When white people do it. When brown people do it.

Earth First! Dances on Governor’s Table in Montana Tar Sands Protest

I'm not sure if this type of direct action will do much good.

Earth First! Dances on Governor’s Table in Tar Sands Protest

Like activist judges? Then you’ll love the balanced budget amendment.

Brad Plumer gives a run down of the really bad idea being touted by tea party Republicans right now:

One of the big unanswered questions about a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution — the new favorite policy of tea party types everywhere — is how it would even work in practice. Sure, the basics are easy to understand: Orrin Hatch and Mike Lee’s proposed amendment in the Senate, for instance, says that spending can’t exceed revenue for a given fiscal year, and spending can’t go above 18 percent of GDP, unless a two-thirds majority of the House and Senate approves. (There’s a war exception.) But how would this rule actually be enforced?

Lee’s bill, for one, would allow any member of Congress to file a lawsuit if a budget violates the Constitution. “The bar for a lawsuit would be pretty low,” explains Doug Kendall of the Constitutional Accountability Center. So take an easy case: Congress passes a budget that either runs a deficit or tries to hide the deficit through accounting tricks. Jim DeMint gets annoyed and files a lawsuit. The courts could order an injunction and block the spending bills — which could, in turn, shut down the government unless Congress scrambles to fix it. (And, given that the Congress needs a two-thirds majority to raise taxes or run a deficit, “scrambling” might be a tall order.)

But it doesn’t stop there. The court could also just step in and make decisions about what exactly to cut, in order to bring the budget in line with the Constitution. In Hatch and Lee’s proposal, the courts couldn’t order tax increases, but they could mandate specific cuts. “They’d have a lot of latitude,” says Kendall. “Do they start setting budgetary policy? Which wars we fight, which veterans we provide for, whether Grandma gets her Social Security benefits — these are the choices we’d be authorizing the court to make.” It seems preposterous, but nothing would bar Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg from donning green eyeshades, breaking out their adding calculators and going through the budget line by line. If you love judicial activism, you’ll love this provision.

It doesn’t stop there, either. Say Congress does obey the new amendment and passes a balanced budget that relies on certain projections for revenue. Now say that midway through the fiscal year, there’s an economic downturn, tax receipts fall unexpectedly and unemployment benefits go up. Deficit! What then? Congress would have to pass immediate (and likely steep) cuts and/or tax hikes. Otherwise, the courts step in. Another problem: Congress, remember, passes appropriations bills in chunks. What if, say, the defense spending bill is the last one passed and is the thing that nudges federal spending over the 18 percent mark? “Do they then strike down the defense bill?” Kendall asks. “Or do they go strike down something else? How do they make that choice?”

And it’s no use pretending that these decisions would be made swiftly — especially because, as Lee’s spokesman has conceded, the amendment doesn’t bar citizen suits. As Robert Bork (yep, that Robert Bork) wrote way back in 1984, this could create a nightmare scenario: “The result … would likely be hundreds, if not thousands, of lawsuits around the country, many of them on inconsistent theories and providing inconsistent results. By the time the Supreme Court straightened the whole matter out, the budget in question would be at least four years out of date and lawsuits involving the next three fiscal years would be slowly climbing toward the Supreme Court.”

“But wait,” you say. “Don’t most states have balanced budget requirements? Why don’t they don’t ever run into this absurd situation?” Luckily, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities took a detailed look at this question years ago. The short answer is that state laws aren’t nearly as strict as a federal balanced budget amendment would be (states can borrow money for their capital budgets, which is used for infrastructure spending, and many states actually do run short-term deficits in their operating budgets throughout the year). No state has to deal with anything like what Republicans are proposing. We’d be in truly uncharted territory.

How to keep up with news and information on the web

A friend asked me a while back how I keep up with news and find all the information that I'm always posting on my blog/facebook/twitter.

You have to use an RSS feed aggregator.  

I use google reader though you can do a websearch for a list of other feed readers

Here is a quick easy to understand Youtube video on what an RSS feed is.

Here are four of my "must reads":

Beat the Press:  Its a blog written by economist Dean Baker over at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Its fantastic because it fact checks of news articles in major newspapers and  puts important economic issues in to very readable english and not economic goobly goop the policy wonks use.  If you want to understand the economy you have to read this blog.

Plug this link into your feed reader to subscribe: http://feeds.feedburner.com/beat_the_press

Talking Points Memo.  Its an online news organization/political blog.  

