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December 04, 2010 04:39 PM UTC

Weekend Open Thread

  • 100 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

Heat not a furnace for your foe so hot

That it do singe yourself: we may outrun,

By violent swiftness, that which we run at,

And lose by over-running.

–William Shakespeare, from The Life of King Henry the Eighth

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100 thoughts on “Weekend Open Thread”

      1. there is that too I suppose.

        There must be a countermanding pithy quote out there somewhere which cautions against being a milquetoast when fighting a fury.

  4. First off business has learned how to significantly increase productivity so we have a growing economy without new jobs.

    That’s a key reason the job market has remained stuck in the mud. While gross domestic product, the broadest measure of the economy, has recovered 84% of the output that was lost during the recession, but the labor market has recouped only 11% of the jobs that were lost.

    “We’re producing almost as much as we did before the recession, with 7.5 million less people,” said Lakshman Achuthan, managing director of Economic Cycle Research Institute. “The difference is going into the productivity numbers and corporate profits.”

    The big danger is that enough people will find high unemployment acceptable that we will not address the problem. Just as America ignored high unemployment for poor African Americans for decades, we may now ignore high unemployment among those without a college degree.

    Only 5 percent of those with college degrees are now unemployed, while more than 20 percent of everyone else is without work. Maybe that’s why Washington doesn’t get it. The Washington echo chamber is filled with college degrees.

    And what is Congress doing? Debating if the uber-wealthy should continue a tax cut while saying we cannot afford to extend unemployment insurance.

    Even as Congress debates whether to extend emergency unemployment checks for more than 6 million Americans who are approaching the 99-week-limit, some four million others are facing the certain end of their benefits over the next year, unless an entirely new program is crafted.

    …

    Many economists argue that paying unemployment benefits is among the most effective ways the government can spur the economy: Jobless people tend to spend nearly all of their unemployment checks, distributing those dollars throughout the economy.

    So where is President Obama and our Democratic leadership in this fight? Howard Fineman put it well

    Today is one: While Democrats in Congress fight a rear-guard action against $700 billion in new tax cuts for the rich, and the city frets over the $14 trillion national debt, and officials announce that the unemployment rose to 9.8 percent, President Obama is gone — off in Afghanistan bucking up troops in an admittedly unwinnable war that is now the longest and costliest (perhaps $2 trillion, depending on your math) in our history.

    …

    Accused of being a radical by the right, Obama in fact has allowed himself to be trapped, with a few notable exceptions (health care and food safety being two), in a slightly more bland rendition of a third Bush term.

    When Bush & the Republicans were in charge we all fought to bring Democratic leadership to Washington to make things better. But now that we’ve had Democratic leadership for 2 years and the focus is still on doing what’s best for the rich and screw the unemployed, what do we do?

    We suck less won’t fix the problems we face. It won’t even come close.

  5. from Simon Johnson

    As Ireland and other European countries have recently discovered to their horror, Too Big To Fail banks that want to expand globally can grow so large that they become Too Big To Save. “Too Big To Save” means that the government wants to save the bank — e.g., by providing a blanket guarantee, as the Irish did in October 2008 — but that creates such a large liability for the state that it pushes the entire country into insolvency.

    JP Morgan Chase is well on its way to becoming Too Big To Save. Through expanding overseas, it effectively bypasses the weak controls we still have in place on bank size (no bank is supposed to have more than 10 percent of total retail deposits). Experience in Europe is that this strategy can enable individual banks to build balance sheets that are larger than the GDP of the country in which they are based — in the UK, for example, the Royal Bank of Scotland had a balance approaching 1.5 times the size of the British economy. And then it failed.

    1. should fail sooner…like aabout 10 minutes after people start believing they are too big too save.

      When the perception is that the bank is unstable (insecure, unsafe) there should be a run.

      When Simon Johnson calls Chase TBTS, that’s enough for me.

      *JP Morgan Chase Manhattan WAMU Chemical Bank One Great Western

        1. I’m not insulting you.  I’m just saying that Sanders, droning on about re-distributing wealth equally throughout the country isn’t going to sway many people who’ve read the Constitution.

          I want to make it clear that this is a philosophical disagreement I have with you, and not a barb or jab thrown in your direction.

          1. and I mean nothing personally against you either. But to me it is even more than just simple philosophical disagreements, it is an apparent unwillingness by the right to recognize that the income is being redistributed in this country, right up to the very top of the pyramid.

