Vote Republican. Vote John Boehner(R-OH) They Are Bought and Paid For

A G.O.P. Leader Tightly Bound to Lobbyists

House Democrats were preparing late last year for the first floor vote on the financial regulatory overhaul when Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio and other Republican leaders summoned more than 100 industry lobbyists and conservative political activists to Capitol Hill for a private strategy session.

The bill’s passage in the House already seemed inevitable. But Mr. Boehner and his deputies told the Wall Street lobbyists and trade association leaders that by teaming up, they could still perhaps block its final passage or at least water it down.

“We need you to get out there and speak up against this,” Mr. Boehner said that December afternoon, according to three people familiar with his remarks, while also warning against cutting side deals with Democrats.

That sort of alliance — they won a few skirmishes, though they lost the war on the regulatory bill — is business as usual for Mr. Boehner, the House minority leader and would-be speaker if Republicans win the House in November. He maintains especially tight ties with a circle of lobbyists and former aides representing some of the nation’s biggest businesses, including Goldman Sachs, Google, Citigroup, R. J. Reynolds, MillerCoors and UPS.

They have contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to his campaigns, provided him with rides on their corporate jets, socialized with him at luxury golf resorts and waterfront bashes and are now leading fund-raising efforts for his Boehner for Speaker campaign, which is soliciting checks of up to $37,800 each, the maximum allowed.

Some of the lobbyists readily acknowledge routinely seeking his office’s help — calling the congressman and his aides as often as several times a week — to advance their agenda in Washington. And in many cases, Mr. Boehner has helped them out.

Boehner and his Conservative supporters have responded that this story is a "hatchet" job. In other words conservatives object to the spot light of open democracy and the ideals of our nation's Founders. Boehner Invites Lobbyists To Help Form GOP Agenda In Intimate Meeting At His Office

As the Wonk Room’s Pat Garofalo has documented, congressional Republicans have “organized a pow-wow with lobbyists in order to devise a strategy” for nearly every piece of major legislation over the past year, from health care reform, to Wall Street reform, to climate change, to a jobs bill.

If the mid-term elections work out the way conservatives hope - the rights of the average American, the direction of the economy and public policy will once again be just like the Bush years. In other words the people and policies that brought us the worse economic crash since the Depression will be driving the bus over the cliff again; apparently because it was so much fun trying to destroy America the first time around. Mom was right - some people never learn.

Sadly Sen. Mike Crapo (R-ID) Appeared to be Mentally Deranged

Crapo On Health Clinic Funded By Stimulus He Opposed: ‘One Of The Core Pieces Of The Solution’ America Needs

Wednesday afternoon, Sen. Mike Crapo (R-ID) attended a ribbon-cutting event for the Health West clinic in Aberdeen, Idaho. Crapo praised the clinic, which will specialize in assisting low-income patients in rural areas, saying, “What is happening right here in Aberdeen today is one of the core pieces of the solution that we need in America today.” What Crapo did not mention in his praise for Health West is that most of its funding came from the stimulus package that he opposed:

    During a brief speech at the ribbon-cutting ceremony, Sen. Crapo said the clinic is essential in providing efficient high-quality services in a rural community. He said the facility helps address two disturbing trends in U.S. health care — skyrocketing cost of services and limited access to quality care.

    “What is happening right here in Aberdeen today is one of the core pieces of the solution that we need in America today,” Crapo said. [...] Stephen Weeg, executive director for Health West in Southeast Idaho, said the clinic hopes to partner with the larger medical hospitals to bring in specialists once a month. Green light for the clinic did not come until stimulus money was made available.

    Weeg said stimulus money from the U.S. Department of Agriculture provided $500,000 of the $660,000 project. Additional money came from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. About $74,000 was raised locally, with about $35,000 left to raise.

At the time of the passage of the stimulus bill, Crapo called it “an avalanche of special funding, much of which is unrelated to stimulating our economy as a whole.” It now appears that the senator realizes, at least implicitly, that it has provided funding to important projects like the West Health center that he calls “one of the core pieces of the solution that we need in America today.”

