Tag: ek Politics

Andrew Cuomo, fake Democrat

By Alex Pareene, Salon

Monday, Nov 19, 2012 07:45 AM EST

If the New York state Senate remains controlled by the Republican Party, it won’t be because of the voters. Democrats have 30 seats, with 32 required for a majority. They’re also ahead in two races currently being recounted. … One guy who’s staying conspicuously out of the fight: Democratic governor and 2016 presidential contender Andrew Cuomo.

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(I)t’s not just that Cuomo’s not trying to help his party win a majority that voters actually voted for. He has at times actively hindered their chances. Cuomo signed off on gerrymandered state Senate districts and did not demand independent, nonpartisan redrawing. In doing so he intended to preserve the status quo – Republicans in charge of the state Senate, Democrats in charge of the more representative assembly – but voters in New York pretty clearly decided that they preferred Democrats in charge of both houses, even with districts drawn specifically to make that nearly impossible.

And if Republicans get their majority, with the tacit support of Cuomo, the governor will have once again shown that he is not the progressive figure he will likely try to sell himself as if he runs for president. His tenure so far has been marked by flashy liberal victories on issues like gay marriage, along with a quietly conservative economic agenda: A property tax cap, total neglect of mass transit, and (partial) support for fracking. Even on economic issues where Cuomo has more liberal priorities, he rarely pushes his Republican friends particularly hard. (A Republican-controlled state Senate will almost certainly block a minimum wage increase Cuomo ostensibly supports.) There’s a reason, in other words, that the National Review loves him.

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Democrats ought to know what sort of Democrat he is. If Cuomo allows Republicans to subvert the will of the voters of New York, so that he has an easier time cutting taxes and rolling back regulations, he shouldn’t be allowed to sell himself to future primary voters as a progressive.

As Atrios says- Zombie Liberal Bloggers Can Still Eat Brains.

There is simply no denying anymore that Europe is entering the second dip of a double dip recession as a result of it’s austerian policies.

Euro Zone Economy Shrinks for a Second Quarter

By JACK EWING, The New York Times

Published: November 15, 2012

Gross domestic product in the euro zone fell 0.1 percent in the three months through September compared with the previous quarter, according to Eurostat, the European Union statistics agency. The downturn was slightly less severe than in the second quarter, when growth contracted 0.2 percent. But it was the fourth quarter in a row of zero growth or worse.

Perhaps more worrisome, the data showed that Spain, Portugal and several other countries remain far from the kind of recovery that would bring increased tax receipts and help them overcome their debt problems. European leaders, who have benefited from a tenuous calm on financial markets in recent months, are likely to face additional pressure to ease the government austerity programs that have undercut growth in Southern Europe.

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A recession is often defined as two quarters in a row of falling output, though many economists say it is important to take other data into account. But with unemployment in the euro area at 11.6 percent and nearly 26 million people out of work, few would dispute that the region is in a deep downturn.

“Leading indicators suggest that the euro zone recession will broaden and deepen in the current fourth quarter,” said Martin van Vliet, an economist at ING Bank.

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(I)n Western Europe the economic decline spread to Austria and the Netherlands, which had been growing in previous quarters. The Austrian economy contracted 0.1 percent, while the previously healthy Dutch economy plunged 1.1 percent, catching economists off guard.

One reason for the decline was that Dutch consumers cut back purchases of cars, illustrating how the crisis in the European auto industry is having a broader effect. Slower export growth and a decline in construction also had an effect, according to Statistics Netherlands, the official data provider.

Euro Area Slips Into Recession Second Time in Four Years

By Marcus Bensasson, Bloomberg News

November 15, 2012

Europe’s economic malaise is deepening as governments across the region impose budget cuts to narrow their fiscal deficits. Spain and Cyprus this year joined the list of countries seeking external aid, following Greece, Portugal and Ireland. Unions across the region have held protests against austerity measures.

“Overall I think it’s remarkable that we haven’t seen so far in the last year a stronger decrease in economic activity considering the strength of the euro-zone debt crisis,” said Alexander Krueger, chief economist at Bankhaus Lampe in Dusseldorf. “Stopping the downward trend is the story for the first half of next year.”

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Euro-area industrial production dropped 2.5 percent in September from the previous month, the most in more than three years, led by double-digit declines in Portugal and Ireland. German investor confidence unexpectedly declined in November, the ZEW Center for European Economic Research in Mannheim said on Nov. 13.

Siemens AG, the biggest engineering company in Europe, on Nov. 8 unveiled a 6 billion-euro savings plan to restore profitability, acknowledging it was slow to react to shrinking demand. Commerzbank AG, which is forgoing its dividend, on Nov. 8 reported profit that missed analysts’ expectations on losses from non-core assets and a decline in consumer banking earnings.

How about England and our Neo-Liberal friend David Cameron?

UK risks triple-dip recession, Mervyn King warns

Josephine Moulds, The Guardian

Wednesday 14 November 2012 08.46 EST

The UK economy risks suffering from a triple-dip recession amid a period of persistently low growth that will last until the next election, the governor of the Bank of England has warned.

Sir Mervyn King cut Britain’s growth forecast to 1% next year and warned that output was more likely than not to remain below pre-crisis levels over the next three years. “There seems a greater risk that the UK economy may be in a period of persistent low growth,” he said on Wednesday.

The UK economy emerged from a double-dip recession in the third quarter of this year, when the economy grew by 1%, but King warned that this was driven by one-off factors. “Continuing the recent zig-zag pattern, output growth is likely to fall back sharply in the fourth quarter as the boost from the Olympics in the summer is reversed – indeed output may shrink a little this quarter,” he said. If that period of contraction continues into 2013, the UK could drop into a triple-dip recession.

How are people reacting?  As you would expect there are massive protests all across Europe.

Europe unites in austerity protests against cuts and job losses

Tom Kington in Rome, Helena Smith in Athens, Kim Willsher in Paris and Martin Roberts in Madrid, The Guardian

Wednesday 14 November 2012 14.30 EST

Hundreds of thousands of Europeans mounted one of the biggest coordinated anti-austerity protests across the continent on Wednesday, marching against German-orchestrated cuts as the eurozone is poised to move back into recession.

Millions took part in Europe-wide strikes, and in city after city along the continent’s debt-encrusted Mediterranean rim, thousands marched and scores were arrested after clashes with police.

There were banners declaring “Austerity kills,” Occupy masks, flares, improvised loudspeakers and cancelled flights. But there was also a violent, even desperate edge to the demonstrations, particularly in Madrid and several Italian cities. In the Spanish capital, police fired rubber bullets to subdue the crowd; in Pisa, protesters occupied the Leaning Tower, and in Sicily cars were burned.

