Sara Robinson gave me permission to post the following ... about her home town of Bishop, CA:
In my mind’s eye, I can walk up and down Main Street of my hometown as it was 30 years ago and easily name 50 thriving small businesses, each of which was supporting at least one middle-class family, often two or three (and I can usually name the families, too, because one of them was mine). On the profits they made from these businesses, these families were able to own nice middle-class houses, send their kids to college, take vacations, buy new cars, and generally live the American Dream as we understood it then.
Several things happened to put an end to that. First, K-mart moved into town, and in short order shut down several of the sporting goods stores, at least one book store, one family-owned pharmacy, two hardware stores (one of which had been in business since 1888), the local dairy, and a couple of dozen other core businesses. The result was a significant loss of middle-class, independent jobs, which were only partly replaced by the deeply inferior $6.50/hour jobs offered at the new store.
The next was that the Berlin Wall fell, which led two years later to the closing of the Union Carbide mine that was the biggest employer in town. Seven hundred union jobs in a town of 5,000 — poof. Suddenly, the US decided that having a domestic source of strategic metals like tungsten, molybdenum, and vanadium was no longer a security necessity; now, was OK to depend on Russia and China for these things, especially if their miners got paid a quarter what ours did. Losing the mine and the related jobs also cost us another big chunk of Main Street.
This one-two punch set the stage for the third plague, which of course was the meth epidemic that came along just after the mine closed.
In my small-town experience, big corporations give (as Carbide did for 50 years) and big corporations also take away (as both Carbide and K-Mart did in the late 80s). But the ultimate effect was to turn my town from a comfortable, optimistic middle-class American town to a working-class trailer-park meth-fueled hell where nobody can get a job that pays a living wage unless they’re running a lab in their garage. “Home” as I knew it has been gone for 20 years.Read the whole thing here.
A middle income household making between about $64,000 and $110,000 would get hit with an average tax increase of about $4,300, lowering its after-tax income by more than 6 percent and increasing its average federal tax rate (including income, payroll, estate and its share of the corporate income tax) from 18.8 percent to 23.7 percent. By contrast, a taxpayer in the top 0.1% (who makes more than $2.7 million) would enjoy an average tax cut of nearly$1.4 million, increasing his after-tax income by nearly 27 percent. His average effective tax rate would be cut almost in half to 17.9 percent. In Cain’s world, a typical household making more than $2.7 million would pay a smaller share of its income in federal taxes than one making less than $18,000. This would give Warren Buffet severe heartburn.My gosh, I'm surprised.
The Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust Company was at one time the seventh-largest bank in the United States as measured by deposits with approximately $40 billion in assets. In 1984, Continental Illinois became the largest ever bank failure in U.S. history, when a run on the bank led to its seizure by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). Continental Illinois retained this dubious distinction until the failure of Washington Mutual in 2008 during the financial crisis of 2008, which ended up being over seven times larger than the failure of Continental Illinois.Now, as you can see, it is renamed the Bank of America building.
The top 1 percent of New Yorkers pay over 40 percent of all income taxes, providing huge benefits to everyone in our city and state .... Paulson & Company and its employees have paid hundreds of millions in New York City and New York State taxes in recent years and have created over 100 high-paying jobs in New York City since its formation. [My emphasis.]Are you surprised to learn that Paulson employees are major contributors to the coffers of John Boehner?
... was filled with horses and riders inextricably heaped together. Terrible entanglement. There were no longer slopes to the road; dead bodies filled it even with the plain, and came to the edge of the banks like a well-measured bushel of barley. A mass of dead above, a river of blood below....As night falls on the battlefield, a lone figure is seen making its way among the corpses.
He looked about. He passed an indescribably hideous review of the dead. He walked with his feet in blood.
Suddenly he stopped.This is our introduction to Thénardier, or "The Master of the House," as he's known in the popular musical made from the book.
