Originally posted HERE

Since the election of President Obama, domestic crude production has steadily risen for the first time since 1985 reversing nearly a quarter century of decline.

Chart via Index Mundi

Simone Sebastion reports:

“The United States’ rapidly declining crude oil supply has made a stunning about-face, shredding federal projections and putting energy independence in sight of some analyst forecasts.

After declining to levels not seen since the 1940s, U.S. crude production began rising again in 2009. Drilling rigs have rushed into the nation’s oil fields, suggesting that a surge in domestic crude is on the horizon.

The number of rigs in U.S. oil fields has more than quadrupled in the past three years to 1,272, according to the Baker Hughes rig count. Including those in natural gas fields, the U.S. now has more rigs at work than the entire rest of the world.” EMPHASIS OURS

At the same time, domestic demand is down dramatically.

Chart via Hard Assets Investor

So, what gives with the staggering increases in the price we are paying at the pump?

As I wrote yesterday, the answer lies in the fact that there is no “free market” for fossil fuels. Supply and demand simply don’t matter much in the equation.

First of all, unrestrained futures speculation is a major factor.

Second of all, the reality that we are obligated to maintain our international price agreements effectively explodes the myth of ever achieving “energy independence” with petroleum.

Kevin G Hall writes:

“U.S. demand for oil and refined products – including gasoline – is down sharply from last year, so much that United States has actually become a net exporter of gasoline, unable to consume all that it makes.” EMPHASIS OURS

If this makes little sense to you it’s because you, like most Americans, have been sold a bill of goods with quaint oversimplifications about “markets” as they were once understood.

Grant Smith and Aaron Clark report on the complexity of the forces involved:

“The highest U.S. oil production in nine years is failing to dissuade Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) from predicting that the price of the country’s most-traded crude will keep climbing.

The New York-based bank says West Texas Intermediate will gain 7 percent by August to trade within $5 a barrel of North Sea Brent, even as rising output swells the nation’s inventories. Citigroup Inc. (C) takes the opposite view, forecasting that WTI’s discount to Brent may widen to $20 a barrel this year, from about $15.79 yesterday.

“There’s a danger in trading the Brent-WTI spread right now with any strong fundamental conviction,” Olivier Jakob, managing director at Petromatrix GmbH, a Zug, Switzerland-based oil researcher, said in a phone interview yesterday.

The outlook for WTI is being clouded by a deluge of oil to Cushing, Oklahoma, the delivery point for WTI futures, amid a production boom that has cut America’s dependence on imports to a more than-10-year low. The logjam is likely to be relieved in June, when flows through the Seaway pipeline are reversed, giving producers in Canada and North Dakota direct access to refineries on the Gulf coast, according to Goldman Sachs, which correctly forecast Brent would decline in April last year and recover the following month.”

While the GOP is sharpening its knives and rooting for prices to continue to skyrocket as an electoral weapon, their framing of the current situation is simply not rooted in reality. They blame Obama for the potential crisis facing consumers but simultaneously deny that supply and demand have been supplanted, not just by predatory domestic traders, but also by an artificial international trade structure from which we cannot hope to ever disentangle ourselves.

With this in mind, so-called “green” arguments for alternative energy development are nearly irrelevant. We must engage in massive investment in solar and wind for the simple fact that it’s the smart move for our bottom line.

Of course, not poisoning ourselves would be a splendid side benefit.

Originally published at  The Hand That Feeds You

I regard myself as a Christian. I believe in the Gospels. I generally keep it to myself and out of my writing because I have the right to do so. In America, no one may tell me what, how, when or where to worship.

I am protected from litmus tests or societal demands to prove my faith by the Constitution. That’s what the separation clause provides for.

What I am not guaranteed is special status to impose my religion when I participate in public markets. I am also supposed to be Constitutionally disallowed access to taxpayer monies while simultaneously demanding the right to implement policies driven by a theological agenda in those markets.

Period.

Contrary to popular GOP propaganda, there is no war on religion in the United States. That is absurd. What we do have currently is a coordinated effort to attack the bedrock principle of separation. Nothing illustrates this more than the recent brouhaha over the Obama Administration’s proposed birth control guidelines.

Politico reported (shortly before Obama’s clever handling of the controversy yesterday):

“The issue has become highly politicized in an election year, and some polls have shown eroding support for President Barack Obama among Catholic voters. Catholic leaders are blasting Obama for the decision, and Mitt Romney Monday night in Colorado lashed out at the administration for seeking to curtail religious freedom.