“There is a social emergency in the south,” said Bernadette Ségol, the secretary general of the European Trade Union Confederation. “All recognise that the policies carried out now are unfair and not working.”

Workers Across Europe Synchronize Protests

By RAPHAEL MINDER, The New York Times

Published: November 14, 2012

The breadth of the demonstrations, which affected scores of cities, reflected widespread unhappiness with high unemployment, slowing growth and worsening economic prospects in Europe, and the resistance that European governments confront as they push plans for more belt tightening. Occasional clashes with the police were reported in some cities.

Among those striking on Wednesday were railroad workers in Belgium; airline workers, autoworkers and teachers in Spain; civil servants in Italy; and transit workers in Portugal. Union leaders called the coordinated actions historic.

Government officials generally played down the disruptions caused by the actions and said their countries had no alternative but to cut spending and reduce their deficits. The Spanish economy minister, Luis de Guindos, said his government “is convinced that the path we have taken is the only possible way out.”

The tumbrils are closer than you think.

Over the last day or so it has been widely rumored that British Petroleum has reached a settlement on criminal charges for the 2010 Deepwater Horizon Disaster in which at least 11 people lost their lives on the rig alone and spilled over 4.5 Million Barrels of Oil and uncounted amounts of toxic chemicals into the Gulf of Mexico.

BP to Admit Crimes and Pay $4.5 Billion in Gulf Settlement

By JULIA WERDIGIER, The New York Times

Published: November 15, 2012

Even with a settlement on the criminal claims, BP would still be subject to other claims, including federal civil claims and claims for damages to natural resources.

In particular, this settlement does not include what is potentially the largest penalty: fines under the Clean Water Act. The potential fine for the spill under the Clean Water Act is $1,100 to $4,300 per barrel spilled. That means the fine could be as much as $21 billion, according to Peter Hutton of RBC Capital Markets in London.

Sources say at least 2 employees will be charged with manslaughter.

BP settlement not the final word in spill story

By Steve Hargreaves @CNNMoney

November 15, 2012: 12:56 PM ET

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — BP announced Thursday it settled criminal charges with the U.S. government over the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill for $4.5 billion. But that won’t resolve some of the biggest liabilities still facing the company.

Chief among them is the penalty that could come out of the Clean Water Act — a potential civil fine for spilling the oil itself.

If things go the company’s way, that fine could be somewhere between $3.5 billion and $5 billion, said Jason Gammel, an analyst at Maquarie Securities Group in London.

But if BP is found guilty of gross negligence in the spill, the penalty could more than quadruple to roughly $20 billion — dwarfing today’s settlement.

The government has accused BP of gross negligence in the spill. A civil trial is set for February, and could drag on for years.

BP’s $7.8 Billion settlement with victims in the uncapped class action has yet to be approved by courts.

Time for the Real Barack Obama to Stand Up

By: Leighton Woodhouse, Firedog Lake

Sunday November 11, 2012 2:19 pm

There are two schools of thought among progressives. For those who consistently support the President despite being well to the left of his record, there’s the widespread conviction that Obama is a closet progressive who has been consistently and tragically hemmed in by the Republicans, by public opinion, or by the reality of governing in Washington DC. According to this theory, the President hasn’t been able to achieve the policy aspirations of ideological progressives because powerful forces have stopped him short or pushed him in other directions. Remove or overcome those obstacles, and you’ll find a different Barack Obama than the one his official record suggests, an Obama who would not hesitate to enact real universal healthcare with a public option, real help for homeowners who are underwater, labor law reform, major global warming legislation, criminal investigations of the bankers most responsible for the financial collapse, an end to the Keystone pipeline project, etc.

Then there’s the alternative theory, which argues that for the last four years, Obama has governed as Obama has seen fit to govern. Certainly, he has faced major opposition to many parts of his agenda from Congressional Republicans, from powerful corporate lobbies, etc., as any Democratic president would. But he has been largely successful in achieving an overall policy framework that conforms to his political convictions, which are by and large centrist and technocratic. He hasn’t pursued criminal prosecutions of bankers because he doesn’t see bankers as criminals or their greed and overreach as the catalysts of the financial meltdown. He doesn’t see helping homeowners who are upside down on their mortgages as necessary to fix the economy, and he doesn’t see doing so as the government’s responsibility. He supports the Keystone XL Pipeline on its merits (with some modest environmental safeguards attached), he believes in healthcare reform only within the parameters of “market-based” approaches, and he doesn’t really care about labor law reform. He’s no right wing radical, but he’s no social justice activist, either. The record of his first four years, disappointing as it has been for progressives, was shaped largely by his own policy preferences, not by the intransigence of his political opponents.

One theory sees the record of the first term of the Obama presidency as the failed aspirations of an ideological ally. The other sees it as the successful implementation of a political philosophy that is simply not progressive in any way.

Leaked Woodward Memo Offers Road Map on Grand Bargain

By: David Dayen, Firedog Lake

Monday November 12, 2012 8:30 am

Bob Woodward leaked the deal memo from the proposed 2011 grand bargain, which didn’t happen for a number of reasons, none of them being Barack Obama’s reticence to cut a deal. In addition to cuts to things like TRICARE and Pell grants and veteran retirement, the “sequester,” the punishment for Congress not reaching a deficit resolution, would have directly cut Medicare and Medicaid by $425 billion (including $150 billion in raising Medicare premiums) and a permanent 20% reduction in tax rates on the top bracket (from 35% to 28%), with four total tax rates (10%, 15%, 25% and 28%). Increases in the Medicare eligibility age were in the plan, as well as the chained-CPI change to Social Security cost of living adjustments, a net benefit cut.

This was what the President signed off on, before the Gang of Six embarrassed him by calling for more revenue. He was perfectly willing to not only endorse this deal, but force the Democratic leadership to swallow it as well. And this is why Ryan Grim can be so sure that the next set of talks will include reductions in benefits to the elderly, the poor and the middle class. That’s what happened before, after all.

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Any sane observer of economic reality understands that the biggest concern in the near term is that the deficit will end up to small, not too large. We don’t have a deficit problem but a health care cost problem, and it’s not entirely clear we even have that as much as we have a CBO which over-hypes the health care cost problem in their models (the fact that CBO wanted to talk with Naked Capitalism’s Yves Smith for daring to question their model is quite telling). We have countless examples of counter-productive austerity in a time of a slowly recovering economy.

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Cutting the deficit has been discussed in terms of a moral imperative for the past two-plus years. But now we’ve arrived at a situation where the deficit would get cut a significant amount, and budget analysts make the obvious, inconvenient case that this would throw the economy back into recession. All the alternative explanations from the deficit scolds – a lack of confidence, the threat of higher interest rates – have nothing to do with the fiscal slope. It’s just that it would pull back on federal spending and raise taxes to such a degree that the economy would suffer.