            Bernie cites numerous facts to prove this point, and you respond with generalisms. And this is a theme too when you’ve been presented with strings of facts which run counter to your world-view.

            In the broad brush argument you and your fellow Republicans and Libertarians like to make, who says that the extremely wealthy made all their money themselves? Even Bill Gates and Warren Buffett relied on thousands of other people toiling away at the respective enterprises to build their own great fortunes. It is not like either is a one man shop. And that doesn’t take into account the many other subsidies from the federal level all the way down to the local level which nearly all businesses receive to some extent which enable them to grow their private wealth at public expense, from various subsidies to infrastructure investments to tax breaks. It is a long list of public investment and tax policy which have directly benefited the owner class. For the last several decades it has done so at the direct expense of the working classes (which is most of us frankly).

            Yes, there may be a real class warfare in the making. The tea-partiers are sure fired up for it, even though they’re just tools of the uber-rich Koch brothers who have funded much of their campaigning. But I wouldn’t bet my last dollar on the outcome just yet if I were you LB.

            1. In my view, there is nothing in the Constitution that sets the role of government as or gives it the power to redistribute anything at the whim of any jackass that might find him or herself in office.

              There are losers in a free market, just like in nature.

              2. The powers assigned to each branch and the division between the federal and state powers are pretty neatly laid out actually. Funny how it has been working that way since it was ratified.

                You can’t just keep MSU about what the Constitution says because you don’t like the laws your elected representatives pass.

              3. Yes, there most certainly are.

                In nature we can find ruthless killing and vivisection and cannibalism and patricide and rape and infanticide and child abandonment and …

                Therefore, are you arguing it is fine to promote these behaviors among citizens of the United States of America?

                Quite the fine set of “values” you are bringing to the table, LB.

                Do you care about anything beyond perpetuating your own chromosomes?

                Merry Christmas to you and yours.

              1. We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, save the banks when they fail, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

              1. Unfortunately, some of our tea party candidates didn’t get past the first paragraph and read the rest of our great of the document.

                I loved the speech, LB. And I love a free market; however, show me one empire in history that has worked with extreme wealth of its top 1% and poverty of the bottom 50%?  And then I ask why you would support it?  You are nowhere near the top 1% and at this point, no one in your family is going get there.  (I mean “you” in the collective posting here that lean Repub or Tea Party)

      2. because if the rich can’t have a huge tax cut, nobody can!

        There’s enough class warfare already from your side. You just don’t like it when your opponent doesn’t surrender in advance.

          1. money in and of itself is an invention of society. If the rich think it’s their. let them print their own and see how fungible that is for them. No, money is printed by the government, backed by the government, even destroyed by the government when it is too worn out. The rich may have exploited many thing to get their hands on the government scrip.

          2. It was pointed out to you a week or so ago that this is a Bush tax increase that a Republican congress passed and Bush signed. If the R’s had wanted to make these tax cuts permanent, then they could have — well, I guess they would have had to compromise with the Dems and not pass this tax increase as part of a reconciliation bill. But I guess “bipartisan” means that only Dems should give something up, huh?

            But again, don’t let the facts get in the way.

            (And don’t let it confuse you that the government is all of us, and that we all get services. But if you want to make it about class warfare, I guess I understand.)

            1. Like the fact that for the tax cuts we’re talking were passed by a Republican House and a Democratic Senate.  The temporary measure was a result of “bipartisanship” to get  Dems to vote for it.

              But don’t let your “ignorance” of history get in the way.

                    1. Let them keep it, right?  To act like the government was just being cool by letting them keep more of the money they earned on some kind of ‘timeout’ is a pretty chilling way to look at the U.S. economy.

              2. Bush tax cuts

                #1  Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001

                Most of the tax reductions would have been phased in over  9 years, except then they were accelerated by …

                #2  Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003.

                The 10-year expiration was to get around the Byrd Rule which allows any Senator to block a piece of legislation if it neutral scoring shows it will increase the federal deficit beyond a ten-year term.

                In 2003 the R’s had a majority in the House and Senate – 2 D’s voted for it, 3 R’s voted against resulting in a 50-50 tie. Dick Cheney cast the the tiebreaking vote.

                It’s the Bush Tax Plan – so they have been the Bush tax cuts and they will be the Bush Tax Increases.

                But don’t let facts get in the way.

