We are not Iceland (but maybe we should be)

What can I say? Seven weeks now, and the market is still up. I'm beginning to regret moving most of my investments to bonds.

But not just yet, because I remain convinced that we have not yet reached the bottom of our economic crisis. And why do I stick to that belief?

Because we're not Iceland.

Iceland went bankrupt a few months ago. Its conservative-led government let what the New York Times called "buccaneering free marketers" run amok through the country's economy, with the expected results.

Disaster.

But unlike here, Icelanders apparently think with the brains they have, and they knew that their conservative, anything-goes-in-the-free-market government was to blame.

So, naturally, they started protesting in the streets. And that led to the conservative government's resignation and a caretaker government's installation -- led by the Social Democrats, whose leader, Johanna Sigurdardottir, became caretaker prime minister.

This weekend, the Icelanders went to the polls, and they chose the Social Democrats and their liberal coalition partners the Left-Greens (does that mean Iceland has Right-Greens?) to stay where they are. And that includes Sigurdardottir, who is Iceland's first female leader.

And the world's first openly lesbian head of state.

I know the American right is terrified right now. But that's what happens when you fuck up your country as badly as the New Vikings, as the greedy sons of bitches in Iceland called themselves, did. The lesbians take over. The lesbians and a trucker dude from the Greens. His name is unpronounceable to us white folk in the United States too. Steingrimur Sigfusson. He's also a geologist. The prime minister used to be a flight attendant. Not a lawyer in sight. Or an MBA.

Sigfusson was Iceland's finance minister in the caretaker government, and he'll probably stay there. Despite being a geologist and former truck driver, he seems to know what he's talking about, finance-wise.

What are the people of the United States mad about now? It is the same poisonous philosophy that we had here, based on a lack of moral awareness and greed, and people who thought nothing of flying Elton John into Iceland for their 50th birthdays and paying him 70 million Icelandic kronur.

That's about $600,000, if you're keeping score. $600 grand, just for the entertainment at your 50th. I had Mexican food at one of my favorite restaurants for my 50th. The entertainment was the house band. If I had $600K to spend on entertainment for my birthday party, I'd fly all my friends to someplace really cool. Maybe Reykjavik. But we'd have to import the Mex.

Anyway, the conservative Independent Party -- independent of reason? -- managed 16 seats in the 63-seat Icelandic parliament -- called the Althingi, which they say is the oldest continuous legislative body in the world -- two more than the Left-Greens. But Sigurdardottir's party racked up 20 seats, giving their coalition 34, more than enough to form the government.

Interestingly, this is the first time in modern history Icelanders have elected a left-leaning government. But no wonder they did it this time. The conservative-New Viking alliance pretty much destroyed Iceland's economy. Unemployment -- virtually unheard of in the tiny country before -- is now at about 10 percent. Inflation is well into the double digits, and the financial experts are still trying to figure out what happened and how much it cost.

According to the Times,

Many of the debts that drove the banks to the brink of default were incurred as the New Vikings went on a splurge of acquisitions that made them owners of department store chains, soccer clubs and investment houses in Britain and other parts of Europe, as well as mansions, helicopters and Ferraris on their sojourns at home here in Iceland.

Sound familiar?

And as for the costs, the Times says that some estimates run to as much as $10 billion, which is about $30,000 for every man, woman and child in a country that has just over 300,000 people.

But unlike here, the Icelanders are following their leader -- a quiet, steady and pragmatic leader, who does not seek the spotlight, but instead puts her attention toward fixing the mess she was left with.

The people are calling for a change of ethics. That is why they have voted for us,

she said. Her chief opponent -- the leader of the Independence Party, Bjarni Benediktsson -- reacted much like his Republican counterparts in the United States. That is, he was clueless.

We lost this time but we will win again later,

he said.

Anyway, Sigurdardottir, who at 66 was getting ready to retire from politics, will have to stick around for a while longer to fix what conservatism wrought in her country.

But that's how I know we're not done here yet. Because in Iceland, when everything crashed, they didn't try to pretend we just needed a little stimulus here and there and some more tax cuts for the rich and everything would be fine. When everything crashed, it crashed, and everybody knew it. And they threw out the greedy bastards who did it.

But don't worry, some of the conservatives in Iceland are just as brain dead as ours are. If you read the comments on some of the Icelandic media Web sites, you'll find them claiming the Social Democrats, who were not in power until earlier this year, were responsible for the collapse of the economy last fall. My Scandinavian language skills are really poor, but I think I saw something about Sigurdardottir being born in Finland or something too. The socialist thing isn't working though, because, well, her party is the Social Democrats.

Oh, and by the way -- I love this -- 26 members of the Althingi elected this weekend were women. That's 46 percent. Compare that to our 16 percent. Now, I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say the Althingi probably isn't very ethnically diverse, but then, we are talking about Iceland, where 94 percent of the people are a mix of Norse and Celts and the rest come from somewhere else more recently.

Y'know, we could maybe learn a lot from a little island in the north Atlantic.



News Writer
AWOP Political Contributing Editor
Author of Stop the Press!

Cross-posted at News Writer's Guide to the Market

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Methinks they doth protest too much

The Department of Homeland Security -- with assistance from the FBI -- in a nine-page report, confirms what hate-group watchers have already said: that the activities of right wing extremists are on the rise since the election of Barack Obama, a Democrat, as president of these United States, and the severe economic downturn caused by Obama's predecessors.

That's no surprise to anyone with half a brain. It's what right-wing extremists -- also known as bigots, racists, homophobes and anti-government nutjobs -- do when a liberal black president takes office. Not that that's ever happened before.

The DHS definition of right wing extremism is quite specific.

Right Wing extremism in the United States can be broadly divided into those groups, movements, and adherents that are primarily hate-oriented (based on hatred of particular religious, racial or ethnic groups), and those that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely. It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.

But apparently, the conservative bloggers, pundits and radio blowhards either can't read very well -- for which there is already ample evidence -- or they actually do consider themselves to be hate-oriented and antigovernment, because they've certainly gone ballistic over this report.

"Confirmed: The Obama DHS hit job on conservatives is real," reads Michelle "Lock me up in a concentration camp please" Malkin's headline, even though the word "conservative" doesn't appear in the report and it was begun under the Bush administration.

"Are you now, or have you ever been a member of the Republican party," whines Charleston (W.Va.) Daily Mail columnist Don Surber, even though the word "Republican" is not mentioned in the report and the previous Republican administration requested it.

