In the course of debunking a particularly bad article by Fareed Zakaria on what he perceives to be high costs of Social Security and Medicare, Dean Baker makes a point which I think is very useful in turning back attacks on Social Security. Baker writes:

Zakaria is upset that seniors are allowed to receive the benefits that they have paid for. By the same logic, he should be upset that billionaires like Peter Peterson can get millions or even tens of millions of dollars in interest each year on the government bonds they own. After all, this money would be far better spent educating our children than being put in the pockets of these incredibly wealthy people. The Zakaria methodology would have us go after these interest payments on the debt, if it were applied consistently.

Of course the idea of ceasing to pay interest on government bonds would be received as absurd in most any quarter. But it is effectively what those who take issue with the federal government paying back the Social Security trust fund are arguing. The government reneging on its debts is a dangerous idea no matter who the debt is owed to. While it’d be great to stop giving taxpayer money to pay interest on the bonds owned by Pete Peterson and the Koch brothers, that’s not a choice available to the federal government and neither is ceasing to pay what is owed to Social Security.

Politico’s Morning Money tip sheet:

INDUSTRY MIND-MELD – Morning Money spoke with a number of bank executives about the concept of a $20 billion “global settlement” of state and federal mortgage servicer abuse probes. The executives view the idea as a naked shakedown by regulators, especially at the CFPB. There is little enthusiasm for signing on to it. They also view it as a direct contradiction of the administration’s attempt to take a “pro-business” stance. “How can they be business- friendly and sign-off on something like this?” one executive said, noting that he did not believe the OCC was in favor of the deal. [Emphasis added]

Law enforcement based on consensus between cop and perp hasn’t caught on broadly, but seems to be how it works when Wall Street is the perp. For example, I don’t think Bradley Manning has much enthusiasm for being left naked in his cell at Quantico. But his level of enthusiasm probably isn’t something that is determinative of how he is treated.

(click here to view)

Clay Bennett Chattanooga Times Free Press Feb 26, 2011 EditorialCartoonists.com

Keith Olbermann, writing at his new blog, does a great job answering the question of why Republicans are waging war on the middle and working class of America.

If you were standing at an ATM machine that spit out a thousand dollar bill every time you pushed any button – and you knew there was no real chance you’d ever be punished for keeping each one of them – how long would you stand there?

Presumably you’d stand there until you passed out. Or until you ran out of room in your pockets because they were stuffed full of thousands. Or until you could call your very best friends to bring over bags and empty pillowcases and wheelbarrows. Or until you realized that there was a finite number of thousand dollar bills in the universe and you’d better make arrangements to get the treasury to print more. Or until you calculated the tax implications of the product of the bottomless ATM and you realized you’d better use some of your thousands to bribe politicians to change those tax laws. Or until you had successfully done all that – and every other connivance you could think of to make sure the ATM kept spewing thousands – at which point you might let your friends take your place in line. Or, if not, screw ‘em – you got yours.

This is, of course, the answer to the most macro of the questions I get asked every day: why are the Republicans trying to do things like what they’re trying to do in Wisconsin? Why do they want to impoverish the middle class, bust unions, cut staples like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, postpone the retirement age, stop government expenditures on everybody except the rich, increase government expenditures on everybody who’s already rich, smother real small business, redefine “small business” by counting not the number of employees but the number of owners, and a thousand other scams worthy of an economic version of the Spanish Inquisition?

Because they’re standing at an ATM machine that’s spewing out thousand dollar bills. They know some day it will stop, or they will be stopped from grabbing them. They know that there is a tipping point coming in this country when – to borrow cartoonist Clay Bennett’s priceless imagery – the mice will realize they are mice and the Republicans are cats. They saw the polling that showed that it took barely six weeks for Scott Walker to lose the state GOP its Republican Union members. They know what the changing demographics of the nation suggest about the extinction of Conservatism.

To put it a different way, Republicans and financial elites are enjoying vacuuming up wealth from the poor and middle classes of America. Working people are the ATM and the cash that comes out is the transfer of wealth that is the product of the class warfare waged by the rich on everyone else in America. These people aren’t going to stop until the ATM finds a way to stop cash from being withdrawn.

Via New Deal 2.0, Tom Scocca has an incredible post dissecting David Brooks’ anti-entitlement, anti-poor people writings. Or, as the person who manages the New Deal 2.0 Twitter account put it, “Tom Scocca argues that deficit hawks are really just irritated by the existence of poor people.”

The debt—the runaway debt—has nothing to do with morality. Casting the debt as an object of moral concern is the work of minds that have come detached from human experience. The debt is an epiphenomenon. It is the side effect created by the specific moral decisions about what the country wishes to see funded, and how it is willing to fund those things.

Talking about the deficit is a way of cutting morality out of the discussion. Waste! Mismanagement! Incompetence! Unaccountable earmarks! These things are noise. The actual questions are: is money to be spent on people who do not have money? And where is that money going to come from?

There are people who do not have money. Some of them do not have money because they are children. Some of them do not have money because they are old or sick or otherwise unsuited for the labor market. Some of them do not have money because the labor market has stopped paying for the work that they know how to do in the places where they live. Robots and other machines can approximate the things these people used to do.

This may be hard for Brooks and other elites to understand, but Scocca is exactly right. There are real moral questions at play here, but the deficit hawks aren’t being honest about what they are.

What happens when there is no money to give to the people who have no money? That is the moral question. It’s fine to say that the old people should have saved more, they should have worked an extra job, they should have done without cable TV, they should have invested more wisely. Saying that doesn’t change the fact that there will be old people who do not have money. These old people will believe that they need food and shelter and medical care.

Will they get it? At the arch-plutocrats’ end of things, the Koch brothers’ end, the end occupied by the most devout worshippers of Ayn Rand, the answer is: no. That’s the goal. It’s long since time for the sloppy, implicit, badly supported social contract to go away. Rich people have been trimming their contribution to the general revenue for decades now. They are not interested in paying the premium that keeps old people and ailing people or just backward people out of the streets. If the day comes that they have to travel to and from their various compounds in armored helicopters, they can afford the helicopters. It’s not their problem.

With all the talk about America being the greatest country on earth from Republicans, it’d be great if some of them recognized what has allowed them to do so well. The Masters of the Universe don’t exist in a vacuum – their successes are built on the efforts of working American. Being glib about the need to make Tough Choices and Hard Decisions when it comes to social spending ignores the real consequences of being so Serious. People will lose their homes. They will get sick. They will be hungry. They will die. These are real moral consequences. Conversely, the color of ink on paper is not a moral question.

Here’s an interesting view from the top banker at Bank of England, Mervyn King:

The governor of the Bank of England said that people made unemployed and businesses bankrupted during the crisis had every reason to be resentful and voice their protest. He told the Treasury select committee that the billions spent bailing out the banks and the need for public spending cuts were the fault of the financial services sector.

“The price of this financial crisis is being borne by people who absolutely did not cause it,” he said. “Now is the period when the cost is being paid, I’m surprised that the degree of public anger has not been greater than it has.”

No kidding. Given that a robust austerity protest movement has developed in the United Kingdom – UK Uncut – it seems that King is suggesting that even more should be done to protest the socialization of loss by bankers. Which, in fairness, is definitely true in the US and likely true in the UK. But if straight protest isn’t enough, then I suppose it’s time for banksters to be told, flat out, “no.”

Via AMERICAblog.