As agitprop goes, this little cartoon, Tax the Rich: An Animated Fairy Tale, from the California Federation of Teachers is quite good. I disagree with some of it. In particular, it greatly understates how much the middle class self-oppresses. I’m well aware of how the Tea Party was largely a marketing campaign from the rich. But there was lots of grassroots organizing that went along with it. There are still a lot of people who think that the financial crisis was caused by the government forcing Fannie Mae to give loans to poor people. And it isn’t just that Fox News has pushed this canard ad nauseam. It is that there are a lot of people who want to believe it.

The cartoon also implies that the rich are so much richer just because they game the tax system. If that were our only problem, there would be reason for much hope. Unfortunately, the rich are able to game just about every aspect of the government, so they are way ahead long before it gets to taxation. In fact, if we treated capital gains as regular income and raised the top marginal tax rate up to 70%, I think the rich would still be getting a large and unfair advantage from the government.

But watch the cartoon; it’s good. And it’s being attacked by Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson. So there’s that.

H/T The Daily Kos This Week in the War on Workers

Sheldon Adelson says, “I’m basically a social liberal.” You better believe it. The only thing that is surprising about this admission is that he thinks this will shock anyone.

Rich people understand better than anyone else that the only thing that matters in life is your own happiness. In fact, I would say that this and luck are 99% of what makes the rich rich. So Adelson is just voting for his own interests. Adelson supports gay rights even as he backs a party that is horribly against them. How can this be? Let’s imagine that Adelson was gay. What would marriage equality mean to him? Nothing. He is too rich and famous to be affected by any of the problems caused by lack of marriage equality. Ditto for reproductive rights.

That’s the thing about our country: social issues only matter if you’re poor. In many areas in the United States, abortion is already illegal in a practical sense. If you are poor. In most places in the United States, gay people have much bigger problems than not being able to get married. If you are poor. And almost nowhere do you have educational choices. If you are poor.

The problems associated with social issues really come down to economics. This is why rich assholes like Sheldon Adelson “support” liberal social policies even while they vote and pay for politicians who are against them. Social issues don’t affect Adelson or anyone he knows. And this is why my focus is on economic justice. Everything flows from it. And without it, no amount of liberal social policy will matter.

But it is logical to ask why Adelson is making a big deal of his social liberalism. It’s because he doesn’t want people to think he’s an asshole. He wants people to think of him as “independent” New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg—the conservative rich asshole who liberals just love. Neither man should get any kudos for their stands on social issues. In fact, we should hate them all that much more. They clearly understand the issues, but they don’t give a fuck about them. And that makes them hypocritical conservative rich assholes.

Yesterday, Charlie Crist made it official: he’s a Democrat. Earlier this year at the DNC, he said, “Half a century ago, Ronald Reagan, the man whose relentless optimism inspired me to enter politics, famously said that he didn’t leave the Democratic Party; the party left him. I can certainly relate.” So now we are supposed to think that he stood still. I’ve been inclined to accept this narrative in the past. Now I think the process works a little differently. Guys like Crist have just been going along to get along.

I could never be a politician. I’m just no good at the bullshit. I can compromise. In fact, I think I am very good at finding common ground with others. What I couldn’t take is all the bullshit within my own party. I couldn’t support the “continuous war” policies of my party. I couldn’t accept “spare change from the rich” economic policies. I couldn’t go along with the policies claiming to “get tough on crime by destroying the lives of drug users.” I’m not saying that this makes me better; we need people who go along to get along—as long as the going along doesn’t involve too much villainy.

Looking at Charlie Crist’s history, it is clear that there was a lot that he didn’t accept about the Republican platform. Let’s face it, it is harder to be a Republican than it is to be a Democrat. It requires almost unimaginable cognitive dissonance. Look at poor Rick Santorum. (Yes, him!) His impulses on economic matters are populist. I rather like him when he’s talking about the economy. But he suppresses all that for the sake of his hellscape dystopia of God’s kingdom on earth. And if he were elected, he would not govern as an economic progressive. He would go along to get along.

