GOP infighting heats up the House

Looks like the one lesson old guard Republicans learned from 2012 is the Tea Party's crackpot conservatism is toxic for the Republican brand. Showing a rare flash of public irritation, it's cear John Boehner has had enough of those people. The crackpot cons were not amused:

Club For Growth issued a statement in response to Boehner's remarks, but didn't mention him by name, and instead lit into the budget agreement he and Ryan are vouching for.

"We stand with Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Tom Coburn, Rand Paul, members of the Republican Study Committee and every other fiscal conservative who opposes the Ryan-Murray deal," Chris Chocola, the group's president. "After carefully reviewing the budget deal, on which we never commented until it was complete, we determined that it would increase the size of government. We support pro-growth proposals when they are considered by Congress. In our evaluation, this isn't one of those."

That would be the same Ted Cruz, Tea Party dreamboat and 2016 dreamer who proudly strutted out of the stadium.

A spokeswoman for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) said Tuesday that the lawmaker walked out of Nelson Mandela's memorial service in Johannesburg when Cuban President Raul Castro spoke to the crowd, according to news reports.

Because nothing says presidential material like storming out of a state event because you don't like another world leader. But it's sure to play well with the rubes. Probably be able to fundraise a decent chunk of change off that tantrum.

Boehner is right. It's all about the grift. I'd take more pleasure in watching him reap his rewards for empowering these miscreants in the first place if we weren't all paying the price for his fall. [graphic via]

The slow motion shutdown of America

David Dayen has a great piece on how the last GOP shutdown extravaganza was just a side show to the ongoing damage being done by the sequester:

You could argue that the recent shutdown inflicted much more damage than sequestration. You would be wrong. Standard and Poor’s estimated that the shutdown cost the economy $24 billion over its 16-day stretch. Sequestration, meanwhile, will be in place for ten years unless Congress does something, and the spending cuts over that time total $1.2 trillion—50 times the economic impact of the shutdown. And that doesn’t include the knock-on effects to the economy—reduced purchasing power by federal employees, fewer contracts for private companies doing business with the government, and generally lower consumer spending as a result. According to the Congressional Budget Office, sequestration cuts will cost as much as 1.6 million jobs if kept in place through the 2014 fiscal year, with a reduction in GDP of 0.7 percent. The continuing resolution funds the government at sequestration levels through January 15, 2014, so we’re well on our way. As veteran Congressional observer Norm Ornstein wrote, “Damaging as the shutdown is for governance, it is minor compared with the long-term damage of the sequester.”

This should, but never will be an ongoing story in BigMedia. There is a reason the recovery has been so slow and almost maliciously uneven. And it's not just the sequester, it's the whole anti-stimulus policy forced through by the austerity zealots.

This time he really means it

Or at least I hope Obama does:

President Obama phoned Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) on Friday to tell him he will not negotiate with Republicans on the debt ceiling, according to a readout provided by the Speaker’s office.

Boehner told the president he was “disappointed” to hear his position, an aide said.

“Given the long history of using debt limit increases to achieve bipartisan deficit reduction and economic reforms, the Speaker was disappointed but told the president that the two chambers of Congress will chart the path ahead. It was a brief call,” the aide said.

Long history? As in since 2008? Time for Obama to make good on his threats. He's saved Boehner's sorry ass for five years. No more negotiating with the GOP's economic terrorists. No other way to break the fever except icing their strategy. If the Republicans shoot the hostage -- well -- we'll all bleed but at least it will be fast. Better than slowly suffocating by obstruction.

A system based almost entirely on fraud

There's another important anniversary at this time of year. Five years ago this week the Banksters crashed our economy, basically by lying and stealing. Their "punishment" cost trillions. Out of our pockets, not theirs.

In summary, the financial industry collectively decided that you could fund economic growth despite stagnant wages through piling on mountains of debt. But when it all went bad, the solution wasn’t to rebalance the economy, to get money into the hands of ordinary workers and preference wages over assets. The solution was to point a fire hose of money at the people who caused the problem, and inflate their assets to preserve the status quo. The Federal Reserve’s emergency lending and then quantitative easing rescued bank balance sheets. The five biggest U.S. banks are now 30 percent bigger than they were at the height of the crisis, nursed back to health by the government. [...]