          4. Remember, they wrote the tax cut legislation to expire in 2011.  The Dems are trying to head off the Bush/RepubCong tax increases by cutting taxes on middle class earners; you Repubs are refusing to allow my taxes to be cut unless the Dems also agree to cut Bill Gates’s marginal tax rate.  I say: fuck that.

          5. But you are right that when people earn money, or receive dividends and interest or other unearned income, it’s theirs first.

            And then it is the patriotic duty of American citizens to pay for the publicly funded expenses.  

            Like most Americans.I believe in a progressive taxation.  The proposal today would have adjusted the income tax making it slightly more progressive.

          6. out of the trillion bucks they took from the taxpayers, LB,  We didn’t hear much about the lgorious of rugged individualism when they were passing around the begging bowl.

          7. Loses whatever credibility you might have as  a “reasonable conservative.”

            As well outlined by others, this was a Republican tax plan passed with Republican votes, set to expire, circa now.

            This is George Bush the lesser’s tax hike.

            QED as you like to say.

          1. The absolute wealthiest persons won’t be satisfied until we are without any ability to purchase food, clothing, or shelter.  At least that is what I get from listening to those on the left.

            1. We’re experiencing on of the more severe housing crises in our history, with record foreclosures.

              The United States has, it can be argued, the highest rates of child hunger, families living in poverty, and economically “at risk” individuals in it’s history.

              If you would actually listen to Americans, and look at factual data, you might wake up the the fact that America is being unacceptably altered….in my lifetime…..to a standard of living, competitive disadvantage, and risk never before faced.

              I grew up poor. There’s a difference today, however, than those days when I was lucky to find a dime in my pocket. The social safety net is under withering attack. The ability to bootstrap your family to some sense of security….virtually nonexistent.

              The young are increasingly depressed, suicidal, self medicating and unemployed. Do you like “eating” your young? Do you like the management of the country’s resuorces to eat our children…..those you don’t get chewed up in the war machine?

              Your insensibilities are astounding, shocking and abhorrent.

              .

              1. We’re experiencing on of the more severe housing crises in our history, with record foreclosures.

                And why is that true?  Is it because the eeeeevil banksters are ruthlessly casting out the widows and orphan ala Snidely Whiplash?  Or is it because the government mandated that people who couldn’t really afford it get home loans?  I have a cousin in Phoenix who can tell you about buyers arriving at closings in 20 year old cars buying quarter of a million dollar homes.

                The United States has, it can be argued, the highest rates of child hunger, families living in poverty, and economically “at risk” individuals in it’s history.

                It can only be argued by those who don’t know history.  The most obvious example is the Great Depression, but there were many times during the early part of the 20th and latter 19th Centuries when the lower classes were chronically short of nutrition.  What is happening today isn’t a patch on that.

                As someone who is a working class American, I know this is not the best time in out history.  But I also know that we’ve been through worse times, and trying to divide the country into “haves” and “have nots” for political gain doesn’t do anything to make the situation better.

                And btw, you don’t have a monopoly on growing up poor, but we never had to rely on government handouts when I was a child.  We made do with what we had.  I’ve lived on ramen noodles and peanut butter when work was scarce, and sold personal items to keep my head above water.

                Go peddle your doom and gloom elsewhere, I don’t buy the left’s scare tactics.

                1. trying to divide the country into “haves” and “have nots” for political gain doesn’t do anything to make the situation better.

                  Are you then saying that doing so for personal gain is OK? Dividing the country into “haves” and “have nots” has been going on since there WAS a country. In fact, dividing society into classes has been going on since your ancestor tried to shove mine away from the campfire so he could have the warmth all to himself.

                  Even emperor penguins rotate around the circle so that everyone shares the pain. Are you not as civilized as a fucking penguin?

                  The gap between the wealthy and the poor grows ever wider and America is rapidly losing it’s place as the “the Land of Opportunity”. I would say that title could now be conferred upon India…China, perhaps. In the USA, “upward mobility” is an endangered species.

                  If you care to defend the sheriff, that is your call. As for me, I’ll stand with Sir Robin.

                3. Or is it because the government mandated that people who couldn’t really afford it get home loans?

                  This canard has a lot of resiliency and nothing but the faith of free-market orthodox belief behind it. The banks, of their own free choice, taking advantage of low interest rates and the fact that they could sell the loans before the borrowers defaulted, did in fact cause this mess.

