Quote of the Day

Romney can't open his mouth without a lie falling out.--SS

Quote of the Day:

"I'm not going to change my positions by virtue of being in a presidential campaign."

-- Mitt Romney, in an interview on Fox News.

Makin' it with Mitt

The Romney Bot 2012 is a lean, mean, lying machine.--SS

Makin' it with Mitt:

(Click for larger size)

So Mitt Romney has taken to giving speeches chock full o' sound bites for the Tea Party, invoking Cold War paranoia and demonizing people who, god forbid, need to use the social safety net during hard times. An excerpt (via Washington Monthly):

"[Obama] seeks to replace our merit-based society with an entitlement society. In an entitlement society, everyone receives the same or similar rewards, regardless of education, effort and willingness to take risk. That which is earned by some is redistributed to the others. And the only people to enjoy truly disproportionate rewards are the people who do the redistributing — the government."

What's remarkable about that quote, aside from the fact that it is ludicrously false, is that Romney and the rest of the Republicans seem hell-bent on destroying what little meritocracy is left in this country, and replacing it with aristocracy. Would Mitt be running for president today had his father not been CEO of American Motors and Governor of Michigan? What if George Romney had been a victim of corporate restructuring instead? Would Mitt still have joined Bain Capital, and would he still be passing on that cool $100 million to his sons? And the fact that son Tagg touts his interest in "private equity" in his Twitter profile... surely that's just meritocracy in action, having absolutely nothing to do with the Romney legacy whatsoever.

David Brooks Is Projecting His Self Indulgence Again

David Brooks is a babbling idiot, part 9,672, from Dean Baker.--SS

David Brooks Is Projecting His Self Indulgence Again:

Undoubtedly projecting from the fact that he can draw a nice 6-figure income for little obvious work, David Brooks complained in his column:

" Today, the country is middle-aged but self-indulgent. Bad habits have accumulated."

For the most part the column is a confused diatribe against the Obama administration's economic policies with a lecture on moral rectitude thrown in for good measure. He starts by condemning the efforts to stimulate the economy by telling readers:

"Today, Americans are more likely to fear government than be reassured by it.

According to a Gallup survey, 64 percent of Americans polled said they believed that big government is the biggest threat to the country. Only 26 percent believed that big business is the biggest threat. As a result, the public has reacted to Obama’s activism with fear and anxiety. The Democrats lost 63 House seats in the 2010 elections."

One might think that the fact that the Obama administration relied on a stimulus that was only designed to lower the unemployment rate by 1.5-2.0 percentage points might have played a big role in the election defeat. (Read the number of jobs the stimulus was projected to create, not the baseline forecasts for the economy.) If the government had used bigger stimulus to get the unemployment rate down to say -- 7 percent -- it is difficult to believe that the Democrats would have suffered such a big defeat last year, in spite of people's fear of big government.

After dismissing the stimulative policies of the Great Depression, Brooks then gives us a beautifully crafted grand misunderstanding of economics comparing the economy today with the economy of the Progressive era:

"the underlying economic situations are very different. A century ago, the American economy was a vibrant jobs machine. Industrialization was volatile and cruel, but it produced millions of new jobs, sucking labor in from the countryside and from overseas.

Today’s economy is not a jobs machine and lacks that bursting vibrancy. The rate of new business start-ups was declining even before the 2008 financial crisis. Companies are finding that they can get by with fewer workers. As President Obama has observed, factories that used to employ 1,000 workers can now be even more productive with less than 100."

The fact that factories can produce large amounts of output with 100 workers is in fact evidence of economic vibrancy, not the opposite. This is called "productivity growth." It is the main measure of the economy's ability to raise living standards through time. The fact that 100 people in a factory can produce the same output as 1000 people did 30 years ago means that we are potentially much richer than we were 30 years ago. We can have the other 900 people doing other productive work. Alternatively, we can all work many fewer hours.

Whether or not this productivity growth generates jobs depends on the structure of the economy. If the productivity growth translates into wage growth, as was the case with the very rapid productivity growth of early post-war period, then it is likely to be associated with a vibrant jobs machine. On the other hand, if the One Percent pocket most of the benefits of productivity growth, then we may have real problems of stagnation and lack of job growth, since the Bill Gates of the world will probably not increase their spending much if they get another billion or two. The key issue here is the distribution of the gains of productivity growth, a simple fact that totally escapes Brooks.

