conservatives

Producers vs. Moochers, Freeloaders And Losers -- The Cruel Pro-Rich Propaganda Of The Right

Dave Johnson — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 15:24:43 -0500

"Producers" and "parasites." Cruel language justifying extreme greed seems to be mainstream now. Even Presidential candidates feel free to disparage 99% of us! In today's right-wing folklore government by We, the People is an evil thing that takes from "producers" and gives to "moochers," "freeloaders," and "losers." Government and taxes "take money out of the economy." Decision-making by We, the People is "collectivism" and "mob rule." And those of us who think the insanely wealthy should pay fair taxes suffer from "envy."

In today's discourse wealthy elites receiving $20 million a year in “capital gains” while paying almost no taxes are “producers,” while janitors or nursing home workers, working two jobs and not making enough to pay rent and feed themselves, are “moochers” and “freeloaders.” Right.

This email came in to CAF yesterday, (see also Richard Eskow's take on it, John Galt Is A Crybaby And So Are You)

I am really curios to know what motivates the mind of a socialist. Why do you think its fair to penalize those of us who produce while rewarding those who do not? If healthcare should be a right then where does it stop?

Could one not use the same argument that everyone has a right to free housing? A free car? Perhaps free air travel? Who will pay for all this?

What happens when the government has exhausted the money acquired from the producers? I have a feeling producers will stop producing if the government is just going to take it. Again, I ask why should the people who produced be punished to reward free loaders?

Actually, a right to housing, health care and decent transportation sound like the kind of things that proud citizens in a democracy ought to demand, if you ask me.

The Ayn Rand Poison

This email and others like it echo the language of the novels of Ayn Rand, which so many Republican politicians today embrace. The people writing them are disciples of Ayn Rand. They used to be teenagers who resented being told to clean their rooms; now they are grownups who don’t want to be told to pay their taxes. Republicans have enthusiastically embraced the poison of Ayn Rand, its justification of psychopathic greed and selfishness, along with her belief that altruism and democracy are "evil."

This Ayn-Randian idea that there are two kinds of people, "producers" and "parasites," is reflected across the language of the right today. The wealthy "producers" are "job creators" Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner, for example, regularly echoes this core philosophy of "producers" and "parasites," saying,

I believe raising taxes on the very people that we expect to reinvest in our economy and to hire people is the wrong idea,” he said. “For those people to give that money to the government…means it wont get reinvested in our economy at a time when we’re trying to create jobs.”

"The very people" who "hire people" shouldn't have to pay taxes because that money is then taken out of the productive economy and just given to the parasites -- "the help" -- meaning you and me...

Who Is The Real Freeloader?

With the release of his (but for some reason only the most recent) tax returns we learned that Mitt Romney collects over $20 million a year, while doing nothing, from the many millions he was able to get control of by stripping companies and laying people off or making them take huge pay cuts and loss of benefits. According to the Christian Science Monitor titled, What kind of society does America want?, this is the story of what happened to the workers in one company when the Romney/Bain machine "came to town":

The new owner, American Pad & Paper, owned in turn by [Mitt Romney's] Bain Capital, told all 258 union workers they were fired, in a cost-cutting move. Security guards hustled them out of the building. They would be able to reapply for their jobs, at lesser wages and benefits, but not all would be rehired.

According to the cruel language of the right, those workers are "losers." If they need to get unemployment or food stamps they are "parasites" and "freeloaders" who are "asking for handouts." When old, they will need the Social Security and Medicare they paid into all their lives, more "handouts." People like Romney says these "entitlements" -- the things we are entitled to as citizens in a democracy -- are "draining the economy."

Mitt Romney says government is the culprit, not people like him who show up and strip our jobs, factories, companies, industries and economy. Romney, who pays very little in taxes on the $20-plus million he receives in "capital gains" every year, wrote in a December USA Today op-ed titled, What kind of society does America want? that the very existence of government itself costs the economy jobs, writing, "With the growth of government has come an inevitable contraction of the private sphere." Romney writes that programs like Social Security and Medicare are examples of "government dependency." And, finally, he writes, "Government dependency can only foster passivity and sloth."

Right. Mitt Romney, producer -- who receives $20-plus million a year for not working -- as contrasted with the "losers" who work two jobs at minimum wage, making so little they need food stamps just to get by. (They used to make more, but Mitt Romney came to town, buying the company they worked for, chopping it up and sending the parts they don't sell to China, laying them off or cutting their wages in half, and taking their health care and pension.)

The Dependency Index

The conservative Heritage Foundation has published an "Index of Dependence on Government," saying we have "unsustainable increases in dependent populations." Heritage writes that, "Americans are haunted by the specter of enormously growing mountains of debt that suck the economic and social vitality out of this country."

Heritage fails to mention that we were paying off the nation's debt before Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy. In fact, at the rate we were paying off the debt when Clinton was President the entire US debt would have been paid off by now. Except for those tax cuts for the wealthy. But according to Heritage, the problem is not wealthy people paying very low taxes, it is humans who have human needs who are a "a potentially ruinous drain on federal finances."

Please take a look at Heritage's "dependency index." Social Security is "government dependence." Medicare is "government dependence." And on and on. Heritage says nothing about the huge, bloated, corrupt, enormous, massive, ginormous military budget -- that doubled under Bush. Heritage says nothing about the incredible subsidies government provides to oil and coal companies. Heritage says nothing about the cost of all of the tax cuts handed out to the wealthiest since the Reagan era. Nothing at all.

