The Democratic turncoats behind the “Fix the Debt” attack on Medicare & Social Security

2/22/2013 10:00am by Gaius Publius

Most left-side commenters paint “Fix the Debt” — the well-funded campaign to scare Americans into believing the debt is not only going to destroy us all, but that massive cuts to Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid are the only way to “fix” the “problem” — as a billionaire-led, CEO-led operation to kill (or at least seriously maim) the social programs by delivering one blow after another. But Fix the Debt is also a bipartisan operation.

This is about bipartisanship — real bipartisanship, bipartisanship in the bad way.

The Time is Right to Create a 21st Century Infrastructure Bank

Feb 20, 2013 - Georgia Levenson Keohane

President Obama has called for the creation of an infrastructure bank. Congress must follow his lead.

“It's not a bigger government we need,” President Obama said in the State of the Union address, “but a smarter government that sets priorities and invests in broad-based growth.” The creation of a national infrastructure bank is a “smarter government” idea whose time has come.

Plans for a national infrastructure bank – one that uses federal funds to incent or leverage even greater investment, public and private, in large-scale public purpose projects – have been percolating since the 1990s. President Obama has long been a champion, and the idea has enjoyed bipartisan support in Congress and backing from the likes of the AFL-CIO and U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Yet we remain stalled in enacting this kind of finance facility, despite the weight of evidence of its potential efficacy and the urgency of the infrastructure (and financing) need. It is time, as the president urged, to put the nation’s interest before party, and to use this kind of public-private partnership to make the investments vital to our economic prosperity.
 

Don't Blink, or You'll Miss Another Bailout

Saturday, 23 February 2013 11:13  
By Gretchen Morgenson, The New York Times News Service | Report 

Many people became rightfully upset about bailouts given to big banks during the mortgage crisis. But it turns out that they are still going on, if more quietly, through the back door. 

The existence of one such secret deal, struck in July between the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Bank of America, came to light just last week in court filings.

That the New York Fed would shower favors on a big financial institution may not surprise. It has long shielded large banks from assertive regulation and increased capital requirements.

Paul Krugman: A History Lesson for Scaremongers

Ah, Paris in the 1920s. It was the era of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, sovereign debt and stabilization. Wait, what?

O.K., I've written before about the notion that France in the 1920s offers the closest thing I can find in the historical record to a crisis of the kind the deficit scolds in the United States keep warning us about. We're not at all like Greece; we have our own currency, and our debts are in that currency. So we can't run out of cash, even if the bond vigilantes turn out to be real and lose faith in America. At worst, we're something like France in the 1920s, with its floating exchange rate and large wartime debt — except that our debt isn't nearly as bad as a share of gross domestic product, and we don't have the lingering gold-standard mentality that prevailed across the Western world back then.

So what actually happened to 1920s France?

Paul Krugman: Sequester of Fools

They’re baaack! Just about two years ago, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, the co-chairmen of the late unlamented debt commission, warned us to expect a terrible fiscal crisis within, um, two years unless we adopted their plan. The crisis hasn’t materialized, but they’re nonetheless back with a new version. And, in case you’re interested, after last year’s election — in which American voters made it clear that they want to preserve the social safety net while raising taxes on the rich — the famous fomenters of fiscal fear have moved to the right, calling for even less revenue and even more spending cuts. 

But you aren’t interested, are you? Almost nobody is. Messrs. Bowles and Simpson had their moment — the annus horribilis of 2011, when Washington was in thrall to deficit scolds insisting that, in the face of record-high long-term unemployment and record-low borrowing costs, we forget about jobs and concentrate exclusively on a “grand bargain” that would supposedly (not actually) settle budget disputes for ever after.
 

As EPA delays new coal ash rules, residents turn to the courts for relief 

By Kristen Lombardi

Sabrina Mislevy is tired of the odors, the way they “hit” her as she drives by the blue-tinted lake, the way they burn her nose. Like many of her neighbors, Mislevy has grown weary of living near the nation’s largest coal ash pond, Little Blue Run, which straddles the Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio state lines.