A few steps before him, in the sunken road, at a point where the mound of corpses ended, from under this mass of men and horses appeared an open hand, lighted by the moon.
This hand had something upon a finger which sparkled: it was a gold ring.
The man stooped down, remained a moment, and when he rose again there was no ring upon that hand.
And now it’s all coming to a head. We’re not talking about a crisis that will unfold over a year or two; this thing could come apart in a matter of days. And if it does, the whole world will suffer.
Did the euro just enter its death throes?Krugman's summary of De Grauwe's paper can be found here. Take a look at it; it's very instructive.
OK, I know that sounds over the top, and I hope it is. But recent developments are really, really bad.
The best guide to recent events is actually a paper written this spring, by Paul De Grauwe (pdf). I have to admit that when I first read De Grauwe’s paper I didn’t grasp the full force of his argument about liquidity crises; but he now looks absolutely prescient.
The key point, which I’ve finally taken fully on board, is that in addition to the huge problems of adjustment created by a rigid exchange rate in the aftermath of a bubble, the fact that European nations no longer have their own currencies leaves them vulnerable to self-fulfilling debt crises – in effect bank runs on governments rather than banks (although those too).
To head off this risk, somebody – the EFSF, the ECB, whatever – has to be ready to act as lender of last resort; Eurobonds would have served much the same purpose.
By resigning from the ECB, Juergen Stark has conveyed, deliberately or not, the message that there will be no such lender of last resort, that there isn’t enough political cohesion in the eurozone to stand behind countries under market attack. And this translates directly into soaring spreads for Spain and Italy; the self-fulfilling crisis is on.
You little know, my friends, with how little wisdom the world is governed.
To those millions of Americans who have finally begun paying attention to politics and watched with exasperation the tragicomedy of the debt ceiling extension, it may have come as a shock that the Republican Party is so full of lunatics. To be sure, the party, like any political party on earth, has always had its share of crackpots, like Robert K. Dornan or William E. Dannemeyer. But the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital center today: Steve King, Michele Bachman (now a leading presidential candidate as well), Paul Broun, Patrick McHenry, Virginia Foxx, Louie Gohmert, Allen West. The Congressional directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy. It was this cast of characters and the pernicious ideas they represent that impelled me to end a nearly 30-year career as a professional staff member on Capitol Hill.And:
It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe. This trend has several implications, none of them pleasant.And:
A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress's generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.And:
The media are also complicit in this phenomenon. Ever since the bifurcation of electronic media into a more or less respectable "hard news" segment and a rabidly ideological talk radio and cable TV political propaganda arm, the "respectable" media have been terrified of any criticism for perceived bias. Hence, they hew to the practice of false evenhandedness. Paul Krugman has skewered this tactic as being the "centrist cop-out." "I joked long ago," he says, "that if one party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines would read 'Views Differ on Shape of Planet.'"And:
Ever since Republicans captured the majority in a number of state legislatures last November, they have systematically attempted to make it more difficult to vote: by onerous voter ID requirements (in Wisconsin, Republicans have legislated photo IDs while simultaneously shutting Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) offices in Democratic constituencies while at the same time lengthening the hours of operation of DMV offices in GOP constituencies); by narrowing registration periods; and by residency requirements that may disenfranchise university students. This legislative assault is moving in a diametrically opposed direction to 200 years of American history, when the arrow of progress pointed toward more political participation by more citizens. Republicans are among the most shrill in self-righteously lecturing other countries about the wonders of democracy; exporting democracy (albeit at the barrel of a gun) to the Middle East was a signature policy of the Bush administration. But domestically, they don't want those people voting.And finally:
The GOP cult of Ayn Rand is both revealing and mystifying. On the one hand, Rand's tough guy, every-man-for-himself posturing is a natural fit because it puts a philosophical gloss on the latent sociopathy so prevalent among the hard right. On the other, Rand exclaimed at every opportunity that she was a militant atheist who felt nothing but contempt for Christianity. Apparently, the ignorance of most fundamentalist "values voters" means that GOP candidates who enthuse over Rand at the same time they thump their Bibles never have to explain this stark contradiction.I swear I did not write that column. Mike Lofgren is a real person, a 30-year Republican staffer. The Republican Party is very sick right now.