The rule’s supporters are confident it will withstand such challenges. Defending the controversial requirement, the administration has often pointed out that 28 states have similar requirements. And those state rules have withstood legal challenges from groups that contend they violate the religious liberties of faith-based employers that object to contraception.

Opponents say a crucial difference between the federal and state mandates could make it easier to get struck down: An employer who doesn’t agree with the state rules can opt out of offering coverage. That won’t be possible under the national health care law, at least not for large employers.

“You don’t have an option on whether or not to provide health insurance coverage,” said James Bopp, general counsel to the National Right to Life Committee. “Under Obamacare, you have to. In these states, you could just decline to provide the coverage.”

The right wing and its demagogues had a field day.

Rush Limbaugh said “It’s not the government’s business to make any church or any religion ‘modernize’ …there is no permissible way the government can do this, according to our Constitution.”

Newt Gingrich called it a “tremendous infringement of religious liberty.”

The Constitution provides the right to freedom of religion. It also provides the right to do business under guidelines set by congress and governmental regulatory bodies. Since when are businesses and houses of worship interchangeable? Also, if we are to conflate the two, when are we going to start taxing them equally?

We are in very dangerous territory here. The GOP is attempting to set a national precedent under which narrow religious interpretations have an accepted role in commercial trades. Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) is insisting on it. Last week, he called the guidelines un-Constitutional. This serves to illustrate just how little he understands or respects the intent of the framers. Having clearly sensed the ginned-up controversy working with their base, he then announced his intent to literally legislate religion.

Under the original proposal, no one was forcing anyone to violate the terms of their faith. This is because no one is forcing anyone to run a business. You don’t like government’s requirements for the general welfare in order to operate commercially? Close. You can’t abide by them? Shutter your establishment. The vacuum created by any such move will be met by the entrepreneurial spirit.

That’s America.

There is something else quite important here; A majority of “contraceptives” prescribed in the United States are not used for “family planning.” They are specifically used to target other women’s health issues as detailed in the chart below.

It is worth noting that a majority of Catholics, the group singled out by so many “social conservatives” as being under siege or in need of defense from this… support the policy.

Originally posted HERE

Matthew Yglesias made an observation recently:

“When I speak ill of the concept of third party presidential campaigns solving anything, someone inevitably brings up the precedent of the Republican Party. 

Quite clearly, Abraham Lincoln and his administration solved quite a bit. This is, in my view, the exception that proves the rule in the true sense of the term.

The crux of the matter is that the GOP, when founded, was a movement of party-switchers from among the ranks of established politicians.”

This could not be more timely. There is a growing whine coming from some disappointed liberals who are calling for a 2012 “alternative” to President Obama. This is not as ridiculous or as potentially self-sabotaging as calls for a primary challenge, but it is close. What’s more, in conjunction with one another, these two phenomena could result in yet another third party-driven disaster for the whole country.

Too many people have forgotten that, although Ronald Reagan won re-election by a legitimate landslide, his first term began with a bruising squeaker. One of the nearly unanimously accepted canards of the Reagan mythology is that Carter could not have won. Everyone talks about “malaise,” or the failed hostage rescue, or shadowy theories surrounding an “October Surprise.”

Nobody talks about National Unity Party candidate John Anderson.

Nobody seems to remember the vicious intra-party spectacle that was the 1980 Democratic convention.

If you look at the total popular vote numbers for only Reagan and Carter, you fail to see that a full 8% of the participating electorate broke from the two major parties, most of them going for the likable and business-friendly Anderson. Those perennially sought after independent voters, those “centrist” voters we are always told make and break Presidential contests, either stayed home or joined with moderate conservatives alarmed at Reagan’s social extremism and threw their vote to the third guy. The slimmest of state by state margins turned into a huge Electoral College victory for Ronnie.

Similarly, nearly everyone on the American left chooses to remember the ascension of George W. Bush in terms of “hanging chads,” Florida vote-trickery or the SCOTUS shutdown of the recall. They rarely, if ever, discuss the fact that Ralph Nader sucked 2,882,955 votes out of a contest which was otherwise a dead heat.

In no way am I saying a second Carter administration would have been all that great. Also, the idea of Lieberman being “a heartbeat away” is like a bad dream.

