The "Complexities" of American Law

With the full unveiling of the concept of corporations are "people" (as Mitt Romney happily repeats on the presidential nomination trail), the Citizens United case settled by the Supreme Court has demonstrated the wondefully "complex" nature of American law.

Here is a bit from a post by UC Berkeley economist Brad DeLong expatiating on the subtleties:

Justinian: How does this Fourteenth Amendment read?

Edward Coke: Like this:

Section. 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens.... No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Section. 2. Representatives shall be apportioned... counting the whole number of persons in each State....

Justinian: So if you have more corporations in your state, you get more representatives in the legislature?

John of Salisbury: No, no, no! "Persons" in Section 2 refers only to human beings...

Edward Coke: And "persons" at the start of Section 1 refers only to human beings...

John of Salisbury: Only "persons" at the end of Section 1 refers to legal persons, i.e. corporations, as well as human beings...

If the US were consistent in its "law" then there would be a rush by the ultra-rich to incorporate all kinds of "companies", millions of companies, so that at the next election the ballot boxes could be happily stuffed with all kinds of votes from the corporate "persons" acting under the full weight of the law as laid down by the Fourteenth Amendment. If ever the poor organized themselves, it would simply require a renewed effort to incorporate some one "instant corporations" to help the "people" of America to keep the 99% in their place. Because... as the Supreme Court has affirmed, corporations are "people" too!

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.

...

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.

America, Land of the Freely Arrested

From an article in the NY Times:

By age 23, almost a third of Americans have been arrested for a crime, according to a new study that researchers say is a measure of growing exposure to the criminal justice system in everyday life.

The study, the first since the 1960s to look at the arrest histories of a national sample of adolescents and young adults over time, found that 30.2 percent of the 23-year-olds who participated reported having been arrested for an offense other than a minor traffic violation.

...

The study did not look at racial or regional differences, but other research has found higher arrest rates for black men and for youths living in poor urban areas.

I have to laugh. Americans love to beat their chest and proclaim their "love of liberty" but they arrest and incarcerate at a rate far beyond almost every other country in the world except for the handful of despot dictatorships. You would think this report would force Americans to look in the mirror. Their myth of "freedom loving" doesn't match up with their eagerness to jail. It is much like the Founding Fathers prating on about "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. while being one of the worse slavery-based societies on the face of the earth.

Hoisting the Republicans on their Own Petard

Here is an excellent post by Robert Reich on his blog. I love the way he carefully lays out the logic so that when you arrive at the last sentence you realize that he has cornered the Republicans by their own screwy logic:

Every time I try to make sense of Republican tax doctrine I get lost.

For example, rank-and-file House Republicans are willing to increase taxes on the middle class starting in a few weeks in order to avoid a tax increase the very rich.

Here are the details: The payroll tax will increase 2 percent starting January 1 – costing most working Americans about $1,000 next year – unless the employee part of the tax cut is extended for another year.

Democrats want to pay for this with a temporary – not permanent – surtax on any earnings over $1 million, according to their most recent proposal. The surtax would be 3.25 percent.

This means someone who earns $1,000,001 would pay 3 and a quarter cents extra next year.

Relatively few Americans earn more than a million dollars, to begin with. An exquisitely tiny number earn so much that a 3.25 percent surtax on their earnings in excess of a million would amount to much. Most of these people are on Wall Street. It’s hard to find a small business “job creator” among them.

Nonetheless, Republicans say no to the surtax.

This puts Republicans in the awkward position of allowing taxes to increase on most Americans in order to avoid a small, temporary tax only on earnings in excess of a million dollars — mostly hitting a tiny group of financiers.

Not even a resolute, doctrinaire follower of GOP president Grover Norquist has any basis for preferring millionaires over the rest of us.

To say the least, this position is also difficult to explain to average Americans flattened by an economy that’s taken away their jobs, wages, and homes but continues to confer record profits to corporations and unprecedented pay to CEOs and Wall Street’s top executives.

So Republican leaders are trying to get rank-and-file Republicans to go along with an extended payroll tax holiday — but by paying for it without raising taxes on the very rich.

According to their latest proposal, they want to pay for it mainly by extending the pay freeze on federal workers for another four years — in effect, cutting federal employees’ pay even more deeply — and increasing Medicare premiums on wealthy beneficiaries over time.

But even this proposal seems odd, given what Republicans say they believe about taxes.

For years, Republicans have been telling us tax cuts pay for themselves by promoting growth. That was their argument in favor of the Bush tax cuts, remember?

So if they believe what they say, why should they worry about paying for a one-year extension of the payroll tax holiday? Surely it will pay for itself.

That last bit should make Republicans squirm. But it won't. They are shameless hypocrites and liars. Being caught in their big lie causes them no shame.

Selfishness is Alive and Well in America

Here is an excellent post by Paul Krugman in his NY Times blog looking at the poison the corrupts political discourse in American politics:

I Do Not Think That Word Means What You Think It Means, Hypocrisy Edition

OK, let me start by talking about Mel Gibson for a minute. Bear with me, this is actually relevant.

Back in 2000 Gibson made a movie, The Patriot, about the Revolutionary War. (I think I saw it on an airplane). And when the movie came out, Michael Lind wrote an essay that has stuck with me, pointing out that nobody involved in the picture seemed to know what patriotism means. The Gibson character was presented as a man who refused to get involved until his own family was hurt — then, he went to war for personal revenge. And this was supposed to show his patriotism.

As Lind said, the truth is that that’s more or less the opposite of patriotism, which is about making sacrifices for the national good, not serving your personal motives or interests.

Which brings me to the subject of this post, the apparently equally misunderstood concept of hypocrisy. I’ve been getting some personal attacks on this front, but it’s a bigger issue than that. Here’s the personal version: suppose that you’re a professor/columnist who advocates higher taxes on high incomes and a stronger social safety net — but you yourself earn enough from various sources that you will pay some of those higher taxes and are unlikely to rely on that stronger safety net. A remarkable number of people look at that combination of personal and political positions and cry “Hypocrisy!”

Wait — it’s not just about me and the wingnuts. If you remember the 2004 election, which unfortunately I do, there were quite a few journalists who basically accused John Kerry of being “inauthentic” because he was a rich man advocating policies that would help the poor and the middle class. Apparently you can only be authentic if your politics reflect pure personal self-interest — Mitt Romney is Mr. Natural.