Brooks then tells us:

"Moreover, the information economy widens inequality for deep and varied reasons that were unknown a century ago. Inequality is growing in nearly every developed country. According to a report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, over the past 30 years, inequality in Sweden, Germany, Israel, Finland and New Zealand has grown as fast or faster than inequality in the United States, even though these countries have very different welfare systems. "

This comment is highly misleading. While most countries have seen increases in inequality over the last three decades, even with the increases over this period countries like Sweden, Germany, and Finland are nowhere near as unequal today as the United States was at the start of this period.

Furthermore, it is not a simple fact of nature that the information economy will generate inequality, it requires the hand of Brooks' friend: big government. People are getting rich off the information economy because the government enforces copyright and patent monopolies. These are massive interferences by the government into the market. As a result of government granted patent monopolies were pay close to $300 billion a year for prescription drugs that would sell for around $30 billion a year in a free market. This $270 billion redistribution of income is close to 5 times as large as the money at stake with the Bush tax cuts for those in the top 2 percent.

The government must also take increasingly repressive measures to ensure that this income keeps flowing to the top. The Stop Online Piracy Act is the latest example of the efforts of big government to ensure that the money keeps flowing upward. In short, this upward redistribution is not the natural workings of the market, it is the direct result of the work of the big government that Brooks doesn't like and tells us the American people do not like either.

After the misleading economics, Brooks gives us a morality lecture:

"the moral culture of the nation is very different. The progressive era still had a Victorian culture, with its rectitude and restrictions. Back then, there was a moral horror at the thought of debt. No matter how bad the economic problems became, progressive-era politicians did not impose huge debt burdens on their children. That ethos is clearly gone."

As a country we cannot impose huge debt burdens on our children. It is impossible, at least if we are referring to government debt. The reason is simple, at one point we will all be dead. That means that the ownership of our debt will be passed on to our children. If we have some huge thousand trillion dollar debt that is owed to our children, then how have we imposed a burden on them? There is a distributional issue -- Bill Gates children may own all the debt -- but that is within generations, not between generations. As a group, our children's well-being will be determined by the productivity of the economy (which Brooks complained about earlier), the state of the physical and social infrastructure and the environment.

One can make the point that much of the debt is owned by foreigners, but this is a result of our trade deficit, which is in turn caused by the over-valued dollar. Brooks never said a word about the trade deficit or the value of the dollar, so insofar as there may be a real issue of indebtedness for our children, it is not even on Brooks radar screen.

Mitt Romney's Anti-Entitlement Strategy - Mitt Romney: The Real Austerity Candidate - Esquire

As usual, this whole Charles Pierce post is worth reading.--SS

Mitt Romney's Anti-Entitlement Strategy - Mitt Romney: The Real Austerity Candidate - Esquire:

"Willard Romney has never known a day of peril in his life. He grew up with a silver spoon lodged so deeply in his gums that he had his baby teeth until he was 25. He did his Mormon mission in Provence, for the love of god. He moved onto a lucrative career in predatory capital. If, as was said, George W. Bush was born on third base and thought he hit a triple, then Willard Romney was born in the dugout with four runs in, nobody out, and the bases loaded."

2012: First Election Cycle Without A Bush Since 1948?

The older I get, the more I realize that the assholes really do screw it up for the rest of us. Here's to the end (hopefully) of these assholes.--SS

2012: First Election Cycle Without A Bush Since 1948?:

George W. Bush left office as one of the least popular presidents in American history, but the Bush family brand still looms large in GOP politics.

Former President George H.W. Bush endorsed Mitt Romney last week; Former President George W. Bush has remained quiet; and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush -- perhaps the biggest prize, for candidates chasing after conservative voters -- has kept his name in the spotlight on some key issues. The bottom line: Republicans still have their eyes on who the Bush family is supporting.

The Washington Post reports:

The current presidential election cycle is the first since 1976 to be taking place without a Bush in a statewide or national office or seeking a national office. Yet the Bush family primary -- a behind-the-scenes drama that has been playing out in the GOP contest for months -- is taking on as much significance as ever.

But that's not all. We here at TPM actually think the Post might be a little too narrow in its definition of Bushes holding national office. If we relax the standard ever so slightly, we end up going way back -- a lot back -- to find a presidential election year without a Bush somewhere.

Going backwards:

2008: George W. Bush is the term-limited president.

2004: George W. Bush is the incumbent president, winning re-election.

