that his staff members were making over $100,000, and that Emmer's quote itself was "manipulated." It should be noted that the Star Tribune's reporter stands by the quote, saying that it is in on tape -- and that Minnesota Public Radio separately reported Emmer saying the same thing.
In his press release announcing the listening session with servers, Emmer said: "This week we met with business owners and next week we will listen to the employees, especially servers concerned about the tip credit issue. I'm looking forward to a robust discussion."
Sure you are. I wouldn't hold a luncheon at the robust discussion, otherwise you're going to get about half a pound of "free condiments" in your meal courtesy of the servers you think are overpaid.
Emmer made a classic mistake, like all Tea Party assholes who have no real clue how to make America better for anyone but asshole politicians, Republicans like Emmer don't have any actual ideas, only an increasingly large list of people who need to be blamed for destroying America. The problem with this is that you constantly have to make the list larger in order to generate continual outrage. Emmer in this case played the "I choose to redefine group X as the outsider who is ruining the country", in this case "servers".
And so with one fell swoop, the people who bring Emmer his food became The Other, defined out of the class of "Real Americans Like Us" and into "One Of Those People", people that have to be hated and shunned so that you feel okay in demanding they have their wages cut in order to help The Ultimate Group Of Real Americans, small business owners. Now, demonizing American workers is fine in the Teabagger Handbook as long as the workers are A) government employees, B) union employees, or C) jobs that Americans believe are mostly filled by minorities. Any combination of the two is gold, any one you can call all three on is diamond-encrusted platinum. Inner-city school teachers? History's greatest monsters, apparently.
But Emmer's problem is he started picking on a non-unionized private-sector job that's been experienced by quite a number of Americans of all walks of life at some point in their lives. I've done it. My family members have done it. There's nothing wrong with working for tips as a server or delivery driver. But...you don't make $100k a year doing this, even at the nicest of restaurants...even if you are the best waitress at the Hooters in the Mall of America. Emmer, like all Teabaggers, is trying to distract hard working Americans from the fact that in Emmer's view, you should be hating people who live off the gratuity of others and don't really provide much of a service in return.
You know, politicians. Now he's trying to plead stupid.
Only one problem, asshole. There's video.
If you think Republicans like Emmer give a good goddamn about Americans who work for a living, you're out of your mind...and you deserve politicians who will cut your wages as soon as look at you.
You have a nice day next time you eat out there, Tom.
As Zero Hedge regular madhedgefundtrader points out, all Obama has to do to fix the deficit is...nothing.
Out of a current projected budget deficit of $1.3 trillion, $700 billion, or 54% comes from the Bush era tax cuts, $320 billion (25%) from a tax revenue fall off caused by the Great Recession, $200 billion from the wars in Iran and Iraq (15%), and $50 billion (4%) is generated by Obama’s recovery measures. The TARP and the bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are so small, they don’t even register on the chart. All of the angst, complaining, moaning, blustering, and carping is about the 4%.
You often see this in politics, where the debate gets focused on where the problem isn’t, not where it is, and is a big reason why I’m not in that business. Markets have a fascinating way of seeing straight though this impenetrable fog. So while the noise out of Washington is trying to convince us that these deficits are ruinous, the ten year Treasury bond yields we saw yesterday at a stunning 2.97% are telling us that, in fact, they are no problem at all, and that the government can now borrow nearly infinite amounts of money at the lowest interest rates in history.
There are some other really interesting things that this chart and the bond market are telling us. The Bush tax cuts expire next year, and a recovering economy will bring a return of tax revenues, eliminating 79% of the deficit. The scheduled withdrawal from Iraq next year will cut another 7%. This assumes that Obama is unable to get a single additional piece of legislation through the congress, a distinct possibility if he loses control of congress in November.
This is the writing on the wall the bond market is attempting to focus our blinkered eyes on. If anyone else has another set of believable numbers that reaches a different conclusion, I am all ears.
So sure, if Republicans are serious that we have to get rid of deficits, they they will let the Bush tax cuts expire. And if Obama is serious about it, he won't lift his pen to sign any sort of extension on them. Bam, we lose a huge chunk of deficit and get back on track.
What's that you say? There's no way on God's green Earth that Obama will let this happen? Why not? According to Republicans, Obama's already doomed as a one term President anyway, and the Republicans will control Congress until the End of Time Itself.
What does he have to lose by letting Bush's tax cuts, the single largest contributor to our deficit, expire?
Today's lousy market news, the weekly ECRI Leading Indicators Index dropped to -8.3%. Keep in mind that every time this Index has hit the negative double digits or below, we have had a recession follow 100% of the time. At the worst parts of the most recent crisis, the index hit a low of -29.7 in December 2008. It then rocketed upwards to +28.4% last October as stimulus was fed in to stoke the fires. It has dropped like a rock in the last 3 months. The odds of a second recession, or more accurately the second leg of the depression, are close to 100% now.
Even with the Biden Administration adults in charge and Democrats in control on Congress (barely), there remains an increasingly crumbling global economy imperiling the world, rising nationalism and deadly racism across Europe and Asia, a seemingly endless war against terror, a federal government nobody trusts or believes in, global climate change putting us on the brink of destruction and a Village media that barely does its job on even the best day.
Needless to say there's a lot of Stupid out there when we need solutions. Dangerous levels of Stupid.
Into the fray, dear Reader. Tray tables, crash helmets, arms inside blog at all times.
Zandar's Tip Jar
If you like what you're reading, drop in two bits.
It's ZVTS, now in a 60-minute podcast!
Get your Zandar and Bon every Saturday and Wednesday!
Also, click on the iTunes button to put the show on
your iTunes podcast list and take us with you!
Or, check out the episode archive page!
Posts
