brainiac conspiracy

Slouching Towards Mogadishu

Via Krugman:

Look, here’s my expectation---and I’ll take John Boehner at his word---that nobody, Democrat or Republican, is willing to see the full faith and credit of the United States government collapse, that that would not be a good thing to happen. And so I think that there will be significant discussions about the debt limit vote. That’s something that nobody ever likes to vote on. But once John Boehner is sworn in as Speaker, then he’s going to have responsibilities to govern. You can’t just stand on the sidelines and be a bomb thrower.

Actually, yes you can. If someone else (*cough*) keeps letting you get away with it.

We are ruled by a generation of fools, cynics, psychotics and grifters. If this isn't the embodiment of American Exceptionalism, I really don't know what is.

---Vitelius

The Piracy Will Continue Until Morale Improves

The extortionists are leaving the shakedown with still more protection money:

The agreement would raise the debt ceiling by $900 billion, enough to last into early next year, with spending cuts of $917 [billion] locked in for the first ten years, and an additional $1.5 trillion in cuts to be worked out on a bipartisan basis as the price for another increase in the debt ceiling next year.

Which means we get to relive this nightmare all over again next spring, woot-woot! Our wise leaders really know how to drive a hard bargain, don't they?

At this point I am starting to believe that a primary challenge to Obama next year is not only desirable as a measure of reasserting Democratic policy priorities but necessary as a measure of accountability and basic morals. And yes, I know the Sensible Democrats will say, Whoa no, we can't do that! 1980 and shades of Teddy Kennedy! And you're only paving the way for President Romney next year! To which I reply: Would President Romney be handling this deficit debate in a substantively different way than Obama is handling it now? Perhaps he would, but to my mind, it would not be differentiated by a matter of principles but only by a matter of degree. Even if you think a Romney presidency would be even more draconian and punitive, I imagine you're right, but let's face it---what we're getting from the President and our Democratic leaders is merely a form of Romneyism on the installment plan. I'd rather take my medicine in one nauseous gulp instead of sipping it gradually for the next nine months, only to be told I need another dose of Ipecac.

Update: Okay, apparently the debt-ceiling issue has been retired until after the elections, but we can still look forward to endless wrangling amongst the Serious People next year over how much we need to voluntarily gouge out of Medicare before some mindless mechanism does it for us. Either way, I fail to see how this helps advance the President's domestic agenda---unless dismantling the New Deal in the middle of a Lesser Depression is his domestic agenda. In which case, as I said, bring on the primary challengers.

---Vitelius

Dumbshit National Committee Fail

Via Cole, if I wanted to eavesdrop on the activities of my political opponents but didn't want to bother with phone-hacking---which is much more intrusive and time-consuming, and which runs a far greater risk of detection---I can't think of a better idea than this:

Internet providers would be forced to keep logs of their customers' activities for one year---in case police want to review them in the future---under legislation that a U.S. House of Representatives committee approved today.

The 19 to 10 vote represents a victory for conservative Republicans, who made data retention their first major technology initiative after last fall's elections, and the Justice Department officials who have quietly lobbied for the sweeping new requirements, a development first reported by CNET.

A last-minute rewrite of the bill expands the information that commercial Internet providers are required to store to include customers' names, addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, and temporarily-assigned IP addresses, some committee members suggested. By a 7-16 vote, the panel rejected an amendment that would have clarified that only IP addresses must be stored.

And most awesomely of all, as John notes:

Once again, Democrats and Republicans unite to fight terrorism the drug war kiddie porn and in the process throw your privacy rights out the window. And while some Democrats put up token resistance, the damned bill was sponsored by none other than Debbie Wasserman Schultz. You know her as the chair to the DNC.

Jesus. I suppose Debbie Wasserman-Schultz is much more knowledgeable than you or I on such matters, and that she's been assured beyond any reasonable doubt that this kind of intelligence-gathering would only ever be employed by the government to hunt down kiddie porn-mongers (and maybe the occasional shariah-law advocate) and not its political opponents because, well, our government doesn't do that kind of thing. President Obama never would. Which I guess is all we need to know.

---Vitelius

Protection Rackets

Extortionists can't generally thrive where people refuse to tolerate being shaken down for protection money, so while I am somewhat sympathetic to Steve's post today, it bears repeating that the behavior of Congressional Republicans over this past term was perfectly predictable, given the marching orders issued by their leadership, and that our President has been perfectly willing to coddle the extortionists by coughing up ransom payments in the form of tax cuts and tax-cut extensions for the last two years running---and no one strong-armed him into engaging the extortionists by his willingness to link the debt ceiling to the deficit. I mean, you can slice it any way you want, but it was an open invitation to be shaken down yet again. Perhaps a little more rigidity and a bit less undercutting-his-own-mandate in the first two years of his administration would have discouraged the gangsters in the House GOP from treating the nation like a bowling alley vending-machine operation. It almost certainly would have made for better policy, but we'll never know now because that approach wasn't tried.