Worst of all, despite a crisis built on fraud, nobody who perpetrated that fraud saw the inside of a jail cell, removing any meaningful deterrent for financial crimes. Most of those criminals walked away with enough money to fund their lavish lifestyles forever.

Which brings us once again to the largest income gap between since the Roaring 1920s when the previous record was set.

The top 1 percent of U.S. earners collected 19.3 percent of all household income in 2012, their largest stake in Internal Revenue Service figures in at least a century. The previous peak of 18.7 percent came back in 1927, according to an analysis of IRS figures dating to 1913 by economists at the University of California, Berkley, the Paris School of Economics and Oxford University.

And do spare me the wailing about how the 1 percenters suffered more during the crash:

[S]ince the recession officially ended in June 2009, the top 1 percent have enjoyed the benefits of rising corporate profits and stock prices: 95 percent of the income gains reported since 2009 have gone to the top 1 percent.

Last year alone, the incomes of the top 1 percent of Americans rose 19.6 percent, compared with a 1 percent increase for the remaining 99 percent.

There oughta be a law. Oh wait. There was a law. They got it abolished and they'll be damned if they're going to allow it to be reinstated.

Fiscal conservatives are killing us

It's always useful to remember budgets are only political documents. They're a rhetorical weapon of mass deception. Appropriations are the real deal. And more proof that the GOP really doesn't give a flying leap about budgets, even as they now refuse to go to conference to pass one, Republicans are furiously slicing and dicing funding to circumvent the sequestration cuts.

Of course they never offer specifics but the plan "focuses the biggest cuts" on aid to local school districts, health research and enforcement of labor laws. Also:

Veterans Affairs, Homeland Security and the Pentagon would be spared under the plan approved by the House Appropriations Committee on a party-line vote, but legislation responsible for federal firefighting efforts and Indian health care would absorb a cut of 18 percent below legislation adopted in March. [...]

Capitol Hill's budget would be untouched, however. House GOP leaders, who have boasted recently of their efforts to cut Congress' generous budget, opted against cutting further below levels imposed under the automatic, across-the-board spending cuts that began taking effects in March. In fact, the House would get a 1.6 percent budget increase when measured against current levels.

The foreign aid budget would be sharply cut as well, while a bill funding the IRS budget and implementation of new financial regulations would absorb a 20 percent cut from levels approved just two months ago.

Much more at the link but basically anything that aids or protects the middle class and working Americans or the needy gets the ginsu knife while their wealthy cronies are pretty much completely spared from the Republican whopper chopper. Now all they have to do is figure out how to blame the Democrats for it.

Ted Cruz don't trust nobody but himself

You'll recall the House GOP passed a ridiculous budget based on Paul Ryan's roadmap to ruin back in March knowing full well it had zero chance of survival. Boehner thought he was being very clever with this pass the buck manuver. The GOPers immediately launched a mass tirade demanding Democrats pass their own damn budget in the Senate. Much to everyone's surprise, the Democrats did just that two months ago. According to normal process, the two budgets would go to a Senate/House conference committee shortly thereafter and a single compromise bill would emerge.

But there is no normal procedure now that the crackpot cons have taken even their own party hostage. Now comes the emerging leader of the lunatics, Ted Cruz who vows to block any budget conference negotiations unless his demand to "take a debt limit increase off the table" is met. In other words he wants to guarantee a replay of the same insane kabuki that almost took our economy down before. And that's much more important than passing a budget, which the GOP has been caterwauling about forever.

Cruz clearly has his eye on 2016 and he's more than willing to trash his own party, saying he doesn't trust big spending establishment Republicans either, in order to polish his bonafides with the crackpot rubes and establish himself as the new "Maverick" of the GOP. This is so "call in the white coats" insane that even the old Maverick Gumpy Gramps McCain is calling Cruz crazy. [video at the link]

Of course, no Republican is going to mention the deficit is actually shrinking. In fact it's shrinking faster than even the most optimistic estimates. But why should they be the first? Not like the media is out there telling the people at home about it either. They're too busy inventing scandals to drive their own damn traffic.

[Big thanks to Batocchio of Vagabond Scholar who is sitting in at Mike's Blog Roundup for the link.]

