How to Know That Your Government is Rotten

Here is a bit from a Washington Post article that points out that while the "representatives" of the people have gotten fabulously wealthy over the last 25 years, the common people are either treading water or slowly sinking:

Between 1984 and 2009, the median net worth of a member of the House more than doubled, according to the analysis of financial disclosures, from $280,000 to $725,000 in inflation-adjusted 2009 dollars, excluding home ­equity.

Over the same period, the wealth of an American family has declined slightly, with the comparable median figure sliding from $20,600 to $20,500, according to the Panel Study of Income Dynamics from the University of Michigan.

The comparisons exclude home equity because it is not included in congressional reporting, and 1984 was chosen because it is the earliest year for which consistent wealth statistics are available.

The growing disparity between the representatives and the represented means that there is a greater distance between the economic experience of Americans and those of lawmakers.

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The growing financial comfort of Congress relative to most Americans is consistent with the general trends in the United States toward inequality of wealth: Members of Congress have long been wealthier than average Americans, and in recent decades the wealth of the wealthiest Americans has outpaced that of the average.

In 1984, the 90th percentile of U.S. families had holdings worth six times the median family’s; by 2009, the 90th percentile was worth 12 times the median family, according to the University of Michigan study, a longitudinal panel survey. These figures include home equity.

This growing inequality, not surprisingly, is seen in Congress. Not only has the median wealth increased, but the proportion of representatives who have little besides a home has shrunk. In 1984, one in five House members had zero or negative net worth excluding home equity, according to the disclosures; by 2009, that number had dropped to one in 12.

When the guardians of the government are stuffing their pockets with money while the people are slowly sinking, things are rotten. There is corruption and incompetence in government.

The Republicans loved to say that "government is the problem, not the solution". That's got it wrong. The problem is that the government politicians are the problem, not the solution. These "elected representatives" have been using their power to feed at the trough of government, taking money from lobbyists, selling their votes, all while they have been telling the ordinary citizens that the problem is "big government", not crooked, greedy politicians.

Rather than pass laws to help their constituents. These pigs have been feasting off tax money while blaming "big government" for everything. They are hypocrites, crooks, and liars. And they and their buddies, the elite 1% are doing this at the expense of the bottom 99%.

Note: From this same article. Here is how the rich view themselves as deserving their wealth. This is what a guy who married into the Phillips petroleum empire says of how "hard work" will make you a billionaire:

In 1973, Kelly married Victoria Phillips, an heir to the oil fortune. Kelly’s financial disclosure forms show that among her holdings is stock in Phillips Resources Inc., which is valued at between $5 million and $25 million and which generated more than $100,000 annually in dividends.

Four years out of college in 1974, Mike and Victoria were able to buy a home for $50,000, roughly twice the median value of homes in Pennsylvania at the time, a large, stately house close to downtown.

In 1997, Kelly bought his dad’s business from him, taking out a $1.6 million mortgage to pay for it.

When discussing his wealth and how it came to him, Kelly, who was called “Millionaire Mike” during the 2010 campaign, grows animated.

“The way my dad taught me was pretty basic: You have to kill more than you eat. You gotta wake up every day before anyone else, you better get to work, and you better stay later than everybody else,” he said. “I’m a rich guy because I’ve worked hard. I gotta work every fricking day. Listen, nobody gives it to you. I compete. I’m not the only guy selling hot dogs at the ballpark, okay?”

I don't doubt he worked hard. But tens of millions of people work hard, real hard. A lot of poor people hold down two jobs at minimum wage working incredibly hard. But they don't "build up" car dealerships. This guy Mike Kelly, a Republican, worked hard. I don't doubt it. But he didn't get fabulously wealthy from working hard. His dad owned a car dealership and he bought out his father (probably at a steeply discounted price) and he married an heiress to a fortune. I bet a lot of janitors would me multi-millionaires if their fathers owned car dealerships and they married heiresses. And I bet they would be millionaires if they only put in an "average day" at work. It wasn't the hard work that made Mike Kelly rich. It was his education, his connections, his charm, probably his "flexible" ethics, and certainly some good old fashioned hard work.

The Whole Dirty, Ugly $7.77 Trillion Truth is Now Revealed

The secret actions of the US government to keep the US banking system from complete collapse are now available. You can now read the gory details of how the US government "on behalf of the taxpayers gave away $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008 and, when you add up all the "free money" the banks got, it totals $7.77 trillion.

From a Bloomberg News article:

Secret Fed Loans Helped Banks Net $13B

The Federal Reserve and the big banks fought for more than two years to keep details of the largest bailout in U.S. history a secret. Now, the rest of the world can see what it was missing.

The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day. Bankers didn’t mention that they took tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans at the same time they were assuring investors their firms were healthy. And no one calculated until now that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue.

Saved by the bailout, bankers lobbied against government regulations, a job made easier by the Fed, which never disclosed the details of the rescue to lawmakers even as Congress doled out more money and debated new rules aimed at preventing the next collapse.

A fresh narrative of the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009 emerges from 29,000 pages of Fed documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and central bank records of more than 21,000 transactions. While Fed officials say that almost all of the loans were repaid and there have been no losses, details suggest taxpayers paid a price beyond dollars as the secret funding helped preserve a broken status quo and enabled the biggest banks to grow even bigger.

“When you see the dollars the banks got, it’s hard to make the case these were successful institutions,” says Sherrod Brown, a Democratic Senator from Ohio who in 2010 introduced an unsuccessful bill to limit bank size. “This is an issue that can unite the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. There are lawmakers in both parties who would change their votes now.”

The size of the bailout came to light after Bloomberg LP, the parent of Bloomberg News, won a court case against the Fed and a group of the biggest U.S. banks called Clearing House Association LLC to force lending details into the open.

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The amount of money the central bank parceled out was surprising even to Gary H. Stern, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis from 1985 to 2009, who says he “wasn’t aware of the magnitude.” It dwarfed the Treasury Department’s better-known $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. Add up guarantees and lending limits, and the Fed had committed $7.77 trillion as of March 2009 to rescuing the financial system, more than half the value of everything produced in the U.S. that year.

“TARP at least had some strings attached,” says Brad Miller, a North Carolina Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, referring to the program’s executive-pay ceiling. “With the Fed programs, there was nothing.”

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The Fed says it typically makes emergency loans more expensive than those available in the marketplace to discourage banks from abusing the privilege. During the crisis, Fed loans were among the cheapest around, with funding available for as low as 0.01 percent in December 2008, according to data from the central bank and money-market rates tracked by Bloomberg.

