Matt Taibbi's Killer Takedown of Mitt Romney

By Laura Gottesdiener

September 5, 2012  |  It’s too bad he’s such a successful journalist, because it looks like Matt Taibbi would have made an incredible banker. He’s latest bet--that people would be willing to read a 8,000-word explanation of the business model of Bain Capital, Mitt Romney’s private equity firm--has paid of epically. As the September cover story of Rolling Stone, the article has already racked up 64,000 likes on facebook and an incensed army of readers who now know the secret to Romney’s “shimmering pearl of perfect political hypocrisy.”

Sure, Taibbi’s article saddled them with a dictionary-worth of industry acronyms that they’ve now got bouncing around in their brains, but who knows when someone’s going to put a gun to your head and demand to know the difference between a CDO and and an LBO? 

 

Well, actually, Taibbi says that time is now. According to the article, either we wise up to Romney’s game, or, as Romney himself warned, succumb to “a prairie fire of debt.”

Michelle Obama's Democratic Convention Speech

September 4, 2012

Below is the full transcript, as prepared for delivery, of First Lady Michelle Obama's speech to the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday night.

Thank you so much, Elaine…we are so grateful for your family's service and sacrifice…and we will always have your back.

Over the past few years as First Lady, I have had the extraordinary privilege of traveling all across this country. And everywhere I've gone, in the people I've met, and the stories I've heard, I have seen the very best of the American spirit.

I have seen it in the incredible kindness and warmth that people have shown me and my family, especially our girls.

Paul Krugman: Rosie Ruiz Republicans

Remember Rosie Ruiz? In 1980 she was the first woman to cross the finish line at the Boston Marathon — except it turned out that she hadn’t actually run most of the race, that she sneaked onto the course around a mile from the end. Ever since, she has symbolized a particular kind of fraud, in which people claim credit for achieving things they have not, in fact, achieved.

And these days Paul Ryan is the Rosie Ruiz of American politics.

This would have been an apt comparison even before the curious story of Mr. Ryan’s own marathon came to light. Still, that’s quite a story, so let’s talk about it first.

Grow Your Own Energy

A NASA-backed experiment harvests algae for oil, releases fresh water.

By Jonathan Trent  |   Posted Monday, Sept. 3, 2012, at 7:15 AM ET

Before we run out of fossil oil, we will thoroughly tap the sea floor, find and frack wells wherever they may be, and excavate and extract the most recalcitrant of oil shales. In so doing, we will fuel our lifestyle for a few more decades at the cost of releasing vast amounts of carbon dioxide, adding to global warming, melting ice caps, raising sea levels, acidifying oceans—and setting course for a future for which there are few optimistic scenarios.

In the face of all this, scientists are racing to find alternatives. Biofuels are my passion, but they have had rather a bad press, from complaints about displacing food production to the inefficiency of soybeans and the carbon footprint of ethanol. Microalgae have a low profile but they deserve a much higher one, since the fossil oil we mine mostly comes from microalgae that lived in shallow seas millions of years ago—and they may be key to developing sustainable alternative fuels.

OPINION: The illusory promise of free-market health care miracles

Republican rhetoric aside, the answers lie elsewhere

By Wendell Potter

While listening to the promises to repeal ObamaCare during the Republican National Convention, I was reminded of what those of us in the health insurance industry said when our friends in Congress were able to block passage of President Clinton’s health care reform legislation 18 years ago.

Like the politicians in Tampa, we insisted then that a big government program not only wasn’t needed, but would be harmful — that what the government really needed to do was get out of the way and let the free market work.

Insurance company spokesmen like me assured the public that our then-novel managed care plans, coupled with the invisible hand of the market, would do the trick. Leave it to us, we said, and we’ll get medical costs under control and enroll every American in a good HMO.

We can't grow ourselves out of debt, no matter what the Federal Reserve does

Let's replace our fixation on growth with a steady-state economy focusing on lower consumption, leisure and ecological health

Charles Eisenstein
guardian.co.uk, Monday 3 September 2012 08.30 EDT

Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke's pledge at Jackson Hole last Friday to "promote a stronger economic recovery" through "additional policy accommodation" has drawn criticism from economists, liberal and conservative, who question whether the Fed has the wherewithal to stimulate economic growth. What we actually need is more spending, say the liberals. No, less spending, say the conservatives. But underneath these disagreements lies an unexamined agreement, a common assumption that no mainstream economist or policy-maker ever questions: that the purpose of economic policy is to stimulate growth.