Same old song and dance on Capitol Hill

The calendar is about to turn on the all new and unimproved GOP debt limit kabuki:

The federal debt limit is set to kick back into effect next weekend after a three-month hiatus, marking the start of a political game of chicken likely to culminate in the fall, when Congress will have to give President Obama a higher limit or risk a federal default.

The GOP's problem is the budget deficit is disappearing on its own. In fact, we're running a bit of a surplus and despite their best efforts at sabotage, the economy is still slowly improving. Government won't run out of money till the fall at the earliest, so the GOPers are left without a hostage to take. Furthermore, GOP leadership isn't keen on threatening default anymore after the beating they took at the end of last year in the polls when they tried to use that trick again.

This is not going according to plan and they don't have a back-up strategy. So after repeatedly demanding the Senate Dems produce a budget, which they did at an astonishing pace, suddenly the GOP doesn't want to talk about budgets anymore.

"I think there's a better atmosphere for a solution than there's been in the past, but I'm a little worried about people here in the Senate having fiscal fatigue. There isn't any sense of urgency right now," said Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), one of three senators who joined Obama on Monday for a round of golf.

Got that. They've been wailing for years that this is the biggest crisis in the history of mankind, but suddenly they don't want to think about that today. In fact, they want to just forget the whole thing.

With the House and Senate both having passed budget resolutions, the next step in the process should be a conference committee, which Republican leaders said they wanted. Recently, however, they changed their mind and now refuse to allow the process to proceed.

The problem as usual is the crackpot caucus. If it's not going to piss off the damn librul Dimmocrats, then they don't want to know about nothing.

Yellowstone business owners unhappy campers

Guessing most of these owners vote for Republicans because, small government. That would be the same Republicans who forced the sequester cuts designed to take a chainsaw to the national budget to take effect because, pisses off liberals, or something. Then the business owners discovered this is what "small government" looks like.

Yellowstone Park having to cut something, suspended snow plowing for a couple of weeks to save $400K . Bad for business. Via Kevin Drum, owners decided to pony up the cash to get it done themselves.

But therein lies the perennial rub: Cuts that are welcomed in the abstract are not always appreciated when they hit home. And everything the government does, however small, touches somebody. "You pay your taxes to get certain services," said Bruce Eldredge, executive director of the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, a world-class museum in the center of town, which delivered a $10,000 check to the chamber. "We would, I think, probably argue as a community that we pay our federal taxes to make sure the park is open at a specific time."

This is, obviously, the problem of government in a nutshell: everyone wants spending to be cut, but no one wants spending to be cut on them. They want it to be cut on other people.

In particular—and please excuse the wild guess here—I imagine that most people who have a serious jones for cutting federal spending are really only interested in cutting spending on poor people. Cutting other services just isn't what they signed up for. It's the Obamaphones and the food stamps that are wasteful, not the Yellowstone snowplows and small town air traffic controllers.

Exactly. Their spending is necessary. They are the mighty makers. Only wasteful spending is on those shiftless poors. You know, those takers who are dependent on government services these people don't need.

The unseen victims of austerity addicts

According to the very important punditry, the sequestration spending cuts are just a big joke because -- ha ha -- the world didn't end and nothing happened to the well off Villagers, so what's the big deal? Of course they don't mention the cuts haven't really taken full effect yet. They're only just now beginning to filter out around our country. Sam Stein and Amanda Terkel collected 100 instances where the spending cuts have started. Already social safety programs like Meals on Wheels are being cut, thousands of jobs are being lost, and those who are lucky enough to keep their jobs are seeing pay cuts of 20% and more. None of these people are laughing.

John Stanton tells one combat veteran's story. The man served honorably in our government's wars. He came home and worked hard to climb the economic ladder. This is his reward.

Then sequestration slashed Maryak's paycheck by nearly 27%. That cut nearly $900 from the $3,400 he makes a pay period. He responded, first, by picking up a job four nights a week delivering pizza for Papa John's; he then traded in the BMW for a white Chevy Impala, to save money and because he discovered that nobody tips the delivery man in the BMW. And since that miserable combination hasn't quite closed the gap — gas is expensive, and the Impala gets terrible mileage — Maryak, who was awarded a bronze star in Sadr City in 2008, found himself dwelling deeply on one question: "How do I unfuck myself from this situation?"

