The unforgiving minute: Feels like fan fiction to me

(Updated below.)

Add my name to the list of people who fail to understand why Sen. Elizabeth Warren's time would be better spent attending the funerals of foreign leaders for the next four to eight years instead of pantsing Mitch  McConnell and making Debbie Wasserman Schultz eat grass (to say nothing of getting under Donald Trump's skin).

Minute's up.

Update:  (6/20/2016) Still think Warren for VP nominee would be a mistake, but if it gives these guys a case the sads, then I'm willing to say I'm no longer 100% against the idea. 

Serendipity, Facebook-style

The following two items turned up back-to-back in my Facebook news feed yesterday:

First, Paul Krugman called the fashionable obsession with long-term budget deficits a "cop-out," since it lets budget scolds off the hook for dealing with America's here-and-now problems like our crumbling infrastructure, rising economic inequality, and jobless "recovery." In fact, it paints the people who want to address those problems as the villains.

Think about it: Faced with mass unemployment and the enormous waste it entails, for years the Beltway elite devoted almost all their energy not to promoting recovery, but to Bowles-Simpsonism — to devising “grand bargains” that would address the supposedly urgent problem of how we’ll pay for Social Security and Medicare a couple of decades from now. [...]

Discussions of short-run fiscal and monetary policy are politically charged. Oppose austerity and support monetary expansion and you’ll be lambasted by the right; do the reverse and you’ll be criticized and maybe ridiculed by the left. I understand why it’s tempting to dismiss the whole debate and declare that the really important issues involve the long run. But while people who say that kind of thing like to pose as brave and responsible, they’re actually ducking the hard stuff — which is to say, being craven and irresponsible.

Which brings me back to the president’s new budget.

It goes without saying that Mr. Obama’s fiscal proposals, like everything he does, will be attacked by Republicans. He’s also, however, sure to face criticism from self-proclaimed centrists accusing him of irresponsibly abandoning the fight against long-term budget deficits.

And immediately below it on the same feed was this cartoon by Gary Varvel, editorial cartoonist for the Indianapolis Star, crediting the economy-crippling sequestration cuts (talk about a cop-out!) for what recovery we're seeing right now, while blaming Obama for seeking ignoring long-term deficit issues to tackle the problems on his plate (and that of the Republican-controlled Congress) right now. You couldn't have measured that gap with an egg-timer.

The IndyStar's editorial board are no friends of Obama, although they did hang Varvel himself out to dry for a Thanksgiving season cartoon on Obama's immigration policy initiative that was generally considered to have crossed a line (although not for opposing Obama's policy in itself). And, amazingly, they keep that scourge of the liberal media, Mallard Filmore, going on the comics page.

Good news everyone: Three reasons to appreciate Krugman, all in one NYT column

Yesterday, Paul Krugman wrote this:

Am I saying that the professional consensus is always right? No. But when politicians pick and choose which experts — or, in many cases, “experts” — to believe, the odds are that they will choose badly. Moreover, experience shows that there is no accountability in such matters. Bear in mind that the American right is still taking its economic advice mainly from people who have spent many years wrongly predicting runaway inflation and a collapsing dollar.

All of which raises a troubling question: Are we as societies even capable of taking good policy advice?

First, I believe he's absolutely right on the merits. Bad economic advice has been running the game in America and Europe for years, and its exponents have paid no price for it. With the blessing of the University of Chicago Friedmanites, the encouragement of right-wing and centrist think tanks, and the self-righteous follow-through of all the Very Important People, superstition has become nearly-indisputable truth. Despite all the evidence.

Second, the use of those quote marks around "experts" is delightfully elegant.

Finally, he didn't write All of which begs the question; he wrote All of which raises a troubling question. First, this reminds readers that Krugman knows what "begging the question" actually means, which too many intellectually lazy commentators don't. And second, it shows why eschewing "begging the question" – even if it meant what mistaken writers suppose it means – which it doesn't – makes for better writing. The usual misunderstanding of "begs the question" supposes it to mean "raises the obvious question," as if it's simply a matter of vaguely-logical sequentiality. Krugman knows that the question raised by the superstition of austerity is not some matter of this-after-that. It's a question – a point of debate – that ought to leave us troubled that it's even on the table.

