We're number -- 16?

By Capt. Fogg

Americans are still number one in one thing -- our capacity for denial and disbelief.  That we may be the most superstitious nation amongst the worlds 'developed' countries makes it all the stranger, but about half us of seem to believe that in the beginning there was something other than the expansion of the universe from an infinitesimal singularity and more of us angrily assert that only our God can change the weather. We're as likely to hold to a superstitious idea of our place in the community of nations as our place in the cosmos.  To very many Americans not only is the universe about Man, the Earth and its history is about the United States of America.

Michael Porter appeared on Fareed Zacharia's GPS the other day.  That's the Michael Porter who is a professor at the Harvard Business School and Director at the Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness, and as Zacharia introduced him:

"a hard core capitalist, a registered Republican.  He is said to be the most cited scholar in economics and business in the world." 

Porter will inevitably be dismissed as a Liberal and probably as a Socialist simply because there is no other way to explain away the results of “The Social Progress Index”, a new report that ranks countries on how well their citizens live.  We're number 16, far too low on the scale for there to be a descriptive hand gesture.  Of course he's anything but a Liberal whereas the countries at the top of  the heap; the countries where people live the best, the longest, the healthiest and perhaps the happiest seem to be just that.  Is it too much of a stretch to look for a correlation between hide bound commitment to unfettered, unrestrained, unregulated Capitalism with massive political power and nearly full 'personhood' for corporations with a quality of life and level of opportunity that barely rivals Iraq and puts us at number 70 in terms of health and wellness?  Where does that put those who snark and mock and snicker and make up lies about Canada and it's "Socialist" health care sucking the life out of their economy when we're told the Canadian Middle class is expanding as ours is shrinking and that middle class Canadians are richer then we are?  It puts us in a locked room, sucking our thumbs, listening to Fox News and whining.

Perhaps if we weren't number one in self delusion and gullibility there might be some major changes coming in short order, but we are and there probably aren't going to be. In our own minds, if I can use that term without irony, we're always number one.

Money changes everything

Kevin Drum tells some very serious people are becoming concerned about income inequality.

This argument follows a simple causal chain: unequal growth concentrates wealth in the hands of a tiny slice of consumers who can only spend so much money. In turn, the vast majority of earners are left with little extra cash for goods and services. Resulting weak demand undermines growth. Low growth makes everyone poorer than they otherwise might be, including those who own the means of production. Inequality produces other bad economic outcomes, too, such as the underutilization of the nation's human capital, inadequate public investment in both human and physical capital, and social ills that are costly to address, diverting away resources from investment.

Of course, us unserious hippies and some shrill professional pundits have been saying this for years but nobody listened to us. Nonetheless, good to see the VSPs finally acknowleging what has been painfully obvious (emphasis on the pain) to most of America for far too long. [graphic via Progress Illinois]

Austerity politics proving fatal to recovery

If you missed it this week, Dr. Krugman consulted with the experts and their diagnosis for our future is grim. Good news is they've identifited the cause. Austerity is killing our economy.

What’s more, the authors — one of whom is the Federal Reserve Board’s director of research and statistics, so we’re not talking about obscure academics — put a number to these effects, and it’s terrifying. They suggest that economic weakness has already reduced America’s economic potential by around 7 percent, which means that it makes us poorer to the tune of more than $1 trillion a year. And we’re not talking about just one year’s losses, we’re talking about long-term damage: $1 trillion a year for multiple years.

True, debt can indirectly make us poorer if deficits drive up interest rates and thereby discourage productive investment. But that hasn’t been happening. Instead, investment is low because of the economy’s weakness. And one of the main things keeping the economy weak is the depressing effect of cutbacks in public spending — especially, by the way, cuts in public investment — all justified in the name of protecting the future from the wildly exaggerated threat of excessive debt.

The bad news is, austerity fiends still infect our policies and the cure requires political courage. Presently, there's a severe shortage of that inside The Bubble. Unfortunately, due to sequester cuts the Dept of Public Health will be unable to resupply the serum for some time.