Nothing like being absolutely for and against the stimulus in addition to taking credit for the good the stimulus does for working class Americans. Americans who right-wing zealots like Crapo have showed nothing but contempt for the last twenty years. Those that think Crapo should resign because of his obvious mental problems can contact him here.

California gubernatorial candidate Republican Meg Whitman wants the poor to fund higher education. Kind of a clue as to how conservative billionaire extremists think

But now Ms. Whitman, even Ms. Whitman, has surprised me with a new level of venality.  The ad opens with a nice proposal to add a billion dollars in funding for California's UC and CSU systems. 

This is a good idea.  Ever since Reagan decided that higher education was a waste of money, and Prop. 13 hamstrung the state, UC and CSU have been punching bags in state politics

And how will she pay for it?  It turns out that very small incremental surtax on the highest earners in the state will provide more than enough funding and, uh ....

Nah.  KIDDING!  Margaret will have the most immiserated people in the state cough up the dough.  People will have to "work" for welfare, and then go off after two years.  We'll take the money that these slackers would waste on food and heat, and hand it over to schools that now serve as an excuse to grind the most vulnerable of us further into despair. 

Put aside the fact that the numbers don't even begin to add up as a way to fund higher education.

If Whitman truly earned her millions is wasn't because she knows anything about math or public policy. It is a safe bet she relied on trained employees - educated by public universities - to do the actual work that made her wealthy. Do conservatives even know what humility is? Those interested in having a non-elitist/non-airhead for California governor can contribute to Jerry Brown here.

Rude But True. Tea Party Agenda Screws Tea Party Members.

5 Ways the Tea Party Agenda Screws Tea Party Supporters

If people could be counted on to vote in their own best interests, there would be no Tea Party movement, for if the economic agenda embraced by Tea Partiers -- a vastly pro-corporation, government-killing plan -- Tea Partiers would find themselves among the people most hurt by it.

To hear Tea Party activists tell it, they seek to save future generations from the crushing demands of big government. Yet the agenda they advocate, dictated by the big-money players behind the muscular interest groups that keep the movement growing, will likely render the Tea Partiers themselves the economically squeezed subjects of a corporate state, one in which the elderly will be left to scrounge for crumbs, small businesses will be crushed by lack of capital, and their own ground-level online organizing supplanted by the networks built by giant, corporate-funded astroturf groups.

As George Lakoff and Drew Westen remind us, people don't vote on the facts: they vote on emotion, according to Westen, and their notion of morality, according to Lakoff. The resentment of Tea Partiers toward liberals, East Coast elites, the poor and people who don't look like them has been effectively marshaled in service of a "free market" ideology cleverly packaged as "freedom." Never mind that free markets are anything but free for ordinary people. The packaging strikes the necessary emotional and moral chords: Free markets = freedom = liberty = endowed by the Creator, as written in the Declaration of Independence by the founders. It's the perfect exploitation of the worldview of conservative middle-class white people -- all in the service of enriching the super-rich at the expense of their unwitting, patriotic ground troops.

Casting themselves as an organic uprising in opposition to a federal government they see as the greatest threat to their freedom, Tea Party supporters conveniently look past the likely consequences of the no-holds-barred, anti-regulatory aims of Rupert Murdoch and David Koch, the billionaires whose dollars grease the skids on which the Tea Party movement rides. Murdoch leads News Corporation, the parent company of Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, the movement's evangelists. Koch is a principal in Koch Industries, the second largest privately held corporation in the U.S., and heir to its fortunes.

The billionaires give the activists lots of entertainment to distract them from this reality, especially in the form of sideshows, such as Glenn Beck's travesty at the Lincoln Memorial, designed to fan the flames of racial resentment while making Tea Partiers feel holy about it. At other times, the demonization or infantilization of the nation's first black president serves up the same charge of adrenaline to the fearful, angry throngs who seek to blame their troubles on anyone other than the corporatist manipulators in whom they've placed their trust.