Plug this link into your feed reader to subscribe:  http://feeds.feedburner.com/talking-points-memo

Ezra Klein -- He's a writer that focuses on Economics and politics over at the Washington Post.

Plug this link into your feed reader:  http://feeds.washingtonpost.com/rss/rss_ezra-klein 

Political Insider with Jim Galloway:  Its a political blog over at the AJC that focuses on GA politics.  A must read for anyone in Georgia.

Plug this link into your feed reader:  http://blogs.ajc.com/political-insider-jim-galloway/feed/

I follow about 150 feeds---websites, think tanks, newspapers from all over the globe, blogs.  Your favorite site probably has a rss feed.  It will save you time and will keep you up to date on items right as they hit the web.  But even if you just add your local newspaper and a few of other sites it will help you save time and catch up on the news quickly.

If you want to follow my blog you can plug this into your feed reader:  http://jimnichols.posterous.com/

The Clearest Sign That Boehner's Bill Will Pass the House

Joshua Green:

 If you listen to Eric Cantor or any of the self-styled Tea Party Republicans pushing the country to the brink of default, they claim to be motivated by an unshakeable fealty to the principle that spending must be cut and must be cut right now -- damn the consequences. They appeared serious enough that John Boehner was forced to pull his debt-ceiling bill last night because it cut too little and did not have the votes to pass. 

But it seems that was all for show. This morning, at a closed-door session, most of the Republican caucus apparently exploded in anger at a staffer for the conservative Republican Study Committee, Paul Teller, who had been rallying support against some of the weaker-willed members who were preparing to support Boehner's plan. Here's how

 

Politico described the scene:

 

House Republicans on Wednesday morning were calling for the firing of the Republican Study Committee top staffer after he was caught sending e-mails to conservative groups urging them to pressure GOP lawmakers to vote against a debt proposal from Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio).

Infuriated by the e-mails from Paul Teller, the executive director of the RSC, members started chanting "Fire him, fire him!" while Teller stood silently at a closed-door meetings of House Republicans.

"It was an unbelievable moment," said one GOP insider. "I've never seen anything like it."

 

This sounds like something out of Lord of the Flies -- only the anger was not unleashed on behalf of the conservative principle of holding the line on spending (a struggle that Teller's wing of the party has plainly been winning). Instead, it was directed at the one person who clearly did mean exactly what his party has been saying and was willing to fight for it. If Republican House members had any convictions at all, Teller would get a medal and a promotion. It speaks volumes about what Republicans really believe -- and confirms every Tea Party suspicion about Washington insiders selling them out -- that this is how they behave in private. There can't really be much doubt, at this point, that Boehner's bill sails through the House. 

UPDATE: A fairly prominent movement conservative just sent me this note:

 

This is infuriating. And you are absolutely correct -- this highlights everything that is wrong with the Republican Party. Instead of spending the morning in their conference meeting deciding how to avert the disaster of a AAA downgrade (which the Boehner plan will not do), they were dicking around like middle schoolers ganging up on the the least powerful person in the room.

If they are trying to spawn a third party they are doing a damn good job.

Eff these morons.

 

Obama's speech

Obama's speech was the last straw for me.  This morning after work I contacted the Chair of the Democratic Committee here in Henry County and resigned my seat on the committee.  To be fair it was more of the reaction that came from local Democratic action before the speech as well as their new found passion after the speech--as if all of a sudden now was the time to contact their Representative that broke the figurative camels back.   

A real political party would have been pounding the pavement and sending out calls to action from their county parties to educate voters on what was going on.  Demand that Obama take Social Security and other cuts off the table and demand a clean bill.  Political Parties are political machines.  The fact that Obama came out in the speech and pretended both parties were partially at fault---because thats what the polls tell him he should say-- was just one more example of his preference for being President rather than being a leader.

This "debt criris" is a fabricated emergency and anyone paying attention knows it.  The nation isn't going broke--we have a long term (public and private sector) health care spending issue not a government spending problem.  But the silence from Democratic leaders--elected and otherwise--tells me the belonging as a member is not something I can stomach; just don't have the heart.

I'll of coarse stay engaged and will look to find local candidates to work for--they'll inevitably be running on the Democratic ticket as its the reality of the political situation.

