The USA Oligarchy-Austerity-Schadenfreude Thread

[justdrew]

27 November 2010 Last updated at 09:12 ET
Is squirrel the perfect austerity dish?
By Katie Connolly BBC News, Washington
The North American grey squirrel - coming to a plate near you?

Related stories
* Anger over squirrel meat on sale

Grey squirrels are ubiquitous in North America - scurrying across our lawns and up our trees, burying nuts and taunting our tantalised dogs.

Bright-eyed and bushy tailed, squirrels are cute, furry and, apparently, very edible.

The notion of stewed squirrel may not tempt everybody's taste buds, but in an age of tightening belts and financial severity, the humble abundance of the squirrel is causing some to reconsider its epicurean virtue.

American hunter William Hovey Smith, a self-described outdoor enthusiast, loves a spot of squirrel stew, made of course from critters he hunts himself.

"It is certainly a very American dish. We've eaten it since colonial days. In fact sometimes, during hard times, a lot of people primarily subsisted from squirrel meat, just for want of anything better," Mr Smith says.

The kill

Born and bred in the state of Georgia, he lives on a property that has been in his family since the 1700s. The house was once an orderly cotton plantation but now the sprawling estate is overgrown with brush and pine trees, making it an ideal hunting ground.

Although the squirrels that dot New York's Central Park have no qualms about scampering toward a picnic blanket or eating from a tourist's hand, wild bush squirrels are quick and evasive.

Mr Smith with squirrel meat Mr Smith says his stew has a "distinctly sweet flavour"

They are best hunted the old-fashioned way - with a rifle and a dog.

His hunter's eye roving, Mr Smith scans his property on a rainy day in November. At his side, his dog's nose twitches.

He has used a variety of weapons to hunt squirrels in the past, including shotguns, handguns, air rifles and even crossbows.

Today, his weapon of choice is a single-shot muzzle-loaded rifle, packed with loose gun powder and a ball.

The kill is a blur. He spots a squirrel, fires, and seconds later his "faithful hound" has retrieved the dead squirrel.

"This is a nice big one. Nice long tail, weighs about 2lb or so. That's a little large for a squirrel," Mr Smith says of the North American grey squirrel he has caught.

A very American dish

Back in the kitchen, as he skins and prepares the dead rodent, Mr Smith explains that squirrel-eating is an American tradition of sorts.

Squirrels, like deer, were an obvious catch for the early settlers who cleared the virgin forests for agriculture in the 1700s. To this day, squirrel stew is not uncommon in the American South.

While some may blanch at the thought of eating a rodent, many food-lovers point out that its cousin, the rabbit, is already widely eaten. In the UK, chefs have been known to whip up apparently delectable squirrel offerings, including pate.

Eating squirrel also raises fewer of the ethical and environmental questions that industrially farmed meats do.

Wearing gloves, Mr Smith first cuts off the tail and four legs using game shears, then strips the hide with a pocket knife with a 3in (7.6cm) blade. The gloves are important, protecting him from "nasties", as he calls blood-borne viruses.

"I do not cook the squirrel heads, although my mother dearly loved them - squirrel brains," he recalls. "They have a nutty taste."

Mr Smith boils the squirrel until the meat separates from the bone, then stews the flesh with canned corn, onion, tomato, bell peppers, salt and pepper. Sometimes he makes squirrel dumplings instead of stew.

"Squirrel stew has a very distinctly sweet flavour," he says, likening it to stewed pork, which also tastes sweet even without the addition of sugars.

"It's a quite pleasant tasting dish and I would not be afraid to offer it to the Queen," he says, before quipping, "Y'all are overrun with squirrels in England. You need to eat some of them!"

[Pele'sDaughter]

When I was little my father's parents lived just down the road from the house where he was born, and they still farmed and raised chickens and pigs. We would visit and I'd go hunting (at 4 or 5 yrs of age) with my father and his brother. There were two dogs named Pete and Repeat which they'd take with us. Just like in the article, the dogs would tree the squirrel which would then be shot. The gun was a rifle of some sort. The squirrel were skinned and gutted with the dogs being rewarded for their participation with squirrel guts. The tail was cut off and give to me. My grandmother braised the squirrel and served it in delicious brown gravy. It was delicious just like everything else she cooked.

[Nordic]

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/bernan ... -qe-coming

Bernanke Tells Nation This Sunday: More QE Coming

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 12/03/2010 17:11 -0500

For those wondering why the market leaked higher in the last hour, it is because someone got an advance copy of the transcript (or advance notice) that in this Sunday's latest attempt at faux transparency on 60 Minutes, the bearded mutant-cum-supreme genocidal overlord says that more QE is coming. From Reuters: "The euro rose to a session peak against the dollar in late afternoon New York trade on Friday after a report on the CBS website that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke did not rule out buying more than $600 billion of bonds in further quantitative easing." It also explains why the euro is back to 1.34, and is right in line with our expectations that the EURUSD is only weak so long as the market realizes that much, much more QE is coming. How much? See the chart below for our ongoing expectation of what the Fed's balance sheet will look like soon. And yes, the $7 dollar jump in gold late in the day may be multiplied 10-20x on Monday after the world realizes that the US economy is as fucked as always.