But, when I used the word “disaster” above, I meant it. Our current economic crisis is the endgame of the Reagan Revolution. The orgy of deficit spending and revenue slashing that has brought us to the verge of being labeled a bad risk internationally and which has very nearly shattered the American social contract was begun under Reagan, was then put into extreme overdrive under Bush II and is killing us today.

Does any honest liberal want to look me in the eye and say that Carter would have engineered the sale of a half a billion dollars in weapons to the Ayatollahs or that a President Gore response to 9/11 would have been a nearly 10 year state of permawar and the invasion of the wrong country? Does anyone still want to say with a straight face that there is no difference between the parties?

Those who wish for a big and blustery Democratic primary fight or are gearing up for the next “third way” seem either unaware of, or willfully ignorant to, the lasting damage this same sentiment did to our country in 1980 and 2000.

Teddy Kennedy might as well have been on Reagan’s payroll just as Nader might as well have been on Dubya’s.

Would four more years of Carter or a Gore cabinet have been wonderful? Probably not. But we would not be here. It’s just that simple.

I am not going to be so dismissive as to say that those who are eager to vote for a third party are “throwing their vote away.” These votes for fringe and splinter candidates have a proven effect. Nor am I proposing that we should hold closed and predetermined primaries as an ideal. I would simply and humbly suggest that, in times as contentious as these and with so much to lose, the disgruntled skip the middle man. Why not just vote for the enemy in the first place?

Or, how about we actually build a movement over a series of years with carefully calculated and principally planned steps to build a fully functioning new party populated by intelligent professionals… then pull that trigger.

Please CLICK HERE to petition the Justice Department to investigate “magic votes” in Wisconsin – Originally posted HERE

UPDATE: 4/9/2011 John Fund called for a full investigation today. His peers should have the decency to join him.

An incredibly ugly thing happened yesterday in America. I am not explicitly referring to the discovery of “magic votes” that were previously uncounted due to “human error” in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race. That is a factor in what disturbs me, to be sure. More troubling than this potential impropriety is that the previous day’s media cycle began with a coordinated series of attacks throughout the usual conservative outlets making baseless claims of “potential fraud” by Democrats in the race. At that time, it looked like the liberal was winning.

This is the modern, post-election playbook for the American Right. If they win, even by the slimmest of margins, it is called a “mandate.” Ah, but if they lose, well then they goose step to their laptops and TV cameras and imply illegitimacy. It is red meat for those who believe that Americans with whom they disagree are, well, not really American.

Prominent right wing commentator and activist John Fund fired the first shot in Wednesday’s WSJ. He laid the usual groundwork for mistrust and it was widely linked to by organizations like FOX.

Some selections from his agit-prop:

“Any recount will be scrutinized for irregularities and possible vote fraud. A recount in a similarly close race in neighboring Minnesota’s 2008 U.S. Senate race stretched on for months, amid charges that some counties counted absentee ballots according to different standards than others did. Al Franken, the Democrat, was eventually sworn in after pulling ahead by 315 votes. His victory gave—for a time—Senate Democrats the critical 60th vote they needed to pass ObamaCare over a potential filibuster.”

That no proof was ever found of systemic fraud in the Franken/Coleman donnybrook can’t seem to shake the devotion of some on the right that there had to be mischief at work. How else could Franken possibly have won? The shared standard of the conservative movement today regarding suspicion of liberal malfeasance is based simply on the fact that liberals are liberals. This not just a poor metric, it is rather un-American.

Fund continues the piece by reminding the reader of suspicious electoral activity and the disqualification of ballots in Wisconsin during the 2004 national election. There were serious questions raised at the time. Which is why there was a major investigation. That the intensive, months long inquiry turned up major errors but no evidence of the conspiracies he implies is used as fodder for further mistrust.

“The investigative unit believed that at least 16 workers from the Kerry campaign, and two allied get-out-the-vote groups, “committed felony crimes.” But local prosecutors didn’t pursue them in part because of a “lack of confidence” in the abysmal record-keeping of the city’s Election Commission. The police department’s report concluded that “the one thing that could eliminate a large percentage of the fraud” would be elimination of same-day voter registration (which is also in use in seven other states). It also suggested that voters present a photo ID at the polls.”

This is pretty serious misrepresentation of the facts. It gets better:

“But proposals to accomplish those two reforms have been bogged down in the GOP-controlled Wisconsin state legislature. If the Prosser-Kloppenburg recount reveals further problems in the state’s porous election laws, perhaps the legislature will finally be compelled to act.”