Seriously. Are we able, in this age of fashionable anti-science and anti-intellectualism, to take sound advice for the common good?

Quote of the day: The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.

Well, close enough:

The most effective form of voter suppression is to convince people that the franchise is out of their reach.

- Charlie Pierce, on the long game behind current vote suppression laws.

Good news, everyone: I loved baseball ever since Arnold Rothstien fixed the World Series in 1919

(That was Hyman Roth (in The Godfather, Part II), musing wistfully about the good old days.)

It's not often I find myself agreeing with Hyman Roth. Or Newt Gingrich. As far as Newt goes, here's the last one, about 20 years ago.

But this one, all these years later, has him back on my good side. At least for the moment:

First: I have never been a sports buff. 

No, seriously. I watch the Blazers, the Timbers, and the Seahawks when they're already on, mostly because of the friends I have who do the same, and why would I want to see my friends miserable and not be able to talk about it with them? But I've always rooted for the Packers – even if I couldn't name a single player on either team – simply because the town owned them and the NFL owners hated them for that very reason. In Green Bay, there are middle class and blue collar homes from one end of town to the other with framed share certificates over the fireplace mantel next to the grandchildren and the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Several months ago, I was riding down 5th Street headed west, and I realized that a pickup truck in front of me had a licence plate holder saying "I'm A Packer Stock Holder" – and I chased it for three or four blocks before it turned of at an intersection where I was blocked. I just wanted to tell the driver how much I envied him.

I suppose that it will be another twenty years until Newt has another idea that's actually good. So let's enjoy this moment while it's here.

Double quote of the day: Now I know why Scotty died young

These two pieces turned up in my reading list this morning. I believe what both of these people have to say.

Perhaps that means I have what  that F. Scott Fitzgerald  would consider a first-rate intelligence, so I suppose I should feel sort of good about that. But to believe both of these things at 9 in the morning . . . now I guess I can understand why Fitzgerald was hammered by noon most days.

First:

Self-government must be an educational enterprise, with lessons learned over and over again, and that is what Elizabeth Warren is about these days. She is still teaching. She teaches because she has learned, and she has learned because she teaches. The great teachers are the ones who remain students at heart, who keep learning from their students, and from the world around them, and from their own drive to know even more about even more things, and who then are able to transmit that knowledge—and more important, the drive to know more—to their students.

Charlie Pierce

Elizabeth Warren Is the Teacher

And then:

No doubt, the Internet and cable television have allowed various political and corporate interests to spread disinformation on a scale that was not possible before, but to have it believed requires a badly educated population unaccustomed to verifying things they are being told. Where else on earth would a president who rescued big banks from bankruptcy with taxpayers’ money and allowed the rest of us to lose $12 trillion in investment, retirement, and home values be called a socialist?

Charles Simic

Age of Ignorance

The quotes only capture the direction of the two pieces; you should read them both – they're going to the p3 Reading list, just in case. But you should also consider whether you'll need a big dose of your self-medication of choice at your elbow when you're through.

Just sayin'.

Quote of the day: "Universal"

I think the health reforms could have been sold as universal health care, but that wouldn't have been true. […]

The problem is the idea of "universal". That is simply not an established American value. We are generally quite content to live in a country with vast disparities in rights, health, wealth and security out of some outdated fealty to "states' rights." And that lies at the root of so many of our problems.

- Digby, on the larger problem faced by ideas like Medicare expansion.

Quote of the day: "The Sheldon Primary"

That's the term of art now for the fashion show in which Republican presidential wannabes do the swimsuit and formal gown strut on the catwalk for the billionaire dark-money providers – a process that is now more lucrative, and probably more predictable from the point of view of campaign strategy than those old-style land-based primaries like New Hampshire or South Carolina. (And as a health plus for the candidates, they probably don't have to eat deep-fried anything or stand in the snow as much.)