It's my belief that Bernacke is doing this because he has no choice at this point -- not enough parties are buying the debt, so this is the U.S.'s only option. Labelling this "Quantitative Easing" is putting lipstick on the dying pig.

[Simulist]

The Big Economic Story, and Why Obama Isn’t Telling It

by Robert Reich

Quiz: What's responsible for the lousy economy most Americans continue to wallow in?

A. Big government, bureaucrats, and the cultural and intellectual elites who back them.

B. Big business, Wall Street, and the powerful and privileged who represent them.

These are the two competing stories Americans are telling one another.

Yes, I know: It's more complicated than this. In reality, the lousy economy is due to insufficient demand - the result of the nation's almost unprecedented concentration of income at the top. The very rich don't spend as much of their income as the middle. And since the housing bubble burst, the middle class hasn't had the buying power to keep the economy going. That concentration of income, in turn, is due to globalization and technological change - along with unprecedented campaign contributions and lobbying designed to make the rich even richer and do nothing to help average Americans, insider trading, and political bribery.

So B is closer to the truth.

But A is the story Republicans and right-wingers tell. It's a dangerous story because it deflects attention from the real problem and makes it harder for America to focus on the real solution - which is more widely shared prosperity. (I get into how we might do this in my new book, Aftershock.)

A is also the story President Obama is telling, indirectly, through his deficit commission, his freeze on federal pay, his freeze on discretionary spending, and his waivering on extending the Bush tax cuts for the rich.

Most other Washington Democrats are falling into the same trap.

If Obama and the Democrats were serious about story B they'd at least mention it. They'd tell the nation that income and wealth haven't been this concentrated at the top since 1928, the year before the Great Crash. They'd be indignant about the secret money funneled into midterm campaigns. They'd demand Congress pass the Disclose Act so the public would know where the money comes from.

They'd introduce legislation to curb Wall Street bonuses - exactly what European leaders are doing with their financial firms. They'd demand that the big banks, now profitable after taxpayer bailouts, reorganize the mortgage debt of distressed homeowners. They'd call for a new WPA to put the unemployed back to work, and pay for it with a tax surcharge on incomes over $1 million.

They'd insist on extended unemployment benefits for long-term jobless who are now exhausting their benefits. And they'd hang tough on the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy - daring Republicans to vote against extending the cuts for everyone else.

But Obama is doing none of this. Instead, he's telling story A.

Making a big deal out of the deficit - appointing a deficit commission and letting them grandstand with a plan to cut $4 trillion out of the projected deficit over the next ten years - $3 of government spending for every $1 of tax increase - is telling story A.

What the public hears is that our economic problems stem from too much government and that if we reduce government spending we'll be fine.

Announcing a two-year freeze on federal salaries - explaining that "I did not reach this decision easily... these are people's lives" - is also telling story A.

What the public hears is government bureaucrats are being paid too much, and that if we get the federal payroll under control we'll all be better off.

Proposing a freeze on discretionary (non-defense) spending is telling story A. So is signaling a willingness to extend the Bush tax cuts to the top. So is appointing his top economic advisor from Wall Street (as apparently he's about to do).

In fact, the unwillingness of the President and Washinton Democrats to tell story B itself promotes story A, because in the absence of an alternative narrative the Republican story is the only one the public hears.

Obama's advisors explain the President's moves are designed to "preempt" the resurgent Republicans - just like Bill Clinton preempted the Gingrich crowd by announcing "the era of big government is over" and then tacking right.

They're wrong. By telling story A and burying story B, the President legitimizes everything the right has been saying. He doesn't preempt them; he fuels them. He gives them more grounds for voting against raising the debt ceiling in a few weeks. He strengthens their argument against additional spending for extended unemployment benefits. He legitimizes their argument against additional stimulus spending.

Bill Clinton had a rapidly expanding economy to fall back on, so his appeasement of Republicans didn't legitimize the Republican world view. Obama doesn't have that luxury. The American public is still hurting and they want to know why.

Unless the President and Democrats explain why the economy still stinks for most Americans and offer a plan to fix it, the Republican explanation and solution - it's big government's fault, and all we need do is shrink it - will prevail.

That will mean more hardship for tens of millions of Americans. It will make it harder to remedy the bad economy. And it will set Republicans up for bigger wins in the future.

Gosh. It sounds like Obama and the Washington Democrats are extremely helpful — not to the people of the United States of course, but — to the Republicans, to big business, to Wall Street, and to the powerful and privileged they are representing. Seems like a recurring theme.

And still most of the dunderheads on the "left" don't get it.

[Nordic]

Great article over at Mother Jones:

http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/12 ... ok-america

How the Oligarchs Took America

Creating a country of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich.


I won't quote the whole thing, but here is the quote that motivated me to post this here:

Most accounts of American income inequality begin in the 1980s with the reign of President Ronald Reagan, the anti-government icon whose "Reaganomics" are commonly fingered as the catalyst for today's problems. Wrong, say Hacker and Pierson. The origins of oligarchy lay in the late 1970s and in the unlikely figure of Jimmy Carter, a Democratic president presiding over a Congress controlled by Democrats. It was Carter's successes and failures, they argue, that kicked off what economist Paul Krugman has labeled "the Great Divergence."

