Tag: ek Politics

Dec 15 2010

Objectively Worse Than President McCain

Is it Time for Democrats to Fight Obama?

Cenk Uygur, Huffington Post

Posted: December 15, 2010 10:43 AM

You want to hear something really depressing? If John McCain had won the presidency, there is almost no chance he could have gotten the Bush tax cuts extended for the rich. Think about it. How was a Republican president going to get an overwhelmingly Democratic Senate and House to pass those tax cuts that they hated under Bush?

No, only a Democratic president could get a Democratic Congress to agree to tax cuts for the rich. So, in this sense, progressives are worse off for having a Democratic president than a Republican one.

…

Democrats would certainly have fought a surge in Afghanistan if Bush was in charge. They would be complaining about warrantless wiretapping if Bush continued that program instead of Obama. They would have hated the monopoly that drug companies got in the health care legislation (because they went nuts over it when Bush made the same deal). And they would have gone apoplectic over these huge tax cuts for the rich. But under Obama, the defense contractors, the rich and the powerful have gotten almost everything they wanted and nary a peep was heard from the Democrats in Congress.

Here is the new memo – fight him, he’s not on your side.

As was shown in 2010 and will be again in 2012.

Anyone who claims to care about Electoral Victory is a LIAR!

Update:

‘Democrat’ Is No Longer A Brand

Howard Fineman, Huffington Post

Updated: 12-15-10 07:23 AM

As the lame duck tax debate slogs towards its inevitable conclusion — nearly $1 trillion worth of extended and new tax cuts over two years — I’m wondering: what does the brand “Democrat” mean?

…

The fact that extension is being touted by the White House as a major “get” is a sad commentary on how far to the right our politics is now moving, no matter how many times Tea Party types call Obama a socialist.

…

Isn’t a nearly $1 trillion bill full of tax cuts and industry giveaways what Republicans do? Isn’t a bill with an absurdly generous inheritance tax break what Republicans write? Aren’t Democrats the “party of the people?” Aren’t they the party that believes government programs and policies have a role to play in leveling the playing field, or at least giving everyone a fair chance? Aren’t the Democrats worried that all of this tax cutting now will starve the social programs they supposedly cherish? Do they know that they won’t be able to push through a change in taxes in 2012 over GOP objections if the economy in fact improves?

…

And if they do vote “yes” for the most part, what does it signify — other than a desperate desire for survival — about the meaning of “Democrat?”

It means “Coward”.

Thanks for nothing Barack.

Dec 14 2010

Thank goodness we’re not a Banana Republic!

Telecom Scandal Plunges India Into Crisis

By JIM YARDLEY and HEATHER TIMMONS, The New York Times

Published: December 13, 2010

NEW DELHI – Tycoons with friends in high places. Public tenders conducted by irregular rules. Tens of billions of dollars in potential losses for the national treasury. Allegations of government ministers on the take, and of a respected prime minister too aloof to notice.

Those are some of the ingredients of a telecommunications scandal that is growing into India’s equivalent of Teapot Dome, an almost daily flurry of revelations about bribery, abuse of power, and privatization of public wealth that paralyzed Parliament for more than three weeks before its winter session ended Monday and have plunged the governing Congress Party into its worst political crisis in years.

The issue is how a minister allied with Congress sold cellphone operators the airwaves to provide their service to in 2008. But the amounts involved – an independent auditor estimated that the government may have left almost $40 billion on the table by selling the rights too cheaply – and subsequent revelations of how some of India’s richest men sought to exercise influence over political appointments and regulatory decisions has surprised a nation seemingly inured to reports of corruption in politics.

“Open corruption and rising stark disparities in wealth are a volatile mix that could affect social stability if the benefits of growth don’t filter down.”

Dec 10 2010

Operation Broken Trust

The Obama Administration’s Financial-Fraud Stunt Backfires

The press shows the feds’ numbers are phony and asks where the whales are.

By Ryan Chittum, The Columbia Journalism Review

December 9, 2010 10:20 AM

Boy, the Obama administration’s slapdash PR effort to show it’s cracking down on financial fraud sure looks to be failing-and getting some serious blowback.

Jesse Eisinger has a column in today’s New York Times noting that the feds’ insider-trading investigation, while important, misses the bigger issue: prosecuting those who caused the crisis.