2000: George W. Bush is elected to the presidency, though losing the national popular vote.

1996: George W. Bush is the governor of Texas.

1992: George H.W. Bush is the incumbent president, but loses re-election.

1988: George H.W. Bush is elected to the presidency.

1984: George H.W. Bush is re-elected Vice President of the United States, on the Republican ticket with Ronald Reagan.

1980: George H.W. Bush is elected Vice President of the United States, on the Republican ticket with Ronald Reagan.

1976: George H.W. Bush is the country's Director of Central Intelligence, having been appointed to the office by President Gerald Ford.

1972: George H.W. Bush is the country's Ambassador to the United Nations, having been appointed to the office by President Richard Nixon.

1968: George H.W. Bush is a Congressman from Texas.

1964: George H.W. Bush is the Republican nominee for Senate from Texas, losing to incumbent Democrat Ralph Yarborough.

1960: Prescott Bush -- George H.W. Bush's father -- is a Senator from Connecticut.

1956: Prescott Bush is re-elected as a Senator from Connecticut.

1952: Prescott Bush is first elected as Senator from Connecticut, winning a special election held at the same time as the presidential race.

1948: Here we are -- as near as we can tell -- the last time that a member of the Bush family did not currently hold, or run for, a significant national or state office.

(But just to be complete, in 1948 Prescott Bush was a delegate to the Republican national convention!)

[ Go back a little further and you find Prescott helping Hitler (the other asshole who really screwed it up for the rest of us).--SS ]

Think Again: As We Leave Iraq, Remember How We Got In

Eric Alterman writes about the reasons all you Iraq war supporters should be ashamed of yourselves.--SS

Think Again: As We Leave Iraq, Remember How We Got In:

Two weeks ago in this space, I employed the 70th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to examine the unhappy precedent set by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in failing to level with the American people about the level of conflict between the United States and the Axis Powers that preceded the attack.

Using this analogy, and speaking of the manner in which President Lyndon B. Johnson deliberately deceived the nation about the imaginary second Gulf of Tonkin incident and thereby entangled the nation in the unwinnable Vietnam War, I noted Sen. J. William Fulbright later remarked that “FDR’s deviousness in a good cause made it much easier for [LBJ] to practice the same kind of deviousness in a bad cause.”

The consequences of President Johnson’s campaign of deliberate deception regarding Vietnam could hardly have been more catastrophic for the nation, the military, the president, his party, and the presidency itself. And while there is no reason to minimize either the level of lying or its consequences, one cannot be impressed by the refusal of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney to learn from his mistake.

As we salute the final American soldiers leaving Iraq, we also remember the enormous costs paid not only by our soldiers and our nation but also denizens of the region, millions of whom were turned into refugees and injured, hundreds of thousands of whom were killed, and countless who were tortured or otherwise abused. But it behooves us to recall the underhanded manner in which President Bush and Vice President Cheney manipulated a quiescent press corps into making it appear as if an American invasion of a nation that had no intention of harming us (and next-to-no capacity to do so, regardless of intentions, as it turned out) was warranted.

At the same time, if we care about our nation’s ability to act as a democracy, we need to ask ourselves and our mainstream media hard questions about how it happened. To do so, I return to some of the research I undertook for When Presidents Lie (where specific citations for all of the quotes below can be found).

The almost ostentatious lack of concern for veracity was evident in almost every area of governance but was most prominent in the administration’s foreign policy pronouncements. Recall the famous (albeit anonymous) Bush press aide who, in response to a string of revelations of falsehoods relating to the president’s reasons for the invasion, replied, “The President of the United States is not a fact-checker.”

Yet the case President Bush made to convince the nation to embark on its first-ever “preventative” war was riddled with deception from start to finish. The examples of purposeful fraud in the Bush White House’s portrayal of the level of alleged threat to Americans’ safety and security posed by Iraq’s Saddam Hussein are so extensive that only a few examples can be offered here.

For instance, in September 2002, with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, President Bush claimed, “I would remind you that when the inspectors first went into Iraq and were denied—finally denied access, a report came out of the Atomic—the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency]—that they were six months away from developing a [nuclear] weapon. I don’t know what more evidence we need.” In fact, the estimate to which President Bush was referring was more than a decade old and was made before Iraq’s military capabilities were decimated in the Gulf War.