"The Constitution is a subversive manifesto per DHS," opines Cornell law professor William Jacobson, even though the report is clearly concerned with the potential for decidedly unonstitutional activities such as violent attacks.

"If the Bush administration had done this to left-wing extremists, it would be all over the press as an obvious trampling of the First Amendment rights of folks and dissent," said Republican radio host Roger Hedgecock, even though the Bush administration did initiate a similar report on left-wing extremism that was released by the Obama administration in January.

Some guy from Alabama who calls himself "The Other McCain" calls the report a "terrorist" smear against conservatives, with terrorist in quotes like that, even though the word "terrorist" appears exactly once in the report: at the end, in the paragraph that describes the purpose of the report and others in "a series of intelligence assessments."

"The report is the blueprint for Obama’s war on Conservatives and patriotic Americans," said Pam "I have no clue what I'm talking about" Geller, even though ... well, you get the picture.

Paranoid much? Or are these and others accidentally telling us the truth -- that they are, in fact, right wing extremists?

Because these same folks have no reservations about calling liberal and progressive organizations extremists -- or even calling Democrats traitors. And how many times have we heard that the president is a socialist?

But now they're all in a tither over the possibility that the Bad eVille government is watching them -- the same government that was all good and protecting the American citizens when it ordered warrantless wiretaps on said citizens during the Bush administration. But now that we have a Democratic president, they're clearly worried that they could be targets.

But weren't they the very ones saying that if we did nothing wrong, we have nothing to worry about from warrantless wiretaps?

Anyway, since these heretofore pretend mainstream conservatives are now acknowledging that they are, in fact, extremists, I say we hold 'em to it.

And since a bunch of 'em are claiming that the report is targeting today's teabaggery, even though the report makes no mention of the parties, I say we call today's events "extremist, right wing protests," just like they called protests against the Bush administration's many illegal activities "extremist left wing protests."

Turn about, is, after all, fair play, and we know the right is all about fair.

Although, I really can't recall any recent examples of left wing extremists bombing federal buildings or churches or shooting anti-abortion activists the way right wing extremists have bombed federal buildings, family planning clinics and gay bars and shot doctors who provide abortions.

But DHS is just picking on the poor right. It has no reason whatsoever to be concerned about potential violence.

News Writer
AWOP Political Contributing Editor
Author of Stop the Press!

Cross-posted at Stop the Press!

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The way we were

Steve Benen at Political Animal notes what we've all been noting -- that the conservative pod people who spent seven weeks decrying Obama for tanking the market have been oddly -- or not -- quiet for the past four weeks that it's taken the Dow to rise above 8,000 for the first time in ... oh, let's see, seven weeks.

Here's what the Wall Street Journal said just a short month ago (i.e., right before the Dow started this upward trend):

Americans have welcomed the Obama era in the same spirit of hope the President campaigned on. But after five weeks in office, it's become clear that Mr. Obama's policies are slowing, if not stopping, what would otherwise be the normal process of economic recovery. From punishing business to squandering scarce national public resources, Team Obama is creating more uncertainty and less confidence -- and thus a longer period of recession or subpar growth.

...

So what has happened in the last two months? The economy has received no great new outside shock. Exchange rates and other prices have been stable, and there are no security crises of note. The reality of a sharp recession has been known and built into stock prices since last year's fourth quarter.

What is new is the unveiling of Mr. Obama's agenda and his approach to governance. Every new President has a finite stock of capital -- financial and political -- to deploy, and amid recession Mr. Obama has more than most. But one negative revelation has been the way he has chosen to spend his scarce resources on income transfers rather than growth promotion. Most of his "stimulus" spending was devoted to social programs, rather than public works, and nearly all of the tax cuts were devoted to income maintenance rather than to improving incentives to work or invest.

Wall Street Journal = Rupert Murdoch = Big Business = Republican. Lately? The WSJ notes that government is the only sector actually hiring people and complains that the Obama administration isn't playing GW's asinine "global war on terrorism" fear game, so labeled because the Bush administration didn't want to openly go and call it a global war on Islam -- that's what they have talk radio and Fox "News" for. Oh, yeah, and since we can't play the terrorism fear game with this administration, we'll just play the fake socialism fear game.

Of course, the whole idea of blaming or crediting a president for the rise and fall of the stock market is just plain silly, because we all know those freaky children out to make a killing and retire to the Hamptons, or GW's toney Dallas neighborhood, make their decisions to buy and sell on which way the wind is blowing, and I don't necessarily mean the political wind.

Meanwhile, both Barry Ritholz and BAGNewsNotes take on one of my favorite subjects: What the fuck was the president thinking to hire people to get us out of the mess that they were responsible for getting us into (jeez, I'd strangle one of my writers for a sentence like that).

BNN does it with this fabulous cover of TIME magazine from February 19, 1999. That's Robert Rubin, Alan Greenspan and Larry Summers, "the three Marketeers." I think Tim Geithner was too young in 1999, but then, he's d'Artagnan anyway.

BNN makes two points that I've been making for weeks now -- that the financial sector has already failed and that if the financial institutions are too big to fail, they shouldn't have been in private hands to begin with, and, in fact, they weren't. The government has been gaming the system for them all along, with lots of campaign contributions to back it up.

A new report by Wallstreetwatch.org reveals that from 1998 to 2008, the finance industry made $1.7 billion in contributions to Washington politicians (55 percent to Repubs, 45 percent to Dems), spent $3.4 billion on lobbyists (3,000 of them on the industry payroll in 2007 alone) and won a dozen key deregulatory victories that led directly to today's financial meltdown.

Inherent in the industry's push for unbridled expansion was the unstated goal of guaranteeing that they would get taxpayer bailouts if things went badly. So many investors, businesses, employees and others would be hooked into these multitentacled blobs that government would be compelled to rescue the banks from their own excesses.

Knowing that they could privatize all of the profits from quick-buck schemes and socialize the losses, bankers were unleashed to do their damnedest. Which they did.

Meanwhile, Cardinal Richelieu (formerly played by Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke, now only portrayed by Bernanke) has d'Artagnon's backing to create yet another regulatory entity, one which no doubt will work just as well as the one we actually have that didn't do its job, largely because it's the banking industry that regulates the watchdog. Talk about your fox and henhouse.