How else to explain the embrace of the billionaires' agenda by the middle-aged, middle-class folks of the Tea Party movement -- the very ones likely to find themselves screwed by it? Here we examine five positions advanced by Tea Party leaders, and what they would mean for Tea Party supporters.

1. Ending Social Security. Rep. Michele Bachmann, doyenne of the congressional Tea Party Caucus, has outlined a plan for an abrupt phase-out of Social Security. Speaking before an audience of Tea Party supporters at the RightOnline conference convened in July, Bachmann referred to Social Security and Medicare as "welfare" that had seen its day. The event was convened in Las Vegas by the Americans For Prosperity Foundation, whose board is chaired by David Koch. There, more than 1,000 Tea Partiers -- the majority of whom are over the age of 45 -- sat in rapt silence as Bachmann outlined a plan to end Social Security for all those who will be under the age of 65 at the time her potential dream Congress enacts the legislation.

The growth of the federal debt and deficit require a drastic cutback in federal spending, Bachmann said. "Spending comes first, so we have to cut it first," she explained, speaking of her plan to devastate Social Security. "And in my opinion, it'll take us about a long weekend to get that done, and then we'll be fine."

For those between the ages of 55 and 65 at the time Bachmann's Kill Social Security Plan hypothetically passes into law, there would be a means-tested program for "those who truly need it -- the truly disadvantaged, those who truly can't go forward." For everybody else, there would be unspecified "alternatives and adjustments." Those under the age of 55 would apparently be squat out of luck, regardless of how truly disadvantaged they are. From the assembled Tea Partiers, not a discouraging word was heard, even as Bachmann outlined a plan to essentially rob them of the money they've been putting into the system all their lives.

According to a New York Times/CBS News poll conducted in April, 46 percent of Tea Party supporters fall into the 45-64 age group. (Untouched by the Bachmann plan would be the 29 percent of Tea Party supporters the poll cited as being over the age of 64.) The same survey revealed that among 47 percent of self-identified Tea Party supporters, either they or a member of their household was receiving Social Security retirement benefits. When asked whether the outlay for programs such as Social Security and Medicare are worth the taxpayer expense, 62 percent said they were.

What to do with all those freed-up dollars? Why not give them back to the corporations and wealthy individuals who bankroll the Tea Party movement? Segueing out of her nuking of the social safety net for the nation's elderly -- and stealing the payroll taxes of all those Americans who paid into Social Security over the course of their lifetimes but would never see a dime of their contributions come back to them under her plan -- Bachmann launched into a pitch for a corporatist agenda that began with her call for a roll-back of the corporate tax from its current 34 percent to 9 percent, which, according to Bachmann, would make it "one of the lowest in the industrialized world."

Actually, make that possibly the lowest in the world (excluding the handful of mostly broken nations that have none), never mind "industrialized." I mean, even Kazakhstan and Burkina Faso have higher corporate tax rates than 9 percent. And India, where all the good jobs are said to be going? Try 43 percent.

Bachmann also called for zeroing out the estate tax -- even for the very wealthiest Americans -- and repeal of the Sarbanes-Oxley law, a bill passed in the wake of the Enron scandal that sets standards for corporate accountability. What would that mean for Americans under the age of 64 whose retirement savings would be entirely invested in the private sector after the demolishing of Social Security? That the same kinds of accounting tricks and corruption that destroyed the retirement savings of thousands in the Enron caper would become standard operating procedure. Sorry, Tea Partiers -- you're screwed.

2. Ending Medicare: See No. #1, Ending Social Security. "Within seven [years], Medicare is dead, bankrupt, broke -- broke," Bachmann told the Tea Partiers. Her solution? End it for everybody but "the truly needy and the truly disabled." (I shudder to think what constitutes "truly needy" in the Bachmann moral universe.) Her solution? You can buy your own health insurance policy on the private market with pre-tax dollars. Sure, you're 70 years old: How much do you think an insurance company is going to charge you for your coverage? Pre-taxed or not, you're going to need a whole lotta dollars to make that one work for you.