When Charlie Crist was a Republican, he was explicitly a pro-choice Republican. And yet, on his website, there was lots of anti-choice rhetoric. But as soon as he turned Independent, he removed all that anti-choice garbage. I don’t think he did this to pander. What we see now is the real Charlie Crist. He was just going along to get along.

The Democratic platform on economic issues is extremely conservative. The Republican platform, on the other hand, is medieval in as much as it is coherent at all. So it just makes sense for economic conservatives to move to the Democratic Party. The truth is that if the Tea Party really believed in economic liberty, they would have fit at least as well in the Democratic Party as the Republican Party. They would have supported Ron Paul rather than Rick Santorum in the Republican primary. They would have elected representatives who cared about economics more than abortion and birth control. But given who they are, they were right to act as they did. Just don’t call them economic conservatives.

So I’m perfectly happy to welcome Charlie Crist into the fold. But this is not because he’s changed or the Republican Party has changed. Who he is is who he’s been. He should have been in the Democratic Party back at the start 20 years ago. If he had been, he wouldn’t have had to go along quite so much to get along.

H/T The Reaction A.M. Headlines

Even by the standards of That Mitchell and Web Look, this is very strange. But funny:

Of course, it is from their earlier series, The Mitchell and Webb Situation.

I had a thought tonight about how Republicans see their position. The Republican focus is on ideology. It’s strange, but if you look closely, they are united in a weird kind of thinking that is based on the idea that how things are is almost perfect. From this we get the libertarian talk that keeps the economy stagnant and the Christian talk that keeps social power stagnant. I’m not sure that most Republicans realize this, but this is how you get a party that draws together a religion founded on a guy who didn’t like the rich with a religion that worships the rich.

Democrats have been ideological in the past, but they are a very practical group now. But even at their most ideological, Democrats always depended upon results. We could certainly quibble about the social policy, but when it comes to economics, there is no question: Democrats favor policies that work. There is no doubt in my mind that if Ted Kennedy had not gotten sick and died, we would have got a second stimulus and that the economy would be far better today. (It might even have been far better in 2010 and would have prevented the Republicans retaking the House and so many state legislatures.)

Earlier today, I saw Rand Paul saying that the Republicans should allow the Democrats to have their tax increase. He said that way, they would own it and when the economy goes to hell, the American people would know who to blame. But if Republicans really believed that, they would have done it before. They would have allowed the Democrats to dig their own grave. But they haven’t and they won’t.

The fact that Democratic policies work scares the hell out of Republicans. They know they can’t just let Democrats have their way because if they do, it will be a long time before they are back in power. So they stop the Democrats from doing anything—even things they would normally agree with. We’ve seen this for the last four years, and not just from politicians. Many conservative economists have made the argument against stimulus even as they had argued for it when Republicans were in power. And this is not a case of changing their minds. We know this because recently (when they thought Romney was going to win) they backtracked.

What’s more, every liberal I know hates conservative economic policy because it is bad for the country. But they take a certain amount of solace from political defeat knowing that before long the Republicans will screw up the economy and give it back to Democrats. This is the opposite of what educated conservatives worry about. And so they have no choice but to oppose everything Democratic administrations want to do.

Afterword

This all makes me wonder about something. If conservatives really do know that their policies don’t work as advertised, why don’t they change sides? I have a few thoughts. First, I think that conservatives see politics as nothing other than a power struggle. They want to keep their power. Second, they see success differently than the rest of society (and frankly the rest of Republican voters). Success is making the rich even richer, it is not making the people generally richer. Either way, I don’t know how they live with themselves.