                  I’m going to give you proof of my case, and ask you to provide proof of yours, OR an admission that you don’t actually have such proof.

                  http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12…

                  1. From Forbes

                    The reason that the most recent bubble created a worldwide financial crisis is that it was inflated with low-quality loans required by government mandate. The fact that the same government must now come to the rescue is no reason for gratitude.

                    It’s not a canard if it’s true.  And a story highlighting just one company doesn’t tell the whole tale.

                    1. sounds an awful lot like completely unsourced bullshit to me. (Gosh, I wonder whether the American Enterprise Institute will blame government and poor people for societal problems this time. Oh look, it happened again! What are the odds?)

                      Maybe if you repeat it often enough, it will magically turn true, or at least stop being a canard. Or maybe not.

                    2. When it comes to proof, commentary and opinion pieces = 0. They are not held to any standard of accountability or ability to prove their cases, unlike news articles.

                      Did you read my link?

                    3. I see people on this forum linking to Paul Krugman, Daily Kos, Progress Now, and other opinion sites of the left.  And you don’t seem to have any problem accepting them as gospel.  To then say that a conservative site has no credibility smacks of more than a little hypocrisy.

                      And yes I read your link.

                    4. is a Nobel Prize winning economist. He sources every one of his opinion columns and every link to his column will also lead to his blog site where he gets really wonky if you’re into that sort of thing.

                      Not even all opinion pieces are created equally, and Forbes would rank towards the bottom in lack of substance, but always high dudgeon!

                    5. Find just ONE place where I’m agreeing with such a post. Just ONE.

                      If you don’t see me arguing with those posts, you’ll probably also note that I’m not in those discussions, or else am completely talking around them.

                      Opinions are good for providing an argument you agree with, or an analysis you think is worthy, but we’re talking about hard facts here. For that, only credible news articles will do.

                      If you read my article, you got some good reporting as to what was going on inside one major subprime organization. You’ll have noted that government quotas had nothing to do with their decisions to recklessly give loans to people not qualified to receive them. You’ll note that these people were advertised to, not just coming off the street looking for a handout. All of this counters the meme that the subprime mortgage crisis was in any way caused by the boogeymen known as Big Government and Barney Frank.

                      That’s what the NEWS reports on that. Find me a NEWS article supporting your assertions, and I’ll buy it. Keep leaning on partisans who aren’t credible, and I won’t.

                      What say you?

                    6. What do you say? This is too important to leave unanswered. Unless you want me to make my own conclusions about your silence.

                    7. But it’s from the Business Page of the highly disreputable New York Times.  (Just thought I’d save you lefties the effort of calling it unsourced bullshit)

                      It’s all about Freddy and Fannie:

                      Indeed, executives of both companies maintain that one of the reasons the firms hold so many bad loans is that Congress has leaned on them for years to buy mortgages from low-income borrowers to encourage affordable housing. In 2004, Freddie Mac warned regulators that affordable housing goals could force the company to buy riskier loans.

                      And then you have an unnamed politician putting his personal appeal:

                      However, the companies were constantly under pressure to buy riskier mortgages. Once, a high-ranking Democrat telephoned executives and screamed at them to purchase more loans from low-income borrowers, according to a Congressional source.

                      I can make an educated guess or two on who that Democrat was.

                      I eagerly await your response telling me how this isn’t real news.

                    8. it’s a good news source, but just one problem – it doesn’t support your assertion that the financial crisis was caused by government mandates to give loans to the poor.

                      Did you read this article closely? It talks about how buying bad loans was causing great risk to Freddie and Fannie, but nary a word about the root cause of the crisis, which was the origination of risky loans, which was the doing of companies such as WaMu and Countrywide.

                      Sure, there’s this, which you pointed out:

                      Indeed, executives of both companies maintain that one of the reasons the firms hold so many bad loans is that Congress has leaned on them for years to buy mortgages from low-income borrowers to encourage affordable housing. In 2004, Freddie Mac warned regulators that affordable housing goals could force the company to buy riskier loans.

                      But it’s immediately followed by this (which you ignored – didn’t fit your worldview, did it?):

                      Others, however, dismiss that explanation. “Sure, it’s hard to deal with the pressures of Congress and shareholders and regulators,” said a former high-ranking Freddie Mac executive. “But that’s why executives get paid so much. It’s not acceptable to blame those pressures for making bad choices.”

                      Personal responsibility, anyone? I guess we let them off the hook if we can blame the boogeymen of the left instead, eh?