But Bachmann's fans likely found comfort in her sunny optimism. "It is possible for every American to be able to retire a millionaire," Bachmann told the Tea Partiers. "It's entirely possible to do that if you plan early and you put away money -- and there are alternatives that we can put forward." Just what those "alternatives" might be were left to the audience's imagination.

3. Opposition to Internet Freedom (aka Net Neutrality). Earlier this month, news media, ranging from mainstream to righty to lefty, breathlessly reported that leaders of 35 "Tea Party" groups signed a letter to the the Federal Communications Commission in opposition to any efforts made by the FCC to "regulate the Internet." At issue is Internet freedom and potential regulations that could prevent Internet providers from saddling small-time Web sites unable to pay for an added jolt of Web juice with slower loading speeds for their sites than, say, big-money players like Google. (This is the crux of the issue in the Google-Verizon deal.) Now, Tea Party supporters fancy themselves to be rugged individualists, dedicated to the preservation of individual freedoms. But it wasn't until the big-money groups that bankroll the national organizing of the Tea Party movement began garnering opposition to Internet freedom that you began to see any of those quaint, homely signs carried at Tea Party rallies dedicated to the subject.

There's nothing wrong with feelings per se - compassion for instance is one of mankind's better qualities. The tea partiers problem seems to be a combination of being blinded by unfounded feelings and a contempt for the facts. Where were the tea party rallies when George Bush was running up the biggest deficit in history. Where were they when Bush lied us into a war in Iraq - based on lies and exaggeration - which will ultimately cost three trillion dollars. Where were the tea partiers when Republicans were letting Wall St run wild with exotic bets on the housing market and other exotic "investments"? Where was the tea party while Bush and Republican let America's infrastructure - roads, bridges, schools - fall into the worse state of disrepair in decades. Now they say America is headed in the wrong direction. Do these people even know what a good direction is.

Fox's Megyn Kelly wanted to make fun of Obama's speech on the economy

Megyn Kelly somehow heard ahead of time from anonymous "senior White House advisers" that President Obama's speech in Ohio yesterday was going to be about "his personal experiences," featuring his "grandma and grandpa". She and Rich Lowry were quick to make fun of the speech beforehand, because no one cares about his grandma.

Then, when Obama actually started speaking, she continued to push this narrative, talking over him at the start by making sure the audience knew he was going to be speaking with "a greater emphasis on his own personal history".

Well, it didn't quite turn out that way. There was only a brief mention of his personal history in the speech itself -- most of which in fact was devoted to ripping Republicans and reminding voters who got them into this mess, particularly House-Speaker-in-Waiting Boehner. I don't think Kelly was too pleased to have 40-plus minutes of her hourlong show dedicated to Obama's Republican-bashing, which may have been why she finally cut in near the end of his speech and resumed her "regular broadcast" with a dismissive sneer.

Megyn Kelly's performance was impressive. Despite the reality that was unfolding before her, she stuck to the faerie tale her and her producers dreamed up - one based on gossip she had heard at that. Fox the official propaganda channel of right-wing idiots.

Please Send Fox News to High School - Simple Arithmetic and Taxes

Please Send Fox News to High School - Simple Arithmetic and Taxes

Dick Morris, purporting to be an expert on the deficit from working in the Clinton White House, attacked President Obama for proposing to let the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans expire, claiming that "is just a method of increasing the deficit." In fact, extending tax cuts actually adds to the deficit.

Morris' economic FAIL: Letting tax cuts expire will increase the deficit

Morris: Letting Bush tax cuts for wealthy to expire is "just a method of increasing the deficit." On the September 8 edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends, Morris argued that not extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest 2 percent in America "is just a method of increasing the deficit, increasing the debt." Morris contrasted Obama's position with that of former President Bill Clinton, who "understood that the solution to the recession was to cut the deficit."
In reality, extending the tax cuts will increase the deficit

CBO estimates extending the Bush tax cuts for wealthiest Americans would cost $700 billion. According to Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates, extending all of the Bush tax cuts would reduce revenue by $2.7 trillion through 2020. Allowing the tax cuts to expire only for those making more than $200,000 a year (or couples making over $250,000) would save an estimated $700 billion:

    CBO's baseline incorporates the assumption that major provisions of EGTRRA, JGTRRA, and ARRA will expire as scheduled at the end of 2010. If those and all other tax provisions scheduled to expire during the projection period were extended through 2020 (and the AMT provisions remained unchanged), total revenues over the next decade would be $4.9 trillion lower than in the baseline, according to estimates by JCT and CBO. That estimate reflects the fact that an increase in the number of taxpayers subject to the AMT would partly offset the effect of lowering the amount of taxpayers' regular liabilities. Of that $4.9 trillion reduction, $2.7 trillion represents the impact of extending only the tax provisions enacted in EGTRRA and JGTRRA. If certain income tax provisions of those two laws were extended just for married taxpayers with income below $250,000 and single taxpayers with income below $200,000 -- as the President has proposed -- the revenue reductions would total almost $2 trillion over the 2011-2020 period. 

JCT: GOP plan "to extend tax cuts for the rich would add more than $36 billion to the federal deficit" in just one year. The Washington Post reported that "[a] Republican plan to extend tax cuts for the rich would add more than $36 billion to the federal deficit next year -- and transfer the bulk of that cash into the pockets of the nation's millionaires. ... New data from the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation show that households earning more than $1 million a year would reap nearly $31 billion in tax breaks under the GOP plan in 2011, for an average tax cut per household of about $100,000."

Orszag: It would be "particularly problematic if the high-income tax cuts are made permanent -- at a 10-year cost of more than $700 billion." In his New York Times column, former White House Office of Management and Budget director Peter Orszag explained that while he favors temporarily extending the Bush tax cuts for two years and then letting all of them expire, making the cuts for the wealthiest permanent would be "particularly problematic":

    In the face of the dueling deficits, the best approach is a compromise: extend the tax cuts for two years and then end them altogether. Ideally only the middle-class tax cuts would be continued for now. Getting a deal in Congress, though, may require keeping the high-income tax cuts, too. And that would still be worth it.

    Why does this combination make sense? The answer is that over the medium term, the tax cuts are simply not affordable. Yet no one wants to make an already stagnating jobs market worse over the next year or two, which is exactly what would happen if the cuts expire as planned.

    [...]

    Despite a dire fiscal outlook, many progressives want to make the tax cuts permanent for all but the very highest earners. Many conservatives are even worse: they'd make the tax cuts permanent for the likes of Warren Buffett, even though he'd prefer they didn't. Making all the tax cuts permanent would expand the deficit by more than $3 trillion over the next decade.

    [...]

    Finally, a key part of this deal is actually ending the tax cuts in 2013 -- and that will surely require a presidential veto on any bills to extend them after that. (Failing to follow through would be particularly problematic if the high-income tax cuts are made permanent -- at a 10-year cost of more than $700 billion.) Minimizing this risk requires as much upfront clarity and commitment as possible, including a strong and unambiguous veto threat from the president.

White House Budget calls for "Upper-Income" tax increases "devoted to deficit reduction." From the White House's proposed budget:   

CBO scores "[d]effering the scheduled increases in tax rates" as the lowest-scoring policy proposal to stimulate economy. In a January 14 report on "Policies for Increasing Economic Growth and Employment in 2010 and 2011," CBO stated:

    [P]olicies that would temporarily increase the after-tax income of people with relatively high income, such as an across-the-board reduction in income taxes or an increase in the exemption amount for the AMT, would have smaller effects [than other options] because such tax cuts would probably not affect the recipients' spending significantly. 

The report further stated that "a permanent extension [of the Bush tax cuts] would entail large revenue losses after the recovery is over."

According to a table in the report, CBO estimated that reducing income taxes in 2011 would have the  least stimulative effect of the policy options considered.

Morris forms his opinions like most conservative extremists. He feels very deeply that he has a grasp on the issues and is right. Where is the math? Where are the charts? Where are the studies that should be the foundation of a well informed opinion? Conservatives have no need for those, they have their seat of the pants feelings to guide them

The Nuts Are Ripe. Vote Republican.