I think the way elites plan to handle this is to not handle this, and merely say a bunch of contradictory things all at once, in the hopes nobody but maybe Krugman will notice. And he can be easily ignored, especially if the rest of the media plays along, hyping the “fiscal cliff” as a dread scenario for which a deficit reduction deal is the only prescription, even though the “fiscal cliff” is, in fact, a deficit reduction deal.

The Presidential Election Exposed, Again, the Death of the Liberal Class

By Chris Hedges, Truthdig

Monday, 12 November 2012 11:00

The presidential election exposed the liberal class as a corpse. It fights for nothing. It stands for nothing. It is a useless appendage to the corporate state. It exists not to make possible incremental or piecemeal reform, as it originally did in a functional capitalist democracy; instead it has devolved into an instrument of personal vanity, burnishing the hollow morality of its adherents. Liberals, by voting for Barack Obama, betrayed the core values they use to define themselves-the rule of law, the safeguarding of civil liberties, the protection of unions, the preservation of social welfare programs, environmental accords, financial regulation, a defiance of unjust war and torture, and the abolition of drone wars. The liberal class clung desperately during the long nightmare of this political campaign to one or two issues, such as protecting a woman’s right to choose and gender equality, to justify its complicity in a monstrous evil. This moral fragmentation-using an isolated act of justice to define one’s self while ignoring the vast corporate assault on the nation and the ecosystem along with the pre-emptive violence of the imperial state-is moral and political capitulation. It fails to confront the evil we have become.

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Liberals have assured us that after the election they will build a movement to hold the president accountable-although how or when or what this movement will look like they cannot say. They didn’t hold him accountable during his first term. They won’t during his second. They have played their appointed roles in the bankrupt political theater that passes for electoral politics. They have wrung their hands, sung like a Greek chorus about the evils of the perfidious opponent, assured us that there is no other viable option, and now they will exit the stage. They will carp and whine in the wings until they are trotted out again to assume their role in the next political propaganda campaign of disempowerment and fear. They will, in the meantime, become the butt of ridicule and derision by the very politicians they supported.

The ineffectiveness of the liberal class, as I saw in the former Yugoslavia and as was true in Weimar Germany, perpetuates a dangerous political paralysis. The longer the paralysis continues, the longer systems of power are unable to address the suffering and grievances of the masses, the more the formal mechanisms of power are reviled. The liberal establishment’s inability to defy corporate power, to stand up for its supposed liberal beliefs, means its inevitable disappearance, along with the disappearance of traditional liberal values. This, as history has amply pointed out, is the road to despotism. And we are further down that road than many care to admit.

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“They attacked liberalism,” Stern writes of the fascists emerging at the time in Germany, “because it seemed to them the principal premise of modern society; everything they dreaded seemed to spring from it; the bourgeois life, Manchesterism, materialism, parliament and the parties, the lack of political leadership. Even more, they sense in liberalism the source of all their inner sufferings. Theirs was a resentment of loneliness; their one desire was for a new faith, a new community of believers, a world with fixed standards and no doubts, a new national religion that would bind all Germans together. All this, liberalism denied. Hence, they hated liberalism, blamed it for making outcasts of them, for uprooting them from their imaginary past, and from their faith.”

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The corporate state, faced with rebellion from within and without, does not know how to define or control this rising power, from the Arab Spring to the street protests in Greece and Spain to the Occupy movement. Rebellion always mystifies the oppressor. It appears irrational. It does not make sense. The establishment asks: What are their demands? Why do they hate us? What do they want? The oppressor can never hear the answer, for the answer is always the same-we seek to destroy your power. The oppressor, blind to the brutality and injustice meted out to sustain dominance and prosperity, escalates the levels of force employed to protect privilege. The crimes of the oppressor are seen among the elite as the administering of justice-law and order, the war on terror, the natural law of globalization, the right granted by privilege and power to shape and govern the world. The oppressor cannot see the West’s false humanism. The oppressor cannot, as James Baldwin wrote, understand that our “history has no moral justification, and the West has no moral authority.” The oppressor, able to speak only in the language of force and increasingly lashing out like a wounded animal, will be consumed in the inferno.

Hawks and Hypocrites

By PAUL KRUGMAN, The New York Times

Published: November 11, 2012

Back in 2010, self-styled deficit hawks – better described as deficit scolds – took over much of our political discourse. At a time of mass unemployment and record-low borrowing costs, a time when economic theory said we needed more, not less, deficit spending, the scolds convinced most of our political class that deficits rather than jobs should be our top economic priority. And now that the election is over, they’re trying to pick up where they left off.

They should be told to go away.

It’s not just the fact that the deficit scolds have been wrong about everything so far. Recent events have also demonstrated clearly what was already apparent to careful observers: the deficit-scold movement was never really about the deficit. Instead, it was about using deficit fears to shred the social safety net. And letting that happen wouldn’t just be bad policy; it would be a betrayal of the Americans who just re-elected a health-reformer president and voted in some of the most progressive senators ever.

About the hypocrisy of the hawks: as I said, it has been evident for years. Consider the early-2011 award for “fiscal responsibility” that three of the leading deficit-scold organizations gave to none other than Paul Ryan. Then as now, Mr. Ryan’s alleged plans to reduce the deficit were obvious flimflam, since he was proposing huge tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations while refusing to specify how these cuts would be offset. But in the eyes of the deficit scolds, his plan to dismantle Medicare and his savage cuts to Medicaid apparently qualified him as a fiscal icon.

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So what we get instead, for example in a white paper on the fiscal cliff from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, is a garbled set of complaints: The adjustment is too fast (why?), or it’s the wrong kind of deficit reduction, for reasons not made clear. Or maybe they are made clear, after all. For even as it rails against deficits, the white paper argues against raising tax rates and even suggests cutting them.

So the deficit scolds, while posing as the nation’s noble fiscal defenders, have in practice shown themselves both hypocritical and incoherent. They don’t deserve to have a central role in policy discussion; they really don’t even deserve a seat at the table. And they certainly don’t deserve to have one of their own appointed as Treasury secretary.

I don’t know how seriously to take the buzz about appointing Erskine Bowles to replace Timothy Geithner. But in case there’s any reality to it, let’s recall his record. Mr. Bowles, like others in the deficit-scold community, has indulged in scare tactics, warning of an imminent fiscal crisis that keeps not coming. Meanwhile, the report he co-wrote was supposed to be focused on deficit reduction – yet, true to form, it called for lower rather than higher tax rates, and as a “guiding principle” no less. Appointing him, or anyone like him, would be both a bad idea and a slap in the face to the people who returned President Obama to office.

