Yes, she thinks you think she’s speaking extemporaneously; not reading off a teleprompter.
Never hesitate to admit failure. Make no attempt to hide failure under deceptive smiles
and beaming optimism. It sounds well always to claim success, but the end results are appalling.
Such a technique leads directly to the creation of a world of
unreality and to the inevitable crash of ultimate disillusionment.
— The Urantia Book
STILLWATER, MN — Resplendent in her foxy* deep blue silk jacket and cultured pearls, Michele Bachmann announced she will not seek another term in the United States Congress.
The Tea Party darling’s very long list of denials about why she is not leaving may become more credible, if and when the rumor we are accused of starting turns out to be true: that she will be joining “Prancersize” inventor Joanna Rohrback‘s firm as its Presidential “Prancer” and Commander-in-Chief horsey:
Another unfortunate example of Camel Toe. But all is not lost; watch with the volume off.
And speaking of prancing show horseys… another angry beaver attacked a man on a roadside near Shestakovskoye lake, west of Minsk, Belarus, slicing through an artery in his leg which caused him to bleed to death. It was the most recent in a string of angry beaver attacks in Belarus, where the beaver population has tripled in the past decade to around 80,000. Belarusian beavers can weigh up to 65 pounds and stand three feet high.
Experts say the increase in attacks is largely due to springtime aggression in young beavers that are trying to make a name for themselves and stake out their own territory after being forced to leave home by their parents. Some older beavers can also become disoriented in life and attack out of fear; others become bitter and vengeful when faced with the inevitable crash of their ultimate disillusionment.
Lost amid the tidal wave of media coverage over the Boston Marathon bombings this week was the destruction of a foundational argument of the Avatars of Austerity, aka “deficit hawks.”
Thanks to a little fact checking and spreadsheet analysis by a U Mass grad student and his associates, they proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that key economic data used by the Austerians to justify their slash and burn budget prescriptions is full of shit.
The bogus data is enshrined in a paper by two Harvard economists, Reinhart and Rogoff, frequently cited as Holy Writ by everyone form Erskine-Bowles to Paul Ryan to Fux News. Details to follow, but first, an overview.
Following the collapse of the international financial system during the George W. Bush Administration, deficits worldwide exploded as former tax paying workers were laid off in the tens of millions. Instead of putting them to work building infrastructure and the like, the strategy chosen by FDR during the last Great Depression to re-start the economy and thereby raise government revenues, the uber rich offered their own re-cycled remedy of trickle-down economics, with a twist– tax cuts for them and budget cuts for everyone else.
While the subtext of the Austerians’ campaign to slash government budgets, which overwhelmingly disadvantage the poor and middle class, is obvious: the One Percenters resent having to pay taxes that benefit society as a whole (see Willard Romney’s attack on the 47% as parasites demanding “free stuff”); and while the actual real world results of austerity regimes currently in place in Europe have resulted in deeper economic dislocation and misery — Great Britain is in the middle of a triple dip recession despite deep cuts in vital government institutions like the BBC — one would think that the Austerians would accept reality and admit their anti-Keneysian belief system is wrong.
Fat chance. Depression levels of unemployment in Greece, Spain, and Portugal, accompanied by negative GDP, the contagion effect of austerity is being felt in even healthy exporting countries like Germany, to the extent that even the IMF came out this week against austerity. Despite irrefutable facts, the Austerians remain convinced of the rightness of their crusade. Ignoring Einstein’s definition of insanity — doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result — they argue for even greater cuts, and more time for them to work their expected magic.
[T]he Rogoff-Reinhart paper entitled Growth In A Time Of Debt became the intellectual backbone for the austerity movement/plutocrats and their apparatchiks in Washington and elsewhere. The big take away was that a high government debt to GDP ratio – past 90% – would hurt economic growth. Hence, the austerity movement’s central claim that cutting government spending is necessary to restore higher growth levels. And if you are following along, you probably realize why this argument does not even work in its own context. Cutting spending does not eliminate debt – which increases perpetually with interest. Nor is debt itself a reflection of spending levels, debt merely represents borrowing. The government can spend as much as possible and avoid high debt to GDP ratios if taxes are levied to pay for the spending. In fact, the highest growth period in the history of America was during one of its highest tax periods. Neither taxes, debt, nor government spending are, in and of themselves, determinative of economic growth.
Sounds reasonable enough on the surface, assuming that the data they used and its analysis reflect reality. But Houston, we have a problem:
Thomas Herndon, a 28-year-old economics grad student at UMass Amherst, just used part of his spring semester to shake the intellectual foundation of the global austerity movement.