Angle Again Refuses To Disavow Claims About ‘Domestic Enemies’ In Congress And ‘Second Amendment Remedies’

Among the many radical statements that Nevada GOP Senate nominee Sharron Angle has made, two that stand out are her agreement that there are “domestic enemies” in Congress, and her seeming endorsement of armed insurrection, saying “Second Amendment remedies” may be necessary if “Congress keeps going the way it is.”

As ThinkProgress has noted, Angle has refused to distance herself from either of these claims. In an interview with a Nevada radio host last month, Angle twice refused to directly respond to her “enemies” claim, saying only that Democratic policies have “definitely hurt our country.” When confronted with the “Second Amendment remedies” statement in June, Angle refused to comment, and her spokesperson eventually blocked the reporter posing the question from asking any more questions, calling him “‘an idiot’ and another term that can’t be repeated.”

In two recent interviews, Angle yet again refused to disavow her dangerous comments.

Angle does think the government has an important role to play in people's lives. If your wife, sister or mother is raped Angle thinks the government should step in to prevent pregnancies resulting from rape from being terminated.On the other hand Angle does not believe differences in political opinion should be solved at the ballot box, but by shooting one's political opponents. Which means she has a lot in common with communist dictator Josef Stalin.

Joe Miller To Nation's Babies: 'Absolutely' Social Security Will Be Gone By The Time You're Old (VIDEO)

Senate nominee Joe Miller (R-AK) thinks Social Security won't last, and believes privatizing the entitlement program might be the only way to save it.

In an interview with John King late last week on CNN, Miller said there "has got to be a move outside of the system," and said he'd want to see the federal government "transfer power back to the states so the states can take out the mantles of the programs if they so desire."

Miler, 43, said he does not expect to see "much" of what he's owed for Social Security when he retires. "Because the government has stolen from me," he said.

King pushed Miller, who won a surprise primary victory to unseat Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R) last month, to explain exactly what he meant.

Like your average conservative Miller is not above telling the most egregious lies to get elected - he's already established himself as more wacky and irresponsible than George ( there are WMD in Iraq Bush). Social Security is in good shape and only needs some slight adjustments to be there for retirees for a hundred years. Millions of Americans - seniors and the disabled rely on S. Security. Social Security is not a black hole. People use the money to pay rent, buy groceries and even gifts for their grand children. All Social Security funds eventually find their way into the pockets of business and employees of those businesses. Why does Joe Miller, a conservative Republican, want to hurt seniors and business. Why does Miller hate America.

Fox calls for repeal of the 20th century

Since President Obama's election, Fox personalities have expressed opposition to or called for the repeal of virtually every progressive achievement of the 20th century, including Social Security, Medicare, the Americans with Disabilities Act, portions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the 16th and 17th Amendments to the Constitution.

Fox is pro greed, pro corporate crime, pro trashing the 4th Amendment, but they are against progress. Fox - the official propaganda channel of the anti-American conservative movement.

Vote Republican. Going in Reverse Will Be More Fun

Vote Republican. Going in Reverse Will Be More Fun

The August unemployment numbers are ugly, yet again. Nearly 30 million Americans are still jobless or forced into part-time jobs. The Bureau of Labor Statistics official unemployment rate is 9.6%. It's borader and more telling jobless rate (U6) of 16.7% confirms that we're stuck in our own version of the Great Depression. We'll need more than 22 million new jobs to bring us back to full-employment. Happy Labor Day.

To get out of this quagmire we'll have to face up to two fundamental facts:

1. We really are in the midst of a horrific jobs crisis. All the happy talk about the economy being on the road to recovery is just plain old denial. We'll never find jobs for all the people who desperately need them until we recognize that this employment crisis poses a clear and present danger to our republic. Modern capitalist societies require full employment. When we don't have it for long periods of time, chaos ensues. What's missing in Washington is a sense of urgency. Denial is dangerous -- and an insult to the unemployed.

