A system based almost entirely on fraud

There's another important anniversary at this time of year. Five years ago this week the Banksters crashed our economy, basically by lying and stealing. Their "punishment" cost trillions. Out of our pockets, not theirs.

In summary, the financial industry collectively decided that you could fund economic growth despite stagnant wages through piling on mountains of debt. But when it all went bad, the solution wasn’t to rebalance the economy, to get money into the hands of ordinary workers and preference wages over assets. The solution was to point a fire hose of money at the people who caused the problem, and inflate their assets to preserve the status quo. The Federal Reserve’s emergency lending and then quantitative easing rescued bank balance sheets. The five biggest U.S. banks are now 30 percent bigger than they were at the height of the crisis, nursed back to health by the government. [...]

Worst of all, despite a crisis built on fraud, nobody who perpetrated that fraud saw the inside of a jail cell, removing any meaningful deterrent for financial crimes. Most of those criminals walked away with enough money to fund their lavish lifestyles forever.

Which brings us once again to the largest income gap between since the Roaring 1920s when the previous record was set.

The top 1 percent of U.S. earners collected 19.3 percent of all household income in 2012, their largest stake in Internal Revenue Service figures in at least a century. The previous peak of 18.7 percent came back in 1927, according to an analysis of IRS figures dating to 1913 by economists at the University of California, Berkley, the Paris School of Economics and Oxford University.

And do spare me the wailing about how the 1 percenters suffered more during the crash:

[S]ince the recession officially ended in June 2009, the top 1 percent have enjoyed the benefits of rising corporate profits and stock prices: 95 percent of the income gains reported since 2009 have gone to the top 1 percent.

Last year alone, the incomes of the top 1 percent of Americans rose 19.6 percent, compared with a 1 percent increase for the remaining 99 percent.

There oughta be a law. Oh wait. There was a law. They got it abolished and they'll be damned if they're going to allow it to be reinstated.

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What's wrong with the media

Jake Tapper explains how he conducts an interview:

Most interviews that I do are not super aggressive. They can’t be, and they shouldn’t be; that would get pretty tiresome. So when there’s an interview that’s tough or a question that’s tough, it’s something that raises eyebrows. It’s not easy to do that in the White House briefing room, at a press conference. That’s never easy. It’s not fun. Because as humans we are built to try to avoid conflict. Society constantly looks down its nose at conflict, even if the media doesn’t. And it’s not a comfortable feeling. It’s absolutely nerve-racking. It’s much easier to be chummy with people in power. It’s much easier to ask softball questions, to not upset the apple cart. And that’s why most people, including me, don’t spend all of their time asking tough questions. But there are times when they are called for, and I think definitely they’re needed in politics, in political journalism.

I actually like Jake. I cut him a lot more slack than most people do because I do think within the parameters of what passes for TV journalism today, he's more willing than most to challenge the GOP perfidy at least some of the time. But he's wrong about this. Aggressive interviews are not tiresome unless they're based on phony memes instead of facts. The traditional mission of the journalist was to engage in conflict. Afflict the comfortable and all that. When he says society "looks down its nose at conflict" he's talking about society inside the Beltway. He's talking about losing access to the insiders by not being invited to the important soirees. Not seeing that as a concern outside the DC bubble.

In my world the people are starving for reliable information on policy. The only thing they're "looking down their nose at" is the media fixation on horserace reporting, false balance and click-baiting. Which sadly, is now the norm in the news business.

[Big thanks to Tengrain for kindly linking in at Mike's Blog Roundup. Tengrain also blogs at of Mock, Paper, Scissors and Dependable Renegade. If you're not reading both, well, you should be.]

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Woodward and Bernstein did it without computers

[Guardian photo]

Adding a bit to my earlier post on trusting BigMedia, here's The Guardian on the destruction of their computers. Not sure which iteration of the story this might be but I'm told this is not a photograph of destroyed hard drives.