Heritage says that We, the People doing things for each other "encourages dependence." They talk about people as if they are squirrels. Like building the interstate highway system encourages dependence or having good public schools encourages dependence or a pension after a life of hard work encourages dependence or public health programs that keep epidemics from spreading encourages dependence or giving vaccines to children encourages dependence or, I guess, in the old days helping a neighbor put up a barn encouraged dependence.

It is the Romneys, getting their $20-million-plus checks for doing nothing -- the "gains" from stripping our economy and sending our jobs to China -- who are dependent. Not the people that the Romneys threw out of work or cut their pay in half. Not the people working two jobs yet not making enough to pay rent and get enough to eat. The real "producers" in our economy are the 99%, the people who work, not the1%er "parasites" who use their wealth and power and connections to game the system and reap vast "gains."

Conservative Message Machine In The Service Of Big Oil

Dave Johnson — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 14:13:21 -0500

See if you can spot the common theme in the latest the conservative message machine pumped out today and in the last few days.

Heritage Foundation: Obama Keeps Turning His Back on Jobs:

This week, President Obama is again set to make a pitch for his latest plan to stimulate the economy, but meanwhile he is turning his back on projects that would put tens or even hundreds of thousands Americans to work. And he’s doing it all to appease his left-wing, environmentalist base at the expense of domestic energy production.

An editorial in the Examiner: Don't let Big Green stymie boom in energy jobs,

Thanks to the new technologies, additional vast untapped energy resources in Texas, Alaska and off-shore could make America energy independent in the 21st century, allowing U.S. policymakers to tell Orgazniation for Petroleum Exporting Countries nations to go pound sand. But Big Green environmentalists - and their political allies in the White House and Congress -- are determined to keep the country from enjoying this boom.

And the Examiner just the other day, Obama's EPA is killing the economy with costly rules

Under President Obama's hand-picked administrator, Lisa Jackson, EPA is hog-tying the economy with dozens of proposed major new rules. One of them, which is aimed at coal-fired power plants that generate electricity, will add at least $18 billion in compliance costs by 2020. As Kathleen White of the Texas Public Policy Center told the House Energy and Commerce Committee earlier this year, "never in its 40-year history has EPA promulgated -- at the same time -- so many costly new regulatory dictates. The rules on track to go into effect in the next three years could cost more than $1 trillion and result in hundreds of thousands of jobs lost."

It's not just the raft of new rules that is killing economic growth, however. Jackson and her EPA minions have been purposefully slow-walking the agency's already hideously complex process for approving permits in a crucial sector of the energy industry.

Wall Street Journal -- note, Fox News, the Wall Street Journal and other Murdoch outlets are co-owned by a Saudi oil billionaire: The Non-Green Jobs Boom,

So President Obama was right all along. Domestic energy production really is a path to prosperity and new job creation. His mistake was predicting that those new jobs would be "green," when the real employment boom is taking place in oil and gas.

... The ironies here are richer than the shale deposits in North Dakota's Bakken formation. While Washington has tried to force-feed renewable energy with tens of billions in special subsidies, oil and gas production has boomed thanks to private investment. And while renewable technology breakthroughs never seem to arrive, horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing have revolutionized oil and gas extraction—with no Energy Department loan guarantees needed.

Townhall: Dump the EPA,

Like a bad lover, the EPA is a nagging, beguiling mooch. The EPA unconstitutionally barged into our lives and we need to break free from this destructive relationship; let’s give the EPA a two-letter title beginning with ‘E’ and ending with ‘X.’

... The EPA’s regulations are so burdensome, sweeping and impractical that it’s nearly impossible for energy companies to comply without going out of business. Hence, businesspeople in the energy industry increasingly find themselves facing enormous fines and even criminal allegations.

... Today, tens of thousands of oil jobs (and therefore the public health) are in jeopardy because President Obama is citing faulty EPA data on greenhouse emissions to delay building the Keystone XL pipeline.

Townhall: Obama Gets Money Bonanza by Killing Energy Jobs

A coordinated oil industry campaign can have a long reach...

LA Times: Democrats need to get real about US energy policy,

Today's Democratic leadership has reached a nadir in rational energy policymaking. In the last several years, congressional party leaders have squandered opportunities for a nuclear waste management storage program and have shown opposition to shale gas production. This month, the party reached a new low: The Obama administration's delay of the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada, in spite of its promise of an additional 750,000 barrels of oil per day and the thousands of new jobs it would create, was an inexcusable political decision unbecoming of a pragmatic leader.

Sacramento Bee, Obama Again Fails Energy Independence for America

The anti-Chevy Volt theme is a little less direct, but is obviously in support of an oil agenda:

Townhall: Chevy Volt Batteries Catching on Fire

Drudge Report: Gov't Motors offering loaner cars to worried Chevy Volt owners...

Powerline: MORE GREEN ENERGY FAIL.

So, we learned in recent days that Chevy Volt batteries can catch fire in accidents. Welcome to the Pinto of our time. Oh goody: another product liability suit in the making.

Meanwhile, Google has quietly abandoned an alternative energy program that it launched with great fanfare just two years ago.