Ritholz targets Athos -- Larry Summers -- for his crimes, noting that he's made quite a bit of money from one particular hedge fund and speaking engagements at various financial institutions. Where might his loyalties lie? Certainly not with the American public. Ritholz:

If the history books eventually judge the Obama administration a failure, they may have to point to one horrific appointment as the root cause of the misguided policies: The 'Smart Guy' who decided to continue the 'Dumb Guy’s' policies.

Sara Robinson, writing at the Campaign for America's Future with Terence Heath in the "Time to Deliver" series, writes that it's crucial to push this administration to make some actual change, else that change will be made for us something else I've been saying).

In short: The Bush administration left behind a political, economic, and social pressure cooker that was building up a dangerous head of steam toward violent, revolutionary change. Obama's lifted the bobbler and let a bit of that pressure escape; but the seal is still tight, and the heat under the pot is rising faster than ever. If he doesn't find a way to resolve these issues and/or channel the outrage soon, Davies' model suggests that our last best chance for peaceful evolution will soon enough be behind us, leaving us to work this transformation out on by far more barbaric means.

...

The important fact about this new era we find ourselves in is this: We can't ever go back to how it was. The world we've known since World War II is gone, and it's not ever coming back. Americans are in varying stages of accepting this reality -- but the sooner they do, the better off we'll be. There are vast structural changes (which, in themselves, are fodder for another post) that are profoundly re-shaping our entire reality, and which are not going away no matter how insistently our elites try to obfuscate or deny them. One way or another, now or later, we are going to be forced to address those shifts, and devise a new economy, new technologies, and new social priorities that will enable us to adapt to them.

The only real choice we have right now is whether we're going do this change the easy way -- thoughtfully, exercising our collective foresight to make clear-headed decisions that will ease us through a peaceful and relatively smooth transition; or whether we'll choose to go down hard by continuing to postpone dealing with it, building up the pressure until there's an inevitable explosion that utterly flattens us economically, environmentally, politically, and socially. That's the deal now. Face up to it while it's relatively cheap and easy; or face up to it later, when our options and resources will both be much fewer.

This is what the conservatives don't get: We can never go back to the way it was. I'm not sure if Obama gets that, and I'm sure the Marketeers and their friends don't, and guess who has the president's ear on these matters?

When he should be listening to Stiglitz, Ritholz, Krugman and Johnson, Obama is listening to Bernanke, Summers and Geithner -- Paulson and Greenspan being at least physically out of the picture.

That needs to change. And soon.

News Writer
AWOP Political Contributing Editor
Author of Stop the Press!

Cross-posted at Stop the Press!

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Budgeting a progressive future

Terence Heath, who blogs at his own Republic of T and at the Campaign for America's Future, announced Tuesday that he and Sara Robinson, who blogs at the Campaign for America's Future and sometimes at Orcinus, are launching a series at CAF "about the progressive values at the core of the president's budget, how to talk about it importance, and what progressives can do to pass the first truly progressive budget we've seen in decades."

That's exciting as hell. But that was at the end of the column. What Terence said before he got to that part was what really got to me.

Terence reminded me that we Americans -- most of us anyway -- don't really know what something truly progressive and new can look like. "The real transformation hasn't happened yet," he wrote.

People don’t yet have a tangible vision of something better than the past eight years or the current crisis. They have hope, but hope wears thin if people have nothing that they can see with their own eyes, hold in their hands, or experience in their own lives as evidence of the possibility of something better.

Quoting from "Ending Slavery" by Kevin Bales (about modern slavery), Terence wrote that

It was only when people began to have a vision of something better that they would rush toward change. He noted how it was only after reforms occurred or economic prosperity arrived that popular revolt began.

And in that passage, Bales was paraphrasing the French historian Alexis de Tocqueville -- author of "Democracy in America -- from a letter he wrote in 1853.

It is almost never when a state of things is the most detestable that it is smashed, but when, beginning to improve, it permits men to breathe, to reflect, to communicate their thoughts with each other, and to gauge by what they already have the extent of their rights and their grievances. The weight, although less heavy, seems then all the more unbearable.

That is just about where we are now, as Terence put it, "the anteroom of that transformational moment."

People are waking up, seeing what's been done to us for the last 30 years -- and particularly the last 8 -- and starting to grumble. Some of us are much more clear about what we're grumbling about, and some of us are just plain misguided about what we're grumbling about. But discontent is fast becoming the order of the day.

Now we need a direction, and the impetus to move in that direction. The president's budget may be just the ticket -- and you know the Republicans and the Blue Dawgs are gonna be fighting tooth and nail to limit what this budget can do. They've already started.

As Terence points out, this budget sings a new tune about America and its people. It's about an America whose people rely on one another, who work together, who cooperate -- who aren't out to see "what's in it for me." It is, he wrote, "a progressive budget that has at its core the understanding that government can and should have an important role in finding ways out of the current crisis and in reviving the economy."

More than that, it's a budget that recognizes that — rather than the 'You're on your own,' everyone-for-themselves conservative policy of the past 30 years — recovering from this crisis, reviving the economy, and thriving as families, communities, and as a nation means recognizing that we have some degree of responsibility to and for one another, because our faces are undeniably tied together.

That, itself, would be transformational. But first we have to offer more than more than a vision of something better. We have to make the beginnings of that vision, and the progressive values it embodies, felt in the lives of more Americans.

Now is our time to deliver. If we can turn progressive values into policies that make a real impact in the lives of every day people — whether it's jobs, health care, etc. — the transformation the country needs, and that the world needs us to make, will almost take care of itself.

This budget has its shortcomings. It can't possibly be all things to all people. But it is a world away from the policies of the past. We could do far worse than to pass it -- and frankly, letting it fail isn't an option. Not if we really, truly want to see the change many of us have been seeking.

It will happen, of course -- the transformation. As I've said before, it's just a question of whether we want to do it now, the hard way, or later -- maybe another generation later -- the excruciating painful way. As usual, the Republicans are looking at it through their own myopic lenses. What we're bequeathing to our children and grandchildren is not mountains of debt but a society that takes its strength from its people rather than the size of a handful of people's portfolios.

Either way, the time is right. It won't be easy. And it will likely be terrifying -- great change, real transformation always is. But the old ways have finally failed. They're on life support. They can continue that way for a while yet. But the end will come.

I'd rather pull the plug now and start the heavy lifting of change.

News Writer
AWOP Political Contributing Editor
Author of Stop the Press Blog

Cross-posted at Stop the Press!

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Why Geithner's Plan Won't Work

Short version: It's too late.