In 2012, Sheldon Adelson himself pissed away what you and I might naively consider a fortune to get Newt Gingrich into the lead for . . . about a week or two before Mitt "Mister Inevitable" Romney ran him out of the race, along with the Randians, snake handlers, and pizza magnates and the rest of the field, one by one. Seeing his colors fade in the backstretch, Adelson let it be known that when they put Gingrich down he'd be looking for another horse, probably Romney. And that was just two candidates and one sugar-daddy. Now, thanks to the miracle of Citizens United and Shelby County decisions, the right-wing majority on the Supreme Court has allowed any billionaire to have his own candidate and bring him up with far less regard for, or deference to, what the RNC might want, with its silly ideas about actually winning elections at the national level.

It's hard to feel too sympathetic about this, since the bear that is biting them on the ass is one they raised and nurtured since it was a cub.

But Robert Reich draws the larger moral:

Charles and David Koch should not be blamed for having more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of Americans put together. Nor should they be condemned for their petrochemical empire. As far as I know, they’ve played by the rules and obeyed the laws.

They’re also entitled to their own right-wing political views. It’s a free country.

But in using their vast wealth to change those rules and laws in order to fit their political views, the Koch brothers are undermining our democracy. That’s a betrayal of the most precious thing Americans share.

The Kochs exemplify a new reality that strikes at the heart of America. The vast wealth that has accumulated at the top of the American economy is not itself the problem. The problem is that political power tends to rise to where the money is. And this combination of great wealth with political power leads to greater and greater accumulations and concentrations of both — tilting the playing field in favor of the Kochs and their ilk, and against the rest of us.

America is not yet an oligarchy, but that’s where the Koch’s and a few other billionaires are taking us. […]

At this very moment, Casino magnate Sheldon Adelson (worth an estimated $37.9 billion) is busy interviewing potential Republican candidates whom he might fund, in what’s being called the “Sheldon Primary.”

“Certainly the ‘Sheldon Primary’ is an important primary for any Republican running for president,” says Ari Fleischer, former White House press secretary under President George W. Bush. “It goes without saying that anybody running for the Republican nomination would want to have Sheldon at his side.”

The new billionaire political bosses aren’t limited to Republicans. Democratic-leaning billionaires Tom Steyer, a former hedge-fund manager, and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, have also created their own political groups. But even if the two sides were equal, billionaires squaring off against each other isn’t remotely a democracy.

Heaven help us.

Nine years ago in p3: I find the job I want, and coin a brand-new word in the process

It was in the days of the newly-reelected Dubya's surprise plan to turn all the money in the Social Security fund over to the same sociopaths whose unregulated speculation with Other People's Money would, a mere four years later, nearly collapse the global economy and remove an incredible amount of wealth from the American economy -- including home equity,the one place other than pensions and Social Security where most Americans put their money away for retirement, as opposed, to say, the Cayman Islands.

But Frank Luntz, the René Emile Belloq of political rhetoric, felt that all this talk of "privatization" by Democrats -- and worse,by  the media! as if there was no honor among thieves anymore! -- was getting a little too close to home. A little uncomfortable. A little too . . . real.

So, because I was more dripping with the milk and honey of bipartisanship in those days, I offered some suggestions.

I'm still a little disappointed that the word didn't catch on. True, it was meaningless, but I hardly expected that to be a deal-killer in Frank Luntz's line of work.

Want to know the oak? Look at the acorn. A banking parable.

Here's the oak:

Before Bernard L. Madoff was charged with stealing billions of dollars from his clients, and before he received a 150-year prison sentence for those crimes, JPMorgan Chase missed its chance to warn federal authorities about his Ponzi scheme.

On Tuesday [January 7, 2014], five years after Mr. Madoff’s arrest set off a panic on Wall Street and in Washington, Mr. Madoff’s primary bank received a punishment of its own.