Simple fixes: Raise the minimum wage

One bright spot in our blithering national debate is this new push to raise the minimum wage. The right people are finally talking about it.

WASHINGTON, Nov. 8, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Business owners applauded President Obama in backing a federal minimum wage increase to at least $10 an hour. "The American Dream needs a minimum wage increase," said Lew Prince, CEO and co-owner of Vintage Vinyl in St. Louis, the Midwest's largest independent music store. "The current minimum wage is too low for workers to live on and too low to sustain the consumer demand that businesses need to survive and thrive."

"We can't build a strong economy on a minimum wage from 1950, which is equivalent to today's $7.25 minimum wage, after adjusting for inflation," said Holly Sklar, Director of Business for a Fair Minimum Wage. "The minimum wage has lost a third of its buying power since 1968, undermining working families, businesses and our economy."

Math so simple, even I can do it my head. Give the working people more money. They'll spend it right here in the good ole USA. Which will raise demand. Which will create more jobs and pump more money into the economy. Which will raise revenue for the government. Which will help eliminate the dreaded debt. The only people who don't get this are the "true" conservatives who are pretty sure if Dimmocrats like it and poor people don't suffer, then it must be some kind of commie, socialist, facsist, Kenyan plot. So they're agin it.

Wall St. Recovery floats only big boats

The Wall Street Recovery has been very good for the casino capitalists and the mega-corporations they call people. The investor class is swimming in cash and it keeps pouring in. Dow closed at an all time high just this very afternoon. Meanwhile, the majority of America is trying to stay afloat from month to month. So how did this titanic economic disaster happen?

How are companies managing to earn so much money in a sluggish economy? And why aren't their profits goosing the economy?

For starters, weak job growth has held down pay. And since the recession struck six years ago, businesses have been relentless in cutting costs. They've also stockpiled cash rather than build new products or lines of business. And they've been earning larger chunks of their profits overseas.

All of which is a recipe for solid profits and tepid economic growth. The economy grew at a meager annual rate of just 1.8 percent in the first half of 2013. The unemployment rate is 7.2 percent, far above the 5 percent to 6 percent considered healthy.

Even so, corporate profits equaled 12.5 percent of the economy in the April-June quarter, just below a 60-year high reached two years ago. Profits of companies in the Standard & Poor's 500 have nearly doubled since June 2009. Earnings appear to have risen again in the July-September quarter.

Rising tide lifts all ships was a lie. Anything smaller than  luxury yachts gets swamped in their wake and slowly sinks. Time to bail out the people barely clinging to the life rafts. [charterworld.com photo]

Let them eat --- nothing

Some 47 million Americans woke up yesterday with less money to spend on food. That's one in seven Americans who currently are in such economic stress they need assistance to feed their families. The $36 on average being lost monthly probably doesn't sound like a lot to the food secure, which is most of us. It's likely impossible to grasp the enormity of these SNAP cuts unless you've spent significant time in the physical spaces of poverty.

While in my many decades of existence on this planet, there has only been one day when I had no food and no money, I've spent much time among the working (and unable to work) poor. Not sure you can understand poverty until you've looked into the eyes of a hungry child across a dinner table. Believe me when I tell you if they qualify for EBT, the extra $20-30 makes a huge difference. Indeed for working poor losing $10 is a BFD. Oftentimes that's more than they have in their wallet to last a week.

It's easy to demonize SNAP recipients. One notices the impossibly fat-assed (and often rude) person ahead of you in the checkout line with a cartful of chips and soda and thinks why am I paying for that. But for every overweight person buying soda you see, there's 1,000+ underweight moms, disabled veterans and elderly singles trying to buy healthier food. You probably don't notice them. They have pitifully small orders. They try to conduct the transaction quickly and discretely out of embarrassment for needing the help. They're the ones digging in the bottom of their pockets looking for an extra coin to pay for the toilet paper. They will all suffer, much more greatly than the few who abuse the system. The abusers always figure out a new way to exploit it.

