The real-life consequence of Cantor’s loss will be to further diminish the already slim prospects for serious legislating, not only dooming immigration reform, at least in the short term, but also raising the prospect of dangerous showdowns on the budget and debt ceiling.
As it happens, Cantor’s loss came just before the Pew Research Center released a depressing new report on that very topic: the increasingly polarized state of American politics. The findings are hair-pulling.
More Americans have moved to the ideological edges. “The overall share of Americans who express consistently conservative or consistently liberal opinions has doubled over the past two decades from 10% to 21%,” Pew reported.
To read the report is to be struck by the pragmatic attitude of the majority of Americans and by their simultaneous abdication of responsibility to the extremes — and, with it, power. This sensible center is willing to compromise; half said they’d be willing to split the difference 50/50 between Republicans and Democrats.
Broderism 1) Actual examples of right-wingers doing stupid things (e.g. threatening to kill police officers, blowing up the Olympics, claiming that "Atlas Shrugged" is history rather than a crappy novel by a nutjob) serve as proof that The Left is equally bad. For obvious reasons, specific mention of the offenses of The Left must be avoided (they care about the environment, don't want to cut Social Security, or even blow up foreigners for corporate profits...THOSE CRAZY ANIMALS!!!).
Broderism 2) The greatest thing in the universe is sweet bipartisanship, aka when right-wing Democrats agree with Republicans on whatever short-sighted, vicious, and ultimately disastrous scheme the GOP has cooked up lately.
Cross-posted at Whiskey Fire. Mouse over pics for captions, and click them for larger versions.
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The governor of Texas is despicable. Of all the crass pandering, of all the gross political kowtowing to ignorance, we haven't seen anything this rank from Gov. Goodhair since … gee, last fall.
Then he was trying to draw attention away from his spectacular failure on public schools by convincing Texans that gay marriage was a horrible threat to us all. Now he's trying to disguise the fact that the schools are in free-fall by proposing that we teach creationism in biology classes.
- Molly Ivins
May Fred Hiatt be infested by the fleas of a thousand camels for hiring this whackjob. Jenghazi's approach to any politician is simple: Is this person more or less likely to get America to bomb the Likud's enemies? By October of 2011, she'd become convinced that Mitt Romney was the man, so she relentlessly attacked Rick Perry. The GOP bench is looking thin for 2016, so now she's warming up to him.
I have a theory that Brian Kilmeade's purpose on "FAUX and Fiends" is to make Steve Doocy seem slightly less moronic by comparison. I suppose Rubin serves the same function at the WaPo for Fred Hiatt and Jackson Diehl.
P.S. Relief from the hackitude:
Cross-posted at Whiskey Fire. Mouse over pics for captions, and click them for larger versions.
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James Bacchus, a former member of Congress who served as a judge at the World Trade Organization and now chairs Greenberg Traurig’s global trade practice.
Thomas Bollyky, a former negotiator for the U.S. Trade Representative who’s now at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Stanford professor Judith Goldstein, who calls this emerging dynamic (foes of granting fast-track authority) a “Baptist-bootlegger coalition.”
Chris Wenk, the Chamber of Commerce’s point person on trade issues.
And just one opponent: Lori Wallach of Public Citizen. Even the caption "Obama needs leverage with the Europeans. Congress could help." is slanted in favor of granting fast track authority to get these trade deals done.
Of course there is no reason the deals have to be complicated. If the trade deals focused on removing traditional trade barriers such as tariffs and quotas, there would not be "a zillion different interests and moving parts." There would be some formulaic wording written into the agreement that specified the rate at which these restrictions would be pared back.
The reason there are a zillion moving parts is because the Obama administration went to the oil and gas industries to ask how they can use the trade agreement to get around environmental restrictions on drilling. It went to the food and agricultural industries to ask how they could get around food safety rules. It went to the pharmaceutical industry to ask it how it can use these deals to increase patent protections and jack up drug prices. It went to the entertainment industry and asked how it can use these deals to strengthen copyright enforcement and require Internet intermediaries to take responsibility (and incurr expenses) to help enforce copyrights.
Note: The Wonkblog post was written by Lydia DePillis, not Ezra Klein. However, I wanted an excuse to put up this youtuber.