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan imposed a $1.7 billion penalty on JPMorgan for two felony violations of the Bank Secrecy Act, a record payout under that 1970 law, which requires banks to alert authorities to suspicious activity. The prosecutors, essentially accusing the nation’s biggest bank of turning a blind eye to Mr. Madoff’s fraud, will require JPMorgan to pay the $1.7 billion to his victims. The bank cannot write off the sum as a tax deduction.

Further:

Prosecutors did not charge any JPMorgan employees with wrongdoing. And the bank itself could have faced a harsher punishment, according to people briefed on the settlement talks, with prosecutors considering last year whether to demand a guilty plea from the bank. Ultimately, prosecutors concluded that a deferred-prosecution agreement was more appropriate for a case that began as a civil investigation, without a criminal component.

And here's the acorn:

J. P. Morgan had started before the war as the son of a banker who began selling stocks for the railroads for good commissions. During the Civil War he bought five thousand rifles for $3.50 apiece from an army arsenal, and sold them to a general in the field for $22 each. The rifles were defective and would shoot off the thumbs of the soldiers using them. A congressional committee notied this in the small print of an obscure report, but a federal judge upheld the deal as the fulfillment of a valid legal contract.

Morgan had escaped military service in the Civil War by paying $300 for a substitute. So did John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Philip Armour, Jay Gould, and James Mellon.

Howard Zinn,

A People's History of

the United States

Or, if you prefer a different parable: Every barbecue has its winners and its losers.

In what, we sincerely hope, will not have to become a p3 Christmas tradition:

Via Charlie Pierce, We are Two Nations: A Christmas Serial.

Part One.

Part Two.

Part Three.

Moral: You can't take on Disney, Chase, and WalMart without paying a price

Six years ago this week, Cinema 21 hosted an appearance by performance artist and activist Bill Talen – aka the Reverend Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping – in connection with his documentary What Would Jesus Buy?

Six years later, here's where we are: Black Friday has been extended back into Thanksgiving Day, WalMart workers are taking food donations for their fellow employees,workers are expected to work on Thanksgiving day and their managers are being fired if they don't compel them to do so, Disney controls Times Square, Chase is paying a $13 billion fine for its part in blowing up the world economy, a business expense for which it had already budgeted $25 billion anyway and which it claims should be a tax deduction, Screening Liberally is defunct, the Loaded Orygun blog is no more – and the Reverend Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping is awaiting trial.

On September 16, BuzzFlash at Truthout posted a commentary on how Rev. Billy Talen -- street theater minister for the anti-consumer movement -- and his choir leader were arrested for leading a performance art protest at a Chase bank branch in Manhattan. The target of the theatrical presentation was how JP Morgan Chase is one of the key banks financing industries that are tumbling earth toward a climate implosion. On December 9th, Talen and his choir master will appear in a NYC court and face the prosecution's charges that could result in up to a year in jail.

Seriously folks. Buy locally. Don't run up consumer debt. Ignore the commercials. Don't stand in line for Thanksgiving sales or Black Friday sales, and don't tie up the internet on Cyber Monday sales. If you have loose change burning a hole in your pocket, send it to Portland's Radio Cab Foundation Turkey Project.

Quote of the day: Choosing your friends

"Friend of mine owns 52 Wendy's, he's put pen to paper, he has 40 percent of his workforce insured today," Graham explained. "Under Obamacare, if 20 percent choose insurance, his insurance costs will double.”

- Republican Senator Lindsay Graham, demonstrating why it might be better for everyone if he knew 52 people who ate at Wendy's.

Quote of the day: Tip of the iceberg?

This can’t be emphasized enough. A lot of Tea Party types in Congress are driven by hatred, anger, prejudice, and fear, but on top of that a great many of them are also really, really, really dumb. […]

Basically, they are people who if they’d been members of the crew would have dealt with the water gushing in through the hole the iceberg ripped in hull of the Titanic by opening a hole on the other side of the ship to let the water out.

- Lance Mannion, surveying the wreckage of the Tea Party's aborted efforts to end the Affordable Care Act, keep the federal government shut down, and default on federal debt payments.