So ubiquitous is the equation of growth with prosperity that few people ever pause to consider it. What does economic growth actually mean? It means more consumption – and consumption of a specific kind: more consumption of goods and services that are exchanged for money. That means that if people stop caring for their own children and instead pay for childcare, the economy grows. The same if people stop cooking for themselves and purchase restaurant takeaways instead.

Work isn’t working

By Matt Bolton

The five Tory MPs who co-authored Britannia Unchained – a book arguing that an 'idle' Britain needs to 'rediscover the lost virtue of hard graft' in order to salvage the economy – may be hypocrites, enjoying the five week Parliamentary recess as they are, but at least they are honest. There is no 'compassionate conservatism' beating around the bush here: this is the true voice of capital, raw and unadulterated. 'Work harder, work longer, get less – only work will set you free' is the message. This 'Britannia' is one straining at the 'red tape' leash in order to race to the bottom, desperate to compete with China and the Asian economies via cuts in wages and the further dismantling of the welfare state.  But in truth, this argument has little to do with economics: this is wholly political, pure ideology. The view of work held by these MPs, and by the right wing press, has actually very little to do with how capitalism operates now, or how it has worked for the past 30 years. It is an anachronism, a hangover from a long-gone time – and, strangely, it is a defunct vision shared by the majority of the liberal and socialist left.

The position of work in our society has shifted under our feet, even as it defines our subjectivity more than ever. Put simply, the work that most of us do everyday has very little to do with how the economy functions. Work, in the traditional sense of a workday and a wage, now finds itself as an economic externality to capitalism: as Marx puts it in the Grundrisse, human labour 'steps to the side' of the workings of capital.[1] From the standpoint of the worker, this is made clear by the fact that it is becoming increasingly difficult to survive through work alone. The repression of wages since the reconstitution of capitalism in the 1970s (through the development of post-Fordist production methods) has meant that workers have had to resort to greater and greater levels of private debt via credit in order to maintain the standard of living necessary to reproduce their labour. The introduction of tax credits by 'Third Way' governments in the UK and US to top up wages is a tacit admission that work does not pay – as demonstrated by statistics showing that nearly a fifth of those receiving housing benefit in the UK are currently in work,[2] or that seven million people used payday loans or other forms of credit to cover their mortgage repayments in 2011.[3] Add to this the millions of temporary and 'precarious' workers on zero hour or casual contracts, as well as those forced to work for free via workfare schemes, and the link between work, the wage and economic survival becomes ever looser.

We’re Going To Tax Their A** Off!

by Corey Robin

Growing up in the 1970s, I had an almost primal association to the GOP as the party of the thrifty and the flinty. Republicans were the grownups at the table, forever cautioning the children against taking that extra piece of cake. Averse to spending money the country didn’t have, they were as leery of deficits as they were of rhetoric. Plainspoken, economizing men of austerity: that was the GOP.

There was some truth to this picture, extending back several decades. Herbert Hoover helped send the Republican Party into twenty years of exile via his ill-timed effort to balance the budget with a hefty tax increase in 1932. One of the first things Eisenhower did upon coming into office was to insist on balancing the budget. Thanks to the Korean War, tax rates were high, and many Republicans wanted Eisenhower to reduce them. He refused, saying “we cannot afford to reduce taxes, reduce income, until we have in sight a program of expenditures that shows that the factors of income and of outgo will be balanced. Now that is just to my mind sheer necessity.” Upon taking office, both Nixon and Ford pursued similar paths, and resisted similar tax-cutting calls from their party.

Rick Perlstein: Peeping Ron

A long-awaited book on Ronald Reagan's secret alliance with the FBI

In January of 1965, FBI agents closing in on mobster Joseph “Joe Bananas” Bonanno discovered that the hellion son of an FBI informant code-named T-10 was raising hell alongside Bonanno’s own teenage son. Agents looked to exploit the two boys’ relationship to help break the case—until, that is, J. Edgar Hoover ordered his underlings to instead warn informant T-10 that his son’s mob associations might harm the confidential source’s fledgling political career. The Justice Department never did manage to pin a decent indictment on Joe Bananas. But T-10—and his fledgling political career—did just fine. He later became the fortieth president of the United States.