The Fed funds also benefited firms by allowing them to avoid selling assets to pay investors and depositors who pulled their money. So the assets stayed on the banks’ books, earning interest.

Banks report the difference between what they earn on loans and investments and their borrowing expenses. The figure, known as net interest margin, provides a clue to how much profit the firms turned on their Fed loans, the costs of which were included in those expenses. To calculate how much banks stood to make, Bloomberg multiplied their tax-adjusted net interest margins by their average Fed debt during reporting periods in which they took emergency loans.

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The U.S. jobless rate hasn’t dipped below 8.8 percent since March 2009, 3.6 million homes have been foreclosed since August 2007, according to data provider RealtyTrac Inc., and police have clashed with Occupy Wall Street protesters, who say government policies favor the wealthiest citizens, in New York, Boston, Seattle and Oakland, California.

The Tea Party, which supports a more limited role for government, has its roots in anger over the Wall Street bailouts, says Neil M. Barofsky, former TARP special inspector general and a Bloomberg Television contributing editor.

“The lack of transparency is not just frustrating; it really blocked accountability,” Barofsky says. “When people don’t know the details, they fill in the blanks. They believe in conspiracies.”

In the end, Geithner had his way. The Brown-Kaufman proposal to limit the size of banks was defeated, 60 to 31. Bank supervisors meeting in Switzerland did mandate minimum reserves that institutions will have to hold, with higher levels for the world’s largest banks, including the six biggest in the U.S. Those rules can be changed by individual countries.

They take full effect in 2019.

Meanwhile, Kaufman says, “we’re absolutely, totally, 100 percent not prepared for another financial crisis.”

There is a lot more detail. Go read the whole article.

Freedom of the press is essential to a democracy. The fact that Bush and Obama administrations fought bitterly to prevent the electorate from knowing what sweetheart deals they gave the banks should be fully understood by American citizens. The US government is deeply corrupted by the banking system.

The fact that nobody has gone to jail for the multiple trillion dollar fraud committed by banks, mortgage brokers, assessors, ratings companies, and the big Wall Street banks that "financialized" junk debt into AAA bonds that quickly went bankrupt cries out for justice. The US government is fighting this tooth-and-nail. Heads must roll. The corruption must be rooted out.

The Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party movements both agree on this one fact: the US political system has been corrupted by the banks.

Worst of all, the ultra-rich show complete contempt for the bottom 99%, the ordinary taxpayers and working stiffs, who don't get tax cuts and "special deals" from the government:

An Interesting Example of a Double Standard

This is just too precious. David Brooks writes for the NY Times and castigates the victims of sexual harassment by Herman Cain. But "Angry Black Lady" at the Balloon Juice blog takes to task for his double standard:

Why the New York Times continues to allow David Brooks to crap all over the opinion page, I will never understand.

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Moving on:

Now we turn to ethical issues. My first question, and this is a genuine question, concerns the victims. Let’s detach ourselves from the specifics of the Cain case and consider a general question: If you are the victim of sexual harassment, and you agree to remain silent in exchange for a five-figure payoff, should any moral taint attach to you? In the old days, somebody who allowed a predator to continue his hunting in exchange for money would certainly be considered a sinner. I’m reluctant to judge people in these circumstances, but I’m inclined to agree. Am I missing something?

First of all, Brooks is never again allowed to use the word taint. Just don’t.

Second of all, everything Brooks said is victim-blaming bullshit. It’s the same argument that the uninformed and unenlightened make when they claim that rape victims have a duty to report their rapist lest they be held morally responsible should the rapist strike again. It’s a callous, anti-feminist, bullshit argument that has no place in public discourse, much less splattered on the New York Times by a person who could have simply googled it, and read one of a hundred blog posts written by feminists on the subject of victim-blaming in the context of sexual assault and harassment.

But here’s the kicker—David Brooks need not have even spent the fifteen minutes it would have taken him to discern that his “ethically responsible women don’t settle” argument is a load of horseshit because David Brooks himself has been the victim of unwanted advances.

In 2009, Brooks appeared on MSNBC with Lawrence O’Donnell to talk about a Republican Senator (whom he refused to name) making an unwanted advance on Brooks. He stated that during a dinner, a Republican Senator had “his hand hand on my inner thigh the whole time” and it made Brooks uncomfortable.

From Think Progress:

BROOKS: You know, all three of us spend a lot of time covering politicians and I don’t know about you guys, but in my view, they’re all emotional freaks of one sort or another. They’re guaranteed to invade your personal space, touch you. I sat next to a Republican senator once at dinner and he had his hand on my inner thigh the whole time. I was like, ehh, get me out of here.

HARWOOD: What?

BROOKS: I can only imagine what happens to you guys.

O’DONNELL: Sorry, who was that?

BROOKS: I’m not telling you, I’m not telling you.

Brooks said that he has “spoken to a lot of young women who are Senate staffers and they’ll have these middle age guys who are sort of in the middle of a mid-life crisis. Emotionally needy, they don’t know how to do it and sort of like these St. Bernards drooling everywhere.”

You would think that a high profile person like David Brooks would be so shamed by being "outed" for such an egregious example of a double standard. But he won't. He gets paid lots of bucks to sit in judgement of others. A little fact like the fact that he is a hypocrite isn't going to stop him. But readers should stop reading him. I did. Several years ago. I can only take a certain amount of sleazy reporting and moral unaccountability before I decide I won't waste any more time reading somebody who commits to print his moral failings and feels no shame.

Keith Olbermann Takes Oakland's Mayor to Task

Olbermann starts out by praising Mayor Jean Quan's previous service to Oakland. It is an impressive list. But then he gets down to the horror that she unleashed by turning her police loose on peaceful protesters and makes it utterly, utterly clear the crime she has perpetrated by her actions. You must watch this video:



For a first person narrative by somebody on the ground in Oakland, read this article by Mike Godwin in reason.com:

If you've been following the mainstream media coverage of the Occupy Wall Street protests, odds are that you've heard about events at Occupy Oakland. What you can't tell from the news clips is how the situation has played out for those of us who live here. I can't speak for everyone, but I do know that my reaction, both to the protestors and to the violent police interventions against them, is hardly an uncommon one.