In Little Blue Run and beyond, coal ash, waste from the production of electricity, has fouled water supplies and endangered public health. “We want action,” said Mislevy, of Georgetown, Pa., explaining why she has joined some 200 other area residents in launching legal challenges against FirstEnergy Corp., the owner of Little Blue Run.

Her community is just one across the country pursuing legal challenges against coal-ash ponds, landfills and pits — a grassroots onslaught stoked, in part, by slow regulatory action by the Environmental Protection Agency.

 

Pete Peterson's Long History of Deficit Scaremongering

Lisa Graves

February 20, 2013

Fix the Debt financier Peter G. Peterson knows a thing or two about debt: he’s an expert at creating it. Peterson founded the private equity firm Blackstone Group in 1985 with Stephen Schwarzman (who compared raising taxes to “when Hitler invaded Poland”). Private equity firms don’t contribute much to the economy; they don’t make cars or milk the cows. Too frequently, they buy firms to loot them. After a leveraged buyout, they can leave companies so loaded up with debt they are forced to immediately slash their workforce or employees’ retirement security.

In 2006, Blackstone ransacked Travelport, a travel reservation conglomerate, piling on $4.3 billion in new debt, then pocketing $1.7 billion to pay shareholders and itself. Travelport promptly fired 841 workers to meet its new debt obligations. It was a great deal for Blackstone but “a horrible one for Travelport,” according to one investment adviser, who described Blackstone as trading in “poisoned waters.”

How Reagan Promoted Genocide

February 21, 2013

Special Report: A newly discovered document reveals that President Reagan and his national security team in 1981 approved Guatemala’s extermination of both leftist guerrillas and their “civilian support mechanisms,” a green light that opened a path to genocide against hundreds of Mayan villages, reports Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

Soon after taking office in 1981, President Ronald Reagan’s national security team agreed to supply military aid to the brutal right-wing regime in Guatemala to pursue the goal of exterminating not only “Marxist guerrillas” but their “civilian support mechanisms,” according to a newly disclosed document from the National Archives.

Over the next several years, the military assistance from the Reagan administration helped the Guatemalan army do just that, engaging in the slaughter of some 100,000 people, including what a truth commission deemed genocide against the Mayan Indians in the northern highlands.

Stacking the Deck: The Phony 'Fix the Debt' Campaign

The Editors

February 20, 2013

The least controversial lines in President Obama’s State of the Union address should have been his assertions that “deficit reduction alone is not an economic plan” and that “we can’t just cut our way to prosperity.” Common sense, right? Wrong—if you’re getting your economic analysis from the GOP, more than a few Democrats and much of the media. Even Obama, in the same speech, paid homage to the safety-net-shredding strategies of the Simpson-Bowles deficit-reduction commission. As Paul Krugman reminds us, “Inside the Beltway Simpson and Bowles have become sacred figures. But the people doing that elevation are the same people who told us that Paul Ryan was the answer to our fiscal prayers.”

Setting the record straight on Medicare's overhead costs: New study

Traditional Medicare's administrative costs were only 1 percent in 2010, but if you roll in the private insurers' Medicare plans, that figure jumps to 6 percent

The traditional Medicare program allocates only 1 percent of total spending to overhead compared with 6 percent when the privatized portion of Medicare, known as Medicare Advantage, is included, according to a study in the June 2013 issue of the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law.

The 1 percent figure includes all types of non-medical spending by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services plus other federal agencies, such as the IRS, that support the Medicare program, and is based on data contained in the latest report of the Medicare trustees. The 6 percent figure, on the other hand, is based on data contained in the latest National Health Expenditure Accounts (NHEA) report.

The journal article, written by Minneapolis-based researcher Kip Sullivan, finds that the gap between the two measures has been growing over the last two decades as enrollment in private Medicare plans has risen.
 

American Assassinations For Dummies

From: Mark Ames
TO: The Horrors of War Desk
Date: Feb 13th, 2013

Las Vegas, NV: It’s hard to have a serious conversation about America’s drone assassination policy when no one seems to have a basic grasp of recent history. This cultural amnesia epidemic is starting to get me down— which is partly my fault for paying more than two minutes’ attention to Twitter at a single go.

