So volunteer. Organize your neighbors. Despair is the direct effect of doing nothing.

MoveOn.org is planning a major push to protect Social Security benefits.

In an e-mail blast today, the liberal organization outlined its strategy: “Deep grassroots organizing: We’re going to organize MoveOn members in races to make sure those on the wrong side of the economy and Social Security hear about it everywhere they go…

Polling: We’re planning to poll in critical swing states and districts to show that voters don’t support conservative answers on the economy…

Ads: We’re going to work on a cutting-edge media program to push out the voices of those who are hurting most in this economy so Washington hears from them directly.”

And in related news, the House Ways & Means Committee is soliciting public input on Social Security. Go for it!

Bookmark It

This is so typical: Insider Village sentiment is that liberal bloggers are out of touch with political reality.

It never even occurs to them that we might know more about how normal people feel. Greg Sargent comments:

I’m no blog triumphalist, and some of the debate about Weigel was overblown, but the claim about blogospheric indifference to the midterms is just laughably false. The liberal blogs I read have spent months now engaged in deep debate about the midterm elections, the best ways to limit losses, and what the consequence for the progressive agenda will be if Dems don’t figure out how to pull themselves out of their doldrums.

Indeed, amusingly enough, the very argument VandeHarris are criticizing liberal blogs for making — that the White House has remained captive to a Beltway culture that fetishizes bipartisanship and has failed to seize this historical moment’s potential to dramatically expand the boundaries of what’s politically possible — has been central to the liberal bloggers’ debate about this fall’s elections.

It’s one thing to criticize liberal bloggers for having unrealistic expectations, given whatever we’re supposed to agree represents “reality” in Washington. I don’t happen to agree with that argument. Many liberal bloggers are advocates and activists. They are supposed to push the White House and Dems in a more liberal direction, even if it doesn’t always pay off. That’s their function as they’ve defined it. But reasonable people can disagree about how realistic the liberal blogosphere’s expectations have been.

However, to make the argument that liberal bloggers have their heads in the sand about Dem losses this fall is just flat out false. All VandeHarris are revealing is that they don’t regularly read liberal blogs — and that they know they can count on the fact that the Beltway insiders who will snicker knowingly about this article don’t read liberal blogs either. And that’s fine: Don’t read them! But please don’t make stuff up about them and call it journalism.

As for the anonymous White House attack, I’m not biting on that one, and I hope others also refrain from doing so.

Dday has much, much more:

A couple unnamed cowards in the article actually get this – “mean person on a blog” matters almost nothing compared to “15 million unemployed.” The White House says they want to “reconnect with voters” on the economy. I’m afraid that’s not possible anymore. They spent over a year touting a too-small stimulus and then “pivoted” back to deficit reduction. They completely botched the popping of the housing bubble and the attendant foreclosure crisis, which hit a record high in the second quarter. HAMP is an executive branch program, so “Obama doesn’t control Congress” doesn’t apply here. (Though it should be noted that maintaining half-decent relations with Congress would probably go a long way toward improving the situation.)

I guess when you’re losing and you can’t admit to yourself the nature of the problem, it’s natural to cast about for a villain. But I’d say two things here. One, Presidents get blamed for recessions in a major way. The state of the economy is all that matters from a political science perspective. And the economy hasn’t improved in the tangible ways it would need to. You can say it’s improved, and make flashy charts and graphs, but ultimately, people know their personal economic situation and will grow more contemptuous of a government that tells them how much better everything’s getting. It’s not just unemployment, it’s that wages are dropping. It’s that inequality is spreading. It’s that the middle class continues to get squeezed. It’s that Wall Street seems to be thriving. That dissonance is driving the negative reaction to the President on every issue.

The second thing is that, to the extent that the “liberal left” is upset at the President, it’s because they are seeing a great opportunity slip away in real time. The only one that told the base that they could change America from the bottom up and bring forth a transformative new era of leadership is Barack Obama. If he didn’t want one, he shouldn’t have said anything. I guess you don’t get elected by opining on “contemporary political realities,” but these roadblocks went up in a flash, from practically the moment after the election. The people who worked for Obama, who knocked on doors and made phone calls and all the rest, got the door slammed in their face on Day One. And now, the people who did the slamming want to know why those guys are so angry all the time.