"First of all, because NAFTA means jobs. American jobs, and good-paying American jobs. If I didn't believe that, I wouldn't support this agreement." - Bill Clinton, September 14, 1993
"In a few moments, I will sign the North American free trade act into law. NAFTA will tear clown trade barriers between our three nations. It will create the world's largest trade zone and create 200,000 jobs in this country by 1995 alone. The environmental and labor side agreements negotiated by our administration will make this agreement a force for social progress as well as economic growth. Already the confidence we've displayed by ratifying NAFTA has begun to bear fruit. We are now making real progress toward a worldwide trade agreement so significant that it could make the material gains of NAFTA for our country look small by comparison." - Bill Clinton, December 8, 1993
So what happened? "As of 2010, U.S. trade deficits with Mexico totaling $97.2 billion had displaced 682,900 U.S. jobs. Of those jobs, 116,400 are likely economy-wide job losses because they were displaced between 2007 and 2010, when the U.S. labor market was severely depressed." - Robert E. Scott, Economic Policy Institute, May 3, 2011
Similarly, it was G.W. Bush who began Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations. And neither the results of NAFTA nor five years of high unemployment due to the financial meltdown have dissuaded our President Hope and Change from pursuing "NAFTA on steroids" one iota. Serving "our" multinational corporations by screwing the American worker has been bipartisan ever since 3rd Way corporatists captured the Democratic party.
Cross-posted at Whiskey Fire. Mouse over pics for captions, and click them for larger versions.
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"No clear answers why Social Security hasn't been cut despite my demands" by Fred Hiatt
"No clear answers why Iran and Syria haven't been bombed back to the Stone Age despite our wildest dreams" by Hiatt, Diehl, Lane, Krauthammer, Gerson, Thiessen, and Rubin
Government documents reviewed by McClatchy illustrate how some agencies are using that latitude to pursue unauthorized disclosures of any information, not just classified material. They also show how millions of federal employees and contractors must watch for “high-risk persons or behaviors” among co-workers and could face penalties, including criminal charges, for failing to report them. Leaks to the media are equated with espionage.
Cross-posted at Whiskey Fire. Mouse over pics for captions, and click them for larger versions.
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UPDATE: Speaking of war criminals, who does Jenghazi quote criticizing the Administration for national security management failure on 9-11? That's 9-11-2012, silly people, not that other one (whatever it was):
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s testimony yesterday vividly demonstrated that competence is as critical as ideology when it comes to the highest ranks of national security officials.
Former deputy national security adviser Elliott Abrams writes, "Having worked as an assistant secretary of state and a deputy national-security adviser, I can report that even in those posts one is entirely swamped by cable traffic and needs a system to cope with it — to be sure that the really important ones get through. From all the available evidence, Hillary Clinton failed to establish such a system for herself, and that management failure is a far more important fact about her tenure than being the third woman to hold the post or having flown more miles than Condoleezza Rice."
But his ambivalence about making a commitment to Afghanistan was evident in the long and tortured decision-making process that led to the surge and the deadline for withdrawal that accompanied his escalation. And the Afghan decision was followed by a retreat from Iraq and near-total passivity as fighting engulfed Syria, with 60,000 people killed so far.
Darn President Obama for not getting us into (even) more wars, and expanding (further) the ones we're already graced with!
Those who argue for a more vigorous international role are sometimes caricatured as war-loving and unilateralist when, in fact, an activist stance has been favored by Democrats from Harry Truman to Madeleine Albright and Republicans from Richard Nixon to Colin Powell. It would be no fairer to label them all bellicose neocons than to call Obama a pure isolationist.
Thanks in large part to its openness to immigrants, the United States is far less demographically challenged than many countries in Europe and East Asia, where aging populations will impede innovation and initiative. What’s in doubt in the United States is the political will to solve its fiscal problem, not whether the problem is manageable. Given the strength of the U.S. economy, posting 20,000 or 30,000 troops in Afghanistan even indefinitely would pose no challenge.
On the other hand, on most days ending in a "y", Fred Hiatt or one of his staff wankers will write about our searing need to cut Social Security right now.
When America last turned its back on Afghanistan, two decades ago, civil war followed, with al-Qaeda close behind. Clinton responded with cruise missile attacks, the 1990s’ equivalent of drone strikes. America learned on 9/11 how inadequate that response had been.
Awesome. Not a single mention of Bush and Cheney, the people who ignored warnings about 9/11, invaded Afghanistan on October 7 of that same year, and then forgot the whole thing just two months later. In order to pursue a war they'd been hoping for since their inauguration...a war that Fred Hiatt helped them sell.
Cross-posted at Whiskey Fire. Mouse over pics for captions, and click them for larger versions.