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The vibe where I was standing was tense. Occasionally an individual shouted at the arrayed police, “This is America! What are you doing here?” Or, “I can't believe you're doing this! We love you guys but what you're doing is wrong!” I didn't think it was a great idea to shout at the (silent but intent) array of police—it wasn't likely they were going to suddenly relent, and I knew they had been wearing heavy riot gear and carrying weapons (including astonishingly large batons) for six or more hours. My instinct was that it was not particularly safe to shout at tired men and women with weapons, no matter how righteous one's outrage is.

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One guy passing me on the way downtown warned about tear gas. I spotted New York Times reporter Malia Wollan talking into her mobile—as she walked past I heard her describing the apparent effects of the gas on individuals exposed to it. Her account is available here.

Of the people headed toward me, I first thought a disproportionate number were bicyclists—only a few minutes later did I realize, embarrassingly, that there were other reasons for wearing a bicycle helmet that night. The tension in the crowd was palpably building so I decided it was time to head home. Keeping my distance turned out to have been wise, because this is what I missed getting caught up in:



I was also standing 50-100 feet south from where a police officer appears to have thrown a flash grenade into a crowd of people gathered to help 24-year-old Scott Olsen, who suffered massive head injuries after allegedly being struck by a tear gas canister.



I confess that it breaks my heart to watch this clip. If I had seen someone collapsed in the street, I'd have tried to help that person too. These people were apparently punished for their impulse to help.

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I don’t know how to interpret everything I saw, and I can’t state with any authority what Occupy Oakland or any of the other protests ultimately mean. But I do know this: The millions of dollars California just spent on this crackdown did nothing to dispel or discourage the protestors. In fact, the police intervention has echoed around the world. Occupy Wall Street committed to sending $20,000 to Occupy Oakland and protestors as far away as Tahrir Square in Egypt have expressed their solidarity with the Oakland protestors.

History tends to happen when you least expect it, and my new neighbors have taken their first steps into its pages.

Go read the full article.

If you want to see the sympathy protest in Tahrir Square Egypt for the Occupy Oakland violence, here is a post on BoingBoing with pictures.

Here is political commentary in Wired magazine on the fallout from the police violence at Occupy Oakland:

But the police forces’ violent tactics worked only temporarily, and have, for the moment at least, handed the Occupy movement a moral and political victory so big that not even Occupy protestors seem to recognize it.

The nation, and even much of the world, seemed to recoil in shock from the images coming out of Oakland Tuesday night, where police used tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse unarmed protestors, who built a camp in the city as part of the nationwide protest against an unfair political and economic system.

Critically wounded Marine veteran Scott Olsen became a rallying point for Occupy, following widely seen footage of protestors trying to carry him to safety in the midst of a tear gas assault. There were other pictures and videos: streets littered with rubber bullets, people in wheelchairs trapped in the tear gas, and bloodied faces and bruised bodies of unarmed protestors.

On Wednesday, OccupyOakland’s fortunes reversed.

Oakland Mayor Jean Quan announced that people could reoccupy Frank Ogawa plaza, renamed Oscar Grant plaza by the occupiers in honor of a black Oakland man shot to death by transit police in 2009. When people arrived for the General Assembly, the occupation’s standard open meeting, the grassy area of the plaza was fenced off. But through the course of the evening, and not without violent conflict among the occupiers, the fences came down.

People fought each other over the fences, pulling at each other, some linking arms to protect the fence, and screaming, all while the GA went on in the distance. Despite the fears of those attempting to protect the fence, no police moved in after it went down. The GA proceeded through the evening undisturbed by anything but news choppers overhead and a turn-out too big for the sound system to cover.

But word came in that an attack was imminent on OccupySF across the bay, and a large contingent moved to get on the BART transit to join San Francisco’s Occupiers in Justin Herman Plaza. But when they arrived at the station they found it closed; BART wasn’t letting the occupation on in Oakland, or letting people off at Embarcadero, the station closest to OccupySF.

The roused crowd took to the streets, marching down Broadway towards the police station. They met no resistance. The police stayed a block away on all sides, and melted back in front of the path of the crowd, directing traffic away from the protestor-filled streets of Downtown Oakland. Many protestors were looking for a confrontation with police, but found none — staying peaceful and well behaved, if boisterous and peripatetic. The only property damage I observed were a couple incidents of graffiti-tagging, of which only one was definitely attributable to the OccupyOakland march. There were no broken windows or even overturned trash bins, and police stayed largely out of sight for the evening.

...

During the slow, tweeted protestor pursuit of police, OccupySF drilled for a police raid, practicing locking arms around their camp and removing vital gear from the site. As the hours wore on, many tired occupiers became paranoid, and every bus or van that went by startled people and sent them into conspiratorial speculations. Some occupiers went around writing the National Lawyer’s guild phone number on the arms of occupiers who didn’t already have a lawyer.

Five members of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, several running for mayor, arrived and used the people’s mic to address the occupiers. They stayed put for hours, and many occupiers credited them for preventing the police raid.

On Thursday, the SFPD stretched credulity by telling ABC Channel 7 that the whole thing was a training exercise, resulting in a sarcastic local news report regarding the whole event. At the same time, OccupySF posted a picture of a notice given to businesses around the occupation warning of “…increased activity by the SFPD in the immediate vicinity of One Market Plaza starting around this evening’s commute.”

In Oakland the occupation was returning Thursday, growing from one tent in the reclaimed area Wednesday night to eight tents. OccupyOakland is rebuilding against the background of a campaign to recall Mayor Quan, calls for OPD to be disciplined, solidarity marches around the country and the world, and the New York City GA’s consensus to devote 100 sleeping bags and $20,000 for legal and medical expenses to OccupyOakland.

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Sheamus Collins, a bartender from Dublin, showed off his rubber bullet wound.

Click to Enlarge
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No one seemed aware of how crushing their political victory in the last 24 hours had really been.

The Bleak American Outlook

Here is an article that sums up the ugly state of US politics:

A decade ago Republican George W. Bush took our great nation into a $3 trillion war on lies. Today that party is mindlessly controlled by a cultish anti-tax pledge made to lobbyist Grover Norquist and his Americans for Tax Reform group, who once proclaimed: “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”

Yes, drown. Kill. Folks, this insane plot line has advanced into a no-compromise, scorched-earth vow to do everything necessary to drown the presidency and reinstall another conservative who will return America to the Wild West policies that sabotaged it in the Bush/Cheney years.