Some Personal Thoughts

by Ian Welsh

2012 November 11

Our response to the financial crisis, a totally optional crisis which was based almost entirely on fraud, was to make the poor and the middle class pay through austerity, while bailing out the rich with trillions and trillions of dollars.  We gutted property rights completely so that banks could easily foreclose on homeowners and four years in, the economy, for ordinary people, has never recovered.  We are now in a depression, and if it’s not yet a Great Depression, it’s bad enough.  Now when I say pay, I mean suffer.  People died, wives and children were beaten, people became homeless, lost their jobs, their health and their self respect because of a completely optional crisis and the criminals who caused the crisis were not just let off, they were rewarded with a huge bailout.

This was done in a bipartisan manner, but it could not have happened in the form it did without Obama.  To give just one example, TARP was going to not pass the House.  Nancy Pelosi was going to let it fail if the Republicans wouldn’t vote for it in equal proportion to Democrats.  This is a fact, I was following it closely at the time as it was my job to do so.  Calls were running between a 100:1 to 1200:1 against TARP.  Obama got down and dirty and twisted arms, and I do mean twisted.  Serious threats were made.  TARP would not have passed without Obama.  This policy of bailing out criminals who caused death and suffering continued throughout Obama’s reign.

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We could go on and on, the point is simple enough.  Evil has been done, and it is unnecessary evil. There were other options, I’ve written of them many times, and I’m not going to bother going over it again.  Obama and Dems in Congress could have instituted different policies if that’s what they wanted to do.  They didn’t.  Bush and his Congress could have if they wanted to, they didn’t.

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The people who sadden me are left-wingers who carried Obama’s water, who I know know better.  I know they know his record.  I know they know where this is all leading.  I know because I was a professional blogger for years.  I’ve met these people in person, I have corresponded with them, and I have talked to many of them.  I have worked with many of them.

They know what Obama is, and they lied about him.

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What I have seen, from many lefties, bloggers and non-bloggers, is that they have become compromised.  One needs the Supreme Court to stay as it is for his career, another works for a union think tank, and the policy is to carry Obama’s water, so he carries their water.  Another got the words on gay rights he wanted, so he carries Obama’s water as he did in 2008, acting as Obama’s outlet for rumors they couldn’t plant in the media directly.  A few are honest sellouts, admitting why they are carrying the water, others aren’t.  Some make the lesser evil argument honestly, most don’t.

And what I realized one sad day is that most of them are limited.  I am a left winger, and what academic training I have is in sociology.  I believe that people are, largely, a product of their environment.  If we want better people, we need a better environment.  To blame the poor as a group for their own travails is stupid, if they had richer parents, they would have different outcomes and be different people  The same is true of the rich, the middle class, and so on.  They are products of their environment, and most people are little more than that. Nothing is more pathetic than people acclaiming their identity through the TV shows they consume, the branded clothes they wear and so on.  They are simply choosing from a menu created by others.  They are limited people, products of their environment, claiming they are something more.

I thought many of my ex-colleagues were more.  I really did.  I believed that they had some ability to stand outside society, even a little bit, and see it for what it was, and that in that detachment they could find honesty and an ability to see the world beyond the lens of their own place and their own needs.  Upton Sinclair’s comment, “it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” is the perfect description of a limited person, intellectually and morally.  If we cannot see beyond our own self-interest, or beyond our own need to feel good about ourselves, then we will never seen the world with anything even approaching clarity.  If we cannot separate our interests from the interests of other people and from the interests of society, we are not fit to play any role in running society or commenting on it.

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If society is to function again for the benefit of all a lot of things need to be done.  One of them is to fix the world of influentials, of whom bloggers are very minor members.  To be an influential should be to be an intellectual, and to be an intellectual is to be able to stand outside ones own society, to see it through the dual eyes of an outsider and a member, then report the truth of what one sees.

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People respond to incentives like Pavlov’s dogs.  If you want to be more than a dog, you have to train yourself to overcome your conditioning.  It’s hard, and you won’t be able to do it all the time (and if you did, you’d be thrown in an insane asylum or be so non functional in society you’d be ostracized), but it is what is required to be an honest, useful influential.  But knowing and believing something is only one part of it, you must then tell it.

A lot more people are going to suffer and die due to policies which are evil.  Part of what makes that happen are the people who know better and lie, part of that is due to the people who convince themselves that evil is necessary because it is in their interests.  They are not the most responsible, no.  But they are responsible.

And I really did think better of so many of them.

Become more than your background, more than a function of the incentives placed in front of you.  See the evil you yourself do, your society does, and stop needing to feel good about yourself.

Stop being someone else’s dog.

Obama Plans to Hit Road With Oh-So-Popular Message of Cutting Social Security and Medicare

By: David Dayen, Firedog Lake

Monday November 12, 2012 10:00 am

President Obama plans to meet with business, labor and civic leaders early this week about the fiscal slope, according to Reuters. Congressional leaders will huddle with Obama at the end of the week. Labor has immediately and vocally rejected the concept of a grand bargain, at least for now, so judging their behavior after this meeting will be critical. The presence of corporate executives who have pull on Republicans probably matters more than the presence of labor, to whom I assume there will be an attempt to dictate terms.

After this inside game and as the negotiations continue, the President plans to hit the road in support of a deal, which sounds to me like a terrible idea for him.

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Maybe the White House thinks they can seduce their base once more, and I wouldn’t necessarily disagree with them. The Obama coalition has always been more tribal than ideological, willing to take their cues from their standard bearer. But maybe it’s worth pointing out that the public soundly rejected the kind of bargain that Obama appears to have in mind. Exit polling shows large majorities opposed to cuts in social insurance. Almost every candidate personally endorsed by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson lost their election. Who exactly will stand behind this effort once it leaves the friendly confines of the Beltway? The grand bargain only works behind closed doors.

One thing the President has going for him is a pliant media. The Washington Post is practically giddy at the prospect of cutting the retirement benefits of old people. The National Journal … described a "left divided" on the subject of a grand bargain, a description only achievable by putting Third Way on the left.

I suppose we all get our schadenfreud on in different ways.  Some prefer the sophisticated humor of R-Money Coyote Super Genius–

According to all the sources I spoke to, the breakdown of the campaign can be traced to the primaries. One source saying “they looked at the guy who could raise the most money in history as a ride” adding that “money no longer matters. That’s the problem,” also referring to the campaign overall as “the biggest political flim flam of all time.”

The result of all of these false numbers and inaccurate ground reports is simple: Mitt Romney was ill-prepared for the actual numbers on election day and his false sense of confidence directly translated into how the campaign operated in the closing weeks. In the words of one source, it was a con job. As David Mamet famously said, “If you’re in the con game and you don’t know who the mark is … you’re the mark.” Mitt Romney had no idea what was coming.

As indicated, the comments are instructive.

I personally like deep human drama of the General Hospital kind.