Have to be honest: I didn't think the House Republicans would cave so suddenly, that they would take so little in exchange for caving, or – if it came to that – that they would ever again utter John Boehner's name without spitting on the sidewalk.

Nevertheless, I worry about what will happen when they next reach the can they just kicked down the road.

Readings: The cult of shareholder satisfaction

Steven Pearlstein, at WaPo's Wonkblog, confirms a long-held conviction of mine: Most bad ideas started out in life as the remedy for a bad idea:

In the recent history of management ideas, few have had a more profound — or pernicious — effect than the one that says corporations should be run in a manner that “maximizes shareholder value.”

Indeed, you could argue that much of what Americans perceive to be wrong with the economy these days — the slow growth and rising inequality; the recurring scandals; the wild swings from boom to bust; the inadequate investment in R&D, worker training and public goods — has its roots in this ideology.

The funny thing is that this supposed imperative to “maximize” a company’s share price has no foundation in history or in law. Nor is there any empirical evidence that it makes the economy or the society better off. What began in the 1970s and ’80s as a useful corrective to self-satisfied managerial mediocrity has become a corrupting, self-interested dogma peddled by finance professors, money managers and over-compensated corporate executives.

Quote of the day: Beautiful

In the intellectual synthesis of of contemporary ultra-conservatism, the impulses of Protestant asceticism can thus be drawn upon to support business self-interest and the beautiful mathematical models of neo-classical economists. (p. 82.)

- Richard Hofstadter, in 1965 – yes, in 1965 -- explaining why austerity economics was discredited before most p3 readers were born, and why Paul Krugman should be allowed to sleep in an extra half-hour tomorrow.

A quantum of umbrage: It's official

We're in the Second Gilded Age.

Tell me again why we should revere “job creators” who don't create jobs? The next time an Oregon politician suggests a whopping corporate tax break to get corporations to stay or relocate here -- in the name of job creation, always in the name of job creation -- this should be stapled to their nose:

With the Dow Jones industrial average flirting with a record high, the split between American workers and the companies that employ them is widening and could worsen in the next few months as federal budget cuts take hold.

That gulf helps explain why stock markets are thriving even as the economy is barely growing and unemployment remains stubbornly high.

With millions still out of work, companies face little pressure to raise salaries, while productivity gains allow them to increase sales without adding workers.

A quantum of umbrage: Thanks for all your help, Harry

The Senate Republicans have made it official: filibuster “reform” -- and Harry Reid -- are a joke, at our expense.

A little more than a week after Senate Democrats decided not to weaken the filibuster, Republicans are vowing to filibuster President Barack Obama's nominee to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau unless its powers are reduced, Reuters reports.

Senators Merkley, Udall, and Warren -- maybe especially Warren  -- should pants Reid in the well of the Senate and run them up the flagpole on the Capitol.

Actually, if they told Reid the Senate Republicans demanded it as a condition of bipartisan comity, he'd probably do it himself.

This must be the reason that the phrase "as courageous as a former Nevada Gaming Commissioner" never really caught on.

Saturday afternoon tunes, part 2: By government order, the long, cold lonely winter will be briefly interrupted for this moment

Somewhere in Spain, in an unemployment office, during the worst recession in 60 years, made worse by the austerity hawks who believe that the only solution to economic problems is to make people they don't know suffer, came this little ray of sunlight:

If your browser won't display the embedded version, click here.

Quote of the day: Changing the rhetorical paradigm

Occupy changed the national dialogue. Willard Romney's surreptitiously taped comments about "the 47 percent" would not have had the resonance they did had the Occupy movement not gotten the country talking about the 99 percent and the one percent. It created a new rhetorical paradigm that simply would not have been there had it not been originally shouted at the correct buildings. And it was that new paradigm that triumphed Tuesday night.

- Charles Pierce, tallying up the influence of Occupy on the Massachusetts Senate race, the Wisconsin Senate the Ohio Senate race, the Ohio Senate race, the Obama victory in Ohio, and the defeat of Romney -- all by “shouting at the right buildings.”