In 1978, the Carter administration and Congress took a red pen to the tax code, slashing the top rate of the capital gains tax from 48% to 28%—an enormous boon for wealthy Americans. At the same time, the most ambitious effort in decades to reform American labor law in order to make it easer to unionize died in the Senate, despite a 61-vote Democratic supermajority. Likewise, a proposed Office of Consumer Representation, a $15 million advocacy agency that was to work on behalf of average Americans, was defeated by an increasingly powerful business lobby.

Ronald Reagan, you could say, simply took the baton passed to him by Carter.

The whole thing is a good read.

[Montag]

Western Civilization Has Shed Its Values'
by Paul Craig Roberts

December 5, 2010
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php? ... &aid=22269

excerpt:

"The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth becomes the greatest enemy of the State." -- Dr. Joseph Goebbels


Western Civilization no longer upholds the values it proclaims, so what is the basis for its claim to virtue?

For example, the US print and TV media and the US government have made it completely clear that they have no regard for the First Amendment. Consider CNN's Wolf Blitzer's reaction to the leaked diplomatic cables that reveal how the US government uses deceptions, bribes, and threats to control other governments and to deceive the American and other publics. Blitzer is outraged that information revealing the US government's improprieties reached the people, or some of them. As Alexander Cockburn wrote, Blitzer demanded that the US government take the necessary steps to make certain that journalists and the American people never again find out what their government is up to.

The disregard for the First Amendment is well established in the US media, which functions as a propaganda ministry for the government. Remember the NSA leak given to the New York Times that the George W. Bush regime was violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and spying on Americans without obtaining warrants from the FISA court? The New York Times spiked the story for one year and did not release it until after Bush's reelection. By then, the Bush regime had fabricated a legal doctrine that "authorized" Bush to violate US law.

Glenn Greenwald writing in Salon has exposed the absence of moral standards among WikiLeaks' critics. A number of American politicians have called for the US government to murder Julian Assange, as have journalists such as neoconservative propagandist Jonah Goldberg, who wrote: "Why wasn't Assange garroted in his hotel room years ago?"

WikiLeaks' critics could not make it clearer that they do not believe in accountable government. And to make certain that the government is not held accountable, WikiLeaks' critics are calling for every possible police state measure, including extra-judicial murder, to stamp out anyone who makes information available that enables the citizenry to hold government accountable.

The US government definitely does not believe in accountable government. Among the first things the Obama regime did was to make certain that there would be no investigation into the Bush regime's use of lies, fabricated "intelligence," and deception of the American public and the United Nations in order to further its agenda of conquering the independent Muslim states in the Middle East and turning them into US puppets. The Obama regime also made certain that no member of the Bush regime would be held accountable for violating US and international laws, for torturing detainees, for war crimes, for privacy violations or for any of the other criminal acts of the Bush regime.

As the cables leaked by a patriotic American to WikiLeaks reveal, the US government was even able to prevent accountable government in the UK by having British prime minister Brown "fix" the official Chilcot Inquiry into the deceptions used by former prime minister Tony Blair to lead the British into serving as mercenaries in America's wars. The US was able to do this, because the British prime minister does not believe in accountable government either.

The leaked documents show that the last thing the US government wants anywhere is a government that is accountable to its own citizens instead of to the US government.

The US government's frontal assault on freedom of information goes well beyond WikiLeaks and shutting down its host servers. In a December 2 editorial, "Wave goodbye to Internet freedom," the Washington Times reports that Federal Communications Commission chairman Julius Genachowski has "outlined a plan to expand the federal government's power over the Internet."

The obvious, but unasked, question is: Why does the US government fear the American people and believe that only news that is managed and spun by the government is fit to print? Is there an agenda afoot to turn citizens into subjects?

[Montag]

Down From The Pedestal
by Ronald Brownstein

December 8, 2010
http://nationaljournal.com/magazine/ame ... t-20101209

excerpt:

Americans no longer think the U.S. economy is No. 1, a new Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor poll shows.

In the global race for jobs and economic prosperity, the United States is No. 2. And it is likely to remain there for some time. That’s the glum conclusion of most Americans surveyed in the latest Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor poll. Henry Luce famously labeled the 20th century the “American Century.” This survey suggests that most Americans now doubt that this new century will bear that name.

In the poll, only one in five Americans said that the U.S. economy is the world’s strongest—nearly half picked China instead. Looking forward, Americans are somewhat more optimistic about regaining primacy, but still only about one in three expect the U.S. economy to be the world’s strongest in 20 years. Nearly three-fifths of those surveyed said that increasing competition from lower-paid workers around the world will keep living standards for average Americans from growing as fast as they did in the past. Ruben Owen, a retired Boeing engineer in Seattle who responded to the survey, spoke for many when he said, “We’re still in a reasonably good place … but it’s going to get harder because other places are growing stronger.”

Across a wide range of issues, the poll found the traditional American instinct toward optimism straining against fears that the nation’s economic struggles may extend far beyond the current slowdown. On many fronts, particularly the quality of higher education and scientific research, large majorities of Americans still believe that we lead the world. And most say that the U.S. can remain a manufacturing leader.

But the survey reveals deep anxiety about the impact on the American economy of increased globalization; the decades-long shift in domestic employment from manufacturing toward services; the quality of decisions by government and business leaders; and the economic prospects for younger generations.