Economist Brad DeLong doesn't think so. It's a big mess of a plan that makes little sense to non-economists, but in a nutshell, this is it:

First the number -- $1 trillion. Don't even stop to let it sink it. It'll upset your stomach. $150 billion of that is coming from TARP fund already allocated. The FDIC is gonna create another $820 billion "in the form of debt," whatever that means. And then the government is going to require $30 billion from the guys that got us into this mess that they're going to hire to run the program, which will buy worthless pieces of paper from the banks in order to take "toxic assets" off their balance sheets and put them on the government's balance sheets.

Does this sound like a sound plan so far? But go ahead, read DeLong's Q&A about how it's going to work. Like, the hedge fund managers the government will hire to run this baby have to kick in $30B "so they'll have skin in the game," and they'll do it because, DeLong says, "they stand to make a fortune when markets recover or when the acquired toxic assets are held to maturity."

The operative word there being the two times DeLong says "when" in that sentence. In fact, "What happens if that doesn't happen" the one question DeLong didn't really answer when asked, although he did tell the sobering truth.

Then we have worse things to worry about than government losses on TARP-program money--for we are then in a world in which the only things that have value are bottled water, sewing needles, and ammunition

Yeah. Add to that that DeLong says the actual fix is gonna take $3 more trillion.

Further, DeLong didn't really get into the $820 billion FDIC is supposed to manufacture with something called "non-recourse loans." What that means is that the government is going to try to convince investors to partner up with the government to buy the toxic assets by waving these loans in front of their faces.

The problem is that the banks are much further gone than this. Take AIG, for example -- an insurer, of course, but all financial sector companies are more or less banks in some form these days. AIG has taken $170 billion from the government. Without it, it would be bankrupt. It's functioning still only because we gave it a bunch of our money. Lehman Brothers, for example, is no more because we didn't give it any money.

The big banks are all essentially bankrupt. Other banks might be doing OK, but under this plan, they're going to become the big banks that are now failing. Economist Paul Krugman:

But it’s immediately obvious, if you think about it, that these funds will have skewed incentives. In effect, Treasury will be creating — deliberately! — the functional equivalent of Texas S&Ls in the 1980s: financial operations with very little capital but lots of government-guaranteed liabilities. For the private investors, this is an open invitation to play heads I win, tails the taxpayers lose. So sure, these investors will be ready to pay high prices for toxic waste. After all, the stuff might be worth something; and if it isn’t, that’s someone else’s problem.

It's all based on whether or not the billions of dollars in bad loans are truly bad loans, or if it's a possibility that they're not really, and will eventually pull up. But nobody's actually checking to find out. They're guessing. Jamey Galbraith:

The way to find out who is right is to EXAMINE THE LOAN TAPES. An independent examination of the underlying loan tapes -- and comparison to the IndyMac portfolio -- would help determine whether these loans or derivatives based on them have any right to be marketed in an open securities market, and any serious prospect of being paid over time at rates approaching 60 cents on the dollar, rather than 30 cents or less.

Note that even a small loss of capital, relative to the purchase price, completely wipes out the interest earnings on the Treasury's loans, putting the government in a loss position and giving the banks a windfall. If I'm right and the mortgages are largely trash, then the Geithner plan is a Rube Goldberg device for shifting inevitable losses from the banks to the Treasury, preserving the big banks and their incumbent management in all their dysfunctional glory. The cost will be continued vast over-capacity in banking, and a consequent weakening of the remaining, smaller, better- managed banks who didn't participate in the garbage-loan frenzy.

Galbraith and Krugman are far from the only economists currently in utter disbelief at the stupidity of this plan. Well, actually, if the goal is to give bankers another shot at millions, then it's a very good plan. But there's a huge difference between rescuing banks and rescuing the bankers and the shareholders. One is a good idea, and the other is just a continuation of what's been going on for 30 years. Another Nobel Prize winning economist, Joe Stiglitz, had this to say in The Nation:

The politicians responsible for the bailout keep saying, 'We had no choice. We had a gun pointed at our heads. Without the bailout, things would have been even worse.' This may or may not be true, but in any case the argument misses a critical distinction between saving the banks and saving the bankers and shareholders. We could have saved the banks but let the bankers and shareholders go. The more we leave in the pockets of the shareholders and the bankers, the more that has to come out of the taxpayers' pockets.

There are a few basic principles that should guide our bank bailout. The plan needs to be transparent, cost the taxpayer as little as possible and focus on getting the banks to start lending again to sectors that create jobs. It goes without saying that any solution should make it less likely, not more likely, that we will have problems in the future.

By these standards, the TARP bailout has so far been a dismal failure. Unbelievably expensive, it has failed to rekindle lending. Former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson gave the banks a big handout; what taxpayers got in return was worth less than two-thirds of what we gave the big banks--and the value of what we got has dropped precipitously since.

Since TARP facilitated the consolidation of banks, the problem of 'too big to fail' has become worse, and therefore the excessive risk-taking that it engenders has grown worse. The banks carried on paying out dividends and bonuses and didn't even pretend to resume lending. "Make more loans?" John Hope III, chair of Whitney National Bank in New Orleans, said to a room full of Wall Street analysts in November. The taxpayers put out $350 billion and didn't even get the right to find out what the money was being spent on, let alone have a say in what the banks did with it.

In my view, if it's too big to fail, it shouldn't be in private hands.

Henry Blodget, top dog at The Business Insider, gets even more specific:

What would be a better plan? Seize the insolvent banks, write down the assets to market levels, and make the banks' bondholders pay for most of the losses by converting a percentage of the bonds to equity. Then sell off and/or re-privatize the banks, which will now be well-capitalized.

This latter plan would wipe out shareholders and hurt bondholders--which is what the Treasury is trying desperately to avoid. It would also hurt the same taxpayers who are getting hosed in the Geithner plan -- because bank bondholders are generally insurance companies, pension funds, and other companies that taxpapers have a stake in.

It's still a better solution, though. It will fix the problem once and for all, it will likely cost taxpayers less, and it's the morally fair thing to do. And the bank equity and credit markets should recover quickly, once they see that the newly recapitalized banks are actually worth owning and lending money to.

But Geithner, no different than his predecessor Hank Paulson, doesn't want to do the right thing. He wants to keep the rich rich. Not much different from the Republicans, I'd say.