FBI probe of Petraeus triggered by e-mail threats from biographer, officials say

By Sari Horwitz and Greg Miller, The Washington Post

Saturday, November 10, 2:17 PM

The collapse of the dazzling career of CIA Director David H. Petraeus was triggered when a woman with whom he was having an affair sent threatening e-mails to another woman close to him, according to three senior law enforcement officials with knowledge of the episode.

The recipient of the e-mails was so frightened that she went to the FBI for protection and help tracking down the sender, according to the officials. The FBI investigation traced the threats to Paula Broadwell, a former military officer and a Petraeus biographer, and uncovered explicit e-mails between Broadwell and Petraeus, the officials said.

That MoveOn Ad

By Matthew Yglesias, The Atlantic

Sep 21 2007, 10:41 AM ET

I completely agree with the dread DC Establishment that calling General Petraeus “General Betrayus” was dumb. That said, I’m staggered by the amount of emphasis that people inside this town are placing on this. One virtue of having moved to the Beltway is that I can tell you, the reader, a thing or to about the mood here and that while you might think the reverse is true, the truth of the matter is that the left-of-center establishment is being restrained in terms of expressing its absolutely fury at MoveOn over this. People seem to really think that this was not merely a misstep, but a huge blunder of world-historical proportions.

Wikipedia–

The organization created the ad in response to Petraeus’ Report to Congress on the Situation in Iraq. MoveOn hosted pages on its website about the ad and their reasons behind it from 2007 to June 23, 2010. On June 23, 2010, after President Obama nominated General Petraeus to be the new top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan (taking over the position from retiring General Stanley McCrystal), MoveOn erased these webpages and any reference to them from its website.

In Washington, That Letdown Feeling

By Sally Quinn, Washington Post Staff Writer

Monday, November 2, 1998

“We have our own set of village rules,” says David Gergen, editor at large at U.S. News & World Report, who worked for both the Reagan and Clinton White House. “Sex did not violate those rules. The deep and searing violation took place when he not only lied to the country, but co-opted his friends and lied to them. That is one on which people choke.

“We all live together, we have a sense of community, there’s a small-town quality here. We all understand we do certain things, we make certain compromises. But when you have gone over the line, you won’t bring others into it. That is a cardinal rule of the village. You don’t foul the nest.”

You see, it’s the lying, not the sex.

How Petraeus changed the U.S. military

By Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst

1:31 PM EST, Sat November 10, 2012

Historians will likely judge David Petraeus to be the most effective American military commander since Eisenhower.

He was, after all, the person who, more than any other, brought Iraq back from the brink of total disaster after he assumed command of U.S. forces there in 2007.

Australia’s Federal Court issues landmark judgment against S&P, ABN Amro

Reuters

Mon Nov 5, 2012 4:18am GMT

SYDNEY (Reuters) – Australia’s Federal court issued a landmark judgment on Monday that Standard & Poor’s misled investors by giving its highest rating to derivatives that lost almost all their value in the run-up to the 2008 global economic crisis.

The Australian case marked the first time a ratings agency had faced trial over the complex financial products widely cited as one of the factors that triggered the crisis and could set a precedent for future litigation around the world.

…

“This is a major blow to the ratings agencies, which for years have had the benefit of profiting from the assignment of these ratings without ever being accountable to investors for those opinions,” said lawyer Amanda Banton of Piper Alderman, who represented the local councils.

“Today’s judgment will ultimately have the effect of ensuring ratings agencies are accountable and promoting transparency in the ratings process,” Banton added.

Monday’s ruling follows a judgment in September against Lehman Brothers Australia, which found that firm breached its legal duties when it sold collateralised debt obligations, or CDOs, to a group of charities, councils and churches that collectively lost A$250 million ($259 million).

Hero of the day, CPDO edition

Felix Salmon, Reuters

Nov 5, 2012 18:38 UTC

I’d never heard of Australian federal judge Jayne Jagot before today, but she’s my new favorite jurist, thanks to her decision in a recent court case which was brought against ABN Amro and Standard & Poors.

The coverage of the decision (Quartz, FT, WSJ, Bloomberg, Reuters) concentrates, as it should, on the hugely important precedent being set here: that a ratings agency – in this case, S&P – is being found liable for losses that an investor suffered after trusting that agency.

…

The case at heart is a simple one: 12 local councils in Australia bought a bunch of CPDOs, and they only did so because S&P had given those instruments a triple-A rating. S&P, in turn, should never have given the CPDOs that triple-A rating. So it’s S&P’s fault that the councils lost so much money – jointly with ABN Amro, which structured the things.

How does Jagot come to the conclusion that “a reasonably competent ratings agency” would never have given the CPDOs a triple-A rating? Simple: S&P used utterly bonkers assumptions in order to come to its conclusion.

…

There’s really no way of reading what S&P did, here, except that it simply massaged the assumptions it was using until it managed to find something which was consistent with the triple-A rating it wanted. When spreads are at 30bp, what makes you think they’ll average 40bp over one year and then 80bp over nine years? Especially when the index as a whole has never averaged anything like 80bp? It’s simply not a reasonable assumption, and the fact that S&P made it just goes to show how the agency was acting for its paymasters – ABN Amro – and was not putting out reliable ratings at all.

…

You’d think that a ratings agency, of all institutions, would be alive to the risk of ratings downgrades. But, it turns out, not so much. ABN Amro, in its model , simply didn’t include what’s known as “ratings migration” – and S&P, similarly, completely ignored it.

The result, in reality, was devastating. Because companies could borrow at such low rates, they were particularly vulnerable to being taken over by private-equity firms which could load them up with cheap debt, devastating their credit ratings. And that’s exactly what happened. A whole series of investment-grade companies, like Alliance Boots, Alltel, and Boston Scientific, got levered up by their new private-equity owners, and lost their investment-grade credit ratings.

…

Put it all together, and you get a very shocking view of S&P. Here’s the list:

• S&P used the wrong model input for starting spread.
• S&P used the wrong model input for volatilty.
• S&P used the wrong model input for average spread.
• S&P completely ignored ratings migration.

If S&P had just got any one of these things right, the CPDO would never have gotten that triple-A rating. If it had got them all right, the CPDO would almost certainly not even have been investment grade, let alone triple-A.

S&P was not doing its job, and as a result a bunch of Australian municipalities lost a great deal of money. Jagot has found S&P liable, as she should. Good for her.

Australian Court: Standard and Poor’s Liable for Bad Ratings on Securities

By: David Dayen, Firedog Lake

Monday November 5, 2012 12:26 pm

This will get approximately no attention today, but a federal court in Australia ruled that Standard and Poor’s, the credit rating agency, lied to investors when they awarded their highest, triple-A rating to derivative securities that lost their value within two years of purchase.

