Tea Party America

Here is the "love of liberty" you can expect once the Tea Party takes power...



The sad fact is that a lot of people who parade around loudly claiming their patriotism and their "love of liberty" are simply right wing thugs more interested in seizing power and forcing others to conform to their straight-jacketed views than they are in a democracy in which people have the right to differing points of view and the right to publicly demonstrate in support of their views.

Here's Maureen Dowd's take on this incident:

The misogyny reached its zenith outside a Rand Paul debate in Lexington, Ky., on Monday night when a group of Tea Party toughs roughed up a woman from MoveOn.org because she wouldn’t move on.

One man, wearing a “Don’t Tread on Me” button, ripped off her wig and wrestled her to the ground with the help of another man, and a third Paul volunteer stamped his foot on her shoulder when she was down.

A New Energy Future?

Here's a bit from a post by Robert X. Cringely that is very optimistic about solar energy:

My work on this past summer’s Startup Tour introduced me to a number of energy startups with technologies that will actually make a difference in this age-old pattern of supply and demand. Because for the first time the supplies that are being created are renewable — they generally won’t be depleted. There is no new well involved to come online then peak and then die. There is just slow and steady energy production growth for 25 years or so from the same facility to which is added over time another and another and another machine.

We have one solar startup that is moving slowly and inexorably toward a target of making electricity from sunlight for $0.50 per watt. They are about three years from reaching their goal, at which point they will bring online a manufacturing capacity greater than the world has ever seen — all without spending a cent to develop that capacity (cue spooky music).

Electricity from coal usually costs $2.00 per watt to produce, so $0.50 per watt is amazing. What if this is hype and they are off by a factor of 10? Electricity at $5.00 per watt is still competitive with everything except coal and hydro. It’s still amazing.

I love the positive feeling that Cringely exudes. I sure hope he's right. He sure sounds like this is the real deal:

That low price per watt scares the crap out of BP and will change the geopolitical balance in the world within a decade, making the Middle East maybe a little less important.

How the Mighty Have Fallen

The Obama administration promised "change you can believe in". It had a mandate. It had a county that was prostrate from the mismanagement of the Bush Republicans. The economy had nose-dived. Unemployment was rampant.

This should be the setting for a Clark Kent to step into a phone booth and put on a Superman uniform.

A lot of people in late 2008 thought they had spotted Superman. They elected him President. But he has greatly disappointed all but his most diehard fans, and of course the Wall Street banks and the other big money interests.

Barack Obama has failed to take seriously the worst recession since the Great Depression. He has played Nero fiddling while Rome has burned.

Here is a posting from Paul Krugman's NY Times blog that highlights just one area (of many) in which Obama has failed:

I haven’t written at all about HAMP — the administration’s disastrously failed home mortgage modification program, which was supposed to be the modern version of FDR’s Home Owners Loan Corporation. My excuse, such as it is, is that I don’t presume to know the legal ins and outs well enough to devise an alternative.

But still: this is a case where the administration had (and still has) the money, $50 billion from TARP. That should be enough to dangle some pretty big carrots in front of lenders. And it could have had sticks, too: it could have advocated cramdown, it could have taken advantage of the popular anger to put pressure on the banks at any time — and especially as the foreclosure scandal has broken.

And HAMP’s failure isn’t news: it has been obvious for more than a year that the thing wasn’t working. I mean, the money wasn’t even being spent, which is a scandal in itself at a time when the economy so desperately needed help. And tales of the Kafkaesque process have been spreading for many months; read David Dayen’s series at Firedoglake.

But there has been nothing; no significant changes, no major rethinks, just excuses.

I really don’t understand the passivity here.

The answer isn't the Tea Party of bringing back the ideological insanity of Bush Republicans. It is to toss out the incompetent, do-nothing Democrats and replace them with fresh blood that will be responsive to the public need. It requires replacing the blowhards and talking heads with people willing to roll up their sleeves and do the hard work required to pull America back from the brink. It means getting Obama out of the way and bringing in somebody how can lead and who understands that leadership means telling people hard truths and calling on them to rise up and face those hardships in united action to create a better tomorrow.

