As for Romer, head of the Council of Economic advisors for Obama, and sidelined for her entire tenure, it’s ’bout time she quit. It’s one thing to trade your soul and reputation for power and access. It’s another thing to trade your soul for powerlessness.
Really nothing worth saying about the job numbers. They were to be expected. Obama decided to save his TARP slush fund for his own reelection. Too bad for Congressional Dems, but hey, they were complicit.
Social Security Trustees report that social security will be able to make full payments until 2037(pdf). Tax receipts will dip below outlays before then, but this is precisely why the Social Security program has taken in more money than it needed, so that it could handle baby boomer retirement and increased life spans.
Any projection which goes out 27 years is so incredibly reliant on the embedded assumptions about growth, employment and lifespans that it amounts to a fiction. It is, at best, a guess.
Increase growth by just a little bit and the entire “problem” goes away. Get rid of the taxation cap so the rich are not capped in what they pay and the entire problem goes away. Assume higher employment, and the entire problem goes away. Assume a reduction in inequality, and the problem goes away.
The US has a number of problems which are at or near crisis, such as employment, inequality and healthcare costs, to name just a few. Social Security is not one of them. It isn’t even close, and politicians and billionaires like Pete Peterson who are trying to gin up a crisis should be ashamed of themselves.
If they want the US budget more in order they should look at health care, where single payer could cut costs by at least a third, and at the military, where real spending has doubled since the end of the Clinton administration.
Or they should work on increasing employment and increasing wages for ordinary people. That’s a crisis.
Instead of dealing with real problems, instead of tackling the medical industry or the military-industrial complex, instead of fixing the job situation, they want to steal money from old people.
Now that the President’s plan to help homeownevers, HAMP, has clearly proven to be a failure, let’s go back to how to do it correctly.
What the government should do instead is set up a Trust to buy mortgages at a discount, then reset them to 20, 30 or 50 year fixed mortgages with a reduced face amount. If the house is later sold, half of the increase goes to the government, so that taxpayers make a profit. The mortgage cannot be paid off before the end of its term so that financial scavengers cannot come around and, as they did over the last ten years, say “get rid of that mortgage, and take ours. It’s better. Honest!”, because we know that when they say better, they don’t mean better for the mortgage holder. The mortgage is attached to the property and is transfered to any new buyer. And the mortgage cannot be removed from the property, and any new mortgages attached to the property are junior to the government mortgage.
Now, when I first made this suggestion back in 2008, the banks would have been eager to sell. Right now they won’t, because they have record profits. So using this plan also requires a whip hand. If the banks won’t sell, then the Fed starts pushing back onto them the bad paper of theirs it is holding (which includes a pile of bad mortgages), or raises rates for the banks, or just threatens them with accounting changes which will force them to recognize their losses right now (there are plenty of losses that should be on the books.)
Or you could just pass a law forcing the banks to sell underwater mortgages, but let’s face facts, that isn’t happening in this Congress.
End results:
a) a floor is set for mortgage prices (the price should be based on what the long run price was in the area before the housing bubble.) This ends the confidence crisis in these securities (yes, there is still a confidence crisis, it’s just muted because the Fed, Freddie and Fannie are sitting on the toxic waste pile they took from banks), because there is now a market price—what the Trust will pay.
b) It helps homeowners stay in their homes.
c) It gets rid of overly complex mortgages and puts in their place a dead simple mortgage that anyone can understand.
d) It punishes lenders, which they deserve, for making loans they should never have made. On the other hand, they get more money than they probably could on the open market if the Feds weren’t keeping bad securities off the market.
e) While it does keep homeowners in their homes, it doesn’t let them off scot-free either. In exchange for a good mortgage they can service, they give up some of the future profits on sales in their houses.
f) The government will almost certainly make a long term profit on this. This is important, because it’s not fair for people who aren’t underwater on mortgages to spend hundreds of billions or trillions bailing out those who are without some expectation that in the end it won’t be more than just a transfer of wealth to them and to investors and banks.
If they do give the administration what it wants, then Wall Street and the Banks just got bailed out, no help goes to ordinary people and you get stuck with a trillion dollar bill. Taxpayers get all the toxic assets, but Wall Street, who paid themselves more in bonuses in 2007 then 80 million Americans got in raises, keeps the profits.
And that’s exactly what happened.