But it's almost like Geithner is the nerd kid in school trying to get some props from the cool kids. Remember what Bear Stearns CEO Jimmy Cayne said about him just a couple of weeks ago, talking how he felt about Geithner's decision to sell Bear?

The audacity of that prick in front of the American people announcing he was deciding whether or not a firm of this stature and this whatever was good enough to get a loan. Like he was the determining factor, and it’s like a flea on his back, floating down underneath the Golden Gate Bridge, getting a hard-on, saying, ‘Raise the bridge.’ This guy thinks he’s got a big dick. He’s got nothing, except maybe a boyfriend. I’m not a good enemy. I’m a very bad enemy. But certain things really — that bothered me plenty. It’s just that for some clerk to make a decision based on what, your own personal feeling about whether or not they’re a good credit? Who the fuck asked you? You’re not an elected officer. You’re a clerk. Believe me, you’re a clerk. I want to open up on this fucker, that’s all I can tell you.

Charming, isn't it? Geithner's just a clerk to the big boys, who clearly don't have a clue what they actually look like to the American people.

The good news, if any news can be said to be good in this mess, is that there's still a chance we won't quite fall to the level that bottled water and ammunition are the only things with value. It'll just mean that we'll have to actually do the right thing when this crashes. It'll just be a lot harder then.

News Writer
AWOP Political Contributing Editor
Author of Stop the Press Blog

Cross-posted at Stop the Press!

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Don't go there

Chalk up Grovel No. 4 for GOP Supreme Leader the Ayatollah Limbaugh. Assemblyman Jim Tedisco, who is running for the congressional seat left vacant when New York Gov. David Paterson appointed Kirsten Gillibrand to fill Hillary Clinton's senate seat, made a boo-boo during an interview with the Oneonta Daily Star.

Rush Limbaugh is meaningless to me. The only constituency I'm worried about are the residents of the 20th Congressional District,

he said. And now he knows how Michael Steele, Phil Gingrey and Mark Sanford all feel. Within hours, Tedisco's spokesman had issued a statement.

Jim's comments were in response to a question about what voters are asking him about on the campaign trail. So far, the concerns he has been hearing from voters on the campaign trail have been local in nature, such as his support for lower property taxes, fiscal responsibility, and his opponents appalling support for the AIG bonus loophole. That was his point and any effort to characterize it otherwise is a distortion of the facts.

Right. That certainly explains why he said the ayatollah is meaningless.

Speaking of meaningless, Congress still is, and the Democrats have not grown a backbone since Obama's election, nor have they done much to develop their brains. Rather than paraphrase, here's Robert Reich's entire take:

It's nice to see that when the public gets sufficiently angry about something, Congress responds. In a rare show of bipartisanship, members are eagerly registering shock and outrage at AIG's bonus payments by coming up with an assortment of ways to reclaim the bonanza, including taxing them away retroactively. Who says democracy is dead?

But much of this is for show. When the public isn't looking, Congress reverts to its old ways. The Obama-supported plan to allow distressed homeowners to renegotiate their mortgages under the protection of bankruptcy has run into a Wall Street wall. Although Citigroup temporarily broke ranks a few months ago when it was receiving one of the most generous bailouts, the rest of Wall Street has remained adamantly opposed, and apparently Democratic leaders have decided not to push back.

Meanwhile, Obama's plan to limit itemized deductions for the richest 1.2 percent of taxpayers (including the top 1.9 percent of small business owners) to 28 percent, starting in 2011, is also in trouble on the Hill. Wealthy contributors and friends of congressional leaders involved in setting tax policy have balked. So Congress is telling the White House to look elsewhere for the $320 billion it needs over ten years to finance half of the tab for health care reform. Congressional leaders have also informed the White House that they don't have the votes to pass Obama's proposal for treating the earnings of hedge-fund and private-equity managers as income rather than capital gains.

Angry populism thrives on stories about the rich and privileged who use their influence to get cushy deals for themselves at the expense of the rest of us. AIG's bonuses provide a perfect example. It's too bad the same populist outrage doesn't extend to issues involving far more money, affecting many more people, and entailing far more insidious abuses of power. Congress's potemkin populism over AIG's bonuses disguises business as usual when it comes to the really big stuff.

Exactly. Congress can puff out its collective chests and act all high and mighty on something like AIG's bonuses (although, we must not forget that the Republicans have consistently opposed any limitation whatsoever on executive compensation, so their feigned outrage is especially egregiously hypocritical). But god forbid they do actually do something that will help Americans at the expense of these same rich bastards who are soaking up every ounce of decency America has left, abetted by Congress.

And that must secretly delight the Republicans and their Supreme Leader, because this kind of non-action will lead to failure, which, they've made perfectly clear, is what they want.

It's when I think about things like this that I wonder if the conspiracy theorists are right -- that a "global elite" controlled on Wall Street is slowly siphoning all the wealth of the world to itself and will soon emerge openly as the Rulers of the Universe.

For now, I can only conclude that the whole of Congress is no more capable of stopping the greed and grand theft of the Wall Streeters than Republicans are capable of standing up to their Supreme Leader.

And neither, apparently is the Obama administration. Paul Krugman:

I’ll leave to others the question of who knew or should have known that the bonus firestorm was coming; but it’s part of a pattern. At every stage, Geithner et al have made it clear that they still have faith in the people who created the financial crisis — that they believe that all we have is a liquidity crisis that can be undone with a bit of financial engineering, that “governments do a bad job of running banks” (as opposed, presumably, to the wonderful job the private bankers have done), that financial bailouts and guarantees should come with no strings attached.

This was bad analysis, bad policy, and terrible politics. This administration, elected on the promise of change, has already managed, in an astonishingly short time, to create the impression that it’s owned by the wheeler-dealers. And that leaves it with no ability to counter crude populism.

So the masses have their pitchforks out and, with my colleagues leading the way, they are heading for AIG, now a symbol of all that's wrong on Wall Street.

That's a dangerous way to affect public policy, particularly since hot heads are quite often wrong-headed, and my colleagues have Beltway amnesia, which affects their ability to remember anything that happened more than a week ago. And that means there's no context for what's happening right now -- there's no recollection that it was the Bush administration that negotiated this bailout, that Tim Geithner, as chairman of the New York Fed, was part of that original process, that Chris Dodd actually tried to put in some real limitations on "retention payments, " only to be blocked by Geithner's Treasury Department.

But, as symbols go, AIG's a pretty good one -- Arrogance, Irresponsibility, Greed.