If you really want to understand me (And why would you?) you would first need to understand that I have no idea who Christina Aguilera is. Well, that’s not exactly true. Based upon my research for this article, I have come to think that she is a singer. But I don’t care. I’m sure she’s either some American Idol screamer or Justin Bieber technological phenomenon. That is to say that I’m sure she is just another example of everything that is wrong with our culture. I’d be pleased if I were wrong and if I am, I’m sure I’ll get mail telling me that, “No! She’s great. She’s a modern fucking Janis Joplin.” But I doubt it.

Anyway, this morning I got this tweet:

ho. ly. shit. RT @davestopera: this is the alpha and the omega of google searches google.com/search?q=dying… (h/t @impaulgale)

— Ryan Broderick (@ryanhatesthis) December 7, 2012

So I clicked. The alpha and omega of Google searches? I’m a sucker for a good techno come on. And what I got was this:

If you can’t make it out, click on the image to see it in all its glory. But you don’t really have to. It is a Google image search of “dying grandparents” and pretty much all the results are pictures of a blond woman I have since learned in Christina Aguilera.

This all goes back to June when the Huffington Post reported, Christina Aguilera Snubs Dying Grandparents, Says Estranged Uncle. Apparently, she hates all of her family. I don’t know. I don’t care. But it does kind of sum up even the best search engines. A search for “dying parents” really shouldn’t bring up a bunch of pictures of a young singer. Oh well.

At least you got to see a detail of Samuel Richards’ Evangeline Discovering Her Affianced in the Hospital. See the whole thing on Wikipedia!

Here’s a question for you: am I wrong to say that companies that care only about profits, and not about employees, are assholes? Before you answer: no I am not. Companies that care only about profits, and not about employees, are assholes. This is at the core of my hatred of the existence of corporations. I think we should make them illegal. I realize this would be hugely disruptive, but unlike free trade agreements, getting rid of the corporation would have great long-term benefits.

Thus it is with Darden Restaurants. It is the corporation that owns Red Lobster and Olive Garden. Typical of the anti-human thinking of a corporation, it decided to look into the possibility of making all their employees full time so that they wouldn’t have to provide them with healthcare. All they would have had to do was contact the “people” at Walmart who are experts at keeping employees just below the number of hours they need to get healthcare.

This is typical of how corporations not only screw their employees, but also the government. Under Obamacare, those part-time Darden employees will still have to get insurance. And almost certainly they will not make enough to buy it themselves. Thus the government will pay for what (in our fucked up society) is an employer’s responsibility. So we all pay higher taxes, the people eating at Red Lobster get slightly lower prices, and the Darden owners make more money.

This is not free market capitalism!

There is good news, however. The word got out about Darden’s evil plan and there was a backlash against it. Sarah Kliff reported earlier this week, “Darden Restaurants, the company that owns Olive Garden and Red Lobster, revised earning projection downwards today.”

Yesterday, she reported on how it is hard for companies to do this kind of thing. If hundreds of chains did it, where would people go for their disappointing dining experiences? But I think there is something important here that she doesn’t acknowledge: companies will continue to work to get around the law, just not in a wholesale way.

And this is another problem with the twisted compromise that is Obamacare. By withholding one extra hour of work from an employee, a manager will be able to save a thousand bucks. And so managers everywhere will do it. It would have been best for employees and the businesses they work for to have had a single payer system. But of course, we couldn’t have that because there was one industry that would have been harmed. It is like reverse Christianity: we all suffer for the sins of the insurance industry.

The Young Turks is a hugely popular internet based news show. It is very good and I like to stay up on what they are talking about. In general, I find them very well informed on issues and their positions are fairly compatible with my own, even if they tend to be a tad more conservative. There are two people on the show who can rightly be called stars Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian.

Uygur is a barrel chested Turk who immigrated to the United States as a kid. He is the kind of guy who, if he were conservative, I would hate. He’s loud mouthed and angry and very, very male. And as it turns out, when he was in college, he was conservative. Somewhere along the line, he grew a brain. But let’s be clear: Uygur would be perfectly at home in the Republican Party of 1970. He is what I call an old Republican: a New Democrat.