                      I found this tidbit revealing, as it supports my assertion pretty well and shows how Freddie and Fannie played into this. After going over the backgrounds of two executives with questionable backgrounds, the article says:

                      By the time both men took over, the firms had perfected the art of making money by capitalizing on the perception they were implicitly backed by the government. That belief allowed Fannie and Freddie to borrow at relatively low rates and use those funds to buy mortgages as investments. The companies also collected fees in exchange for guaranteeing that borrowers would repay other home loans.

                      This, in a nutshell, is the housing crisis: Companies investing in unsound mortgages, bringing the gung-ho capitalist profit maximizing incentive to parts of the economy that shouldn’t be mined for big payoffs.

                      Finally, we get to the other brief quote that you used:

                      However, the companies were constantly under pressure to buy riskier mortgages. Once, a high-ranking Democrat telephoned executives and screamed at them to purchase more loans from low-income borrowers, according to a Congressional source. Shareholders attacked the executives for missing profitable opportunities by being too cautious.

                      Make all the “educated guesses” about that Democrat’s identity that you want, so long as you admit that you do so based more on all the swirling accusations from the right wing media and blogosphere, and that you wouldn’t ordinarily give an anonymous source the time of day if they were telling a story that you didn’t like.

                      Congratulations of finding at least one legitimate story that gives a tiny bit of evidence to support your theory. If you’re fair, you’ll agree that you have more research to do to build a case as good as the one I presented to you. I’m open to the possibility that government mandates played a role in the crisis, but if this is all there is to support that assertion, then we can say, authoritatively, that that isn’t the case.

                    10. yeah, that’s reliable. And where are their facts? The piece you pasted is nothing more than right-wing pablum. Op-Eds don’t really count.

            1. They aren’t trying to take money away from them – unless you mean in terms of the rich folks money not being taken from them by the government to pay for things for the rest of the people.

              The poorest people in the country (lowest quintile) are net tax receivers, anyway – they have nothing taken from them.

                  1. If you want to calculate what people get from the government vs. what they pay in for every individual, you can try doing it. I think we both know who’d win: senior citizens (who tend to vote for Republicans).

                    Though I eagerly await any sort of reference to a number more specific than “a pig’s fart” from you. (If one of my students answers a question on a math test this way, s/he gets no partial credit.)

          6. You act like the profit the rich makes is totally disconnected from the infrastructure & system the government and the people provide. But it’s not. If it was disconnected then Somalia would be the richest country on earth.

            Those government expenses go to pay for things that allowed the rich to make their money, that protect them so they keep it, and give them the opportunity to make more.

            All I want is for each to pay taxes in proportion to the advantage they gain from the system those taxes provides.

            Many of the rich appear to want a free ride.

              1. then I could quit…see future ex.

                I suppose it should really be more “future conditional”  but I missed a lot of school when they taught how to conjugate irregular voter affiliation.

    4. Does that mean I can stop blaming John McCain for raising her from obscurity to the lofty status of America’s best known half-term governor of one of our smallest, in terms of population, states?

  8. In 2001, John McCain voted against the Bush tax breaks, saying: “I cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us, at the expense of middle-class Americans who most need tax relief.”

    From an article titled, “Bush Aides Admit the Tax Cuts Were a ‘Trap’ for Obama.”  http://www.businessinsider.com…

  9. We had a bookalanche this week. A number of people decided spontaneously that it would be a good idea to bring in what amounts to at least a couple dozen boxes of books. Which is not a bad thing…but sadly I have no way to overclock the part of my brain I use for book processing. So I have to spend extra hours on that project to keep the shop area de-cluttered. Hmm, or else maybe I could decorate some of the boxes to look like big Christmas presents!

    Anyway, here is a jolly tune someone sent me!

  10. assassinate Assanger, remember when the ability of the NYT to publish the Pentagon Papers (truly an embarrassment for the government) went to the Supreme Court? Nixon’s attempts to force the Times and over a dozen other papers to stop publishing went to the Supreme Court, which ruled 6-3 that the papers could be published freely.

    “Justice Brennan’s decision argued that press reports that embarrass the government were precisely the reason the First Amendment was invented. Just Black concurred. “Every moment’s continuance of the injunctions against these newspapers amounts to a flagrant, indefensible, and continuing violation of the First Amendment… [F]or the first time in the 182 years since the founding of the Republic, the federal courts are asked to hold that the First Amendment does not mean what it says.”

    http://downwithtyranny.blogspo…

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