I once believed that the greatest myth in American political discourse was “The Liberal Media.” I’ve realized I was wrong. ”The Liberal Media” is indeed an absurd, self-evident myth, but the greatest myth is that there is too little bipartisanship in Washington. There is very little but that.
This is exactly right.
If there’s anything we need, it’s obviously to cut the corporate tax rate! The LA Times reports that we may be getting just that:
As part of their budget plan passed last week, House Republicans want to cut the corporate tax rate to 25% from 35%. The Obama administration and many Democrats also are looking to slice the current rate, but not as much.
Supporters of the corporate tax cuts say they’re needed to make U.S. companies more competitive with their foreign counterparts, and the administration and House Republicans say they want to offset rate cuts by eliminating unspecified loopholes and tax breaks.
Yet despite complaints that they fork over too much money to Washington, U.S. corporations have been paying an increasingly smaller share of federal taxes over the last half-century.
Nearly a third of all federal taxes came from corporations in 1952. Last year, they paid just 8.9%, according to government figures. Loopholes, credits and the ability to shelter earnings abroad have helped many of the country’s biggest companies pay far less than the corporate tax rate set into U.S. law.
What the corporate tax rate is on paper would be relevant if there weren’t massive loopholes that enable corporations evade taxes and pay as little as zero. Or in GE’s case, get a $3.2 billion tax benefit. Corporations are making record profits, but rather than turn those profits into capital and create jobs, they’re sitting on them or paying out massive bonuses to their CEOs.
There are a lot of things that could be done to improve our economy. Helping corporations pay a smaller share is most definitely not one of them. The fact that members of both political parties want to follow this destructive path just goes to show how little variance there is between them.
http://i.cdn.turner.com/cnn/.element/apps/cvp/3.0/swf/cnn_416x234_embed.swf?context=embed&videoId=bestoftv/2011/04/15/exp.arena.prosecute.resign.spitzer.cnn
Via Yves Smith, Eliot Spitzer hits Attorney General Eric Holder really hard, urging him to prosecute Goldman Sachs officials or resign. Watch the video of Spitzer here.
Which brings me to those calls for a bipartisan solution. Sorry to be cynical, but right now “bipartisan” is usually code for assembling some conservative Democrats and ultraconservative Republicans — all of them with close ties to the wealthy, and many who are wealthy themselves — and having them proclaim that low taxes on high incomes and drastic cuts in social insurance are the only possible solution.
This would be a corrupt, undemocratic way to make decisions about the shape of our society even if those involved really were wise men with a deep grasp of the issues. It’s much worse when many of those at the table are the sort of people who solicit and believe the kind of policy analyses that the Heritage Foundation supplies.
So let’s not be civil. Instead, let’s have a frank discussion of our differences. In particular, if Democrats believe that Republicans are talking cruel nonsense, they should say so — and take their case to the voters.
I’ve been saying this for years, but in the Beltway press, conservative views are normative. It’s no surprise when allegedly Serious pundits fawn over Paul Ryan’s “tax cuts for the rich, austerity for the middle class” budget plan. It’s no surprise that when the President makes a fairly timid defense of a social safety network which has succeeded in keeping tens of millions of Americans out of poverty when they get old or sick is viewed as shameful partisanship. The only thing which is remotely surprising is the continued willingness of so many people in the Democratic Party to accept any press framing which makes conservative views normative. Normally I’d explain that as being connected to the fact that huge swaths of Democrats with actual power, unlike the Congressional Progressive Caucus, actually agree with these conservative policies and austerity. But in this case, when even a mild attempt to hold the line is met by cries of unseemly partisanship, I have to think that the luminaries on the Hill and in the White House will exhibit the elemental instinct for self-preservation and stand up for themselves.
On Friday the House Republicans passed Ryan’s budget and positioned themselves as the party which seeks to eliminate Medicare to pay for more tax cuts for millionaires. Opposing this politically couldn’t possibly be easier, but at the end of the day, the best hope for our country is that all Democrats actually oppose this from an ideological perspective too. We don’t need more civility and bipartisanship. We need unfiltered partisanship in defense of the programs which make America a great place to live, regardless of whether you make $30,000 per year or $30 million per year. Sadly, that doesn’t look like the course Democrats in the Senate are taking, as they pursue a deeply misguided, faux-compromise through the Gang of Six. Hopefully sanity prevails and anything determined within this cabal fails to get the support it needs to be passed.