…

Further rulings of this type in this very new area of case law would be devastating to the rating agencies. They would also be correct. Rating agencies, paid by the banks whose securities they rate, simply failed to model the potential for a collapse in value of a basket of securities, particularly mortgage backed securities during the housing bubble. This led a host of investors to trust the ratings and buy the products, only to have their values collapse. While the banks got bailed out, the investors did not; they were collateral damage in the financial crash. And when I say “investors” I also mean municipal and union pension funds.

Those who want to defend the system argue that investors should have done their own due diligence before deciding on purchasing these structured finance products. The Australian court didn’t agree. They argued that the rating agencies are culpable for their work, and that their failures amounted to fraud. Rating agencies have never been held accountable for the ratings they assign, and this ruling, if replicated, would completely upend that expectation. The first place we could see further action from investors would be in Europe. The US has seen some case law in this area, and by and large the rating agencies have gotten off scot-free, using both disclaimers in their written materials and Constitutional protections on freedom of speech, believe it or not. There are some outstanding cases, however.

But Mr. Market certainly took notice of this ruling, dropping the stock of S&P’s parent company, McGraw-Hill, over 5%. Other rating agency stocks fell as well. And that’s appropriate, because the money that Standard and Poor’s will now have to pay the local councils in Australia outstrips the money the councils lost on the securities. There’s massive exposure here.

This is your space to share your thoughts and reactions.

My prediction?  Boring Barack Blowout.  It really isn’t even as close as all that.

Poll Closings–

• 6 pm– Parts of Indiana and Kentucky (no results yet)
• 7 pm– Parts of New Hampshire and Florida (no results yet), Vermont, Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, all of Indiana and Kentucky (results)
• 7:30 pm– Ohio, West Virginia, North Carolina (results)
• 8 pm– Parts of Michigan, North Dakota, South Dakota, Kansas, Texas (no results yet), Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, D.C., Illinois, Missouri, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Oklahoma, all of New Hampshire and Florida (results)
• 8:30 pm– Arkansas (results)
• 9 pm– New York, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Louisianna, all of North Dakota, South Dakota, Michigan, Kansas, Texas (results)
• 10 pm– Parts of Oregon, Idaho (no results yet), Iowa, Montana, Utah, Nevada (results)
• 11 pm– Washington, California, all of Oregon, Idaho (results)

Alaska and Hawaii close much later, but the election will be well over by then.

It’s not really about the race at the top of the ticket though, it’s how badly Romney and the Tea Party Partisans have damaged the Republican brand for the under ticket.  I’m predicting +2 D in the Senate and +23 D in the House (just short of a Pelosi Speakership).

TheMomCat and I will be trying to follow the under ticket as best we can, the final results will probably not be known until the end of the week on those races.

If you’re just sick of it and want to talk about that?

It’s an Open Thread, no subject off topic.  If I wasn’t running this myself I’d be sorely tempted to watch The Looney Toons premier, the Chopped marathon or American Pickers (anyone know what I can get for my McCain/Palin ‘Wet Start’ bumper sticker?).

Let me start by saying that this is not an endorsement of any particular party, candidate, or course of action.  For one thing it would be awfully presumptuous of me to think that anything I could do or say would influence you more than stark reality, the thing about truth is that it’s unpersuadable- it doesn’t change because of the excellence of the argument or the eloquence of the presenter.

Likewise you have no expectation or entitlement to know anything at all about me like what I had for breakfast (a spinach quesadilla) or especially what I choose to do in a voting booth unless I tell you and at that I’ll likely lie my ass off unless my answer is inconsequential and then I’ll probably lie just for sport.

I’m not your mommy or daddy, or your child.

I’ll also repeat this just in case it’s slipped out of your consciousness-

DocuDharma and The Stars Hollow Gazette are explicitly non-partisan.  You may freely express your support for any candidate.  They are also public so if you publish an unpopular sentiment or inconvenient truth only your discretion and the obviously mean spirited nature of cross blog stalking protect you from consequences and suppression in other forums.  Nor are your ideas immune from criticism and discussion here, but you won’t be sanctioned for anything except violating the normal rules of behavior.

Another thing that I don’t think people ‘get’ about me politically is that I’m really pretty conservative.  Sure I’m in favor of confiscatory wealth taxes; strict environmental, fraud, business and financial regulation including criminal imprisonment of guilty managers, officers and directors in the general population just like any common cut purse; transaction taxes, punitive tariffs and currency controls; and dismantlement of the corporate welfare system including carbon energy, genetically modified agriculture and factory farming, and the military industrial complex including the subsidized National Security Theater, Prohibition Morality Police, and Privatized Prisons.

But I’m generally against changes to our Constitution.  I like the Electoral College and filibuster because I think they help preserve minority and regional rights.

And yes, I do realize that the filibuster is not “Constitutional” except that part which says that Article One institutions (the House and Senate) get to establish their own rules.

On the other hand I am in favor of Article Three Court packing because the exact number of Justices is nowhere enshrined even nearly as well in our founding document or its amendments and has been set by legislative precedent (a power explicitly given to the Legislature by the Constitution and subject to Executive Veto) at various configurations between 6 and 10 (see, no historic preference for odd numbered tie breaking either).

FDR was right.

The nature of evil

The Republican Party is composed of 30% of the population who are either avaricious scoundrels or hopelessly bigoted or both.  They propose policies, and enact them if possible, that reflect their evil nature.  I am not one to sugar coat the stark inhumanity of their souls and while I admire the idealism of those missionaries who think they can educate them away from their willful ignorance I find them fundamentally foolish, their energy misguided, their faith misplaced.

Ignorance does not equal stupidity.  They are cunning, ruthless, and resourceful and they look upon you as naive rubes, mere marks to be exploited and harvested like sheep.  The trouble with Kansas is that there are so many Kansans in it and they are happy being evil, not that they are dumb.

And of course they’re not limited to Kansas, would that they were.  The War of Northern Aggression was primarily motivated by the fact that northern states aggressively didn’t recognize the obvious moral superiority of the South and it’s peculiar institution of race slavery and instead condemned it as hateful and uncivilized.  This itself was not was not without a class economic component as over half the wealth of the entire United States was held in the value of human cattle, its breeding, and labor.

Representative Democracy

“The past is never dead.  It’s not even past.”

A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved – I do not expect the house to fall – but I do expect it will cease to be divided.  It will become all one thing or all the other.  Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new – North as well as South.

Mr. Lincoln’s argument goes something like this- At the beginning of 1854 race slavery was legislatively excluded from more than half the United States.  With the incorporation of Kansas and Nebraska that legislation was superseded by mandate for a local plebiscite and the Supreme Court subsequently found in Dred Scott that the property right to own, work and breed human cattle for profit once granted to a citizen under that laws of any State must be equally enforced in all States in the absence of Federal legislation which was impossible to achieve due to bi-partisan acquiescence in the institution of slavery.