In follow-up conversations, several of those polled struggled to maintain hope that their children will live better than they have, against growing unease that it won’t turn out that way. “I would like to say yes,” said Dana Rigby, a homemaker in Kirksville, Mo., when asked if she expected her children’s living standards to exceed her own. “I’m trying to get my kids on the right path; who doesn’t want that? But I don’t know if there’s going to be enough out there for all the young kids to have good jobs.”

Conducted after a tumultuous midterm election, the poll captured a populace that remains uneasy, ambivalent, and divided. The nation is split almost exactly in half over President Obama’s job performance and over whether he or congressional Republicans should take the lead in confronting the country’s problems. Just as tellingly, few of those polled expect their economic situation to improve much over the next year, and most say they are skeptical that either party’s agenda can achieve the nation’s major challenges. As America lurches into its third consecutive winter of discontent, confidence in the political system and optimism about the economy remain scarce.

AMERICA’S STANDING IN THE WORLD

The latest Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor poll is the seventh in a series exploring the ways that Americans are navigating the changing economy. The poll, conducted by Ed Reilly and Brent McGoldrick of FD, a communications strategy consulting firm, surveyed 1,200 adults from November 29 through December 1. It has a margin of error of +/- 2.8 percentage points. This survey focused on Americans’ view of the nation’s standing in the global economic competition and on the role they see for manufacturing in the U.S. economy.

On several fronts, those surveyed said that the United States still compares well with other nations. Nearly three-fourths said that the U.S. leads all or most of its major competitors in the quality of its colleges and universities, and about two-thirds offer the same verdict on American science and research. To Julie Gordon, a computer programmer in Yorktown, Va., those advantages are grounds for optimism about the nation’s long-term prospects. “Definitely in areas of science and technology there is potential,” she said. “If we do focus on educating our young people in the right fields, we do have the right [prospects].”

Slightly smaller majorities give the nation high marks on two other key measures of competitiveness: 57 percent said that the U.S. outranks most competitors in the quality of corporate leaders, and 56 percent reached the same judgment on the quality of the American workforce. “I think we have a fairly well-trained workforce,” said Bill Scherer, a trucking-company manager in St. Joseph, Minn. “I think that would probably be the biggest benefit … that would help us compete against China.”

On other horizons, though, Americans see more clouds. Just half say that the U.S. beats out most of its competitors in the quality of government programs to encourage growth; only 46 percent said that business and government cooperate more effectively in the U.S. than in other nations. Most strikingly, only 43 percent said that the U.S. leads most other nations in the quality of elementary and secondary education; 53 percent said that we trail our major competitors. That pessimistic sentiment was broadly shared. At least half of both the affluent and the working class, and half of those with and without college educations, saw U.S. primary education as lagging.

The verdict was most downbeat, though, on the bottom line. Asked which nation now has the world’s strongest economy, just 20 percent picked the United States. More than twice as many (47 percent) picked China. Eleven percent chose Japan. White working-class voters—the group that turned most sharply against the Democrats in November—were the most pessimistic: Just one in seven of them placed the U.S. atop the list; half named China. But the pessimism was widespread. Almost half of both college-educated whites and minority adults also tabbed China as No. 1. Americans who consider themselves politically independent were especially downbeat (53 percent went with China), but both Republicans and Democrats were also twice as likely to name China as the U.S.

[Bruce Dazzling]

Highlight:

‎

"Here's what this all comes down to: who is going to pay for a) the Bush tax cuts b) the bank bailouts and c) the Iraq and Afghanistan wars? If you want to get there by making janitors and pipe-fitters wait until they're 69 to retire, raise your hand. If you want to get there by making Jamie Dimon rent out his 900-foot rooftop terrace in Chicago two nights a year, raise your hand."

Matt Bai's Post-Partisanship
Posted: December 5, 2010 11:23 A.M. EST | By Matt Taibbi

A few weeks back I participated in a post-election roundtable that included Peter Hart and former Nixon aide David Gergen. The session got unexpectedly hot, in particular over the whole issue of whether or not Obama had done enough to keep America's CEOs happy. Gergen kept pressing this idea that, even though finance-industry bonuses are back up to record highs at the same time that real human beings are facing horrific unemployment and foreclosure crises, Obama needed to work harder at jacking off the CEO class.

When I got genuinely emotional in response to this idea, Gergen continually expressed not so much anger as surprise. He made some cryptic comments (which didn't appear in the printed transcript) that included one exchange in which he suggested that he didn't expect to hear this sort of thing from me, among other things because my opinions clashed with something that had recently appeared in my own "newspaper."

I thought, what newspaper? What is this guy talking about? In a quizzical voice I asked Gergen what he meant, but by then we were rolling onto the next subject. The whole thing was odd -- clearly he had no idea who I was, but the interesting thing is that he seemed to think he knew who I was. After the event I smiled weakly, shook his hand, and walked out, confused.

A few hours later, I figured it out. Gergen clearly had me mixed up with Matt Bai, the New York Times reporter.