Read it and see if it makes more sense to you, but for me the real tell was the last graf:

"I hope what [the Miranda detention row] will do is to send people back to read the stories that so upset the British state because there has been a lot of reporting about what GCHQ and the NSA are up to. What Snowden is trying to do is draw attention to the degree to which we are on a road to total surveillance."

As I said when the story broke, Miranda's detention was entirely predictable. And as I asked John Cole, who would have known Mr. Miranda was even traveling if he hadn't been detained? I didn't. And really? No other route  to Brazil available except going through Heathrow?

Clickbait journalism is all about traffic. As Politico editor-in-chief John F. Harris said in an interview, "We have an obligation to be interesting. We don’t think of ourselves as the electric company or the water company: Well, we have a responsibility ...”2 That was a mindset in a previous generation of journalists. That mindset might have even been legitimate."

In other words, the big money is in infotainment. It's about amusing the people for profit, not some quaint, last century concept about a responsibility to inform the public.

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Scandalmania

Alec MacGillis at TNR finds the charts on media scandal mongering on the IRS nontroversy. This is how truthiness becomes gospel among the many victims of Obama Derangement Syndrome.



Click bait "journalism" is going to destroy this country. They shouldn't even be allowed to call themselves news orgs anymore.

Addendum: Steve Benen adds:

If the political world took a keen interest in this controversy when it first came to public light, then moved on when there were no new developments, it'd be fairly routine. But that's not quite the case here -- rather, the IRS story broke, news organizations pounced, and then proceeded to ignore new developments that undermined the legitimacy of the story itself.

Outlets didn't move on when nothing happened; outlets instead made a conscious decision not to report when all kinds of things happened -- things that made the story itself appear baseless.

In other words, in this case, the media only cared about the allegations from Republicans, not the evidence that proved those allegations false. The political world was obsessed for weeks with the questions, then found the answers boring and not worth sharing with the public.

And worse, never having admitted the "scandal" was a nothingburger, the media will continue to refer to it as one in a string of scandals, as if the false allegations by the GOP should have been afforded any credibility whatsoever. The real scandal -- that Republicans invented this fakery -- will never be told by our so called liberal media.

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Tragically jaded journalists

Under the heading, "What's wrong with everything," this was posted by the political editor of Buzzfeed as a "reminder" to his fellow journos.


Click over to read the responses. It's a case study in bored Beltway insiderism. The journos are all yeah, covering the effects of policy is such a loser. Which may well be true, but that's because these too cool to care journos are reporting the politics instead of the policy. The cruel effects of the GOP's massacre of food assistance are going to affect 47 million people, most of whom are likely still blissfully unaware it's happening because these guys can't be bothered to inform the public. Not enough clicks in it.

Meanwhile, Max Fisher posts the best response.

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The kings of click-bait journalism

New Republic posts an interview with Politico's head honchos John F. Harris and Jim VandeHei that illuminates their business model. It's an interesting piece if you have a high tolerance for smug pricks, but this is the graf that explains why Charlie Pierce dubbed their rag, "Tiger Beat on the Potomac."

JH: We have an obligation to be interesting. We don’t think of ourselves as the electric company or the water company: Well, we have a responsibility ...”2 That was a mindset in a previous generation of journalists. That mindset might have even been legitimate. There really were only a handful of establishments reporting on this stuff and making judgments on its relative importance. People were looking to editors to say, “Tell me what I should think about.” We are in an era where everyone is his or her own editor and will decide what they care about. If we are boring, ... there is no market for that. Nor is there a public calling to be boring.

In other words, informing the public isn't their job. Informing the public with actual facts presented in context is a loser's game. Won't get a Drudge link with real news. All the money is in useless insider gossip and creating fake controversies. For this crapola we give them special protections under rule of law. And they expect a Pulitzer for it too, which isn't as unlikely as it should be since I think one of them sits on the damn prize committee.

I could mock this at great length but, as usual, Charlie Pierce's scathing takedown of the gruesome twosome already says it all.

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What year is this again?