So to say what should be obvious but apparently isn’t: supporting policies that are to your personal financial disadvantage isn’t hypocrisy — it’s civic virtue!

But, say the wingnuts, you say that rich people are evil. Actually, no — that’s a right-wing fantasy about what liberals believe. I don’t want to punish the rich, I just want them to pay more taxes. You can favor redistribution without indulging in class hatred; it’s only the defenders of privilege who try to claim otherwise.

Lind’s essay about Mel Gibson ended with concerns that we may have lost the sense of what citizenship and its duties mean. Indeed. If people can’t comprehend what it means to work for larger goals than their own interest, if they actually consider any deviation from self-service somehow a sign of phoniness, we, as a nation, are lost.

The political right is poisonous. Right now they are blocking any attempt to heal the US after the 2008 economic collapse. They put politics above country... and of course consider themselves "patriots" because in their lexicon "patriotism" is doing what is in your own interest, not in the country's interest. This has made the US ungovernable and turned a big recession in the Great Recession and stretched it from a 2 or 3 year rut in the road into a decade long collapse of the economy. What I find incredible is that there appear to be roughly half the population in the US so bitterly "fundamentalist Christian" that they are willing to punch out their fellow man than go the extra mile, or turn the cheek, or give him the extra cloak. Pathetic!

Update 2011nov05: Here is a bit from from Krugman today on his NY Times blog:

But here’s an item that caught my eye, given what I wrote about hypocrisy yesterday:

Deadbeat Rep. Joe Walsh, Who Owes $100k In Child Support, Receives ‘Pro-Family’ Award From Family Research Council.

Now that’s real hypocrisy — and if the past is any indication, it won’t matter at all for Rep. Walsh’s career.

There’s a big difference between the left and the right in such matters, one that I don’t fully understand, although I’m trying. Here’s how it goes: if a liberal politician is caught behaving badly — enriching himself while preaching the need to help the poor, or just in general showing himself less than admirable by having an affair, visiting call girls, whatever — his career is over.

But if a conservative politician who preaches stern traditional morality is caught engaging in actions that are at odds with what he preaches — buying sex, taking wide stances in restrooms, or, in this case, stiffing his family even while preaching family values — he may well ride right through the scandal. Witness what’s going on now with Herman Cain.

How can this be? Here’s what I understand: on the right, “moral values” are considered to be, literally, God-given principles. And a politician is well-regarded for advocating those values, no matter what he does personally. Instead of his personal behavior devaluing his political position, his political position excuses his personal behavior; a philandering politician who preaches the sacred bond of marriage is considered a good man because of what he says, no matter what he does.

Unlike Krugman, I simply dismiss the right wing as insincere idiots who are completely self-serving in their manipulation of "morality". Paul Krugman, on the other hand, takes them at face value and tries hard to understand this hypocritical behaviour. I can't be bothered because I lived up close to a serial manipulator who used religion and self-serving "morality" to enable his crimes and cover his tracks. I have no patience with these people. But I do admire Krugman for trying to make sense of their behaviour.

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.

...

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.

Obama Joins Wall Street Against Occupy Wall Street

Here are some key bits from a post by Matt Taibbi in his Rolling Stone blog:

... there have been two disgusting developments in the realm of plutcratic intervention on behalf of Wall Street that everyone protesting should take note of.

The fact that both of the following things took place in the middle of the full fever of OWS, when everyone is supposedly trying to placate anti-banker sentiment and Obama and the DCCC are supposedly pledging support of the protesters, shows how completely bankrupt this system is and how necessary street-level protests have become. Popular uprising is probably the only move left to stop developments like the following:

1) Bank of America is shifting a huge collection of Merrill Lynch derivatives contracts onto its own federally-insured balance sheet. This move of risky instruments off the uninsured Merrill balance sheet onto the commercial bank's balance sheet was done to prevent Bank of America's creditors from attacking the firm with collateral calls and other sorties. Essentially, an irresponsible debtor, B of A, is keeping a loan shark from breaking his legs by getting his rich parents to co-sign his loan. The parents in this metaphor would be the FDIC.

The FDIC naturally is not pleased with this development, but the Fed, the supreme banking regulator, is apparently encouraging this move. Here's how Bloomberg characterized this move:

In short, the Fed's priorities seem to lie with protecting the bank-holding company from losses at Merrill, even if that means greater risks for the FDIC's insurance fund.

Again and again, the Fed proves it has not appetite for allowing Wall Street to eat its own pain, and continually encourages banks to stick the government with its losses and bad assets. This move will allow Bank of America to keep a Band-Aid over its disastrous financial situation far longer than it would be able to in a genuinely free market. People should be outraged at this development.

2) Barack Obama is apparently expressing willingness to junk big chunks of Sarbanes-Oxley in exchange for support for his jobs program. Business leaders are balnking at creating new jobs unless Obama makes compiance with S-O voluntary for all firms valued at under $1 billion.

Here's how to translate this move: companies are saying they can't attract investment unless they can hide their financials from investors. So the CEOs and gazillionaires on Obama's Jobs Council want the politically-vulnerable president to give them license to cook the books in exchange for support for his jobs program. From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

"All you're going to do is have more fraud. The ultimate losers are going to be investors," said Jeff Klink, a former federal prosecutor whose Gateway Center firm helps clients prevent and detect fraud.

If the financial crisis proved anything, it's that Wall Street companies in particular have been serial offenders in the area of dishonest accounting and book-cooking. Sarbanes-Oxley is obviously no panacea, but removing it in exchange for a temporary, election-year job boost is exactly the kind of myopic, absurdly irresponsible shit that got us into this mess in the first place. For Obama to pull this in the middle of these protests is crazy.

That Obama is pulling this stunt shows that he is as corrupt as the Republicans. Poor America. It has no political party that represents the 99%. The GOP and Dems are completely sold out to the 1%. Your choice is between getting yourself kicked in the teeth by the GOP or whether you are quietly stabbed in the back.

The GOP is up front in its hostility to the 99%. Cain tells you "if you don't have a job, it's your own fault" and they keep yelling for more "tax cuts" and more "deregulation". The Dems pretend to be "on the people's side" but they keep stabbing them in the back where nobody can see it.