Hot Air: The untold jobs boom: Non-green edition,

But no… the boom in jobs and opportunity isn’t coming from “green.” It’s being found in “brown” – the same old reliable energy sources we’ve been dealing in for decades. Yep.. oil land natural gas.

... And yet, as the WSJ editors note, Washington somehow seems to continue pursuing policies which inhibit growth in these areas while flushing more taxpayer dollars we don’t have into technologies which routinely fail to bear economically viable fruit.

These are just from today and a few from the weekend. If you look around you'll see many, many similar articles and posts. If you look over the last week you'll see hundreds. If you look at the month you'll see thousands.

These can't all come from oil money - can they?

Conservative Tax Tricks – Are We "Broke?"

Dave Johnson — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 15:26:07 -0400

Conservatives have been saying lately, "We're broke," and need to cut back on the things we (government) do to protect and empower each other. They have a unique definition of the word "we" when applied this way to Americans. For them "we" doesn't mean "We, the People," it means something different.

In the last few decades conservatives cut taxes on the rich. And then they cut taxes on the rich. And then they cut taxes on the rich. And then they did it even more. Finally, after cutting, cutting and cutting taxes on the rich they complain that there isn't any money to run our government!

Speaker of the House John Boehner, Jan. 26: "Well, if you really want to talk about what the 'Sputnik moment' is," he replied, "it's the fact that we're broke. And American people know we're broke." Again on Feb. 10: "We're broke. Let's be honest with ourselves."

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker says Wisconsin is "broke," too. (Therefore they have to get rid of unions???)

Conservatives even extend their nonsense to claim California is "broke" because it taxes the rich!

Are We Broke?

If the definition of "we" is "we" then we certainly aren't "broke." In fact just 400 of us have more money than half of the rest of us -- 155 million people. Just 400 people have that much! That's a whole lot of "not broke" right there.

Last year the top 25 hedge fund managers -- just 25 people -- had income of $22 billion. Those 25 people had more income than all the people in 440,000 average American families combined. (Median household incomeaccording to the Census Bureau in 2008 was $52,029.) That's a whole lot of "not broke" right there, too.

And these are just two examples of how extreme the income inequality in our country has gotten. A few at the top have so much at the expense of the rest of us.

Where Did The Money Go?

Those 25 hedge fund managers have been granted a special tax rate of only 15%. Those 400 wealthy people who own more than half of the rest of us get much of their income from "capital gains," dividends and other special low-tax gimmicks. The top few percent of Americans have been getting tax breaks since Reagan, and the result is that the rest of us have to make up the difference. We're not "broke," we're paying for the gains at the top.

Joshua Holland, Tax Day Question: Who's Paying What?,

The federal income tax bill for a person making $15,000 is 51 percent higher today than it was 30 years ago -- a big jump.

... If you make $100,000, you'd be paying 33 percent less today than in 1981.

Someone making a really good living that brought in $250,000 would pay 47 percent less – that person's federal income tax bill dropped from $126,953 in 1981 to $67,398 today.

It hasn't just been income-tax cuts, either. The businesses owned by the top few percent have also been getting the breaks. Joshua Holland again, in How Big Business Gets a Free Ride by Lobbying to Raise Your Taxes, explains,

Well, consider this: in the 1940s, corporations paid 43 percent of all the federal income taxes collected in this country. In the 1950s, they picked up the tab for 39 percent. But by the time the 1990s rolled around, corporations were paying just 18.9 percent of federal income taxes, and they forked over the same figure in the first decade of this century. We – working people – paid the difference.

So what we are seeing it that the income at the top is rising:

While the taxes at the top are falling:

And the taxes paid by the corporations is also falling:

How Did It Happen?

Since the early 80s our economy has been restructuring itself in ways that send almost all of the gains to a few at the top. "Free trade" pitted our workers against exploited workers in a race to the bottom. Deregulation removed consumer and other protections, allowing corporations to become predatory and monopolistic. Meanwhile the tax system has been restructured to send the tax collections downward. One of the biggest tax shifts was increasing the Social Security payroll tax on those at the bottom and middle – money that was supposed to be set aside for their retirement -- and using that money to fund tax cuts for those above. And now they claim all that money people were putting away is gone so we need to cut their retirement by moving the retirement age out. In addition the corporations are paying a lower share of the taxes as well.

America Is Not Broke

Simple answer to a simple question: America is not broke, we are richer than ever. But the "We" that make up We, the People are not sharing in the gains, while the "we" that make up the wealthy few are not sharing ... anything. The tax cuts have stolen from us our ability to maintain our infrastructure, education our people, maintain our competitiveness in the world and take care of each other.

As Michael Moore said in Wisconsin,

"America is not broke, not by a long shot. The country is awash in wealth and cash. It's just that it's not in your hands. It has been transferred, in the greatest heist in history, from the workers and consumers to the banks and the portfolios of the uber-rich."

Here's Cenk on this:

Highway Robbery and the Progressive Future

Zach Carter — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 09:27:33 -0500

Kevin Drum gives a pretty thorough analysis of President Obama’s open assault on the mainstream Democratic Party at yesterday’s press conference, and declares that “programmatic liberalism is dead.” I think that’s more than a little exaggerated, but regardless, it’s not a fair description of the policies at stake in Obama’s lousy tax deal. The tax deal is fundamentally about whether the United States still believes it has a basic commitment to protect its most vulnerable citizens from harm. For so basic an intuition to be the subject of political negotiation should be abhorrent to anybody of any ideological stripe in today’s United States. The deal is not a signal of strength or weakness on the left or the right, it is a symbol of rank political cynicism.