I'm hearing this Cheerios commercial has unleashed a firestorm of racism. I saw it for the first time the other night and didn't even notice the couple was interracial. People are so weird.

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GOP agree: Feed the rich, starve the poor

Rebuffing Democratic attempts to stop this inhumane pandering to special interests, Republicans rammed a bill through committee that starves children of the poor and impoverished olds in order to give more money to wealthy corporate farmers.

A Republican-controlled panel in the U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday approved the biggest cuts in food stamps for the poor in a generation and a potentially expensive expansion of federally subsidized crop insurance. [...]

Almost half the savings in the House bill would come from a $20.5 billion cut over 10 years in spending on food stamps for low-income Americans. [...]

Some 45.6 million people, many of them impoverished elderly or working-poor families with children, received food stamps at latest count.

The bill restructures the corporate farm welfare in a way that expands their subsidies, effectively putting the risks of the business on the taxpayer without any share of the profits in return. The biggest beneficiary of the shift will be crop insurance companies which have been riddled with fraud.

Small government the GOP way. You see, the "dependency culture" only applies to poor people who can't get jobs that pay a living wage, if they can get a job at all. [image via]

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Must have got lost

Day slipped away from me. All I got at this hour is a Joel Pett cartoon.



[click to embiggen]

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Call it treason dammit

There's no other definition for what's going on among the crackpot con crowd. The same people who held mass burnings of Dixie Chick albums because they had the audacity to say out loud they were embarrassed by George W Bush (former wingnut hero, now disowned) and demanded we not criticize the Commander in Chief because, respect for the office, are now openly calling for armed rebellion against the US government. There's an huge industry making millions, if not billions, on anti-Obama paraphenalia and that's okay because, that blackity black guy in their White House is not the POTUS they voted for.

Ed Kilgore sums out the treasonous haterage of the right:

It’s ironic that people who almost certainly think of themselves as patriots—perhaps as super-patriots—are deliberately courting the impression that loyalty to their country is strictly contingent on the maintenance of laws and policies they favor, to be achieved if not by ballots then by bullets. Republican politicians should be repudiating such people instead of celebrating them, accepting their money and support, and even adopting their seditious rhetoric.

Hell, Republican politicians spoon fed them this seditious rhetoric. Millions of beer-bellied chickenhawks gobbled it up like free pizza at the local dive bar and regurgitated it into lame brained bumper stickers, tshirts and viral emails. The masses of eagerly deluded now jam into events like the NRA convention, where lifelike runbber target dummies in the likeness of the President of the United States is a hot seller. The perfect gift for your Republican dad. And if your buddy isn't that political, well there's the bleeding ex-wife dummy you can shoot to death to satisfy the urge to murder. But this is all perfectly acceptable because there was that one time some random librul drew a Hitler moustache on a picture of George Bush and carried it around at an anti-war rally.

When schoolteachers were being arrested for wearing anti-war tshirts within 25 miles of their guy, Mr. Mission Accomplished, this proud angry mob was all about love your country or leave it. But dare to suggest that billionaires who gamed the system to bleed our national treasury dry should pay a few thousand more in taxes and you gotta "water the tree of liberty with blood" because, tyranny. We thought their heads were going to explode when they lost the elections. Instead it appears, their brains melted into toxic jelly.

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For whom the economy recovers

This isn't new, but it shows income inequality keeps getting progressively worse every day.

In short, our current obsessed-with-profits philosophy is creating a country of a few million overlords (shareholders) and 300+ million serfs (employees).

It is also resulting in employees sharing less of the corporate wealth that they spend their lives creating than they ever have before.

That's not what has made America a great country. It's also not what most people think America or other lands of opportunity are supposed to be about.

This is an old chart I've had saved for a few months. Read the link for the wonkery and more charts that show how quickly the gap has grown. Yet they call the workers, "the takers." Clearly they have it backwards.

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Just one of those crazy accidents

Story got such wide play, I wasn't going to talk about the five year old kid who killed his two year sister with his very own gun. Then I saw the marketing stats for "My First Rifle."