You have "Rights" but not the Right to Exercise Your "Rights"

Here is a bit from a post by a legal site that claims to be helping the public. Here they try to explain your "rights" and just how much limitations can be put on them:

As protests supporting Occupy Wall Street have swelled in recent weeks, hundreds of demonstrators have been arrested across the U.S. This weekend, nearly 100 people were arrested in New York and 175 in Chicago. More than 100 protesters were arrested in Boston last week; a few weeks ago, 700 were arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge.

So, if the First Amendment guarantees the right to peaceable assembly, why do peaceful protestors keep getting arrested — and sometimes pepper-sprayed and beaten up?

We take a closer look at the laws governing protests and how the government can limit them.

Time, place and manner restrictions

The First Amendment is not absolute. Government can make reasonable stipulations about the time, place and manner a peaceable protest can take place, as long as those restrictions are applied in a content-neutral way.

But what constitutes a reasonable time, place and manner restriction? "It depends on the context and circumstances," said Geoffrey Stone, a professor specializing in constitutional law at the University of Chicago. "Things like noise, blockage of ordinary uses of the place, blockage of traffic and destruction of property allow the government to regulate speakers."

Stone gave a few examples of impeding ordinary usage: disturbing patients at a hospital, preventing students from going to school, or, more relevant for the Occupy movement, disrupting the flow of traffic for a long period of time.

The majority of Occupy Wall Street-related arrests have been on charges of disorderly conduct. Under the New York Penal Code, that includes making "unreasonable noise," obstructing "vehicular or pedestrian traffic," or congregating "with other persons in a public place and refus[ing] to comply with a lawful order of the police to disperse." Basically, the central question is the standard of reasonableness. "You have to tolerate a certain amount of inconvenience in order to make room for First Amendment activity, but not so much that it disrupts things," Stone said. Individual states' unlawful assembly and disorderly conduct statutes have to fall in line with this standard. "They can regulate it less if they want to," Stone added, "but not more."

I remember as a kid watching the blacks in the Deep South trying to exercise their "right" to vote. They would be made to wait in the hot sun all day. They would be told to come back umpteen times. They would be given "tests" that mysteriously only blacks failed, not whites. Etc., etc. They had "rights" just no right to exercise their rights.

Native Indians in the US signed umpteen "perpetual treaties" only to watch them be torn up a few years later. Many Indian bands have horror stories to tell. The "trail of tears" for the civilized tribes of the US Deep South that freed up land for the big slave plantations is especially egregious. These are tribes that had signed many treaties, even fought on the side of the US revolutionaries and the side of the new United States in the Battle of 1912. All these "rights" and "promises" were ignored to feed the land fever of white slave owners.

This "expert" for propublica goes through the motions as if rights were real and the state is truly interested in your rights and it is just a question of balancing rights with responsibilies. What a load of crap. If they could get away with it, governments would have a rule that you can only demonstrate between 3:00 AM and 4:00 AM on one side of town, and by the way, you must have a permit that can only be picked up on the other side of town between 2:59 AM and 3:00 AM and only those with a valid permit at 3:00 AM at the demonstration site will be allowed to demonstrate. (A version of this is the recent rules where you have have "public" demonstrations during high profile international gatherings but only at a "designated" demonstration site that is miles from where the dignataries gather and is carefully fenced in with riot cops all around to ensure that in this "proper" demonstration area you won't be seen or heard by anybody.)

I'm pretty positive that Syria has a wonderful Constitution which lays out all kinds of "rights" for its citizens. But right now the only "right" that citizens seem to be enjoying is a bullet through the brain or torture in some dungeon run by Bashar al-Assad's thugs. Under the USSR's Constitution people had wondeful, extensive, very progressive "rights". But in reality if you thought you could exercise your rights you would be sent off to a slave labour camp in Siberia or shelved in a 24x7 drugged state in an insane asylum. That's how you got to "exercise" your rights in the USSR.

The thuggery by the US and its police is just one in a long line of countries with wonderful "rights". Sure the top 1% get to exercise those rights. But the 99% better not cross the line. Their "rights" have a way of mysteriously becoming re-interpreted as disorderly conduct, assaulting a police officer, or some other drummed up charge. If you read the labour history of the US (late 19th century early 20th century) it is filled with workers exercising their "rights" only to be mowed by by police or private gangs: the (Homestead Strike, the Lattimer Massacre, the Ludlow Massacre, the Columbine Mine Massacre, the Chicago Memorial Day Massacre, etc.)

Oh... and I just noticed this. A French court has ordered ISPs to block any site that allows people to post videos of police misconduct. I guess the theory is "out of sight, out of mind". Or, if nobody sees it, then it isn't a crime.

The Tribunal de Grande Instance de Paris [official website, in French] on Friday ordered [judgment in PDF, in French] French Internet service providers to block access to Copwatch Nord Paris I-D-F, a website designed to allow civilians to post videos of alleged police misconduct. The decision was applauded by the police union, Alliance Police Nationale (APN) [union website, in French], which argued that the website incited violence against police. Jean-Claude Delage, secretary general of the APN, said that "[t]he judges have analyzed the situation perfectly—this site being a threat to the integrity of the police — and made the right decision." Opponents of Internet censorship were also quick to comment on the judgment. Jeremie Zimmermann, spokesman for La Quadrature du Net [advocacy website], a Paris-based net neutrality organization, called the order "an obvious will by the French government to control and censor citizens' new online public sphere." The site was ordered to be blocked immediately.

In France you have the right to think that police might violate the rights of citizens, but you have no right to communicate that belief because that is "an insult to the majesty of the Law". I guess the reasoning is that if you let people question the honesty and integrity of the government then you are on the slippery slope to anarchy. So everybody will be liable by law to only say good things about their laws, their politicians, the rich, and the police. You can insult your neighbor, the poor, immigrants, and dogs in the street. But not the noble "leaders" of society and their enforcers, the police.

Sylvia Nasar's "Grand Pursuit"

This book is an intellectual history of economics with a focus on a handful of names: Karl Marx, Alfred Marshall, Beatrice Webb, Irving Fisher, Joseph Schumpeter, John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek, Joan Robinson, Milton Friedman, Paul Samuelson, and Amartya Sen.

As you can see, those choices are idiosyncratic. Most modern economists would not include Marx, Webb, and Robinson since they are off in the dead end of Marxist "economics". But for me they are part of the spice of this book. This isn't a text to teach you economics. It is really more of a history of personalities and circumstances. The stories are delightful. The sketches of economics are thin gruel, so don't come here to understand economic theory. Come to savour history, personalities, and ideas.