Bai is one of those guys -- there are hundreds of them in this business -- who poses as a wonky, Democrat-leaning "centrist" pundit and then makes a career out of drubbing "unrealistic" liberals and progressives with cartoonish Jane Fonda and Hugo Chavez caricatures. This career path is so well-worn in our business, it's like a Great Silk Road of pseudoleft punditry. First step: graduate Harvard or Columbia, buy some clothes at Urban Outfitters, shore up your socially liberal cred by marching in a gay rights rally or something, then get a job at some place like the American Prospect. Then once you're in, spend a few years writing wonky editorials gently chiding Jane Fonda liberals for failing to grasp the obvious wisdom of the WTC or whatever Bob Rubin/Pete Peterson Foundation deficit-reduction horseshit the Democratic Party chiefs happen to be pimping at the time. Once you've got that down, you just sit tight and wait for the New York Times or the Washington Post to call. It won't be long.

Bai is the poster child of those guys. So naturally Gergen must have been shocked to see, well, Matt Bai screaming kill-the-rich brickbats at him over coffee and pastries. I had a good laugh imagining that somewhere, at that very moment, David Gergen was telling someone what an asshole Matt Bai is. I wonder if anyone's filled him in on the mistake yet.

Against the backdrop of that long backstory, I bring you Matt Bai's latest gem of an article. The Times man this week wrote an article entitled, "Debt-Busting Issue May Force Obama Off The Fence."

This article of Bai's is such a classic piece of Beltway-Dem propaganda, it should be an exhibit in a museum. It starts with this gorgeous false dichotomy (emphasis here is mine):

When President Obama’s fiscal commission offers its proposals on Wednesday, after the release by several liberal groups of their own debt-busting plans this week, the essential decision facing Mr. Obama in these last two years of his term will have been neatly framed. He can side either with centrist reformers in both parties, who would overhaul both cherished entitlements and the tax system, or with traditional liberals, who prefer new levies on the wealthy and substantial cuts in military spending.

In other words, the suddenly pressing issue of the debt will force Mr. Obama to choose, at last, between the dueling, ill-defined promises of his presidential campaign — between a “postpartisan” vision of government on one hand and a liberal renaissance on the other.


This is an ancient trick -- defining the insider move that the campaign donors like as "bipartisan" (or, in this case, "post-partisan") centrism, while dissing the move favored by clear majorities of human beings as narrow radicalism.

Bai is talking here about some very clear and obvious choices Obama is about to make. There's the question of whether or not to extend the insane Bush tax cuts, and paired up with this is the recent return of that unkillable Beltway cliche, the notion that Social Security is going broke and that the solution to the nation's deficit reduction problems lies there.

Let's be clear about what's going on here. Social Security was never the cause of the nation's debt problems. This issue dates all the way back to the Eighties, when Ronald Reagan hired Alan Greenspan to chair the National Commission on Social Security Reform, ostensibly to deal with a looming shortfall in the fund. Greenspan's solution was to hike Social Security tax rates (they went from 9.35% in 1981 to 15.3% in 1990) and build up a "surplus" that could be used to pay Baby Boomers their social security checks 30 years down the road.

They raised the SS taxes all right, but they didn't save the money for any old Baby Boomers in the 2000s. Instead, Reagan blew that money paying for eight years of deficit spending and tax cuts. Three presidents after him used the same trick. They used about $1.69 trillion in extra Social Security revenue (from the Greenspan hikes) to pay for current-day goodies, with the still-being-debated Bush tax cuts being a great example. This led to the infamous moment during Bush's presidency when Paul O'Neill announced that the Social Security Trust Fund had no assets.

Well, duh! That is what happens to a fund, when you spend 30 years robbing it to pay for tax cuts for Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein. It will tend to get empty. But of course this wasn't presented to the public as being the consequence of too many handouts to wealthy campaign contributors: this was presented as a problem of those needy goddamned old people wanting to retire too early and being just far too greedy when it came to actually wanting their Social Security benefits paid out.

And so in all seriousness none other than Alan Greenspan proposed back in 2004 that the "social security problem" be rectified by means of reforms that should sound familiar to those reading the news of late: raising the retirement age and cutting benefits.
I wrote about this in Griftopia , but there's one more key fact here. Social Security taxes are capped, which means that above a certain level (I believe it's $106,000 this year) there are no additional taxes. Which means that Jamie Dimon pays a disproportionately small amount of Social Security tax -- an arrangement that makes sense, if that money is only going to one place, i.e. back, later on, to the person who paid the taxes, in the form of Social Security benefits.

But if all that money is just going into a big pile to be stolen by a long line of presidents who are using it to pay for things like pointless wars and income tax cuts for their rich buddies, the Social Security cap means that this stealth government revenue source disproportionately comes from middle class taxpayers. Add in the fact that the proposed solution to the budget problem now is cutting Social Security benefits, and what you get is a double-screwing of middle-class taxpayers: first they see their Social Security taxes used to fund tax cuts for the wealthy, and then they see cuts to their benefits to pay for the fallout from that robbery.

Of course, that's not how Bai is presenting it. In his telling of the story, Obama is going to be presented with sober, correct analysis (the Bush tax cuts must be preserved, while Social Security bennies must be cut), and whether or not he forges ahead and defies his hysterical and irrational base to make those cuts will reveal the extent of his character. He writes:

The problem with this stance, two years into his presidency, is that it seems to have put Mr. Obama in something of a box. Since he isn’t willing to break publicly with liberals, independent and conservative voters tend to see him as a tool of the left. And since he generally won’t do exactly what the left wants him to do, he ends up with very little gratitude from his own party.

This political no-man’s land, however, is about to become uninhabitable. The national debt is near the top of any list of voter concerns at the moment, and when his commission votes Friday on its final recommendations, Mr. Obama will be handed concrete and contrasting options for addressing it.

