'bout Time.

Washington Post:  "Obama attacks Republican economic theory: ‘It’s never worked’"

...Obama delivered a searing indictment of Republican economic theory, setting the stage for the coming presidential campaign. Summoning the image of a populist Theodore Roosevelt — in the same town (Osawatomie) where Roosevelt delivered a famous speech on economic fairness in 1910 — Obama deployed the language of right and wrong, fairness and unfairness, in a lengthy address that aides said he largely wrote himself.

The theory of “trickle down economics,” which holds that greater wealth at the top generates jobs and income for the masses below, drew some of Obama’s harshest criticism.

Link to WaPo.

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Save our City Parks!

Who are all these so-called "Occupy" people and is it their goal to preserve park spaces that are in danger across the United States?

Washington DC

New York
 
San Francisco

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The Tea Party Peasants.

As the so-called Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests have grown, many people, including President Obama, have compared the groups to the Tea Party protests. While both groups seem to like dressing up in funny costumes, it seems to me that only two or so substantive factors energize both groups:

1) The stagnant economy.
2) The banking crisis/bailout.

This is where the similarities end. The TPer’s blame the Government for creating the mess through too much Government. The OWS crowd blames the mess on not enough government: "Wall Street"* is the problem and government is not regulating/punishing them enough.

What are the TPers answers to our problems? Less oversight, less government, less economic justice and more regressive taxation. In other words, the Ayn Rand fantasy world that Wall Street loved, right up until they needed a bailout. The two groups might be pissed about similar problems, but their solutions could not be more different. OWS wants policies not seen in a generation. TPers want more of the same stuff that got us into this mess.

Take it from a Conservative:

The tea party stands for a series of propositions that don't meet the reality test: that deficits matter more than jobs, that cutting deficits and tightening credit will accelerate economic growth, that high taxes and over-regulation are the most important reasons that growth has not revived, and that America still offers the world's best opportunity for the poor to rise. Tea party plans call for a radical shift in the burden of taxation from the rich to the poor -- and promise big reductions in government spending without touching any of the benefits of current retirees.

If put into practice, the tea party platform is a formula for political and economic crisis.

David Frum, the author of the above piece at CNN is no lefty.  He worked for President George W. Bush. He might not be calling for a return the Glass-Steagall Act but I think he makes it clear whose side these fools are really on.  He admits that an American Laissez-faire economony does not lift all boats.

If the Tea Party advocates for all that corporate America wants, are they really a populist movement of the right as the MSM has made them out to be? I think not. In reality, they are a mislead group of peasants, carrying water for the ruling class.

They sure aren't patriots.  It's time to call them what they are:  peasants advocating for the landowner.  They are like a sharecropper running to the Government for more land for the landowner.  They are the slave fighting for the confederacy on behalf of the plantation owner. 

The TPers are just too ignorant to realize who is pulling their chain. Between Freedom Works, a lobby firm, funding their operations and Fox News giving them marching orders, I have little confidence they will figure it out.


*For purposes of this article “Wall Street” is shorthand for the international corporate overlords in the Financial, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) Sectors and other paper-pushers who make a boat load of cash at the expense of everyone else.

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Maybe that financial reform bill ain't half bad.

If this article in the New York Magazine is accurate, then the financial reform bill is way better than I thought. When the Wall Street banksters start going postal, I say we are almost to the point of perfect legislation.

"On May 20, the Senate passed its bill to reregulate Wall Street by a vote of 59-39, complete with a (watery) version of the Volcker Rule. The story of the legislation’s passage can be told in a number of ways: a tale of conflict or compromise, triumph or capitulation. But on any reading, that story is only the climactic chapter in a larger narrative: how the masters of the money game fell out of love with—and into a state of bitter, seething, hysterical fury toward—Obama. "

And...

