Pat Lang seems to think so. This may be a case of cry wolf. No one believes it anymore, because it hasn’t happened despite warnings yet.
But remember, when the boy cried wolf the second time there was a wolf.
We’ll see.
Figure out the truth once it’s too late to matter.
Analysis is mostly about noticing the obvious, but for the obvious to do any good it helps to notice it before it’s too late to matter.
Let me reiterate: Republicans understand opposition politics. Also, policy matters. As I was saying back during the stimulus debate, if the economy sucks, the incumbent party gets blamed for it, and that means you have to make it work. I don’t know if Democrats will lose the House (the consensus amongst the few analysts I trust seems to “no, but they will lose a lot of seats”). I do know that they’ll be losing more seats than they should be.
The only reason Dems aren’t having a complete meltdown is that a sizable part of the Republican party is mad dog insane.
Even that won’t save them forever if they can’t figure out how to do policy right.
And, sorry to say it, they can’t.
Democrats Face 200 million Republican War Chest Without the Strong Allies They Should Have
It seems, that in the wake of the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United, which allowed uncontrolled corporate money into elections, that (surprise!) Republicans have a huge warchest from outside actors like the Chamber of Commerce:
On the left hand side of the chart is a list of ten Republican aligned institutions, ranging from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to the Family Research Council. Next to it is a column listing the amount of money each group has pledged to spend by Election Day. A third column on the right details what those groups actually spent in 2008 on federal elections.
The number at the bottom delivers the key message. If their pledges are fulfilled, these ten groups will unleash more than $200 million in election-focused spending — roughly $37 million more than every single independent group spent on the 2008 presidential campaign combined. This time around, almost every single penny will be going to Republican candidates or causes.
So, how did this happen?
First, Democrats didn’t make an all out effort to torpedo either Roberts, or more reasonably, Alito. With both on the Supreme Court, decisions like Citizens United were inevitable.
Second, when given a historic opportunity to break the power of the rich and corporations by not bailing them out, Democrats bailed them out. They did not make shareholders get wiped out (as they deserved, they took the profits from housing bubble fraud, after all) and they did not let the bondholders take their losses. Be very clear, this was never about saving the economy, the trillions of dollars used to bail out these corporations could have been loaned directly to consumers and businesses which needed loans. In fact, at this point, it is entirely likely that bailouts made things worse, not better.
Third, Democrats did not push hard for the Employee Free Choice Act, an act which would have made union organizing much easier. Union members vote for Democrats at much higher rates than non Union members (in particular, white male union members are pro-Democrat while as a group white males who aren’t union members vote Republican). Unions not only provide financial resources for Democrats, they put feet on the ground for Democrats. Where unions are strong, Democrats tend to win. Where unions aren’t strong, Democrats tend to lose.
Fourth, Democrats abandoned their constituencies economically in order to bail out the financial sector. They seem to have thought the financial sector would be loyal. Of course, it isn’t, it will give money to whoever it thinks can win and from whom it’ll get the best deal. Meanwhile unmarried women, Hispanics, African Americans and Youth, all core Demoratic groups, have high unemployment rates. That means they are not motivated to vote or volunteer, they cannot give as much money as they could if they were doing well. The money spent on bailing out banks and the rich, could have been used for a proper stimulus and proper loans which would have helped these groups.
Fifth, Democrats let ACORN be destroyed. ACORN was framed, but Democrats threw it under the bus. ACORN was a community organization which did huge voter drives which registered voters who were overwhelmingly likely to vote Democratic. Again, a key liberal organization was simply abandoned.
Democrats made a play for corporate money and in so doing, they sold out constituencies which were actually loyal to them, and could actually be counted on. Wall Street will never be reliably loyal to Democrats, neither will the very rich. At best they will play Democrats and Republicans off against each other, but realistically, they prefer Republicans whenever Republicans can win.
You reap what you sow. Sell out the interests of your core supporters, and they can’t help you as much as they could if you helped them. When will Democratic politicians learn this lesson?
Democrats should have much stronger allies in 2010. But they preferred to play footsie with Wall Street and abandon their own constituencies.
Latest victim is Octavia Nasr, who tweeted:
“Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah… One of Hezbollah’s giants I respect a lot.”
Hezbollah, of course, are designated terrorists by the US state department, for the 1983 bombing of marine barracks in Lebanon.
Two things about that attack:
- Marine barracks are, by any definition, legitimate targets of war.
- Do you know why they attacked a military target? Because the US shelled Shia villages in Lebanon.
Let me emphasize, Hezbollah attacked a military target, killing soldiers, in retaliation for US attacks on defenseless civilians.
Now that doesn’t mean I agree with everything Hezbollah does, they’ve done some real terrorist attacks. But they have a policy against terrorist attacks against Americans and have for a long time. Certainly they have killed far fewer civilians than either the US or Israel.