And yes, I realize the President is doing a good job of play-acting like he's the only grown-up in the room (though that honor rightly belongs to Pelosi, IMO),and while I am sure that his pollsters have got plenty of numbers that show public support for his "balanced approach" to slashing domestic programs responsible deficit-cutting, he and his most devoted followers have got to know that nothing---and I mean nothing---will redound to the President's, or his party's, favor a year and a half from now, particularly if Social Security, Medicare and/or Medicaid are involved. It's not like you can sacrifice your party's signature legislative accomplishments of the past hundred years and still expect people to vote for you, right?

Oddly, many voters prefer the policies of Democrats to the policies of Republicans. They just don’t trust the Democrats to carry out those promises.

This also too.

---Vitelius

Mainlining the Crazy

Smack dab in the middle of the front page of the Times today, you have to read nine breathless paragraphs and some 400 words of nonsense before you get to the substance of this story:

[T]he movement is arguably directed at a problem more imagined than real.

Naturally, this is not on Page 1 where it belongs, but buried in the back of the news section. And there's nothing "arguable" about this---these people are seriously deranged. Just because one guy in New Jersey won a shariah court case, it doesn't validate the paranoid fears of a bunch of birthers and bigots. It's this same selective cherry-picking of factoids, and drawing false conclusions from them, that led us into fucking Iraq in the first place---with a big assist, of course, from the Times.

Seems to me the real story here is the shadowy network of right-wing organizations that are pushing this shariah crap. They're mentioned in passing, but we're not really told who they are beyond their paid TV spokesmodels, are we? Like, who really runs these groups? Where are they based? And most germanely, where do they get their money?

But I guess that would require a journalist who's willing to dig deep into the weeds and uproot some worms instead of a stenographer who uncritically passes along the ravings of a madman and calls it reporting.

Like I said yesterday, a society that draws few if any distinctions between its craziest members and everyone else is destined to live under Crazyman Rule, and anyone who professes shock over what has transpired in Washington over the past decade and a half simply hasn't been paying attention. One need only have read the political reporting in major dailies like the Times and the Post on a semi-regular basis to see where our political discourse was heading. The endgame was always easy to extrapolate, and we have finally reached it.

---Vitelius

Why We Fight II

Because someone, somewhere, will make money from it.

---Vitelius

Still Governed by Falsehoods

The city of Washington has not gone mad. A cult of militant hostage-takers has gone mad, and the government has ground to halt while the other parties debate how big the ransom payment is going to be.

A society that continually tells itself that the crazy men in its midst aren't any crazier than the rest of us is destined to live under Crazyman Rule.

Meanwhile, this.

---Vitelius

Governed by Falsehoods

Contrary to what the Serious People tell you, there is no debt crisis. Neither is there a spending crisis. What we have is a bunch of crazy white people who hate their jobs and who are trying to blow up their workplace out of spite. Period. If they succeed---and it looks like they will, as predicted---then we will have a crisis on our hands.

This isn't counting, of course, the very real and still ongoing economic crises our leaders have been largely ignoring for two years running.

Also too, this.

---Vitelius

Why We Fight

No good reason.

---Vitelius

Looters and Moochers

We used to call them hunters and gatherers, and in pastoral Meso-America, they were entirely self-sufficient. But nowadays, in our consumptive age, anyone who can't or won't throw money at Safeway to obtain their food is simply expected to starve.

---Vitelius

Lessons in Macro Economics

Last decade, our Galtian overlords took out millions of fire insurance policies on your house, then torched it when the price was right. Now they are applying the same Best Practices to the government that paid out their claims:

The cost of buying insurance against a default by the US rose to a record on Wednesday, in a sign of growing unease that gridlock in Washington over raising the federal debt ceiling may result in the Treasury failing to pay interest to bondholders.

The market for buying and selling insurance on the creditworthiness of the US is thinly traded, denominated in euros and dominated by European and UK banks in London. But trading in so-called credit default swaps has picked up as the threat of a default has grown.

In a CDS, a buyer of protection is compensated by the seller should there be a default or missed payment, known as a “credit event”.

“The US CDS market is much less liquid than other sovereign markets as up until recently no one thought the chance of a US credit event was very high,” said Ira Jersey, strategist at Credit Suisse. “The market is getting nervous over the risk of a default.” Premiums for one-year US sovereign CDS rose sharply this week and traded at about 90 basis points in London on Wednesday, overtaking the previous high set in March 2009.

Now I know there's going to be a default next week. There's too much money to be lost if it doesn't happen.

---Vitelius

Lying Sacks of Shit

Never change over time. They simply reveal themselves:

“My first reaction was anger. Who the hell would do that to America? Then I immediately focused on the children, and the contrast between the attack and the innocence of children,” Bush says in an excerpt of the interview shown to television writers in Los Angeles on Thursday.

Someone had a really short memory, no?

We've known for years now that George W. Bush received a presidential daily briefing on Aug. 6, 2001, in which he was warned: "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." We've known for almost as long that Bush went fishing afterward.