His best answer is to go back to active combat duty, but that's not an easy option:

But Maryak, who's applied for eight deployments so far, has run into another problem: With the United States out of Iraq, withdrawing from Afghanistan, and wary of putting boots on the ground in Africa and the Middle East, "deployments are ridiculously hard to find nowadays."

Admit it pleases the anti-war part of me that this is true, but it doesn't help Maryak solve his cash flow problems. He takes responsibility for his choices. He's worked hard all his life. His story is being repeated thousands of times all across America. They deserve better than to be used as a pawns in the partisan political games on Capitol Hill.

Sweet charity

I didn't find this at all surprising. Anybody who has ever worked in the restaurant/hospitality industry knows the rich are tightwads. Indeed the richer the are, the stingier they are with tips. So it goes with charitable giving.

One of the most surprising, and perhaps confounding, facts of charity in America is that the people who can least afford to give are the ones who donate the greatest percentage of their income. In 2011, the wealthiest Americans—those with earnings in the top 20 percent—contributed on average 1.3 percent of their income to charity. By comparison, Americans at the base of the income pyramid—those in the bottom 20 percent—donated 3.2 percent of their income. The relative generosity of lower-income Americans is accentuated by the fact that, unlike middle-class and wealthy donors, most of them cannot take advantage of the charitable tax deduction, because they do not itemize deductions on their income-tax returns.

It's not that rich don't donate at all, but they do it mainly for self-interested reasons. Like tax breaks. This is especially true of conservatives. Something that was made perfectly clear after the fiscal cliff farce of 2012 finally concluded and Ari Fleischer tweeted this threat.



The super wealthy also do it for prestige. Billionaires will donate hundreds of millions to museums and universities and other cultural insitutions that cater mainly to their social class to either get things named after them, or to advance academic work that suits their personal agenda. You won't see the Kochs endowing a chair in civil rights studies or labor law. Nor will you likely see the Waltons donating to Planned Parenthood even as Walmart's business practices create the welfare clients who desperately need the affordable health care.

The true cost of the Iraq war

James Fallows reminds us George W. Bush fired anybody who dared suggest the true cost of Iraq war. Before the invasion the Bush administration falsely claimed it would be over in a few months, with few troops and cost a couple of billion dollars because as Paul Wolfowitz put it, "the invasion would be largely 'self-financing' via Iraq's oil." Of course, it didn't happen that way at all. Not even close.

Furthermore, according to a new study done at the the Kennedy School at Harvard, we've only just begun to pay and the real costs look more like this:

The Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, taken together, will be the most expensive wars in US history - totaling somewhere between $4 to $6 trillion.

Mother Jones created a set of cost charts about this as well. You'll notice the greatest cost driver is the interest. Never let them forget, the Bush administration borrowed a ton of money to pay for this folly.



And then there's the hidden costs which were mostly not covered in appropriations at the time. Taking care of the troops that survived and came home damaged. That was the double edge sword of improved battlefield care of the injured. It kept the death count relatively low compared to previous wars, but now we have an obligation to take care of these veterans for the rest of their lives. Considering how young they were when they were deployed, those costs will survive longer than those who started this abomination will live themselves. Our children, and quite possibly our grandchildren, will be paying this war off until they reach old age.

Funny, you never hear the austerity addicts talking about that spending.

Look at all the hungry people

Wall St. Journal is concern trolling about the rise in use of the food assistance. Some well fed genius is appalled to learn the number of enrollees aren't falling along with the unemployment rate. Well you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure it out. There's a simple answer:

There are record numbers of Americans on food stamps today because there are record numbers of Americans in poverty (records begin in 1959.)

As of 2011, there were 46.2 million men, women, and children living below the U.S. poverty line. There isn't much reason to believe that the last year of mediocre job growth has dented that number. And until it plunges, the food stamp rolls are going to stay full -- plain and simple.

