Category: Class War
ROFLMAO
Greg Sargent on the NYT report that Obama considered cutting Social Security to get Republican support for tax increases:
It’s hard to imagine that anyone could conclude that it would be a good idea to signal a willingness to entertain major changes to Social Securityat the outset, on the theory that it could induce Republicans to make concessions on tax cuts for the rich. So let’s presume this isn’t an indicator of what’s to come in the speech even in the most general sense.
Now that I’ve stopped laughing, I’ll say that I really, really hope Greg is right.
Winning the future
Remote Area Medical is shown at a free clinic in Kentucky back in 2008.
It’s really strange, being trapped in this American nightmare without end. People who once had happy, productive lives are standing in the cold all night to see a desperately-needed free dentist, the Republican House majority leader thinks sick old people should learn to weave straw into gold, and the Democratic president is patting himself on the back for how politically clever he is to broker the deep, painful cuts to be inflicted on services to the needy. Not only that, he plans to announce more of them this week!
What is wrong with this picture?
By the time the free health clinic at the Oakland Coliseum opened Saturday at dawn, some 800 tickets had been handed out to people who waited in the cold all night for the chance to have a tooth extracted, get new glasses or to finally get prescription medications for arthritis or other painful conditions.
Geneva Clay, 51, of San Leandro worked as a project manager and had health benefits before she was laid off in 2009. She had been waiting in line since 11 p.m. Friday and was number 282.
“We are the middle class. We are in need of health care because of the lack of jobs,” she said, trying to keep warm until her number was called. “In this country, we shouldn’t have to fight for medical coverage, we shouldn’t have to fight to see a doctor. We can send money all over the world, but we can’t take care of our own.”
Clay was one of about 1,000 people expected to be seen on the first day of the huge, four-day health clinic organized by Remote Area Medical. RAM, a volunteer medical corps based in Tennessee, has been providing health clinics in underserved areas around the world since 1985 and has been offering them in this country since the mid-’90s.
All three branches
Of government are broken. Please go read all of it.
Fox, meet henhouse
It sure sounds like the feds wanted to let the mortgage bankers off the hook. We are, of course, officially shocked:
Prepare for a disappointment. As early as this week, federal bank regulators and the nation’s big banks are expected to close a deal that is supposed to address and correct the scandalous abuses. If these agreements are anything like the draft agreement recently published by the American Banker — and we believe they will be — they will be a wrist slap, at best. At worst, they are an attempt to preclude other efforts to hold banks accountable. They are unlikely to ease the foreclosure crisis.
[…] The deals grew out of last year’s investigation into robo-signing — when banks were found to have filed false documents in foreclosure cases. The report of the investigation has not been released, but we know that robo-signing was not an isolated problem. Many other abuses are well documented: late fees that are so high that borrowers can’t catch up on late payments; conflicts of interest that lead banks to favor foreclosures over loan modifications.
The draft does not call for tough new rules to end those abuses. Or for ramped-up loan modifications. Or for penalties for past violations. Instead, it requires banks to improve the management of their foreclosure processes, including such reforms as “measures to ensure that staff are trained specifically” for their jobs. The banks will also have to adhere to a few new common-sense rules like halting foreclosures while borrowers seek loan modifications and establishing a phone number at which a person will take questions from delinquent borrowers. Some regulators have reportedly said that fines may be imposed later.
But the gist of the terms is that from now on, banks — without admitting or denying wrongdoing — must abide by existing laws and current contracts. To clear up past violations, they are required to hire independent consultants to check a sample of recent foreclosures for evidence of improper evictions and impermissible fees.
The consultants will be chosen and paid by the banks, which will decide how the reviews are conducted. Regulators will only approve the banks’ self-imposed practices. It is hard to imagine rigorous reviews, but if the consultants turn up problems, the banks are required to reimburse affected borrowers and investors as “appropriate.” It is apparently up to the banks to decide what is appropriate.
It gets worse. Consumer advocates have warned that banks may try to assert that these legal agreements pre-empt actions by the states to correct and punish foreclosure abuses. Banks may also try to argue that any additional rules by the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to help borrowers would be excessive regulation.
The least federal regulators could do is to stress that the agreements are not intended to pre-empt the states or undermine the consumer bureau. If they don’t, you can add foreclosure abuses to other bank outrages, like bailout-financed bonuses and taxpayer-subsidized profits.
The revolution will not be organized
Solidarity in Olympia
Since our Democratic leadership is useless, we simply have to go around them, as the labor movement has done. It’s alive and growing in Washington State, as thousands slept over for a third night to protest proposed budget cuts:
OLYMPIA, Wash. – Thousands of union members from all over Washington poured into the state Capitol Friday, calling on lawmakers to “put people first” by ending corporate tax breaks and painful cuts to public programs.
The protest was by far the largest of four days of boisterous demonstrations in Olympia over spending cuts legislators are considering in order to help close a looming $5 billion budget deficit for the next two-year cycle.