More than being “shut out” or “dissed,” because I really don’t care, the anger springs from the loss of a political moment. Nobody had a bigger challenge coming into office than Barack Obama but nobody had a bigger opportunity. And liberals like myself are generally peeved that the opportunity has been squandered. Yes, squandered: I know I’m supposed to talk about all the accomplishments and victories and how things would have been much worse if, say, McCain-Palin won. That’s a given and it’s not good enough. That’s not an expression of “immaturity” (man do I hate VanDeHarris), but an honest assessment of the situation.

Bookmark It

Robert Reich is right: No one ever mentions this on the teevee. (Instead, we have people like Mrs. Alan Greenspan and Mika Brzezinski giving us stern lectures about tightening our belts.) In real dollars, adjusted for inflation, people are actually making less than they made thirty years ago. This is a massive systemic problem and it will require a major course correction to fix (and no, I don’t mean cutting unemployment benefits):

Missing from almost all discussion of America’s dizzying rate of unemployment is the brute fact that hourly wages of people with jobs have been dropping, adjusted for inflation. Average weekly earnings rose a bit this spring only because the typical worker put in more hours, but June’s decline in average hours pushed weekly paychecks down at an annualized rate of 4.5 percent.

In other words, Americans are keeping their jobs or finding new ones only by accepting lower wages.

Meanwhile, a much smaller group of Americans’ earnings are back in the stratosphere: Wall Street traders and executives, hedge-fund and private-equity fund managers, and top corporate executives. As hiring has picked up on the Street, fat salaries are reappearing. Richard Stein, president of Global Sage, an executive search firm, tells the New York Times corporate clients have offered compensation packages of more than $1 million annually to a dozen candidates in just the last few weeks.

We’re back to the same ominous trend as before the Great Recession: a larger and larger share of total income going to the very top while the vast middle class continues to lose ground.

And as long as this trend continues, we can’t get out of the shadow of the Great Recession. When most of the gains from economic growth go to a small sliver of Americans at the top, the rest don’t have enough purchasing power to buy what the economy is capable of producing.

America’s median wage, adjusted for inflation, has barely budged for decades. Between 2000 and 2007 it actually dropped. Under these circumstances the only way the middle class could boost its purchasing power was to borrow, as it did with gusto. As housing prices rose, Americans turned their homes into ATMs. But such borrowing has its limits. When the debt bubble finally burst, vast numbers of people couldn’t pay their bills, and banks couldn’t collect.

***
A second parallel links 1929 with 2008: when earnings accumulate at the top, people at the top invest their wealth in whatever assets seem most likely to attract other big investors. This causes the prices of certain assets—commodities, stocks, dot-coms or real estate—to become wildly inflated. Such speculative bubbles eventually burst, leaving behind mountains of near-worthless collateral.

The crash of 2008 didn’t turn into another Great Depression because the government learned the importance of flooding the market with cash, thereby temporarily rescuing some stranded consumers and most big bankers. But the financial rescue didn’t change the economy’s underlying structure — median wages dropping while those at the top are raking in the lion’s share of income.

That’s why America’s middle class still doesn’t have the purchasing power it needs to reboot the economy, and why the so-called recovery will be so tepid—maybe even leading to a double dip. It’s also why America will be vulnerable to even larger speculative booms and deeper busts in the years to come.

Bookmark It

Oh, Alan. If only you’d had your epiphany sooner. Yes, Alan Greenspan has admitted that free market ideology is wrong, and now he’s calling for Congress to let the Bush tax cuts expire. This won’t make him any friends on the GOP side, or among an entire new generation of Ayn Rand devotees:

July 15 (Bloomberg) — Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, whose endorsement of George W. Bush’s 2001 tax cuts helped persuade Congress to pass them, said lawmakers should allow the cuts to expire at the end of the year.

“They should follow the law and let them lapse,” Greenspan said in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “Conversations with Judy Woodruff,” citing a need for the tax revenue to reduce the federal budget deficit.
Greenspan’s comments, to be broadcast tomorrow and over the weekend, place him in the middle of an election-year struggle over extending trillions of dollars of tax cuts enacted under Bush.

President Barack Obama campaigned for election in 2008 on a promise of extending the Bush tax reductions for families earning up to $250,000 while eliminating the cuts for higher- income Americans, a position also embraced by most congressional Democrats. Republicans have pressed for continuing the cuts for higher-income families, arguing that a weak economy is no time for a tax increase.

Isn’t it funny? This Bloomberg reporter doesn’t even go through the motions of trying to figure out if those positions have any basis in reality! I suppose he thought that the fact that the highest brackets are doing quite well had nothing to do with this story. Well, God bless ‘im, at least guy he has a job, right? Good on him!