That’s it. Make voting harder. Beware of large turnout because that means more of them will vote. Mr. Fund is a student of the Paul Weyrich school of the right which actually argues for greater voter disenfranchisement. He has made a career of implying corruption and vote fraud by Democrats. A regular contributor to Glenn Beck and an inspiration to the wingnuts, he proudly joined the chorus of those who described the government response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster as a “shakedown” and dismisses little things like the importance of voter turnout. As Media Matters made clear later in the day, John Fund is a “liar.” He is also an incredibly hypocritical little creep.

Matt Boyle brought in the reinforcements for Fund over at the Daily Caller via FOX:

“Wisconsin citizens and election experts are questioning the veracity of the state’s Supreme Court race, which the Associated Press reports left-wing legal activist JoAnne Kloppenburg won by 204 votes over Justice David Prosser, out of the more than 1.4 million votes.”

Uh oh. Experts? Who are these experts?

“Scott St. Clair of the Freedom Foundation, a conservative think tank.”

Framing Mr. St. Clair, a radical Tea Party figure, as an impartial ”expert” is a stretch of stunning proportions.

I had expected this as a matter of course. With a vote so close and a recount nearly certain, it was going to be contentious. Then came the Waukesha announcement. At first and very briefly, some reports incorrectly stipulated that the “magic votes” favored Kloppenberg. Michelle Malkin, one of the more prominent proponents of the “liberals equal vote fraud” meme breathlessly blogged:

“I’ve been tied up with other work and family matters (here’s my Fox News appearance today talking about Marizela), but you have probably already heard the stunning (though not completely surprising) news that some 7,500 ballots were suddenly discovered today in the key Supreme Court race in Wisconsin. I say not surprising because, as long-time readers know, Wisconsin and election shenanigans are like peanut butter and jelly.”

“Shenanigans.” Yup. It obviously doesn’t pass the smell test. But then she had to update her post clarifying that it was her guy who got the votes. Do you think she continued to insinuate hanky-panky? Do you suppose she made another glib remark about vote fraud and Wisconsin going together “like peanut butter and jelly?”

Of course not. She copy/pasted a few paragraphs from the Journal Sentinel and then added the blistering commentary “stay tuned…” One must wonder if she isn’t annoyed with herself for trying to get ahead of the story in first place.

How have outlets which in the past  most propagandized flimsy charges of liberal electoral corruption responded to the stunning “human error” in Waukesha, WI?

There is no mention at all on Drudge at this time. Over at Breitbart’s Big Government, Jim Nolte has a dry and utterly guileless report on this being a “clerical error.”

Big Government is one of the most foreceful outlets to have pushed the New Black Panther story, a series of allegations without merit that have been repeatedly proven false. They did so as part of a supposed mission to keep elections clean.

In fact, J. Christian Adams, the right wing smear-monger who first spun the phony NBPP scandal was given a byline at Big Government on March 31st following the most recent confirmation that there’s no story there. They made sure to run it with a big picture of African American radicals pointing guns because that’s “scary.” They clearly think that voters should be much more concerned with armed African American radicals than institutional electoral conspiracy.

This double standard gets more repulsive. Hot Air’s always pleasant Allahpundit thinks it’s funny. He ran a glib little Prosser victory piece with the cute headline “The Greatest Press Conference Of All Time.” He is referring to Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus’ shaky performance.

That he gives a wink and a nod to the most dubious electoral surprise in over a decade in America is in very stark contrast to his dogged pursuit of “fraud” allegations in Ohio a few years ago. Of course, the Ohio controversy was much more intriguing. It involved registration forms! Not something as trivial as a reversed decision with numbers conveniently just over the margin required for a state-funded recount.

Jim Hoft, the notorious Islamophobe and Breitbart lackey with ties to white supremacist groups, is also laughing. “Oh SNAP,” he heads his exercise in Schadenfreude. Yes, the same Jim Hoft who has pushed the NBPP smear relentlessly. Oh well, I guess we should just assume that because nice, wholesome white-people fraud might be at play we can call it something else.

Hey, Jim! We can say “it’s not fraud… it’s a “freedom correction!”

Lastly, as it is all I have the stomach for, I present Mary Katherine Ham and her “funny tweet.”

This would be merely glib if her specialty was not in fact an endless series of pieces condemning liberal double standards.

To their credit, Hot Air seems to be one of the rare right wing outlets demonstrating partial integrity. They have prominently linked to the group Citizen Action Wisconsin’s call for an investigation.