When it comes to hippy punching, the Washington Post’s in-house “liberal,” Dana Milbank, is one of the Beltway press corps’ most accomplished pugilists. His career can be easily defined by his use of his platform as a nominal liberal to say how silly and out of touch liberals are. Milbank’s latest involves mocking the Congressional Progressive Caucus for having the temerity to produce a budget which arrives at a surplus within 10 years. Milbank frames the awful policy choices by the CPC thusly:
Still, it gives a sense of how things would be if liberals ran the world: no cuts in Social Security benefits, government-negotiated Medicare drug prices, and increased income taxes and Social Security taxes for the wealthy. Corporations and investors would be hit with a variety of new fees and taxes. And the military would face a shock-and-awe accounting: a 22 percent cut in Army forces, 30 percent for Marines, 20 percent for the Navy and 15 percent for the airforce. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would end, and weapons programs would go begging.
I hope no one fainted by this brutal vision of reality! Milbank mockingly closes his column:
The Progressive Caucus will win that argument, just as soon as they gain control of the weather. The drizzle, alas, did not let up.
What a dick.
Fed up with Milbank’s ridiculous hippy punching, Jonathan Schwarz at A Tiny Revolution decided to punch back:
First they came for the welfare mothers, but I did not speak out, because I was a member of Skull & Bones.
Then they came for middle-class manufacturing unions, but I did not speak out, because I had to get to a party at Marty Peretz’s.
Then they came for the upper middle class people who didn’t have columns in the Washington Post, but I did not speak out, because Dennis Kucinich is short.
And then they came for me…and I was STILL so fucking stupid that I spent my time making fun of the House Progressive Caucus.
And boom goes the dynamite.
The New York Times’ Gretchen Morgenson and Louise Story have a long, detailed account of how no major figures who caused the financial collapse of 2007-2008 have been criminally prosecuted for their roles in wrecking the economy. Morgenson and Story frame their piece, “why, in the aftermath of a financial mess that generated hundreds of billions in losses, have no high-profile participants in the disaster been prosecuted?” One of the overarching themes they find is a choice by prosecutors like Andrew Cuomo, then New York’s Attorney General, and regulators like Timothy Geithner, then at the New York Fed, to not risk market instability by holding people accountable or conducting detailed investigations. Morgenson & Story have plenty of regulators saying they “have done the best they could under difficult circumstances,” but nonetheless, “no senior executives have been charged or imprisoned, and a collective government effort has not emerged.” This is in contrast to the S&L scandals of the 1980s, when “special government task forces referred 1,100 cases to prosecutors, resulting in more than 800 bank officials going to jail.”
One of the articles most powerful quotes comes from Bill Black:
“This is not some evil conspiracy of two guys sitting in a room saying we should let people create crony capitalism and steal with impunity,” said William K. Black, a professor of law at University of Missouri, Kansas City, and the federal government’s director of litigation during the savings and loan crisis. “But their policies have created an exceptional criminogenic environment. There were no criminal referrals from the regulators. No fraud working groups. No national task force. There has been no effective punishment of the elites here.”
Glenn Greenwald describes this as evidence of our two-tiered system of justice in the United States:
The evidence of rampant criminality that led to the 2008 financial crisis is overwhelming, but perhaps the clearest and most compelling such evidence comes from long-time Wall-Street-servant Alan Greenspan; even he was forced to acknowledge that much of the precipitating conduct was “certainly illegal and clearly criminal” and that “a lot of that stuff was just plain fraud.”
Despite that clarity and abundance of the evidence proving pervasive criminality, it’s entirely unsurprising that there have been no real criminal investigations or prosecutions. That’s because the overarching “principle” of our justice system is that criminal prosecutions are only for ordinary rabble, not for those who are most politically and financially empowered. We have thus created precisely the two-tiered justice system against which the Founders most stridently warned and which contemporary legal scholars all agree is the hallmark of a lawless political culture.
Not surprisingly, Greenwald has a comprehensive look at other stories where law-breaking elites are given a complete pass when it comes to accountability, from warrantless wiretapping to torture as compared to vicious prosecution of minor drug offenders overflowing our prisons and whistleblowers whose leaks shed needed light on illegal or immoral behavior by our government.