They’ve become a vengeful cult that will never back the president on anything, even their own job-growth policies. Will even destroy the economy to achieve their goals. They do not care about democracy. They want absolute control. And they’re succeeding.
America’s an addict, out-of-control, doesn’t care who gets hurts

Yes folks, I am mad as hell. The America I believed in when I volunteered for the Marine Corps, went to Korea, that America has been hijacked by an irrational, dark force that’s consuming our political system. We saw this coming a few years ago reviewing Jack Bogle’s warnings in “The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism.” Buffett called that one: “There’s class warfare, all right. But it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

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You know exactly what I’m saying: America is way off track. Our great nation is acting like a drunken self-destructive addict. Could use an intervention. But sadly we’ve drifted so far off our moral compass that only hitting bottom, a total collapse, near-death experience, only another meltdown bigger than 2008 and a depression will do the trick.

You know addictions turn even nice people into monsters. In the end they don’t care who they take down with them. Nothing matters, not families, not nations. Protect your assets folks.

The author is far more pessimistic than me. Also he is riding that old hobby horse of the 1960s: "overpopulation". But that is crazy. Almost all of the developed countries now have birth rates below replacement and the rest of the world, as it gets wealthier, is quickly sliding into the same situation. So "overpopulation" will cure itself.

The problem with the world isn't "overpopulation". It is out-of-control elites who are buying off politicians to let them grab all the money and leaving everybody else slowly sinking in debt. It is a fixable problem: re-establish progressive taxation to stop the rich from scooping up all the wealth and crashing the economy.

The Ultimate IP Sleaze from Obama

The "people's" president is supposed to be on the side of the people. Everybody understands that Republican presidents cater to the 1% and those wingnuts who aspire to be the 1%. But for everybody else there is only one choice: the Democratic president.

Obama is pushing his "jobs" agenda, but with great irony, he wants creative graphic designers to labour for free to create him a poster. No job for them. Just the glory of knowing that "they did it for a good cause". Oh yeah...

Here is a bit from a post in Rolling Stone magazine:

The Obama campaign has more than $60 million cash on hand. In an economy this bad, you'd think a presidential campaign that flush would be happy to pay good money for a talented designer to create a campaign poster.

But the folks at Obama campaign have taken a page from the Arianna Huffington book of economic exploitation and called on "artists across the country" to create a poster ... for free.

And here's the kicker. It's a jobs poster.

Yes, the Obama campaign is soliciting unpaid labor to create a poster "illustrating why we support President Obama's plan to create jobs now, and why we'll re-elect him to continue fighting for jobs for the next four years."

If you win? You get: A framed copy of your own poster, signed by the president ("approximate retail value $195").

And if you don't win? Well, that's too bad. You've not only lost the contest, you've also surrendered your intellectual property. "All submissions will become the property of Obama for America," according to the fine print.

Just like the Obama presidency knows that his job #1 is to bailout banks and make sure billionaire bankers get their humungous bonuses, the Obama presidency knows that intellectual property rights (IP) goes to the sleazeball who can squeeze it out of the dumb proletariat who will sign up for work for free and give up all rights to their ideas. Wow. Isn't capitalism great, or what? Obama is a typical 1% type, you work, he gets the money, the glory, the top job, the babes, the media, the big retirement package. You get to hang on to your warm-and-fuzzy feeling that you "helped". That and $5 will help you buy a hamburger to split with your wife and 3 kids.

Obama wants to create jobs... he wants to create 4 more years for No. 1. For the 99%? This is just a slogan. He is going through the motions, crafting this as a "message with spin and a careful political game of partisanship". Whether you get a job or not? He could care less. That's your problem, not his. He is the president for the 1%.

Rupert Murdoch, the Moralist

It is good to see that Rupert Murdoch's heart is in the right place and that he had his flagship newspaper in the UK, The Times, carry this cartoon to remind people that there is something more important than a missing girl's family' hopes were played with by Murdoch's journalists when they hacked her phone (not to mention the other 4,000+ victims of hacking). Rupert Murdoch wants us to quit paying attention to the silly phone hacking story and instead focus on the great moral dilemma of our time: starvation in Africa:

Click to Enlarge
From BoingBoing
It is miraculous that Murdoch has suddenly "got religion" on starvation in Africa. I'm sure this new found moral concern of his has nothing to do with all the press coverage about phone hacking. He understands that in the big scheme of things that tens of thousands starving in Africa is far more important than political corruption (buying police & politicians and using phone hacking to get leverage over people).

This stance demonstrates how great a man Murdoch is to forego the scrutiny of phone hacking and political corruption and instead put his papers on the trail of the truly important story: starvation in Africa.

If you need confirmation of the ruthless and manipulative and evil nature of Rupert Murdoch, the above cartoon should suffice.

Here is Murdoch's news channel in the US, Fox "News", and how it behaves:



If you watch this clip to the end, the CNN reporter is saying that while Fox "News" is ignoring the Murdoch scandal, other Murdoch properties are covering it and he notes The Times. But the above cartoon should cause you to question how seriously the other Murdoch properties are "covering" the scandal.



And this is a prime example of Murdoch's minion's manipulating the coverage of "this hacking problem" by confusing criminal hacking by Murdoch with the fact that the Pentagon is a victim of hacking...




Go see my viewpoint on the above video.

We Gotta Deal With This Hacking Problem

Here is a very clever bit of progaganda. Fox "News" is owned by Rupert Murdoch, the very guy who owns the now defunct News of the World. That publication's reporters illegally hacked into roughly 5,000 phones in the UK in order to get dirt for publication. So how does Fox "News" present this fact?



They cleverly confuse the viewer of their "news story" by putting the "hacking" at News of the World side-by-side with the fact that the Pentagon has been hacked by unknown outsiders. This creates the impression that both the Pentagon and Rupert Murdoch are victims of hacking! Sure the Pentagon has been. But it was Rupert Murdoch's reporters who were hacking into the phones of innocent victims. The above "news story" claims "we gotta deal with this hacking problem" and leaves the impression that it is News of the World that is the victim of hacking when in fact it was Rupert Murdoch's company that was the perpetrator!

They do two moves:

1. Present Murdoch as a victim of "piling on" and claim that he "took responsibility" and "acted immediately" to fix the problem. Those are bald-faced lies. He denied responsibility in this scandal which is over a decade old with thousands of victims. Over the years Murdoch has thrown one or two sacrificial lambs in to get the heat off, but when it became clear that his "reporters" had been hacking a dead girl's phone to get "news" for the tabloid and when the mailbox was full deleted messages to make room for more messages to keep the story going (while leaving the parents with the impression that their daughter was alive and updating her mailbox when in fact she was dead). This was just plain cruel, and this is the bit that created widespread revulsion in the UK and has caused these arrests of key managers in the Rupert Murdoch empire.