He gets a lot of claims to the effect that he is a liberal extremist. This is due to two things. First, the radical departure of the Republican Party for la-la-land over the last 30 years. Second, he states his fairly liberal views loudly and with passion. For a conservative, this is SOP. When a liberal does it, he must be an extremist. Cenk Uygur is not an extremist.

Except in one way: his humor. Uygur has an extreme case of Unfunny Guy Likes to Make Up Groaners syndrome. You don’t have to watch much of The Young Turks to find him making a clearly planned pun at the end of a story. His colleagues duly groan and even tease him for this. And that, of course, is the humor of such puns: “guy makes bad joke” is a classic genre. No one gives him more grief than Ana Kasparian.

Whereas Uygur hosts the political part of the show, Kasparian is the host of the social part of the show—still with a political slant. For example, Uygur did a piece on Israel withholding tax revenue from the Palestinians over the UN statehood issue. Kasparian did a piece on the cop who gave the shoes to a homeless man and all the follow ups. Most of all, however, she complains about Uygur’s terrible puns.

Then yesterday, Ana Kasparian was presenting a story about John McAfee, the founder of the anti-virus company. He’s been avoiding the police since they’ve wanted to talk to him about the murder of his neighbor. (For the record, I doubt he did it; is it surprising that an anti-virus guy would be paranoid?) She covered the whole thing and then added, “I’m also happy that he didn’t have a heart attack or some kind of virus.” And she was every bit as pleased with herself as Cenk generally is.

It’s sad, really. But I recommend watching at least their YouTube Channel.

The jobs report was released this morning. The headline is good: 146,000 jobs were created and unemployment dropped to 7.7%. But you really can’t trust the headline. I start most mornings by reading Paul Krugman, but this morning, I went directly to Dean Baker. In a sense, Baker is the most important economic writer we have. He is a total buzz kill. So on the one hand, if there’s bad news hidden in the jobs report, he will know it. On the other hand, if he’s optimistic, it’s time to sell those government bonds and buy some real estate! (Or something. Don’t take investment advice from me or you’ll end with my portfolio: .)

Unfortunately, there is no word yet from Baker. So I went elsewhere. I knew WonkBlog would not let me down, and indeed, Dylan Matthews provides the usual competent overview of the numbers (Brad Plumer also has a good overview):

• 146,000 jobs created in November;
• Unemployment dropped to 7.7%;
• September-October jobs created revised down by 49,000 total;
• Labor force participation is generally stable at 63.6%;
• Job creation is all in the private sector, public sector losses.

This last bit of data is important. Check out this graph below from the BLS report. The red bars show net private sector jobs added or lost during a month. The blue bars show the same thing for public sector (i.e. government) jobs.

Notice that other than during the census in 2010, the government has been shedding jobs. And yet, to listen to Republican politicians or Fox News reporters, you would get the impression that the government has been on a hiring spree. This is why it is important to look at the data. But it raises an important question: how can the country have an honest debate about policy if one of the major parties is consistently dishonest?

To this data, Brad DeLong provides more details from the report. He notes that there are three ways to look at full employment. Compared to the employment peak of 1999, we are 6 percentage points below full employment. (Those were great days!) Compared to the computed economic potential in the mid-2000, we are 3.5 percentage points below full employment. Or now, due to the movement of the Beveridge curve[1], we are 2.5 percentage points below full employment. As DeLong notes, it doesn’t matter how you look at, we are well below where we should be.

But let us not be too gloomy. At least Obama was re-elected. With the unemployment rate improvement and the previous job numbers revised down, you can imagine what Republicans would be saying now if Romney had won, “Employers are feeling more comfortable about the future now that they know Romney will be president; that’s why they’re hiring!” This may seem like a silly thing to suggest, but in Romney’s 47% talk, he said exactly this. He claimed that the markets would rally based on nothing but the idea of his awesomeness:

So let’s be grateful that at least we won’t have to hear this kind of rubbish for the next 4 years.