Protecting the most vulnerable members of society is not a liberal idea. It is the basic moral intuition of every philosophical and religious tradition but two: cruel interpretations of Friederich Nietzsche, and a brand of libertarianism far more radical than anything in contemporary American politics. Republicans were threatening to cut off unemployment benefits and a poverty tax credit for families with children. Let me emphasize: poverty relief for children.

These policies should never, ever be the subject of political negotiation. Obama could have raised a fuss, he could have publicly shamed his adversaries for threatening a basic moral building block of a decent society. Instead, he offered absurd giveaways to the rich that have not only been the ire of “the professional left,” but of the mainstream Democratic Party for almost a decade. Nearly every Democrat in Congress is now wondering if a primary challenge will be the result of support for this deal. And Obama now has the gall to chastise “the left” for being outraged.

A decent society takes care of its poor. Committing to conservative political thinking does not require one to believe that the poor should suffer for no reason. The number of poor families in the United States has gone up dramatically during the worst recession since the Great Depression, just as the number of unemployed parents has skyrocketed. These problems are caused by major structural economic problems, not by laziness or recklessness on the part of families (and even if it were only the result of laziness or recklessness, a decent society would not take that out on the children of the lazy and reckless). Amid mass poverty, any policymaker should support poverty relief.

This is a moral intuition even more fundamental than the commitment to equality of opportunity—the root belief that a decent society does not let its members endure extreme suffering needlessly. It is not egalitarian, it is not Marxist, it is not socialist, it is not liberal. It is just something a decent society does. It can be described with economic language, but it is not fundamentally an economic problem, unless short-term poverty relief somehow results in total economic calamity. Needless to say, the United States faces no such crisis from aiding its poor.

But Obama did not make this case. He didn’t even try. He entered a room with Republican leaders, and returned to declare they had been given everything they wanted.

Shortly before the deal was announced, Gretchen Morgenson and Louise Story of The New York Times ran a numbers on how the Bush tax cuts affect Wall Street bonuses. For every $1 million in bonus payouts, they calculated, the Bush tax cuts allow Wall Streeters keep an additional $40,000 to $50,000 in income.

The price Republicans demanded for allowing the United States to participate in the basic moral foundation of every decent society the world over was $40,000 for every $1 million in Wall Street bonuses. That should be appalling to liberals and conservatives alike, and a President who does not go to the mat to shame his opponents under such circumstances is bound to lose respect among his followers.

Via a link to a prior post, Kevin defines “programmatic liberalism” as the Progressive Era of 1911 – 1919, the New Deal of the 1930s, and the 1960s. All of these involved significant restructurings of the United States government and its institutions. This is not the sort of thing under discussion in the tax debate. Not even close.

“Should the poor be sustained?” Is a much different question than, “Is it the proper jurisdiction of government to regulate X given recent events?” All kinds of ideological issues can play into regulatory questions. But for quite literally centuries, there has been a broad moral consensus about the right of the poor to live (this glosses over racism and sexism, of course). The “professional left” is not demanding new institutions or government functions. It’s demanding that our society actually be a society.

And so Obama’s assault on what he called “purist” and “sanctimonious” left cannot be viewed as anything but outrageous. MoveOn and DailyKos and FireDogLake are not actually demanding leftist positions on tax policy—their opponents are threatening outright brutality, and the President of the United States is not seriously challenging those threats. Obama’s willingness to capitulate does reveal the man’s fundamental human compassion—but it also portends serious dangers. The next major negotiation, as Matt Yglesias and Mike Konczal have emphasized, will be over raising the federal debt ceiling. If it is not raised, the United States will have no choice but to default on its debt, and the global economy will collapse. If Obama is willing to throw up the Bush tax cuts to preserve the basic moral foundation of society, then he will certainly offer anything to prevent mere economic Armageddon. With this deal, the President has signaled that whenever a difficult choice arrives, he will roll over.

Here’s a leftist tax position: restore tax rates on millionaires to Johnson-era levels of 90 percent, and use that money to guarantee free college education for the children of families earning less than $50,000 a year. Nobody on the “professional left” is demanding that right now. We’re demanding that the basic functioning of society not be ransomed away in the name of bigger bonuses, and that negotiations over economic and tax policy not allow the most vulnerable members of society to be used as bargaining chips.

So perhaps this is what Kevin means. Now that a Democratic president is willing to cave on negotiations about the moral foundation of society, liberals cannot hope for serious economic progress for several decades. I see things otherwise. Two years ago, pundits were forecasting the end of conservatism as it has been practiced for 30 years. “Liberal” thought is not dead. Our president is simply ineffective.

Conservative Policy = Bad Jobs Report

Dave Johnson — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 12:51:37 -0400

The September jobs report is out and conservatives got exactly what they wanted: less government, less stimulus, less aid to states, less help for small businesses, less infrastructure investment, less help for the unemployed and ... a bad jobs report. Conservatives successfully watered down the first stimulus, defeated further stimulus, fought aid to state governments, fought unemployment benefits, defeated help for small businesses, etc., etc. Here are the results, just in time for the election.

NY Times, Employment Picture Dims as Government Cuts Back:

... over all, the economy shed 95,000 nonfarm jobs in September, the result of a 159,000 decline in government jobs at all levels. Local governments in particular cut jobs at the fastest rate in almost 30 years.