Make no mistake, the right wing media’s “so what” reaction to this is simply the most recent indicator that their movement has been co-opted by a fundamentally dishonest cadre of hypocrites. It’s not the thought of vote fraud by liberals that makes them mad. It’s the citizenship of liberals that they detest. It is the fact that American government might actually reflect liberal views from time time. What they argue we should be really, really afraid of is ordinary citizens. Pay no attention to possible establishment conservative corruption. Keep your eyes on the scary African Americans.

The so-called liberal MSM is almost equally disgusting. They aren’t ignoring this. It’s worse. They just don’t seem to want to ask any messy questions. Which is ridiculous for anyone who has any respect for the core principles of journalism. There are huge red flags in Clerk Nickolaus’ statement to the press. In fact, she seems to be describing both an operational save issue that isn’t possible with the software involved as well as acknowledging a security breach!

Now just picture for a moment if it was “liberal activist” Kloppenberg who had actually received the “magic votes.” I suspect the shooting would already have started.

UPDATE 9:23pm CST 4/9/2011 Facebook has restored my primary site to unrestricted share status. Thank you to everyone who piled on the pressure.

UPDATE 12:37am CST 4/7/2011 The primary site is postable again on FB but only through copy/paste.  The share button system is still blocking it as offensive. Still no explanation FB. Thank you to everyone who has attempted to contact them and moved the ball towards the goal line.

Well. It’s been a heckuva few hours. A funny thing happened. Apparently, a group of organized pro-Scott Walker trolls has targeted me. They have successfully flagged my primary blog, THE HAND THAT FEEDS YOU, as “abusive.” This was brought to my attention by members of a group on FB called “Recall Scott Walker.” They let me know that my work was no longer postable.

I was taken aback to say the least. I have made no violations of Facebook’s “terms of service.” I have not abused anyone in chats. I have not posted my work in conservative forums. Hell, I haven’t even had a friendly argument with my favorite archly-conservative personal friend in the last week. But, you know, the Tea Party is all about “freedom.” They’re trying to protect the country from all of us “freedom hating progressives.”

Riiiiiiiight. I encourage all readers who appreciate my work, and even the ones who don’t, to please attempt to share THIS LINK from the past weekend on Facebook if they have accounts. And then fill out the form explaining that my site is not “abusive or spammy.” This link is one of the little things I post to bring a smile to my readers in between the politics. It’s Snoopy. Ice skating. I hope that this encourages Facebook to acknowledge the absurdity of their actions. You will receive the image below… unless the situation has been rectified.

This post is one of several that have appeared at THE HAND THAT FEEDS YOU regarding the Scott Walker/Brian Deschane scandal which continues to unfold in Wisconsin

The history of Chicago’s political underbelly is something of a hobby of mine. Having grown up in it’s shadows and in a house of a decidedly political timber, it just fascinated me. I can tell you amazing stories about the bad old days. It was once truly a city without peer in a nation without a whole lot of “sunlight.” For a time, it even made “Boss” Tweed’s Tammany Hall in New York look good. I hadn’t thought about it much recently until a short time ago.

Yesterday, I posted about Gov. Scott Walker’s (R-WI) doling out state money and an important position to the seemingly unqualified, legally challenged and not college degreed son of a major political backer. It’s a stunning caper. I jived to a few pals that Walker’s shenanigans would’ve made the average 1950s, cigar-chompin’, Chicago-Machine hack blush. After some further thought, I have concluded that this was correct. No one in the first Daley Administration would ever have done anything this blatantly not on the level.

In the midst of a dust-up Walker has intentionally crafted to steamroll over his own state’s nearly century long history of open government while giving the high hat to organized labor, he has put an apparent connected bum on the taxpayer’s nickel to the tune of just over 80 thousand samolians. To find a guy this craven in Chicago’s past, I can only come up with the infamous prohibition era bosses of the 1st Ward, Michael “Hinky Dink” Kenna and “Bathhouse” John Coughlin.

At the height of the “Hinky Dink” and “Bathhouse” stranglehold on power in Chicago, a frustrated Mayor Carter Harrison questioned “Hinky Dink” about his quite eccentric and bent partner. The Mayor wanted to know if “Bathhouse” was using narcotics or might actually be certifiable. Kenna looked at Harrison. He suggested that it was not really explicable. “To tell you the God’s truth, Mayor, they ain’t found a name for it yet,” he said.