It would be beyond swell if Democrats got serious about actually helping homeowners in a way that’s good for the country and good for homeowners, rather than a placebo meant to look like action is being taken.
Obama Claims Right to not just assassinate American citizens without trial but to deny them the right to a lawyer
Seriously, fuck Obama and fuck anyone who defends this shit. Oh, I know, if you’re even thinking of defending this, you’re a moral imbecile, but you should at least be able to understand that unless you’re in the top .1%, you, personally, will eventually have only the rights the least amongst us do.
The government should not (I won’t say “does not” because they do it anyway) have the right to punish anyone without a timely trial before their peers, the right to see the evidence against them and the right to face their accusers.
I will add what should be obvious: while much worse than the no-fly list, this is a linear extrapolation of the no fly list (and a cousin to the idea of plea bargaining virtually everything). Punishment without a trial. We will see whether murdering people without a trial is still a step too far for US courts.
This is what you NEED to understand. Go read it. It also underlies most of my economic thinking and writing. If you want to understand the underpinnings of what I write, this is fundamental.
Let me state the obvious, which we all know, one more time.
Obama intends to gut social security. Republicans failed, it requires Democrats. If Obama did not intend to gut social security he would not have set up the SS comission with the members it has.
Nancy Pelosi is onside with this (or she wouldn’t have forcefully scheduled a vote for the lame duck session.)
The Democrats most of us supported in 08 intend to gut Social Security.
Betrayal: the most bitter sauce.
But why shouldn’t they betray us? No matter what they do, most folks say “well, the Republicans are worse”. All it requires is that Democrats beat ordinary people with canes instead of chains.
They’re not the suckers.
I had a good time in Vegas, so I didn’t spend a huge amount of time at NN, but I did spend enough time to take in the mood, and it was schizophrenic. About half the people there are some combination of angry, disappointed and bitter with Democrats in general and Obama in particular. This group sees him as not a heck of a lot better than George Bush, and in fact the Democrat who extended some of Bush’s worst policies, especially in civil liberties. This includes a lot of feminists (angry at what they see as betrayals on abortion), many Hispanics angry at the continued harsh enforcement of immigration laws, gays who feel Obama has betrayed clear promises on gay rights, anti-war activists saddened by escalation in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and a mishmash of folks who think health care reform was a dog’s breakfast and that the general way the economy and financial reform has been handled is a disgrace.
Then there are the folks who would characterize themselves, in general, as hard nosed pragmatists and “realists”. These range from the “Obama is the greatest liberal president since FDR” types, who think that the Obama is just wonderful and those progressives and liberals who don’t agree are simply delusional to those who feel that a lot of what he’s done has been watered down pap in general but that it’s certainly better than nothing and that those who are disappointed are unrealistic idealists who simply don’t understand the constraints Obama and Congressional Democrats are working under.
As regular readers know, I tend to the first camp, but I’m not going to go into why, I simply want to note that this divide is very real. It’s occasioning a lot of anger on both sides. The first sees the second as tribalistic sellouts, willing to excuse horrible things they would never excuse in Republicans so long as they are committed by Democrats and lacking an understanding of just how bad Democratic policy has been. These are folks who tend to sneer at the “wins” as either illusionary or so underwhelming as to be a parody of the lesser evil argument. (Reminding one inevitably of the t-shirts which say “Why Vote for the lesser evil. Cthulhu 2008.”) To many of these folks the other side are, crudely put, sell-outs.
The second side is angry at what they parody as fairy tale thinking and deeply unrealistic. “Obama couldn’t fix everything, but he’s better than the Republicans will be if they get back in power” is their mantra, ranging from “really, he’s wonderful and you’re insane for thinking otherwise” to “well, yes he sucks but he sucks less than what the Republicans will do when they get in power.” Either way, they see the attacks from what they consider the “purists” as deeply damaging. Democrats may or may not be a ton better than Republicans, but either way, they are better, and there is a moral case to be made for sucking it up one more time and working hard to elect, as the old progressive battle cry runs, “better Democrats”. This is a two party state, with those parties having an unbreakable oligopoly on power. Dissing Democrats just helps the even worse party win, at which point they will do even worse things. So get over your problems, whether they are with economic policy or Obama’s continued shredding of fundamental civil liberties like Habeas Corpus, jump back into the trenches with your bowie knife or bayonet and fight for Democrats, not against them because by constantly bad mouthing Dems all you do is make it more likely that Republicans will win, and if they win, well, that will be baaaaddddd. Very, very baaaaaddddd.