“We need to wake up to the fact that the end of the stimulus has really hit hard on local governments,” said Andrew Stettner, deputy director of the National Employment Law Project.

Conclusion: conservative policies kill jobs. They got what they wanted, and most of all they wanted bad job news, right now. Now, some if this was strategic, using obstruction to intentionally cause a bad jobs report in time for the election in order to turn voters against the governing party. But this jobs report clearly demonstrates what the results will be if conservatives get what they want: less government = fewer jobs. Less state government = fewer jobs. Less stimulus = fewer jobs. Fewer jobs = more people fighting for what jobs there are = lower wages. Lower wages = more stress on workers = angry electorate. Angry electorate = people divided, set against each other, not thinking long term, not thinking about the greater good, not seeing the bigger picture = conservative paradise.

Less government: Government payrolls shrank by 159,000.

Less help for the states: Local governments reduced payrolls by 76,000, 50,000 of those in education.

Less stimulus: The stimulus obviously turned things around, halting the freefall of job losses, but is running out. The chart below shows this Conservative have blocked more stimulus. Keep in mind, conservatives want to go back to the policies of the left side of this chart, the part that is in red. They want to stop government from stimulating demand in the economy.

Lower labor costs for businesses: "Flat hourly wages, now at $22.67, also threaten what fragile confidence American families may have in their household budgets."

Less help for the unemployed: Conservatives say helping the unemployed makes people lazy. They follow a dehumanizing "If you feed them they will breed" philosophy. There are nearly 15 million unemployed, 42% of them out of work longer than half a year. At the end of November help for those unemployed more than 26 weeks runs out.

Desperate workers: "In September, the typical unemployed worker had been searching for a job for 33.3 weeks."

Chad Stone, Chief Economist at the Economic Policy Institute, on the jobs report,

Today’s jobs report shows that the economy still faces a long and difficult climb out of the jobs hole created by the recent recession. The private sector has created, on average, fewer than 100,000 jobs a month this year — not enough to keep up with population growth and not nearly enough to reduce the unemployment rate. Worse, the pace of job creation is slowing as the economy slows, with only 64,000 private-sector jobs created in September.

Speaker Pelosi,

Today’s jobs report shows our private sector continues to lead our economic recovery. We lost more than 800,000 private sector jobs the last month of the Bush Administration, but America’s business owners and entrepreneurs have added more jobs this year than the Bush Administration and its Republican allies did in eight years. Democrats are moving our country forward, and we will and we must do more to strengthen our economy and put people back to work.

The American people face a clear choice: Democrats fighting for the middle class or Republicans standing up for special interests. They know Democrats want to ‘Make It in America,’ cut taxes for small business, and create good-paying jobs here at home. Republicans want to protect Wall Street and corporations that ship jobs overseas. Democrats want to cut taxes for the middle class, and Republicans want to give a break to millionaires and billionaires, and blow an even larger hole in our deficit. Democrats will preserve Social Security and Medicare; Republicans promise to privatize and cut benefits.

Americans can’t afford a return to the ‘exact same’ failed policies that produced the worst recession in generations. We will keep moving forward to create more jobs, growth, and prosperity for our workers and our families.

The "underemployed" - people who can only find part-time jobs, or have had hours cut, is up to 17.1%. See this chart:

And, finally, here is Calculated Risk's "scariest jobs chart," updated:

Third World America: Reagan Revolution Drags Us Down

Dave Johnson — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 11:51:56 -0400

The recession ended in June, 2009? What? Seriously? No one told the millions of unemployed. And last week we got more bad news: 44 million of us living in poverty, and that was last year, before unemployment and COBRA subsidies started running out for the unemployed,

... four million additional Americans found themselves in poverty in 2009, with the total reaching 44 million, or one in seven residents. Millions more were surviving only because of expanded unemployment insurance and other assistance.

We are living in the Reagan Revolution every day. Conservative policies are making us poor and poorer,

Who counts and who doesn't count? We hear so much about the "middle class" but rarely about the plight of the poor. And of course we hear again and again that the wealthy are "successful" and the "job-creators" who shouldn't be "punished" by being asked to give something back to the country that enabled their wealth. Conservative "market" thinking and Ayn Randian "the poor are losers" dehumanizing ideology has become pervasive and dominant as we transition from one-person-one-vote democracy to one-dollar-one-vote plutocracy. In this plutocratic environment the national discussion of tax cuts for the wealthy saturates the corporate media, while the 44 million of us in poverty now are barely mentioned and count for little.

Arianna Huffington's new book, Third World America, documents what is happening to us. RJ Eskow explains,

Third World America is direct and clear in its message: Decades of aggressive corporate lobbying, driven by bankers and other large corporations, have led to a series of policy decisions that are eroding the American standard of living. The details are all there: The financial industry's gone from 2.5% of our GDP in 1947 to 8.3% right before the meltdown. Financial profits went from a maximum of 16% between 1973 and 1985 to 41% right before the crisis hit. And rather than being chastened by their failure, or disciplined by taxpayers in return for being bailed out, bankers have embraced their old ways with enthusiasm. Meanwhile the American households that rescued them lost $13 trillion in wealth between mid-2007 and March 2009.