Lesser Evilism

Remember the Whigs!  In 1852 the party fractured along pro and anti slavery lines and was never again a national political force.  By contrast the Democrats were the party of slavery uncontested and united.

Does that mean loyal Whigs should have supported Millard Filmore?

I guess that depends on whether you think it would have delayed or prevented the War of Southern Rebellion and that “compromises” such as compensating the owners of slave wealth and shipping their Cain marked property back to Africa like the inhuman savages they were was less evil.

Wesley Culp died assaulting the hill named after his Uncle defending slavery and compromise after all.  I’m sure his family and dog loved him and missed him terribly.

Greater Evilism

I suppose you expected me to talk about War Crimes.  About torture and ovens and extermination.  When I was younger I used to wonder what could bring an entire nation to such depths of depravity that they could condone and ignore aggressive war.

Now, unfortunately, I know.

And the question is what I must do.

Out there is a hill with my family’s name on it and when I visit it will not be to compromise or defend evil of any sort.

I will wear a white rose.

Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism has pointed out an important new study for defenders of the social safety net, specifically Medicare and Medicaid (anyone claiming that Social Security contributes to the deficit is simply a liar and a thief).

The name of the paper is An Examination of Health-Spending Growth In The United States: Past Trends And Future Prospects (.pdf) by Glenn Follette and Louise Sheiner.  As she points out the first important thing to recognize about it is who it comes from.

(T)he authors are uniquely qualified to make this critique. Follette is chief of the Fed’s fiscal analysis section. Sheiner, a fellow member of that group, has worked for both the Treasury and the Council of Economic Advisers previously. In other words, the sort of analysis they have made here is the core of what they do on a daily basis.

Fed Budgetary Experts Demolish CBO Health Cost Model, the Lynchpin of Budget Hysteria

Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism

Sunday, November 4, 2012

(C)onventional wisdom is that Medicare does have a long term cost predicament, but the problem is not demographic, but that of the steep rise of health care costs in general.

The fundamental beef of Follette and Sheiner with the CBO model is that it naively assumes past growth in health care spending as the basis for its long-term projections. The result is that it shows that trees will grow to the sky. One of the things anyone who has build forecasting models will tell you is you come up with assumptions that look reasonable and then sanity check the output (for instance, does your model say in year 10 that your revenues will be 3x what you can produce given your forecast level in plant and investment? If so, you need to make some revisions). The Fed economists point out numerous ways that the model output flies in the face of what amounts to common sense in the world of long term budget forecasting.

…

The CBO assuming public health care spending will sustain its growth rate of the last 50 years for as long as they do (see further discussion below) with no policy changes is like budget analysts in 1946 assuming that military spending will grow at the same rate it did during World War II without any policy changes. Yet they further assume that, having reached this crushing level, Medicare costs in 2082 will still be growing faster than GDP!

The underlying issue is that nothing that is a large portion of GDP can exceed the growth rate of GDP forever, or even for all that long; that’s how we’ve gotten in the insane position of having health care reach 16% of GDP. The term of art is “excess health care spending growth” which as noted above, they define in relationship to per capita incomes.

…

The CBO’s performance on this front looks like malpractice. The Fed economists note telling irregularities, such as the substitution of scenarios, as opposed to the use of confidence band analysis, as the CBO employed in its Social Security forecasts. And this would not the first time that CBO has apparently allowed political considerations to interfere with its pretense of objectivity. First we have the case of CBO analyst Lan Pham, who was fired for attempting to incorporate the impact of foreclosures and chain of title issues on home price and property tax forecasts. Second, we have the instance of Tom Ferguson and Rob Johnson of alerting the CBO to a significant omission in their deficit analysis, that of failing to include financial assets in their debt-to-GDP ratio calculation. CBO staffers have not disputed the accuracy of the Ferguson/Johnson research but nevertheless will not change their projections. Now we have what is demonstrably an overly aggressive set of assumptions driving health policy debate, with two Federal Reserve analysts sufficiently taken aback by the model as to publish a serious takedown of it.

The CBO’s independence is, like its output, treated as above question. It’s time to subject both to harsh scrutiny.

The thing about ‘trees to the sky’ is that they all grow to the sky, but they do not grow indefinitely or at a constant rate.  Assuming that they do is at best naive and at worst disingenuous.

So, stupid or evil?

The Left Wing Case Against Obama and Obama’s Next Term

by Ian Welsh

2012 November 3

The key thing to realize is that Obama is the President who normalized Bush’s Republic.  He normalized routine civil liberties violations, normalized anti-immigrant raids, normalized the eternal war on terror, pushed executive power even further than Bush with a unilateral war against the wishes of Congress in Libya and by arrogating for himself the right to kill any American.  He made sure the rich not only stayed rich, in the face of a financial collapse which he could have used to break their power, but has increased inequality significantly.  The wealth and wages of ordinary Americans have dropped, the portion of the country’s income going to the wealthy has increased, and the US is well on its way to becoming a corrupt petro-state.  Nothing is more hilarious than Mayor Bloomberg endorsing Obama because of climate change, when Obama has quite deliberately overseen a huge increase in hydrocarbon production and openly embraces so-called “clean” coal.   Obama may agree that Global Warming exists, and Romney may pretend that it doesn’t, but the policies of the two are functionally identical and the money Obama spent on renewables was so horribly misspent as to do nothing but discredit the industry.

The argument for “who cares” is simple enough.  Yes, Romney will be worse than Obama in certain respects, but if Obama is not in charge, then the Democrats are far more likely to oppose both civil liberties absuses and efforts to cut Social Security and Medicare.

Let me tell you how Obama’s second term will play out.

1) He will appoint a milquetoast “liberal” to the Supremes.  You’ll keep the remains of Roe vs. Wade, but he’ll keep doing things like overruling Plan B as an over the counter medicatin, because he doesn’t really believe that girls impregnated by their fathers have a right to an abortion.  And every case that enshrines oligarchy, like Citizens United or HCR, will go for oligarchy (you aren’t stupid enough to think that Roberts switched his vote for any reasons other than to give insurance companies their bailout and gut Medicaid, I hope.)

2) The economy will struggle along till he gets his grand bargain, then it will absolutely crater.  You’ve got a couple years of lousy but not awful economy at most, use it, because years 3 and 4 are going to be awful.

3) He will make a Grand Bargain.  Winning by only a small margin of the popular vote will help with this.  The rich will pay slightly more, but most of the money will come from cutting Social Security, Medicare and other such programs.  The Republicans will give him just enough votes to pass it, so that it will be the Democrats who have gutted SS and Medicare.