Worse yet, this is just the beginning. There's a mind boggling bi-partisan consensus to cut SNAP benefits even more:

The Republican-controlled House version of the farm bill proposes cutting $39 billion from the program over the next decade; the Democratic-controlled Senate would cut $4 billion over the same period.

WTF is up with these Democrats? Cutting food assistance is the most cruel and counterproductive GOP policy on the table. For one thing it subverts everything the Democratic party once stood for. And SNAP is one of the best stimulus for the economy. Cutting benefits will only throw one more roadblock on the way to some kind of meaningful national economic recovery.

The food stamp cuts scheduled to go into effect on Nov. 1 will reduce spending by $5 billion in the 2014 fiscal year, and another $6 billion over the 2015 and 2016 fiscal years. They are expected to shave 0.2 percentage point from annualized consumption growth in the fourth quarter of 2013 and trim an estimated 0.1 percentage point off the annual growth rate of the nation’s gross domestic product, according to estimates by Michael Feroli, the chief United States economist at JPMorgan Chase. Those drags may seem small, but right now projections for gains in fourth-quarter gross domestic product hover around an annual rate of just 2 percent.

And on top of this, in January they'll be cutting unemployment benefits again at a time when millions are still without work that provides a living wage. Republicans have made clear they want to wreck the joint so they can blame the "tax and spend" Democrats. Instead of enabling this vandalism, every Democrat should be out there pushing for every form of stimulus possible. GOP is living in their alternate reality, but the true facts remain the same. Some 70% of our economic growth depends on the consumer spending. Democrats should be out there pushing every single day to give the people money to spend. Betting it would be a popular policy. [photo via ]

Obama takes to the bully pulpit

This is the president we've been waiting for since 2008. At his presser today, President Obama called out the crazy cons in the Crackpot Caucus. No more catering or cratering to the vandals in the GOP House of Dysfunction. John Boehner is going to have to deal with his own damn crazies or take the blame.

Read the transcript or watch the vid at the link. It was mostly a thing of beauty. The only weak point was when Obama indicated a willingness to accept a short term agreement. To which I say -- no mas. This time it's got to be all or nothing. There's no other way to shut down the Tea Party tantrums. Agreeing to anything will only encourage them to try it again. In fact, as Charlie Pierce wisely counseled yesterday, Dems should up the ante:

For all the talk about how Republican extremism is finally catching up with the party, one can argue just as well that Wall Street-friendly, deficit-hawk, DLC-onomics is finally catching up with the Democratic party. There is no reason in the world now for the Democrats not to trot out a wish-list as long and as detailed as the one the Republicans burped up last week. Every last cut in the sequester agreement should be debated in the Democratic Senate. Medicare For All should get another run around the track. Major stimulative infrastructure programs should be designed. Hell, they should dig up John Maynard Keynes and sit him in the well of the Senate. If the denizens of the monkeyhouse want to gimmick things up with "continuing resolutions" funding those parts of the government that a) poll well, and b) make them look as though they give a rat's ass about poor people -- Tea Party congressmen defending the WIC program? Pull the other one. -- then the Democrats, many of whom actually care about this stuff, should give them a double dose of it in return.

I wish they would. If the GOPers want to redefine "negotiation" as no compromises allowed, then I don't see a down side to making equally extreme counter demands for stuff that would actually benefit the people. Let the GOPers fight against that. What better way to finally draw the bright line between the two party's platforms?

Mint the coin

Screw the nattering nabobs of conventional wisdom. The platinum coin is a valid idea well worthy of discussion:

It's not that there's no value in knowing what's possible or likely, it's that it isn't an argument against the value of the proposition. Most things which should happen don't. We talk about them anyway.

So what if it's tied up in the courts for years? It's a legal solution. It would shut down the extortionists. Somebody has to do it. Clearly Boehner isn't up to the task.