2. Present Murdoch as a "victim of hacking" by confusing the hacking of the Pentagon with the hacking by Murdoch employees of roughly 5,000 innocent victim's phones in the UK. This is criminality on a massive scale and Fox "News" pretends it is "old news", of limited interest, and is really "unfair" to Murdoch to blame him for how he runs his companies!

This video is presented on Fox "News" as a "news story" but it is pure propaganda being put out by a sophisticated company hoping to confuse people and get them to misunderstand what has really been happening. A real news organization tries to inform people about the facts. Fox "News" is manipulating the "news" to get their boss, Rupert Murdoch, off the hook for his crimes!

The Real Reason Why Taxes Must Not Be Raised in the US

Here is a post by "Invictus" on Barry Ritholtz's The Big Picture blog:

High Net Worth Wealth: +9.1% in 2010

The Republican position on tax increases was perfectly articulated by Mitch McConnell on Fox News Sunday. Per the NY Times:

On “Fox News Sunday,” the Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said that he was “for the biggest deal possible, too, it’s just that we’re not going to raise taxes in the middle of this horrible economic situation.”

Yes, we are in a “horrible economic situation.” Of that there can be no doubt. But the horribleness of that situation is not being felt by a segment of the population — High Net Worth Individuals (HNWI) — whose numbers and net worth have swelled even over the past two years. Per the annual Capgemini/Merrill Lynch World Wealth Report:

The population of HNWIs in North America rose 8.6% in 2010 to 3.4 million, after rising 16.6% in 2009. Their wealth rose 9.1% to US$11.6 trillion. [Ed note: Per Capgemini's 2010, the HNWI gain in 2009 was 17.8%.]

While the single biggest asset most of us own is our home (still deflating, unfortunately), the single biggest asset most HNWI own is their investment portfolio (S&P500 up almost 100 percent over the past two years); real wages for working stiffs barely budging while those in the C-suite party like it’s 1999 (or 2007). These folks — presumably the “job creators” about whom we hear so much on a regular basis — have seen their wealth rise by about 28% over the past two years. I can only conclude that a 13+ percent annual gain on one’s wealth is insufficient to begin adding to payrolls, which begs the question as to how much more wealth our “job creators” need to amass before they’ll hang the “Help Wanted” sign. Or how much additional wealth they need to amass before a minimal tax increase is considered within the realm of the possible.

NOTES:

1 HNWIs are defined as those having investable assets of US$1 million or more, excluding primary residence, collectibles, consumables, and consumer durables.

2 Ultra-HNWIs are defined as those having investable assets of US$30 million or more, excluding primary residence, collectibles, consumables, and consumer durables.

Yes... the real reason why taxes can't be raised is that the ultra-rich are doing really, really well and really, really want to do even better! It is greed gone wild. They don't care that the bottom 90% is suffering. All they care about is themselves. They want more and they want it right now! They've bought and paid for the politicians so they are keeping the pressure on to make sure that they aren't dinged to pay any more taxes. In fact, they are the ones behind the continuous call for more "tax cuts"!

The Greatest Theft in History

From a Los Angeles Times article:

Missing Iraq money may have been stolen, auditors say

After the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the George W. Bush administration flooded the conquered country with so much cash to pay for reconstruction and other projects in the first year that a new unit of measurement was born.

Pentagon officials determined that one giant C-130 Hercules cargo plane could carry $2.4 billion in shrink-wrapped bricks of $100 bills. They sent an initial full planeload of cash, followed by 20 other flights to Iraq by May 2004 in a $12-billion haul that U.S. officials believe to be the biggest international cash airlift of all time.

This month, the Pentagon and the Iraqi government are finally closing the books on the program that handled all those Benjamins. But despite years of audits and investigations, U.S. Defense officials still cannot say what happened to $6.6 billion in cash — enough to run the Los Angeles Unified School District or the Chicago Public Schools for a year, among many other things.

For the first time, federal auditors are suggesting that some or all of the cash may have been stolen, not just mislaid in an accounting error. Stuart Bowen, special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, an office created by Congress, said the missing $6.6 billion may be "the largest theft of funds in national history."

The mystery is a growing embarrassment to the Pentagon, and an irritant to Washington's relations with Baghdad. Iraqi officials are threatening to go to court to reclaim the money, which came from Iraqi oil sales, seized Iraqi assets and surplus funds from the United Nations' oil-for-food program.

There's more. Read the whole article.

This criminally negligent mishandling of $12 billion -- losing $6 billion -- was symptomatic of the incompetence of the Bush administration. Not only did they not plan the Iraq war -- an unnecessary and expensive war -- they pretended it could be done easily and "paid for" by Iraqi money. Well, the above article proves that is just another lie from the clique of Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld.

The Bush administration was an unmitigated disaster for the American people. Sadly, something like 40% of the people in the US still have "good thoughts" about that idiot who led the US into disastrous foreign wars and set up the greated financial crisis since the Great Depression. He lied his way into office. He was a right wing ideologue that wasn't open to facts or reasoning. He was a disaster.

Something More Important than Weiner's Wiener

I get annoyed with how the media finds silly stuff, minor stuff, personal stuff far more important than really important political and economic stuff. There are 14 million people without jobs. That means there are roughly 30 million people hurting badly, struggling to put food on the table, or to keep a roof over their head. But the press makes all the time in the world for stories about immature idiots who sexting.

Here is a post by Paul Krugman which puts this in its place:

The Case of the Mystery Study

Oh, wow. From Greg Sargent:

The other day, the consulting company McKinsey released a startling study claiming that 30 percent of employers are planning to stop giving health insurance to their workers as a result of the Affordable Care Act. The study received a good deal of press coverage and was widely bandied about by conservative politicians and media outlets as proof that conservative warnings about the law are coming to pass.

But as a number of critics were quick to point out, McKinsey’s finding is at odds with many other studies — and the company did not release key portions of the study’s methodology, making it impossible to evaluate the study’s validity.

There’s now been a new twist in this story.

I’m told that the White House, as well as top Democrats on key House and Senate committees, have privately contacted McKinsey to ask for details on the study’s methodology. According to an Obama administration official and a source on the House Ways and Means Committee, the company refused.

One has to assume that there was something terribly wrong with the study. At any rate, nobody should be citing it until or unless McKinsey comes clean.

Oh, and if you ask me, this is a lot more important than some sex scandal.