But for now i've got to back away from a party that toes the line and  jumps when a Democratic President says jump.  Its just not a good idea.  Sometimes you are standing at the edge of a cliff.  All of this is so similar to the run up to the Iraq War.  The silence from Democratic leaders in this state over the past few weeks has been deafening.  I'm going to fold for a few hands. 

"Madness is rare in individuals - but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule."  --Friedrich Nietzsche

The Cult That Is Destroying America

Paul Krugman:

Watching our system deal with the debt ceiling crisis — a wholly self-inflicted crisis, which may nonetheless have disastrous consequences — it’s increasingly obvious that what we’re looking at is the destructive influence of a cult that has really poisoned our political system.

And no, I don’t mean the fanaticism of the right. Well, OK, that too. But my feeling about those people is that they are what they are; you might as well denounce wolves for being carnivores. Crazy is what they do and what they are.

No, the cult that I see as reflecting a true moral failure is the cult of balance, of centrism.

Think about what’s happening right now. We have a crisis in which the right is making insane demands, while the president and Democrats in Congress are bending over backward to be accommodating — offering plans that are all spending cuts and no taxes, plans that are far to the right of public opinion.

So what do most news reports say? They portray it as a situation in which both sides are equally partisan, equally intransigent — because news reports always do that. And we have influential pundits calling out for a new centrist party, a new centrist president, to get us away from the evils of partisanship.

The reality, of course, is that we already have a centrist president — actually a moderate conservative president. Once again, health reform — his only major change to government — was modeled on Republican plans, indeed plans coming from the Heritage Foundation. And everything else — including the wrongheaded emphasis on austerity in the face of high unemployment — is according to the conservative playbook.

What all this means is that there is no penalty for extremism; no way for most voters, who get their information on the fly rather than doing careful study of the issues, to understand what’s really going on.

You have to ask, what would it take for these news organizations and pundits to actually break with the convention that both sides are equally at fault? This is the clearest, starkest situation one can imagine short of civil war. If this won’t do it, nothing will.

And yes, I think this is a moral issue. The “both sides are at fault” people have to know better; if they refuse to say it, it’s out of some combination of fear and ego, of being unwilling to sacrifice their treasured pose of being above the fray.

It’s a terrible thing to watch, and our nation will pay the price.

Obama’s Scare Tactics to Get Democrats to Vote for His Republican Wall Street Plan

Michael Hudson over at Naked Capitalism on Obama's scare tactics:

You know that the debt kerfuffle is as staged as melodramatically as a World Wrestling Federation exhibition when Mr. Obama makes the blatantly empty threat that if Congress does not “tackle the tough challenges of entitlement and tax reform,” there won’t be money to pay Social Security checks next month. In his debt speech last night (July 25), he threatened that if “we default, we would not have enough money to pay all of our bills – bills that include monthly Social Security checks, veterans’ benefits, and the government contracts we’ve signed with thousands of businesses.”

This is not remotely true. But it has become the scare theme for over a week now, ever since the President used almost the same words in his interview with CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley.

Of course the government will have enough money to pay the monthly Social Security checks. The Social Security administration has its own savings – in Treasury bills. I realize that lawyers (such as Mr. Obama and indeed most American presidents) rarely understand economics. But this is a legal issue. Mr. Obama certainly must know that Social Security is solvent, with liquid securities to pay for many decades to come. Yet Mr. Obama has put Social Security at the very top of his hit list!

The most reasonable explanation for his empty threat is that he is trying to panic the elderly into hoping that somehow the budget deal he seems to have up his sleeve can save them. The reality, of course, is that they are being led to economic slaughter. (And not a word of correction reminding the President of financial reality from Rubinomics Treasury Secretary Geithner, neoliberal Fed Chairman Bernanke or anyone else in the Wall Street Democrat administration, formerly known as the Democratic Leadership Council.)

It is a con. Mr. Obama has come to bury Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, not to save them. This was clear from the outset of his administration when he appointed his Deficit Reduction Commission, headed by avowed enemies of Social Security Republican Senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming, and President Clinton’s Rubinomics chief of staff Erskine Bowles. Mr. Obama’s more recent choice of Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats be delegated by Congress to rewrite the tax code on a bipartisan manner – so that it cannot be challenged – is a ploy to pass a tax “reform” that democratically elected representatives never could be expected to do.