4) The Republicans will nominate a right wing crazy in 2016.  He will stand a good chance of winning, because the Democrats, having cut SS and Medicare will now stand for nothing other than “fear the Supreme Court!”  In fact, the Republicans will run as the defenders of SS and Medicare.

Because the Republican Congress is now extremely far right wing, in fact reactionary, when they get their President, they will be able to do almost anything they want.  And all they will need is the House and 51 votes in the Senate, because they will not play stupid games about the filibuster, they’ll pass under reconciliation or just do it with 51 votes and tell everyone to go fuck themselves.  There will be no nonsense about super-majorities.  HCR will, at that point, be removed or gutted.  The court decision making Medicaid optional, however, will remain the law of the land.

Reelecting Obama does mean a better economy for the next couple years.  It does mean that people who can afford health care with mandated issue, and who must have it to make the bridge to Medicare, will get that.  It means nothing else.  It will gut the Democratic coalition, it will make a reactionary right wing president far more likely, it will kick the restructuring of the economy which is needed down the road further, making it more difficult when, or rather if, it ever occurs.  It will make the Grand Compromise, meaning SS and Medicare cuts, far more possible than if Romney were in power and Democrats were opposing the bill.  And yes, poor women will still be able, at least theoretically, to get abortions (upper middle class women are always able to get them, since they can travel.)

Why is the left defending Obama?

Matt Stoller, Salon

Saturday, Nov 3, 2012 10:00 AM EDT

The 2012 election is next Tuesday. We face a choice between Barack Obama, a candidate whose Presidency we can examine and evaluate, and Mitt Romney, who is a dangerous cipher. My argument – made last week in “Progressive Case Against Obama“, is that progressives should evaluate these risks honestly, with a clear-headed analysis of Obama’s track record.This piece sparked a massive debate that has had both Obama loyalists and Republicans resort to outlandish name-calling, evidently as a result of their unwillingness or inability to address the issues raised.

It is remarkable to see the level to which Obama defenders have sunk. Let’s start with a basic problem – why is Obama in a tight race? Mitt Romney is more caricature than candidate, a horrifically cartoonish plutocrat whose campaign is staffed by people that allow secret tapings of obviously offensive statements. The Republican base finds Romney uninspiring, and Romney has been unable to provide one good reason to choose him except that he is not the incumbent. Yet, Barack Obama is in a dog fight with this clown. Why? It isn’t because a few critics are writing articles in places like Salon. The answer, if you look at the data, is that Barack Obama has been a terrible President and an enemy to progressives. Unemployment is high. American household income since the recovery started in 2009 has dropped 5%. Poverty has increased substantially. Home equity – the main store of wealth for the middle class – has dropped by $5-7 trillion, in contrast to the increase in financial asset values held by Obama’s friends and donors. And this was done explicitly through Obama’s policies.

Obama came into office with a massive mandate, overwhelming control of Congress, hundreds of billions of TARP money to play with, the ability to prosecute Wall Street executives and break their power, and the opportunity for a massive stimulus. Most importantly, the country was willing to follow – the public believed his calls for change. Yet, instead of restructuring the economy and doing obvious things like hardening infrastructure against global warming, he entrenched oligarchy. This was explicit. Obama broke a whole series of campaign promises that would have helped the middle class. These promises would have reduced household debt, raised the minimum wage, stopped outsourcing, and protected workers. He broke these promises for a reason – Barack Obama uses his power for what he believes in, and Barack Obama is a conservative technocrat. Obama sided with Wall Street. He probably made the foreclosure crisis worse with a series of programs designed to help banks but marketed to help homeowners. These were his policies, they reflected the views of his most valued advisors like Robert Rubin and his Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. Moreover, he’s proud of this record – the only mistake he cites in his first term is inadequately communicating how effective he has been, focusing too much on getting the policy right.

And the result is inequality in income gains that is higher than that under George W. Bush. Most of Obama’s defenders refuse to acknowledge Obama’s role in this policy mess. He deserves credit for the auto bailout, but when it comes to the bank bailouts, hey he’s just one man. What could we possibly expect? Yet, reelecting this man to a Presidency that is hamstrung by the system is the most important thing in the world. In other words, just as they’ve been arguing for years, Obama is both entirely powerless and utterly essential.

…

In other words, as Glen Ford put it, Obama is not necessarily the lesser of two evils, he may be the “more effective evil“. He puts the left to sleep (whether by defunding progressive groups or allowing the destruction of Occupy encampments), and the left is where the resistance to imperial tendencies currently resides. It is this problem, of how to organize large groups of people into a political force for justice, that should concern us. Otherwise, under Bush or Obama, inequality would continue to increase. And with this, I’d bring us to the argument I made about leverage points, most notably, that policy leverage is apparent during a crisis.

Consider that there is a crisis right now, in the Frankenstorm, Sandy. Parts of lower Manhattan are still without power, and much of the Eastern seaboard will never be the same. Late night comedians, NBC, and even Businessweek are jumping up and down and screaming that this catastrophic storm is a result of climate change. Yet, on Monday, no major environmental groups except Bill McKibben’s 350.org featured Sandy on its home page. These groups, from the Sierra Club to the Environmental Defense Fund – focused instead on the safety of chemicals, saving the Osprey, voting for Obama, or other such problems. As Brad Johnson noted, almost every left-wing journalist or advocate was equivocating as to whether climate change was the cause. This is the moment of leverage, when an organized advocacy space should have been arguing for a massive emergency mitigation and adaptation efforts. Tens of billions of dollars will flow into the Northeast, this money could be used for rebuilding unsustainable Con Ed, or for powering the New York with entirely renewable and robust energy. Instead, the right-wing, including Democrats like MSNBC contributor Ed Rendell, are working to undermine environmental, labor rules in the reconstruction while privatizing rebuilt infrastructure.

…

Progressives are obsessed with reelecting Obama instead of governing, so there is silence in response to a massive leverage point (except on CNBC, where the anchors are screaming for more refining capacity in response to Sandy). We the people need to protest and demand the solutions that might have a chance at saving our civilization from the many Sandy’s to come. Indeed, global warming fueled Hurricane Katrina killed 3000 people, and we did nothing except allow the privatization of the New Orleans school system. But as we see now, this is not just because of George Bush, it is because our theory of change, of looking to right-wing politicians entrenched in the Democratic Party as an answer, was an utter failure. It is the politics of self-delusion, and catastrophe. Voting third party is a way of indicating, to yourself and your community, that you will not be party to this game any more. Voting third party is a way of showing, to yourself and your community, that you consider Barack Obama an opponent, and that you oppose his policy. This is a profound admission, and it creates the space for real opposition, for real resistance.

Well, you know, so many of them have web infrastructure in New York and are experiencing service disruptions until after the election.

After 35,000 hours what’s a mere 170 or so between “friends?”

(h/t Naked Capitalism)