Update: The plot thickens. Brian Beutler reports:

But multiple sources both within and outside the firm tell TPM the survey was not conducted using McKinsey’s typical, meticulous methodology. Indeed, the article the firm published was not intended to give the subject matter the same authoritative treatment as more thorough studies on the same topic — particularly those conducted by numerous think tanks, and the Congressional Budget Office, which came to the opposite conclusion. And that’s created a clamor within the firm at high levels to set the record straight.

“This particular survey wasn’t designed in away that would allow it to be peer review published or cited academically,” said one source familiar with the controversy.

All sources were granted anonymity, in order to be able to speak candidly about the controversy.

Reached for comment today, a McKinsey spokesperson once again declined to release the survey materials, or to comment beyond saying that, for the moment, McKinsey will let the study speak for itself. However, McKinsey notes that the survey is only one indicator of employers’ potential future actions — that the conclusions remain uncertain and employers’ future decisions will ultimately depend on numerous variables. The three authors of the report were not immediately available for comment.

Another keyed-in source says McKinsey is unlikely to release the survey materials because “it would be damaging to them.”

Both sources disagree with the results of the survey, which was devised by consultants without particular expertise in this area, not by the firm’s health experts.

This is a scandal. McKinsey is obviously putting together political propaganda to sabotage the Democrat's health care bill by putting out a rumour that private companies were abandoning their health care plans. This kind of "dirty tricks" campaign is sleazy. It should be getting top billing. But nope. The "media" has decided that idiotic can't-keep-it-in-their-pants behaviour deserves top billing. Oh, and the media has joined the pitchforks-and-torch crowd wanting to "string 'em up!"

Funny... here is a list of Republican Congressional sex scandals over the last half dozen years. In none of these cases did the Republicans mount a campaign screaming "you must resign!" and the media didn't join in hounding the legislator out of office. Why the uneven behaviour? Why is Weiner selected for "special treatment"?

• Chris Lee – was sexting pictures of himself, but he removed himself too quickly to let much public outrage build (this is the closest to the Weiner scandal)


• Mark Souder – had an affair with a staffer


• Chip Pickering – had an affair, didn’t resign, but chose not to run in the next election


• John Ensign -- he not only had an affair with a staffer, but he had his parents pay hush money to the husband!


• Vito Fossella – guilty of drunk driving, having extramarital sex, and fathering a bastard


• Larry Craig – caught for lewd behaviour in an airport restroom (he claims it was all a misunderstanding about his desire to have a ‘wide stance’), this was attempting to procure gay sex by a politician who publicly called for laws against gays!


• Mark Foley – who sent text messages to underage boys (like Weiner, but worse because it was both underage and it was “gay” sex which of course Foley publicly said was “unacceptable behaviour since the official stance of the Republican party is anti-gay)


• Ed Schrock – solicited sex from a male prostitute


• Don Sherwood – had an extramarital affair and on top of that he physically abused the woman!


• David Vitter - had an extramarital affair and his name was in the little black book of the infamous Washington DC madam Deborah Jeane Palfray while selling himself as a "family values" man who was for "abstinance education" and against gay marriage.

The above is taken from this long, long list of sex crimes by both Republican and Democratic parties.

For the braying crazies hot on Anthony Weiner's case:

1. Polls show that his constituents want him to stay in office and to continue to represent him. For anybody other than a constituent to try and deny the democratic rights of those citizens to be represented by a person of their own choice fails to understand the principles of democracy and the Constitution of the US.


2. All those Christian "family values" types who want to crucify Anthony Weiner should pull out their Bibles and read John 8:7 "If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her." Hypocrites!

Why can't the media perform its real job: inform the public on important issues so that the electorate can wisely choose its representatives? Why feed the salacious in-the-gutter mind of the lowest common denominator? Why join in a partisan, one-sided attack? Why distract the electorate with a stupid sex scandal when much more important issues affecting 30 million people immediately that the whole society indirectly (via the recession and collapsing economy)?

The Role of Oil Speculation in US Markets

Here is a report from McClatchy newspapers:



More detail can be found here on the McClatchy site:

But in the cables, Saudi officials explain that they have two primary concerns about artificially high crude prices: that they'll dampen the long-term demand for oil and that the wide price swings typical of commodity speculation make it difficult for them to plan future oil field development. After that $147 a barrel peak in 2008, for example, prices plunged to $33 a barrel as the global financial crisis rocked the world. That was a stunning change in less than half a year.

One cable recounts how Dr. Majid al Moneef, Saudi Arabia's OPEC governor, explained what he thought was the full impact of speculation to U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Fla., who in July 2009 was in Saudi Arabia for the first time.

According to the cable, Moneef said Saudi Arabia suspected that "speculation represented approximately $40 of the overall oil price when it was at its height."

Asked how to curb such speculation, Moneef suggested "improving transparency" — a reference to the fact that most oil trading is conducted outside regulated markets — and better communication among the world's commodity markets so that oil speculators can't hide the full extent of their trading positions.

Moneef also suggested that the U.S. consider "position limits" — restrictions on how much of the oil market a company can control — something the CFTC is considering. But the proposal to prevent any single trader from accumulating more than 10 percent of the oil contracts being traded hasn't received final approval, and the CFTC also has yet to define what it considers excessive speculation.

Saudi concerns also came up during a May 2008 meeting in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, between U.S. officials and Prince Abdulazziz bin Salman bin Abdulaziz al Saud, the assistant petroleum minister.

Prince Abdulazziz was "extremely worried" that high prices would destroy the demand for oil, according to the May 7, 2008, account of his meeting with embassy officials.

"Aramco is trying to sell more, but frankly there are no buyers," the cable quoted him as saying, referring to the Saudi state oil company. "We are discounting crudes."

These Wikileaks make it pretty clear that the US government has been fully informed about speculation but has chosen to pretend that its hands are tied. In short, the US government is aiding and abetting the speculators. I could understand that under the Bush administration, but it appears to have happening early in 2011 under the Obama administration. And the key figure behind the speculation? Goldman Sachs, the recipient of over $40 billion of taxpayer money when it was going backrupt in late 2008. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you!

Matthew Yglesias on the Power of a Union

Here is a post by Matthew Yglesias on his blog at Think Progress that makes it clear just how a union empowers people:

Harassment Incentives

Penelope Trunk:

These women have nothing to lose when they report men who cross the line sexually. So the maid reported. And then, it turns out, all sorts of women in higher up positions spoke up against Strauss-Kahn. The women wouldn’t report the harassment on their own. They don’t want to suffer retribution. But now there will be no retribution, so it’s safe to come forward.