When a 21st Century Midwestern Governor is reminiscent of either of these goofs, he can take his good government malarkey and scram. I begin to wonder if Walker might not be ossified. Maybe he’s just a piker. This is only beginning to heat up, kids. I am pretty sure that it ain’t goin’ away.

Wisconsin Assembly Minority Leader Peter Barca (D-Kenosha) is awfully temperate in his response, if you ask me:

“Gov. Walker has repeatedly stated that all public employees must sacrifice, but it appears his political appointees are exempt from any sacrifice. Media accounts in the past few weeks have focused on two appointees with close Republican connections getting questionable appointments with excessive raises.

Gov. Walker’s budget adjustment bill that is tied up in court gave him 37 additional political appointees and recent revelations make that highly inadvisable.

A governor cannot ask his employees to sacrifice while rewarding his political cronies and relatives of big donors. I call on the Legislature to halt any expansion of political appointments, no-bid contracts or gubernatorial power over rule-making in the future. This includes special session bill AB 8, which could come back to the Assembly as early as tomorrow.

If there is any shred of independence among legislative Republicans they will not allow the hiring of additional political cronies after the revelations of the past weeks. This is simply not how we do business in Wisconsin.”

Personally, I would’ve at least called Walker a spifflicated palooka. The guy keeps spoonin’ the applesauce. He’s tryin’ to take the whole state and maybe even the country for a ride. He thinks we’re all pushovers.

He is wrong.

March 30th, 2011

This post appeared originally at the author’s site THE HAND THAT FEEDS YOU

by F. Grey Parker

I have never seen so many self-described “adults” issue public declarations that a glorious America can be achieved exclusively by allowing the rich to eat their cake and have it too. Honest liberals and conservatives are increasingly coalescing around what I have been saying for years; That is, that Reaganomic idealism is as naive as pure socialism. It is non-sustainable. It wreaks havoc over time. Most notably, it’s childish. It is predicated on economic faith rather than statistical science. It’s not a philosophy; it’s a tee-shirt.

America faces a crippling crisis of revenue and not spending. Say it with me. “Revenue.” The next person you hear who makes dire pronouncements about how ”destructive” the United States’ corporate or highest marginal individual tax rates are is either willfully stupid or they are lying.

One of the great ironies of the success American “conservatives” have achieved in utterly corrupting our tax code is that we, the American taxpayer, are essentially underwriting two thirds of America’s publicly traded corporations. The right has, for all intensive purposes, begun nationalizing some of our businesses with the slick caveat that we receive no dividends for our investment. This is not hyperbole. For example, “Exxon Mobil made $19 billion in profits in 2009. Exxon not only paid no federal income taxes, it actually received a $156 million rebate from the IRS, according to its SEC filings.”

Exxon Mobil made no commitment to domestic workforce expansion. They made no commitment to invest in our infrastructure. They made no commitment to keep more of their currency reserves in country. In fact, in 2009 they outsourced 1 billion dollars in contracts to India alone. They did nothing for the United States of America that warrants middle class taxpayers forking over $156 million dollars. Unless we are investors. When do we receive our shares? This is the real government Ponzi scheme, not Social Security.

The supply-side argument for decades has been that the more we “let businesses keep” the more they will invest. That this has turned out to be so provably untrue is completely ignored by “free market” fundamentalists. There is no arguing with those in our country who have bought into this nonsense. It turns out that the more we let the rich keep, the more they keep. Surprise. Cash hoarding takes less work than “innovation.” It also involves less “risk.” Most importantly, it incurs the least “uncertainty” as far as financial choices are concerned.

My “radical” suggestion since roughly 2003, when I first actually read Bush 2’s jaw droppingly stupid tax proposals , has been to suggest a return to the Eisenhower Era code. Seriously. I am endorsing the economic worldview of one of our nation’s great Republicans. I am not the only one who has noticed the absurd vilification that this sort of talk receives.

Andrew Sullivan wrote recently:

“Income tax rates are now lower than they were under Ronald Reagan and far lower than they were under Eisenhower. And yet it has become a Norquistian non-negotiable that no taxes can be raised at all on anyone, let alone the beneficiaries of the last thirty years – and those who differ must be “leftists” – even when the US is facing debt of historic and dangerous proportions. Someone advocating what Eisenhower was perfectly comfortable with would be regarded by the Republican right today as a communist. And yet, of course, Eisenhower was emphatically not a Communist, whatever the John Birch society believed. In retrospect, he might even be seen as the most successful small-c conservative of the 20th century. “

Sully went on to cite a tough piece by Glenn Greenwald titled Billionaire Self Pity and The Koch Brothers which I also recommend.