RIP: I remember the middle class

Once the people worked hard and prospered. Those days are gone. The middle class is disappearing like free snacks at happy hour now. So for your Sunday reading, a good review of how we got to our current dismal state of "everything is all fucked up and bullshit."

When I was growing up, it was assumed that America’s shared prosperity was the natural endpoint of our economy’s development, that capitalism had produced the workers paradise to which Communism unsuccessfully aspired. Now, with the perspective of 40 years, it’s obvious that the nonstop economic expansion that lasted from the end of World War II to the Arab oil embargo of 1973 was a historical fluke, made possible by the fact that the United States was the only country to emerge from that war with its industrial capacity intact. Unfortunately, the middle class – especially the blue-collar middle class – is also starting to look like a fluke, an interlude between Gilded Ages that more closely reflects the way most societies structure themselves economically. For the majority of human history – and in the majority of countries today – there have been only two classes: aristocracy and peasantry. It’s an order in which the many toil for subsistence wages to provide luxuries for the few. Twentieth century America temporarily escaped this stratification, but now, as statistics on economic inequality demonstrate, we’re slipping back in that direction. Between 1970 and today, the share of the nation’s income that went to the middle class – households earning two-thirds to double the national median – fell from 62 percent to 45 percent. Last year, the wealthiest 1 percent took in 19 percent of America’s income – their highest share since 1928. It’s as though the New Deal and the modern labor movement never happened. [...]

The United States will never again be as wealthy as it was in the 1950s and ’60s. Never again will 18-year-olds graduate directly from high school to jobs that pay well enough to buy a house and support a family. (Even the auto plants now demand a few years in junior college.) That was inevitable, due to the recovery of our World War II enemies, and automation that enables 5,000 workers to build the same number of cars that once required 25,000 hands. What was not inevitable was the federal government withdrawing its supervision of the economy at the precise moment Americans began to need it more than at any time since the Great Depression.

The lesson of the last 40 years is that we can’t depend on the free market to sustain a middle class. It’s not going to happen without government intervention. Even when American industry dominated the world, one reason workers prospered was that the economy operated on New Deal underpinnings, which included legal protections for labor unions, government regulation of industry and high marginal income tax rates.

Related: The Complete Guide To The GOP’s Three-Year Campaign To Shut Down The Government. Alternate title, "The GOP invents its own reality." If it was a work of fiction no publisher would publish it because the storyline is so absurd.

Team Yellen

Considering the ongoing dismal state of our so-called economic recovery, it's rather clear the Fed's monetary policy under Bernake was (as the kids say) all fucked up and bullshit. So now that we got rid of Helicopter Ben, Obama has a clear choice. It's between the Bankster's best friend, Larry Summers or the Bankster's greatest fear, Janet Yellen. Joseph Stiglitz is on Team Yellen. So am I because:

The controversy over the choice of the next head of the Federal Reserve has become unusually heated. The country is fortunate to have an enormously qualified candidate: the Fed’s current vice chairwoman, Janet L. Yellen. There is concern that the president might turn to another candidate, Lawrence H. Summers. Since I have worked closely with both of these individuals for more than three decades, both inside and outside of government, I have perhaps a distinct perspective…

Whoever succeeds Ben S. Bernanke as the Fed’s leader will have to make repeated judgment calls about when to raise or lower interest rates, the levers of monetary policy.

Two elements enter into these judgments. The first is forecasting. Wrong forecasts lead to wrong policies. Without a good sense of direction of where the economy is going, one can’t take appropriate policies. Ms. Yellen has a superb record in forecasting where the economy is going — the best, according to The Wall Street Journal, of anyone at the Fed. As I noted earlier, Mr. Summers’s leaves something to be desired.

Of course, the galling reality is Summers will most probably get the job because, the damnable Boy's Club. This is why we can't have nice things.

Give the people a living wage

Alec MacGillis asks a good question:

Liberals have spent years now agonizing over why it is that many working-class white Americans vote for the party whose policies on taxes, organized labor and much more work against their own economic interests—the "What's the matter with Kansas" problem. Well, here is an issue where lower-income people who vote Republican are quite clear about what's in their own interest—that is, they state a preference at direct odds with their party's line. Maybe it would be a good idea for Democrats to try to peel them away by actually talking up that issue?