Budget experts from both parties agree, for instance, with the commission’s co-chairmen, Erskine B. Bowles and Alan K. Simpson, that some reduction in Social Security benefits will be essential to the nation’s long-term fiscal stability. But liberal groups are adamant about preventing any change to the structure of the program, which they see as the last unassailable pillar of New Deal liberalism.

So the issue here isn't whether or not it makes more sense to get the rich to pay our debts than middle-class old people; the issue is that cutting Social Security would upset those old liberals who are so emotionally attached to this last doomed symbol of New Deal liberalism. Will Obama have the character necessary to kneecap these doddering old sentimental Fondas? Bai frames this choice against an anecdote culled from Obama's past:

The body of Mr. Obama’s writing and experiences before he became a presidential candidate would suggest that he is instinctively pragmatic, typical of an emerging generation that sees all political dogma — be it ’60s liberalism or ’80s conservatism — as anachronistic. Privately, Mr. Obama has described himself, at times, as essentially a Blue Dog Democrat, referring to the shrinking caucus of fiscally conservative members of the party.

In a 2005 blog post that may be as valuable as either of his books in identifying the inner president, then-Senator Obama castigated his own party’s ideological activists for their attacks on Democratic senators who had voted to confirm John G. Roberts Jr. as chief justice. “To the degree that we brook no dissent within the Democratic Party, and demand fealty to the one, ‘true’ progressive vision for our country, we risk the very thoughtfulness and openness to new ideas that are required to move this country forward,” Mr. Obama, who voted against confirming Chief Justice Roberts, wrote then.

So in other words, those of us who think robbing Social Security a second time to pay for the continuation of the obscene Bush tax cuts -- well, that's "demanding fealty to the one" and "brooking no dissent" and lacking "thougtfulness and openness to new ideas."
On the other hand, approving those Social Security cuts and green-lighting the continuation of those insane tax breaks -- tax breaks that were extremely radical even by Republican standards when Bush originally passed them amid two preposterously expensive war efforts -- well, that's being "pragmatic" and seeing "all dogma " as "anachronistic."

Here's what this all comes down to, dogma or no dogma: who is going to pay for a) the Bush tax cuts b) the bank bailouts and c) the Iraq and Afghanistan wars? If you want to get there by making janitors and pipe-fitters wait until they're 69 to retire, raise your hand. If you want to get there by making Jamie Dimon rent out his 900-foot rooftop terrace in Chicago two nights a year, raise your hand.

The really infuriating thing? Bai has it backwards. The real consensus, i.e. the consensus of actual human beings, outside Washington, overwhelmingly backs the idea of not fucking with Social Security benefits and ending the Bush tax cuts for people making more than $250,000. In fact, only 26% of Americans support extending the cuts for everybody.

So when Bai talks about "bipartisanship" and suggests that extending the Bush cuts is a move to the center, what he's talking about is the Washington consensus.

In some very vague way I suppose it could be argued that Barack Obama crawling into bed with John Boehner represents "post-partisanship," but if you want to talk about building actual political bridges, the only meaningful way to achieve that is through the union of voters on the left who want to end the Bush tax cuts, and the voters on the right who want to end the Bush tax cuts. Unite the elderly Democrats who want to hold on to their Social Security Benefits and the elderly Republicans who want the same thing. That's bipartisanship, but not in the way these Silk Road types like it.

[justdrew]

HARPER’S INDEX
Percentage change in the U.S. unemployment rate since June 2009, when the recession offi cially ended : +1
Chance that a heterosexual man who moved in with his partner in 2010 had been unemployed for at least a year : 1 in 4
Estimated percentage of all U.S. murders that are committed by women : 10
Percentage of executions for murder since 1977 that were of women : 1
Percentage of U.S. female senior-level executives who say they have had an affair with a male boss : 15
Estimated percentage change since 2000 in the number of management positions in U.S. companies held by women : 0
Percentage change in reading scores for public-school fourth graders since No Child Left Behind became law : +1
Number of delayed-notice search warrants granted by federal judges last year under the Patriot Act : 1,150
Number that were related to drug offenses and terrorism, respectively : 844, 6
Number of times between January and June that Google turned over user information to government investigators : 4,287
Date a congressional report called the number of government entities to be created by health-care reform “unknowable” : 7/8/10
Value of economic-recovery bonds the State of Louisiana has sold since Hurricane Katrina : $5,900,000,000
Percentage of the revenue that has been spent on projects in New Orleans : 1
Percentage spent on the Lower Ninth Ward : 0
On the state’s oil industry : 29
Estimated percentage change in the poverty rate in the developing world since 1990 : –40
Change if China is not included in this fi gure : –18
Estimated value of Chinese household income that goes unreported : $1,400,000,000,000
Portion of China’s GDP this represents : 1/3
Portion of all pencils, pens, and crayons sold last year that were manufactured in China : 1/3
Percentage of African Americans in a September survey who said they feel their standard of living is improving : 63
Percentage of white Americans who feel this way : 40
Percentage change in the U.S. suicide rate for every 500 meters above sea level : +17
Price a British company charges to have a deceased person’s ashes pressed into a package of 30 vinyl records : $4,704
Estimated loss to Japan’s economy last year from suicides and depression : $29,000,000,000
Percentage of all food consumed in Cuba that is imported : 80
Chance that an Indian child younger than fi ve is chronically malnourished : 1 in 2
Rank of carbonated beverages among the best-selling grocery items in the United States this year : 1
Rank of baked desserts, pizza, and soda as sources of calories for American children, respectively : 1, 2, 3
Number of children born last year on Christmas Day in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania : 3
Chances that an American believes that Jesus Christ will return to earth by 2050 : 2 in 5
Percentage change since 2008 in the number of Jewish Americans who identify themselves as Republican : +77
Chance that an American believes Ramadan is the Jewish day of atonement : 1 in 10
Chance that a U.S. Protestant knows who Martin Luther is : 1 in 2
Percentage of Americans who believe that Stephen King wrote Moby-Dick : 4
Number of U.S. states in which it is legal to own a tiger without a license : 9
Portion of the world’s reindeer herds that are currently in decline : 4/5
Number of poisonous dead mice the USDA airdropped into Guam this year to eradicate an invasive snake species : 316
Milligrams of acetaminophen inserted into each mouse : 80
Number of episodes of Happy Days that aired after the one in which the Fonz jumped a shark : 164

