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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GOP’s ‘seven biggest economic lies’

As told by Robert Reich and printed at RawStory.

link

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Let Them Eat Cake

Bill Maher, though an occasional asshole, is spot-on in his criticism of greedy bastards. Plus, I love how he does snark; it's a passing subtle comment more than the dripping hate that clouds my own brand.

At any rate, here's what Bill has to say about people who whine about a 3% tax increase:

New Rule: The next rich person who publicly complains about being vilified by the Obama administration must be publicly vilified by the Obama administration. It's so hard for one person to tell another person what constitutes being "rich", or what tax rate is "too much." But I've done some math that indicates that, considering the hole this country is in, if you are earning more than a million dollars a year and are complaining about a 3.6% tax increase, then you are by definition a greedy asshole.

And let's be clear: that's 3.6% only on income above 250 grand -- your first 250, that's still on the house. Now, this week we got some horrible news: that one in seven Americans are now living below the poverty line. But I want to point you to an American who is truly suffering: Ben Stein. You know Ben Stein, the guy who got rich because when he talks it sounds so boring it's actually funny. He had a game show on Comedy Central, does eye drop commercials, doesn't believe in evolution? Yeah, that asshole. I kid Ben -- so, the other day Ben wrote an article about his struggle. His struggle as a wealthy person facing the prospect of a slightly higher marginal tax rate. Specifically, Ben said that when he was finished paying taxes and his agents, he was left with only 35 cents for every dollar he earned. Which is shocking, Ben Stein has an agent? I didn't know Broadway Danny Rose was still working.

Cake?  Yeah...not so much...

Ben whines in his article about how he's worked for every dollar he has -- if by work you mean saying the word "Bueller" in a movie 25 years ago. Which doesn't bother me in the slightest, it's just that at a time when people in America are desperate and you're raking in the bucks promoting some sleazy Free Credit Score dot-com... maybe you shouldn't be asking us for sympathy. Instead, you should be down on your knees thanking God and/or Ronald Reagan that you were lucky enough to be born in a country where a useless schmuck who contributes absolutely nothing to society can somehow manage to find himself in the top marginal tax bracket.

And you're welcome to come on the show anytime.

Now I can hear you out there saying, "Come on Bill, don't be so hard on Ben Stein, he does a lot of voiceover work, and that's hard work." Ok, it's true, Ben is hardly the only rich person these days crying like a baby who's fallen off his bouncy seat. Last week Mayor Bloomberg of New York complained that all his wealthy friends are very upset with mean ol' President Poopy-Pants: He said they all say the same thing: "I knew I was going to have to pay more taxes. But I didn't expect to be vilified." Poor billionaires -- they just can't catch a break.

First off, far from being vilified, we bailed you out -- you mean we were supposed to give you all that money and kiss your ass, too? That's Hollywood you're thinking of. FDR, he knew how to vilify; this guy, not so much. And second, you should have been vilified -- because you're the vill-ains! I'm sure a lot of you are very nice people. And I'm sure a lot of you are jerks. In other words, you're people. But you are the villains. Who do you think outsourced all the jobs, destroyed the unions, and replaced workers with desperate immigrants and teenagers in China. Joe the Plumber?

And right now, while we run trillion dollar deficits, Republicans are holding America hostage to the cause of preserving the Bush tax cuts that benefit the wealthiest 1% of people, many of them dead. They say that we need to keep taxes on the rich low because they're the job creators. They're not. They're much more likely to save money through mergers and outsourcing and cheap immigrant labor, and pass the unemployment along to you.

Americans think rich people must be brilliant; no -- just ruthless. Meg Whitman is running for Governor out here, and her claim to fame is, she started e-Bay. Yes, Meg tapped into the Zeitgeist, the zeitgeist being the desperate need of millions of Americans to scrape a few dollars together by selling the useless crap in their garage. What is e-Bay but a big cyber lawn sale that you can visit without putting your clothes on?

Another of my favorites, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann said, "I don't know where they're going to get all this money, because we're running out of rich people in this country." Actually, we have more billionaires here in the U.S. than all the other countries in the top ten combined, and their wealth grew 27% in the last year. Did yours? Truth is, there are only two things that the United States is not running out of: Rich people and bullshit. Here's the truth: When you raise taxes slightly on the wealthy, it obviously doesn't destroy the economy -- we know this, because we just did it -- remember the '90's? It wasn't that long ago. You were probably listening to grunge music, or dabbling in witchcraft. Clinton moved the top marginal rate from 36 to 39% -- and far from tanking, the economy did so well he had time to get his dick washed.

Even 39% isn't high by historical standards. Under Eisenhower, the top tax rate was 91%. Under Nixon, it was 70%. Obama just wants to kick it back to 39 -- just three more points for the very rich. Not back to 91, or 70. Three points. And they go insane. Steve Forbes said that Obama, quote "believes from his inner core that people... above a certain income have more than they should have and that many probably have gotten it from ill-gotten ways." Which they have. Steve Forbes, of course, came by his fortune honestly: he inherited it from his gay egg-collecting, Elizabeth Taylor fag-hagging father, who inherited it from his father. Of course then they moan about the inheritance tax, how the government took 55% percent when Daddy died -- which means you still got 45% for doing nothing more than starting out life as your father's pecker-snot.

We don't hate rich people, but have a little humility about how you got it and stop complaining. Maybe the worst whiner of all: Stephen Schwarzman, #69 on Forbes' list of richest Americans, compared Obama's tax hike to "when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939." Wow. If Obama were Hitler, Mr. Schwarzman, I think your tax rate would be the least of your worries.

Now I'm fired up. Where'd I put that guillotine...

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Where is the outrage?!?!?