What I found delightful is that the book reinforced my prejudices. Economics is not a "science". It is a liberal art with the pretension of science through its mathematicization of its arguments. The formalism doesn't make the models and arguments any more right. They do provide a bit more formal clarity but they also lead to obscurantism with dithering over details and ridiculous "simplifying" assumptions. I had a mathematician as a friend who made this point by arguing about cows by first stating "consider a sphere". Yep... mathematics does some wonderful leaps in simplification to make the mathematics "tractable".

Here are some snippets to give you a feel for the writing style:

Before resuming his journey north to the Scottish highlands, Alfred Marshall, a twenty-four-year-old mathematician and fellow of St. Hohn's College in Cambridge, spent hours walking through factory districts and the surrounding slums "looking into the faces of the poorest people." He was debating whether to make German philosophy or Austrian psychology his life's work. These were his first steps away from metaphysics and the beginning of a dogged pursuit of social reality. He later said that these walks forced him to consider the "justification of existing conditions of society."

In Manchester, Marshall found the smoky brown sky, muddy brown streets, and long piles of warehouses, cavernous mills, and insalubrious tenements -- all within a few hundred yards of glittering shops, gracious parks, and grand hotels -- that novels such as Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South had led him to expect. In the narrow backstreets he encountered sallow, undersized men and stunted, pale factory girls with thin shawls and hair flecked with wisps of cotton. The sight of "so much want" amid "so much wealth" prompted Marshall to ask whether the existence of a proletariat was indeed a "necessity of nature," as he had been taught to believe. "Why not make every man a gentleman?" he asked himself.

...

He took great pains to demolish Socialists' claim that but for oppression by the rich, the poor could live in "absolute luxury." England's annual income totaled about £900 million, he told the women. The wages paid to manual workers amounted to a total of £400 million. Most of the remaining £500 million, Marshall pointed out, represented the wages of workers who did not belong to the so-called working classes: semiskilled and skilled workers, government officials and military, professionals, and managers. In fact, an absolutely equal division of Britain's annual income would provide less than £37 per capita. Reducing poverty required expanding output and increasing efficiency; in other words, economic growth.

One of the points that Nasar makes is that modern societies organized around liberal economic principles has unleashed productivity and wealth. But as I read the above I keep picturing the billionaire tycoons on Wall Street and the masses in the street with their Occupy Wall Street protests. Sure there has been progress, but the economic injustice is still just as bad. The greed and indifference is there which exacerbates the pain. The fact that the billionaires can buy the politicians means that nothing will ever change. The fact that the rich are pushing to cut education and social services while cutting taxes on the rich as their "solution" to the current Lesser Depression is very depressing.

Sylvia Nasar's story points out that the same humbug and foot-dragging that blocked a real solution to the Great Depression was very, very similar to the humbug and foot-dragging of today:

Despite his financial straits, damaged reputation, and advancing age, the sixty-five-year-old Fisher seemed more energized than depressed by the economic calamity. In 1932 he published an extraordinary number of scientific papers and newspaper pieces. He bombarded the Hoover administration and the Federal Reserve with advice and organized other economists to do the same. His chief objective was to convince President Hoover to take the United States off the gold standard, if not de jure then de facto by having the Federal Reserve do nothing to prevent the foreign exchange value of the dollar from falling. He met with the bankers at the Federal Reserve to urge them to adopt an aggressive program to buy bonds from the banks and the public in order to pump money into the banking system. To his frustration, the "Federal Reserve men thought it would be 'safer' if they waited!" as he later complained. "That waiting, in my opinion, cost the country the major part of the depression."

In January 1932, Fisher attended a second meeting of monetary experts at the University of Chicago. This time, he organized a telegram urging the president to permit the federal budget deficit to rise, pump reserves into the crippled banking system, slash tariffs, and cancel inter-allied debts. Thirty-two prominent economists from Chicago, Wisconsin, and Harvard universities signed the statement, in which Fisher pointed out that Sweden, Japan, and Britain were recovering after going off gold the previous year. The signatories reflected the extent to which Fisher and Keynes's view of the crisis with its emphasis on its global nature, monetary causes, forecasts of its future course, and the need for concerted monetary intervention had gained adherents. On the other hand, theirs was still a minority view.

Sadly, today Obama ignores neo-Keynesian solutions. He shows himself to be uneducated about economics and has surrounded himself with the same fanatical deregulation libertarian economists who created this Lesser Depression. There has been absolutely no progress in economic "science" in 80 years. The same humbug and "morality play" rationalizing goes on to protect bondholders at the expense of the 25 million unemployed, the 10 million who are losing their homes, the youth who have given up on education because it is too expensive, and those nearing retirement who are desperate because their savings are exhausted. It is a social disaster, but Obama is acting like a modern Hoover and the 2012 Republican presidential candidates would make Hoover look like a bleeding-heart liberal. Tragic.

Sylvia Nasar traces out Keynes' thinking:

As the Great Depression dragged on, Keynes's faith in the effectiveness of monetary policy ebbed further. By the time A Treatise on Money appeared, he was beginning to pose a theory of the causes of unemployment. Cambridge undergraduates were his first audience. The nub of the new theory was that, as he put it in an article published in the American Economic Review in December 1933, "circumstances can arise, and have recently arisen, when neither control of the short-rate of interest nor control of the long-rate will be effective, with the result that direct stimulation of investment by government is a necessary means."

In a severe depression, prices fell even faster than interest rates. So reductions in nominal rates did not prevent real rates from climbing. Once nominal rates fell to zero, there was nothing further that the central bank could do to make borrowing cheaper or to ease debt burdens and thus to end the depression -- with incalculable political consequences, what Keynes called The Liquidity Trap. As he had once observed, "The inability of the interest rate to fall has brought down empires." Once monetary policy was rendered ineffectual, the only option for shoring up demand was getting money into the hands of those who could spend it.

...

As Herbert Stein, the economist, pointed out, Keynes asked a very different question from the one posed by Hayek and Schumpeter. In explaining depressions, in terms of the preceding booms, the Austrians were trying to figure out how the economy had gotten there. Keynes was less interested in the genesis of slumps than in the more basic puzzle of how high unemployment and slack capacity could persist for long in a free market economy with unrestricted competition.