Figures cited are the latest available as of October 2010

[AhabsOtherLeg]

.


This video, and the audience reaction, actually make some kind of sense when you realise that Oprah regularly releases killer bees into the studio, that are then airbrushed out in post-production. This has been proven.



It also explains where all the bees went, especially the killer ones that everybody was scared of. Oprah took them all.

[justdrew]

Teen arrested in California creamed spinach attack that injured drive-through worker
Associated Press
12/09/2010 01:13:51 AM CST

ROSEVILLE, Calif. — A 17-year-old boy has been arrested for what police initially described as a prank gone wrong at a California restaurant drive-through.

Police say a 21-year-old worker at a Boston Market in Roseville suffered second-degree burns when someone threw a creamed spinach dish at his face Friday night.

Roseville police Lt. Michael Doane says the attack appeared to be a prank known as "fire in the hole," in which people video-record themselves throwing food or drinks into the faces of drive-through workers.

The Sacramento Bee reports the teen turned himself in Wednesday, accompanied by his parents. He was booked on suspicion of committing battery causing great bodily harm.

Police are still trying to determine whether the three other youths who were in the car during the assault should be arrested.

The Bee reports that the worker, David Almas, was treated for serious face and neck burns.

[Montag]

Teen arrested in California creamed spinach attack that injured drive-through worker
Associated Press
12/09/2010 01:13:51 AM CST

ROSEVILLE, Calif. — A 17-year-old boy has been arrested for what police initially described as a prank gone wrong at a California restaurant drive-through.

Police say a 21-year-old worker at a Boston Market in Roseville suffered second-degree burns when someone threw a creamed spinach dish at his face Friday night.

Roseville police Lt. Michael Doane says the attack appeared to be a prank known as "fire in the hole," in which people video-record themselves throwing food or drinks into the faces of drive-through workers.

The Sacramento Bee reports the teen turned himself in Wednesday, accompanied by his parents. He was booked on suspicion of committing battery causing great bodily harm.

Police are still trying to determine whether the three other youths who were in the car during the assault should be arrested.

The Bee reports that the worker, David Almas, was treated for serious face and neck burns.

This is the culmination of the right-wing hatred for working people. What could be more despicable, start at the lowest place on the totem pole, and actually scar and maim the person. Thank you Rush Limbaugh. Limpballs will probably have this kid's picture up on his website. After he's done jacking off to a photograph of the corporate whore of the month, he'll probably need to look at a picture of this poor kid for shits and giggles.

The right-wing nutbars say execute Assange, I say execute these fire in the hole debauched, sordid individuals...

[justdrew]

I don't like it, but there comes a time when you just have to put a rabid dog down

[Elvis]

[Emphasis mine]

Let Them Eat Cake

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

It is not unusual for members of the diminishing upper middle class to drop $20,000 or $30,000 on a big wedding. But for celebrities this large sum wouldn’t cover the wedding dress or the flowers.

When country music star Keith Urban married actress Nicole Kidman in 2006, their wedding cost $250,000. This large sum hardly counts as a celebrity wedding. When mega-millionaire real estate mogul Donald Trump married model Melania Knauss, the wedding bill was $1,000,000.

The marriages of Madonna and film director Guy Ritchie, Tiger Woods and Elin Nordegren, and Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones pushed up the cost of celebrity marriages to $1.5 million.

Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes upped the ante to $2,000,000.

Now comes the politicians’s daughter as celebrity. According to news reports, Chelsea Clinton’s wedding to investment banker Mark Mezvinsky on July 31 is costing papa Bill $3,000,000. According to the London Daily Mail, the total price tag will be about $5,000,000. The additional $2,000,000 apparently is being laid off on US Taxpayers as Secret Service costs for protecting former president Clinton and foreign heads of state, such as the presidents of France and Italy and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who are among the 500 invited guests along with Barbara Streisand, Steven Spielberg, Oprah Winfrey, Ted Turner, and Clinton friend and donor Denise Rich, wife of the Clinton-pardoned felon.

Before we attend to the poor political judgment of such an extravagant affair during times of economic distress, let us wonder aloud where a poor boy who became governor of Arkansas and president of the United States got such a fortune that he can blow $3,000,000 on a wedding.