The problem starts with Reagan, as problems so often do. Most people on the left take for granted that Reagan’s executive order 12333 "banned assassinations" — which is not just a false interpretation, but really awful mangling of one of the dark turning points in modern American history.
 

They Are Coming for Your Birth Control 

Pro-Lifers Must “Advocate for Sexual Restraint”

by Robin Marty

 

(Note: Think that anti-choice politicians and activists aren’t trying to outlaw contraception?  Think again.  Follow along in an ongoing series that proves beyond a doubt that they really are coming for your birth control.)

Charlotte Lozier Institute’s Michael New is at it again, with another article reminding us of why the battle over the right to control a woman’s reproduction is about more than just abortion, but also about contraception and the act of sex itself.

Writing in the National Review Online, New posits that the clearest way to determine a person’s opinions on whether abortion should remain legal is to examine whether or not that person believes premarital sex is immoral. It’s a fairly simple gamble to make, and one that doesn’t need any studies or surveys to really back it up. Considering almost 60 percent of Americans think that premarital sex isn’t a sin, and that 95 percent of Americans have had premarital sex (yes, even people who believe they were going to Hell for doing it… well, do it), the idea that the same minority of people would also believe abortion is immoral would make perfect sense.

Nation Could Double Energy Productivity

February 7, 2013
Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have long understood that using energy more efficiently can be just as beneficial as finding new ways to produce energy more efficiently.

On Feb. 7, NREL Director Dan Arvizu and a blue-ribbon panel of 20 energy experts drove that message home, declaring that the United States can double its energy productivity by 2030 — and do so in ways that bolster the nation's economy.

Unveiling their recommendations at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., Arvizu and other members of the Alliance to Save Energy (ASE) Commission on National Energy Efficiency Policy said that doubling energy productivity could create a million new jobs, while saving the average household $1,000 a year and reducing carbon-dioxide emissions by one-third.
 

The Cooperative Way to a Stronger Economy

Co-ops—just like people—can get more done together than anyone can do alone. They come in many forms, and are more common than you might imagine.

 

by Sarah van Gelder

Our little group of a dozen families was running out of time. After meeting every weekend for three years to plan our hoped-for cohousing community, and after investing much of our savings to acquire a few acres of land, it looked as though our dream would fail. We couldn’t find a bank that would finance a cooperative.

It was our local credit union that saved us. “You’re owned by your members? What’s so odd about that? We’re owned by our members,” the president of the Kitsap Credit Union mused. 
 

Simpson and Bowles Unveil a New, Wealth-Friendly Austerity Plan

By Richard Eskow | February 19, 2013

As the prospects for a “Grand Bargain” fade, additional European-style austerity on the American economy is becoming increasingly uncertain. That has meant a greater likelihood of a reappearance by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, the two Washington power players whose names have become synonymous with the Deficits First approach to our economic woes.

Today they appeared, right on schedule, bearing yet another plan – and this time it’s even more heavily skewed toward the financial interests of larger corporations and high-earning individuals.
 

Southern poverty pimps 

The “original sin” of the Southern political class is cheap, powerless labor
 
By Michael Lind

Contemporary American politics cannot be understood apart from the North-South divide in the U.S., as I and others have argued.  Neither can contemporary American economic debates.  The real choice facing America in the 21st century is the same one that faced it in the 19th and 20th centuries — Northernomics or Southernomics?

Northernomics is the high-road strategy of building a flourishing national economy by means of government-business cooperation and government investment in R&D, infrastructure and education.  Although this program of Hamiltonianism (named after Washington’s first Treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton) has been championed by maverick Southerners as prominent as George Washington, Henry Clay and Abraham Lincoln (born in Kentucky to a Southern family), the building of a modern, high-tech, high-wage economy has been supported chiefly by political parties based in New England and the Midwest, from the Federalists and the Whigs through the Lincoln Republicans and today’s Northern Democrats.
 