It’s worse than this, though. There really are no more loopholes to create when you’ve reduced the majority corporate tax burden to zero. Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder may be tipping the hand we can expect to be played nationally by these folks. Having no other way to give our money to corporations in his state, he has now devised a scheme that actually raises taxes on the poor and middle class to do so. This is with no new expansion, construction or hiring guarantees. I am sure the corporations will do the right thing with our money.

The class war is on. The rich declared it on the rest of us. That they are winning is a testament not only to their long term planning and well organized propaganda, but to the inherent trust ordinary Americans had developed over several generations in a brighter tomorrow. They have used our own optimism against us. I’ll spare you the frog in a cold pot metaphor but it is increasingly apt. The solution is also incredibly simple… Raise taxes, dammit.

The following is an excerpt. The complete satire may be found at

THE HAND THAT FEEDS YOU

by Stephanie Baselice

The once mighty US economy remains in deep and dangerous waters. Although the markets have largely recovered from the “Great Recession” the general public remains wary and depressed, which is potentially bad for business. It is also a political minefield. Unemployment floats around 10 % by official standards, closer to 20% if one includes those who have ceased looking for work. Despite modest job gains in 2010 at current rates employment growth will take 5 or 6 years to reach pre-recession unemployment levels of 5-6%. Indeed, it may be that the problem lies deeper and that many of the workers recently laid off during this difficult time were comparatively unproductive and will not need to be replaced. We may well shoulder a 10% unemployment rate far into the future. In any case, once high hopes for “change” have been dashed against the rocks of a deep and extended downturn. Inflammatory rhetoric from liberal elites and labor groups about the possibility of shifting economic focus to risky and untried ventures in “green jobs” puts the American way of life at risk. Quality of life measures rank America lower and lower, and despite relatively high worker productivity, our creative and technological edge is growing dull. Rising nations such as India and China will soon surpass us in critical areas such as inventing new products. Education and healthcare are thankfully still private enterprises, yet they consume increasingly large shares of the economic pie for most families. National solutions to these problems are out of the question, of course. Any reasonable person understands that such solutions must be too expensive and disruptive to the profits of current business leaders to even be considered. Yet recent pro-business political gains may well evaporate if the recovery does not soon produce sufficient job growth to avoid a broad based re-evaluation of the political and economic system.

Of course when it comes to the job market, we have been in rough waters a long time. Over the past thirty years, the ever greater economic growth once fueled by manufacturing has been essentially replaced by highly lucrative financial services, largely related to consumer debt. Loose credit has been very, very profitable for a long time, allowing ordinary people to purchase more and more goods and services—far in excess of those enjoyed by previous generations. Yet the bill for this spending has now come due, and many cannot afford the interest payments. Today’s young and middle-aged adults are the first in US history to face living standards significantly below those of their parents. One of the reasons for this is increased global competition for jobs. Companies naturally move production facilities to places with lower labor costs given the opportunity. With current communications technology, the same now holds true for office labor. Increasingly, well-educated workers in the developing world can often offer their services at a significant cost advantage over US based employees. This trend will likely continue as most US workers seem to be unwilling to follow their jobs abroad. The other main factor in the reduction of middle class living standards is a crippling debt load that remains stubbornly undiminished by the predominance of two income households. Austerity measures such as reduced consumption of consumer goods or moving to areas where cost of living is lower are not realistically available to everyone, nor are they desirable for the economy at large. After all, many people have already lost their homes and cut spending in every area they can imagine. Not everything is relative—cost of living does have some actual bright line minimums when it comes to housing, transportation, food and medical care. Meeting those minimums often means missed debt payments as well as reduced consumption. Both have a very negative effect on the economy as a whole. While interest on debt payments may have become a significant area of revenue for many businesses, let us not forget that consumption is the actual prime mover of our economic system and whatever is consumed must be produced at an ever lower cost. If economic growth and corresponding profits are to continue, any reduction in debt service payments must be counterbalanced by increases in productivity. US labor costs must somehow be brought down to become competitive with those of developing countries, regardless of relative cost of living…

Please CLICK HERE to read the conclusion.