The New York Times’s Andrew Ross Sorkin called out Eric Holder’s Justice Department on Monday, noting that the 343 criminal defendants it said it’s prosecuting in a sweep it lamely calls Operation Broken Trust are small fry. No executive from the major corporations (like, oh, AIG, Lehman Brothers, Washington Mutual, Countrywide, Ameriquest, etc.) has yet been charged.

…

I suppose if there’s one good thing that comes out of this headslapper, it’s that maybe the Obama administration’s laughable attempt to show it’s tough on financial fraud will cause enough of a backlash in the press that it forces them to actually do something about the people who took down the financial system in order to make tens or hundreds of millions of dollars.

Dec 10 2010

Your Korean ‘Free Trade’ Agreement Update

From Firedog Lake of course since they’re the ones giving the best coverage.

Dec 10 2010

Gullible isn’t in the Dictionary

You could look it up.

I spotted this when I was feeling much more charitable than I am at the moment so calibrate your ourage meter.

Krugman: White House Blowing the Stimulus, Again

By: Scarecrow, Thursday December 9, 2010 8:08 am

The White House is moving heaven and earth, and enlisting everyone from Vice President Biden to the Mayor of Gullible (remember this next time the White House says they can’t get something the public actually supports, because they can’t get the votes) to convince Congressional Democrats the nation’s economic survival depends on passing the Obama-McConnell Tax Gifts for the Rich Act of 2010.

(And if you don’t think this is a massive gift to the rich, check out this graphic from David Dayen. Those big black dots will be Obama’s record.)

But instead of focusing on what the bill actually is, a massive give away to the wealthiest people in America combined with an openly admitted threat to Social Security funding, the White House has pulled out its biggest economic guns to convince skeptics that it’s the economic stimulus from the various measures that are absolutely essential. If so, then the question becomes, will the stimulus measures do what the White House claims?

…

Yesterday, Obama’s chief economic adviser, Larry Summers reversed a year of White House assurances to tell us the economy was at risk of a double-dip recession which would become more likely if Congress failed to pass this package. This is the first time the White House has said this, and since the Republicans are likely to increase the risks with their promised punitive spending cuts, we need to take this seriously.

It behooves the White House to do more than hand Congress a take-it-or-leave it package that’s poorly designed and misguided, based again on a flawed analysis of where we are and what’s needed. For once, this White House should be talking to people who got it right instead of continually listening to those who failed. And until they do, no Democrat has any business voting for this mess.

Dec 10 2010

Working Poor?

Just for reference, US Median Household Income is $44,389.  Median means 50% make more than that, and 50% make less.

Who Loses Under Obama’s GOP Tax Compromise? The Working Poor

By CHARLES WALLACE, AOL Daily Finance

Posted 6:30 AM 12/09/10

“Single working people with earnings below $20,000 and married couples with earnings below $40,000 are worse off under the payroll tax cut proposals in the compromise between the president and the Republicans,” explains Bob Williams, a senior fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Tax Policy Center.

Here’s why: The Obama proposal substitutes a Social Security payroll tax cut for the Making Work Pay credit, which was targeted to do the most good for low-income families. Under current rules, the working poor receive $400 when they earn at least $6,452 a year through the Making Work Pay credit. Married couples with earnings above $12,900 get $800 under the program.

The compromise cuts the Social Security payroll tax from 6.2% to 4.2%, so a couple wold have to earn $40,000 to get the same $800 tax benefit. Every working-class couple earning less than that will get less than $800, meaning they lose money under the Obama proposal.

…

The rich, however, do really well. A worker earning $106,800, the maximum amount of income subject to Social Security tax, stands to save $2,136 in payroll taxes. A married couple with both spouses making over $100,000 will actually save $4,272.

Obama had been saying for months that he wanted to increase the tax burden on the wealthy while keeping it the same for the middle class. But the new plan actually increases the tax burden on the lowest-income working families. “If you are worried about who needs the money and are trying to help people, targeting the cuts to the wealthy who don’t need it seems the wrong way to go,” Williams says.

So Barack Hussein Obama’s “Tax Compromise” is actually a TAX HIKE for almost 50% of Americans.

Way to sell-out a campaign promise Mr. “I’ll never raise taxes on those earning less that $250,000”.

And just to benefit the richest 2%.

What a disgusting liar.

Dec 10 2010

The Title Fraud Smoking Gun

I’ll cut right to the chase.  What this means is that if you have financed or re-financed a home since 1999, you no longer have clear title to your property and nobody else does either.

If you own a Mortgage Backed Security it’s a worthless scrap of paper.