Herndon became instantly famous in nerdy economics circles this week as the lead author of a recent paper, “Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff,” that took aim at a massively influential study by two Harvard professors named Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff. Herndon found some hidden errors in Reinhart and Rogoff’s data set, then calmly took the entire study out back and slaughtered it.
What Herndon had discovered was that by making a sloppy computing error, Reinhart and Rogoff had forgotten to include a critical piece of data about countries with high debt-to-GDP ratios that would have affected their overall calculations. They had also excluded data from Canada, New Zealand, and Australia — all countries that experienced solid growth during periods of high debt and would thus undercut their thesis that high debt forestalls growth.
Oopsie. Paul Krugman in his Friday column asks the logical, resulting gobsmacking question:
So, did an Excel coding error destroy the economies of the Western world?
Informed of the mathematical mistake that undergirded his and his BFF Alan Simpson’s whole austerity thesis, Democrat deficit hawk Erskine Bowles in essence replied that he didn’t care–he still believes in its viability, the facts be damned.
“I have obviously read the report and have referenced it a number of times,” Bowles said. “I know they had a worksheet error in the report and my understanding is that does make a difference.”
“But what it doesn’t change is the common sense and my own personal experience in both the public and private sector that when any organization has too much debt that is an enormous risk factor and your risks go up then people lending you money will want more money for their money,” Bowles said.
Translation: “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!”
So, Bowles is reduced to playing the “common sense” card so popular among conservatives these days when one of their pet ideologically driven crusades fails an objective analysis of its underlying facts. Sure, there is evidence that debt in excess of 90% of GDP retards economic growth by a measurable percentage. But it doesn’t drive it down anywhere near the level the Austerians maintain, making their Chicken Little The Sky Is Falling routine absurd on its face.
(Reminds me of the cognitive dissonance I used to see operating inside the criminal justice system. As advocacy groups like the Innocence Project has shown, not everyone convicted of a crime is guilty, as post-hoc DNA tests regularly show. You’d think that the original police investigators and prosecutors would eat a little humble pie for being proven wrong, but you’d be wrong. Like chest thumping politicians, they are geniuses at rationalization, maintaining that the victim was guilty for some other reason, because, well, just because. After all, they are professionals, experts who know their stuff.)
Other problems with R&R’s analyses includes the counterfactual case of England, which despite violating the 90% threshold for 19 continuous years, still maintained positive economic growth; and worse, cancelling its influence on the overall data set by giving it equal weight with a single year of severe negative economic growth in New Zealand in the early 1950s. Furthermore, economic conditions change over the decades, and when one analyzes R&R’s data from the beginning of the 21st century forward, the presumed relationship between the 90% level of economic stagnation becomes even more tenuous.
The question now is whether this cold slap of mathematical reality will be enough to end the hysteria of debt obsession that has the Serious People is D.C. so enthralled, and whether the far more critical and economically productive emphasis on job creation is once again the subject of serious policy debate.
Democratic accountability has been sucked out of the nation-state system and deposited into the hands of a planetary bureaucracy of transnational corporations and central bankers. And from their perspective there is no crisis, at least not anymore, just a continued redistribution of wealth up and the necessity of building a police state to protect it. Austerity forever.
As the Master of Disaster W. once said: “Fool me once, shame on, shame on, you. Fool me–you can’t get fooled again!”
Rand Paul tries to get his Black on at Howard University
Rest at pale evening…
A tall slim tree…
Night coming tenderly
Black like me.
–Langston Hughes, Dream Variations
Following a decade-long bout with a temporary form of blindness, Texas author John Howard Griffin lit upon a novel idea: to effectively alter his physical appearance such that he could pass for a black man, to better understand the challenges that confronted the Black race in the pre-Civil Rights era of the late 1950s. The gritty results of this one man social experiment were published in book form under the title Black Like Me (later turned into a movie of the same name, starring James Whitmore). From the BBC account on the 50th anniversary of its publication:
In the American Deep South in 1959, to be black was to be despised — to be treated as something less than human. There was the grinding poverty, of course, and the segregation and legalised discrimination which reserved certain railroad cars, bus seats and drinking fountains for the whites. But there were humiliations that ran deeper still. In some states, black men accused of looking at white women with lust in their hearts could be arrested under laws which made “ogling” a form of sexual assault. In others, “eyeballing” laws meant that failing to look down at the sidewalk when white folks passed by could lead to a charge of behaving in a confrontational way.