Raising the minimum wage polls well with pretty much everybody except crackpot cons who are against anything that doesn't piss liberals off and the people who make a living exploiting minimum wage workers. All the focus inside the Beltway bubble is on the well off and reasonably secure but the working poor are the fastest growing demographic in our country. They're not feeling any grass shoots recovery in those circles.

Championing this demo could not only win back the House but a successful push to raise the damnably inadequate wage would actually help all the people. Hell, it might even restore the people's faith in government.

The Koch plan for prosperity

Charles Koch studies the problem of poor Americans. He's figured out what's keeping the poor folk down and has come up with what he thinks is a brilliant solution. Eliminating the minimum wage.

But how to convince the working poor that this odious requirement they be paid at least $7.25 a hour is a bad thing? That the real problem is a "culture of dependency" on government mandated fair wages because, as the Buddhists say -- money is suffering? Well, he launched a $200,000 ad campaign for that. Thus says the man with a personal worth of $43 billion:

The Kansas ad does not specifically mention the minimum wage, but it does claim that Americans earning $34,000 a year should count themselves as lucky, because that puts them in the top 1 percent of the world. “That is the power of economic freedom,” the ad concluded.

Said world including billions of people who work for pennies a day in countries where there is no minimum wage.

I imagine the next ad will explain why a living wage is holding our economic growth down because giving the working class more money to spend is never going to increase buyer demand in a consumer based economy.

Yes, austerity kills economies

Just when you think there's no hope left for this country, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) does something spectacular:

So it was a little striking to see her using the Senate Budget Committee, which she chairs, to hold a hearing on the negative effects of austerity. This isn’t a flip on policy; her budget does, after all, include some stimulus spending. But instead of the usual routine of emphasizing the importance of medium-run deficit reduction, while paying lip service to the need to prevent premature cuts, Murray used the hearing to focus almost exclusively on the latter concern.

The CBO’s latest projections and the Reinhart-Rogoff debacle, she argued, “make it clearer than ever that now we need to focus above all else on our fragile economic recovery, and that the case for austerity in a time of economic weakness is simply wrong.”

Lots of charts and wonkery at the link, but the other important point is The Heritage Foundation has devolved under DeMint from a pseudo think tank that at least made some attempt to advance logical argument into a hotbed of pure conservative crackpottery. Steve Benen makes the case for why any remaining pundits of good conscience should be embarrassed to afford Heritage any credibilty at all.

Hitting the Niall on the head

I don't often feel like visiting physical violence against someone, but Niall Ferguson deserves to be hit upside his head for his bizarre speech at some investment conference.

Keynes' economic philosophy, Ferguson reportedly suggested, was the result of Keynes not caring about future generations.

Keynes didn't care about future generations, Ferguson reportedly suggested, because Keynes was gay and did not have children.

Ferguson apparently issued a lame apology after the entire internet went into an uproar over his ridiculously offensive remarks. He claims he went off the written script and didn't realize how insensitive it would sound to normal people.

Plenty of articulate outrage at the last link, so all I'm going to say is this guy is a Harvard professor and a noted historian. If he's so stupid that he doesn't realize accusing gays and people who are unable to have children of virtually causing economic calamity because they're selfish and uncaring, then he has no business teaching at Harvard, much less collecting presuambly big figure speaking fees to spew his claptrap.