The jobs being created are minimum wage positions that often only offer part time hours. Minimum wage in this state is $7.25 and most of the jobs in that range won't give any one person more than 24 hours of work in a week. The price of everything from food, to fuel, to clothing to shelter has risen far faster than wages, which we already know have been basically flat for over a decade. Every private food bank is seeing an astronomical rise in clients who were formerly secure in the middle class.

Furthermore the vast majority of the weath that's been created during this stubbornly slow recovery is being sucked up by the already wealthy 1% at the top. But sure, let's demonize the poors. You know, you give those people too many free ramen noodles and they'll never want get off the dole. Better we should let their kids starve than ask the wealthy to kick in a few more tax dollars to help them out. [graphic via Class Wars]

The invisible victims of casino capitalism

I may as well have titled this "expendable people." Those would be the millions struggling to cope with having lost everything that formerly defined their comfortable lives. They live among us, nearly unnoticed by the throngs of the still secure who stride confidently down sidewalks to their next appointment or linger in cafes absorbed in their mobile devices. In the vast halls of our policy makers, they only exist as random numbers on charts and spreadsheets. The political overlords do not see their faces. They're too far removed from the reality of the invisibles' existence to have even the faintest understanding of their misery.

The luckier invisibles can still afford tenuous shelter in cheap motels but there is little hope they will find a way to return to any semblance of the middle class comfort they once enjoyed. Once the jobs they performed were essential to the creation of wealth for the investor class. Casino capitalism changed all that. Workers are expendable, a negative expense to be eliminated from the balance sheets lest they interfere with the profit margins.

Most of the invisible newly poor played by the rules. They worked hard to build decent lives. They were cheated out of everything, in one way or another, by the investor class. The end of their road looks like some version of this.



No one thinks it could happen to them before they get there. Truth is, it could happen to anyone.

Voters support stimulus spending for job creation

More proof nobody cares about the deficit. When it gets down to specific policy voters support "government spending" to create jobs. Even Republican voters:

Americans widely support each of three job creation proposals, including offering tax breaks to businesses that create jobs in the U.S. and a program that would put people to work on urgent infrastructure repair projects. Support for these programs is only slightly lower in a variant of the question that asks respondents if they are in favor of spending government money to pay for the programs.

Greg breaks out the figures:

* 72 percent support a “federal government program that would spend government money to put people to work on urgent infrastructure repairs.” This is also backed by 71 percent of independents and 53 percent of Republicans.

* 72 percent support a “federal jobs creation law that would spend government money for a program designed to create more than 1 million new jobs.” This is backed by 69 percent of independents and 52 percent of Republicans.

So why does the polling always show deificit concern in the abstract you ask? It's all that other spending that's wasteful.

More than two-thirds of Americans think the budget deficit is largely a result of waste and fraud? But wait! It's all explained by a deeper dive into the poll results:

A more detailed look at which programs were named by Democrats and by Republicans suggests that for many, waste is indeed defined as "money spent on some government program I don't like."

It has always been so. Voters like spending when the money goes to their priorities. I believe this is called "enlightened self-interest" by conservatives and glibertarians. An old liberal like me calls it selfishness and quite often greed. Doesn't help that we have an entire political/corporate/media system dedicated to promoting that mindset as an appropriate definition of morality.

Elect Republicans, kill the economy

As the kids say, shit just got real. The sequester cuts that were never supposed to happen because they were so awful everybody would want to stop them are now being embraced by the GOP as a great win for the party. Republicans, especially the crackpot caucus, are now crowing about how they cowed that uppity President and his false alarms about calamity. Guess when you live in a self-constructed reality, it's easy to believe the voices in your head whispering about sweet success.

Or maybe they just didn't know how quickly the cuts were going to kick in. Already the spending cuts are hitting the people back home. In my little corner of the world, this is a big deal:

The Charlotte Observer notes, “Closing the control tower at Concord Regional Airport could cost the city hundreds of charter flights from NASCAR teams and other businesses, local officials said Wednesday after learning that the tower’s federal funding is being eliminated. … Concord officials said they were notified Tuesday by the Federal Aviation Administration that funding would be cut off soon.”

Meanwhile, the Republicans in charge of the Statehouse are making big moves to take control of Charlotte Douglas International Airport away from the city and are quashing the long fought for expansion of inner city light rail transit. Even my obviously conservative local news anchors are beginning to sound appalled.