"Today, it’s hard to find anyone on Wall Street who doesn’t speak of Obama as if he were an unholy hybrid of Bernie Sanders and Eldridge Cleaver. One night not long ago, over dinner with ten executives in the finance industry, I heard the president described as “hostile to business,” 'anti-wealth,' and 'anti-capitalism'; as a redistributionist,' a 'vilifier,' and a 'thug.'"

I hope the compromise bill twists the screws a bit more.

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The Zen of the American Public

What's right is wrong, what's true is false. We can cut taxes and not make any cuts to programs like Medicaid. We're Americans, and we can have our cake and eat it too!

The Slate's Jacob Weisberg, at least, thinks we're full of shit. Take a look at the article. His point is that Washington's gridlock has nothing to do with Obama's shitty salemanship or political ideologues. It has everything to do with the fact that we as the public, exhibit "the childishness, ignorance, and growing incoherence of the public at large."

Some gems from the article:

One year ago, 59 percent of the American public liked the stimulus plan, according to Gallup. A few months later, with the economy still deeply mired in recession, a majority of the same size said Obama was spending too much money on it.

Sixty percent of Americans want stricter regulations of financial institutions. But nearly the same proportion says we're suffering from too much regulation on business.

Nearly half the public wants to cancel the Obama stimulus, and a strong majority doesn't want another round of it. But 80-plus percent of people want to extend unemployment benefits and to spend more money on roads and bridges. There's another term for that stuff: more stimulus spending.

He brings it home with this quote, and I tend to agree:

I don't mean to suggest that honesty is what separates the two parties. Increasingly, the crucial distinction is between the minority of serious politicians in either party who are prepared to speak directly about our choices, on the one hand, and the majority who indulge the public's delusions, on the other. I would put President Obama and his economic team in the first group, along with California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Republicans are more indulgent of the public's unrealism in general, but Democrats have spent years fostering their own forms of denial. Where Republicans encourage popular myths about taxes, spending, and climate change, Democrats tend to stoke our fantasies about the sustainability of entitlement spending as well as about the cost of new programs.

Go figure. We get our opinions fed to us in 25-second sound bites generally from one single source. It is easy for politicians to play to our basest sensibilities when we don't collectively know enough to call them out on their own glaring contradictions.

Wake. Up.

[readers and contributors to this blog are not subject to this criticism...we're fucking brilliant]

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SOTU Open Thread

State of the Union Coverage:

Full Text at the New York Times.

New York Times coverage.

Washington Post coverage.

FiveThirtyEight coverage.

Mr. Furious reaction.

Thoughts? Comments? Critiques?

NOTE: If any of my ATK colleagues have a full SOTU post, commentary or analysis ready to go, feel free to bump this post.

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Populist Angst or Good Public Policy?

I found myself in DC last week for work. I met up with an old friend, who also happens to be a US Congressman. He was really upset with AIG for giving bonuses (or, retention payments…whatever you choose to call it). Because they were given out in the form of contracts, there was nothing the government could do to retract them, even though they were paid for by taxpayer bailout dollars. So, he had the idea that the government would tax the bonuses. Technically, the bill he introduced would tax bonuses (retention payments) for companies that have a certain percentage of ownership by the federal government (70%, I think). Thus, this will pertain to AIG and to Fanny and Freddie (thus preventing this from being punitive to one company only).

He argued that this company shouldn’t be using taxpayer bailout dollars for bonuses to the people who got us in this mess in the first place and almost decimated the economy.

The opponents said that the retention payments are needed to keep talented people at AIG in order to clean up the mess. They also said that this punishes anyone in the company who was not involved in the bad stuff that AIG did.

The House of Representatives passed a very similar bill on Friday, and the Senate will take it up and the President has said he would sign it.

Someone else told me, upon hearing about this bill, that “good public policy never gets in the way of populist angst” and that he thought this was more political than policy.

I think this is good policy and good politics, but I am open to hearing the other side. I know that the general public wants this done (I heard so at an irish bar on St. Patrick’s day!). What do you think? Good policy, or just good politics?

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