Taking Stock

Tom Engelhardt takes stock of the political winners and losers in an article on his TomDispatch.com blog. There is much of interest about America's wars and "partners" around the world. But this bit about Obama caught my eye:

Barack Obama & Company: He had the numbers (in the polls and in Congress) and the popularity in early 2009. He could have done almost anything. But first, in the key areas of foreign and economic policy, he surrounded himself with the old crew, the deadest of heads, and the stalest Washington thinking around. While this was presented as an Ivy League fest of the best and the brightest, so far their track record shows them to be politically dumb and dumber. They missed out on jobs (about as simple and basic as you can get), and took a dismal year of review to double down twice on a war from hell. Now, the president stands a reasonable chance in 2012 of turning over to a new (possibly far more dismal) administration an even more disastrous Afghan War, an unfinished Iraq crisis, a Guantanamo still unclosed, “don’t ask, don’t tell” still in place (who says the coming Congress will care to do Obama’s bidding on this one, now that he’s bypassed the courts), and a jobless nonrecovery or worse -- and that’s just to start down the path of DisObamapointment.

And here's his assessment of a long time US ally:

Great Britain: The British lion just got a haircut and -- who could be surprised -- most of the hair that got cut was shorn from women and children, always first to disembark from the HMS Economy. One other casualty of government slashing, however, is the British defense establishment, suffering an 8% budget cut over the next four years -- which means losing lots of jets, 17,000 bodies, and even the fleet’s flagship aircraft carrier, which will be “decommissioned,” leaving the British unable to launch a plane at sea until at least 2019. As the Washington Post politely put the matter: “[T]he [government’s] moves amount to a tactical scaling down of military ambition by the one European ally consistently willing to back the United States with firepower in international conflicts.” Put more bluntly, as the British in their imperial days used native recruits to help police their colonies and fight their wars, so in recent years, the Brits have been America’s Gurkhas. No longer, however, will Britain be, militarily speaking, the mouse that roared. Despite pathetic pledges to remain at the American side in Afghanistan forever and a day, the sun is now setting on the British military, which means that the U.S. has lost its key sidekick in any future “coalition of the willing.” (Note for the Pentagon: Carpe diem. The Brits are the canary in the mine on this. Sooner or later, it will be your turn, too. By then, of course, women and children in the U.S. will already be well shorn.)

Go read the whole article to get the low down on the many depressing facts & situations facing the US.

An Inconvenient Truthiness

Warren Meyer runs the website climate-skeptic.com and has made an interesting and informative video on "global warming". This is an excellent anti-dote to Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. It comes in 9 parts:

Part 1:


Part 2:


Part 3:


Part 4:


Part 5:


Part 6:


Part 7:


Part 8:


Part 9:

Arguing for Austerity

Those who claim that stimulus spending in the US will only create inflation because unemployment is "structural" and not demand-driven need to look at the following table by Mike Konczal on the blog new deal 2.0:


This shows that unemployment is widespread, among all age groups, and among all education levels. A "structural unemployment" problem would be one where the 1960s clerk typist pools disappeared as personal computers allowed supervisory staff to do their own communication. In this situation demand for typically younger workers with modest education would spike as these people were forced to change careers. That's structural. But with the Great Recession unemployment is up across the board.

Austerity makes no sense in this environment. It was tried in 1937-38 when FDR was convinced that recovery was underway and that he had to head off inflation by reducing deficits. Read the Wikipedia article on the Recession of 1937-38 to get details..

The Bush/Republican Great Depression

Here's a very nice paper by Dean Baker published by the Center for Economic and Policy Research. I've pulled out a few bits that I find most informative:

CBO also calculates that the gap between potential GDP and actual GDP will be $730 billion in 2010. This is equal to almost $2,400 in wasted output per person. By 2014, when CBO projects that the economy will again be close to normal levels of unemployment, the economy is projected to have lost a total of $3.4 trillion in output due to the downturn, more than $11,000 per person, as shown in Figures 1a and 1b. Losses of this magnitude swamp the damage done by even the worst policy mistakes of the last half-century. The losses from the recession also vastly exceed the cost of any of the government programs that have proven controversial in recent years, as shown in Figure 2.