Last week more than 300 economists issued a dire warning that the current conservative "austerity" approach to the economy is dangerous. Focus on jobs now they say,

More than 300 economists, policy experts and civic leaders have signed a statement warning political leaders of “a grave danger” that the still-fragile economic recovery will be undercut by austerity economics of the kind being pushed by conservative politicians and by the White House deficit commission. Read the statement and more at dontkilljobs.org.

Meanwhile, all over the blogs this weekend was the story of the whiny rich, complaining that they "only" make a few hundred thousand a year. Why are they whining?

The reason is that the income inequality has become so extreme that even the really rich see people above them who make VASTLY more than they do, so they feel like they aren't making hardly anything at all. They don't look down, they look up, and they see people making millions, hundreds of millions, even billions in a single year.

One more nasty outcome of the Reagan Revolution: even the really rich feel poor compared to the really, really rich who are the primary beneficiaries from conservative policies.

What can you do? There is a One Nation Working Together rally in DC on October 2. PLEASE click this link and find out what you can do to help, even if yo can't make it to DC. There are local events across the country.

And remember, the election is coming up. We need to remind people that it was conservative policies that got us into this mess. It was conservatives who bailed out the banks. It was conservatives who ran up the massive debt. It was conservatives who killed the jobs.

Other posts in the Reagan Revolution Home To Roost series:

To Lift The Economy, Lift Wages
Tax Cuts Are Theft
Reagan Revolution Home To Roost -- In Charts
Reagan Revolution Home To Roost: America Drowning In Debt
Reagan Revolution Home To Roost: America Is Crumbling
Finance, Mine, Oil & Debt Disasters: THIS Is Deregulation

See the Reagan Revolution Home To Roost series.

Unpaved: Out-Of-Cash America Undoing Its Infrastructure

Dave Johnson — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 01:35:34 -0400

In case you missed Rachel Maddow last night, she had a segment on American cities and counties actually undoing their infrastructure because they are out of money. She listed city after city across the country that is shutting off its streetlights, turning paved roads into gravel, shutting down bus systems, shutting down schools, firing police, and other steps to save money.

To me, the most striking comment was, "Somewhere in China it is entirely possible that a businessperson sat down for a ride on a 200mph state-of-the-art levitating bullet train, and cracked open the Wall Street Journal, and read about how in American we've decided we can't afford paved roads anymore."

Is that how we want the rest of the world to think of us? Do we really want to become a broken-down, corrupt, uncompetitive 3rd-world country? Well, that is where we are going. We can see the infrastructure crumbling around us.

Meanwhile, as the country falls further and further behind the rest of the world the government is unable to function. In Washington the conservative Senate minority continues to use the filibuster -- over 110 times since President Obama took office -- to block every effort to do anything about our problems. They block helping states keep teachers. They block helping the unemployed. They block job-creation efforts. They block everything government does for We, the People.

And at the same time as they resist spending to help the country, publicly pleading that the deficit and debt are too high, the conservatives also resist doing the things that will fix the problem: raise tax rates on the wealthy, and cut the huge, massive, bloated, more than $1 trillion per year military and military-related budget.

They think a worsening economy with no solutions will demoralize enough voters that they can turn out their "base' and win in November. Destroy the economy and the country to get votes. Great. You'll make marvelous leaders -- oh wait, been there, that's how we got into this mess.

Yes, we know how we got here. Everyone this knows that the deficits and debt come from tax cuts for the wealthy, and huge increases in military spending. AConservatives know. They said their plan was to cut taxes and thereby "starve the beast" as a way to cut government. Their reason to cut government is to make way for the only available alternative: so that the large corporations and the wealthy can rule instead. Cutting government means cutting the controls and protections that We, the People have been able to build up over the years, ensuring that we get a slice of the pie. This has been going on for thousands, even ten thousand years, as the broad masses of regular people work to assert their rights over whatever wealthy and powerful group has seized the reigns of power and is trying to grab everything for themselves as fast as they can.

Look where this cynical strategy is taking the whole country! We are not only not maintaining and modernizing our infrastructure, we are falling into 3rd-world status. This can't even help the wealthy and the big corporations they control. The conservatives still have to live here even if this scheme does bring them control. They will still have to live with fewer police, fewer teachers, fewer streetlights, unpaved roads, crumbling factories, and an ever-less-competitive economy.

Will it be worth it?

Make Them Work - Citizens As "The Help"

Dave Johnson — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 09:52:06 -0400

Conservatives seem to think of America's citizens as "the help."

"Everyone knows Americans are lazy, shiftless, always looking for a way to shirk their responsibilities. People don't want to work so we have to make them work. And good dose of humiliation is good for the soul. If you let them have any dignity they might get uppity." That is what conservatives sound like when they talk about the long-term unemployed -- who, by the way, are out of work because of conservative policies.

For example, from Tuesday's WaPo, No extension of unemployment benefits in sight for the long-term jobless,

"Workers are less likely to look for work, or accept less-than-ideal jobs, as long as they are protected from the full consequences of being unemployed," said Michael D. Tanner, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. "That is not to say that anyone is getting rich off unemployment, or that unemployed people are lazy. But it is simple human nature that people are a little less motivated as long as a check is coming in."

That's right, you have to make them work, or they'll just sit around and wont be "productive." They wont face up to the "consequences" of unemployment. These parasites will just suck the blood out of the producers. You hear language like this all the time from conservatives. The unemployed are "lazy," or "on drugs" etc. They are not "productive." They are mooching off the rest of us.