This is why men are going to focus harassment at the higher ranks of the corporate ladder. These are the women who have to keep their mouths shut if they want to keep climbing the ladder.

But God help the guy who harasses a women with nothing to lose.

On the other hand, Steven Greenhouse reports that various kinds of harassment and assault of hotel maids are extremely common. Is it true, after all, that a maid has “nothing to lose”? Perhaps that would be true if the economy operated at a permanent full-employment state. Even if you did get fired, you could find some other hotel to clean in. But when unemployment’s 9 percent it seems to me a low-wage worker has a huge amount to lose. Unless she’s represented by a strong labor union, which was the case for the maid at the Sofitel in question.

The truth is that Dominique Strauss-Kahn's past sexual assaults were covered up not because the women he assaulted "had something to lose" but because the women he assaulted did not belong to a labor union. Think about this as Republicans continue to assault unions in the US. These political ideologues are destroying an institution that gives the powerless one small bit of power to fight back against the immensely powerful.

Learning an Important Life Lesson

Here is a plea to "not feed the beast"...



Sad... sad... sad...

Bush Team Takes a Victory Lap on the "Success" of Torture

It is really sickening to see all the major figures in the Bush administration come crawling out of the woodwork to "take credit" for the killing of Osama bin Laden by the military under Obama's direction. This from the team whose titular head, Bush, claimed that he no longer had any interest in OBL.

But this scurrilous crew now claim that "enhanced interrogation" (aka TORTURE) was the key that allowed the victory of getting OBL. Funny. Barry Ritholz has a very long list of real experts who publicly state that torture is absolutely useless in getting meaningful material in an interrogation:

Virtually all of the top interrogation experts – both conservatives and liberals (except for those trying to escape war crimes prosecution) – say that torture doesn’t work:

• Army Field Manual 34-52 Chapter 1 says:

“Experience indicates that the use of force is not necessary to gain the cooperation of sources for interrogation. Therefore, the use of force is a poor technique, as it yields unreliable results, may damage subsequent collection efforts, and can induce the source to say whatever he thinks the interrogator wants to hear.”

• The C.I.A.’s 1963 interrogation manual stated:

Intense pain is quite likely to produce false confessions, concocted as a means of escaping from distress. A time-consuming delay results, while investigation is conducted and the admissions are proven untrue. During this respite the interrogatee can pull himself together. He may even use the time to think up new, more complex ‘admissions’ that take still longer to disprove.

• According to the Washington Post, the CIA’s top spy – Michael Sulick, head of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service – said that the spy agency has seen no fall-off in intelligence since waterboarding was banned by the Obama administration. “I don’t think we’ve suffered at all from an intelligence standpoint.”

• The CIA’s own Inspector General wrote that waterboarding was not “efficacious” in producing information.

• A 30-year veteran of CIA’s operations directorate who rose to the most senior managerial ranks (Milton Bearden) says (as quoted by senior CIA agent and Presidential briefer Ray McGovern):

It is irresponsible for any administration not to tell a credible story that would convince critics at home and abroad that this torture has served some useful purpose.

This is not just because the old hands overwhelmingly believe that torture doesn’t work — it doesn’t — but also because they know that torture creates more terrorists and fosters more acts of terror than it could possibly neutralize.

The above is just a very small snippet of the public statements. Go read the original post by Ritholtz to see just how universal the agreement among real experts is that torture is of no benefit.

Talk about zombies. The Bush "team" with its bad ideas, bad leadership, economic failures, military failures, etc. just can't be killed. Here they are back in force trying to pull the same stunt and convince people that OBL was "gotten by Bush" and not by that socialist Kenyan pretender Obama. Incredible. These people not only torture, they are torturing me by refusing to get off the stage of history after their time is up. They continue to want to distort truth and bend the world to their warped views.

NATO Incompetence and Intransigence

When you make a mistake, apologize. It is the easiest thing in the world. It is only words. To be a prig and say you "regret" something but refuse to "apologize" and then aid insult to injury by blaming the victim seems to be the "standard operating procedure" for NATO. Ridiculous!



From CNN, here is a bit about this insane situation:

British Royal Navy Rear Adm. Russell Harding said NATO forces may have hit rebel tanks near the eastern oil town of al-Brega on Thursday.

...

It was the second time NATO has been blamed for civilian deaths, Last week, opposition leaders said NATO airstrikes killed 13 civilians in the al-Brega area. NATO is investigating that strike as well.

"I'm not apologizing," Harding, the deputy commander of the NATO operation, said of the latest incident. "The situation on the ground is fluid, and we had no information the opposition forces were using tanks."
Harding said NATO had only recently learned that opposition forces had tanks. In the past, it was Gadhafi's tanks that had taken aim at civilians, he said.
"There's a lot of vehicles going back and forth," he said. "It is very difficult to distinguish who is operating the vehicles."
The airstrikes also injured 14 people, and an additional six are missing, said Gen. Abdul Fattah Yunis, a commander of the rebel forces.

...

After the aerial attack Thursday morning, Gadhafi's troops pushed the rebels back, retaking territory and moving the front line farther east, Yunis said.
He said the rebels notified NATO of their tank movement and of their presence.

"There is no tension between us and NATO; this is a war situation, and we understand that mistakes are made," Yunis said.

Let me see how this NATO stance works...

You find out that kids playing road hockey were run over by a driver. The driver said "There were a lot of kids on the street one day, off the street the next day, besides, nobody told me that these were local kids playing road hockey. I wasn't properly informed. So I simply floored the car and flattened them. Just like NATO! And I'm really 'sorry' about killing those kids, but I'm not going to apologize."

A criminal in for sentencing told the judge "You guys arrest me once in a while when I commit a crime, but there are lots of times when you don't arrest me. Nobody has told me when your cops are going to be out arresting, so I just broke in and raped and robbed because nobody informed me. Just like NATO! Sure I'm sorry that I got arrested, but I'm not going to apologize because how was I supposed to know that this time you would catch me?"

I just don't get the "attitude" of NATO. Are they trying hard to be hated more by the eastern rebels than is Gaddafi? Just why puff up and make this idiotic statement about "sorry, but no apology"? NATO made a mistake. They should have said "we apologize and we will work harder to coordinate with the eastern rebels so this doesn't happen again!" Instead, they get all puffy and prideful and want to blame the victims for "confusing" the trigger happy pilots.