Think about this. The Republicans are raising a big stink about "Obamacare" and "the Obama stimulus". But these programs are tiny compared to the economic losses cuased by the Republican "deregulate, deregulate, deregulate" ideological fanaticism under Bush.

The loss of $11,000 of production by unemployment is a huge loss to a society. It is money that can't be recouped in any obvious way because you can't reach back into the past and put people to work. The nearly 10 million "officially" unemployed or 18 million who are forced out of the work force or under-employed are a loss because they become a burden on family, friends, and social services. The bankers and right wing ideologues are against "stimulus" which would put these people back to work. They think that unemployment will "discipline labour" and teach others to be more "economically prudent". But in reality, the very class of people who precipitated the economic disaster -- the Wall Street banks, the hedge fund managers, and other big money men -- have all been rewarded through TARP (a George Bush bill passed in 2008, necessary for the economy, but which rewarded the miscreants who created the problem in order to save the rest of us from complete economic collapse) and by Federal Reserve policies and on-going programs by Obama.

Dean Baker addresses the inequity of the pain suffered by this worst economic downturn in 80 years:

The situation is made even worse by the fact that these losses are not evenly shared. High rates of unemployment create anxiety among tens of millions of employed but vulnerable workers. They also put downward pressure on the wages of workers who most fear unemployment, which are disproportionately workers without college degrees. However, the unemployed and under-employed bear the bulk of the loss that results from the economy operating far below its potential level of output. These workers have, by far, seen the sharpest decline in income and are in the most precarious financial situation. They have suffered the greatest losses from the Great Recession.

By contrast, corporate profits have completely recovered from the downturn. In the 2nd quarter of 2010, the broadest measure of corporate profits, net operating surplus, stood at $1,570 billion. This is $104 billion, or more than 7.0 percent, above the pre-recession peak reached in the 2nd quarter of 2007, as shown in Figure 3. The recovery of profits suggests that corporations, or more specifically their major shareholders and top executives, are no longer feeling the pain of the downturn.

Here's Baker's attack on those who would "fix" the problem by austerity measures. He points out that is an "indirect" technique. Whereas stimulus spending is a "direct" technique:

Proponents of fiscal stimulus see the direct effects of the stimulus as fostering growth. Government spending, for example on infrastructure or education, directly employs people and also provides paychecks that will mostly be spent by the workers hired, creating additional demand and employment. Transfer payments like unemployment benefits or tax cuts also put money into people’s pockets, much of which will typically be spent, thereby creating demand and jobs.

By contrast, advocates of fiscal adjustment, in the form of higher taxes and/or lower government spending, rely on the indirect effect of these policies to increase growth. The argument is that fiscal adjustment will reduce the government’s demand on the economy’s resources, thereby allowing the private sector to make better use of these resources. In principle, this shift to private sector spending comes about through lower interest rates, which both fosters domestic investment and leads to a lower-valued currency that supports improvements in the trade balance.

Relying on these indirect measures is quite uncertain. By definition a recessionary time is a time of slack demand and with Fed rates at zero percent, there is no stimulus to come from monetary policy. For a country like the US with a relatively small part of the economy involved in international trade, the benefits of a lower valued dollar are consequently small. The reality is that during a Great Recession, government spending does not "crowd out" private spending because there is little or no private spending. The very point of government stimulus is to make up the shortfall in spending because of retrenchment in the private side of the economy.

Here is Dean Baker's conclusion:

There has been a considerable effort to tout the merits of fiscal austerity as a route to restoring growth. This argument has been put forward in direct opposition to arguments for increased stimulus for boosting the economy. While there may be a case that lower deficits can foster growth under some circumstances, the evidence presented in the Broadbent and Daly paper does not suggest that a movement toward lower deficits in the current economic situation in the United States would be expansionary.

...

Finally, all the countries that successfully used austerity to boost growth had much higher interest rates than the United States does at present. This meant that there was substantial room for rates to decline following the imposition of austerity.