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The misdirection is blindingly obvious. The claim is that the Administration needs new tools to get tough on banks. No, it has plenty of tools, starting with Sarbanes Oxley. As we’ve discussed at length in earlier posts, Sarbox was designed to eliminate the CEO and top brass “know nothing” excuse. And the language for civil and criminal charges is parallel, so a prosecutor could file civil charges, and if successful, could then open up a related criminal case. Sarbox required that top executives (which means at least the CEO and CFO) certify the adequacy of internal controls, and for a big financial firm, that has to include risk controls and position valuation. The fact that the Administration didn’t attempt to go after, for instance, AIG on Sarbox is inexcusable. The “investigation” done by Andrew Ross Sorkin in his Too Big To Fail (Willumstad not having a good handle on the cash bleed, the sudden discovery of a $20 billion hole in the securities lending portfolio, the mysterious “unofficial vault” with billions of dollars of securities in file cabinets) all are proof of an organization with seriously deficient controls.
But more broadly, it’s blindingly obvious this Administration has never had the slightest interest in doing anything more serious than posture.
Finally, a blood pressure-reducing video:
UPDATE: Here's a couple of items I forgot to include yesterday, and one from today.
Tengrain suggests changing your registration to a third party or Independent.
I was planning to post about Matty Yglesias, using a column Thers referenced and one other. Only just now did I notice that the 'other one' was written by Ezra Klein instead. Go figure!
In my defense, Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein wrote essentially the same post within a half hour of each other. Knowing that Yggy was moving to the Washington Post corporation (albeit Slate), I searched WaPo for the topic. Eventually I noticed the authors were different people, thanks to Pinko's entry in the latest Three Bulls! Header Contest. They don't look the same. In any case the WaPo now owns 100% of the hive mind.
From Ezra:
The question is what, if anything, comes next for Occupy Wall Street. The movement has already scored some big wins. As this graph by Dylan Byers showed, they have changed the national conversation. Income inequality is now a top-tier issue. Before Occupy Wall Street, it wasn’t.
Shorter: "OMG, Bloomberg could have ignored OWS, and then we could have done the same!"
Income inequality has been increasing for some time. It isn't some cat that is alive or dead depending on whether or not the likes of Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, or anyone else in the press is forced by OWS to write about it.
Having said that, I don't think 'income inequality' comes close to describing the issues that have created OWS. All that says is some people get a lot less, others get a lot more. This is true, but it leaves the door open for the counterclaim that the OWS is "just jealous of the job creators." (More discussion of the semantics in this thread.)
For 30 years, people who make money with their money have had the government tilt the table in their favor. Everyone else has gotten the short end of the stick. This has happened through tax policy, deregulation and approval of merger after merger, trade policy, and through chipping away at the the social safety net. And of course, our government comes to the rescue of the Randroid Masters of the Universe when the bets they've made with their too-big-to-fail banks turn out the the wrong way.
And it's also been accompanied by judicial inequality. One law for the plutocrats, and another for everyone else.
DOJ has obtained ten convictions of senior insiders of mortgage lenders (all from one obscure mortgage bank) v. over 1000 felony convictions in the S&L debacle. DOJ has not conducted an investigation worthy of the name of any of the largest accounting control frauds. DOJ is actively opposing investigating the systemically dangerous institutions (SDIs).
The elections of 2006 and 2008 did not change this in any way. Banks still own the place, and both parties curry their favor.
But we have plenty of law enforcement focused on peaceful members of OWS attempting to exercise their rights to free speech.
I see plenty of skepticism around the innertoobz as to what OWS will eventually accomplish. I have a lot more faith in OWS than I have in Obama and the Democrats.
UPDATE: At Naked Capitalism, Andrew Haldane, Executive Director, Financial Stability, Bank of England and Vasileios Madouros, Economist in the Financial Stability directorate of the Bank of England:
In fact, high pre-crisis returns to banking had a much more mundane explanation. They reflected simply increased risk-taking across the sector. This was not an outward shift in the portfolio possibility set of finance. Instead, it was a traverse up the high-wire of risk and return. This hire-wire act involved, on the asset side, rapid credit expansion, often through the development of poorly understood financial instruments. On the liability side, this ballooning balance sheet was financed using risky leverage, often at short maturities. ... There is a second, equally important, reason why the measured value-added of the financial sector in the national accounts may be seriously over-stated. We now know that the risk being taken by banks was not in fact borne by them, fully or potentially even partially. Instead it has been borne by society.
That is why GDP today lies below its pre-crisis level. And it is why government balance sheets, relative to GDP, are set to double as a result of the crisis in many countries. ... Elsewhere, we have sought to estimate those implicit subsidies to banking arising from its too big-to-fail status. For the largest 25 or so global banks, the average annual subsidy between 2007-2010 was hundreds of billions of dollars; on some estimates it was over $1 trillion (Haldane 2011). This compares with average annual profitability of the largest global banks of about $170 billion per annum in the five years ahead of the crisis.
(Cross-posted at Whiskey Fire. Mouse over pics for captions, and click them for larger versions.) ~