Then there's the national impact. We just saw the best jobs report in years this month, but next month job growth is likely to crash.

Merrill Lynch said this morning that job creation will likely shrink to below 100,000 in April and May as "sequester-related job cuts are implemented."

It doesn't take a Nobel prize winning economist to figure out you can't haphazardly cut $85 billion out of the economy and avoid crashing a still shaky recovery. Republicans have to know this, which is why they worked so hard at trying to foist off ownership of the sequester to Obama. But, despite the best efforts of the "liberal" media to help them, it didn't work. The only conclusions remaining are either they're so far out of touch with reality they don't see how this could backfire on them or they simply don't care.

[Ben Sargent cartoon]

When austerity addicts overdose the world will change

Riffing off Sam Stein, Greg Sargent flags the disconnect inside the Beltway bubble between the Villagers view of the sequester and the reality of the cuts on the streets. The insiders are all about who's winning the optics game and hurling themselves en masse onto the fainting couches about the cancelled White House tours. The outsiders, meaning the vast majority of the population, have greater concerns that are finally showing up on their local news stations.

Most people haven't paid attention because they're bored with the endless Congressional theatrics that so obsesses the national media. Nobody told them what the sequester was going to do to in their town. That's changing.

But this local coverage tells a different story with a different emphasis. Real people around the country are beginning to tune into the possibility that these spending cuts could do real damage to their communities and to the country’s economic recovery.

The sequester cuts are only just beginning to filter down tangibly enough to disrupt the daily lives of the unengaged masses. And they will be widely felt. Think Progress assembled The 32 Dumbest And Most Devastating Sequester Cuts. I picked out 10 of them.

$75 million cut from the Aging and Disability Services Programs
$199 million cut from public housing
$928 million cut from FEMA’s disaster relief money
$125 million cut from the Wildland Fire Management
$53 million cut from Salaries and Expenses at the Food Safety and Inspection Service
$57 million cut from the Health Care Fraud and Abuse Control
$633 million cut from the Department of Education’s Special Education programs
$512 million cut from Customs and Border Protection
$79 million cut from Embassy Security, Construction, and Maintenance
$232 million cut from the Federal Aviation Administration

These cuts aren't just going to be felt by the poors and the olds. They're going to greatly inconvenience the reasonably secure. When the spending cuts start bleeding already underfunded local budgets and reversing a still sluggish economic recovery, the people will not be amused.

Austerity addicts have yet to feel the bite of public opinion. There will be backlash and I'm pretty sure it will fall on the Republicans much more heavily than on Obama or the Democrats.

[Big thanks to Batocchio for linking in at Crooks and Liars blog round up.]

Consumption Junction

Finally got around to watching this video from MoJo that everyone is talking about. I can see why it's going viral. Best illustration of the sadistic inequity in wealth distribution I've seen yet. Worth six minutes of your time.



[Full size version]

If the one-percenters were actually doing honest work for the money, it would be justifiable. But they're not. They make their money by cheating the system. Thing is, they own everything, so no one with the power to stop them is willing to call them out. The appointed and elected watchers look the other way, for a pittance of the spoils and a bare modicum of social status.

But at the top it's not about money, it's about power. The Overlords of the World Economy are acquisition addicts. They want all the things -- literally. They won't stop until they've plucked the last "business opportunity" from among the wreckage of civil society, which by then will be stranded on a ruined planet.

Slow motion disaster

The only sensible thing to do at this late hour would be to just cancel the stupid sequester. But this is D.C. so it's going to happen because, crackpot cons need a Potemkin victory to please the angry rubes back home. GOPers are betting they can pin it on Obama, but the polling says otherwise. A vast majority, even among unengaged voters, know who to blame for the sequester. It won't be Obama.

The problem is, though it's being spun as a world shattering disaster, the effects won't be immediately apparent to regular people who don't depend on government paychecks. But if it's allowed to linger, the effect on government services people do depend on (yet take for granted) in their daily lives will become increasingly apparent. Oddly, this is the silver lining in the sequester madness:

If the economy sputters as a result of the spending cuts, as some economists predict, deficit reduction will look even worse. An already frustrated workforce will become even more angry, and likely take out their frustration on a Republican Party that has been insisting deficit reduction should be the nation's short-term goal, rather than stimulating the economy.