Paul Krugman: In the US, Austerity Could Be Disastrous

Most analysts are, rightly, shrugging off the recent surprise report of an actual decline in fourth-quarter gross domestic product in the United States. It will probably be revised away, and in any case it's the result of one-off factors: a drop in inventories and a quirky sharp decline in defense spending.

Still, the report does highlight the role that shrinking government purchases of goods and services are playing in holding the economy back. And yes, I mean shrinking, not just growing more slowly than I'd like. Transfer payments like Medicare and Social Security are rising (although unemployment benefits are falling), but government purchases of stuff — mostly at the state and local level, where the stuff in question includes hiring schoolteachers — has been in fairly rapid decline.
 

The Real Problem with the Big Banks

Posted by James Surowiecki

Ask what’s wrong with America’s banks, and you’re likely to hear that they’re just too complicated, too opaque. Banks are doing too much trading and not enough traditional lending, and their speculation with complicated financial instruments (like the ones that led to J. P. Morgan losing six billion dollars with its “whale” trade last year) is a recipe for disaster, with the financial crisis of 2007-2008 seen as proof positive of the dangers of too much complexity and too little disclosure. (Thus Jesse Eisinger and Frank Partnoy argue in last month’s Atlantic that the panic of 2008 resulted “from a lack of transparency.”) And so we get calls for banks to simplify their operations—to go back to what’s often called “plain vanilla” banking—and to disclose more about what they’re doing. This quest for simplicity and transparency is understandable in a world of collateralized-debt obligations and endlessly proliferating derivatives. But it doesn’t actually get at the heart of the issue. The fundamental problem with the banks isn’t that they look (and act) more and more like hedge funds. The fundamental problem with banks is what it’s always been: they’re in the business of banking, and banking, whether plain vanilla or incredibly sophisticated, is inherently risky.

Strictly Legal

by HUGH IGLARSH

“In what follows it should always be remembered that there is no question of illegality involved. Everything reported is strictly legal, just as Hitler’s extermination of the Jews was legal – a little point I mention merely to suggest how much weight one may attach to the notion.”
– Ferdinand Lundberg, The Rich and the Super-rich

It was not an earth-shaking decision made this past December by the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York, if one goes by the breadth of media coverage. (The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel’s article being an honorable exception, and the source for many of the facts mentioned here.) But it was certainly a judicial moment to take note of, one of those milestones a society passes as it merrily skips down the garden path toward … what, exactly? That is the question.

And here is the story behind what is perhaps the second worst judicial decision of the still-young century, a nose behind the notorious Citizens United ruling, which begot this horror.

Banksters Rip Apart Spanish Health Care

Monday, 18 February 2013 13:54  
By Thom Hartmann, The Daily Take | Op-Ed 

According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's latest health care rankings of the 34 most developed nations in the world, the United States ranks dead last in male life expectancy.

We also rank near the very bottom in preventing premature death, infant mortality, total health care coverage, number of practicing doctors, and preventing heart disease deaths.

America faces more than a dozen deadlines, all caused by billionaires and wealth transfer

2/12/2013 10:00am by Gaius Publius

I’ve had an article in draft for some time — “The 16 Deadlines Facing America” — that details each deadline, describes the dangers, and states why each faces an end-point rather than just a periodic fluctuation. (Example of periodic fluctuation: The price of GM stock goes up and down — sometimes the number is good, sometimes bad — but GM stock continues to be traded on the market. Example of an end-point: The market price of tradable tulip bulbs goes up to impossible heights, then crashes so badly that the interest in trading them completely disappears. The market for tradable tulip bulbs is dead forever.)

I’ve identified 16 of these game-over situations facing America today, situations from which there is the possibility of no recovery — not the certainty, but the possibility. As I was working on that article though, looking especially what it would take to reverse each trend, I realized it’s really only one story writ 16 times on 16 separate canvasses.

That story? The song of the predator class, the rich and the rest — “All your money are belong to us.”
 

Dave Dayen: Yes, Katrina, Wall Street Won Again, and Progressives Need to Face Up to That

Yves here. I hope you are as excited as I am that Dave Dayen will be posting at NC when the mood strikes him. Welcome Dave!