The original essay appears atThe Hand That Feeds You

Most liberals, progressives, Democrats, moderate Republicans and decent Americans were appalled when Sarah Palin’s PAC used weaponized language last year in conjunction with the release of the now infamous “gun-sight” graphic. We were met with derision from her supporters and the far right as if we were somehow trying to suppress her speech. We were not. As a matter of fact, most of us argued clearly that such imagery is simply contrary to the fundamental principles of the Republic.

The modest proposal most made was that framing electoral contests with the terminology of guns, suggesting “2nd Amendment remedies” in the event of ballot defeat and , yes, the placement of gun-sight targets on maps over the districts of political opponents was, at the very least, irresponsible. Rather than engage with her critics in a discussion of the implications of such tactics, Mrs Palin doubled down. In fact, “Don’t retreat, reload” became her catch phrase of the year. There is no way to count precisely the number of times she repeated it for the gleeful consumption of her loyalists, often with her trademark wink and a practiced, “you betcha.”

As everyone now knows, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), one of the 20 politicians targeted by Palin’s disturbing agit-prop, has actually been shot. The image has been “scrubbed” from her various web presences. Some of her supporters, however, continue to actually defend it with the flimsiest of excuses. Loyal Palinista and devoted employee Rebecca Mansour went so far as to repeat the claim in an interview yesterday that the gun sights weren’t actually gun sights at all: “We never ever, ever intended it to be gun sights.”

The Palin supporting interviewer, Tammy Bryce, chimed in, “it’s surveyor’s symbols.”

You can draw your own conclusions about Bryce and Mansour’s claims. In my opinion, they form one of the most vulgar instances of callous dishonesty I have ever heard. After all, Sarah has used every possible opportunity to romanticize and glorify not only guns, but shooting to kill. It is so fundamental a part of her calculated persona, that she recently attempted to score political points by using one to take the life of an animal on her (now cancelled) “reality” show.

My point here is not to explicitly blame Mrs. Palin for this insane act of terrible violence. Nor is my point to blame the poster. For the sake of argument, let’s say this act and her rhetoric are not directly related.

That doesn’t change a thing. The image is no more disgusting and un-American today than it was prior to the shooting. It is exactly the same. It was unforgivable then and it is reprehensible now.

We still have much to determine in the motivations of the assassin who took 6 lives yesterday and wounded 14 others, nearly killing Rep. Giffords. I, for one, kept my immediate reactions largely contained. Suffice to say, the eagerness to lay blame for this event at this time is territory that ought be tread carefully.

Nevertheless, as details continue to emerge about the shooter, Jared Loughner, two things are increasingly clear. The first is that the man is deeply sick and twisted. The second is that he very likely responded to an atmosphere created by the cynical rage-speak which has overwhelmed contemporary discourse. For this, in spite of many back-flipping reaches over the past 24 hours, there is no left-right equivalence. No matter how many inappropriate, fringe remarks the right can dig up and attribute to the left, there is no one using the language of murder on the progressive side who has been rewarded with multi-million dollar broadcasting contracts or a potential Presidential bid, in part, because of that rhetoric.

So. Let’s not blame Sarah for this tragedy. Let us view her through it’s prism. She owns it as much as anyone else who has worked to drag our country into the mud.

So now we wait. And we watch the spin.

The following is an excerpt from the full essay at

THE HAND THAT FEEDS YOU

“Let’s be clear, the early reports of Gov. Beshear’s public support of the park were controversial enough. The Governor’s office being used to promote so specific an interpretation of a major religion runs contrary not just to Jeffersonian tradition but to a simple understanding of being the servant to all of the state’s people. The fact that the project is now poised to be financially supported by the taxpayers of Kentucky during the national debate over the financial crisis and calls for fiscal restraint is abominable.

Kentucky is facing a 500 million shortfall and Gov. Beshear has told all state agencies to plan for a 4% budget cut. In the last year, the Republican dominated state legislature has made sweeping restrictions on state Medicaid recipients’ services which could lead to potentially dangerous early hospital discharges and has imposed furloughs and wage cuts on state workers. Over the past two years, Kentucky has cut aid to it’s local school districts as well as it’s public colleges and universities directly causing an average in-state tuition increase of 5.2%.

Even if the backer’s own projections on job creation prove to be any more accurate than their view of the miracle of creation itself, this is a bad investment. Think the numbers through. For all of the cherry picking by the right wing over the cost of the jobs created by the still divisive stimulus package, it would seem that a state with such obvious budget difficulties allocating roughly $45,000 in revenue offsets per hire for an army of “carnys” is rather extravagant.”