Buses began arriving at the Capitol hours before the noon rally, carrying musicians, iron workers, firefighters and others concerned about the scarcity of jobs, the rising cost of college and the security of their pensions. The Washington State Patrol estimated 7,000 people gathered outside the main legislative building, while labor group leaders put the figure closer to 12,000.
Protesters said they hoped the demonstration would serve as a powerful reminder to lawmakers of who their decisions are affecting as they work to craft the state’s next two-year budget. The House plans to vote Friday or Saturday on a budget plan that includes $4.4 billion in cuts, while the Senate will introduce its own proposal next week.
“We need to remind them that we need changes right now, not later,” said Tim Haslett, an electrical worker and father of five from Seattle who has been unemployed for most of the past two years. “I’m trying to do everything I can to pay for my youngest daughter to go to college next year, but I don’t know how I’m going to be able to do that if there are no jobs.”
“We do not have a budget deficit,” Jeff Johnson, president of the Washington State Labor Council, one of the rally’s main organizers, told the crowd. “We have a social services deficit, we have a jobs deficit, we have a revenue deficit, and we have a deficit of leadership.”
What Obama should have said
It was a really bad deal
As even Ezra Klein points out:
So why were Reid and Obama so eager to celebrate Boehner’s compromise with his conservative members? The Democrats believe it’s good to look like a winner, even if you’ve lost. But they’re sacrificing more than they let on. By celebrating spending cuts, they’ve opened the door to further austerity measures at a moment when the recovery remains fragile. Claiming political victory now opens the door to further policy defeats later.
And policy defeats are what will matter. The Obama White House is looking toward the Clinton model. After all, Clinton also suffered a major setback in his first midterm, Clinton also faced down a hardline Republican Congress, Clinton also suffered major policy defeats, and yet Clinton, as the story goes, managed to co-opt the conservative agenda and remake himself into a successful centrist. The Obama administration has even hired many of Clinton’s top aides to help them recapture that late-90s magic.
That story misses something important: Clinton’s success was a function of a roaring economy. The late ‘90s were a boom time like few others — and not just in America. The unemployment rate was less than 6 percent in 1995, and fell to under 5 percent in 1996. Cutting deficits was the right thing to do at that time. Deficits should be low to nonexistent when the economy is strong, and larger when it is weak. The Obama administration’s economists know that full well. They are, after all, the very people who worked to balance the budget in the 1990s, and who fought to expand the deficit in response to the recession.
Right now, the economy is weak. Giving into austerity will weaken it further, or at least delay recovery for longer. And if Obama does not get a recovery, then he will not be a successful president, no matter how hard he works to claim Boehner’s successes as his own. Clinton’s speeches were persuasive because the labor market did a lot of his talking for him. But when unemployment is stuck at eight percent, there’s no such thing as a great communicator.
It was really making me crazy last night, all the political operatives and armchair “strategists” saying what a great victory this was. Bullshit.
It’s not just politically stupid, it will cause harm to us all. But hey, “winning the future”!
Taibbi
On Paul Ryan and his budget plan:
Paul Ryan, the Republican Party’s latest entrant in the seemingly endless series of young, prickish, over-coiffed, anal-retentive deficit Robespierres they’ve sent to the political center stage in the last decade or so, has come out with his new budget plan. All of these smug little jerks look alike to me – from Ralph Reed to Eric Cantor to Jeb Hensarling to Rand Paul and now to Ryan, they all look like overgrown kids who got nipple-twisted in the halls in high school, worked as Applebee’s shift managers in college, and are now taking revenge on the world as grownups by defunding hospice care and student loans and Sesame Street. They all look like they sleep with their ties on, and keep their feet in dress socks when doing their bi-monthly duty with their wives.
Every few years or so, the Republicans trot out one of these little whippersnappers, who offer proposals to hack away at the federal budget. Each successive whippersnapper inevitably tries, rhetorically, to out-mean the previous one, and their proposals are inevitably couched as the boldest and most ambitious deficit-reduction plans ever seen. Each time, we are told that these plans mark the end of the budgetary reign of terror long ago imposed by the entitlement system begun by FDR and furthered by LBJ.
Never mind that each time the Republicans actually come into power, federal deficit spending explodes and these whippersnappers somehow never get around to touching Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid. The key is that for the many years before that moment of truth, before these buffoons actually get a chance to put their money where their lipless little mouths are, they will stomp their feet and scream about how entitlements are bringing us to the edge of apocalypse.
The reason for this is always the same: the Republicans, quite smartly, recognize that there is great political hay to be made in the appearance of deficit reduction, and that white middle class voters will respond with overwhelming enthusiasm to any call for reductions in the “welfare state,” a term which said voters will instantly associate with black welfare moms and Mexicans sneaking over the border to visit American emergency rooms.
The problem, of course, is that to actually make significant cuts in what is left of the “welfare state,” one has to cut Medicare and Medicaid, programs overwhelmingly patronized by white people, and particularly white seniors. So when the time comes to actually pull the trigger on the proposed reductions, the whippersnappers are quietly removed from the stage and life goes on as usual, i.e. with massive deficit spending on defense, upper-class tax cuts, bailouts, corporate subsidies, and big handouts to Pharma and the insurance industries.