By David Dayen, a lapsed blogger, now a freelance writer based in Los Angeles, CA. Follow him on Twitter @ddayen



Greetings, NC readers! Yves has been nice enough to open up her Internet home to me, and I intend to grab the opportunity from time to time.



This offer turned fortuitous after I wrote a little piece from Salon on the “anniversary” of the securitization fraud task force, announced at last year’s State of the Union address. The scare quotes are warranted because, as I detailed, it’s hard to honor an anniversary of something that never really existed in the first place. I don’t remember annual celebrations of the founding of Atlantis, either.



Well, Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of The Nation, got very upset at my characterization of the task force, and scolded me for taking a “victory lap.” I could spend this entire refutation on the revealing attitude behind that phrase. I would have been extremely happy to have been completely wrong about this whole matter if it meant that even one homeowner would get a measure of justice for what they’ve encountered. I don’t tally up my punditry on a whiteboard and seek out the showiest opportunities to boast about my scores.

Wall Street’s Misdeeds Cost Trillions, But It’s Main Street Who’s Getting Nickel-and-Dimed.

By Richard Eskow | February 19, 2013

Take a look at these two sentences:

“(I)f losses from the 2007- 2009 crisis were to reach similar levels (as they did in previous recessions) … losses could exceed $13 trillion.” Government Accountability Office

“You would think that any regulation that could affect a major part of the economy and cost industry and/or consumers millions of dollars to comply with would be based on rigorous and consistent economic analysis.” David C. Johns, Heritage Foundation

Filipino super-typhoon an ominous warning of climate change impact

Philippines is having to adapt and adjust to rapidly deteriorating climatic trends at a great cost to its economy

Simon Tisdall
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 17 February 2013 11.27 EST
When super-typhoon Bopha struck without warning before dawn, flattening the walls of their home, Maria Amparo Jenobiagon, her two daughters and her grandchildren ran for their lives.

The storm on 4 December was the worst ever to hit the southern Philippines: torrential rain turned New Bataan's river into a raging flood. Roads were washed away and the bridge turned into an enormous dam. Tens of thousands of coconut trees crashed down in an instant as unbelievably powerful winds struck. The banana crop was destroyed in a flash – and with it the livelihoods of hundreds of farmers.

The only safe place the family could think of was the concrete grandstand at the village sports stadium. Two months later, Jenobiagon, 36, and her three-year-old granddaughter, Mary Aieshe, are still there, living in one of the improvised tents spanning its steep concrete tiers along with hundreds of other people.
 

9 Economic Facts That Will Make Your Head Spin

By Lynn Stuart Parramore

February 18, 2013  |  How much will you need for medical expenses in retirement? What does it cost to keep 2.5 million Americans behind bars? Here are a few facts and figures that might surprise you.

1. Recovery for the rich, recession for the rest.
Economic recovery is in rather limited supply, it seems. Research by economist Emmanuel Saez shows that the top 1 percent has enjoyed income growth of over 11 percent [3] since the official end of the recession. The other 99 percent hasn’t fared so well, seeing a 0.4 percent decline in income.

[...]

2. Half of us are poor or barely scraping by.
The latest Census Bureau data shows that one in two Americans currently falls into either the “low income” category or is living in poverty. Low-income is defined as those earning between 100 and 199 percent of the poverty level. Adjusted for inflation, the earnings for the bottom 20 percent of families have dropped from $16,788 in 1979 to just under $15,000. Earnings for the next 20 percent have been stuck at $37,000.

Thirsty crops and hungry people: Symposium to examine realities of water security

You may have guzzled a half-liter bottle of water at lunchtime, but your food and clothes drank a lot more. The same half-liter that quenched your thirst also produces only about one square-inch of bread or one square-inch of cotton cloth.

Agriculture is in fact one of the world's most insatiable consumers of water. And yet it's facing growing competition for water from cities, industry, and recreation at a time when demand for food is rising, and water is expected to become increasingly scarce. Take irrigation, for example, says Fred Vocasek, senior lab agronomist with the nation's largest crop consulting firm, Servi-Tech, Inc., in Dodge City, KS.

