Fitz and the Tantrums:
Month: June 2014
I learned the hard way
Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings:
Happy Hour: Red Garland – But Not For Me
http://youtu.be/AL3kbBw4dKM
‘The pitchforks are coming’
One of my friends just sent me this piece from Politico written by Nick Hanauer, a .01%er, “to my fellow zillionaires”:
But let’s speak frankly to each other. I’m not the smartest guy you’ve ever met, or the hardest-working. I was a mediocre student. I’m not technical at all—I can’t write a word of code. What sets me apart, I think, is a tolerance for risk and an intuition about what will happen in the future. Seeing where things are headed is the essence of entrepreneurship. And what do I see in our future now?
I see pitchforks.
At the same time that people like you and me are thriving beyond the dreams of any plutocrats in history, the rest of the country—the 99.99 percent—is lagging far behind. The divide between the haves and have-nots is getting worse really, really fast. In 1980, the top 1 percent controlled about 8 percent of U.S. national income. The bottom 50 percent shared about 18 percent. Today the top 1 percent share about 20 percent; the bottom 50 percent, just 12 percent.
But the problem isn’t that we have inequality. Some inequality is intrinsic to any high-functioning capitalist economy. The problem is that inequality is at historically high levels and getting worse every day. Our country is rapidly becoming less a capitalist society and more a feudal society. Unless our policies change dramatically, the middle class will disappear, and we will be back to late 18th-century France. Before the revolution.
And so I have a message for my fellow filthy rich, for all of us who live in our gated bubble worlds: Wake up, people. It won’t last.
If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when.
Many of us think we’re special because “this is America.” We think we’re immune to the same forces that started the Arab Spring—or the French and Russian revolutions, for that matter. I know you fellow .01%ers tend to dismiss this kind of argument; I’ve had many of you tell me to my face I’m completely bonkers. And yes, I know there are many of you who are convinced that because you saw a poor kid with an iPhone that one time, inequality is a fiction.
Here’s what I say to you: You’re living in a dream world. What everyone wants to believe is that when things reach a tipping point and go from being merely crappy for the masses to dangerous and socially destabilizing, that we’re somehow going to know about that shift ahead of time. Any student of history knows that’s not the way it happens. Revolutions, like bankruptcies, come gradually, and then suddenly. One day, somebody sets himself on fire, then thousands of people are in the streets, and before you know it, the country is burning. And then there’s no time for us to get to the airport and jump on our Gulfstream Vs and fly to New Zealand. That’s the way it always happens. If inequality keeps rising as it has been, eventually it will happen. We will not be able to predict when, and it will be terrible—for everybody. But especially for us.
***
The most ironic thing about rising inequality is how completely unnecessary and self-defeating it is. If we do something about it, if we adjust our policies in the way that, say, Franklin D. Roosevelt did during the Great Depression—so that we help the 99 percent and preempt the revolutionaries and crazies, the ones with the pitchforks—that will be the best thing possible for us rich folks, too. It’s not just that we’ll escape with our lives; it’s that we’ll most certainly get even richer.
Panhandle Slim… Art for Folk…
The point of war is to keep it going
Drones are perfect for that. No muss, no fuss, no need for silly Congressional resolutions!
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration’s embrace of targeted killings using armed drones risks putting the United States on a “slippery slope” into perpetual war and sets a dangerous precedent for lethal operations that other countries might adopt in the future, according to a report by a bipartisan panel that includes several former senior intelligence and military officials.
The group found that more than a decade into the era of armed drones, the American government has yet to carry out a thorough analysis of whether the costs of routine secret killing operations outweigh the benefits. The report urges the administration to conduct such an analysis and to give a public accounting of both militants and civilians killed in drone strikes.
The findings amount to a sort of report card — one that delivers middling grades — a year after President Obama gave a speech promising new guidelines for drone strikes and greater transparency about the killing operations. The report is especially critical of the secrecy that continues to envelop drone operations and questions whether they might be creating terrorists even as they are killing them.
“There is no indication that a U.S. strategy to destroy Al Qaeda has curbed the rise of Sunni Islamic extremism, deterred the establishment of Shia Islamic extremist groups or advanced long-term U.S. security interests,” the report concludes.
Flailing
Shameless John Boehner, doing what he has to do to keep his job:
House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) confirmed Wednesday that he will file a federal lawsuit challenging the executive actions of President Barack Obama, despite supporting President George W. Bush’s extensive use of executive authority.
Boehner said at a news conference, “You know the constitution makes it clear that the president’s job is to faithfully execute the laws and in my view the President has not faithfully executed the laws.” He added that the suit was “about defending the institution in which we serve” because “what we’ve seen clearly over the past 5 years is an effort to erode the power of the legislative branch.” He refused to say which specific actions he believes to be illegal.
President Obama has issued about 180 executive orders — a power that has been utilized byevery president since George Washington except for the brief-tenured William Henry Harrison — and taken other executive actions. A Boehner spokesman denounced these as “a clear record of ignoring the American people’s elected representatives and exceeding his constitutional authority, which has dangerous implications for both our system of government and our economy.”
But Boehner embraced the power of a Republican president to take action, even at times when he would circumvent Congress by doing so. President George W. Bush’s issuedhundreds of orders of his own over his eight years in office. In 2001 and 2007, Boehner strongly supported unilateral actions by Bush to prevent embryonic stem-cell research involving new embryos, saying the 2001 decision “preserves the sanctity of life and allows limited research that could help millions of Americans suffering from life-threatening diseases.” He endorsed a 2008 Bush executive order to limit earmarks. In the final days of Bush’s second term, he even wrote to the president asking him to use an executive order to exempt a historic steamboat from safety regulations after Congress opted not to do so.
