Why does the criminal banker Larry Summers continue to command a global forum?

probably because the venue is the financial times, the newspaper of the 0.0001%...

The US tax system needs rebuilding

By Lawrence Summers

i won't even bother posting snippets from the above article... suffice it to say, summers starts out by sounding the alarm about "entitlements," social security, medicare, etc., and then goes on to suggest the plenary solution to everything that ails us is to revisit the catfood commission (simpson-bowles)...

however, the most galling piece of information to come my way this past week is that summers' name is actually being floated by obama as a replacement for zoellick at the world bank... fuck... what do we have to do to get rid of these dangerously evil people...?

Larry Summers To Run World Bank? 37,000 Sign Petition Saying No In 24 Hours

anybody who's got two brain cells to rub together should be putting his or her name on that petition... you can do it here...

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Who would be on a deficit commission if we lived in a real democracy...?

we can only dream...

Here is the real deficit commission that you would expect to see if we were a democracy instead of a plutocracy: It would have 100 members:

# 98 of the 100 members would make less than $250,000 a year.
# 50 of the members would come from households in which the total income of all wage-earners is less than $50,221.
# 17% of the commission members would be un- or underemployed, and would be wondering why they are on a deficit commission instead of a jobs commission.
# 19 people on the commission would receive some form of Social Security benefits, 12 of those as retirees. And on this deficit commission they get to talk when the ones making over $250K propose cutting Social Security.
# 43 of the commission members would have less than $10,000 saved up for retirement. 27 of those less than $1,000.
# The commission would include the right proportion of factory and construction workers, and people who work in a kitchen, and waiting tables, and teaching, and nursing, and installing tires, and all the other things that people do except, apparently, those on DC elite commissions. (People who do manual labor get an extra vote each on what the retirement age should be.)
# Include people who are on active duty in the military – the people who said they don’t need that expensive plane, but couldn’t get body armor.
# 60 members would not have college degrees.
# 13 members would be receiving food stamps.

simply because such stuff is my life's work, i have to smack myself on the forehead when i think about organizing the work of a 100-member commission but i do like the idea of a truly representative commission trying to address ANY national issues of significance...

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How cutting the mortgage interest deduction might actually ACCELERATE foreclosures and walk-aways

as someone who is obsessed with keeping up with the daily outrages perpetrated on ordinary folks, i have obviously been aware that the catfood commission was recommending cutting out the mortgage interest deduction along with the unconscionable trimming of social security benefits and raising the retirement age (particularly when social security has absolutely NO connection to the budget deficit)... but, until my son brought it up in an email yesterday, i hadn't made the connection that cutting the mortgage interest deduction might actually accelerate the foreclosure crisis and speed up those sitting on the fence about walking away from underwater mortgages... i had emailed him about the pay freeze for federal workers (he and his wife are both government employees)... here's what he said...

I’m terrified about the bigger cuts that are proposed. Freezing the pay tables saves about 60 billion over the next 10 years. That is small potatoes to the 400 billion (doing away with Mortgage interest rate deduction) or the 3 trillion (middle class tax cuts possible expiring soon) Obama’s budget panel has proposed. If stuff like that occurs we will have no choice but to walk away from the mortgage on the house and who know what else.

personally, i think we're in the middle of the biggest heist in world history... the enormously rich get enormously richer and us poor bastards who actually have to WORK for a living continue to get screwed...

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Manufacturing consent - this is how it's done

ever since i started this blog, i've been saying that the plan was to run government into the ground which would then serve as the pretext for destroying whatever is left of any existing or implied social contract... our super-rich elites can't stand the thought that ALL money, resources and power might not be in their control so they're going to stop at nothing to make sure nothing escapes their grasp...

The Shock Doctrine Push to Gut Social Security and Middle Class

Today's Washington Post was punch two of a one-two punch. Punch one was the Simpson/Bowles "plan" to cut Social Security, cut middle-class tax breaks and programs (and dramatically cut taxes on the rich.) Punch two is pushing this plan hard with headlines claiming this solution is actually popular, while shutting out voices who explain why we shouldn't do this. This is full-on Shock Doctrine: Wait for an emergency like the terrible recession so people are in shock and want solutions, and then change everything so fast they can't respond while telling them how this is good for them.

This is how they do it, folks, demonstrated by this story in today's Washington Post: Consensus is forming on what steps to take in cutting the deficit,

After an election dominated by vague demands for less debt and smaller government, the sacrifices necessary to achieve those goals are coming into sharp focus. ... Smaller Social Security checks and higher Medicare premiums. ... the plan unveiled this month by co-chairmen Erskine B. Bowles ... and Alan K. Simpson ... has been respectfully received with a few exceptions by both parties. Its major elements are also winning support from a striking line-up of commentators. ... The strange bedfellows are a "testament to the moderate nature" of the ideas under discussion.

Consensus? Sharp focus? Here's your "sharp focus": The public hates this!

That headline is the manufactured reality. The real reality is that the public just hates this, and has voted against and will vote against politicians who push it.

Last month you saw campaign ad after ad hitting Democrats who "cut $500 billion from Medicare," and Democrats lost the senior vote and the midterms. The public hates this.

A recent Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research report showed that an overwhelming 69% of voters agreed that "politicians should keep their hands off Social Security and Medicare" when they address the deficit. The public hates this.

Only 6% of the public says the government's priority should be deficits now. The public hates this.