This is just one of at least a dozen revelations about one of the most studied men in history in Seth Rosenfeld’s new book. “Here was Ronald Reagan,” writes Rosenfeld, “avowed opponent of big government and people’s over-dependence on it . . . taking personal and political assistance from the FBI at taxpayer expense. . . . Moreover, he seems to have been unaware, or unconcerned, that in doing so he was becoming beholden to the Boss,” who now possessed the sort of blackmail-worthy secret anyone who has seen the recent film J. Edgar knows made even presidents slaves to the FBI. But such questions were moot when it came to Reagan: As readers of this unbelievably good book will learn, he was unblackmailable. There had never been any favor too big for Reagan to volunteer for Hoover, and no favor too small for Hoover to tender him in return—including, in March of 1960, sending out agents to track down a rumor that his daughter Maureen was living with a married man.

Add It Up: Taxes Avoided by the Rich Could Pay Off the Deficit

by Paul Buchheit

Conservatives force the deficit issue, ignoring job creation, and insisting that tax increases on the rich wouldn't generate enough revenue to balance the budget. They're way off. But it takes a little arithmetic to put it all together. In the following analysis, data has been taken from a variety of sources, some of which may overlap or slightly disagree, but all of which lead to the conclusion that withheld revenue, not excessive spending, is the problem.

1. Individual and small business tax avoidance costs us $450 billion.

The IRS estimates that 17 percent of taxes owed were not paid, leaving an underpayment of $450 billion. In way of confirmation, an independent review of IRS data reveals that the richest 10 percent of Americans paid less than 19% on $3.8 trillion of income in 2006, nearly $450 billion short of a more legitimate 30% tax rate. It has also been estimated that two-thirds of the annual $1.3 trillion in "tax expenditures" (tax subsidies from special deductions, exemptions, exclusions, credits, capital gains, and loopholes) goes to the top quintile of taxpayers. Based on IRS apportionments, this calculates out to more than $450 billion for the richest 10 percent of Americans.

One Man Against The Wall Street Lobby

By Simon Johnson

Two diametrically opposed views of Wall Street and the dangers posed by global megabanks came more clearly into focus last week.  On the one hand, William B. Harrison, Jr. – former chairman of JP Morgan Chase – argued in the New York Times that today’s massive banks are an essential part of a well-functioning market economy, and not at all helped by implicit government subsidies.

On the other hand, there is a new powerful voice who knows how big banks really work and who is willing to tell the truth in great and convincing detail.  Jeff Connaughton – a former senior political adviser who has worked both for and against powerful Wall Street interests over the years – has just published a page-turning memoir that is also a damning critique of how Wall Street operates, the political capture of Washington, and our collective failure to reform finance in the past four years.  “The Payoff: Why Wall Street Always Wins,” is the perfect antidote to disinformation put about by global megabanks and their friends.

Commentary: Drastic measures may be needed to stem the tide of cash in US elections

Tom Eblen | The Lexington Herald-Leader

"We have the best Congress money can buy," humorist Will Rogers quipped in the 1930s. More recent comedians have suggested that politicians wear NASCAR-like jumpsuits so citizens can see the logos of all of their sponsors.

Trouble is, the joke is no longer funny. Many of us think special-interest money and the corruption it creates are threatening the very future of American democracy.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/09/02/163816/commentary-drastic-measures-may.html#storylink=cpy

Katha Pollitt: Women Who Love Republicans Who Hate Them

I know there is no monolithic voting bloc called “women”—femaleness, like maleness, is cross-cut with race, education, class, income, ethnicity, religion, marital status, even geography. I also know we all make allowances for our own side, which usually boils down to forgiving men for sexual shenanigans and insulting “gaffes” (aka blurting out their true feelings) that no woman politician would get away with. But with that fully acknowledged, I still want to say: Women! WTF?! After all the weird, heartless, misogynistic, ignorant things Republican men have said about women and pregnancy and rape over the past month, I’m ashamed for my sex that any woman is still planning to vote for Romney and Ryan.

Fairer Sex

Saturday, 01 September 2012 07:09
By Sarah Leonard, Jacobin | Op-Ed

There's been a lot of bullshit written lately about what is or is not feminist. Notable bones 
of contention include: ladyblogs, working in finance, doulas, "having it all," housewifing, rioting, protesting, protesting in lingerie, getting married, watching Girls. Essays in publications ranging from mass-circulation glossies like the Atlantic to small literary magazines like n+1 appeal to a widespread fascination with the confused meaning of the term. The narcissism underlying the debate is parodied by the blog "Is This Feminist?" featuring stock photos of people shaking hands, walking the dog, and doing laundry. The pictures are rated as either "representing feminism" or "problematic."

With no sense of what feminism is, these writers turn to personal experience. With each step and gesture, they wonder what they're contributing to feminism. Is navel-gazing feminist?

Let us borrow a definition from bell hooks: feminism is the struggle to end sexist oppression.