The blogosphere has been following the bailout and various other programs from Obama et al. I readily concede that on many issues, it is possible to make reasoned arguments on both sides. I am having a harder time with the current economic policies understanding why people think they are a good idea, are fair, or will ultimately be helpful. I am having an ever harder time understanding why most of the media isn't that interested in asking hard questions or being critical of these policies. I know that some are doing this, but it just doesn't seem to have gathered much steam.

It does seem that some non-traditional outlets are doing the hard work. Matt Taibbi (h/t to Mr. F and Mike) has had a few really good, well researched articles on the subject. Comedian, Jon Stewart has been willing to ask some hard questions of Jim Cramer (I'd love to see him interview Geithner). Hell, even Cracked Magazine gets it. The article is a week old, but still good. I love how he breaks it down:

Anyway, many of these banks own toxic mortgage-backed assets (for brevity I’m going to refer to these as ‘horseshit’ from here on). This horseshit is, amazingly, still considered an asset, although if anyone tried to sell it right now, they wouldn’t get a very good price for it, on account of its horseshitty attributes. The central problem here is that some banks own so much of this horseshit that if they valued it at what they could actually sell it for, they would effectively be bankrupt. In short, getting this horseshit off the banks’ books without making them bankrupt is our ultimate goal.

The government will provide loans for private investors to buy up the aforementioned horseshit from the banks. This would give these banks enough money so they could go about their business and not collapse like an old woman getting out of the bathtub. After that, if the horseshit goes up in price the government gets back their money and splits the profit with the private investors. If the horseshit goes down in price, the private investor takes a small loss, and the government takes a small to enormous loss, depending on various properties of the horseshit (taste? grittiness?)

There’s three problems with this plan. One, this involves buying horseshit from the banks for more than it’s probably worth, and keeping each bank’s current management intact, despite growing evidence that they’re colossal fuckers. Two, it involves the private investors taking a chunk of any potential profit while risking only a tiny portion of their own money–effectively another subsidy for wealthy jerks. And the third problem is that this plan may not be big enough. The private investors, even playing mostly with the government’s money, might not be willing to pay enough for this horseshit to keep the banks from going bankrupt. So the banks won’t sell, and we’ll all sit around picking at each other’s asses for a bit longer.

I am not suggesting that the revolution start now, but I would like to some serious questions coming from the MSM and some accountability demanded from the people.

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Career Day

Like ATK Regular Mike says, we need to get educated and get loud. The methods behind the current "solutions" to the financial debacle are certainly not helping, as more and more money gets rolled into neat little cigar-shapes and smoked. Regular offenders like Citibank and AIG, and even GM (which is arguably part of the overall crisis) keep coming back to the trough, and getting everything they ask for as legislators act all indignant about giving it to them again (which they do). Oscar-worthy performances all around.

Arguments made all over the intertubes about the financial sector revolving door [lots of Mike's Neighborhood love on ATK today...] between Wall Street and K Street suggest that this is part of the problem, and I tend to agree despite the fact that I too am an evil lobbyist (though not for any financial institutions!).

But here's where I am stuck: what do we do instead? Cole's Balloon Juice thinks that just letting banks fail is not a solution. It's one thing for me to write Stabenow and Levin once a week and bitch at them for supporting more money-chucking. But my letters feel empty in that unlike a lot of other bitching I do at my elected officials, I have not been able to say "instead of X, do Y." In this case, I have no idea what "Y" is.

So I leave it to the giant mental muscle that is our ATK community. What do we do instead?

I'll start. I said "nationalize the banks, and make the Fed Chairman an elected position" on another blog. An elected fed chairman would be accountable to "the people," and imagine what listening to campaigning for that position would do for our national conversations on economy.

React. Make up your own. Today is career day, and ATK is looking for an economist.

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Bailout?

I will readily admit that economics is not one of my strong areas.  My coursework on that subject was limited to half a year in high school and two semesters in college.  I have been trying to wrap my mind around the proposed bailout and other types of interventions.  While I am generally against too many regulations, I also don't believe that the market will just correct itself.  My middle of the road stance will allow some regulation with the probably naive belief that regulation should be minimal, fair, and do what it is proposed to do.

I know that some kind of intervention in our current economic crisis is necessary.  Unfortunately, the more I read about what is proposed, the more I am getting nervous.  This article, from the Volokh Conspiracy didn't alleviate any of those concerns.  Some of the proposed measures by Dodd just don't sit well with me.  From the article:

I have read Dodd’s proposed statute and in some respects, it is far worse than has been reported. Senator Dodd has placed a loophole in the bill that is explicitly designed to siphon off tens or hundreds of billions of dollars to the Housing Trust Fund and the Capital Magnet Fund even if there are no net profits in the $700 billion venture.

and,

With a net loss, one might think that nothing would be funneled to the housing funds for service organizations, but that is not what the statute says or means. One looks only at the sales generating gains to determine the size of the payments to the housing funds. With $2 trillion in profits and $2.1 trillion in losses, the housing funds nonetheless get $400 billion dollars in “profits.” (This is over 40% of a typical year’s US total federal income tax receipts.) And that is the result if only 20% of "profits" are skimmed; the statute puts no upper limit on the skimming, so long as they come from profits (not net profits). Theoretically, the new Agency could potentially siphon off $2 trillion to the two housing funds, more than its $700 billion portfolio limit.

What?!?  I know that some of this is speculation, but the fact that Congress created the environment for the current financial crisis doesn't exactly give me much confidence.  The author concludes with:

I was mildly in favor of the bailout until I read Dodd's proposed statute. The way that the statute is drafted is so tricky and its definition of profit is so unsophisticated and nonsensical that the statute smells more of graft than of an honest attempt to solve the financial crisis.

It sure looks that way to me.  

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