(As a detested “heepy” living in Hawaii in the early ’70s, I learned early on, if possible, never make eye contact with da local boys. A fellow traveler was not so fortunate. Having caught the attention of the big guys hanging outside of Auggie’s Pool Hall in Paia, they raced across the street, chased him into a cane field, and beat him with their pool cues to within an inch of his life.)
All of which is background for a condescending historical lecture on Civil Rights given by Senator Ron Paul (R-Teabagger) to a polite but gobsmacked audience Wednesday at one of the country’s premiere Black colleges, Howard University. ThinkProgress has the highlights:
1.The Civil Rights movement is actually the “history of the Republican Party”. The thrust of Paul’s speech was a recapitulation of the history of race and racism and a defense of the Republican record on race (representative line: “The story of emancipation, voting rights and citizenship, from Fredrick Douglass until the modern civil rights era, is in fact the history of the Republican Party.”) The problem was that this speech, ostensibly designed to persuade black voters that the GOP was interested in them, was telling the audience things it already knew. Moreover, the speech didn’t grapple with what happened to make the Democrats the more racially liberal party in the mid-40s or the turn towards racially divisive politics on the Republican right, essentially skipping over the real reason the GOP alienated African-American voters.
2. Assumed the audience didn’t know the history of the NAACP. In one of the most awkward moments of the talk, Paul asked the audience if anyone knew that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) had been founded by Republicans. The audience responded with a resounding “yes!”
3. Suggested that African-Americans were “demeaning” the history of sergregation by calling voter ID laws discrimination. When asked how African-Americans could trust the Republican Party given its generalized support for discriminatoryvoter ID laws, Rand Paul told the audience to chill out about the measures, suggesting they were common sense. Paul argued that the view that these laws were an updated version of poll taxes was “[demeaning] the horror” of segregation. NAACP President Benjamin Jealous has said voter ID laws are “pushing more voters out of the ballot box than any point since Jim Crow.”
4. Mangled the name of the first popularly-elected black Senator. In what appeared to be an attempt to demonstrate his familiarity with the subject matter, Paul brought up Senator Edward William Brooke III (a Republican mentioned in the prepared remarks as “the first [elected] black U.S. Senator”). He referred to him, however, as “Edwin Brooks,” a point the audience corrected.
5. Misled about his opposition to the Civil Rights Act.Paul said “I’ve never wavered in my support for civil rights or the Civil Rights Act.” The problem, as Mother Jones‘ Adam Serwer pointed out, is that he opposed the law’s ban on discrimination in “places of public accommodation” like businesses, one of its most important planks. As an audience member asking Paul about this issue pointed out, “this was on tape.”
“an example of what happens when a staunch conservative steps out of the GOP’s tightly-drawn racial nonsense bubble and hits an audience not dying to be convinced that the GOP’s problems with non-whites are the results of boffo misunderstandings about a Republican party that is actually the best thing that ever happened to black people.”
Marshall concludes with an insight into what happens when the brain’s narrative circuitry crystallizes around a long held personal prejudice:
” You can become so lost in your own story that you confuse your conciliation with your aggression. The GOP is so deep into its own self-justifying racial alternative reality that there’s some genuine surprise when the claptrap doesn’t survive first contact with actual black people.”
It’s like, for the whole fifty years of his sheltered life, Senator Aqua Buddha lived in a parallel Libertarian universe where compassionate, visionary Republicans ushered in the Second Great Emancipation of the downtrodden Negro race. I guess his nose was too stuck too far into Ayn Rand’s fantasy novels to notice that when the Redneck South abandoned the Democratic Party after LBJ signed the Civil Rights and Voting Acts, those Yellow Dog Democrats found a welcome home in the GOP. Or that Ronald Reagan announced his 1980 presidential run in the Mississippi town where civil rights workers, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Cheney were murdered in 1964.
Yesterday, I watched the new movie 42 about the legendary Jackie Robinson, the first Black professional baseball player who did so much to pave the way for later day civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King and Medgar Evers. Jackie suffered much abuse as he became the focal point of the intense racial hatred that prevailed during the year of his breakthrough, 1947. Scenes from the movie include the iconic Whites Only signs that hung like nooses over bathroom doors and restaurants and professional baseball parks. In one scene, his minor league team bus stopped to gas up and Jackie headed towards the restroom to relieve himself. The attendant forbade from using it, saying he should know better.
Ron Paul, even today, would have supported the attendant’s choice, given his reading of the Constitution that private businesses should be allowed to discriminate.