The devil is always in the details. And Wall Street lobbyists always have such details tucked away in their briefcases to put in the hands of their favored congressmen and dedicated senators. And in this case they have the President, who has taken their advice as to whom to appoint as his cabinet to act as factotums to capture the government on their behalf and create “socialism for the rich.”

There is no such thing, of course. When governments are run by the rich, it is called oligarchy. Plato’s dialogues made clear that rather than viewing societies as democracies or oligarchies, it was best to view them in motion. Democracies tended to polarize economically (mainly between creditors and debtors) into oligarchies. These in turn tended to make themselves into hereditary aristocracies. In time, leading families would fight among themselves, and one group (such as Kleisthenes in Athens in 507 BC) would “take the people into his party” and create a democracy. And so the eternal political triangle would go on.

This is what is happening today. Instead of enjoying what the Progressive Era anticipated – an evolution into “socialism,” with government providing basic infrastructure and other needs on a subsidized basis – we are seeing a lapse back into neo-feudalism. The difference, of course, is that this time around society is not controlled by military grabbers of the land. Finance today achieves what military force did in times past. Instead of being tied to the land as under feudalism, families today may live wherever they want – as long as they take on a lifetime of debt to pay the mortgage on whatever home they buy.

And instead of society paying land rent and tribute to conquerors, we pay the bankers. Just as access to the land was a precondition for families to feed themselves under feudalism, one needs access to credit, to water, medical care, pensions or Social Security and other basic needs today – and must pay interest, fees and monopoly rent to the neo-feudal oligarchy that is now making its deft move from the United States to Ireland and Greece.

The U.S. Government has spent $13 trillion in financial bailouts since Lehman Bros. failed in September 2008. But Mr. Obama warns that thirty years from now, the Social Security fund may run a $1 trillion deficit. It is to ward it off that he urges dismantling the plans for such payments now.

It seems that the $13 trillion used up all the money the government really has. The banks and Wall Street firms have taken the money and run. There is not enough to pay for Social Security, Medicare or other social spending that the Blue Dog Democrats and Republicans now plan to cut.

Not right away. The plan will be to “paper over” the current crisis by delegating the plans to a “Deficit Reduction Commission #2,” appointed from Congressional members.

Finally, we have “Change we can believe in.” Real change is always surprising, after all.

The faux crisis

Usually a crisis is needed to create a vacuum into which these toxic details are fed. Wall Street does not like real crises, of course – except to make quick computer-driven speculative gains on the usual fibrillation of today’s zigzagging markets. But when it comes to serious money, the illusion of a crisis is preferred, staged melodramatically to wring the greatest degree of emotion out of the audience much like a good film editor edits a montage sequence. Will the speeding train run over the girl strapped to the tracks? Will she escape in time?

The train is debt; the girl is supposed to be the American economy. But she turns out to be Wall Street in disguise. The exercise turns out to be a not-so-divine comedy. Mr. Obama offers a plan that looks very Republican. But the Republicans say no. There is an illusion of a real fight. They say Obama is socialist.

Democrats express shock at the giveaway being threatened. Many say, “Where is the real Obama?” But it seems that the real Obama turns out to be a Republican Wall Street imposter in Democratic clothing. That is what the Democratic Leadership Committee basically is: Wall Street Democrats.

This is not as much of an oxymoron as it may sound. There is a reason why today’s post-Clinton Democrats are the natural party to undo what FDR and earlier Democrats stood for. A Democratic Senate never would stand for such giveaways to Wall Street and double-cross of their urban constituency if a Republican president would propose what Mr. Obama is putting before them.

Here’s what the next Republican presidential candidate can say: “You know that whatever we Republicans want, Mr. Obama will support us. If you don’t want a Republican policy, they you should vote for me for president. Because a Democratic Congress will oppose a Republican policy if we propose it. But if Mr. Obama proposes it, congress will be de-toothed, and cannot resist.”

It’s the same story in Britain, where the Labour Party is called upon to finish up the job that the Conservatives start but need New Labour to subdue popular opposition to privatizing the railroads and a Public/Private Partnership financial giveaway for the London tube line. And it’s the same story in France, where a Socialist government is supporting the privatization program dictated by the European Central Bank.

Round up the usual fallacies

Whenever one finds government officials and the media repeating an economic error as an incessant mantra, there always is a special interest at work. The financial sector in particular seeks to wrong-foot voters into believing that the economy will be plunged into crisis of Wall Street does not get its way – usually by freeing it from taxes and deregulating it.