Meanwhile, it's business as usual in Congress -- the party of no, the party that won't fight back and the outside party that waves all the money in front of campaign committees.

News Writer
AWOP Political Contributing Editor
Author of Stop the Press Blog

Cross-posted at Stop the Press!

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Cramer's LIttle Big Horn

Wall Street had its first good rally in months this week, and the only thing that's really and truly different about this week and all the others is that Jon Stewart had Wall Street guru Jim Cramer on the ropes.

The S&P 500 jumped nearly 11 percent. How else can we explain it than somebody finally spoke truth to the jackasses who helped fuck this economy up?

And they did help. This economy's been in trouble for 30 years. GW's policies accelerated the crash. Plenty of people saw it, watched it for three decades. But these morons on television never said a word -- but they knew. Hell, most of 'em probably participated in it.

But thing that boosted the marked started, of course, last week, when Rick "Homeowners are lazy slackers who should lose their homes if they can't pay the mortgage no matter what the reason" Santelli for his insane rant on the floor of Wall Street with a Greek chorus of traders behind him backing his position that it's the poor folks on Wall Street who are really suffering, not the regular people who watched their 401(K)s sink to oblivion.

Stewart had intended, of course, to take on Santelli face to face, but the weasel canceled, naturally. So Stewart aired his pre-prepared video -- the one he was going to show before the Santelli interview -- all by itself. It was devastating to CNBC in general and Jim "Mad Money" Cramer in particular.

Cramer, arrogant bastard that he is, took it personally and fired back on Monday, saying Stewart's treatment "rankles me" and whining he'd been taken out of context and that he hadn't said three days before the company folded that people should buy Bear Stearns. The market hit a 12-year low that afternoon, but Stewart responded that night, noting that no, Cramer hadn't in fact recommended buying Bear Stearns three days before it folded. It was five days before, and he played the tape.

The next day, the Dow gained 379 points, its biggest gain in 2009. But Cramer hit The Today Show and Morning Joe that morning trying to defend himself. That was when the Stewart as a "variety show" host came up.

Now cautiously optimistic that Stewart might go after Cramer again, investors tweaked out a small gain that afternoon. Stewart did not disappoint. He responded with tape of Cramer's show with all its silly sound effects. And tape of himself appearing on Dora the Explorer and The Hills.

By the end of the next day, Cramer was scheduled for Stewart's last show of the week. All I can about that is, what were they thinking? Did they expect a proper English tea party?

To prepare for the meeting, Cramer hit Martha Stewart's show that morning. And we all know how that went over.

In fact, the Dow was up another 240 points at closing, all in anticipation of Cramer vs. Stewart.

It wasn't even close. Stewart held Cramer's feet to the fire and never let up. "It's not a fucking game," he told the awfully contrite Cramer.

It was a battle of wits with an unarmed man.

And the Dow closed up another 54 points at the end of the week. Cramer has disappeared from sight, and the NBC networks have been ordered not to talk about the rumble they hyped all week long. Supposedly, he told friends he felt blindsided by Stewart's hostile approach.

A brief pause while you let that sink in.

So, you see, Stewart taking down one of the chief cozy-up-to-the CEOs guys gave investors a boost of confidence that will probably disappear next week when we get the report that industrial production and factory output declined in February (Monday) along with reports on housing and wholesale inflation (Tuesday), the Consumer Price Index (Wednesday), the weekly jobless report (Thursday) and a Ben Bernanke speech on Friday.

Unless Cramer's meltdown creates some serious changes in financial reporting to give investors some trust that they might actually hear the truth from their mouths, next week we go back to the deep recession.

Or maybe Stewart can take on some of my colleagues next week. If he'd like a list of potential targets ...

Cross-posted at News Writer's Guide to the Market

The News Writer
AWOP Political Contributing Editor
Author of Stop The Press Blog

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Stupid People

Stupid people annoy me. All the "stupid people" quotes you can think of -- they all apply.

Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.

Note to self: It is illegal to stab people for being stupid.

When you're surrounded by idiots, just remember that murder is illegal and sarcasm is much more satisfying.

It's not that I'm not a people person. I'm just not a stupid people person.

People are idiots and I hate them.

Sarcasm. It's easier than actually having to deal with stupid people.

Never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity.

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.

When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.

Everyone has a right to be stupid; some people just abuse the privilege.

Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.

It is better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt.

Oh, I sure have my moments of being stupid. We all do. But some people, as some anonymous soul pointed out, abuse the privilege. Those are the ones who annoy the crap out of me. I mean, I just don't have the time in my life to drum up the kind of energy it takes to deal with stupid people.

Like Bobby Jindal, Mark Sanford, Rick Perry, Sarah Palin and Haley Barbour -- stupid governors who get their noses all up in the air because they don't want to let unemployed people have more unemployment benefits. There was a another stupid people quote -- something about when people do stupid things they declare it their duty. Just like these stupid governors. It's their little protest against the recovery bill. They, of course, want to continue the failed policies of the last 30 years, believing they'll get us out of the mess that those very policies put us in.

Stupid. People.

Like Eric Cantor, the Republican whip in the House of Representatives. He thinks Obama's decision to overturn GW's ban on federal funding for embryionic stem cell research is a "distraction" from the economy. Well, Eric, sweetie, it's only a distraction if you make it one. So shut up about it and keep your nose on the economy.

News flash: The president is a Democrat. A Democrat -- a liberal. And yes, he damn sure is a liberal.

He is not a socialist, and that brings me to the entire Republican party and all of its followers, each and every one of whom apparently do not know what socialism is. They seem to think that Obama the socialist, which he is not, is planning to strip billions of dollars from rich people and give it to the poor. Kind of an elected Robin Hood, which personally I don't think is such a bad idea, given the atrocious behavior of most rich people of late.

But that's not going to happen, and I'm not stupid enough to push for it.

But that's not socialism anyway. Socialism does call for a more equitable compensation plan, wherein John Thain does not make billions of dollars while Lily Ledbetter loses her job and can't file suit for the gender discrimination she suffered. But that's all highly theoretical. And, like capitalism, there are varying degrees of socialism.

And the argument for or against socialism and for or against capitalism isn't what I'd like to carry on here. I don't consider myself much of a socialist, but then, I don't consider myself much of a capitalist either since I let go of my business several years ago and dove wholeheartedly into journalism. Personally, I think some new type of economy is what we're going to end up with -- the best of both worlds, and probably a few others too. Provided we survive.