The president’s then-press secretary, Ari Fleischer, tried to claim in The Washington Post that “It was in fact the International Institute for Strategic Studies that issued the report concluding that Iraq could develop nuclear weapons in as few as six months.” But that report, which was unavailable at the time President Bush originally made his claim, did not support his statement either.

In a speech to the nation, President Bush also added, “Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists,” an alliance that “could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints.” But this claim, too, was wholly unsupported and contradicted by CIA intelligence. The testimony, declassified after President Bush’s speech, rated the possibility as “low” that Hussein would initiate a chemical or biological weapons attack against the United States but might take the “extreme step” of assisting terrorists if provoked by a U.S. attack.

In the same speech President Bush warned the nation that Iraq possessed a growing fleet of unmanned aircraft that could be used “for missions targeting the United States.” But a CIA report suggested that the fleet was more of an “experiment” and “attempt” and labeled it a “serious threat to Iraq’s neighbors and to international military forces in the region.” The report said nothing about the fleet having sufficient range to threaten the United States.

President Bush’s repeated acts of dishonesty did not become widely known to the public until the famous controversy regarding “16 words” in his 2003 State of the Union address, referring to the story he told about Iraq’s alleged purchase of “yellow-cake” uranium from the African nation of Niger. But the focus on the mere “16 words” by the media was most notable for the successful spin that the White House managed to put on the story.

It wasn’t that these 16 words alone in the president’s State of the Union message were false. Much of what was presented as evidence for the American attack on Iraq dissipated upon receiving postwar scrutiny. Some of these examples derived, no doubt, from honest errors, relating to the difficulty of accurately assessing decidedly murky intelligence. But President Bush and his staff could easily have communicated the complexity of this judgment to the country had honesty been among their primary concerns.

In fact, they purposely argued on exactly the opposite: certainty of knowledge where none was possible. The president and his advisers were virtually unanimous in insisting that the threat facing the United States from Saddam Hussein and his alleged weapons of mass destruction was all but inarguable. Just a few examples suffice:

• “Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.” — President George W. Bush, address to the nation, March 17, 2003.


• “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.” — Vice President Dick Cheney, speech to Veterans of Foreign Wars National Convention, August 26, 2002.


• “We know they have weapons of mass destruction. … There isn’t any debate about it. [It is] beyond anyone’s imagination that U.N. inspectors would fail to find such weapons if they were given the opportunity.” — Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, September 2002.


• “I’m absolutely sure that there are weapons of mass destruction there, and the evidence will be forthcoming.” — Secretary of State Colin Powell, remarks to reporters, May 4, 2003.


• “We do know, with absolute certainty, that he is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs in order to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon.” — Vice President Dick Cheney, NBC’s “Meet the Press,” September 6, 2002.

These statements are all demonstrably false, as the president’s own weapons inspections team judged them to be. While many in and out of government shared the misperception that Iraq might be in possession of such weaponry, only the Bush administration—supported by the Blair government in Britain—insisted that there could be no possible room for disagreement in assessing the conflicting shards of evidence. Indeed, a number of experts within the U.S. government itself were fully aware of how sketchy and incomplete were the government sources about Iraq’s WMD program, but these people were either ignored or purposely discredited.

For instance, a secret September 2002 report by the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency informed Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, “There is no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons, or whether Iraq has—or will—establish its chemical warfare agent production facilities,” according to U.S. officials interviewed by the Los Angeles Times.

Also, according to Patrick Lang, former head of human intelligence at the CIA, when Bruce Hardcastle, a defense intelligence officer for the Middle East, South Asia, and counterterrorism, explained to Bush officials that they were misreading the evidence, the Bush administration not only removed Hardcastle from his post:

They did away with his job. They wanted just liaison officers who were junior. They didn’t want a senior intelligence person who argued with them. Hardcastle said, ‘I couldn’t deal with these people.’ They are such ideologues that they knew what the outcome should be and when they didn’t get it from intelligence people they thought they were stupid. They start with an almost pseudo-religious faith. They wanted the intelligence agencies to produce material to show a threat, particularly an imminent threat. Then they worked back to prove their case. It was the opposite of what the process should have been like, that the evidence should prove the case.

Greg Thielman, the former head of the Department of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, likewise observed, “What everyone in the intelligence community knew was that the White House couldn’t care less about any kind of information that there were no WMDs or that the U.N. inspectors were very effective. Everyone knew the White House was deaf to that input. It was worse than pressure; they didn’t care.”