[1] Leave it to Brad DeLong to offer up a concept like the Beveridge curve without providing even the smallest amount of condescension for the non-economists who read him. (This is a big part of why I no longer read him every day.) The Beveridge curve is a graph that plots unemployment versus the job vacancy rate. For example, right now there is high unemployment and a small vacancy rate. What is important is that the unemployment predicted by a given vacancy rate can be changed by a number of factors: long-term unemployment, labor force participation, skills mismatch (generally a conservative canard, but not always).

Increasingly, I have very fond thoughts about Ezra Klein. But he is still capable of driving me crazy! Today, he did so with, Jim DeMint and the Death of Think Tanks.

His basic argument is that Jim DeMint going to head the Heritage Foundation is indicative of some kind of trend. Specifically, it means that Washington think tanks are getting more politicized. That conclusion I accept, but the argument? No way. To suggest that the Heritage Foundation is something other than a political organization is madness.

Consider the Cato Institute. It has a hell of a lot better a claim to being a real think tank than Heritage. And yet, a few years back I heard an interview with whomever was the head of Cato. In it, he said that if some bit of their research indicated that a libertarian approach to government was bad, they would bury it. I still remember it because at that time I still thought that libertarians might be wrong but at least they were honest.

The Heritage Foundation was formed as a political organization by Joseph Coors. It is no think tank as we normally think of one. And reading Klein’s column, you can see that he agrees with this interpretation. But he still tries to make an argument that is as thin as can be. And he also practices a bit of false equivalence. He writes, “The politicization of Washington’s think tanks long predates DeMint.” But then the only non-conservative think tank he mentions is the Brookings Institution. He can’t think they are politicized. So what it seems he means is, “The politicization of Washington’s conservative think tanks long predates DeMint.” He just isn’t willing to come right out and say it.

I’m thinking of starting a weekly rundown of the best writing I find online, because a lot of it doesn’t get mentioned here because I have nothing to add. That is very much true of John Nichols at The Nation who manages to write brilliantly on the local and national level. This evening, he wrote an article that gave me a little bit of hope about Michigan, GOP, Koch Brothers Sneak Attack Guts Labor Rights in Michigan.

As you have likely heard, the Michigan senate managed to ram through a right-to-work bill and it is certain to be passed by the house and signed by Governor Rick Snyder. Unfortunately—and I think this is a big part of its power—most people are confused about what right-to-work means. It certainly sounds like a good thing; who could be against more rights?! But as with similarly Orwellian phraseology like the Clear Skies Act, it is bad. Nichols suggests the term “no-rights-at-work.”

Right-to-work laws limit rights. They stop companies from having contracts that dictate that all workers must be unionized. In effect, they deprive unions of most of their power. What’s more, since all the workers must be paid equitably, the union ends up negotiating and fighting for the rights of non-union workers who do not pay them dues. It is a way to destroy the last vestiges of unionization.

So what made me hopeful? First, there is the possibility of a court challenge. But it is hardly a sure thing. The main thing is that if the Democrats can get back control of the state’s government—and this is likely given all that the Republicans are doing to increase the ranks of the poor—this can all be changed. Eventually. Nichols ends by quoting UAW president Bob King, “This is a short-term victory for… the radical right wing. In the long-term there will be a victory for working families in Michigan.” I hope so.

Afterword

It bothers me a bit that Bob King refers to the “radical right wing.” It reminds me that many unions supported Ronald Reagan, who probably did more to destroy unions than any other single man in this country. And many police and firefighter unions still support Republicans. I understand that the Democratic Party has been a mixed bag. But that’s just it: they’ve been a mixed bag. There is nothing mixed about the bag of bullshit the Republicans have long offered to organized labor.