Labor Day Reads

Good Morning and Happy Labor Day!
New Orleans didn’t get quit the rain that was expected from TS Lee because of a high over Texas that sent some dry air at us.  However, Lee’s still around and it looks like it’s going to bring lots more rain as it makes its way to the NE so others may not be so lucky.

I read a great article by Robert Reich yesterday on the NYT about the plight of the middle class in the US which is one of my favorite topics to follow. I just can’t help but notice some of the astounding statistics that show how much wealth is being confiscated upwards.

THE 5 percent of Americans with the highest incomes now account for 37 percent of all consumer purchases, according to the latest research from Moody’s Analytics. That should come as no surprise. Our society has become more and more unequal.

When so much income goes to the top, the middle class doesn’t have enough purchasing power to keep the economy going without sinking ever more deeply into debt — which, as we’ve seen, ends badly. An economy so dependent on the spending of a few is also prone to great booms and busts. The rich splurge and speculate when their savings are doing well. But when the values of their assets tumble, they pull back. That can lead to wild gyrations. Sound familiar?

The economy won’t really bounce back until America’s surge toward inequality is reversed. Even if by some miracle President Obama gets support for a second big stimulus while Ben S. Bernanke’s Fed keeps interest rates near zero, neither will do the trick without a middle class capable of spending. Pump-priming works only when a well contains enough water.

Look back over the last hundred years and you’ll see the pattern. During periods when the very rich took home a much smaller proportion of total income — as in the Great Prosperity between 1947 and 1977 — the nation as a whole grew faster and median wages surged. We created a virtuous cycle in which an ever growing middle class had the ability to consume more goods and services, which created more and better jobs, thereby stoking demand. The rising tide did in fact lift all boats.

During periods when the very rich took home a larger proportion — as between 1918 and 1933, and in the Great Regression from 1981 to the present day — growth slowed, median wages stagnated and we suffered giant downturns. It’s no mere coincidence that over the last century the top earners’ share of the nation’s total income peaked in 1928 and 2007 — the two years just preceding the biggest downturns.

So, as BostonBoomer wrote last night, the President’s speech on jobs and labor is not expected to be a barn burner.  Salon’s Matt Stoller asks “What can Democrats do about Obama? The discussion around here has one answer, fall on your sword and let a real Democrat lead the way.

71 percent of Americans disapprove of how Obama is doing his job. Even among reliably Democratic groups — union households, women and young people — he’s now unpopular.

No one, not even the president’s defenders, expect his coming jobs speech to mean anything. When the president spoke during a recent market swoon, the market dropped another 100 points. Democrats may soon have to confront an uncomfortable truth, and ask whether Obama is a suitable choice at the top of the ticket in 2012. They may then have to ask themselves if there’s any way they can push him off the top of the ticket.

That these questions have not yet been asked in any serious way shows how weak the Democratic Party is as a political organization. Yet this political weakness is not inevitable, it can be changed through courage and collective action by a few party insiders smart and principled enough to understand the value of a public debate, and by activists who are courageous enough to face the real legacy of the Obama years.

Obama has ruined the Democratic Party. The 2010 wipeout was an electoral catastrophe so bad you’d have to go back to 1894 to find comparable losses. From 2008 to 2010, according to Gallup, the fastest growing demographic party label was former Democrat. Obama took over the party in 2008 with 36 percent of Americans considering themselves Democrats. Within just two years, that number had dropped to 31 percent, which tied a 22-year low.

Oh, the other hand, Republicans can say just about anything and the press will not call them out on their absolute insanity in search of some imaginary chalice of  fair-mindedness.  John Holbo has some interesting thoughts on that. He has a response to an earlier Kevin Drum question wondering if Democrats could get away with as much craziness and used Hillary Clinton as an example.

Kevin points out that if Hilary Clinton wrote a book about how much she wanted to repeal the Second Amendment and ban hate speech everyone would freak out that she was a radical. So what gives?

But the question answers itself: it’s really true that Perry doesn’t mean what he says. Mostly. As Kevin says, these are just the words he has to say to prove to the base he’s one of them.

By contrast, Hilary Clinton would only write that book about wanting to repeal the Second Amendment, etc., if – against all likelihood – she really wanted to repeal the Second Amendment. Because, since she isn’t a conservative, she’s not going to get a Get Out of Crazy Jail Free card. So there is no profit to her in writing such a book. Turning the point around: given that liberals don’t systematically employ a rhetoric of believing things they don’t, but conservatives do, it makes a great deal of sense to give conservatives an endless supply of Get Out of Crazy Jail Free cards. And round we go.