To put it crudely and unfairly to both sides, it’s the sell-outs without principles against the purists without realism. And many of them do put it that way. The netroots are split, in a very real way. Life was easy when we could all agree that Bush was the worst American president in over a hundred years and all turn our guns on Republicans with the occasional shot at what we considered apostate Democrats like Lieberman. The in-your-face discovery that people not much better ideologically than Lieberman run the Democratic party and determine its policies has split the tribe and turned brother against brother. It’s not all-out war, not even close, but there is a disdain, bitterness and contempt between the two sides which is very real, and very dangerous.
This isn’t the Netroots of years past, it’s a Netroots torn by the question of what it means to be pragmatic: get what you can versus get what some feel the country actually needs or what they feel they were promised. It is a Netroots torn by the question of bedrock values: of what is non-negotiable, and what isn’t non-negotiable.
It is, fundamentally, a Netroots which is learning that it isn’t one big happy family, that it does have internal disagreements which are serious and which can’t be papered over.
What that means in the short run is simply that the enthusiasm and support which has been there in the past for Democrats is no longer as strong as it was before. 2010 will see a lot of the Netroots at best tepidly pro-Democratic. “Well, they are very slightly the lesser evil, so yeah, vote for them I guess”. In the long-run, we’ll see. It could be that a new consensus will coalesce, especially if Republicans win in 2010 and 2012. It could be that this is the new normal. Or it could be that the splits will continue to widen and become even more bitter, till the tribal identity is completely destroyed.
But last week, in Vegas, I found a Netroots that is more divided than I’ve ever seen it in its short existence. I think, contrary to what the “realists” might say that this isn’t entirely bad. It is a real split, over real issues, and thrashing it out is worth the pain, because until we do, we won’t know what it really means to be a modern Netroots liberal or progressive: what our bedrock values are, and what we’re fighting for.
So, I’m in Vegas,and being the creature of the internet I am, I get the laptop hooked up. Someone has left me a message on Facebook. I go to log in. Facebook notices I’m not logging in from my home computer and decides to play security games with me–which apparently means showing me pictures tagged with “friends”.
Do these idiots not understand that many Facebook friends aren’t real life friends? That they aren’t people I’ve met? That I don’t know what they look like? Do they not understand that this is true of much of their customer base? (Heck, one picture was an abstract picture with no people in it at all, I’m supposed to guess who got tagged in it?)
What happened to asking me questions about, oh, myself?
Morons.
(Staying at the Encore in Vegas. So far, it is very nice.)
and Netroots Nation 10, tomorrow. Decided to go early and return a bit late so I could spend some time in Vegas, see some shows and help Vegas’s economy by losing some money at the tables.
If you’re going to be at NN, or you live in Vegas, and you’d like to meet, feel free to drop me a line at iwelsh-at-ianwelsh-dot-net.
There will be some updating while I’m there.
So, apparently 68% of Americans think that the political class doesn’t listen to them. After TARP, where calls were running between 100:1 to 1200:1 against, passed, the failure of Congress to get out of Iraq after 2006, the failure of the 70%+ supported public option, and on and on, the only mysterious thing is why it’s only 68%.
But why should the political class listen? They get the majority of their reelection funds from corporations and the rich. Their spouses and children are given good jobs by such donors, and if ordinary people do actually ever vote them out for not looking after their interests, well, as long as they went down doing what they were supposed to, they’ll still be very well taken care of.
Get elected, do what your corporate masters tell you to, and you’ll never ever have to worry about money ever again.
Only a sucker or an idealist would do anything else.
This is the fundamental problem with the US. There is no accountability for the political class. They and those who take care of them have made sure of it. Go to war with a nation which has never attacked the US based on a big lie propaganda campaign, or spy on millions of Americans, or torture, or deregulate the economy so that Wall Street can cash in and crash the economy, and hey, so what, there’s no cost for you.
And as long as there is no cost for them, they’ll keep doing it. Just like Wall Street, having been bailed out after crashing the world economy, will do it again. They got rich doing it, why wouldn’t they do it again.
They’d have to be suckers or idealists not to.