Here we go again
Does this sound familiar? I thought it would!
WASHINGTON—Intense competition in a slow-growth, low-interest-rate environment is continuing to fuel riskier lending by banks, a top U.S. regulator warned in a report released on Wednesday.
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency highlighted two areas in particular where banks took on more risk in pursuit of profits: high-yielding loans issued to more speculative borrowers and indirect auto loans, in which banks provide financing through a car dealer. Banks also are easing lending standards in commercial loans, the report said.
The report cites “erosion in underwriting standards” for leveraged loans and said banks have taken on other kinds of risks, such as offering longer terms, in the area of indirect auto lending.
“The OCC sees signs that credit risk is now building after a period of improving credit quality and problem loan cleanup,” according to the report, which looked at bank data during the second half of 2013.
That buildup comes despite an effort by regulators to clamp down on so-called leveraged lending by warning banks against funding debt-laden deals. Leveraged-loan issuance reached a record in 2013, the report said, noting that the largest OCC-supervised banks reported the highest share of loosening underwriting standards among various size groups.
SCOTUS shocker
So they’ve taken it upon themselves to define a “recess” as lasting at least 10 days, effectively boxing in Obama’s ability to make needed appointments in the face of Republican obstruction.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Thursday limited the president’s power to fill high-level vacancies with temporary appointments, ruling in favor of Senate Republicans in their partisan clash with President Barack Obama.
The high court’s first-ever case involving the Constitution’s recess appointments clause ended in a unanimous decision holding that Obama’s appointments to the National Labor Relations Board in 2012 without Senate confirmation were illegal. Obama invoked the Constitution’s provision giving the president the power to make temporary appointments when the Senate is in recess.
Problem is, the court said, the Senate was not actually in a formal recess when Obama acted.
Obama had argued that the Senate was on an extended holiday break and that the brief sessions it held every three days were a sham that was intended to prevent him from filling seats on the NLRB.
The justices rejected that argument Wednesday.
Justice Stephen Breyer said in his majority opinion that a congressional break has to last at least 10 days to be considered a recess under the Constitution.
The issue of recess appointments receded in importance after the Senate’s Democratic majority changed the rules to make it harder for Republicans to block confirmation of most Obama appointees.
But the ruling’s impact may be keenly felt by the White House next year if Republicans capture control of the Senate in the November election. The potential importance of the ruling lies in the Senate’s ability to block the confirmation of judges and the leaders of independent agencies like the NLRB. A federal law gives the president the power to appoint acting heads of Cabinet-level departments to keep the government running.
I remember reading an interview with a Republican insider who said, “Why didn’t Obama just make recess appointments? That’s what we all expected him to do.” Yeah, until they decided not to let him.
I can’t really argue with this
Mark Ames wrote this in 2008, and it’s still true: There are a lot of men who hate Hillary because she’s a woman, and they’re not even conscious of it. Every female blogger I spoke to in 2007-8 saw it, and most tried to address it, despite overwhelming attacks FROM DEMOCRATS. (There were some women who hopped on the bandwagon, though.) Attack her politics all you want. But this was gendered. It was insane, it was primal, and it was violent. Most women bloggers managed to separate their defense of Clinton from her policies, because Jesus, it had to be done. If you want to read more, get Eric Boehlert’s “Bloggers On The Bus,” because he wrote about it in great detail:
And then there’s the doomed co-star Hillary. Poor Hillary, no matter how sweetly she soups up her cheek implants or blonds up her gray roots, and no matter how blandly she tries to out-bland Barack with her her flat monotone voice, she just can’t break out of her character role as America’s Misogyny Magnet: she’s the bitchy-neighbor in the bad sitcom who always gets the live studio audience to crow “oooo”: the minute the camera focuses on her, most men feel a kind of unmediated hate that’s completely beyond their control, a strain of perfectly preserved, primal misogyny locked up deep inside of just about every voting-age male’s psyche (if you men claim you haven’t felt it, you’re either monstrous liars or else you’re wearing a leather head harness with an inflatable mouth gag as you’re reading this).
Sure she’s as bland as Obama, perhaps even marginally blander, but at the animal level, she triggers a neurochemical jet that sets off the very first hate most men feel when they encounter a powerful and threatening woman (like, say, I dunno, your 4th grade teacher Mrs. McManus? or the dean Ms. Mead, the wrinkled-mouth Episcopalian baboon who kicked you out of school and told you you’d never amount to anything?).
For years now American men have been trying to attach some sort of moral or political significance to their Hillary hatred, but safely out here in Eurasia, I can tell the simple plain truth about it: it’s a misogyny that they can’t control. They hate her because she’s the embodiment of every woman they’ve ever hated since the time they opened their eyes. It can’t be explained, which is why it’s such an ugly yet pure hatred, and why everyone burns the candle on both ends to justify the hate in moralistic terms, or political terms, or anything but raw misogyny. She’s been taking the misogyny heat for a good 25 years from roughly 150 million Americans, maybe more, and it’s transformed her into the perfect male-ego punching bag, with just about as much soul and sensitivity as a thick leather bag full of padded stuffing can possibly have.