...

Thus what made the General Theory so radical was Keynes' proof that it was possible for a free market economy to settle into states in which workers and machines remained idle for prolonged periods of time -- that there were depressions that, unlike the garden-variety ones, were not brief and didn't end of their own accord as a result of falling prices and interest rates, or, at an extreme, that free market economies tended naturally to stagnate even when there were idle workers and machines available. In such depressions, unfreezing credit flows through monetary policy didn't provide a sufficient stimulus, because even zero-percent interest rates could not tempt businesses to borrow while prices were falling and there was [no] reason to think that demand would recover. The only way to revive business confidence and get the private sector spending again was by cutting taxes and letting businesses and individuals keep more of their income so that they could spend it. Or, better yet, having the government spend more money directly, since that would guarantee that 100 percent of it would be spent rather than saved. If the private sector couldn't or wouldn't spend, then the government had to do it. For Keynes, the government had to be prepared to act as the spender of last resort, just as the central bank acted as the lender of last resort.

This is the same intellectual landscape that has policy makers hung up today. Bernanke and the Federal Reserve have been too timid in using monetary policy and now the only tool left is fiscal stimulus, but you have right wing nuts screaming about "inflation!" and "debt!". Obama is too timid to properly stimulate the economy and instead falls into the trap of Hoover and FDR in 1937 of worrying about deficits and debts. They ignore the ruined lives and the lost production that can never be retrieved while the country stays mired in a depression. The arguments of 80 years ago are lost to policy makers today because they are illiterate about history and economics. Oh, and they are blinded by their ideology, an ideology bought and paid for by the billionaire ultra-rich who are quite happy to leave the system just as it is, a system that has let them exploit it for billions in personal gain. This is a tragedy for the bottom 99%. The top 1% are laughing, but the bottom 1% are paying in ruined lives... and they will also pay through taxes to cover the lost monies and even provide the billionaire bonuses for the frauds and cheats who created the mess. Sorrows heaped on woes, and smothered with injustice.

This is a good read and it is highly relevant. This book will give you useful background to understand the economic arguments of today and the tragedy that today is a maddening repeat of the 1930s.

A Very Important Question about Debt

Barry Ritholtz asks a very important question about the accumulated debt of the US:

Here is a quick look at total debt as accumulated by each US President.

Click to Enlarge
Its kinda funny — how come so few people (especially those on the right) were all that upset about the massive surge in debt under Bush? Is it that they only recently kinda figured out the significance of debt — or are they are merely hypocrites when it comes to this sort of thing?

Whatever your political or economic views are, it is not up to me to tell you what to believe. However, you need to be intellectually consistent and not merely grab whatever ideological bullet point that suits your purposes at the moment. If you do so, you best be prepared to be charged with being intellectually dishonest, and to be categorized as called a political hack. Or worse.

I think the answer is pretty obvious. The political right is hypocritical. Their only goal is to get power. They are willing to destroy the economy to obtain power. When in power they have no principles other than to line their own pockets and use money to buy votes. For over thirty years they have claimed to need to be elected to effect a social agenda that favours the concerns of fundamentalist Christians, but once in power they never seem able to ban abortion, shoot the gays, or force everybody to attend church on Sunday. They are only effective in giving tax cut after tax cut to the ultra-rich. Odd isn't it?

The Self-Made Billionaire

Elizabeth Warren wants to tax billionaires because they made their billions thanks to what society made available to them. Here is a bit from an opinion piece by E. J. Dionne Jr. in the Washington Post that expands on this:

It’s not often that a sound bite from a Democratic candidate gets so under the skin of my distinguished colleague George F. Will that he feels moved to quote it in full and then devote an entire column to refuting it. This is instructive.

The declaration heard ’round the Internet world came from Elizabeth Warren, the consumer champion running for the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts. Warren argued that “there is nobody in this country who got rich on his own,” that thriving entrepreneurs move their goods “on the roads the rest of us paid for” and hire workers “the rest of us paid to educate.” Police and firefighters, also paid for by “the rest of us,” protect the factory owner’s property. As a result, our “underlying social contract” requires this hardworking but fortunate soul to “take a hunk” of his profits “and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

In other words, there are no self-made people because we are all part of society. Accomplished people benefit from advantages created by earlier generations (of parents whom we didn’t choose and taxpayers whom we’ve never met) and by the simple fact that they live in a country that provides opportunities that are not available everywhere. The successful thus owe quite a lot to the government and social structure that made their success possible.

You really should go read the whole article to see how Dionne tears apart the nifty piece of propaganda that George Will constructed.

Dionne catches the hypocrisy of Will by pointing to an earlier bit of writing by him that argued with Elizabeth Warren that we need to acknowledge the very real boost we all get from having a solid, successful society upon which to build:

In his thoughtful 1983 book “Statecraft as Soulcraft,” Will rightly lamented that America’s sense of community had become “thin gruel” and chided fellow conservatives “caught in the web of their careless anti-government rhetoric.” He is also the author of my favorite aphorism about how Americans admire effective government even when they pretend not to. “Americans talk like Jeffersonians,” Will wrote, “but expect to be governed by Hamiltonians.”

In short, George Will is a propagandist. He cuts his opinions to sell to the highest bidder and these days that is the extreme right of fanatical anti-tax, anti-state, libertarian viewpoints. At least Elizabeth Warren is out selling her own ideas. George Will is an intellectual prostitute who sells whatever ideas brings him the biggest bucks.

The Political Right's Grand Hypocrisy

I get a chuckle out of the fact that the big intellectual leaders of the fanatical right in the US fought tooth-and-nail to remove social programs for the disadvantaged, but secretly availed themselves of the goodies despite the conflict of their acts with their professions of faith.

Here is an excellent post by Yves Smith in her Naked Capitalist blog that outs the two big shots Friedrich von Hayek and Ayn Rand:

• Hayek was hired by Charles Koch, an infamous right wing ideologue billionaire, who funded the Cato Institute and brought Hayek to the US to be a scholar at one of his right wing think tanks. Hayek was reluctant because he had medical problems and insurance in the US would have been prohibitive. Koch uncovered the fact that during a previous stay in the US Hayek qualified for Social Security. With the promise of US taxpayer supported medical care, Hayek came to the US and took up the role that Koch gave him: to propound arguments why social entitlement programs in the US must be destroyed to bring back "liberty" to the American people.


