Unemployment, Poverty, Police Violence, Iran… What Does Obama Think We Need In Response?

Answer: a corporate tax cut. No, really. As Robert Reich explains,

The Obama administration is proposing to lower corporate taxes from the current 35 percent to 28 percent for most companies and to 25 percent for manufacturers.

The move is supposed to be “revenue neutral” – meaning the Administration is also proposing to close assorted corporate tax loopholes to offset the lost revenues. One such loophole allows corporations to park their earnings overseas where taxes are lower.

…

Oh, right. And what happens if Congress, in response to his proposal, gives us a corporate tax cut WITHOUT closing any loopholes, as Republicans have already indicated they intend to do?

Read Reich’s post to learn more about Obama’s unforgivable utter stupidity. Where was Obama when they passed out brains?

Greece and Greeks: Financially More Virtuous Than Most Of Europe

This paragraph from an article by James Meadway of Counterfire (H/T Enfant in comments upstream) needs to be read by everyone in the US and the UK, and especially by everyone in Germany:

… The deal [between the EU/ECB/IMF Troika and Greece] is the latest in the long line of brutal calamities inflicted on Greece. Not that much of the reporting here in the UK would tell you this. For months, the lie has been peddled that Greeks are lazy, spendthrift, and have brought the crisis on themselves. This is xenophobic garbage. Greeks work the longest hours in Europe – half as much again, every year, as the Germans. They retire, on average, later than Germans. The Greek government spends less than the EU average, as a share of GDP.

I have spent this week reading an historical detective novel by Paul Quinn called The Hour of the Cat, set mostly in the period between the two World Wars, in New York and Berlin. A subject that comes up several times in the novel is the plethora of volumes of “scientific” racism published in Germany prior to that period, especially “scientific” bigotry against Jews, of course, but by no means limited to Jews… other Europeans are also often cast as inferior to Germans. These tomes, which exist in real life, may be an earlier manifestation of the very xenophobia Meadway mentions. Today that xenophobia is directed against Greece and Greeks. But it is as ugly as ever, and like all xenophobia, is simply not based in fact.

UPDATE: the damage done is more than merely economic. From the same article:

Elections are scheduled for April. The three main parties of the far left, all of them opposed to the Troika, are polling over 40 per cent. In these circumstances, whether elections will occur is increasingly moot. Wolfgang Schäuble, the German finance minister, has already hinted at their suspension. Most likely they will proceed, with the centre parties’ agreement to observe Troika demands.

Great. Gun pointed straight at Greece: “your democracy or your life!”

Contraception A First Amendment Issue? Here’s How Much The GOP Believes In The First Amendment

This is the kind of thing that is so absurd it would make one laugh… if it weren’t so deadly, relentlessly, terrifyingly serious:

House Republicans have refused to televise a Democratic-led hearing on birth control that features the testimony of a female witness the GOP spurned in a recent hearing, says House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). And Pelosi wants you to know it.

…

“In an apparent effort to again silence women on the topic of women’s health,” Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammil said in a statement Tuesday, “the Committee on House Administration, chaired by Dan Lungren, has apparently reversed existing policy and denied a request from the Democratic leadership for the House Recording Studio to cover this event and provide video publicly so all Americans can finally hear Ms. Fluke.”

…

A GOP aide said it has not been the committee’s policy to accept all such requests, noting that it has at times denied both Democratic and Republican efforts to televise hearings. The aide said granting it to some members necessitates granting it to all members, and there aren’t enough resources for that.

But granting it to one major political party but not the other major party is just peachy-keen with them. And permitting dour Catholic priests to speak and denying speech to a young woman student… who, unlike the priests, might actually be affected… is “jes’ doin’ my duty” to Chair-Nazi Issa.

I do sometimes wish I believed in a Hell. Some people really, really deserve to be there, and Issa is one of them. But I don’t. Damn, so to speak!

Romney’s Latest Sin Of Omission

From Evan McMorris-Santoro of TPM:

There are a lot of kind words for Mitt Romney on the Detroit News editorial page Wednesday. But by trying to hide the few words that weren’t very nice, the Romney campaign could lose the narrative — and the goodwill of the paper.

The News endorsed Romney with less than a week to go in the Michigan primary race. … All in all it was a nice editorial for the campaign …. But there was one graph where the paper took strong issue with Romney over the issue of the auto bailout, which has dogged him since the Michigan race began in earnest.

The Romney campaign apparently felt it best to drop that part down the memory hole. …

…

(Follow the link to read the endorsement, or the earlier link to view McMorris-Santoro’s article citing the omitted paragraph.)

This “sin of omission” is neither more nor less dishonest than the lies of other Republican candidates, particularly this year. It is what we have come to expect of the Republican candidates and the Republican base. It is who they are; it is what they do.

That said, I’m damned if I can see how Romney and his campaign thought they were going to get away with this in Michigan. The GOP has already given us one (to put it politely) less-than-bright president in the past decade. If this is typical of Romney’s reasoning skills, he is no better than Dubya.

Steam Planet

TPM’s Carl Franzen:

Using NASA’s famed Hubble Space Telescope, scientists have determined that an alien world located just 40 light years from Earth is unlike anything previously found before: A world composed primarily of steam.