What we didn't know is what happened in between the briefing and the fishing, and now Suskind is here to tell us. Bush listened to the briefing, Suskind says, then told the CIA briefer: "All right. You've covered your ass, now."

Prediction: History will one day reach the conclusion that the Obama administration's single most glaring moral failure was its willingness to run interference for this genocidal criminal, and for all of his accomplices too.

---Vitelius

Credit Where Due

Don't really expect anything more legally binding than the usual sternly worded earnings to come out of this initiative, but props to the administration for forcing the hand of recalcitrant states to get with the program and start implementing some of the ACA's most basic cost-cutting measures. It's a semi-sucky law, but it is the law, and as such it should be obeyed, and can be improved later on. This should also make it harder, at least in theory, for some court to overturn it as unconstitutional if every state government is already abiding by its provisions. At least they're not offering to lay off the auditors as part of our awesome Gand Bargain, so I guess we should thankful at this point for whatever semi-nourishing policy crumbs our leaders decide to offer us.

---Vitelius

Tell Us Something We Didn't Already Know

Nobody could have possibly, etc.:

The 2007-2009 recession, already in the record books as the worst in the 66 years since the end of World War II, was even worse than previously thought.

From the start of the recession at the end of 2007 to the end in June of 2009, the U.S. economy shrank 5.1 percent. That is 1 percentage point worse than the previous estimate that the recession reduced total output during that period by 4.1 percent.

The new estimates emerged from the annual revision of economic data prepared by the Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis and released Friday.

Among the previous 10 postwar recessions, output in only two dropped by more 3 percent. In the 1957-58 recession, the economy contracted 3.7 percent. And during the 1973-1975 downturn, the economy fell 3.2 percent from the start of the recession to the end.

The government attributed the bigger declines in output in part to weaker consumer spending and business investment than previously estimated.

By year, the government's new figures show that the economy took a much bigger hit in 2009, when output shrank 3.5 percent.

And what do our wise leaders propose to fix this? Naturally---shrink the economy.

Default or no, we are totally hosed.

---Vitelius

Ending America's Class War

Is a simple matter of admitting that it's already over. And we lost.

---Vitelius

Counterintuitive. Also Too, Stupid Politics

One of the biggest tragedies of the Lesser Depression is the number of people over the age of 50 who have lost their jobs. A lot of these people have been unemployed for years, and some may never work again in their chosen fields, or earn the levels of income they once did. Doubtless a lot of these same people have lost their company health insurance, or are paying through the nose for extremely expensive COBRA plans. So why aren't our wise leaders talking about lowering the Medicare eligibility age instead of only raising it? Yes, there are some added costs accrued from, say, lowering the eligibility age from 64 to 62, but they're really rather nominal---about the same as two of these---plus, businesses would realize significant cost savings once relieved of the burden of having to provide coverage for their older employees who are typically the most expensive to insure, which should improve productivity, profitability, etc. Seems to me it's a win-win proposition that would relieve the effects of a chronic social problem while improving private-sector balance sheets for minimal cost. Why, people might even think that their government was doing something good for them for a change.

So why aren't our leaders even talking about this? And also too, this?

---Vitelius

Honey, I Swear It'll Never Happen Again

Is a line that most abused spouses have probably heard in their lives, and so long as the abuser keeps to his/her word, it's fine as far as it goes. But when the beatings resume on even a semi-regular basis, there comes a time in most people's lives when they stop putting faith in mere words and maybe decide to, you know, file for divorce.

---Vitelius

Externalities

One if the things you'd like to hear our leaders talk about more often is the fact that public-works projects like roads and railways and airport construction not only provide good-paying jobs and expand the tax base while the work proceeds, but they also convey secondary benefits by saving businesses and individuals lots of money in the long run through increased efficiencies and lower fuel costs. Conversely, failing to make these kinds of investments costs everybody more through lost time stuck in gridlock and taxiways, increases in fuel consumption and vehicle maintenance, etc. But I guess our leaders don't believe we can have both guns and butter anymore.

---Vitelius

Can't Think of a Better Use of Column-Inches in a Newspaper Than Devoting the Sunday Magazine to the Paranoid Rants of a Right-Wing Criminal Who Practices the Antithesis of Real Journalism

Memo to Pinch Sulzberger: Fire Bill Keller. Fire him now.

---Vitelius

Demolition Derby

First they got paid off for demolishing the housing market. Now they're demolishing the houses they stole from homeowners, and passing the losses one more time to you:

“No one needs these homes, no one is going to buy them,” said Christopher Thornberg, founding partner at the Los Angeles office of Beacon Economics LLC, a forecasting firm. “Bank of America is not going to be able to cover its losses, so it might as well give them away and get a little write-off and some nice public relations.”

Donating a house may create an income-tax deduction, said Robert Willens, an independent accounting analyst based in New York. A bank might deduct as much as the fair market value if a home wasn’t acquired with the explicit intent of knocking it down, he said.

They haven't been required to abide by mark-to-market practices yet. Why would they even think of starting it now?

---Vitelius