• Ayn Rand took taxpayer paid for Social Security and Medicare payments while espousing her anti-government, destroy the entitlements to bring back real "liberty" to Americans theme.

It is stunningly hypocritical that these "big thinkers" both pushed a message for others which they refused to follow for themselves. Disgusting.

The Brave New World Imposed by the "Moral Majority"

The party of "family values" and Christian pietudes has struck again. Are they attacking the rich who Jesus said were less likely to make it to heaven than a camel make it through the eye of a needle? Nope!

The religious right has decided -- yet again -- to attack the poor. To take food from the mouths of impoverished mothers and children. Yes, the Bible thumpers have notched another victory on their belt.

Here's a bit from a post on Robert Reich's blog:

We dodged another shut-down bullet, but only until November 18. That’s when the next temporary bill to keep the government going runs out. House Republicans want more budget cuts as their price for another stopgap spending bill.

Among other items, Republicans are demanding major cuts in a nutrition program for low-income women and children. The appropriation bill the House passed June 16 would deny benefits to more than 700,000 eligible low-income women and young children next year.

What kind of country are we living in?

The pious are happy to rush to their churches and push to the front so that God will see them and be pleased with them. These devout souls know that God keeps tally and you show your piety by your bank account. If you give a dollar to the poor like Jesus preached, you lose favour with God, so why listen to the junior partner when the big man, God himself, is telling you to hoard your cash to show your devine favour? So the religious right calls for tax cuts and more tax cuts. This is the manna from heaven that will let them pile up the little green bills that show God's accounting. So what if women and children starve? That's their problem.

The devout are winning hearts and minds in America. Here's Reich's tally:

It gets worse. Most federal programs to help children and lower-income families are in the so-called “non-defense discretionary” category of the federal budget. The congressional super-committee charged with coming up with $1.5 trillion of cuts eight weeks from now will almost certainly take a big whack at this category because it’s the easiest to cut. Unlike entitlements, these programs depend on yearly appropriations.

Even if the super-committee doesn’t agree (or even if they do, and Congress doesn’t approve of their proposal) an automatic trigger will make huge cuts in domestic discretionary spending.

It gets even worse. Drastic cuts are already underway at the state and local levels. Since the fiscal year began in July, states no longer receive about $150 billion in federal stimulus money — money that was used to fill gaps in state budgets over the last two years.

The result is a downward cascade of budget cuts – from the federal government to state governments and then to local governments – that are hurting most Americans but kids and lower-income families in particular.

So far this year, 23 states have reduced education spending. According to a survey of city finance officers released Tuesday by the National League of Cities, half of all American cities face cuts in state aid for education.

I love the hypocrisy of the religious right. Their God is the god of Mammon and they literally love to serve their Master.

Mitt Romney Catering to the Anti-Intellecutalism of America's Right Wing Politics

This post is funny because the author has caught to pot calling the kettle black... oh so apropos for Romney criticizing Obama...

Harvard-supported Harvard Grad Mitt Romney Criticizes Obama for being a Harvard-supported Harvard Grad

by Wilfred Chan | September 28, 2011 at 8:25 am

Good ol’ scrappy Republican “man of the people” Mitt Romney has been using Barack Obama’s elitist, Ivy-League pedigree as a punchline in recent campaign speeches, deriding the president’s foreign policy as no more than a ill-advised surrender scheme cooked up by effete snobs in the “Harvard faculty lounge,” out of touch with “what they know on the battlefield”.

Ignoring the laughable notion that Mitt Romney ever even got close to a real battlefield, we find a lot of reasons why this most recent spat of Harvard-bashing fails the giggle test (and miserably so).

• Mitt Romney holds not one, but two degrees from Harvard: a JD and an MBA earned in 1975, when he graduated in the top 5% of his class.


• Harvard international relations professor and former Bush aide Meghan O’Sullivan is one of Romney’s foreign policy advisers.


• Harvard economics professor, daddy of the Bush tax cuts — and author of many a textbook – N. Gregory Mankiw is Romney’s chief economic adviser. (Like Romney, Mankiw is also a pretty bad actor.)


• Three of Romney’s sons graduated from Harvard Business School (and also none have served in the armed forces).


• Mitt Romney gave $50,000 to Harvard Business School in 2003.


• The “Harvard faculty lounge” is quite cozy with Mitt: since 2002, Romney has received more than $56,000 from people who are either current Harvard professors or married to one.


• Fuck Mitt Romney.

I have no love for either of them. They are both "plastic people". Obama has shown no concern for the bottom 90% who are suffering through a deep recession. Instead he is busy keeping Wall Street happy. Meanwhile, Romney is a complete bimbo who, like Bush, probably couldn't find his way out of a toilet if he didn't have one of his "staff" to advise him on where to go and how to open and close those complicated things called "door handles".

To refresh your memory, here is a previous Harvard (and Yale) graduate showing some of the smarts he learned from America's Ivy League colleges...

Paul Krugman Examines "Class Warfare"

From Krugman's latest op-ed in the NY Tims:

This week President Obama said the obvious: that wealthy Americans, many of whom pay remarkably little in taxes, should bear part of the cost of reducing the long-run budget deficit. And Republicans like Representative Paul Ryan responded with shrieks of “class warfare.”

...

Detailed estimates from the Congressional Budget Office — which only go up to 2005, but the basic picture surely hasn’t changed — show that between 1979 and 2005 the inflation-adjusted income of families in the middle of the income distribution rose 21 percent. That’s growth, but it’s slow, especially compared with the 100 percent rise in median income over a generation after World War II.

Meanwhile, over the same period, the income of the very rich, the top 100th of 1 percent of the income distribution, rose by 480 percent. No, that isn’t a misprint. In 2005 dollars, the average annual income of that group rose from $4.2 million to $24.3 million.

So do the wealthy look to you like the victims of class warfare?

...

On one side, we have the claim that the rising share of taxes paid by the rich shows that their burden is rising, not falling. To point out the obvious, the rich are paying more taxes because they’re much richer than they used to be. When middle-class incomes barely grow while the incomes of the wealthiest rise by a factor of six, how could the tax share of the rich not go up, even if their tax rate is falling?

On the other side, we have the claim that the rich have the right to keep their money — which misses the point that all of us live in and benefit from being part of a larger society.