Oh, and socialism and communism aren't the same thing either.

Just so you know, socialism calls for state or worker ownership of the means of production and distribution. Since the rich jackasses have exported all the production the United States once had, there's not much around here to create a true socialist system with. So, you stupid people, shut the fuck up. You don't know what you're talking about.

You have all your panties in a wad because Obama's tax plan calls for people who make more than $250,000 a year to pay a little more tax than they've been paying. Here's what you don't know -- the rest of that sentence, since you start screaming the moment you year "more tax." The plan calls for people who make more than $250,000 a year to pay a little more tax than they've been paying on the part of their income that exceeds $250,000. So all your stupid friends who are trying to figure out how not to make more than $250,000, they're not doing themselves any favors at all. They're just stupid.

Listen to what distributorcap NY says about it:

Finally, you also have to laugh when people like Glenn Beck and Laura Ingraham talk about 'redistributing the wealth' and that 'people who have higher salaries are more productive and more valuable.' (Tell that to a nurse, teacher or fire fighter). Not that people shouldn’t reap the benefits (if that means having lots of money) of their hard work and great ideas, but tell me how different would Richard Fuld’s or Stan O’Neal’s or some other robber-banker’s life be if they paid a 39% marginal tax rate on the $500 million they stole earned, rather than 35%. Would it mean one less $12,000 garbage can? And if that extra 4% in marginal tax went to attaining cleaner water (which they have to drink) or retiring debt to fight the useless Iraq War or to helping kids get an decent education (who I would think they want buying products to keep corporate America busy) or by making the bridge they drive over safer – wouldn’t that be better for the Fuld family?

But that's too much thinking for stupid people. They just hear "taxes" and go all nutzoid. because for them, thinking is just regurgitating what you've been told by others, who probably heard it from some other stupid person too. Reminds me of another stupid people quote.

Lord, what fools these mortals be.

Whatever, though. What's pretty darn clear is that the stupid people and their Eville lords (not sure who they are, but stupid people can't make up all this shit by themselves) are scared. There's new ideas out there. They've been out there for a while, but they're moving now, percolating up from the dismal depths of the mess the conservatives have made of things. And Mahatma Gandhi knows what happens when new ideas get started.

First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, and then you win.

I think we're at the fighting part now.

Cross-posted at Stop the Press!

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Sense Of Entitlement

Conservatives are whining about "entitlement programs" now. You know, entitlement programs, like Medicare, Social Security, Head Start, food stamps, unemployment benefits -- anything that could actually help the citizens of the United States of America.

Keep an eye out for Democrats -- and not just those stinking Blue Dogs -- who may follow suit and adopt that hideous language as if people in dire straits are sticking their hands out and demanding help because they feel entitled to it and not because it's the right thing for government to do when its people are desperate.

But it's not true that conservatives oppose entitlement programs. Why, they're some of the biggest supporters, in fact.

You may not be aware of it, because when a conservative supports an entitlement program, they don't call it that. They call it a "bailout" or a "rescue plan" or "tax cuts." And it's meant explicitly for bankers and investors and CEOs and other campaign contributors.

Some people get it though. I found this blog, Stunatra's Place, earlier today.

You know, I am tired of hearing about this fucking stimulus/bail out/bullshit package. Look at these whiny motherfuckers. Let's see if I got this straight....you fucks are okay with bailing out the rich cocksuckers on Wall Street who robbed the people on Main Street but when it comes to helping those on Main Street you say "Fuck them?" What a bunch of bullshit.

If we're gonna alienate Main Street....why don't we just save us all a lot of money and not bother bailing anyone out. Tough shit for everyone. Auto industry, banks, crooks on Wall Street, struggling homeowners and anyone else who wants a hand out....fuck you.....you're all on your own. Good fucking luck!

Now, I won't go that far. I think that government does have a place -- an obligation even -- to help its citizens. And yes, that is a bit different from how it was set up in the 18th Century, when the entire U.S. population could have lived in Brooklyn. Times -- and the country -- have changed. Then, an economic downturn would have made barely a blip on the population since most of it was agrarian.

Not true anymore. Now, the population is too dependent on all kinds of artificial constructs -- many of them, if not most, set up by the government. An economic downturn -- especially a severe one like we're seeing now -- has the potential to be devastating to the people of the country.

But still, the conservatives would rather continue with their own entitlement programs for companies and rich bankers. Why, they're so horribly upset that taxpayer money might be used to help taxpayers that one of their rich buddies in the media, Rick Santelli, is calling for "tea parties," presumably some take off on the Boston Tea Party way back when. All the conservative sycophants are drooling over the possibility.

Billmon, however, says the rich guy version of a tea party doesn't look like anything like the old American variety of tea party. He thinks it probably look more like this, and I'm inclined to agree. It's clear they don't really know what the first one was about -- the favored tax status of the British East India Tea Company. Not the same thing as an attempt to help the people, and more akin to the Republican entitlement program of helping out corporations.

You heard them all going on and on about how the stimulus bill, for example, was just awful, was going to add to our already skyrocketing debt, shackle Americans for generations to come. John McCain, I think, called it "generational theft."

Only one problem, and for that I go back to Billmon. Government debt, it seems currently amounts to only about 50 percent of Gross Domestic Product, which is not that far from where it's been for the past 30 years. In fact, government debt as compared to GDP has risen only about 38 percent in those 30 years.

And, that's far below most other industrialized nations, like Japan (180 percent), Italy (170 percent), France (70 percent) and Germany (60 percent).

But other kinds of debt, not included when politicians say "national debt" but possibly more important in the grand scheme of things, have jumped far more.

And the biggest offender is the indebtedness of our finely tuned, well-oiled and strongly running financial institutions, now at about 350 percent of GDP -- more than six times what it was in 1975. And that's precisely where conservatism went wrong. Billmon...

The trend towards ever greater debt ratios has been particularly steep since then mid-1990s, which was roughly when the global creditor class decided that the "Great Moderation" (the globalization-induced taming of both inflation and recession) was here to stay, and began shoving loans in the face of any borrower who could fog up a mirror -- and some who couldn't.

There is an on-going economic debate -- too wonkish and tedious to explore here -- about whether this wall of money was a result of a coincident collapse in personal saving in the US, the UK and some of the other wealthy countries, or whether it actually caused middle-class and upper-middle class consumers to go an a spending spree the likes of which the hasn't been seen since the invention of the credit card.