"Irrigation withdrawals in the United States have stabilized since about 1980, but food consumption trends are following the upward population trend," he says. "In other words, we have an increasingly hungry world with stable, or limited, freshwater supplies for food production. So, how do we keep pace with the widening gap?"

Dean Baker: Minimum Wage: Who Decided Workers Should Fall Behind?

It was encouraging to see President Obama propose an increase in the minimum wage in his State of the Union Address, even if the $9.00 target did not seem especially ambitious. If the $9.00 minimum wage were in effect this year, the inflation-adjusted value of the minimum wage would still be more than 2.0 percent lower than it had been in the late 1960s. And this proposed target would not even be reached until 2015, when inflation is predicted to lower the value by another 6 percent.

While giving a raise worth more than $3,000 a year to the country’s lowest paid workers is definitely a good thing, it is hard to get too excited about a situation in which these workers will still be earning less than their counterparts did almost 50 years ago. By targeting wage levels that roughly move in step with inflation we have implemented a policy that workers at the bottom will receive none of the benefits of economic growth through time. In other words, if we hold the purchasing power of the minimum wage fixed through time, as the country as a whole gets richer, minimum wage workers will fall ever further behind.

Glenn Greenwald: The premises and purposes of American exceptionalism

That the US is objectively "the greatest country ever to exist" is as irrational as it is destructive, yet it maintains the status of orthodoxy

Last week, North Korea tested a nuclear weapon, and the US - the country with the world's largest stockpile of that weapon and the only one in history to use it - led the condemnation (US allies with large nuclear stockpiles, such as Britain and Israel, vocally joined in). Responding to unnamed commentators who apparently noted this contradiction, National Review's Charles Cooke voiced these two assertions:

[...]

Nobody can reasonably dispute that North Korea is governed by a monstrous regime and that it would be better if they lacked a nuclear weapons capability. That isn't what interests me about this. What interests me here is that highlighted claim: that the US "is the greatest country in world history", and therefore is entitled to do that which other countries are not.
 

ALEC's Plan to Kill Union Jobs Everywhere -- Even Outside the U.S.

By Dave Saldana

February 15, 2013  |  It’s an anniversary London, Ontario, did not celebrate. It’s been a year, and the shock has yet to wear off in the Canadian city just an hour’s drive east of Detroit. All that remains is the hardship [3] of carrying on through mass joblessness, and its hand-in-hand partners, surges in poverty, mental health crises and addiction.

It’s a story many American communities will recognize -- but this one involves an American company wooed with a sweetheart deal by the Canadian government for a factory the Americans likely never intended to keep. What they really wanted, it seems, is to bust the union.

The lockout began on New Year’s Day, 2012, when Caterpillar Inc., a U.S. company, left 465 union workers on the pavement. At the Electro-Motive Diesel factory, they made engines and parts for diesel locomotives; Caterpillar subsidiary Progress Rail Services bought up the company in 2010.

The American Housing Market is Set to Screw People Far into the Future

By Sam Pizzigati

February 17, 2013  |  Our political vocabulary is changing all the time. Words that loom large in one generation’s national public discourse can almost totally disappear in the next.

Take the word “segregation.” A half-century ago, newspapers headlined “segregation” on almost a daily basis. This same word today seldom ever appears, either in print or on our computer screens. To our contemporary sensibilities, segregation seems so, well, yesterday.

But segregation still stains America, and not just the lingering legacy of the racial segregation that Americans battled decades ago. America now faces a stark income segregation as well — and this income segregation is getting worse.
 

Paul Krugman: Raise That Wage

President Obama laid out a number of good ideas in his State of the Union address. Unfortunately, almost all of them would require spending money — and given Republican control of the House of Representatives, it’s hard to imagine that happening.

One major proposal, however, wouldn’t involve budget outlays: the president’s call for a rise in the minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $9, with subsequent increases in line with inflation. The question we need to ask is: Would this be good policy? And the answer, perhaps surprisingly, is a clear yes.