I bet the rebels would have been happier to overlook this killing, but NATO has been very slow to shoot at Gadaffi's forces and seems more than trigger happy to shoot at the rebels. If I were a rebel I would wonder just whose "side" NATO is on. There is night-and-day difference between the aggressive help the US gave, and this tepid, reluctant to bomb Gadaffi, but quick to bomb the rebels NATO "mission". This just plain stinks! Whoever is heading the NATO mission should be canned. He is more of a problem than a help.

Starting at the Top

Why get an education? Why get work experience? If you live in Wisconsin, the "deficit cutting" and "union busting" governor Scott Walker believes in starting the sons of rich people right at the top management position.

This is the governor who claims that big deficits forced him to bust unions and cut pay for working people. But when it comes to giving a cushy job and big pay to a big money political contributor? Why, that is a different kettle of fish. The young boy is immediately handed a senior position and lots of money!

From the ThinkProgress blog:

Scott Walker Gives $81,500 Government Job To Top Donor’s 26-Year-Old College Dropout Son

Since taking office in January, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) has stripped public workers of their collective bargaining rights, proposed wage cuts to local government employees, and insisted that his “state is broke” and that its public workers are overpaid. But Walker applies a different standard to himself.
Today, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reveals that Walker is using state funds to pay more than $81,500 a year to the 26-year-old son of a major campaign donor with no college degree and two drunken-driving convictions.

Despite having almost no management experience, UW Madison college dropout Brian Deschane now oversees state environmental and regulatory issues and manages dozens of Commerce Department employees. After only two months on the job, Deschane has already received a 26 percent pay raise and a promotion.

Deschane’s father, Jerry Deschane was a major financial backer of the Governor’s campaign.

Go read the post on ThinkProgress for more details.

I'm guessing not many voters went to the polls in November 2010 eager to vote for sleaze, for "favours" for big donors, or to bust the unions. That's the "surprise" that Scott Walker waited to spring on the poor citizens of Wisconsin.

And this is the same sleazy politics that Republicans are pulling all across the US. Sad.

US Mortgage Fraud

Here is Barry Ritholtz in his The Big Picture blog making it very clear that the banks have shown contempt for the law in their handling of mortgages and the rules for foreclosure:

Even 60 Minutes seems to be sugarcoating the motivation for fraudclosure:

“Banks so poorly handled documentation on millions of mortgages that many today cannot prove that they own the homes they want to foreclose on. The resulting rash of lawsuits from people seeking to save their homes has one of the government’s top banking regulators worried that the torrent of litigation will delay the real estate market’s recovery.”

Understand this precisely: This was not a case of slipshod handling, of sloppy paperwork, or bad management. This was a willful decision to break the law in order to save expenses and be more profitable.

Follow the money: MERS to subprime lending to automated underwriting to securitization to robosigning to fraudclosure — its ALWAYS been about saving a few bucks regardless of the consequences.

The good thing about this Sunday’s 60 Minutes piece (which I have not seen yet) is that it will apply more popular pressure to the State AGs for some legal action on Fraudclosure.

But they are missing the bigger picture here: Reckless disregard for property rights and the rule of law. And exactly where are all of my Libertarian friends on this . . . ?

There are so many stories of "foreclosure" on people who don't hav a mortgage or who have already paid off their house or are completely current on their payments. All because of sloppy paperwork. But what Ritholtz is pointing out is something worse: when the banks "securitized" the loans into the half billion dollar of MBSs and CDOs, they simply failed to do the proper legal paperwork. Why? To cut costs! They were busy packaging up risk and selling it to "suckers" they figured these suckers were ripe for being stuck with the legal mess of a process that ignored the requirements of the law. These are the same banks that got a trillion dollar bailout by the US taxpayer so they could continue to pay their exorbitant "bonuses" and quickly become profitable again so they could once again suck blood out of the US economy. Success!

Maddow on the Fanatical Republican Plot to Re-Make America

On March 10th the Rachel Maddow Show had an excellent presentation of what is going on in Wisconsin as well as the other Midwest & New England states that innocently elected Republican state governments not realizing they were opening the door to the mad schemes of anti-democracy, destroy-the-village-to-save-it right wing fanatics:

McClatchy Prints the Truth

Fox "News" may claim to be "fair and balanced" but they simply a propaganda machine.

If you want real news, you need to go to a media outlet with integrity and a commitment to truth. Here's a bit from an article by McClatchy newspapers:

From state legislatures to Congress to tea party rallies, a vocal backlash is rising against what are perceived as too-generous retirement benefits for state and local government workers. However, that widespread perception doesn't match reality.

A close look at state and local pension plans across the nation, and a comparison of them to those in the private sector, reveals a more complicated story. However, the short answer is that there's simply no evidence that state pensions are the current burden to public finances that their critics claim.

Pension contributions from state and local employers aren't blowing up budgets. They amount to just 2.9 percent of state spending, on average, according to the National Association of State Retirement Administrators. The Center for Retirement Research at Boston College puts the figure a bit higher at 3.8 percent.

Though there's no direct comparison, state and local pension contributions approximate the burden shouldered by private companies.

...

Also fueling backlash is the perception that state and local workers don't contribute to their own retirement funds the way private sector workers do.

Four states have non-contribution public pension plans_ Florida, Utah, Oregon and Connecticut. Missouri until recently had a non-contribution policy for state workers, as did Michigan until 1997. Michigan workers hired before 1997 still don't pay toward their pensions, and some teachers in Arkansas don't have to contribute toward theirs. Tennessee doesn't require contributions from most workers and employees in the state higher education system.

Those notable exceptions aside, most states require employee contributions. The midpoint for these contributions for all states and the District of Columbia is 5 percent of pay, according to academic and state-level research. That contribution rate climbs to 8 percent for the handful of states whose workers or teachers are prohibited from paying into the federal Social Security program.

By comparison, private-sector workers shoulder a bit more of the burden.

In its data for 2010, Fidelity Investments, the largest administrator of private-sector 401(k) retirement plans, showed employee contribution rates in its plans averaged 8.2 percent of pre-tax pay.

Separately, the Employee Benefits Research Institution estimates that most private-sector employers match up to 50 percent of employee contributions up to the first 6 percent of salary.

Go read the original. It has more details and some excellent graphics. In particular, look at this graphic.

The above makes it very clear that the hysteria thrown up by the political right in the US is just so much nonsense. It is hysteria to cloud people's judgement and let them sneak some legislation past clear-headed and dispassionate review by riding it through on a wave of "the end is nigh" hysteria.