Super Congress

I've decided not to piss and moan about the ridiculous level of self aggrandizement and ego-petting when it comes to naming the gimmick these guys have come up with to try to deal with the petty politics of the Budget and the Debt.

I don't know about the legalities of the thing because I don't think it matters, because I think it's wired to fail anyway.  The Repubs have stacked their side with people who are dead set against any tax increases.  They're all on the record, or they've signed one of Grover Norquist's stupid pledges.  And the Dem Leadership (making what looks like a deliberate attempt to prop up the "both sides do it / they're all the same" meme), have appointed members who are party loyalists and apparatchiks - but Harry Reid made one pick that I think absolutely ensures an outcome favorable to the Repubs, and his name is Max Baucus.

First, of course, we have to ignore the irony of a government setting up a brand new piece of bureaucracy in an attempt to cut back the existing bureaucracy.  But no matter; I expect they'll make a nice show of it, and we'll be entertained (ie: distracted) long enough for the "automatic cuts" to kick in.

The real fight goes on backstage; the real fight is about whose fiefdom lives or dies.  Watch and listen.  I think this thing is all about re-organizing the power allotment of the existing structures of congressional committees; the relationships between federal, state and local governments; and practically all things "government".  This is nothing short of a full-on paradigm shift fueled by the big-time ambitions of small-time operators, and it's bound to be a wild ride.

Corporate Personage

Here's Willard employing a Debate Stopper as he tries to make the point for lowering Corporate Tax rates.
(A Debate Stopper is a meme; a statement of "political fact" - usually in simplistic terms - intended to require agreement on the speaker's basic premise, allowing the speaker to go on to make a conclusive statement of policy).



The problem, as always, is that if your basic premise is false, then your conclusion cannot be true.

And here's the fallacy: If a corporation is a person; and it is entitled to the same rights and privileges of all other people, then it must be subject to the same responsibilities and liabilities as any other person.

A corporation is allowed to own another corporation, but a person is not allowed to own another person.

A corporation is not - cannot be - a person.

Both Sides

The centrist meme starts with a perfectly reasonable assumption that there're at least two sides of the story; that we need to be sure we're addressing questions from as wide a perspective as possible. All well and good, but it starts to fall apart when you take that next step and assume that ALL issues MUST have at least two sides (they don't), and that both points of view are ALWAYS valid (they aren't).

While Centrism has its uses, as a political philosophy, it's just intellectually lazy. It's a product of our need not to feel embarrassed because we supported the wrong candidates and causes; or because we aren't willing to do the work required of every good citizen in a democracy; or that we were just following a fashionable trend; or whatever.

To take just a piece of the argument, here's Bill Maher exposing the lie of "both sides do it".

Go, Dylan

Some Not-So-Good Signs

There was once quite a buzz surrounding the recall attempts in Wisconsin, but somehow, because the Repubs held on to four out the six seats in question, the Press Poodles decided it was no longer much of a story - suddenly, it got kinda hard to find any in-depth coverage or analysis of the results. (see the numbers here)

By winning 2 seats and trimming the Repub majority to 17-16, the Dems are claiming they've changed the dynamics of Wisconsin's State Senate to some degree, but I'm betting the lesson the Repubs are taking away is that the combination of gerrymandering, advertising and dirty tricks is the key;  that as long as they can apply the Big Money Propaganda, then they can maintain the "50% plus 1", which means they can still just bull their way thru.

Put that election news together with this, and we've got an overall outlook that remains pretty bleak.

In fact, they said, America was composed of two distinct groups: the rich and the rest. And for the purposes of investment decisions, the second group didn’t matter; tracking its spending habits or worrying over its savings rate was a waste of time. All the action in the American economy was at the top: the richest 1 percent of households earned as much each year as the bottom 60 percent put together; they possessed as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent; and with each passing year, a greater share of the nation’s treasure was flowing through their hands and into their pockets. It was this segment of the population, almost exclusively, that held the key to future growth and future returns.

And finally (for today), there's this from a CNN Poll:

A lot of that anger seems directed toward the GOP. According to the survey, favorable views of the Republican party dropped eight points over the past month, to 33 percent. Fifty-nine percent say they have an unfavorable view of the Republican party, an all-time high dating back to 1992 when the question was first asked.

If Repubs are unpopular, and if a majority of voters are saying they don't deserve to be re-elected; and yet they keep winning elections, then what logical conclusion can we draw regarding our little experiment in self-governance?