Matt Taibbi has been writing about the choice to not pursue criminal charges for the financial collapse for a while. The Morgenson piece really just validates a lot of his work and shows, in painful clarity, the extent to which the scales of Justice are no longer balanced and her blindfold has been removed in the United States of America.
I don’t have the expertise to add anything to the discussion, but if you want to see the definition of a demolition job on a shitty paper, this is it. Yesterday American Banker posted a research paper by three economists, Charles Calomiris, Eric Higgins, and Joe Mason, into the possible effects of a settlement between 50 state attorneys general and mortgage servicers. According to the first footnote, the paper was funded “in part by the financial services industry, including entities affected by the proposed settlement.” This is a standard practice in the field of economics and something that has been highly criticized by Yves Smith in her book Econned and in Charles Ferguson’s Academy Award winning documentary, Inside Job.
Not shockingly, a paper funded by the mortgage service industry is laughably bad, ranging from being deliberately obtuse to factually inaccurate to intellectually inconsistent to intellectually lazy. The financial blogosphere has rapidly torn the paper apart. Here are a few articles worth reading on it:
All of these are detailed take-downs of a bunk paper. If you’re at all interested in how the mortgage servicers are marshalling a defense of their practices from both state attorneys general and federal oversight bodies, it’s instructive to read these posts. Additionally, you can bet that lobbyists for mortgage servicers are taking the Calomiris, Higgins, and Mason paper around the Hill and trying to influence policy makers away from actually doing anything about the foreclosure crisis. Getting this debunked is important and folks did their part in an heroic way.
Originally posted at AMERICAblog Elections: The Right’s Field
Following yesterday’s CNN poll which showed Donald Trump tied for the lead nationally with Mike Huckabee, Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight takes a hard look at the Republican race and sees a very flawed field. First, Silver makes a fairly useful distinction between the parts of the primary field who are approved by Beltway Republicans (Romney, Pawlenty, Huntsman, Barbour and Daniels) and those who are seeking to run through Tea Party and social conservative support (Palin, Bachmann, Ron Paul, Gingrich and Trump). Silver calls the first group the Fairfax Five and the second the Factional Five (left uncategorized are Huckabee, Santorum and Giuliani).
What’s more interesting is Silver’s observation that Trump’s surge comes through the counterintuitive path he has set out for himself as a candidate.
If Mr. Trump were going to run for president, it might have been more natural for him to do so as a social moderate but fiscal conservative, touting his executive experience and the virtues of free-market capitalism. Instead, he’s run far to his right, giving voice to false and misleading claims about Mr. Obama’s birth certificate, and reversing his prior, more moderate positions on gay rights and abortion.
Silver then looks at polling for the race and sees what we’ve pointed out here repeatedly: the Beltway approved candidates largely do not play well outside of the Beltway. Trumps rise has come at the expense of Romney and Palin. While Intrade betting markets give the Beltway approved candidates a better chance than polls currently suggest, they are hardly determinative. Instead, the current polling and Trump’s rapid rise by embracing Birtherism suggest the inadequacy of how most of the field is running.
If Mr. Trump, with such a cynical strategy, can rocket up in the polls so quickly, that suggests that the Fairfax Five and the Factional Five are both flawed in their own way. Instead, I suspect the value bets in markets like Intrade — and by extension, relative to conventional wisdom — are those candidates who belong to neither group.
The key to all of this analysis is that Mike Huckabee is at the top of the average of three national polls and Silver hasn’t fit him into either core of candidates. Huckabee doesn’t fit as easily into the boxes Silver sets out, in part because he’s already a well-known commodity among Republican voters. He doesn’t have to come to DC to get approval from George Will to be recognized by voters. He also doesn’t have to dive deep into Birtherism to get a media hit. If Huckabee decides to run, something which is by no means a certitude today, he will be able to avoid a lot of the baggage both of Silver’s cohorts have to deal with in order to pursue the nomination. If Mike Huckabee reads Nate Silver or this blog, I’m guessing he will be encouraged by what he sees.
Today we are getting more details about President Obama’s planned speech Wednesday night on deficit reduction. The Washington Post is reporting that the President will use the Bowles-Simpson plan, which failed to be passed by the bipartisan Catfood Commission, as his template for deficit reduction. Throw in a Wall Street Journal article on the administration’s willingness to add deficit reduction provisions to a deal with the Republicans raising the debt ceiling and the White House’s commitment to cutting the deficit through cutting spending should be clear. After all, the President wouldn’t have put together the Catfood Commission if he didn’t plan to use it as a policy vehicle at some point.