They are available with different barrel and stock designs, including some made in hot pink to appeal to young girls.

Business has boomed since the company's inception in 1996, according to its website. In its first year, it had four employees and produced 4,000 rifles for kids; by 2008 it had greatly expanded its operations, with 70 employees and an output of 60,000 rifles a year.

Seriously. Sixty thousand of these rifles that shoot live ammunition are in the hands of kids? And please do click that link to see a photo gallery of the kids who are playing with them. It's a "crazy accident" begging to happen.

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She's so sorry

I'm sure you heard retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor issued a sort of pseudo-mea culpa the other day. She didn't apologize for inflicting the Bush years on us by voting to appoint him president, but she was very sorry SCOTUS took the case at all because, in retrospect, it made the court look like a gaggle of politicking assclowns.

Today Linda Hirschman at TNR unearths a tasty bit of historical trivia making it rather clear Justice O'Connor voted her personal politics in Bush v. Gore.

Although most of O’Connor’s papers are private, her legendary secrecy could not prevent the publication of her correspondence with others, including Goldwater, who saved her letters to him. On November 1, 1988, then-sitting Justice O’Connor wrote to Goldwater to bemoan the state of the nation on the eve of the presidential contest between Democrat Michael Dukakis and Republican George H.W. Bush.

"A week until election day," Justice O'Connor wrote. "Despite your advice, the campaign never really hit the basic issues. People are tired of it all. Many will not vote. I will be thankful if George B. wins. It is vital for the Court and the nation that he does.” (emphasis mine.)

Not hard to imagine she felt the same way about his son.

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The next Elizabeth Warren

I've never heard of her before today, but it sure looks like Susan Crawford is to telecom reform as Elizabeth Warren is to banksters. She was briefly part of the Obama administration but quit out of disgust with the Beltway kabuki. She's now taking on the telecom industry as a private citizen.

The telecoms loathe and fear her, with good reason. She's armed with dangerous facts. Like this:

Last year, Americans paid Comcast a monthly average of $153 for television, telephone, and Internet. According to a New America Foundation study, Parisians paid as little as $34.47 a month for the same bundled services, with Internet speeds five to 20 times faster than Comcast.

She even has an solution to break their monopoly.

Instead, she believes the answer is for local communities to build their own fiber networks, as more than 250 have done already. The largest is probably Chattanooga, where homes and businesses can obtain Internet that is 200 times faster than the national average and is cheaper than cable. Meanwhile, Google is building a fiber system in Kansas City and planning others in Austin and Provo. Such networks, Crawford says, will help the public see the benefits of real regulations, just as they once did with electricity. “Until Americans understood how useful [electricity] was and Americans understood it didn’t have to be a luxury, it didn’t change,” she says. The drawback to this strategy is that the industry will fight these grassroots efforts as fiercely as it does FCC reforms. So far, it has gotten 19 states to effectively ban local alternative networks.

My own North Carolina is one of those states. When I first moved to my little city they had big plans to have a free wifi downtown system. Then the Republicans took over the state government. The little city locals don't talk about it anymore.

"Four huge corporations dominate telecommunications much like a handful of companies once controlled the railroads and the electricity industry." Once we had public servants in government who had the political will to break their vile stranglehold. Now we're overrun with politicians who can be bought off for a few thousand bucks in campaign donations. We need less of those and many more Susan Crawfords and Elizabeth Warrens.

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Hardly working

There are millions of Americans who have been out of work for so long they stopped even looking for a job. There are millions more who are barely employed in jobs that don't pay a living wage. I've heard that there are fast food joints that now require a bachelor's degree to apply for a position as an assistant manager. Against that backdrop, this was the scene at a Joint Economic Committee in the Senate hearing on long term unemployment.



The hearing started with only one out of 20 members of the committee in attendance. Eventually three others managed to show up. Shortly thereafter, they passed a sequester fix to eliminate waiting times for airline flights by unanimous consent at lightning speed. Of course, they have a job. For now.

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