Scientists denied rumors that an intelligent inhabitant of this world has been discovered and named a “steam punk” … [/snark]

(The WordPress post editor has resumed fucking over the internals of the HTML version if you switch from HTML to Visual mode, including, in this case, outright removing a nonbreaking space in a quoted string. I think someone needs to fire their coder before s/he does any more harm…)

Not A Typo

I was reading a post on Dean Baker’s “Beat the Press” blog about … Things Not to Love About the Mortgage Settlement. A few paragraphs in, Baker begins to list the things:

…

1) It is not clear what baseline is being used to determine how much is being paid. The banks are already doing some amount of modifications, principle reductions, and short sales. It is not clear how it will be determined that they are going beyond what they would have done anyhow as a result of the settlement. This means that it will be difficult to determine that the $17 billion in write-downs stipulated in the settlement have actually taken place.

…

(Bolds mine.)

At first I thought it was a typo, specifically, that he really meant principal reductions. Then I remembered: Baker is talking about bankers…

Bill Moyers & Company

How could I have missed the simple fact that the great Bill Moyers has resumed regular broadcasts, programs of interviews, programs containing readings of poetry by the poets who create it and by other poets, a clearer and less hostile but still incisive understanding of American politics, and Dog only knows what other good things!

Videos of whole shows and individual segments are linked from the main page. If your system coughs and sputters on Vimeo videos as badly as mine does, try the podcasts; Moyers and his guests are scarcely diminished by being hidden from view. Here’s a segment (video or audio) that I just listened to, with Kathleen Hall Jamieson on political ads (including a parody ad from flackcheck.org) and the mesmerizing poet Rita Dove, reading works from her new anthology of American poetry, including at least one of her own works. Treat yourself to an informative and moving hour of video or audio!

Phil Harris Novelty Song: ‘The Thing’, 1950

I often take a nap in mid-afternoon before Stella comes home from work. Today I was awakened by Stella’s arrival, only to realize that my mind was singing to me. What was it singing? A novelty song that topped the charts in 1950. I think my parents must have had a 78rpm record of it, because my memory of it was virtually complete, which usually means that at some point in my childhood I attempted to memorize the song. Anyway, here are the lyrics, and below is the song. Enjoy!

‘Foolery, Sir, Doth Walk About The Orb…’

Paul Krugman examines the utter folly of the austerity approach taken by the EC toward the now-admitted shrinking of its nations’ economies. Read his lament in his column Pain Without Gain. In summary, Krugman asserts

For things didn’t have to be this bad. Greece would have been in deep trouble no matter what policy decisions were taken, and the same is true, to a lesser extent, of other nations around Europe’s periphery. But matters were made far worse than necessary by the way Europe’s leaders, and more broadly its policy elite, substituted moralizing for analysis, fantasies for the lessons of history.

I can’t help believing Krugman is right. But I also can’t help seeing through the façade to the bare fact that the Euro-banksters know exactly what they are doing. And there is no assurance, no commitment from leadership, that things won’t continue getting worse, or that that leadership will even try to make them better. David Dayen of FDL offers this observation:

I don’t know how many Eurozone finance meetings have been seen as consequential, but we’ve got another one today, with the Greek bailout as the main topic. Greek leaders hope that the finance ministers will approve the bailout, after they gave final assent to austerity measures. CNBC quotes officials saying the chances are “little higher than 50-50.”

The fundamentals of depression economics have been known for at least seven decades since America and Europe addressed the last great one. What to do is well-known. What not to do is presumably equally well-known. And yet European and American leaders alike, political and financial leaders, are approaching the problem exactly backward to the way that both Keynesian theory and actual experience would indicate. So I can only conclude that the 1% simply don’t give a damn what happens to the 99%, as long as the 1% lead lives of ease and comfort.

All I can say is that they’d better assemble good security armies at their gates. When the social fabric and the social contract begin to fray, so do reasonable expectations of orderly behavior. They want us to sit down and STFU while they hoard for themselves all the goodies we produce? Good luck with that!

CORRECTION: of course it should be not “Foolishness” as I originally misquoted but “Foolery, sir.” It would help if I looked things up even when I’m in a hurry.

Springsteen: ‘What Was Done To My Country Was Un-American’

And the Boss ain’t talkin’ no Tea Party bullshit, neither. Fiachra Gibbons of The Guardian has the particulars about the attitude and passion behind Bruce Springsteen’s album Wrecking Ball, to be released March 5. Here’s Gibbons:

Indeed, it is as angry a cry from the belly of a wounded America as has been heard since the dustbowl and Woody Guthrie, a thundering blow of New Jersey pig iron down on the heads of Wall Street and all who have sold his country down the swanny. Springsteen has gone to the great American canon for ammunition, borrowing from folk, civil war anthems, Irish rebel songs and gospel. The result is a howl of pain and disbelief as visceral as anything he has ever produced, that segues into a search for redemption: “Hold tight to your anger/ And don’t fall to your fears … Bring on your wrecking ball.”

Yep. Bring it on. I can’t wait to hear it. Springsteen’s music is unsubtle, but it has a focus and a passion not to be ignored by any American, or indeed by anyone, anywhere, who has been mistreated, shortchanged, used and thrown away, or trained in some high technology and later forced to clean shithouses just to pay the bills. It’s about damned time The Boss spoke up to the bosses.

H/T Avedon.