TIme For Change

In abbreviated form: The natural flow of events, as any civilization evolves, is for more and more of the power and money to be concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.  Conversely, as power and money shift upwards, the number of people who are left with with less and less grows almost geometrically.  Eventually, you have way too many people who feel they have nothing more to lose, and you get a kind of spontaneous combustion as they come together, form into a mob and go about taking what they believe should be theirs.  Usually, it amounts to some smash-and-grab looting and car-burning, and it goes on for a relatively short period of time (a few days to a few weeks).

What's happened in Greece and now what's been going on in The UK looks to me like this random form of protest so far; people venting their frustrations and trying to get somebody to acknowledge their plight.  And even tho' the official version is that the riots are in reaction to the death of a young man at the hands of Police, it's really just the instigating event and not the underlying cause at all.

But a coupla things to watch for:
1) As the thing widens, are there signs of leadership and organization?
2) What force is to be brought against the protesters, and what kind of language is the government using to justify the use of force?

A Confluence Of Many Things Financial

Kinda looks like S&P just can't help themselves.  They went after Freddie and Fanny today, and they downgraded 10 out the 12 banks that make up a kind of plumbing system for the mortgage market too.  S&P could be on very dangerous ground now, as some of this starts to look very much more like politics than strictly business.  The editorial attacks from the press and from some of the big finance players are very huffy (FT, CSM), and if they're coupled with political counterattacks, it could prove fatal.  So I wonder: what are they up to?  Is S&P the one good guy who at long last has decided he'll try telling the truth?  Or is this Caesar crossing the Rubicon?

Also, AIG's filing suit against Bank of America.

Verizon phone workers are out on strike in the US Northeast.

Street riots in London.

And, oh yeah - the Dow is down another 630 points at the close today.

Who's Is It?

I posted the other day: "Obama owns it now".  Well, as usual, the spin competition ramped up in a hurry, with one of Washington's all-time great gaffemeisters (John Kerry) calling S&P's decision to downgrade US Debt "the Tea Party Downgrade".

The Repubs and the wingnut bloggers jumped on it and started the usual whine-a-thon about those mean old Dems calling people names and shit, blah blah blah.  But a coupla things here:  First, it's kinda cool that Kerry was finally able to make a point without fuckin' up the delivery.  Second, there was a significant number of Tea Partiers who said out loud that they thought default might be a good thing, so why are they pouting now when people are identifying them with the downgrade?  And third, how long before the Dems get tired of reminding everybody about all the bad shit the Repubs have gotten us into and decide not to use any of it as a campaign issue?

S&P's Downgrade

There's a paragraph in their reasoning saying basically that S&P doesn't feel comfortable with a high rating for US Government Debt because of their concern for the politics of the Debt Ceiling debate we just went thru.

If I can take as a given my thinking that Wall St is moving away from the GOP because of the Tea Party nutbags, then it makes a lot of sense that the downgrade is actually S&P sending a signal to the GOP that they need to get their shit together.

If your interest burden goes up because of the S&P downgrade, and S&P says it's because they don't trust the political process, and it's the Tea Baggers making the political problems, then who ya gonna blame?

It's possible the Tea Baggers kinda fucked up in reverse tho'.  Imagine how popular they'll get when somebody figures out how to spin it back and say the Tea Party was absolutely right about everything because look - we scared Wall St half outa their socks.

The grand shift in power continues and it just gets weirder as we go.

Gotcha

The Day-Trader phenomenon is a part of the big myth - all it really takes is a little common sense and you can make anything work. No need for training or experience or intellectual rigor; just jump in and do it.

Intentionally Stupid

Better access to contraception = lower demand for abortion. It's a measurable and obvious cause-and-effect thing going on. If you're against preventing the pregnancy, then you simply are in favor of keeping the demand for abortion high.

So how can these guys be in favor of sustaining the demand for abortion? Well, first and foremost, it gives them a way to keep abortion as a political weapon; but the kicker is that they can hide their cynicism in the fog of being "against ObamaCare". The politics of fear requires the maintenance of as many perceived threats as possible. If you allow any real progress towards solving even small parts of any problem, then you have to concede that government is in fact good for something; and you start to lose an important way to motivate your contributors and your voters.

There's also a pronounced element of their outright fear of sexuality in general, and the sheer terror they feel when they have to contemplate female sexuality in particular.

Hang Onto Yer Hats

This shit just makes me sick to my stomach.

"The conventional wisdom on Wall Street was that the economy was growing -- that the worst was behind us," said Peter Schiff, president of Euro Pacific Capital. "Now what people are realizing is the stimulus didn't work, and we may be headed back to recession." --CNNMoney

"Conventional wisdom..."?  That's Corp Code for happy talk.  They've been sittin' there in their Executive Suites jackin' each other off, collecting nice fat checks at taxpayer expense, pretending that what they tell the Press Poodles to say has some actual relation to the truth.