Despite being disproven by its own experts, the Bush administration attempted to maintain the fiction that the president’s prewar arguments and warnings had been borne out with false claims of imaginary discoveries. When asked in the summer of 2003, “Where are the weapons of mass destruction?”, President Bush replied, “We found them.” Vice President Cheney, too, claimed months later, “Conclusive evidence now demonstrates that Saddam Hussein did in fact have weapons of mass destruction.”

Finally, when pressed by ABC News’s Diane Sawyer to address the disjunction between his prewar claims and his postwar discoveries, President Bush laughed off the reporter’s distinction between desire and capability. “What’s the difference?” he asked. Later, in his third State of the Union address, instead of acknowledging to the nation the misguided nature of his previous warnings following these revelations, President Bush attempted a rhetorical sleight of hand, speaking not of Hussein’s actual weaponry but of something he termed “weapons-of-mass-destruction-related-program-activity.”

All of the information presented here was available in open, mainstream sources published by early 2004. How much happier and healthier the world would be if the media had simply carried out their collective responsibility and held the administration accountable for a simple matter such as truth. Who knows whether the Arab Spring might have made it to Iraq and deposed that dictator without the unending catastrophe caused by President Bush and Vice President Cheney’s hubris and dishonesty and the fecklessness of the people whose job it was to prevent its happening.

History may not repeat itself but it is a rule of thumb that the sequel is almost always worse than original. The consequences of LBJ’s deception were far worse than those of FDR’s. But sadly for everyone involved, President Bush’s trumps them all.

Eric Alterman is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and a Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. He is also a columnist for The Nation, The Forward, and The Daily Beast. His newest book is Kabuki Democracy: The System vs. Barack Obama. This column won the 2011 Mirror Award for Best Digital Commentary.

The Housing Bubble and the Big Lie

When your glorious leader (GWB) and his friends on Wall Street destroy the US economy, what should you do? Well, lie about it, of course.--SS

The Housing Bubble and the Big Lie:

As longtime readers with good memories will remember, Peter Wallison of AEI has spent several years pushing the preposterous idea that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were responsible for the subprime bubble. (See here and here for background.) After Wallison's latest jeremiad, Joe Nocera has finally decided he can't take it anymore:

So this is how the Big Lie works.

You begin with a hypothesis that has a certain surface plausibility. You find an ally whose background suggests that he’s an “expert”; out of thin air, he devises “data.” You write articles in sympathetic publications, repeating the data endlessly; in time, some of these publications make your cause their own. Like-minded congressmen pick up your mantra and invite you to testify at hearings.

....Thus has Peter Wallison, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and a former member of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, almost single-handedly created the myth that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac caused the financial crisis....Allies? Start with Congressional Republicans, who have vowed to eliminate Fannie and Freddie — because, after all, they caused the crisis! Throw in The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, which, on Wednesday, published one of Wallison’s many articles repeating the Big Lie. It was followed on Thursday by an editorial in The Journal making essentially the same point. Repetition is all-important to spreading a Big Lie.

What's most remarkable about this is how brazen it is. As Nocera notes, Wallison's latest piece is about the charges the SEC brought last week against six former Fannie and Freddie executives. That's a plausible hook for Wallison's hobbyhorse, but even a casual reading of the case shows that the SEC isn't claiming that government mandates for affordable housing drove Fannie and Freddie headlong into the subprime market. Just the opposite: Starting around 2002, Wall Street banks started their subprime binge and Fannie and Freddie began to lose market share. A few years later, when Fannie and Freddie joined the subprime orgy, they were doing it to compete with their private sector rivals, not because Congress or anyone else was forcing them to.

How brazen is this? Just look at the chart on the right. In 2002, Wall Street banks start the subprime bubble. That same year, Fannie and Freddie see their market share start to plummet. It's not until 2005, at the tail end of the bubble, that Fannie and Freddie get back into the game.

This is butt simple stuff. All you have to do is look at one simple chart to see exactly what happened. And yet, conservatives don't care. As Paul Krugman says, this "isn’t just a case where different people look at the same facts but reach different conclusions. Instead, we’re looking at a situation in which one side of the debate just isn’t interested in the truth, in which alleged scholarship is actually just propaganda."

Fannie and Freddie were bad actors in a lot of ways, and that makes them an easy target for conservatives who are desperate to absolve the private sector of any blame for the financial crisis. But when it comes to assigning blame for the housing bubble, the evidence against them is laughably thin. Like it or not, this was Wall Street's fault.