Bookmark It

I don’t understand enough of this to interpret what’s going on, but it doesn’t sound good:

NEW ORLEANS — Worried about triggering another blowout — possibly deep down a well of uncertain condition — BP and federal officials have put the brakes on the latest effort to choke off the undersea geyser of crude.

Instead, they ordered a new round of analysis scheduled to start Wednesday before moving forward with pressure tests intended to determine whether a new 150,000-pound cap and a well three miles below the sea floor are strong enough to withstand the powerful flow of oil and gas.

The decision was made Tuesday in Houston, where U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu and a team of federal and industry scientists and geologists are overseeing BP’s plans to run a “well integrity test.”

“As a result of these discussions, we decided that the process may benefit from additional analysis,” U.S. Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, who is in charge of the federal effort, said in a statement issued Tuesday afternoon.
After successfully placing a new and beefier cap on the blown-out well, the oil giant had been scheduled to start slowly shutting off valves, aiming to stop the flow of oil for the first time in three months.

If the cap works, it would enable BP to stop most, and possibly all of the oil, now gushing into the sea. The company could either use the cap as a cork to “shut in” the well. Or, if capping would create too much pressure, use the more sophisticated new cap to channel as much as 60,000 barrels a day through pipes and lines to as many as four collection ships.

Neither BP nor the federal government offered an immediate explanation of the additional analysis, but in briefings early in the day, it was clear there are still significant questions about conditions of gear on and underneath the sea floor — particularly the casing that lines the well.

Those concerns also had prompted Chu to halt BP’s earlier “top kill” effort to pump heavy drilling mud down into the well. Kent Wells, a BP senior vice president, told reporters in a conference call from Houston Tuesday afternoon that the integrity test would indicate whether there was damage inside the well. If the pressure doesn’t build up as valves are closed on the new cap, he said, it would point to a breech that could worsen if the well is simply capped.

In the worst-case scenario, it could trigger a blowout deep beneath the sea floor that would be difficult, and perhaps impossible, to control — at least until BP finishes drilling relief wells. That effort is still expected to take until mid-August.

Bookmark It

Some good news for the people who were left hanging this month (but no new benefits tier to help those who ran out entirely). But at least this will help some people, and hopefully it will pass uneventfully:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said Wednesday that the Senate would vote move forward with reauthorizing unemployment benefits on Tuesday morning, after the replacement for the late Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) has been sworn in.

Republicans and Nebraska Democrat Ben Nelson have been preventing a final vote on the bill because of its $33 billion cost. Reid said the GOP filibuster, which has prevented more than 2.1 million people from receiving checks, is designed to crater the economy. “They’re betting on failure. They think the worse the economy is come November, the better they’re going to do election wise,” said Reid. “Almost two million people who are long-term unemployed. These are not numbers. They are people.”

Congress allowed extended benefits for people who’ve been out of work for longer than six months to lapse at the beginning of June. Since then Senate Democrats have repeatedly failed to muster 60 votes to overcome the deficit reduction demands of the Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) and the Republican party. In the final vote just after Byrd’s death at the end of June, Democrats came up just one yea short.

And in other news, all the Republican senators have embraced the formerly-deplored position of Jim “Tough S**t” Bunning. I think I’ll start referring to them as “T.S. Republicans,” because they just don’t care what happens to anyone who doesn’t play golf with them. They want us to wave magic wands and find jobs where none exist!

Seems like the voters are on the side of those without work:

Two national polls released Tuesday revealed that registered voters think it’s more important to help the unemployed than to reduce the deficit.

Voters are generally wary of government spending to boost the economy, but they nevertheless told ABC News and CBS News that the deficit is no reason not to help the unemployed.

Fifty-two percent of voters told CBS that Congress should extend unemployment benefits “even if it means increasing the budget deficit,” including 35 percent of Republicans. Sixty-two percent of registered voters told ABC Congress should extend benefits despite concerns that doing so “adds too much to the federal budget deficit.”

In a Bloomberg survey, 70 percent of voters said reducing unemployment is more important than reducing the deficit. But only 47 percent said Congress should reauthorize extended benefits, which in some states provided the unemployed with up to 99 weeks of checks.

A poll commissioned by the National Employment Law Project in June found that 74 percent of voters think helping the unemployed is more important than reducing the deficit.

Bookmark It

Robert Reich and Conan O’Brien. This is hysterical:

Bookmark It

Hall & Oates with the Stylistics classic:

Bookmark It

Company of Thieves and Daryl Hall live:

Bookmark It

Happy birthday, Woody Guthrie! Billy Bragg:

Bookmark It