2. We must face up to the real causes of this mess. Unfortunately, a lot of Americans are succumbing to a wrong-headed narrative that has been pushed into our heads:

    "We Americans sank ourselves in debt. We consumed more than we produced. We bought homes we couldn't afford and used them as ATMs. Of course Wall Street did its part by offering us mortgages they knew we couldn't really afford. The government also contributed mightily by pushing Fannie and Freddie, the giant housing agencies, to underwrite "politically correct" loans to low-income residents who shouldn't have been buying homes at all. In short, we all are to blame."

From a flawed narrative always comes a flawed policy prescription:

    "The era of excess is over. We need to cut back on spending and borrowing. We need to reduce government debt by raising the Social Security retirement age and cutting social programs We've got to streamline our public sector by laying off public employees and cutting back their lavish pensions. And all workers will have to adjust to an era of intense foreign competition: We've got to reduce our wage and benefit demands if our companies are going to compete globally. We have to live within our means."

In short, we gorged ourselves until the economy crashed. Now we've got to tighten our belts and accept less to get it going again. It's simple and logical and.....dead wrong.

Collective guilt is always seductive. It may even be programmed into our genes. It's possible that prehistoric homo sapiens survived by sharing blame in difficult times. But that soothing instinct does not serve us well today. We need to know the truth behind this crisis if we're going to come close to solving it.

For starters, "we" didn't create this mess. Wall Street did, with the help of politicians who pushed through financial deregulation and an increasingly regressive tax structure that put outrageous sums of money in the hands of a few. Freed from regulations and flooded with money, Wall Street bankers went crazy. And before long, our economy crashed.

It really is that simple. Starting in the late 1970s our country embarked on a grand real-time experiment to "unleash" the economy from government rules and oversight. The theory was that to end the era of "stagflation," we had to cut taxes on the super-rich, freeing them to lead a gargantuan investment boom that would of course lift all boats. At the same time, the financial sector was liberated from its New Deal-era shackles. Yes, those constraints had prevented a financial crash for more than 40 years. But now, argued the best and the brightest, the new world order required a more nimble financial sector. Naturally, the markets could police themselves.

In retrospect it seems like a very bad joke.

Actually, the plan did work beautifully for the top one percent of us. In fact, these excessively wealthy people laughed all the way to the bank. America's distribution of income, which had been reasonably equitable during the post WWII era, flew apart. In 1970 the top 100 CEOs earned about $45 for every dollar earned by the average worker. By 2008 it was $1,081 to one.

With so much wealth in hand, the super-rich literally ran out of tangible goods and service industries to invest in. There simply was too much capital seeking too few real investments. And what a honey pot that proved to be for Wall Street's financial engineers! Freed from any limits on constructing complex new financial products, hedge funds and too-big-to-fail banks and investment houses created an alphabet soup of new securities with the sky-high yields the super-rich craved. The rating agencies abetted the crime by blessing these flimsy products with AA and AAA ratings.

Wall Street built this flim-flam of finance out of junk debt -- like sub-prime mortgages -- which it could pool, slice, and resell for enormous profits. In fact, selling these bogus securities was the most profitable enterprise in the history of Wall Street. Wall Street wrapped credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations into pretty packages so that they could literally sell the same underlying junk assets again and again. It was through these marvelous feats of financial engineering that a $300 billion sub-prime crisis turned into a multi-trillion dollar catastrophe. (Check out The Looting of America for all the gory details.) And that's how, the big bankers -- not us -- pumped up the biggest housing bubble in history. Wall Street didn't need Fannie or Freddie or low-income homebuyers. It just needed deregulation, a lot of super-rich people with money to burn, and junk debt it could spin into AAA gold.

The whole scheme worked just fine as long as the underlying collateral (our homes) appreciated year after year. But as soon as housing prices peaked, it was game over. The upside-down pyramid of debt and junk financial instruments came crashing down. The entire credit system froze, tearing a gaping hole in the real economy. Eight million jobs were destroyed in a matter of months.

The cause of the crash is no mystery. The Great Depression happened the same way: a skewed distribution of income combined with a deregulated financial sector created a big bubble, and it burst. The only way to break the cycle is to attack those fundamental causes -- we need to move money from the very top of the income ladder to the middle and the bottom, and we need to tie Wall Street up in regulatory knots.