...

Republicans claim to be deeply worried by budget deficits. Indeed, Mr. Ryan has called the deficit an “existential threat” to America. Yet they are insisting that the wealthy — who presumably have as much of a stake as everyone else in the nation’s future — should not be called upon to play any role in warding off that existential threat.

Well, that amounts to a demand that a small number of very lucky people be exempted from the social contract that applies to everyone else. And that, in case you’re wondering, is what real class warfare looks like.

I believe Americans should give the rich what they want: no taxes. Simply take away their citizenship and put them on a boat and tell them "bon voyage". They can then paddle to some place that is willing to coddle them as they demand.

Luckily, the sensible rich, people like Warren Buffet will stay behind, accept higher taxes, and help to build a stronger US society: one where everybody gets enough food, clothing, housing, medical care, education to have a fair chance to rise to a better position in society than their parents.

Krugman Spots Hypocrisy

Here is a post by Paul Krugman in his NY Times blog that tries to wake people up to the ridiculous hypocrisy in the supposed "serious" discussion of the economy and how to fix it:

Stimulus, Austerity, and Double Standards

Just a quick thought: in much discussion of economic policy these days, the presumption is that stimulus had its chance, it failed, and that’s that. Never mind those of us who say that we actually didn’t do nearly enough — and were saying that from the beginning, not as an after-the-fact rationalization. It’s one strike and you’re out.

Meanwhile, the pain caucus keeps telling us that austerity is the way to restore confidence; and confidence keeps not being restored. Ireland, for example, has imposed savage austerity, yet the interest rate on its 10-year bonds is still 6.7 percentage points higher than Germany’s, down from recent peaks but still far above its level when the austerity program began.

Yet somehow nobody in the pain caucus says hey, this was supposed to work but it didn’t, so our theory is all wrong. Instead, they just insist that we double down, continuing the beatings until morale improves.

Just saying.

Funny how the rich and powerful are willing to quickly pooh-pooh stimulus, but they cling to their advocacy of austerity well past the point where it is shown to be wrong-headed. It just shows that politicians and "the serious people" simply don't understand economics. Instead they see the world as a morality play written from the viewpoint of the ultra-rich, i.e. how to punish the peasants until they are willing to fall on their bellies and squirm begging "enough! enough!".

Listen the Republicans Talking Out of Both Sides of Their Mouth

Here is a bit from a post by Ezra Klein in his WonkBlog in the Washington Post. Klein has dug up the evidence that the Republicans are hypocrites about "stimulus". Just 10 years ago it was excellent politics and just what the economy needed. Today it is "socialism" and is to be fought tooth-and-nail

Want to know why President Obama is going to have such a hard time persuading Republicans to support his jobs proposals this week? Don’t ask a pundit, or a politician, or a pollster. Ask a psychologist.

It has become common for Republicans to deride the very concept of stimulus as absurd, to mock Keynesian economics as an ivory-tower fantasy, and to oppose temporary tax cuts as a recession-fighting measure. But during the Bush administration? All that was orthodox conservative policy.

In 2001, Grover Norquist called a national sales-tax holiday “exactly the kind of immediate stimulus our shell-shocked economy needs now.” Norquist went on to quote George W. Bush’s chief economist, Glenn Hubbard, saying we needed stimulus “sooner rather than later.” Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) introduced a bill to that effect.

Around the same time, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) held a hearing in which he invited Kevin Hassett, a conservative economist based at the American Enterprise Institute, to make the case for a fiscal stimulus. “The economists who studied this were quite surprised to find that fiscal policy in recessions was reasonably effective,” Hassett testified. “It is just that folks tried a first punch that was too light and that generally we didn’t get big measures until well into the recession.”

All the old lawyer jokes apply to the Republicans:

Want to know how to tell when a Republican is lying? His lips are moving.

They have sold their soul to the Devil. They will lie about anything to win elections. They have no principles other than greed and "looking out for Number One".

The New Trend in American Politics

Mark Thomas has a post on his Economist's View blog discussing the new trend in American politics:

The CBPP notices what may be a new trend:

Yet another state has proposed raising taxes on low-income residents to pay for new corporate tax breaks. Leading lawmakers in Missouri want to eliminate a property tax credit for low- and moderate-income seniors and people with disabilities in order to help finance new tax credits for businesses.

Sadly, swaps like this are increasingly common; both Michigan and Wisconsin have cut low-income programs this year to pay for business tax breaks.

The Missouri proposal, which the legislature will consider in a special session that begins today, would make renters ineligible for the state’s property tax “circuitbreaker” credit. Landlords generally pass along a large share of their property taxes to tenants in the form of higher rents; the circuitbreaker credit helps offset those higher rents for more than 100,000 low-income and disabled Missouri residents. ... Some 29 states offer property tax circuitbreakers or similar programs.

Killing this tax credit would raise taxes on some of Missouri’s most vulnerable residents by up to $750 a year. It would also hurt local retailers and other businesses, since low-income people are among those most likely to spend every dollar they have. That’s not a smart deal for Missouri.

It used to be that policymakers would try to shift income from higher to lower income individuals based upon the idea that the lower savings rate at lower incomes would stimulate demand (i.e. the MPC is higher at lower incomes, so transferring income in this way increases consumption). That is a demand-side argument.

...

The supply-side, trickle down argument from the GOP goes beyond the rich:

...Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) told CNN yesterday that he’s visited with a lot of business people lately, and he’s learned they’re “actually afraid to hire people” because they’re “afraid of what the government will do to them.”

That’s awfully dumb — when Republicans find evidence of government punishing employers for hiring workers, they should let everyone know — but it was the next part of the interview that really stood out.

“I have talked to a lot of businesses in South Carolina who can’t get employees to come back to work because they are getting unemployment and they’re getting food stamps and they say, ‘Call me when unemployment runs out.’ […]

“There are a lot of people who desperately need it and we need to make sure that we have that safety net in place, but we also have to realize there are a lot of people gaming the system right now.”

I’m not sure which of DeMint’s talking points were supposed to believe — are employers afraid to hire or are they struggling with lazy people who won’t apply for openings? — but the rhetoric is a reminder that Republicans just don’t seem to like the unemployed.

In DeMint’s mind, the jobless are living it up on meager unemployed benefits, and don’t want to seek gainful employment.