Really it’s more complicated. If people say crazy stuff long enough, they start to believe what they say, and other people do, too. The Overton Window gets dragged all over the place. (Michelle Bachmann really does seem to mean what she says. So she’s unviable, in the eyes of Republican establishmentarians. Even though she isn’t really saying anything absolutely crazier than Perry is saying at this point, and he’s looking pretty ok.) Having the license to say crazy stuff, without getting called on it, prevents serious debate and allows people to conceal any crazy stuff that really do believe, by hiding it in plain sight, as it were. It’s really true, I suspect, that when most conservatives say that they don’t buy this global warming junk science, what they really mean to do is, simply, signal ‘I’m in favor of capitalism’. If you are a conservative, talking to conservatives, and you say you think the scientists might be right, your audience is going to hear you refusing to send an ‘I’m in favor of capitalsim’ signal. Needless to say, this means conservatives can’t have reasonable discussions of global warming unless they are free from worries about what they are signalling, as opposed to saying. Which they never are, at least if they are politicians.

That only holds water when you consider polls that show a lot of the republican base actually believe insane things like the world is less than 10,000 years old.   Just look at this Pew poll taken on Darwin’s 200th Birthday.  Americans–and fundies in particular–look absolutely ignorant.  Here’s a great take on that from LGF scoffing at Erick Erickson’s assertion that not all of his fundie buddies are all that literal.  Sorry, Eric, they are.

Even pinning down the creationists’ beliefs more finely, the Gallup survey shows that approximately 44% or so of all Americans believe “God created human beings pretty much in the present form at one time within the past 10,000 years or so.”

Those are surveys that sample from all people living in the US. Since both Pew and Gallup show that only a small number accept the science (evolution over long periods of time), somewhere between 14% and 26%, it seems that those who believe in an old earth creationism process are roughly the same share (or slightly less) than the young earth creationists.

The bottom line is this, Erick: around half of all your fellow creationists are Young Earth Creationists. They even probably have a majority in your religion (American “conservative” Christianity.)

And yes, they are delusional, caught up in magical thinking.

You can read the original Ericson dribble here at the Washington Examiner where he tries to tell us that Michelle Bachmann’s brand of christianity is just misunderstood by the media.  There are many christians who believe the bible is metaphor, but your fundie friends–and Michelle Bachmann in particular–are not in their number.  I remember the first time I met an older woman that thought that there was a literal Garden of Eden some where on earth and that we actually were sons and daughters of Adam and Eve.  I was just speechless.  It’s a bit like watching a child talk excitedly about Santa Claus when you know the entire story. You don’t want to crush them, but sheesh, at some point you have to grow and realize that nothing is that simple and that magical thinking does no one any good.

Speaking of Michelle Bachmann, it seems she agrees with Quitterella on the elimination of corporate taxes.  Oh, great, not only does she want to eliminate the EPA so they can do whatever they want to our air, water, and environment, now the two Republican women don’t want them even contributing to the roads they over use or anything else.

Republican presidential candidate Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) said she was “open to” former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s call to eliminate corporate income taxes.

“I’m open to having that debate,” said Bachmann on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday.

But she cautioned that “if we went that route, then we’d have to have a fundamental restructuring of the tax code.” “What we would have to do then is rejigger other elements to define revenue and what revenues would be needed to the economy.”

In the short term, however the Tea Party favorite said President Obama could lower corporate taxes to aid American businesses. “I do believe that the president at minimum should lower the corporate tax rate to 20% so that businesses can see that they will have a more competitive rate,” she proposed.

Bachmann has made tax reform and rolling back regulations the centerpiece of her plan to boost job growth and jump start the economy.

Bachmann said if elected president, the first thing she would do would be to “bring about repatriation of income from American corporations that have earned money overseas … we have over $1.2 trillion in earnings that we could bring immediately to kick-start the economy which would be a true stimulus.”

Wow, for a tax attorney she sure doesn’t know what she’s talking about.  Businesses are overseas these days because that’s there’s a growing customer base there.  They’re taking advantage of the cheap labor and the fact they don’t have to transport the stuff over there.  US corporations just beg a tax loophole out of congress if they want their taxes cut.  The effective rate they pay is so low they don’t really care any way about the actual rate.

Speaking of manufacturing, here’s a report that might keep you up all night.  Gun manufacturers lose thousands of guns every year. 

More than 16,000 guns were “lost” from gun manufacturers’ inventories over the last two years, according to a report by a gun control advocacy group.

The report, released by the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, pulled data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) and found that 16,485 guns left the inventories of nearly 4,500 licensed gun manufacturers throughout the country without a record of them ever being sold.

In 2004 Congress passed the Tiahrt amendment – named for its sponsor then-Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-Kansas) – which prohibited the ATF from requiring gun manufacturers to track their inventory. The Brady Campaign has long advocated for a repeal of the Tiahrt amendment.

“It is shocking that gun makers are so oblivious to public safety that they lose track of thousands of guns every year,” said Dennis Henigan, the acting president of the Brady Center. “ Given the lethality of its product, the gun industry has a special duty to act responsibly.  Instead, it has a scandalous record of carelessness.”

The report states that the unaccounted for guns are often used in crimes because a trace of the weapon is not as likely to lead law enforcement officials back to the criminal.

Well, that’ll get things started on this Labor Day 0f 2011.  Have a good one and be safe if you’re under the threat of all that severe weather out there!!!