Conservatives will suffer as the focus of congressional debate will quickly shift from the issue of spending cuts, where the emphasis has been since 2011, to the issue of spending more.

In other words it exposes the fraudulence of the entire premise of conservative economic theory. If it accomplishes that much, maybe it will be worth it. Unfortunately, by the time that happens, our economic recovery will be set back, increasing the already significant suffering of the under and unemployed, the poors and the olds. It will not only arrest forward progress, it will probably kick us back into another recession.

Not that our wealthy overlords care. They make their money either way. [graphic via]

Can't live without a living wage

Happy to see Nancy Pelosi throw down a challenge to the GOP on an issue that really matters to the little people. She told the media Democrats would be pushing a minimum wage raise and if GOPers didn't get on board they could explain it to the voters in 2014.

The strategy is straightforward:

“Just keep it simple. We want to raise the minimum wage, and you don’t. Why not?”

She understands the politics perfectly:

“There’s an even greater awareness now than there was six years ago about the disparity of income in our country — and that this disparity is not a healthy thing for a family or an economy,” Pelosi told me. “Raising the minimum wage is the right thing to do, but it’s a popular thing to do as well.”

This was something Republicans once understood as well. When George W. Bush was president, 67 GOPers (still in office today) supported minimum wage hikes. The hike passed with a large bi-partisan majority vote because Democrats didn't put their personal partisan interests over the common good of the working class people.

Not so for Republicans. GOP House leader John Boehner rejected the idea almost before President Obama finished proposing it. Boehner wails it can't be done because, job killer. A claim that is not supported by empirical evidence but yet goes unchalleged by the DC media elites, who merely transcribe the nonsense without comment or context.

In truth, what actual non-partisan research shows is that an artifically low minimum wage effectively subsidizes highly profitable corporate employers. They rake in record breaking profits while the taxpayer foots the bill for social services the employees need. Social welfare the working poor qualify for because their inadequate wages do not cover the barest basic cost of living.

The hell of it is, the paltry $9 an hour still isn't enough in today's economy. If we look at the history of the minimum wage, we find, "it had its highest buying power in 1968 at $1.60, when it was worth about $10.56." If memory serves a gallon of gas was well under 50 cents in those days.

This isn't about protecting jobs. It's about Republicans protecting the wealthy. It comes down to unmitigated greed. Sadly, we don't have Ted Kennedy to make the case anymore.

Obama, jobs and right wing media amnesia

In a piece that might have been delivered to him pre-written by the RNC, hapless GOP steno Byron York falsely claims Obama has done nothing to encourage our economic recovery. In fact, in this worthless word salad of phony GOP talking points, York alleges President Obama ignored the nation's economic woes altogether for the last four years except for a few words in his last inaugural address.

Maybe Mr. York didn't notice the hard fight Obama put up right out of the gate to rescue our economy from the fiery ruins of the economic meltdown his predecessor left behind. The battle to get stimulus funds. The bold and much criticized rescue of the auto industry. The executive orders to institute jobs programs such as he could outside of the relentless obstruction of a Congressional mob of recalcitrant Republicans who not only blocked and/or voted against every single job creating program put forward by the White House or the Democratic party but also fought to defund already existing job creating programs.

And York's amnesia apparently extends to the now long dead jobs bill Obama pushed for many weeks to get to the floor of Congress. Elon Green remembers:

I refer, of course, to the American Jobs Act, which was introduced in September 2011 and died on the table, thanks to Republicans, a month later. The failure to pass this $450 billion bill was of massive consequence to the economy in general and jobs in particular.

Obama certainly wasn't perfect on addressing unemployment. He put way too much trust into self-interested financial advisors who were wrong about almost everything. But to suggest that Obama did nothing at all is so wilfully blind to the historical record it verges on a criminally negligent failure to inform the public.

This sort of journalistic malfeasance is exactly why the Republican party has no fear of repeatedly pushing blatant lies into the news media. Not only can Republicans feel safe to lie with impunity, they can depend on friends like Bryon York to amplify the false and invented reality that is currently destroying the GOP from within today.