Etch-a-Sketch Rope-a-Dope?

I mean, what else can you say?  Or, maybe, if you ask, "Are they stupid or cynical?"  The answer would be, "Yes."



Oh, and have I mentioned, to paraphrase Charlie Pierce, what a colossal asshole Mitt Romney is?

They are wrong

Gosh, if only we could elect a truly progressive president.

Oh...wait...

Grand Ol' Wingnuttery

Think the venom Obama has to deal with is new?  Think again.

So Crow was insane. But he was also by no means atypical of the venom spewing Republicans of the 1940s. We think of Obama facing some uniquely crazy Republican opposition but it’s not so original. This kind of hackery goes back a long ways. Of course, the Republican Party of the 1940s had more than just crazies, and that’s why Crow hated Morse so much. But add a little geographical realignment to the mix and it’s not hard to see how complete wingnuttery would come to take over the entire Republican Party. 

The Republican party of the 1940s had been completely out of power for more than a decade, feeding the frenzy of their impotent hatred.  But that rising bile would eventually weaken the Democratic party in ways we're still feeling today.  It started with Yalta where FDR "lost Europe" to Stalin, and reached it's apotheosis when Truman and the "China hands lost China," when China was not ours to lose.  There was a direct line from there to Joe McCarthy and disastrous foreign policy decisions in Asia by administrations terrified of "losing" first Korea than Vietnam.

Income inequality as public policy

In their new book, Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson point to public policy as the source of income inequality and the growing economic pressure on the middle class. And there is very good reason for the middle class -- even, or especially, those not members of a union -- to pay attention to events in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Indiana.

Mr. Hacker: We’re certainly not arguing that changes in the balance of power are the only cause of inequality and stagnating wages. The college premium has indeed grown, though it’s hard to see how this accounts for the most striking and distinctively American development – namely, the extreme concentration of economic rewards at the very, very top of the economic ladder. Most of those who have a college degree haven’t shared in the really big gains experienced by the top 1 percent or top 0.1 percent (average 2007 income: $7 million), which has seen its share of income more than quadruple since the early 1970s.

The big question is whether these outsized rewards could have been distributed more broadly given different economic policies. We’re convinced the answer is yes. The key to getting the answer right, we argue, is to look beyond the economics of rising inequality to examine the politics. Much of our book traces how major changes in policies governing finance, corporate governance, taxation, and industrial relations helped fuel the “winner-take-all economy.” These changes, we show, directly reflected the declining clout of middle-class voters and unions relative to a much more organized and mobilized corporate sector.

Mr. Pierson: We need to think more broadly about what shapes markets and the distribution of economic rewards. For instance, economists generally err in thinking that unions influence the income distribution mostly through direct negotiations with employers. Instead, we argue the most important role these forces play is to create some organized countervailing pressure in Washington. Cross-national research suggests that strong labor unions are associated with greater government redistribution through taxes and transfers. The United States is one of only a handful of countries where government taxes and benefits have become less redistributive as inequality has grown.

And failure to compensate for rising inequality through taxes and benefits is only the tip of the iceberg. From industrial relations policy to regulation of executive pay to financial deregulation, policy makers either remade markets in ways that encouraged inequality or stood on the sidelines (despite plenty of complaints and clear alternatives) as changes in the market outran existing policy rules. Especially after the financial crisis, it’s hard to deny that some of the big policy shifts that enriched those at the top have contributed substantially to the hardships faced by the middle class.

Conservative Republican crusades against collective bargaining and for making union dues "voluntary" and making it illegal to take public employees' union dues directly from their paychecks aren't about reducing deficits. They are about depriving unions of their members and their members' dues. They are about eliminating union clout as a countervailing political force against corporate control of public policy. And we are all -- or at least 99% of us -- victims of that.

And, the authors argue, the Republican party is no longer "conservative." It is radical in its ideas about economics, and that, along with the filibuster, have made financial reform all but impossible.

UPDATED for clarity

One more reminder that this is all Bush's fault

Sen. Kyle is an idiot.

The fault lines

Kevin Drum takes a look at the state of play for financial reform and is left feeling more than simple "resigned cynicism."

The whole subject has left me with considerably more than that. Brutal partisan brawling over things like healthcare reform and climate change legislation was (and is) entirely unsurprising. It was the same old fights as always, and it never really left me with a feeling that politics had broken down in any real way. Financial reform is different. Politically, the obvious play for both parties is to outbid each other in efforts to rein in Wall Street, which practically everyone in America hates. But even though this would be an enormous vote getter, neither party is doing it. Democrats are offering up some mild reforms that would modify the playing a field a bit but not really fundamentally change anything. Republicans won't even go that far. Apparently motivated by industry fealty and a desire to simply oppose anything Democrats offer up, they're unwilling to support even modest reforms.

It's hard to know what to think about this. If your city were nearly destroyed by a huge earthquake, proposing better building standards would be an obvious response. It wouldn't be a left vs. right thing, it would be a property developers vs. everyone else thing. The financial meltdown of 2008 was like that. It exposed such massive fault lines in our banking system that outrage really shouldn't be a left vs. right thing. It should be a big banks vs. everyone else thing. But the intellectual and monetary hold of Wall Street on our political class is so overwhelming that it was able to turn the whole affair into just another excuse for the usual partisan bickering. The winners, of course, will be the big banks.

As weak a tea as Democrats propose brewing, the level of dishonesty the cynicism that Republicans are showing -- that voters won't bother to question McConnell's and Boehner's claim that legislation means permanent bail-outs by taxpayers. In fact, not doing anything means permanent bail-outs, and rather than those bail-outs being paid by the financial institutions, much the way the FDIC works, they'll continue to be paid by you and I. Whooppee.