Municipal, County, and State Governments have been defrauded of $10s of Billions of legally obligated filing fees by the banksters.

Anatomy of Mortgage Fraud: MERS’s Smoking Gun, Part I

L. Randall Wray, The Huffingtom Post

December 9, 2010 06:04 PM

I think we have finally found the smoking gun. An interested reader alerted me to MERS’s instruction manual, “MERS Recommended Foreclosure Procedures — State by State”, originally written in 1999, updated in 2002 and available on MERS’s website (accessed by clicking on: Recommended Foreclosure Procedures).

The first thing to note is the date. Folks, this strategy was formulated in 1999. The second thing to note is these documents demonstrate that failure to properly endorse the notes and transfer them to the REMIC trustee was not an occasional mistake, but rather was MERS’s business model. As we will see, MERS planned from the get-go to defraud the counties, and the IRS, and the homeowners, and the buyers of the mortgage-backed securities.
…
The foreclosure manual establishes three key points that we have long suspected:

  1. Mortgage notes were not typically transferred to the trusts, as required by law. Further, there is no clear “chain of title” for these notes–which are actually presented for endorsement only on foreclosure (if then).
  2. MERS recommended that mortgage servicers retain the notes.
  3. MERS “deputized” employees of the servicers, pretending that these became MERS employees. This allowed the fiction that MERS had the notes so that it could foreclose.

…
In the document, MERS claims that its recommended procedures are “customary”. In fact, there are several hundred years of “custom” that requires endorsement of notes at the time of transfer, with a clear chain of title to ensure that anyone who claims to be a creditor, and who tries to seize someone’s home, has clear documentary proof of entitlement. What MERS proposes in this document is to break the chain of title, to eliminate the protection that debtors need to prevent mortgage servicers and MERS from illegally stealing their property through the use of robo-signers and the manufacture of fake documents. In other words, both law and custom were formulated to prevent the sort of foreclosure fraud that has become normal business practice — what the MERS document calls “customary”.

(I)f the servicers hold the notes, why on earth can’t they find them–why do they need to file “lost note affidavits”? In a word, fraud. If they now produce the notes, it will be clear that they were not properly endorsed each time the mortgages were transferred. And they were never held by the REMIC trusts. As I will explain, that means mortgage backed securities are fraudulent and the banks are on the hook for hundreds of billions of dollars. And that the banks holding the mortgages cannot legally foreclose. That is why they are destroying the documents, and hiring robo-signers to forge new ones.

Smoking Gun?  More like a Smoking Cannon.  Every one of the Too Big To Fail Banks is insolvent.

Dec 09 2010

“Let historians not record”

November 3, 1969–

I believe that one of the reasons for the deep division about Vietnam is that many Americans have lost confidence in what their Government has told them about our policy. The American people cannot and should not be asked to support a policy which involves the overriding issues of war and peace unless they know the truth about that policy.

…

Let historians not record that when America was the most powerful nation in the world we passed on the other side of the road and allowed the last hopes for peace and freedom of millions of people to be suffocated by the forces of totalitarianism.

And so tonight-to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans-I ask for your support.

So what does the “silent majority” want today?

The New Silent Majority

Richard (RJ) Eskow, The Huffington Post

December 9, 2010 03:50 AM

Only 4% of people polled by CBS News after November’s election thought that Congress should focus on deficits, and only 2% thought Washington should make taxes its highest priority. … Politicians and the media obsessed over them and ignored the topic that 56% of the public considered its highest priority: jobs and the economy.

…

Now it’s on everybody’s lips – conveniently enough, just as it could be applied to extending tax cuts for the wealthy. That part of yesterday’s deal was opposed by 64% of the American public.

Is it any surprise that over 70% of those polled by CBS were either “dissatisfied” or “angry” with the way Washington works?

…

When asked how we should cut the deficit, the public would rather raise taxes on the wealthy than cut Social Security – by more than two to one.

That includes 71% of independents, 77% of Republicans–and 76% of Tea Party supporters. That’s the populist face of the New Silent Majority.

…

What else does the “new silent majority” stand for, besides jobs, protecting Social Security, and taxes for the rich?

  • 72% want the government to crack down on Wall Street more than it has.
  • 81% want the government to do more to reduce poverty.
  • Eight out of ten oppose cutting Medicare.

Despite the widespread support for these views by members of both parties (bipartisanship at last!), the political and media landscapes are dominated by journalists and politicians who keep telling us these positions are “extremist” and politically unrealistic.