An AARP poll finds that 90% of people aged 18 to 29 say Social Security is important. The public hates this.

An NBC/WSJ poll finds that 57% are against cutting Social Security no matter how bad the deficit is. The public hates this.

A USA Today poll finds that the public by 66/31 says don't cut benefits to fix the deficit. The public hates this.

I can continue citing poll after poll; there are no polls that show the public is in any way behind this.

It's clear: The public hates this and will vote out any politician who does this. If you think the public didn't like the bailouts and the politicians who voted for them, this "Deficit Commission" plan to cut Social Security is the other shoe dropping. Bailouts helped Wall Street and not Main Street and people certainly didn't like that. But this is paying for bailing out Wall Street by hitting Main Street in the gut. And the public understands this.

But here is today's reality: the public hates this, and the corporate media tells you how much you love it. This is how it's done. You have heard the stories of FDR and LBJ saying "make me do it," meaning create the public pressure that forces politicians to do act. This is a story of manufacturing consent where the elites, the Peterson Foundation, the president and the corporate right are setting up an appearance of making them do it.

sit back and watch how it's all coming down...

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We are dealing with shameless demagogy - the financial End Time has arrived

michael hudson in counterpunch via alternet...

We are dealing with shameless demagogy. The financial End Time has arrived, but Mr. Obama’s happy-talk pretends that “two years” will get us through the current debt-induced depression. The Republican plan is to make more Congressional and Senate gains in 2012 as Mr. Obama’s former supporters “vote with their backsides” and stay home, as they did earlier this month. So “two years” means forever in politician-talk. Why vote for a politician who promises “change” but is merely an exclamation mark for the Bush-Cheney policies from Afghanistan and Iraq to Wall Street’s Democratic Leadership Council on the party’s right wing? One of its leaders, after all, was Mr. Obama’s Senate mentor, Joe Lieberman.

The second pretense is that cutting taxes for the super-rich is necessary to win Republican support for including the middle class in the tax cuts. It is as if the Democrats never won a plurality in Congress. (One remembers George W. Bush with his mere 50+%, pushing forward his extremist policies on the logic that: “I’ve got capital, and I’m using it.” What he had, of course, was Democratic Leadership Committee support.) The pretense is “to create jobs,” evidently to be headed by employment of shipyard workers to build yachts for the nouveau riches and sheriff’s deputies to foreclose on the ten million Americans whose mortgage payments have fallen into arrears.

hudson engages in a re-naming exercise that is sadly appropriate...

The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform might better be called the New Class War Commission to Scale Back Social Security and Medicare Payments to Labor in Order to Leave more Tax Revenue Available to Give Away to the Super-Rich.

and sums up the situation in a most sobering fashion...

Mr. Obama’s appointees are turning the U.S. economy into a Permanent Emergency, a Perpetual Ponzi Scheme requiring injections of more and more Quantitative Easing to to rescue “the economy” (Mr. Obama’s euphemism for creditors at the top of the economic pyramid) from being pushed into insolvency. Mr. Bernanke’s helicopter flies only over Wall Street. It does not drop monetary relief on the population at large.

naturally, being a u.s. citizen, i am focused more on what's happening in my own country... however, as someone who also spends a great deal of time outside the u.s., i can state with certainty that this same scenario - the super-rich elites looting every last molecule of the world's natural and financial resources - is being played out in every country i have had the pleasure of visiting...

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Paul Krugman and Marcy Wheeler on the continued upward transfer of wealth to the already-rich

i didn't post on either of these subjects yesterday as i found them just too damn depressing...

krugman on the catfood commission proposal...

The Hijacked Commission

[...]

It will take time to crunch the numbers here, but this proposal clearly represents a major transfer of income upward, from the middle class to a small minority of wealthy Americans. And what does any of this have to do with deficit reduction?

[...]

It’s no mystery what has happened on the deficit commission: as so often happens in modern Washington, a process meant to deal with real problems has been hijacked on behalf of an ideological agenda. Under the guise of facing our fiscal problems, Mr. Bowles and Mr. Simpson are trying to smuggle in the same old, same old — tax cuts for the rich and erosion of the social safety net.

marcy expostulates...

David Axelrod’s Quaint Idea of Middle Class “Security”

There’s a lot to despise about David Axelrod’s announcement of Obama’s capitulation to the oligarchs on tax cuts, not least that he made this announcement on the same day Obama’s Catfood Commission Chairs started the process of stealing from seniors to “fix” our deficit.

Let yesterday be marked as the day when a nominally Democratic President began to dismantle Democrats’ signature policy achievement, social security, so he could shovel $700 billion to the very rich.

[...]

[T] worst thing that could happen to this economy may well be passing legislation that continues to hollow out of the middle class and with it increasing the massive income inequality that continues to subject the American people to the craven demands of a few very rich people. That is, precisely what Axe and Obama have now agreed to do.

These men either don’t know or don’t give a damn about the security of the middle class.

oh, they KNOW, all right... they also KNOW all too well which side their bread is buttered on...

but wait, marcy isn't quite finished...

You know, it is not just that the arrogant and cluelessly detached President Pangloss is steaming toward a one and done Presidency, it is that he is literally destroying the Democratic Party and liberal ideology in the process and leaving them in his wake.

UPDATE: I guess Obama couldn’t even sell crack free trade to Charlie Sheen the Koreans.

see what i mean about too depressing...?

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