THERE’S A SPECIAL KIND OF STUPID out there in “Merca,” and over the last four decades or so, it’s been allowed to proliferate quite unimpeded by other aspects of cultural society, especially by things like intelligence, wisdom, facts, and truth.
The current poster weenie for this affliction is National Rifle Association executive tool, Wayne LaPierre.
LaPi— Mmm. Wait.
Actually, the poster weenie for this affliction is NRA tool, Ted Nugent. But LaPierre is the suit that spouts the crazy at official NRA propaganda sessions. Recently he pointed out to a few Senators that tighter gun control laws aren’t needed— because criminals ignore laws.
“They’re criminals, they’re homicidal maniacs… we all know that homicidal maniacs, criminals, and the insane don’t abide by the law.”
Ah. So, since criminals don’t always follow laws, no new laws (regulation) would work— because criminals break laws— so laws won’t work— because criminals, by definition, break laws— so we shouldn’t resort to laws as a way of trying to regulate or restrain criminals, homicidal maniacs, or the insane, because, you know, laws break.
See?
Ironically, it’s a perfect example of what Right Wing Nut Jobs call “Special Stupid” — a peculiar and tortured logic maze created and justified by fear— and its shadow— hate. It’s simplistic and selfish, and a hypocritical way of negating everything Jesus ever said about loving your neighbor, one another, or, because, foreigners.
But like nearly everything in the lizard brain, the blazing irony of Special Stupid defies not just logic, love, fact, truth, and common sense, but even the most basic level of moral humanity— while assuming the very mantel of superior morality at the point of a gun and wrapped in an American Flag.
And it is this ongoing cultural conundrum of the cold dead values of the past, being inexorably and evermore forcefully supplanted by the progressive values of true brotherhood, which will occupy center stage of American politics until the battle is won. And it will not be won with bullets.
WRT to the so-called fiscal cliff negotiations, President Obama, as expected, caved on his many promises to draw the line of tax increases at $200-250k, settling for $400-450k. This has the effect of reducing his initial position of raising $1.6 trillion in new revenues to a mere $620 billion. The difference will likely be made up in even further cuts to discretionary spending, including an already weakened social safety net, though Obama made some vague promises to offset some of the difference by closing some tax loophole and other exemptions.
While in the short run the Obama Administration won some significant concessions on issues like extended unemployment insurance, green energy tax credits (at the price of extending subsidies for the fossil fuel extraction industry), and patching the Alternative Minimum Tax loophole (that was starting to sweep more and more of the middle class into its grasp because it wasn’t originally indexed to inflation), he has substantially weakened his future negotiating position with the Rethugs by not insisting that the debt limit be extended permanently.
This latter development sets up a replay of hostage taking strategy that the Rethugs used so effectively in 2011. While Obama has stated in no uncertain terms that he wouldn’t entertain negotiations on the issue, he hardly has the negotiating cred to convince anyone that he won’t fold on that issue as he has on so many others. (I heard today a spokesman for Patriotic Millionaires, who have lobbied for higher taxes on individuals in his income class, say that Obama was the worst presidential negotiator evah.)
That said, the bottom line on the income tax issue for Rethugs is that because they agreed to higher income taxes (if only on the top 0.016%), it represents a clear break with the vaunted Grover Norquist no tax increases ever pledge. Nonetheless, as a leader in the Grand Old Denial Party, Grover tried to spin the defeat, saying:
“The Bush tax cuts lapsed at midnight last night. Every R voting for Senate bill is cutting taxes and keeping his/her pledge.”
Interviewed on MSNBC by a dumbfounded Andrea Mitchell, she offered a more realistic assessment:
“Wait a second,” Mitchell interjected with a laugh. “We’re not living in the Alice in Wonderland world here. There is a tax increase for wealthy Americans. It’s literally a tax increase. Rates are up.”
“We had an election Boehner was elected speaker. Now lame duck obama should get over it.”
Oh, Grover, you quack us up. The Rethugs regained control of the House despite receiving less votes than the totality of Democratic reps nationwide, thanks to the 2010 census and some heavily biased redistricting shenanigans.
That sound you’re hearing is the cement shoes hardening around your feet as history awaits your plunge into the primordial D.C. tidewaters. Future generations might find it necessary to re-drain the Washington swamp, at which time your rotted corpse will surface and serve as a time capsule embodying the worst of the Greed is Good ethos that has done so much to corrupt the US government.
Bon voyage, you selfish prick. And may the Ancients of Days judge you divinely.