Suffice it to say both sides of the trade thought they were getting a great deal at the time. And many of the same right-wing financial pundits now bitching about all this debt were perfectly happy to invent sunny stories that explained why it could go on forever.

But equally problematic is that private debt -- the kind that you and I hold -- has also risen, to just under 300 percent of GDP, one and half times what it was in 1975. That's also the fault of the conservatives, who convinced us over the years that we'd be just fine, no matter how much debt we took in. Billmon again.

Of course, conservative gospel tells us private debt is never a problem -- even when it's used to turn houses into ATM machines. But government borrowing (the only type of IOU dignified with the label 'national debt') is always a problem, even when it's used to build roads and bridges for all the cars bought with all that equity extracted from all those overpriced suburban mini-mansions. Then it's 'porkulus.'

It's been all that financial indebtedness that has us in the pickle we're in now. Nobody was very concerned about it, especially conservatives, because according to their smoke and mirrors fiscal understanding, everything worked out fine in the end.

Except it didn't. It created "toxic assets," all those crap loans that they gave to people who couldn't afford 'em, pushing private debt up. And now, all the chickens have come home to roost. The banks are stuck because the people they loaned money to can't pay. Then there's a bunch of financial mumbo jumbo about what makes things work or not work that come into play, and the result is that people who could pay their mortgages and car loans start to lose their jobs. Then they can't pay either, and everything slides further downhill.

Now, according to the conservatives, all we have to do is make sure the shareholders and executives of the bank receive their entitlement funds, and everything will be OK. But it won't. People will still be out of work. The bad loans will still be bad loans.

That's apparently not the concern of conservatives, who care only for their own bank and stock accounts. Except, again, it's not going to work. The same shortsightedness and half-assed efforts that doomed the Republicans before the last Great Depression are dooming them now. And us, if we don't act quickly and forcefully.

I go back to Billmon, who knows whereof he speaks, having covered financial matters for a long, long time.

The hard truth is that there is now only one, and only one entity on the planet that can keep the private credit excesses of the past decade, which most conservatives wildly applauded, from ending in a classic debt-deflation meltdown. And that is the US federal government.

Sometimes, deficit spending is the right thing to do. And the "entitlement" programs the conservatives hate so much are the very ones that need to be carefully preserved during this very difficult times, Republican governors refusing the bucks to bolster their conservative street cred be damned.

It's clear that Republicans have no answers but the ones that got us into this mess. Listen to them. What do they say that's different from what they've said for the past 8 years?

Oh, that's right. Because they've run us into the ground with their deficit spending, we must stop it now that we've sunk so low that the middle class is feeling the pinch. Oh, and cut taxes for our rich friends.

Don't buy it. Don't even think it. They're wrong, as they have always been. The Blue Dogs are wrong too. The liberals? At this point, they may not be right either, but they've sure got a better shot at it than Republicans who only want to keep doing what they have been doing.

It's gonna be a hard road ahead, my friends.

The years of anti-government and anti-deficit propaganda have definitely left their mark -- not least on the village idiots of the Beltway media, who may not rant and rave on camera, but who can't even comprehend, much less accept, the idea that there are times when expanding government debt is not only not a bad thing, but is a positive good thing, even an essential thing. The Keynesian idea of fighting a recession brought on by excessive debt with more debt is a hopelessly counter intuitive strategy. And intuition, for better or worse, is what democracy runs on most of the time -- that is, when it isn't being powered by base emotions like greed, fear and hatred.

Maybe there is no way out of this mess, either practically or politically. Limitless growth, Edward Abbey once wrote, is the ideology of a cancer cell, and the doctrine of endless debt-fueled expansion may have created an economy so riddled with it that any therapy powerful enough to kill the cancer will also kill the patient. In other words, globalized capitalism (or rather, this strange brew of corporate oligopoly and lemon socialism) may have finally dug itself a hole too deep for the traditional neo-Keynesian policy tools (fiscal and monetary policy) to lift it out of.

But, if that's true, then our children and our grandchildren may indeed spit on our graves, but it's going to be because we have bequeathed them much bigger nightmares than an increase in the federal debt.

And if that happens, remember where it came from. It didn't come from helping America's citizens. It didn't even come from unnecessary wars and bailouts. It came from unfettered financial irresponsibility brought on by greed and megalomania -- outside the government sector, but enabled by greedy and megalomaniacal elected officials who duped an entire country into thinking it could survive on somebody else's money.

They were wrong. And these modern day robber barons are wrong now to give a pass to their own entitlement programs while denying help to people who really need it.


Cross-posted at Stop the Press!

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Perspective

This is why I really have a hard time having compassion for politicians.

Where for art thou, Barack? We hired you to kick some ass not to be kissing it.

I snagged this from Thurman over at Random Abstractions...which he snagged from the Rude Pundit...

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A fine piece of perspective today, courtesy of The Rude Pundit. Hope he doesn't mind.

By the Numbers: Creeping Class Warfare, Republican Style:
How about just a minute or two of perspective?
Amount to bailout AIG - at least $85 billion
Amount to bailout Citibank - at least $45 billion
Amount to bailout Bank of America - at least $45 billion, with guarantees on $118 billion in loans
Amount the Bush administration overpaid for bailed-out bank assets - $78 billion

Proposed cuts to President Obama's economic stimulus bill (currently being debated by 20 "centrist" senators):
$1.1 billion to Head Start
$24.8 billion to states for budget shortfalls in education programs
$15 billion to states for additional education funding
$2 billion to Child Care Development Block Grants
$150 million to funding for programs in the Violence Against Women Act

Oh, and, hell, let's just throw this in:
Amount of just two years of George W. Bush's tax cuts: roughly $500 billion (adjusting for interest). Two-thirds of that came from tax cuts on the top 20% of wage earners.
(Note: this leaves out the cost of operations in Iraq because, well, does it need to be said?)

Education funding is seed money for better paying jobs and a larger tax base. Assistance for families to help with child care has a direct impact on the ability of people to work. And, really, even talking about cutting $150 million in a bill like this is like saying, "If I stop putting nickels in the gumball machine, I'll be able to buy that car."

The unemployment rate is 7.6%. And "centrists" (which is another word for "attention-seeking assholes begging to appear relevant") are quibbling over whether or not it'd be better to cut programs for health and education?

When you walk into an old house that's been neglected for years and is about to collapse into itself, yeah, you need to make sure the frame is stable, but you better get rid of the asbestos insulation before it infects everyone living there.

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