Will you still need me, when I'm 54

This piece was written by a woman of relative privilege. She's not worried about where her next meal is coming from, or how to keep a roof over her head. But these grafs could apply to anyone who lost good paying jobs after the crash of 08. Thing is, with unemployment still too high and advancing technology allowing big employers to wring greater productivity out of fewer workers, "leaning in" is a cruel joke on 50something women:

Leaning in isn’t really an option for women like Marie and me, because frankly, it’s not even that easy to get someone to take our calls. In a world where newly minted JDs can’t get jobs, and college graduates are willing to take extended unpaid internships, very few employers have an interest in a 50-something-year-old woman who has been out of the workforce for 15 years and would now like a paying job. Hiring managers, facing a wave of thousands of well-qualified candidates, are going to toss out ones that try to substitute PTA executive board skills for work experience (and that’s assuming the resume even makes it through the computer algorithms that select a handful to be perused by a real person). Reading Sandberg’s prescriptions — get a mentor, don’t ever exclude options, lose your shyness and be assertive, negotiate like a man, marry a man willing to change diapers — I feel like I’m listening to a well-meaning yet clueless relative.

Women over 55 are generally ignored if they don’t have good jobs, lots of money, social standing, or powerful husbands. While this so-called “invisibility” problem has been well documented (just google “invisibility older women” and you’ll find a host of articles and blogs), today’s world seems fixated on youth, good looks and viral fame. Older women generally don’t elicit a second glance – we seem to have a sell by date and after that we’re pretty disposable – and to me, that lack of interest coupled with a resume that might have some blank spots, spells trouble if you’re trying to lean in.

The author of that piece will be okay no matter what happens, but for millons of women of lesser social standing, the desperate trade-off is between abject poverty and part time, minimum wage jobs in the service industry. Their economic security will never recover and even the employment they can find won't pay all the bills.

And it's not just women of a certain age who suffer in the age of austerity madness. Young people are finding it impossible to make ends meet as well:

“I never thought that I would be struggling as much as I have this year,” said Horton, whose already-stretched income dropped abruptly when her hours were cut at the disability services agency where she works.

The article doesn't say, but one can assume that agency almost surely depends on government grants to operate. The current mania to slash spending, mainly perpetrated by Beltway overlords who themselves enjoy income security, leads to this sort of downsizing. Which in turn leads to further economic contraction, which will lead to more downsizing in the private sector.

I've been mocked for saying this before, but I don't care. It's difficult to see this as anything less than slow motion genocide of the poors and the olds. These people are struggling to provide food and shelter for themselves and their families. Health care doesn't even enter the picture. The lack of proper nutrition, preventative health care and adding in the stress of living with permanent insecurity can only lead to many early deaths. So what else can you call it? [photo via]

The Banksters have gone well and truly crazy - Updated

This bank bailout in Cypress is insane. You can get the wonky details here, which include Russian mobsters, but the shorter is: The major bank in Cypress is nationalized. The bank fucked up. They intend to bail out the bank by taking between almost 7% to 10% of the depositor's money.

Unsurprisingly this has already led to a run on the ATM machines that ran them dry. Suspect they haven't refilled them. Meanwhile, the bank holiday that was supposed end tomorrow has been extended to Thursday to give the Banksters time to legalize the thievery.

I'll be surprised if this doesn't backfire. It brings to mind this quote from an old but still timely Atlantic piece, The Silent Coup: "But inevitably, emerging-market oligarchs get carried away; they waste money and ... look first to ordinary working folk—at least until the riots grow too large."

Update: The Cypriot Parliament rejected the Bankster's bailout deal. No way they're going to take depositor's cash. Can't blame them for wanting to avoid the torches and pitchforks. Don't understand this scam well enough to predict what the Banksters will do next but I'll be surprised if people don't take their money out of that bank anyway, if it ever opens its doors again.

Paul Ryan's plan for social Darwinism

Everybody is talking about Paul Ryan's new budget which is pretty much like his old budget, only with more granny starving. I'd sum it up as further slash the taxes on the wealthy, raise taxes on everyone else and pretty much destroy any government program that might possibly increase the life span of the poors, olds and disabled. The man who spent pretty much his whole life dining on the taxpayers' dollar apparently thinks the government is spending entirely too much money keeping these "takers" alive. In his world they don't need so many poors anymore to do the menial work. Hell, we have machines for that now.