I’m sure Wednesday’s speech will be met by a similar range of unthinking Beltway pundits talking about how equally Serious President Obama is next to Congressman Paul Ryan. The outsides of the debate will be set and I’d expect the actual lack of legitimized liberal deficit plans will ensure that whatever the President proposes, we will get something to its right in the end. Digby writes:
The leftward position is tepid market-oriented compromises coming out of the gate. Better than Ryan, of course. But hardly a position that could balance the rightward yank that Ryan and the Simpson Bowles atrocity have given us or serve as an opening ante. The problem, unfortunately, is that when anyone sets forth a truly liberal plan like Cohn proposes, they are not only met with shrieks of horror from conservatives, establishment liberals and Democratic third-way centrists stalk them like a pack of hyenas and marginalize them as outside the “mainstream” and assure everyone who will listen that they are not “serious.” You may have noticed that Paul Ryan’s lunacy is not similarly treated by his own. Indeed, it’s not even similarly treated that way by liberals. Just try to imagine a plan like the one Cohn describes being hailed as “courageous” (even though it surely would be.) Yeah, I know. Shrill.
The fact is that there is no liberal establishment willing to validate liberalism. Indeed, for reasons only they can tell us, they almost always go out of their way to exclude anyone who can readily be identified as a person of the left and rush before the cameras and into print to reassure America that they have no support. I have my theories about why that might be, but suffice to say it’s a fairly easily documented phenomenon. There is simply no space in the establishment political dialog for explicitly left policy or rhetoric.
The key here is that the President is not seeking to change a dynamic that he is perfectly happy with. Again, he pulled together the Catfood Commission. We could have liberal ideas, if the leaders of the Democratic Party wanted there to be liberal ideas. Instead, Third Way, Goldman Sachs, and Citibank are the main pipelines for staff into (and out of) the administration.
I don’t know what the solution here is. In the near term, Nancy Pelosi is likely the most important Democrat in the country for those people who want to stop austerity, stop cuts to Social Security, Medicare & Medicaid, and have a shot at stopping tax cuts for millionaires. But the tension between liberals in the House and the President is glaring; the conflict of ideas dramatically reduces the chances that these programs be preserved as-is.
I’ve lived in Washington, DC for almost two and a half years, but only this past weekend, as Congress approved a budget which included a ban for the District to use its own funding to pay for abortion services for poor women, did the absurdity and cruelty of DC’s status become clear. The budget bill included a provision that makes a special application of the federal ban of money being used to fund abortion. DC’s budget, even with money raised from its own taxes and not from federal funds, must currently be approved by Congress. And this Congress has said that not only can no federal dollars go to pay for abortion in DC, but none of DC’s money can be used to pay for abortion services for poor District citizens.
License plates in DC carry the slogan, “Taxation without representation,” and clearly this is the system we live under. But the cruelty of the structure is not merely about the quid pro quo the rest of America makes with our government (taxes in exchange for how those taxes are spent). DC is, at the end of the day, a colony of the United States, and we live at the whims of a Congress in our own back yard.
There’s been talk in recent years of giving DC a representative with full voting rights in the House of Representatives, often pairing this addition with a new congressional district in reliably Republican Utah. But even this would be to treat DC like a colony, with sub-standard rights when it comes to representation. Either DC needs to be given full statehood – and the accompanying representation in the Senate – or DC should be merged into Maryland, our contiguous geographic neighbor. While full statehood for DC is probably the most appealing and straightforward solution, at the end of the day, the necessity for a particular cure of the current colonial system is more important than the particular solution which is used to treat it. If Maryland will take us, fine. If statehood is achievable as the state of Columbia, great. But what we currently have must end and fast.
For what it’s worth, a while back Matt Yglesias mocked up a simple map of how you could give DC statehood, while still carving out the constitutionally required federal district around the White House, Capitol, the Mall and most federal buildings. It would include essentially no residential areas and certainly end the current situation where DC has a larger population than the state of Wyoming. Ygelias’ rough map:
My hope is that the absurdity and the cruelty of the recent budget bill – an outright attack on the rights of poor women in DC – is enough to engender wide support in Democratic circles for DC statehood. The current situation is a blight on our national conscience and an affront to our Founding Fathers’ memory as patriots who fought against unfair taxation and non-representative colonialism.
Hold Fast 