This is all in sharp contrast to the noble rich, who are an entirely different species biologically and spiritually. They are the "wealth producers" who we must treat with kid gloves and certainly not ask them to pay for their use of infrastructure or government services lest they decide to stop working. They just want to keep working, and what they do is so important, so pure, so necessary to the sustenance of the rest of us that they must be coddled at all times lest we lose their golden-egg magic touch!

Maybe this kind of attitude towards their fellow citizens comes from the slaveholder roots of conservatism. According to Robin L. Einhorn, author of American Taxation, American Slavery,

...Americans are right to think that our antitax and antigovernment attitudes have deep historical roots. Our mistake is to dig for them in Boston. We should be digging in Virginia and South Carolina rather than in Massachusetts or Pennsylvania, because the origins of these attitudes have more to do with the history of American slavery than the history of American freedom. They have more to do with protections for entrenched wealth than with promises of opportunity, and more to do with the demands of privileged elites than with the strivings of the common man. Instead of reflecting a heritage that valued liberty over all other concerns, they are part of the poisonous legacy we have inherited from the slaveholders who forged much of our political tradition. [emphasis added]

As for this idea of low taxes, smaller government that we hear about so often, (and please read this, it is so important)

It might seem strange to trace our antitax and antigovernment ideas to slavery instead of to liberty and democracy. Isn't it obvious that a democratic society where "the people" make the basic political decisions will choose lower taxes and smaller governments? The short answer is no. In this democratic society, the people might decide to pool their resources to buy good roads, excellent schools, convenient courthouses, and an effective military establishment. But slaveholders had different priorities than other people—and special reasons to be afraid of taxes. Slaveholders had little need for transportation improvements (since their land was often already on good transportation links such as rivers) and hardly any interest in an educated workforce (it was illegal to teach slaves to read and write because slaveholders thought education would help African Americans seize their freedom). Slaveholders wanted the military, not least to promote the westward expansion of slavery, and they also wanted local police forces ("slave patrols") to protect them against rebellious slaves. They wanted all manner of government action to protect slavery, while they tended to dismiss everything else as wasteful government spending.

Compromises with the slave states became entrenched in our political system with consequences to this day,

Majorities voluntarily renounced the right to regulate their society by majority rule. Giving up the essence of democratic self-government, they celebrated the outcome as democracy. The consequences would outlive the slaveholders who played such a large role in establishing this attitude toward government and taxation. Long after slavery was gone, a regime forged around preferential treatment for the slaveholding elite came to favor very different elites—commercial and industrial elites who shared little with their slaveholding predecessors except a demand that majorities renounce their right to govern what ostensibly was a democratic society.

. . . Today, this brand of politics looks eerily familiar. We have experience with political parties that attack "elites" in order to rally voters behind policies that benefit elites. This is what the slaveholders did in early American history, and they did it very well. Expansions of slavery became expansions of "liberty," constitutional limitations on democratic self-government became defenses of "equal rights," and the power of slaveholding elites became the power of the "common man." In the topsy-turvy political world we have inherited from the age of slavery, the power of the majority to decide how to tax became the power of an alien "government" to oppress "the people."

Please go read it all.

It is time to take a fresh look at what it means to be a citizen in a country where We, the People are supposed to be in charge. This idea that we should force people into demeaning jobs with no minimum wage and make them work seems antithetical to democracy. A government of We, the People should be about taking care of each other, protecting and empowering each other and respecting each other. You are supposed to be the boss of you here. And we are supposed to be in charge.

If You Feed Them They Breed -- And Other Dehumanizing Conservative Idiocy We Should Ignore

Dave Johnson — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 14:38:23 -0400

The country is in an economic emergency. Unemployment -- especially long-term unemployment -- is at extremely high levels and the recovery is faltering. Conservatives are obstructing efforts to solve this because they believe it helps them in the November election. To this end conservatives are throwing out every possible argument against helping the economy to see if any of them stick, and to provide cover for opposing taking any action that might help matters.

The latest nonsense they are spreading is that helping the unemployed keeps them from finding jobs. Good Lord! This is basically the old "if you feed them they just breed" storyline. They say "it makes them dependent" as if hard-working people laid off because of Wall Street's scams are squirrels. Or, to hear the nasty way conservatives talk about these human beings, they are like rats. "Hobos," one Congressman called the unemployed! And the DC elite listen, chuckle and repeat.

But while they say unemployment assistance keeps these lazy parasites from finding jobs, they also obstruct bills that create jobs by maintaining and modernizing our infrastructure. This tells you it's just something they say, to cover for what they do. And what they do is obstruct any effort to fix the problem because they believe they will benefit if it is not fixed.

For example, the big DC drumbeat right now is against "spending." They claim that government spending caused the crisis, ignoring and passing the buck on everything that actually caused it, especially their deregulation and their lack of oversight. They blame government for everything, so why should this be different.

Along these lines they claim that the stimulus didn't work, or even that spending made the problem worse, because there are still people out of work. But look at the following chart. The right side of the chart shows the effect of the stimulus. (Source, Jed Lewison and Karina Newton)

A conservative, anti-government myth that is everywhere now is that "Government forced banks to give loans to people who couldn't pay them back, and this caused the financial collapse" -- and its variant that it was about forcing banks to "help minorities. This is an example of the tactic of repeating a lie over and over until enough people believe it. To deflect people from understanding what really caused the crisis and from seeing that they are obstructing the effort to reform the financial system they made this one up" Unfortunately this has become what bloggers call a "zombie lie" -- no matter how many times you prove it is just a lie, it comes back from the dead.