…

Historians will marvel someday at our current president’s iron-willed refusal to fight for policies that are both widely popular and broadly considered by experts to be the best solutions: stimulus spending to achieve jobs and growth, more regulation to reign in reckless and greedy banking, and ironclad protections for core social benefit plans. They’ll wonder why deficits were given higher priority than the bleeding wounds of a jobless economy, while the deficit-busting costs of military spending and an overly privatized health care system were considered off-limits.

…

And yet President Obama doesn’t just fail to fight for the New Silent Majority and its positions. He gets visibly angry when he’s asked about about it. The president known for keeping his cool loses it whenever the subject comes up. Why?

Part of the answer may lie in this line in an article by Matt Bai (this leads to a bad link, the one Eskow intended is here): “Privately, Mr. Obama has described himself, at times, as essentially a Blue Dog Democrat.”

Unfortunately for Mr. Obama, his administration, and Democrats, ‘The New Silent Majority’ doesn’t like ‘Blue Dog’ policies, only the Versailles Village Idiots do.

As was amply proven in November when 50% of the ‘Blue Dogs’ lost their jobs.

And as will be proven again in 2012.

Dec 09 2010

What Tax Cuts Do

The Obama tax deal with Republicans is insane

Tony Wikrent, Real Economics

Wednesday, December 8, 2010, 8:54 PM

If you look under the hood of the industrial economy, you easily see why there is this counter-intuitive relationship between tax rates and economic growth . With high taxes, the only way to retain the bulk of the wealth created by a business is by reinvesting it in the business — in plants, equipment, staff, research and development, new products and all the rest. But if tax rates are low, then there is more incentive to pull the wealth out, by declaring it as profits that are taxed at what turns out to be too low a rate. In other words, low taxes create an incentive for profit taking.

…

If tax rates are high enough to discourage profit taking – forcing wealth created by a business to be recycled back into the business – then businesses are pushed toward longer-term planning, as they invest in new plant and equipment that will be used for many years. And you do not get the absurd situation you have now, where companies are posting record breaking profits, but are not buying new equipment, nor hiring new employees.

Low tax rates encourage taking wealth out of industrial companies; the wealth taken out must then be “put to work.” That means more money chasing “investment” opportunities, leading to price increases in financial capital or real estate or some other asset. In other words, an asset bubble. The rise in prices of an asset bubble has nothing to do with the creation of real wealth. It all looks like prosperity – until the asset bubble bursts. That’s where we are now.

Is it that simple?  Yes, yes it is.  It’s just that simple.

I encourage you to read the whole thing which also includes 3 great historical failures of low tax policies and a prescription for a modest financial transactions tax to further encourage investment in capital (as opposed to financial) assets.

(h/t Corrente)

Dec 08 2010

Just Like Health Care

December 7th, 2010, a day that will live in infamy.

So this notion that somehow we are willing to compromise too much reminds me of the debate that we had during health care.  This is the public option debate all over again.  So I pass a signature piece of legislation where we finally get health care for all Americans, something that Democrats had been fighting for for a hundred years, but because there was a provision in there that they didn’t get that would have affected maybe a couple of million people, even though we got health insurance for 30 million people and the potential for lower premiums for 100 million people, that somehow that was a sign of weakness and compromise.

What goes around comes around.

The Ghosts Of Health Care Deals Past: Industry Negotiations Could Haunt WH In New GOP-Led Congress

Amanda Terkel and Ryan Grim, The Huffington Post

12-8-10 01:00 PM

WASHINGTON — The deals that the White House cut with major industries during the health care debate are threatening to come back to haunt the administration once Republicans take control of the House. One of the most closely-watched deals involved the White House working closely with a onetime foe, former GOP congressman Billy Tauzin, head of the drugmakers lobby. Now that the deal is done, Tauzin and the White House will find themselves once again on opposite sides. Tauzin, say people close to him, will be happy to talk.

Reps. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Michael Burgess (R-Texas) will likely be the chairmen of the two committees that will have jurisdiction over any investigation into the health-care dealmaking. Both tell The Huffington Post they’re certain Tauzin is willing to chat.

“He’s a very transparent guy. He’s the kind of guy that’s happy to sit down and, you know, he doesn’t hide anything. If he made a deal as part of PhRMA with the White House, he’s going to tell you exactly what that deal was, who he made it with, what the terms were, et cetera,” said Burgess, the incoming chairman of the Energy and Commerce Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee.

Load more