The American people did not take up a collection to reward him for his service to them.

Where did the money come from? Who was he really serving during his eight years in office?

How did Tony Blair and his wife, Cherrie, end up with an annual income of ten million pounds (approximately $15 million dollars) as soon as he left office? Who was Blair really serving?

These are not polite questions, and they are infrequently asked.

While Chelsea’s wedding guests eat a $11,000 wedding cake and admire $250,000 floral displays, Lisa Roberts in Ohio is struggling to raise contributions for her food pantry in order to feed 3,000 local people, whose financial independence was destroyed by investment bankers, job offshoring, and unaffordable wars. The Americans dependent on Lisa Roberts’ food pantry are living out of vans and cars. Those with a house roof still over their heads are packed in as many as 14 per household according to the Chillicothe Gazette in Ohio.

The Chilicothe Gazette reports that Lisa Roberts’ food pantry has “had to cut back to half rations per person in order to have something for everyone who needed it.”

Theresa DePugh stepped up to the challenge and had the starving Ohioans write messages on their food pantry paper plates to President Obama, who has just obtained another $33 billion to squander on a pointless war in Afghanistan that serves no purpose whatsoever except the enrichment of the military/security complex and its shareholders.

The Guardian (UK) reports that according to US government reports, one million American children go to bed hungry, while the Obama regime squanders hundreds of billions of dollars killing women and children in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

The Guardian’s reporting relies on a US government report from the US Department of Agriculture, which concludes that 50 million people in the US--one in six of the population--were unable to afford to buy sufficient food to stay healthy in 2008.

US Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said that he expected the number of hungry Americans to worsen when the survey for 2010 is released.

Today in the American Superpower, one of every six Americans is living on food stamps....

http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts07302010.html

[Montag]

Valerie Plame, YES! Wikileaks, NO!
http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/column ... kileaks-0/

In my recent article Ward Churchill: The Lie Lives On (Pravda.Ru, 11/29/2010), I discussed the following realities about America's legal "system": it is duplicitous and corrupt; it will go to any extremes to insulate from prosecution, and in many cases civil liability, persons whose crimes facilitate this duplicity and corruption; it has abdicated its responsibility to serve as a "check-and-balance" against the other two branches of government, and has instead been transformed into a weapon exploited by the wealthy, the corporations, and the politically connected to defend their criminality, conceal their corruption and promote their economic interests; and, finally, that the oft-quoted adage "Nobody is above the law" is a lie.

Some critics were quick to dismiss my article as politically motivated hyperbole. But with the recent revelations disclosed by Wikileaks, it appears that this article did not even scratch the surface, because it is now evident that Barack Obama, who entered the White House with optimistic messages of change and hope, is just as complicit in, and manipulative of, the legal "system's" duplicity and corruption as was his predecessor George W. Bush.

For example, as I stated in the aforementioned article, the Obama administration has refused to prosecute former Attorney General John Ashcroft for abusing the "material witness" statute; refused to prosecute Ashcroft's successor (and suspected perjurer) Alberto Gonzales for his role in the politically motivated firing of nine federal prosecutors; refused to prosecute Justice Department authors of the now infamous "torture memos," like John Yoo and Jay Bybee; and, more recently, refused to prosecute former CIA official Jose Rodriquez Jr. for destroying tapes that purportedly showed CIA agents torturing detainees.

Predictably, the official mantra supporting these refusals is that "exhaustive" investigations had been conducted. But now, thanks to Wikileaks, the world has been enlightened to the fact that the Obama administration not only refused to prosecute these individuals itself, it also exerted pressure on the governments of Germany and Spain not to prosecute, or even indict, any of the torturers or war criminals from the Bush dictatorship.

This revelation invariably leads to three inescapable conclusions: these so-called "exhaustive investigations" were a sham; the Obama administration never intended to prosecute such crimes and, in fact, went to inordinate lengths to cover them up; and the American government has the proven capacity to influence the legal systems of other countries.

And now, given the fact that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is facing criminal charges in Sweden, it is also evident that America even has the Swedish government and Interpol in its hip pocket.

Of course, I do not know if Assange committed the crime he is accused of. I do know that to the American legal "system" the truth is irrelevant. The minute Assange revealed the extent of America's criminality and cover-ups to the world, he became a marked man. And America is going to do anything it can to silence him.

Already we see the treacherous Joe Lieberman, the man who almost single-handedly killed the "public option" in the health care reform bill so insurance companies can continue to enjoy record profits, intimidate an American server into discontinuing its transmission of Wikileaks.

And we see many right-wing commentators demanding that Assange be hunted down, with some even calling for his murder, on the grounds that he may have endangered lives by releasing confidential government documents.

Yet, for the right-wing, this apparently was not a concern when the late columnist Robert Novak "outed" CIA agent Valerie Plame after her husband Joseph Wilson authored an OP-ED piece in The New York Times criticizing the motivations for waging war against Iraq. Even though there was evidence of involvement within the highest echelons of the Bush dictatorship, only one person, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, was indicted and convicted of "outing" Plame to Novak. And, despite the fact that this "outing" potentially endangered the lives of Plame's overseas contacts, Bush commuted Libby's thirty-month prison sentence, calling it "excessive."