Thus, instead of arguing that giving money to the unemployed helps to stimulate demand, and thereby boost sales and employment, the supply-sider's argument is that it makes the unemployed lazy. So we should take away all of that money and give it to the rich who, of course, deserve and earn every penny they get and will run out and invest it in new business ventures no matter how depressed the economy might be. It has nothing to do with the incentive to do what's best for the rich and powerful, it's what's best for the people whose programs get cut to fund these tax cuts for wealthy indiviuals and businesses.

Go read the original post to get the embedded links.

Mark Thoma has made the right wing politics of the US utterly clear. No more progressive taxes. No breaks for the guy on the bottom. The guy on the bottom will be taxed and taxed so more tax cuts can be engineering for the fat cats on top. Oh... and the politicians are getting more ridiculous in the "blame the victim" game by claiming that the unemployed are refusing to work because they are addicted to the "easy money" from unemployment. I guess those huge lines of tens of thousands showing up at the Black Caucus jobs fairs around the US weren't serious about finding a job. They went and stood in the hot summer sun for long hours just to get their jollies. That's the story of the right wing politicos.

What a mean-spirited, vicious country the US has become under the right wing. And the amazing thing is that the real heart of the Republican party are those evangelicals, the Bible-thumping Christians who apparently haven't opened their holy books to find what Jesus said about the poor (love them, give to them) and the rich (it is easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than a rich man to get into heaven). It is pretty clear to me that as the role of religion has grown in the right wing politics in the US, the right has gotten more mean-spirited and vicious in their treatment of the poor, the disadvantaged, the sick, etc. What a sad, sad state of affairs.

A Soupçon of Criminality

Here's a bit from a post by Simon Johnson on the NY Times blog Economix raising a suspicion about the motives of S&P and the way it "grades" investment risks:

Standard & Poor’s downgrade of United States government debt last month has been much debated, but not enough attention has been devoted to the fact, reported last week by Bloomberg News, that it continues to rate securities based on subprime mortgages as AAA.

In short, S.&P. is suggesting that these mortgages are more creditworthy than the United States government — a striking proposition. Leave aside for a moment that S.&P. made a big mistake in its analysis of the federal budget (as explained by James Kwak in our blog). Just focus on all the things that can go wrong with subprime mortgages: housing prices can fall, people can lose jobs, the economy may fall into recession and so on.

Now weigh those risks against the possibility that the United States government will default. As we learned this summer, that is not a zero-probability event — but it would take either an act of Congress, in the sense of passing legislation, or a determination by members of Congress that they could not act. S.&P. finds this more likely to happen than some subprime mortgages’ going bad.

Now S.&P. might be right, of course. Or its assessment might be influenced by the fact that it is paid by the issuer of those mortgage-backed securities — which presumably wants a higher rating. The rating agency’s employees may want to do an accurate assessment; management can reasonably expect to make higher profits if its ratings please the paying customers.

Yes, more than a soupçon. I would say S&P's playing with AAA ratings more properly reeks of corruption and criminality. As Simon Johnson points out: you get what you pay for. The big banks want AAA on subprime mortgages, so S&P mysteriously finds these are rock-solid, gold-plated investments. The US government is run by a Democrat, and suddenly S&P smells "socialist" and decides that nobody can trust the US to repay its debts. I bet if Ben Bernanke fronted a little anonymous cash under the table, those AAA ratings would suddenly reappear. You know, wink, wink, nudge, nudge, the US is very close to AAA and those analysts at S&P might "spontaneously" have a change of heart and discover that the US really is a more solid bet than a subprime mortgage. Thank God Wall Street has no criminals... the lot of them are all solid, like choirboys, as honest as the day is long.

Corruption in Government

There is an excellent article by Yves Smith in her Naked Capitalism blog. Here is the juiciest tidbit to whet your appetite:

What is disturbing about the Wall Street Journal is the moral blindness of too many of the key actors, namely Friedman himself and some Fed officials. Let’s parse some of the key bits of the Wall Street Journal story:

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York shaped Washington’s response to the financial crisis late last year, which buoyed Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and other Wall Street firms. Goldman received speedy approval to become a bank holding company in September and a $10 billion capital injection soon after.

... he latest news tidbit, of former Goldman co-chairman Steven Friedman staying on as chairman of the New York Fed after Goldman became a bank holding company, isn’t as troubling as when current Goldman chief Lloyd Blankfein was the only Wall Street denizen to meet with Hank Paulson when the Treasury was deciding what to do about AIG. Readers may recall that Goldman had the biggest exposure to AIG and thus had the most to benefit from a course of action that would be generous to counterparties (who had chosen of their own cognizance to enter into contracts with the big insurer).

During that time, the New York Fed’s chairman, Stephen Friedman, sat on Goldman’s board and had a large holding in Goldman stock, which because of Goldman’s new status as a bank holding company was a violation of Federal Reserve policy.

The New York Fed asked for a waiver, which, after about 2½ months, the Fed granted. While it was weighing the request, Mr. Friedman bought 37,300 more Goldman shares in December. They’ve since risen $1.7 million in value.

Get that? The guy in charge of "saving Wall Street", the head of the NY Federal Reserve, gets to decide to save Goldman Sachs (and thereby save the value of his shares in that company), and once he sets them up as a bank holding company and gives them an infusion of $10 billion of taxpayer money, he decides they look like "a good investment" so he buys more shares... of the very bank he is supposed to "regulate".

That's letting the fox look after the hens in the hen house because he is best situated to know which is the tenderest, plumpest, and more desirable. Willie Sutton would have given up his career as a bank robber if he could have gotten himself named as a bank director!

Go read the whole article.

Thank God America has Obama on the job to bless this bit of self-serving double-dealing. We wouldn't want America to descend into "crony capitalism" like Asia in 1997 when the US and the IMF all chided Asian countries over their "corruption".

Sadly, I expected crony capitalism from George Bush and the Republicans. I'm surprised by Obama's eager embrace of Wall Street and all that lobbyist money to fund his 2012 re-election. Thank God Obama is incorruptible and has shown himself to jump in and nip corruption in the bud by turning a blind eye to these Federal Reserve shenanigans, by watering down the Dodd-Frank bill, and showing great reluctance to attend the $100,000 a plate celebratory dinners that Wall Street has thrown in celebration of finally have a tough "regulator" in the White House.