As for Fadlallah and Nasr, her own words say it best:
I used the words “respect” and “sad” because to me as a Middle Eastern woman, Fadlallah took a contrarian and pioneering stand among Shia clerics on woman’s rights. He called for the abolition of the tribal system of “honor killing.” He called the practice primitive and non-productive. He warned Muslim men that abuse of women was against Islam…
It is no secret that Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah hated with a vengeance the United States government and Israel. He regularly praised the terror attacks that killed Israeli citizens. And as recently as 2008, he said the numbers of Jews killed in the Holocaust were wildly inflated.
But it was his commitment to Hezbollah’s original mission – resisting Israel’s occupation of Lebanon – that made him popular and respected among many Lebanese, not just people of his own sect.
She further notes that as he got older, he actually spoke out against Hezbollah and hardline Iranian clerics:
In later years, Hezbollah’s leadership apparently did not like Fadlallah’s vocal criticism of Hezbollah’s allegiance to Iran. Nor did they like his assertions that Hezbollah’s leaders had been distracted from resistance to Israeli occupation of portions of Lebanon and had turned weapons against their own people.
At first, he was simply pushed to the side, but later wasn’t even referred to as a Hezbollah member. Rather, he was referred to as the scholar – the expert on Islam – but nothing more. During the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel, his honorary title “Sayyed” – indicating that he’s a descendant of the prophet – was dropped any time he was mentioned on Hezbollah’s Al-Manar TV and other Hezbollah media outlets.
None of this is to say he was a “good guy”, but he was certainly no more evil than a man who launched a pre-emptive war based on lies against a country which was no threat to his own country, killing hundreds of thousands and making millions homeless.
It’s not that journalists can’t have opinions, it’s that they can only have approved opinions, or at least they can only admit to approved opinions.
UNIFIL presence in Lebanon will increase civilian casualties
Intentional, or a side effect?
In the last war, much of the fighting took place on open scrubland, Merli said. But the deployment of United Nations forces in southern Lebanon had forced Hezbollah into built up areas where troops from the international UNIFIL force have no authority.
Not good. Note that Hezbollah fought outside built up areas for military reasons: they felt they were more effective there, because outside of population centers they were also away from informants. UNIFIL’s mission means the next war will be fought in population centers.
Somehow that does not seem to be something a UN peacekeeping operation should be ensuring.
rates on 10-year Treasury bonds are only about 3 percent, many consumers still carry tens of thousands of dollars of credit card debt at 20 percent or more. This burden has been a continuing drag on spending. The federal government could reduce it by borrowing at 3 percent and lending to consumers at 8 percent under a one-time debt-restructuring plan.
With their debt service payments cut by more than half, consumers could increase spending immediately. And the five-percentage-point spread on money lent under the program would help cover its administrative costs, and maybe even relieve short-run government budget pressure.
This is, of course, correct, though I’d only push it up 4%, myself. I originally suggested this February 9, 2009. It was the right thing to do then, it’s still the right thing to do.
As David Anderson notes, this would be a huge help to ordinary people:
Going from 18% to 8% interest, the individual with $10,000 in credit card debt would see their initial monthly payment go from $250 a month to $167 per month. Using a declining minimum payment formula of (monthly interest expense +1% of current balance), the debt burden at the end of the year is still $9,000 but the interest expense declines from $1,570 to $700. That gap of $870 is greater than the ARRA Making Work Pay tax credit and it most likely would be targeted at individuals with a high marginal propensity to spend (as evidenced by credit card debt.) If balances or interest rates are higher, the freed up cash flow would be even greater.
Also the government can make real, significant money by doing this. All it is is arbitrage. If you can borrow money cheap and lend it at higher rates that’s free money. Not only would that help consumers, and the economy, it would also reduce the deficit. Win/Win/Win. If Blue Dogs are really sincere about their belief in deficit reduction they should jump all over this suggestion.
Note that rates being so high is a classic case of market failure. The banks are charging more than they need to in order to make a profit. In an actual free market other banks are supposed to step in and undercut them, but that isn’t happening. We could argue about why (they’re a collusive oligopoly or they’re broke being the most probable causes), but in the immediate term, it doesn’t matter, what matters is fixing it.
But I doubt it will happen. Why? Because the banks are making a TON of money by gouging customers, and they own DC. I suspect the best we can hope is that this is a warning shot across their bows, a message to reduce the looting or pillaging to “acceptable” levels.
Which will be a heck of a lot higher than you might like, but hey, they run the place.
I recently wrote that Obama has chosen to stay in Afghanistan because war spending is one of the only reliable forms of stimulus he has. I am baffled by many of the responses to that article. What do readers think would happen to the US economy if all that spending stopped and wasn’t replaced by anything?