Mr. Obama’s first fallacy is that the government budget is like a family budget. But families can’t write IOUs and have the rest of the world treat it as money. Only governments can do that. It is a privilege that the banks would now like to obtain – the ability to create credit freely on their computer keyboards, and charge interest for what is almost free, and what governments can indeed create for free. (That is the State Theory of Money. See the UMKC Economics Blog.)

“Now, every family knows that a little credit card debt is manageable. But if we stay on the current path, our growing debt could cost us jobs and do serious damage to the economy.” But economies need government money to grow – and this money is provided by running federal budget deficits. This has been the essence of Keynesian counter-cyclical spending for more than half a century. Until the present, it was Democratic Party policy.

It’s true that Pres. Clinton ran a budget surplus. The economy survived by the commercial banking system supplying the credit needed to grow – at interest. To force the economy back into this reliance on Wall Street rather than on government, the government needs to stop running budget deficits. The economy will then have a choice: to shrink sharply, or to turn almost all the economic surplus over to banks as economic rent on their credit-creation privilege.

Mr. Obama also pretends that credit ratings agencies are able to act as mascots for their clients, the large financial underwriters, by making the entire economy pay even higher interest rates on its credit cards and banks. “For the first time in history,” Mr. Obama dissembled, “our country’s Triple A credit rating would be downgraded, leaving investors around the world to wonder whether the United States is still a good bet. Interest rates would skyrocket on credit cards, mortgages, and car loans, which amounts to a huge tax hike on the American people.”

The reality is that running a budget surplus would increase interest rates, by forcing the economy into captivity to the banking system. The Obama administration is now deep into its Orwellian rhetorical phase.

Why Wall Street needs Obama Democrats to shepherd Rubinomics #2 through Congress

During Mr. Obama’s speech I could not help feeling that I had heard it all before. And then I remembered. Back in 2008, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson sought to counter Sheila Bair’s argument that all FDIC-insured depositors would be able to ride out the September crisis, with only the reckless gamblers losing the gains they hoped to make on their free credit. “If the financial system were allowed to collapse,” he warned in his Reagan Library speech, “it is the American people who would pay the price. This never has been just about the banks; it has always been about continued prosperity and opportunity for all Americans.”

But of course, it is all about the banks! Wall Street knows that to get sufficient Congressional votes to roll back the New Deal, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, a Democratic president needs to be in office. A Democratic Congress would block any Republican president trying to make the kind of cuts that Mr. Obama is sponsoring. But Congressional Democratic opposition is paralyzed when President Obama himself – the liberal president par excellence, America’s Tony Blair – acts as cheerleader for cutting back entitlements and other social spending.

So just as the City of London backed Britain’s Labour Party in taking over when the Conservative Party could not take such radical steps as privatizing the railroads and London tube system, and just as Iceland’s Social Democrats sought to plunge the economy into debt peonage to Britain and Holland, and the Greek Socialist Party is leading the fight for privatization and bank bailouts, so in the United States the Democratic Party is to deliver its constituency – urban labor, especially the racial minorities and the poor who are most injured by Pres. Obama’s austerity plan – to Wall Street.

So Mr. Obama is doing what any good demagogue does: delivering his constituency to his campaign contributors on Wall Street. Yves Smith has aptly called it Obama’s “Nixon goes to China moment in reverse.”

The Republicans help by refraining from putting forth a credible alternative presidential candidate. The effect is to give Mr. Obama room to move far to the right wing of the political spectrum. Far enough so that it is his own Democrats who are most intent on scaling back Social Security, not the Republicans.

This is done most easily under pressure of near panic. This worked after September 1008 with TARP, after all. The Wall Street bailout melodrama should be viewed as a dress rehearsal for today’s debt-ceiling non-crisis.

Econbrowser: The Bonds of August

Welcome to unknown economic territory.

On a positive note the Gauls didn't sack Rome for a number of years after the decline of the Roman Empire. We'll be fine and will leave the mess we've made to generations down the road. The sky won't fall tomorrow but cracks erode away at the heart of our Empire.

In just one sentence you get a glimpse of how we reached this point...

Too Painful To Watch | Talking Points Memo

Probably too much to ask that the cable nets bring on guests with expertise on the budget or on economics to provide insight and perspective on a budget and economics story.

A Republic can't function without quality journalism/media watchdog that educates and informs...