In Romney's defense, most people who make $200,000 a year think they're middle income, and would be offended if he called them anything else.From Mitt Romney, explaining step 3 of his 59-step plan to get to get America back to work:
You know, of course, Greta, who has been most hurt by the Obama economy. And it's people in middle incomes. And so what I want to do is lower taxes for middle-income Americans. And so I will remove, for middle-income Americans, people earning under $200,000 a year, any tax on interest, dividends or capital gains. Let people save their money and use their money as they feel best with education, with their future, planning for retirement. Look, we've got to reduce the burden on middle-income Americans. They're just — they're just struggling right now.I'm not sure which is more breathtaking: Romney's suggestion that someone earning $200,000 is "middle income," or his implication that actual middle-income Americans have more than a minuscule amount of investment income in the first place.
For the record, in 2004 the Tax Policy Center estimated that a median earner would save a whopping $70 if taxes on interest, dividends, and capital gains were eliminated completely. That's right: $70. Seven zero.
Of course, Romney has paired up this proposal with another one to eliminate the estate tax completely, which would save median earners zero dollars but save the super rich millions. The cynicism here is almost off the charts.
Experts and watchdog groups say the W Spann case highlights broader disclosure problems in the post-Citizens United era. One issue is whether corporations could be used as a vehicle for anonymous donations from foreign nationals. While only Americans can legally contribute, the FEC's three Republican commissioners have blocked efforts to craft rules defining exactly how this applies to corporations, who may be partially owned by foreign entities or may be an American subsidiary of a foreign company. Politico's Ben Smith noted on Thursday that the issue is particularly relevant to "Restore Our Future" because, unlike anonymous-money nonprofits like Karl Rove's "Crossroads GPS," Super PACs only report their contributions to the FEC and not to the more aggressive IRS.That such a donation could be made by foreign nationals – including foreigners who want to institute Sharia Law in the U.S. (snicker) – is just half the problem.
It’s important to keep some caveats in mind when looking at results like these. For one thing, the public’s understanding of what these words actually mean varies considerably, and not everyone who considers themselves “conservative” is on the same page as, say, Jim DeMint. For another, ideological identification often doesn’t match up well with policy positions.And that is really true. Conservative politicians want to end Medicare and Social Security, yet I'd guess that most people who call themselves conservative would like to preserve both programs. Most people who call themselves conservative probably don't like polluted air and rivers, yet conservative politicians promote policies that guarantee both. It goes on and on.
You know what they say: Never negotiate with terrorists. It only encourages them.
These last few months, much of the country has watched in horror as the Tea Party Republicans have waged jihad on the American people. Their intransigent demands for deep spending cuts, coupled with their almost gleeful willingness to destroy one of America’s most invaluable assets, its full faith and credit, were incredibly irresponsible. But they didn’t care. Their goal, they believed, was worth blowing up the country for, if that’s what it took.
[...]
For now, the Tea Party Republicans can put aside their suicide vests. But rest assured: They’ll have them on again soon enough. After all, they’ve gotten so much encouragement.
A deal to raise the federal debt ceiling is in the works. If it goes through, many commentators will declare that disaster was avoided. But they will be wrong.Jimmy Carter was called a weak president, but he was not. He was undermined by the Northeast liberals in his own party, who did not understand and snickered at his evangelical Christianity.
For the deal itself, given the available information, is a disaster, and not just for President Obama and his party. It will damage an already depressed economy; it will probably make America’s long-run deficit problem worse, not better; and most important, by demonstrating that raw extortion works and carries no political cost, it will take America a long way down the road to banana-republic status.