And the crap about "the stimulus hasn't worked..."?  What exactly do they think was holding this shit up in the air this whole time?  The stimulus is gone, and now there's nothing to supplement what little demand there was.

I imagine right now, Geithner et al are having lots of phone conversations in very blunt language and urgent tones about taking huge amounts of the cash that Big Corp has been sitting on for 2 years and pouring it into the markets tomorrow to try to stop the bleeding.

!Wild Speculation Alert!
I can also imagine a guy like Jamie Dimon lickin' his chops at the prospects of a leveraged buyout of significant government assets.  And we're not talkin' about the NYC Water Dept or the 10 biggest airports.  We're talkin' about dismantling the whole bureaucracy and auctioning off the pieces.

But where do we start?  The standard play here would be to ramp up the Blame-The-Victim machinery.  The narrative should begin with "The American worker just isn't properly equipped to compete in the global marketplace blah blah blah."  Then you need to point at the schools.  A lot of this is already in place of course; this just makes it easier to topple the whole system, and make us more accepting of a corporate-style takeover.

Disaster Capitalism is now here.

Reconstruction - In All Its Gnarly Glory

I couldn't figure out how to get a ruler in the shot to show scale - the scar's about 7 1/2 inches.

The dressing came off Monday, and it can stay off as long as the wound stays closed and doesn't start to leak. Shower tomorrow (post-op day 7).  Swabbing myself down every day with a sponge and baby wipes is a drag.

And BTW, Dammit

If anybody (particularly anybody who self-identifies as a conservative) really wants to do something that might actually prevent another Debt Crisis, one thing to do is pretty simple: Amend the War Powers Resolution to require real-world financing proposals be enacted before the 90-day Freebie Period lapses.

Double Dip

I'm tryin' hard to figure out how the Debt Deal doesn't make things worse.  An awful lot of people are stuck in this kind of economic limbo, where treading water is about all they can hope for in the near and mid term; and when the average age of the American worker is close to 52, "middle term" can easily mean the remainder of your working life when the economy is stuck in the doldrums.  So while there's a fair stack of good news for households in the $200K+ category, that leaves a huge number of "middle classers" at risk of losing buoyancy and slipping under.

Here's the thing:  There's no substitute for demand.  The law is the law, and no combination of ideology and happy talk is going to change the simple fact that demand drives inflation and inflation is what makes capitalism work in the first place.  You can argue all you want about regulating the thing appropriately, but that's a different conversation.  If your premise is false, your conclusion CANNOT be true.  Demand is everything.  Every time we've tried to move away from that bedrock principle, we've seen some extremely bad shit pile up on us.

So if we take this debt deal at face value (not particularly valid, but ya gotta start somewhere), then what I see is an attempt to remove about $200 Billion worth of demand from the system every year for 10 years.

Here's my clever representation of this dynamic as a DOS batch file:
10: demand goes down, prices go down
20: prices go down, wages go down
30: wages go down, demand goes down
40: GO TO 10

No matter what, Obama owns this thing now.  What exactly he owns is up for debate.  And of course, the main point is to look at what affect this acton and the politics of this action will have on campaign contributions for 2012.

Contributors get people elected.  Big Contributors (eg: Target) that have aligned themselves  too closely with political issues that proved to be unpopular have taken occasionally severe beatings.

I think the strategy is for the White House to continue sending very strong signals to the business community to the effect that "this next part of the shift is on; this is for real and the smart money is backing policy that is fact-based, pragmatic and market-driven - not the Looney Toons bullshit coming from the wingnuts who think everything'll be fine if we just close our eyes and pretend it's 1954."

What if Obama really is playing way over all of our heads?  Maybe he's giving us the impression of the rope-a-dope, or the 3D chess master (remember that the Press Poodles aren't really all that bright - their job is to smash-fit whatever is going on into a prepackaged narrative).  What if Obama is actually working towards a position that forces the Tea Party GOP to isolate itself to the point where it consists of nothing but Michelle Bachmann, Rand Paul, Pat Robertson and The Koch Bros?  But if that's true on the Repub side, then it can just as easily mean he's in the process of stripping away the the hardcore leftie base of the Dems.  All of which translates to the emergence of a "new political entity" - which probably isn't really new at all.

As always, we'll see.  Or at least we'll see something that may or may not be what actually happened.  Maybe we should call this Quantum Politics.  We see only the evidence that something MIGHT have happened, and we're left to theorize as to whether or not it was "real".