The Zombie Lie Problem

The "zombie lie" problem shows that it is a mistake to think that just arguing facts is a way to shoot this stuff down. Spending your time arguing facts with people who are trying to mislead misses the point. The lie is not about the facts, it is cover for the obstruction. When you try to argue a fact they will make up something else to throw you off track. Facts are not what this is about, feeding a narrative of no action is what this is about, because they understand that a bad economy helps them in the Fall.

Listening to this stuff at all, and trying to argue facts just contributes to the lack of action. There comes a point when you have to stop llsteneing and getting bogged down by intentional distractions and get something done for the economy and the public.

It Is Time To Stop Listening To This Stuff And ACT

Enough with these stupid, heartless, dehumanizing right wing "if you feed them they breed" arguments that are preventing action. People are out of work and the recovery is faltering. It is time to push aside the nay-sayers, and get something done. The government simply has to step in and act. First, do the minimal, obvious things:

1) Pass the unemployment extension, because people can't find jobs.

2) Continue COBRA subsidies, because so many of the long-term unemployed are older people who cannot get or afford insurance any other way. This is simple humanity, people! And, by the way, COBRA itself is running out for many people, never mind subsidies.

3) Send aid to the states. 900,000 jobs in the states are riding on this help.

At a minimum do this. Don't get lost in the weeds of what bill to attach it to. Just do it. Bring it out by itself for an up or down vote so the public can clearly see who is helping and who is voting against jobs and help for the unemployed.

But what Congress really ought to be doing is passing the George Miller "Local Jobs for America Act." .

As economists like Paul Krugman keep saying we risk going into a serious depression. At the least we are entering a pattern of slight recovery, slight decline for a decade. Look at what happened to Ireland when they tried "austerity."

Here is an undeniable fact about government spending. Government spending on infrastructure creates the conditions that enable businesses to prosper. Tax cuts leave nothing behind, but the roads, transit systems, ports, electric grid, Internet, courts, schools, universities, research, and all the rest that government spending creates make us competitive and are needed by businesses

Do it. Ignore the obstructors who are trying to set the stage for November. Put people to work. Help the long-term unemployed. Pass jobs bills.. And spend on modernizing our infrastructure so American can be competitive again.

Drill Baby Drill Judge Pits Mega-Corporations Against The Rest Of Us

Dave Johnson — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 10:49:10 -0400

American deregulated corporatism: Short-term profits for a very few at the expense of the rest of us. The Gulf oil spill is driving home the "expense of the rest of us" part of this equation. And the corporatist/conservative reaction to government's efforts to reign in an industry that provides so much of their funding highlights for us the battle lines of the equation.

Conservatives say that getting a company to set up a fund to compensate its victims is "Chicago-style thuggery" and a "shakedown" and apologize to the company! Instead we demand they apologize to democracy for this.

But this is not really about "corporatism" it is about raw bigness translating into raw power. This is big industries and companies and a few extremely wealthy people that "have" vs not-as-big industries, companies and the rest of us that "have not." Big, centralized oil is a "have." Fishing, tourism, alternative "green" energy - these are industries and corporations too -- and democratic decision-making are "have nots." This is not corporations vs democracy, this is big corporations (really, the wealthy few people who control their resources) against smaller corporations and the rest of us.

Yesterday a Reagan-appointed, oil-stock-owning judge set aside the Obama administration's moratorium on exploratory offshore oil drilling, citing "potential economic harm to businesses and workers" in the oil industry while ignoring the not-potential threat of harm to the fishing, tourism and other industries now being destroyed by that industry. Big oil's wishes, a judge appointed by the guy who took Carter's solar panels down from the White House roof and dismantled mass-transit and alternative energy programs, and an anti-government conservative movement out to dismantle democracy combine to push back against the "thuggery" of a public daring to attempt to assert that safety is assured. The battle is over who is in charge.

The administration placed the moratorium while they develop new safety standards and procedures. This followed the revelations of near-complete regulatory capture of the Minerals Management Service by the oil industry, resulting in the chain of safety-ignoring, cost-saving diversions from standard procedure. They filed a xeroxed spill plan citing dead phone numbers and dead consultants, and the dead regulatory agency never bothered to read it before approving it. The blowout preventer wasn't working and they knew it but didn't want to take the time or expense to fix it. Etc, and etc.

Since so much was wrong on this rig the government wants to take a look at the other rigs drilling offshore and make sure they are operating safely, and get procedures that work in place. The industry is infuriated that government is "interfering' in their profit-making enterprise. Their oil is under our water and they want it now.

The industry threatens to just move oil rigs out of the Gulf to other areas, taking the jobs with them. Democratic oversight of corporate behavior is again held hostage to the threat of moving jobs across a border. The judge lets them get away with it.

This is the fight. The big and wealthy industries, corporations and people against the smaller industries, corporations and the rest of us. This is the same fight as that unleashed by the recent Citizens United case. It is not corporations vs democracy, it is the the wealthy few people who control the resources of the biggest corporations against everyone else.

And it is in no way clear who will come out on top.