Through steep progressive taxes on the super-wealthy, fair income taxes on hedge funds and transaction fees on Wall Street's proprietary trading, we can keep that bubble from reinflating -- and in the process raise the money we need to put America back to work. With the revenue we collect, we can hire millions of people to weatherize homes and buildings and rebuild our infrastructure. Instead of laying off teachers we can hire more, and provide them with better training and support. We can expand universities and colleges too, and allow people to go to college for free, which will improve our peoples' skills -- and keep young people off the unemployment rolls.

All of that sounds it it requires some thoughtful consideration, which right-wing conservatives don't do. It all sounds like it would require some work and patience, but Republicans have taught America that being lazy and crazy pays off. Republicans have taught America that one should never apologize and admit wrong, but instead to double down on the proto-fascism that Republicans pass off as patriotism.

Republicans cannot win the war of ideas so no wonder they're buying votes - Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina: Why Ex-Tech CEOs Make Dangerous Politicians

Social Security Commission Seems to Hate Your Grandchildren and Veterans

Social Security Commission Seems to Hate Your Grandchildren and Veterans

The President's Deficit Commission is designed to be as anti-democratic and un-transparent as possible.  Its work is done in total secrecy.  It is filled with behind-the-scenes political and corporate operatives who steadfastly refuse to talk to the public about what they're doing.  Its recommendations will be released in December, right after the election, to ensure that its proposals are shielded from public anger.  And the House has passed a non-binding resolution calling for an up-or-down/no-amendments vote on the Commission's recommendations, long considered the key tactic to ensuring its enactment.  The whole point of the Commission is that the steps which Washington wants to take -- particularly cuts in popular social programs, such as Social Security -- can occur only if they are removed as far as possible from democratic accountability.  As the economist James Galbraith put it when testifying before the Commission in July:

    Your proceedings are clouded by illegitimacy. . . . First, most of your meetings are secret, apart from two open sessions before this one, which were plainly for show. There is no justification for secret meetings on deficit reduction. No secrets of any kind are involved. . . .

    Second, that some members of the commission are proceeding from fixed, predetermined agendas. Third, that the purpose of the secrecy is to defer public discussion of cuts in Social Security and Medicare until after the 2010 elections. You could easily dispel these suspicions by publishing video transcripts of all of your meetings on the Internet, and by holding all future meetings in public . . .

    Conflicts of interest constitute the fourth major problem. The fact that the Commission has accepted support from Peter G. Peterson, a man who has for decades conducted a relentless campaign to cut Social Security and Medicare, raises the most serious questions.

That's why Commission co-chair Alan Simpson -- with his blunt contempt for Social Security and and other benefit programs (such as aid to disabled veterans) and his acknowledged eagerness to slash them -- has done the country a serious favor.  His recent outbursts have unmasked this Commission and shed light on its true character.  Unlike his fellow Commission members, who imperiously dismiss public inquiries into what they're doing as though they're annoying and inappropriate, Simpson -- to his genuine credit -- has been aggressively engaging critics, making it impossible to ignore what the Commission is really up to.  

In June, he walked out of a Commission meeting and proceeded to engage in an amazingly informative, 8-minute colloquy streaming in real time on the front page of FDL, making unambiguously clear that the Commission is working to cut Social Security benefits.  And over the last several weeks, he has used increasingly flamboyant rhetoric to attack both defenders of Social Security and the program itself, as well as even attacking wounded veterans for failing to sacrifice enough by giving up some of their benefits.  Whatever one thinks of Simpson's remarks, I prefer his public, engaged candor to the extreme, arrogant secrecy of his fellow Members.

Simpson is a millionaire who has not done an honest days work in his life. Social Security is not in trouble. Some relatively minor adjustments would shore up Social Security for a hundred years. Like many conservative millionaires Simpson and other commission members are out of touch with average American seniors and the disabled. he has no business on a commission which is supposed to be unbiased. he has already decided those collected Social Security are a burden on society.

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