If you want the blow by blow analysis, well, there's lots of critiques. Me, I'm not that interested in the details. This abomination is just one more act in the Beltway's theater of the absurd. A meaningless slapstick skit to amuse the Village. Lizzie O'Leary tweeted it best over a year ago:

@lizzieohreally: Budgets are political documents. Authorizations have some relationship with reality. Appropriations are the real deal.

This is just the opening act for Ryan's 2016 bid. A counter to Rand's fabulous filibuster. Which is not to say I don't think, given the power to do so, Ryan wouldn't follow through on it. I don't see a speck of compassion in his zombie eyes.

Sequester is killing the internet

It appears the general public is burned out on manufactured crises. Almost nobody paying attention to the scary sequester showdown except obsessives and paid media who doggedly continue to transcribe the tactical minutia of the contest. Which at this point on the Republican side is a desperate bid to try to shift ownership of the sequester solely onto President Obama. Yes I know, stupid and deceitful but that didn't stop Bob Woodward from delivering some of the dumbest punditry ever to come from a website that doesn't have Zombie Breitbart's imprimatur stamped on it.

Woodward's farcical case for blaming Obama had all of Wingnuttia drooling into their keyboards today. It matters not at all that Woodward ignored the salient facts that disproved his whole thesis. Didn't stop the wingnuts from rushing to spread Woodward's validation of their cockamamie meme.

So, in a way, Woodward wins. He surely generated some page hits. But in general, the paid media is moaning about the boring sequester killing the internet, like this:

Meanwhile, at The Atlantic Wire's sister site, Atlantic politics editor David Graham speculated that since the sequester was a bipartisan invention, it has failed to generate the kind of left-versus-right food fight that is typically great for traffic.

Apparently, the electorate still remembers the sequester was a stupid deal made necessary by Boehner's inability to corral his caucus into a sensible solution. It was made in desperation and haste; based on the flawed notion establishment Republicans just needed a little more time to co-opt their crackpot contingent. Except the well-funded insurgents refused to be co-opted and instead doubled down on the crazy. Their livelihood depends on never accepting any deal that is in any way associated with the "Democrat Party" in general and President Obama in particular.

Of course Big Media won't tell you that, and even the less corporate, more honest news sites won't either. Everyone making a living on delivering news is just biding their time with an eye to the fallout:

But while voters may be tired of their elected officials inventing phony deadlines rooted in their own dysfunction rather than in reality, there's little doubt that if the cuts do go into effect, the consequences will be very real. And so journalists continue to labor on through the valley of page view death.

"It's a worthy topic to cover," said Stein. "And it is bound to get more important and interesting if sequestration does, in fact, hit. There will be tons of stories to tell then, both inside and outside of Washington, D.C."

Interesting that he's saying "if" it goes through. There's a fair number of Big Media pushing a sequester - meh - theme to keep it from dying under its own destructive absurdity.

File that under what's wrong with everything. The 24/7 news beast is insatiable. It demands page views. The news media's incentive is to heat up the controversy, not quash it with cold facts. But you can't blame them entirely. It's also what the outrage addicts on all sides want. It's their job to give it to them.

All cashed up with no where to grow

KDrum and Ezra are mystified. They can't imagine why multinational corporations are hoarding cash in these amounts: "Total liquid assets held by nonfinancial corporations have increased from 7.7 percent of GDP to 11.3 percent of GDP."

Kevin is looking for an answer:

I'm not sure. But for 15 years the people with money to bet have been betting that they'll get better returns investing in financial instruments than they will by investing in expansion of existing products and the invention of new ones. Until we figure out why, we're going to be stuck with a combination of sluggish growth and financial bubbles as far as the eye can see.

The obvious answer is -- pure greed. Almost everybody in that crowd wants instant Bain level returns on their capital. No profit in invention because, Charlie's first rule of economics. The big money is in acquisition and liquidation. The social cost of this branch of cannibal capitalism doesn't even show up on the spreadsheets.

Jutxaposition

A truth:

And a validation: