What Americans Would Have Lost If The Supreme Court Had Ruled Against Health Care Reform (ObamaCare)

What Americans Would Have Lost If The Supreme Court Had Ruled Against Health Care Reform (ObamaCare)

1) Access to health insurance for 30 million Americans and lower premiums. More than 30 million uninsured Americans will find coverage under the law. Middle-class families who buy health care coverage through the exchanges will be eligible for refundable and advanceable premium credits and cost-sharing subsidies to ensure that the coverage they have is affordable.

    2) The ability of businesses and individuals to purchase comprehensive coverage from a regulated marketplace. The law creates new marketplaces for individuals and small businesses to compare and purchase comprehensive coverage. Insurers will have to meet quality measures to ensure that Americans can access comprehensive coverage when they need it.

    3) Insurers’ inability to discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions. Beginning in 2014, insurers can no longer deny insurance to families or individuals with pre-existing conditions. Insurers are also prohibited from placing lifetime limits on the dollar value of coverage and rescinding insurers except in cases of fraud. Insurers are already prohibited from discriminating against children with pre-existing conditions.

    4) Tax credits for small businesses that offer insurance. Small employers that purchase health insurance for employees are already receiving tax credits to encourage them to continue providing coverage.

    5) Assistance for businesses that provide health benefits to early retirees.The law created a temporary reinsurance program for employers providing health insurance coverage to retirees over age 55 who are not eligible for Medicare, reimbursing employers or insurers for 80% of retiree claims. The program has offered at least $4.73 billion in reinsurance payments to more than 2,800 employers and other sponsors of retiree plans, with an average cumulative reimbursement per plan sponsor of approximately $189,700.

    6) Affordable health care for lower-income Americans. Obamacare extends Medicaid to individuals with incomes up to 138% of the federal poverty line, guaranteeing that the nation’ most vulnerable population has access to affordable, comprehensive coverage.

    7) Investments in women’s health. Obamacare prohibits insurers from charging women substantially more than men and requires insurers to offer preventive services — including contraception — at no additional cost.

    8) Young adults’ ability to stay on their parents’ health care plans. More than 3.1 million young people have already benefited from dependent coverage, which allows children up to age 26 to remain insured on their parents’ plans.

    9) Discounts for seniors on brand-name drugs. Pharmaceutical manufacturers are required to provide a 50% discount on prescriptions filled in the Medicare Part D coverage gap. Seniors have already saved $3.5 billion on prescription drug costs thanks to the Affordable Care Act provision.

    10) Temporary coverage for the sickest Americans. The law established temporary national high-risk pools that are providing health coverage to individuals with pre-existing medical conditions who cannot find insurance on the individual market. In 2014, they will be able to enroll in insurance through the exchanges. 67,482 individuals have already benefited from the program.

One of the crazy aspects to the opposition to the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) is that it was based on a conservative Republican plan from the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation and was implemented in Massachusetts by Mitt Romney. According to polls the only reason that the wacky right-wing conservatives do not like health care reform is because it has Obama's name on it. One could say shame on conservatives for their petty spitefulness, but you have to have a moral conscience to fell shame.

Mitt Romney outsourced jobs when he was at Bain. At which according to him he was a job creator. If by that he means he created jobs in Asia, he's right. Serial liar and king of conservatism and drug addict Rush Limbaugh Fabricates Wash. Post Fact Check To Cast Doubt On Romney's Outsourcing. Honor is apparently not a Republican value.


Traitors among us, Mississippi Republican Tea Party Chairman Calls For Open Rebellion Against Federal Government After Obamacare Ruling

Free markets run the world? 'Monopoly': Calling the Global Financial Sector What It Is

Free markets run the world? 'Monopoly': Calling the Global Financial Sector What It Is

New York Times columnists Protess and Scott report that Barclays Bank is paying some US$450 million to regulators in the US and UK to “resolve accusations” surrounding its manipulation of a key interest rate, the London Inter-Bank Offer Rate (Libor), during the first years of the ongoing global financial crisis.  According to the article, the Libor rate is used as a benchmark rate to price some US$350 trillion in financial products worldwide each year, from credit cards to derivatives and student loans.

The Financial Times reports that the investigation now spans 12 regulators—from the US to Europe and Japan—and 20 banks, including the multinational giants JP Morgan, Citigroup, Bank of America, UBS and Deutsche Bank. The general idea is that the big banks—so far only Barclays has admitted wrongdoing—misreported the rates at which they borrowed from other banks, influencing the LIBOR rate so as to profit the banks. Barclays has also admitted to allowing consultations between various bank departments, and between itself and other banks, before reporting its rates to Libor, an illicit practice.

In most accounts, blame for such unsavory practices are spread around from bank managers and employees seeking higher profits and lower losses, to regulators who were asleep at the wheel, to the secretive and opaque process by which the Libor rate is set.  Yet, behind the regulators and the greedy bankers, lies the ‘m’ word that no one dares utter in the business presses—monopoly. The global financial system is increasingly run by a few big firms operating in a highly uncompetitive market place and wielding enormous power, often behind a veil of secrecy, (intentional) regulatory blindness, and technical complexity.

As any introductory economic textbook shows, imperfectly competitive marketplaces (e.g. monopoly, monopsony, oligopoly and oligopsony) are defined by the ability of a few firms, or only one firm, to manipulate prices and other exchange terms.  As markets concentrate, and free competition is replaced by collusion and superprofits, firms gain the market power to influence market rules and prices in their own interest.  Indeed, any college freshman in an traditional economics department could foresee that growing concentration in global credit markets would result in price distortions, to the detriment of consumers and other less powerful actors.  And, some might also be able to cite a few examples of the manner in which market power confers political power, another dangerous dimension of monopolistic market structures frequently noted in the Marxist tradition, among others (think, say, of Goldman Sach’s ability to staff the US Treasury and Federal Reserve).

Reintroducing the concept of monopoly into public discourse is critical for seeing patterns of injustice in the global economy, continuities that are otherwise obscured by national, geographic, partisan and sectoral distinctions. And not just in the financial context.  The word “monopoly” helps to understand why it is that Greek citizens suffer austerity even as financial institutions get rescue packages, just as it helps us to understand how it is that Starbucks could rake in record profits from its coffee sales even as world prices fell to record lows during 1998-2002.  The word “monopoly” helps us to see why our pigs and cattle are raised in confinement with antibiotics and without any trace of humanity, just as it helps us to see why small farmers in India are killing themselves by the tens of thousands.  The word “monopoly” untangles the Mexican tortilla crisis, just as it unravels the overthrow of Arbenz in Guatemala and Mossadeq in Iran.  The word “monopoly” helps us to understand why it is that Presidents Bush and Obama have such a similar economic agenda, despite their playing for two different political teams.  And, just today, the word “monopoly” helped me to understand how it is that it is illegal for me to collect rainwater in my backyard here in Denver.

Justice demands that we call things what they are—indeed, we must name the system to change it.  In this context, the “m” word allows clarity of thought and analysis in the face of often overwhelming economic complexity. The “m” word allows us to strip the economy of its competitive veil, allows us to de-robe the trusts and combines of the 21st century. The “m” word prevents us from lapsing into the view that all of these injustices—from antibiotic resistance to farmer suicide to coup d’etat—must be treated separately by different movements and different peoples.  The “m” word allows us to see the architecture of the global economy for what it is—a playground for the new robber barons, a collection of corporate fiefdoms, an integrated system of monopolies, with all of the typical injustices that such arrangements usher forth.

Sasha Breger Bush is a Lecturer at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver.  Her new book, Derivatives and Development: A Political Economy of Global Finance, Farming and Poverty, is due out this month from Palgrave Macmillan.

It is laughable to hear conservative Republican twits say the U.S. is becoming Marxist. there is a kind of socialism at work, some would call it corporate socialism. Big banks and corporations have all the power and workers have less and less. Which is mostly what Republican finger pointing is about. They demonize the critics of our bloated plutocracy so they can prevent change to a worker centered and humane competitive capitalism. Mitt Romney is their champion because he promises to shift the balance even more towards billionaires being our modern lords and masters, a conservative Republican dream come true.

Will Fox Report On Fortune Bombshell That Fast And Furious Didn't Involve Gunwalking? Call or e-mail your congressional rep and ask them to censure Darrell Issa (R-Ca) for using his political power to drum up a phony scandal that has cost the tax payers millions.

Suck it conservatives: BREAKING: Supreme Court Upholds Individual Mandate As A Tax

Based on The Number of Shameless Lies, Mitt Romney May Be The Most Immoral Presidential Candidate In Modern History

Based on The Number of Shameless Lies, Mitt Romney May Be The Most Immoral Presidential Candidate In Modern History

Not everything Mitt Romney says is on the level.

For those who are watching the 2012 presidential race closely, Mitt Romney's penchant for falsehoods is hard to miss. Michael Cohen summarized the issue nicely this week in a piece for The Guardian:

    Granted, presidential candidates are no strangers to disingenuous or overstated claims; it's pretty much endemic to the business. But Romney is doing something very different and far more pernicious. Quite simply, the United States has never been witness to a presidential candidate, in modern American history, who lies as frequently, as flagrantly and as brazenly as Mitt Romney.

    Now, in general, those of us in the pundit class are really not supposed to accuse politicians of lying -- they mislead, they embellish, they mischaracterize, etc. Indeed, there is natural tendency for nominally objective reporters, in particular, to stay away from loaded terms such as lying. Which is precisely why Romney's repeated lies are so effective. In fact, lying is really the only appropriate word to use here, because, well, Romney lies a lot.

If there are any lingering doubts about the accuracy of this observation, consider the 23rd installment of my weekly series, chronicling Mitt's mendacity. (I've been at this for several months now, and this week's list is the longest to date.)

1. In an interview with Fox News' Sean Hannity, Romney claimed it's fiscally responsible to eliminate the entirety of the Affordable Care Act: "It saves $100 billion a year to get rid of it."

That's the opposite of the truth. According to the CBO and other nonpartisan budget estimates, killing the law would make the deficit go up, not down, and would cost, not save, the country hundreds of billions of dollars in the coming years.

2. In the same interview, Romney said, "I think a lot of people forgetting is there is only one president in history that's cut Medicare by $500 billion and that is President Obama."

Romney says this a lot. He's not telling the truth.

3. Romney also said, "I see people holding up signs, 'Don't touch my Medicare.' It's like, hey, I'm not touching your Medicare."

Romney endorsed Paul Ryan's House Republican Budget plan, which ends the Medicare program and replaces it with a private voucher scheme.

4. In the same interview, Romney said President Obama has "never had the experience of working in the private sector."

Actually, that's not true. Obama worked at a private-sector law firm before entering public service.

5. Romney also told Hannity Obama went on "an apology tour" in his first year.

As Romney surely knows by now, he's lying.

6. Romney, trying to talk about foreign policy, said Syria is Iran's "route to the sea."

Iran doesn't share a border with Syria, and Iran already borders two bodies of water.

7. At a campaign event in Stratham, New Hampshire, Romney claimed, "Bill Clinton and so many other mainstream Democrats are revolting against the backward direction President Obama is taking his party and our country."

In reality, Bill Clinton supports the president's re-election and recently said a Romney presidency would be "calamitous for our country and the world."

8. At an event in Cornwall, Pennsylvania, shared an anecdote about a local optometrist who was forced to fill out a "33-page" change-of-address form -- several times -- at the post office.

There is no such change-of-address form.

9. At the same event, Romney said Obama is "taking away" scholarships and charter schools for "kids in Washington, D.C."

This has become a line in Romney's stump speech, but it isn't in any way true.

10. Romney also claimed, "This president has put together almost as much public debt as all the prior presidents combined."

That's a lie.

11. Romney went on to say, "It's immoral in my view for my generation to pass on to these kids the burden of our generation. I think it's wrong. It's got to stop. And if I'm president of the United States I will get us on track to have a balanced budget."

That's plainly false. Romney says his plan "can't be scored," but independent budget analysts have found his agenda would make the deficit bigger, not smaller, and add trillions to the national debt.

12. At a campaign stop in Weatherly, Pennsylvania, Romney said the president's "trillion- dollar stimulus" failed to "create jobs."

That's the opposite of the truth.

13. At the same event, Romney said about Obama, "He was told that one small business was having a hard time dealing with Obamacare. He said he hadn't heard that."

That's not what happened. In fact, the small business wasn't having a hard time dealing with Obamacare, and was hurt by policies Romney wants to pursue.

14. Romney went on say, "I was in Las Vegas and met a woman who was worried. She has a business renting furniture to casinos and to conventioners that come to Las Vegas. And when the president said, don't bother coming to Las Vegas for your company meetings a few years ago, her business dove."

Obama actually said, in reference to Wall Street recklessness, "You are not going to be able to give out these big bonuses until you pay taxpayers back. You can't get corporate jets. You can't go take a trip to Las Vegas or go down to the Super Bowl on the taxpayers' dime. There's got to be some accountability and some responsibility." To blame the failure of some random business in Nevada on this is ridiculous.

15. Romney added, "If we stay on the road we're on, we're going to become like Europe.... I don't believe Europe works in Europe. I don't want it here."

The irony is, Europe is trying to grow through austerity, just as Romney intends to do here. He's lying in a self-refuting sort of way.

16. In his "Face the Nation" interview, Romney said of Obama's new immigration policy, "If he really wanted to make a solution that dealt with these kids or with the illegal immigration in America, then this is something he would have taken up in his first three and a half years, not in his last few months."

That's remarkably misleading. Obama has pushed for the DREAM Act for years, and would have signed it into law in 2010 had it not been blocked by a Republican filibuster.

17. In the same interview, Romney said about health care, "I will continue to describe the plan that I would provide, which is, number one, to make sure that people don't have to worry about losing their insurance if they have a preexisting condition, and change jobs."

This is the kind of answer that's clearly intended to deceive. Under Romney's approach, millions of people with pre-existing conditions would be denied coverage -- and occasionally his campaign even admits it.

18. Also on health care, Romney said the president "jammed through a bill" and "didn't really try and work for a Republican vote."

This is laughably untrue. Obama worked for months to find someone -- anyone -- in the Republican Party who would work with him in good faith, including delaying progress while the "Gang of Six" engaged in pointless talks.

19. Romney also said, "I'm not looking for a tax cut for the very wealthiest."

Either Romney hasn't read his own tax plan, or he's lying.

20. Appearing via video at the "Faith and Freedom Coalition" annual event, Romney applauded the far-right group's leader: "Ralph Reed has been a real champion in fighting for the fundamental values that have made America the nation that it is."

You've got to be kidding me.

21. In the same speech, Romney said, "When you put in place a bill like Obamacare, you attack the freedom of people to make a choice about their own insurance and what kind of coverage they want to have."

That's not true. Under the Affordable Care Act, consumers would choose from competing plans as part of a health care exchange. Romney knows this -- it was part of his own plan.

22. Romney went on to say, "[M]edian income in this nation has dropped by 10 percent over the last four years."

That only makes sense if we count Obama's first year in office, which relies on a standard Romney believes is fundamentally unfair.

23. He also argued, "Government at all levels is about 37 percent of the economy today -- 37 percent. And if Obamacare were allowed to stand, government would control about half of the economy of America."

That's demonstrably ridiculous.

24. At the same event, Romney said that Obama "insists" that "Israel return to the '67 borders -- indefensible borders."

He's lying.

25. At a campaign event in Brunswick, Ohio, Romney claimed that Obama said "if you let him borrow all that money, he'd keep unemployment below 8 percent."

As Romney surely knows by now, that's simply not true.

26. At the same event, Romney said under Obamacare, we'll get "a healthcare system run by the government."

There is no universe in which this is true.

27. At a campaign event in Janesville, Wisconsin, Romney argued, "[T]he path we're on, spending $1 trillion more every year than we take in, is leading us to Greece."

That's painfully untrue.

28. At a campaign event in Holland, Michigan, Romney claimed that, as a result of the Dodd-Frank reforms, "small banks and community banks are finding it harder and harder to make loans to small businesses."

According to community banks, this is false. These banks have actually gotten stronger after Dodd-Frank, and the president of Independent Community Bankers Of America recently said, "I am sick of Wall Street using community banks as their shills to scare community bankers into stampeding Congress into undoing provisions of law that finally attempt to deal with too big to fail and Wall Street overreach."

29. In a speech to the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials yesterday, Romney argued that President Obama "has not completed a single new trade agreement with Latin America."

Romney does realize that Panama is part of Latin America, right?

30. Romney went on to argue, "Unfortunately, despite his promises, President Obama has failed to address immigration reform."

Actually, Obama has addressed it quite a bit, taking executive action where the law allows, and pushing Congress to pursue comprehensive reform based on a bipartisan plan he presented last year.

Mitt Romney should not be allowed near the White House, he should be in a psychiatric hospital under medication and having regular therapy sessions. The other possibility is that Romney is as venal and malicious as a person can be. And because he is so wealthy he can get away with being radical, anti-middle-class, anti-American worker agenda; he is a crony capitalist who believes in government by and for the elite.

One Thing Mitt Romney and Republicans Need to Learn; Morality is a Value

One Thing Mitt Romney and Republicans Need to Learn; Morality is a Value

The Washington Post has a blockbuster, must-read story today detailing how Mitt Romney and Bain Capital were “pioneers in the practice of shipping work from the United States” to countries like India, China, and elsewhere.

ThinkProgress’ Pat Garofalo gets to the heart of it:

    Bain “invested in a series of firms that specialized in relocating jobs done by American workers to new facilities in low-wage countries like China and India.”

    In one example, Bain was the largest shareholder in a company called Modus Media, which “specialized in helping companies outsource their manufacturing“:

        Modus Media told the SEC it was performing outsource packaging and hardware assembly for IBM, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard Co. and Dell Computer Corp. The filing disclosed that Modus had operations on four continents, including Asian facilities in Singapore, Taiwan, China and South Korea, and European facilities in Ireland and France, and a center in Australia.[...]

        According to a news release issued by Modus Media in 1997, its expansion of outsourcing services took place in close consultation with Bain. Terry Leahy, Modus’s chairman and chief executive, was quoted in the release as saying he would be “working closely with Bain on strategic expansion.”.

    Other companies that Bain invested in sent jobs all over the world, including to Ireland and Mexico, while Romney has tried to claim that Bain was all about creating jobs and turning around American companies that otherwise would have gone under.

    As one of Romney’s former partners put it,”I never thought of what I do for a living as job creation…The primary goal of private equity is to create wealth for your investors.” And that’s what Bain did, even if it meant helping companies move operations to the same country Romney now blasts for stealing American jobs.

While the Romney campaign declined to comment for the article, they offered a laughable response today: outsourcing is different than offshoring. In other words, they didn’t dispute one iota of the substance of the story, but instead wanted to split hairs over semantics.

WHY IT MATTERS: While it’s troubling that Mitt Romney amassed a quarter-billion dollar fortune by bankrupting companies, laying off workers, and sending jobs overseas, where his policies would take America is of even greater concern.

Not only did Romney personally profit from the outsourcing and offshoring of American jobs, he has signed a pledge to a Washington lobbyist to protect tax breaks for companies who ship American jobs overseas. Mitt Romney also wants to encourage companies to dodge taxes by simply getting rid of taxes on foreign profits altogether. And he has also eagerly embraced the House Republican budget plan that also protects tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas and also abolishes corporate taxes on foreign profits — many of which are “foreign” only because of accounting tricks and other gimmicks.

By contrast, President Obama wants to end tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas and instead use the money to reward companies who bring jobs back to America. The president also wants to make sure that companies pay their fair share by instituting a global minimum tax to make sure they don’t use tricks and gimmicks to avoid paying what they owe.
Evening Brief: Important Stories That You May Have Missed

A Romney campaign co-chair said that Romney would “rescind” the president’s new immigration policy if he’s elected.

The Montana Republican Party bankrolled an ad attacking the Republican budget because it hurts Medicare.

Why the revelations about Romney’s career as an outsourcer really matter.

Romney has been good at reaping profits for the millionaire elite who invested with Bain. If that is the end all of what constitutes values and love of country, than Mitt is your man. If making a living is a value than Mitt is working against you - and that means most Americans. he even sheltered some of his money is an offshore bank account when taxes in the USA are at their lowest since the 1950s. That is hardly the way a true patriot acts. 

New video shows Scott Brown(R-MA) spoke of meeting with ‘kings and queens’ five times. Brown denies he has said he has meet with kings and queens even though the video is clear. Perhaps brown would be better off and certainly the American people would be better off if this he retired to a sanitarium.

This is what happens when you give a moronic Anti-American lunatic a cable show, Bill O'Reilly Tries To Grasp Complex Argument From Melissa Harris-Perry, Fails

The U.S. Does Not Practice Capitalism As Much as Theft From Workers

The U.S. Does Not Practice Capitalism As Much as Theft From Workers - Capitalism and the Mad Uncle in the Attic

Listen.  Can you hear the Mad Uncle in the attic? His muffled shriekings are getting louder as the myths, deceptions and delusions we’ve been living on evaporate one by one in the face of reality.

Can you feel that sickening thrill as we poise atop this Sisyphean peak we call capitalism, right before the inevitable, nauseating plunge back down into reality?

Can you smell the stench from the soon-to-fail Rio plus 20 meeting as we con ourselves into believing we can snatch a bit more time at the peak if only we could steal yet more of our children’s children’s children’s birthright?

Ah, but we – plutocrats and people alike -- all beg, can’t we keep this damned Uncle locked up for just a little more time.  Maybe until this election is over.  Or until we’ve extracted a little more money from a fossil-fueled economy based on greed and exploitation. Or until … oh, I don’t know … until we’ve bled the last iota of money from the 99%?  Or at least until … I get mine?

Can’t we pretend for just one more generation that capitalism – pure, unconstrained capitalism, the kind Reagan promised us would bring morning to America – isn’t instead bringing mourning to America, and to the world?

Can’t we just pretend, for one more generation, that the whole infinite growth on a finite world thing isn’t just a giant, tragic Ponzi Scheme designed to sell out the future?

Can’t we pass this problem onto them?

Can’t we use buzz words and sound bites to drown out the lunatic?  Words like socialist or redistribution or – most dreaded of all – communism.  Can’t we keep pretending that capitalism is the necessary handmaiden of Democracy, the only path to prosperity, our only source of happiness?

No. We can’t.  Because deep down inside, in places we don’t like to visit, we know the Mad Uncle is right.

What we’re doing now isn’t making us all rich.  It’s impoverishing us.

Ultimately, all wealth comes from natural capital.  Things like fertile soils; viable forests; intact gene pools; abundant minerals; clean water and living oceans; sustainable fish stocks; flourishing ecosystems; a stable, life-sustaining climate.  We are liquidating these essential sources of wealth as if they were so much junk offered for pennies on the dollar at a desperate garage sale.

Our current version of capitalism is good at generating more currency, not greater wealth. And we forget that currency is merely a surrogate for things of real value, with no tangible value in and of itself.

And even the currency isn’t being distributed equally.  It’s being siphoned off by the richest and most powerful in a spiral of inequity.

It isn't making us happy, it's enslaving us to a life spent pursuing more and more stuff we don’t need for reasons we don’t understand.  Bigger; more; faster becomes biggest; most; fastest.  But easy, easier, easiest becomes fatter, sicker weaker.

It isn’t making us free, it’s creating a tyranny of the corporations and plutocrats. They weaken government in the name of freedom, only to turn us into indentured servants to a system that's designed to take from the poor and middle class and give to the uber rich, even as it liquidates Earth’s treasures.

But the real tragedy isn’t our own alienation or our economic and spiritual impoverishment.   It is the diminished legacy we leave the rest of humanity and indeed, the rest of the biosphere.

It’s our willingness to consume the future in an orgy of gluttony, drowning out the Mad Uncle’s protests with the noise of our own slurping, chewing, smacking, munching, crunching as we inhale our children’s birthright.

Hyperbole?

Not really.  Every living system is in decline, and the rate is accelerating.

In the case of climate change we are at the threshold of igniting feedbacks that will usher in an inevitable and catastrophic set of changes that will make life difficult in some areas and impossible in others.

It’s time to admit that the Mad Uncle is right.  Pure, unconstrained capitalism is the problem, not the solution.

What, then, are we to do?

There are alternatives.  We could tie currency to sustainable eco-systems.  Instead of a gold standard we could have a green standard.  Thus, destruction of a nation’s stock of natural capital would devalue its currency, and make it poorer.

We could adopt systems of production and ownership such as Co-ops that emphasized cooperation, equitable sharing of revenue and stewardship of our natural resources. It’s not pie-in-the sky, to consider this. Cooperatives already produce more than $1 trillion in assets, enough to make them equivalent to the 10th largest economy in the world.

Buying and selling stuff is part, but only one of the aspects of freedom. Conservatives seem to aim - on the surface anyway - for some pure capitalism where there are no regulations/no restraints on what has become criminal behavior. This is one they consider the 2012 elections so important. Demographics are changing - and not in favor the proto-fascism practiced by Republicans. They see this as their last chance to put on the power in the hands of the wealthy elite. It is astonishing that at least some working class Americans are happy to help them with their sick twisted agenda.

Please write to the Fox News Anti-American Propaganda channel and ask Monica Crowly to start taking her meds. She cannot tell reality from her fetid paranoia - Fox's Monica Crowley: "Kooks" In Democratic Party Have Taken U.S. "On A Socialist Joyride, Starting With" Obama. The fact is M's Crowly the object of so much Republican idol worship- Ronald Reagan - was more liberal than Obama.

Republican Congressional Candidate Wants To Impeach Obama For ‘Giving Away’ Seven Arctic Islands

Wes Riddle, a Republican tea party activist locked in a run-off with fellow GOPer Roger Williams in Texas’ 25th congressional district, is campaigning on a conspiracy theory even more bizarre than the fantasy that the United Nations and George Soros are conspiring to eliminate the game of golf.

Riddle has promised to begin the impeachment process against President Obama the day he enters Congress — seemingly implying that he believes Obama will be reelected — because of a boundary treaty that was ratified by the Senate in 1991. Obama was 30 years old at the time and just finishing up law school.

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram has the details:

    Riddle, a retired Army officer from Gatesville, wants to impeach Obama for “giving away” seven Arctic Ocean and Bering Sea islands near Siberia to Russia.

    (Yes, even though those islands were ceded in 1991 under President George H.W. Bush.)

Riddle also wants to impeach Obama, according to the paper, because of “President Obama’s abuse of power and blatant disregard to the Constitution.”

This paranoid fantasy appears to have been spawned by Tea Party favorite Joe Miller. According to his World Net Daily piece, the Obama administration gave away “seven strategic, resource-laden Alaskan islands.” Miller was apoplectic: “We won the Cold War and should start acting like it.”

Though FactCheck.org has thoroughly debunked this conspiracy theory, reality hasn’t stopped Riddle from using it as a rationale for his goal of impeaching Obama.

Riddle has to prove to the other anti-American conservative wackos that he is as deranged as they are so they'll vote for him. Whether what he says is true or not has nothing to do with it. Making mentally deranged claims is the way nutcan Republicans signal to each other they belong to the same tribe of knuckle dragging morons. 

Nah We Don't Need Regulations - $29.5 Billion in Overdraft Fees? How the Big Banks Are Still Screwing Over America

Nah We Don't Need Regulations - $29.5 Billion in Overdraft Fees? How the Big Banks Are Still Screwing Over America

Remember when America’s big banks destroyed our economy, and then got bailed out by the government to the tune of trillions of dollars? And remember how, in the wake of that disaster, the government passed some important but relatively modest regulations to keep the banks from fleecing consumers – the very people whose taxpayer dollars saved the banks from ruin – quite as badly as they had been in the past? Well, it turns out that after all of that, banks are still doing wrong by Americans by quietly ratcheting up fees and not being forthright about their policies.

A new report from the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Safe Checking in the Electronic Age Project finds that, despite new rules meant to keep banks from increasing fees on consumers, banks that offer consumer checking accounts have increased fees in some cases, engaged in hidden-fee trickery and pushed high-cost, low-benefit services on customers.

The nerve.

The report looked at the 12 biggest banks in the country based on deposits, as well as the biggest credit unions, and found their practices and transparency to be lacking. One of the biggest ongoing problems is overdraft fees, those pesky $35-ish charges you get when you accidentally take out more cash than you have in your account. Pretty much everyone, even the most diligent of checkbook balancers, has had at least one overdraft fee experience. In the worst cases, it’s possible to rack up hundreds of dollars in overdraft fees without realizing it, even if you checked your account balance before you left the house, turning a morning of running small errands into one hell of an expensive shopping trip. (That $1.99 roll of toilet paper you bought? Suddenly it costs $36.99.) As with many of these penalties, it is often the people who have little or no wiggle room in their budgets who are hit hardest with the fees.

Consumer advocates have long targeted overdraft fees as an unfair practice, and new rules passed over the last few years were meant to keep banks from imposing quite so many overdraft fees on so many customers. Under guidelines passed in 2010, banks must give customers the right to opt in to so-called "overdraft protection" programs, meaning that unless you give your bank explicit permission, the bank must deny debit card purchases you try to make that exceed the amount of money you have in your account. The mild embarrassment of being rejected at the cash register in exchange for knowing you won’t accidentally spend more money than you'd planned, seemed, and seems, like a good deal.

Unfortunately, the banks found sneaky ways to keep increasing fees while technically adhering to these rules. For instance, although the opt-in programs are in place and the median overdraft fee has remained the same ($35), related fees, like the median charge imposed for automatically transferring money from another account in case of an overdraft, have increased (from $10 to $12). Likewise, the median fee for an “extended overdraft,” one that isn’t rectified within a certain number of days, went up, from $25 to $33.

About those “extended overdraft” fees: consumer advocates have noted that they are not unlike shady payday loans that charge consumers a tremendous amount of interest to get some needed cash in the short term. The Consumer Federation of America recently compared the two practices, and came up with some disturbing findings:

    As it has before, the Consumer Federation reported the cost at each bank of a $100 overdraft repaid two weeks later as if it were a short-term loan. It said the best deal, at Citibank, was equivalent to a loan with an annual percentage rate of 884 percent. Some banks, including PNC and RBS Citizens, charge more than 2,000 percent.

Another thing: the banks examined in the Pew report have continued to reserve the right to process withdrawals by dollar amount, rather than chronologically. This practice “maximizes the number of times an account goes negative, thus increasing overdraft fees” – and the banks can choose to reorder transactions whenever they want, without telling their customers.

You know when we will no longer need good regulation and rigorous enforcement? The day corporations start having a sense of morality. Did someone tell bank executives that when they die they get to take all their ill gotten loot with them. They act as though that were true. They seem to figure that one should live this live as greedy bastards so they'll be rewarded in the next. Just like radical conservative Republicans in Congress, presidential candidate Mitt Romney promises to fight regulation and its enforcement as much as possible. Because like most conservatives he thinks being evil is the new morality.

‘Joe the Plumber’ links Holocaust with gun control. Conservatives continue to have a stunningly moronic and deeply insulting understanding of history.

The new face of “Democrats are the real racists!” - The National Review's lame attempt at revisionist political history. This is why the political labels should really be the Right-wing Conservative Party and The Moderate or Liberal Party. back in the 1950s and 1960s there used to be conservatives and liberals in the Republican Party and The Democratic Party. As political realignments took place all the racists, homophobes, weirdos, freaks, Bible thumbing hypocrites and misogynists moved into the Republican Party and all the reasonable adults became Democrats.

Media Bias - Is The Media Pushing For Mitt Romney

Media Bias - Is The Media Pushing For Mitt Romney

Not once in the past twelve months has President Obama logged a seven-day stretch where his positive press coverage outweighed the negative, according to Pew Research analysis. And based on recent media trends, that streak is in no danger of being broken as the Beltway press continues to pile on the Democratic president with routinely negative and increasingly misleading coverage, while at the same time giving his Republican rival a pass.

Whether it's in response to the right wing's incessant whining about unfair campaign coverage, or the product of the media's innate desire to create a close, competitive (and marketable) presidential contest to market, the resulting  storyline is clear:  Obama's faltering!

From a late-May Politico campaign analysis piece ("Obama Stumbles Out of the Gate") that read like it had been cribbed from a Karl Rove column the previous week ("Obama's Campaign Is Off to a Rocky Start"),  to the recent congestion of sound-alike refrains, the "liberal media's" narrative has become set in stone and conservatives must be pleased since it echoes their own anti-Obama message.

There's nothing wrong with chronicling the ups and downs of campaigns. And nobody's suggesting the Obama re-election run hasn't had stumbles. All of them do. (Although note, Obama's Gallup approval rating has remained constant in the high-40s for a few months now, and even climbed to 50 percent last week.) But the feverish, one-sided coverage in recent weeks signals that a clear, GOP-leaning script  has been adopted by the Beltway media.  And yes, it makes a mockery out of the tired chant of a left-wing newsroom bias.

No surprisingly, the current wave of coverage is cresting on some shoddy journalism. (See fabricated oral sex jokes and botched Bill Clinton reporting.) Just look at the remarkably lazy and dishonest handling of Obama's comment about private sector job growth being "fine." The coverage represents a sterling example of how the press has had its thumb on the scale this spring.

The Obama quote:

    The truth of the matter is that, as I've said, we've created 4.3 million jobs over the last 27 months, over 800,000 just this year alone. The private sector is doing fine. Where we're seeing weaknesses in our economy have to do with state and local government.

As Slates's David Weigel noted, "This isn't even particularly clumsy phrasing." That's why CNN media critic Howard Kurtz stressed there wasn't "a journalist in the country" who heard Obama's "fine" comment and didn't know exactly what he was talking about. That's because Obama explained exactly what he was talking about at the time; job growth.

Yet reporters rushed out ahead of Republicans and seized on the Obama phrase and announced that "fine"  (when ripped out of context) was going to be a problem for the White House and a "gift" for Romney. But since when are campaign reporters supposed to act as opposition research scouts for the GOP, tipping them off to potentially embarrassing comments by Democrats? Aren't they supposed to report on and fact-check GOP attacks, not initiate them?

One week removed from the kerfuffle and the press has stopped making even the slightest attempt to report the "fine" comment in the context it was used. Instead, the press now routinely uses the truncated version of the quote circulated by the Romney campaign. Here's the Wall Street Journal doing it, and here's the Washington Post doing it twice on two days. The examples are boundless. It's now a Beltway conventional wisdom that Obama announced unequivocally that the private sector is doing  "fine."

He did not.

Note that that same day, June 6, while responding to Obama's "fine" comment about public-sector job losses, Romney mocked the president, claiming "he wants to add more to government." Said Romney: "He says we need more firemen, more policemen, more teachers. Did he not get the message in Wisconsin? The American people did. It's time for us to cut back on government and help the American people."

A presidential candidate suggesting more first responders and schoolteachers are a bad thing? Doesn't that qualify as a buzz-worthy gaffe?

Apparently not.

Between June 8 and June 13, a search on TVeyes.com for on-air discussions that include the key words "Obama private sector" produced nearly 260 matches on the three all-news cable channels, plus ABC, CBS and NBC. A  search over that same time period for "Romney firefighters" produced less than half the mentions; 120. (Half of those references appeared on MSNBC.)

Obama saying private sector job growth is "fine" became a very, very big news story, in part because excited journalists announced it would become a very big news story once Republicans spun it. By contrast, Romney saying the country doesn't need more cops and firefighters and teachers was mostly greeted with a muted response on TV. 

Romney, who made his money by using complex leverage buyouts of corporations - where he paid his company a guaranteed profits regardless of how well he did( Romney is said to be worth over $225 million) - once joked that he related to average folks because he was "unemployed" too. He and his wife had the gull to claim what a rough start they had it life - if starting out half way up the ladder before everyone else is a rough start. Romney is so clueless and out of touch with the average American he cannot even fathom how out of touch he is.

Republicans, Immigration, Presidential Executive Orders and Hypocrisy


Someone might want to throw a net over Taliban Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Since when has America allowed criminals to run law enforcement agencies.

Dark Ages Redux: American Politics and the End of the Enlightenment. Conservatives are pushing America back to the Dark Age.

This Week's Assault on Freedom: Mitt Romney Has a Deep Sense of Morality - Like Letting His Friends Buy Him The Presidency

This Week's Assault on Freedom: Mitt Romney Has a Deep Sense of Morality - Like Letting His Friends Buy Him The Presidency

Though he has been one of Mitt Romney’s most visible supporters, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) took aim yesterday at both Romney’s Super PAC and one Romney’s most controversial talking points. In an interview on PBS’s NewsHour, McCain told Judy Woodruff that because casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson makes a huge portion of his profits from a casino in Macau, his massive spending in support of Mitt Romney and other right-wing candidates is a form of foreign money influencing American elections:

...Romney, of course, said in August that “corporations are people, my friend,” a claim that he and his campaign surrogates have vigorously defended since.

Adelson gave $10 million to the pro-Romney Restore Our Future Super PAC this week — after giving millions more to fund a pro-Newt Gingrich Super PAC’s attacks on Romney during the GOP primaries. According to Forbes, Adelson and his wife are willing to spend a “limitless” amount in order to defeat President Obama.

Though it is illegal for non-citizens to spend any money to influence U.S. selections directly, the Supreme Court’s 5-4 Citizens United ruling left the door wide open for the American employees of American subsidiaries of foreign owned corporations — and even sovereign wealth funds — to spend millions or billions from their corporate treasuries on “independent” expenditures.

Adelson may spend as much as $100 million on buying the kind of sleazy attack ads, filled with falsehoods, that the conservative Republicans used with the scurrilous Swftboat ads against war hero John Kerry (D-MA). Adelson is not the only one - most of the money flowing into anti-American conservative Mitt Romney's campaign is from billionaires - Can 46 rich conservative proto-fascists buy an election? Conservative Republicans claim they have the best 'ideas' for running the country. So how odd that they cannot win based on their ideas. They have to rely on propaganda, lots of money and most of all on lies, to win. Get ready America for the fake patriots to ram unadulterated gutter swill down down your thraot for the next five months.

Conservatives cannot go back in time and win the Civil War for the traitorous Confederacy, but they can turn the USA into a nation of plantation wage slaves: The Exploitation of U.S. Worker Productivity

One of our worse presidents was George H.W. Bush or Bush 41 as he is commonly referred to on the web. Since his son may the worse or second worse president in U.S. history, H.W. does not seem that bad. Though the attempts by An ti-American conservatives to make him into a saint are just as ridiculous as everything else they stand for - The Three Word Legacy of George H.W. Bush. The senior Bush was just a less aggressive kind of cancer than some others.

 Star Parker hates America and Our Ideals, so what better place for her to find a sympathetic audience than the bedbugs at Fox News. If anyone has lies to tell about taxes, Fox would be happy to hear from you.

Though she purported to give the view of what the American people think about tax increases, her repeated invocation of "taxed enough already" were really a reference to the tea party; "tea" is the acronym for "taxed enough already." This came as no surprise considering Parker has tea party ties.

In reality, Americans support tax increases as part of debt reduction.  A CBS News/New York Times poll from April found that a majority of people believe upper-income Americans pay less than their fair share of taxes.

Federal income taxes are the lowest they have been since the 1950s. Perhaps Star and her friends should consider moving to China - they hate the truth, freedom and taxes.

Is The U.S.A. Becoming a Marxist Country. In a Way, and Conservative Republicans Are Helping

Is The U.S.A. Becoming a Marxist Country. In a Way, and Conservative Republicans Are Helping Weird

Statistics are boring, but it’s important to wrap your head around this latest one from the Federal Reserve as the definitive epitaph for the American dream. Wall Street’s financial shenanigans, the banking games that made some fat cats outrageously wealthy as they turned home mortgages into toxic securities, wiped out 20 years of growth in American families’ net worth.
“Americans saw wealth plummet 40% from 2007 to 2010, Federal Reserve says,” is how The Washington Post headlined the startling news that all of the economic gain of the past two decades had been destroyed by the banking meltdown. And with housing values—the bulk of middle-class savings—indefinitely moribund, the situation will not get better anytime soon.

“The recession caused the greatest upheaval among the middle class,” the Post noted. “... Their median net worth ... suffered the biggest drops. By contrast, the wealthiest families’ median net worth rose slightly.”

That outcome, disastrous to the American ideal of a nation of mostly middle-class stakeholders competing on a relatively equal economic playing field, was preordained. When tens of millions lost their jobs and homes as a result of financial swindles that the Federal Reserve failed to prevent, this ostensibly public agency, with strong bipartisan support in the White House and Congress, adroitly directed the flow of public funds to save the bankers while abandoning their victims.

On Tuesday Sen. Bernie Sanders, acting under authority of the Dodd-Frank financial regulations, released the conclusions of a Government Accountability Office report showing that “[d]uring the financial crisis, at least 18 former and current directors from Federal Reserve Banks worked in banks and corporations that collectively received over $4 trillion in low-interest loans from the Federal Reserve."

One of those Fed directors, Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, who has been on the New York Fed board since 2007, testified before Congress on Wednesday that he was sorry his company lost billions in risky trading even after all of the warnings concerning too-big-to-fail banks.

Dimon—whose company last year paid him $24 million, compared to the $45,800 median U.S. family income—testified that the bank could manage its own affairs. But that is hardly reassuring given that the Fed provided JPMorgan Chase $391 billion in total assistance as well as paying the bank to administer the government’s emergency lending program. It was the Fed that back in March of 2008 made $29 billion available to Dimon’s bank so it could acquire beleaguered Bear Stearns; the Fed also agreed to purchase Bear Stearns’ most toxic assets before the merger.

Conservative Republican Hank Paulson was Treasury Secretary when this banks started to fail. Moderate conservative Republican Ben Bernanke was and still is the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank.A majority of conservatives in both houses of Congress voted for the bank rescue known as TARP. It might well have been necessary to rescue the banks - Hoover did so in the 1920s - which FDR continued. Ronald Reagan seized the savings and loan industry in the 1980s, had the government reorganize them. Though what they could have done in 2007-2008 was seize the banks, isolate toxic assets and broken them up into smaller competitive banks that were no longer too big to fail. Instead conservative Republicans in the government used socialism for the wealthy. They made the public pay for the bank losses. They also made the public pay for the losses they suffered because of the banks, themselves ( Obama has set up a mortgage assistance program for average Americans, but it is not big enough). Now that the Great Recession has settled in for at least another three to five years, conservative Republicans are saying that the failures of conservative policy must continue to be paid for by the middle-class and low income workers by cuts in college loans, cuts in or gutting Medicare altogether. We have Marxism in America for the wealthy - who never have to pay for their loses or their risks. Those losses will be paid for the the proletariat - the workers. No wonder Republicans are always calling liberals socialists. It is to distract from their own very real crony corporate socialism for conservatives and their base, the wealthy and powerful elite.


Ex-loan officer claims Wells Fargo targeted black communities for shoddy loans


Contrary To Anti-American Conservative Broadcaster Limbaugh's Claims, Public-Sector Workers Do 
 Contribute To Economic Growth

How to buy an election. Because conservative Republicans cannot win an election based on their ideas, Billionaire Adelson Pledges Unlimited Campaign Contributions To Mitt Romney

Mitt Romney Beleives in Voodoo. In Other Words He'll Be Bush 3.0

It was a Bush and Conservative Republican fairy tale that tax cuts would pay for themselves and create jobs. That while trickle down supply-side economics did not work under Reagan and has never worked any where for long, this time, with a little magic and wishful thinking voodoo economic would work. Mitt is not one to give up on the belief in voodoo economic magic. Many Americans Will Buy Romney's Economic Fairy Tales Just Like They Bought Bush's

Mitt Romney delivered a speech today about the budget deficit. It’s hard to wrap your arms around Romney’s argument, because it’s an amalgamation of free-floating conservative rage and anxiety, completely untethered to any facts, as agreed upon by the relevant experts.

In the real world, the following things are true: The budget deficit was projected to top $1 trillion even before President Obama took office, and that was when forecasters were still radically underestimating the depth of the 2008 crash. Obama did propose temporary deficit-increasing measures, an economic approach endorsed in its general contours, if not its particulars, by Romney’s economists. These measures contributed a relatively small proportion to the deficit, and their effect is short-lived. Obama instead focused on longer-term measures to reduce the deficit, including comprehensive health-care reform projected to reduce deficits by a trillion dollars in its second decade. Obama put forward a budget plan that would stabilize the debt as a percentage of the economy. Obama has hoped to achieve deeper long-term deficit reduction by striking bipartisan deals with Congress, and he has tried to achieve this goal by openly endorsing a bipartisan deficit plan in the Senate and privately agreeing to a more conservative plan with John Boehner, both of which were killed by Republican opposition to any higher revenue.

The story told by Romney is one in which all of these things are either untrue or could not possibly be true.

Romney elides some inconvenient facts — for instance, by asserting “Then there was Obamacare. Even now nobody knows what it will actually cost,” which is literally true in the sense that precise cost estimates are always impossible, but sounds to his audience like a claim that the program will swell the deficit in vast, unknowable ways. But most of Romney’s speech doesn't even refer to the facts stated above. It's simply orthogonal to facts. It’s a story, one in which Obama increased the deficit because he loves big government and Europe and hates the private sector.

Not only does Romney elide vast swaths of established facts about the deficit, it’s fairly clear that he does not operate within the mainstream understanding of the term “deficit” at all. As Jonathan Bernstein has repeatedly explained, modern Republican behavior and even language in relation to the deficit is completely nonsensical if you understand “the deficit” to mean the gap between revenue and outlays. Republican use of the term only makes sense if you define “the deficit” to mean “spending Republicans don’t like.” That’s why Republicans consider it impossible to believe that one could simultaneously extend health insurance to the uninsured while reducing the deficit.

Look at Romney’s terms to describe deficits, and it’s pretty clear he has adapted himself to his party’s conceptualization of it. His speech includes the following phrases:

    a financial crisis of debt and spending

    Washington has been spending too much money

    out-of-control spending sprees, or to piling up massive amounts of debt

    This is why I do not, for one moment, share my opponent’s belief that our spending problems can be solved with more taxes.

In Romney’s telling, the terms debt and spending are essentially interchangeable. When presented with Obama’s position — that the solution to the debt ought to include both higher taxes and lower spending — he rejects it out of hand. Naturally, Romney has admitted before that his budget plan “can’t be scored.” It’s an expression of conservative moral beliefs about the role of government. While loosely couched in budgetary terms, Romney is expressing an analysis that resides outside of, and completely at odds with, mainstream macroeconomic forecasting and scoring assumptions.

Cannot be "scored" means that no unbiased expert will say that his plan will reduce the deficit. No unbiased expert will say that the Romney plan will not gut Medicare. Tax cuts did not create jobs from 2001 to 2008 - employment remained flat. Extending tax cuts did not create jobs from 2008 until today ( the stimulus created jobs). never mind the facts, Romney will have more tax cuts for millionaires because conservatives believe the elite should not pay their fair share for the cost of America's infrastructure. America's wealthiest citizens and corporations are the biggest group of welfare recipients. They are supported by a middle-class that is shrinking every year.

Mitt Romney has a long history of attacking firefighters and their unions, going back to his days in Massachusetts

President Obama was right, Wages haven’t kept pace with recovery, study finds.
The stock market is improving. Corporate profits are up dramatically. But workers’ wages don’t seem to be rising, a study finds.

Isn't Truth a "value" ? Romney Just Making Stuff Up Now

Isn't Truth a "value" ? Romney Just Making Stuff Up Now

A couple weeks ago, Mitt Romney quoted Noam Scheiber’s book about the Obama administration’s economic rescue, The Escape Artists, in a highly misleading way. Yesterday he did it again, only this time Romney altered his description so that whatever shred of truth that once existed in his telling is gone, and nothing remains but a pack of lies. Here’s Romney’s incredibly false account:

    A book that was written in a way that’s apparently pro-President Obama, was written by a guy named Noam Scheiber and in this book he says that there was a discussion about the fact that Obamacare would slow down the economic recovery in this country and they knew that before they passed it.  But they concluded that we would all forget how long the recovery took once it had happened, so they decided to go ahead.  The idea that they knowingly slowed down our recovery in order to put in place Obamacare, which they wanted and they considered historic but the American people did not want or consider historic, is something which I think deserves a lot of explaining …

The lies. Let us tote them up.

First, and most importantly, at no point did anybody in the Obama administration ever believe that passing the Affordable Care Act would “slow down the recovery.” Nothing close to that is ever described. Romney presents the book as revealing that Obama believed health-care reform, through its "big gummint" regulations, would harm the recovery, but cackling that he wanted to pass it out of some belief that Americans wouldn’t notice mass economic suffering. This bears no relationship to anything the book says.

In the book, Noam Scheiber asked Larry Summers if he believed that the decision to pass health-care reform cost Obama the chance to pass a second stimulus, and thus came at the cost of a faster recovery. Summers answered that he did not think the health-care law prevented a second stimulus, but that even if that were the case, he would have supported it anyway.

Not only is it false for Romney to say Obama “knowingly slowed down our recovery,” it’s not even true that Obama knowingly passed up a chance to accelerate the recovery. The notion that anybody in the administration believed that the health-care law would actually slow down the recovery is complete fiction. It does not appear in the book anywhere and it’s pretty obviously untrue.

What’s more, the notion that the book is “pro-President Obama,” and hence some damning indictment that slipped into a laudatory account, is also wrong. You don’t have to read the book to know this. You don’t even need to listen to my account (I have read it). All you need to do is read all the way to the book’s subtitle: “How Obama’s Team Fumbled the Recovery.” That is not the subtitle of a laudatory book.

Noam — not Obama or his aides — believes that Obama should have shelved health-care reform in order to pass more stimulus. I’ll note that, according to Romney’s most frequently professed theory, stimulus made the recovery slower. (“[Obama] bailed out the public sector, gave billions of dollars to the companies of his friends, and added almost as much debt as all the prior presidents combined. The consequence is that we are enduring the most tepid recovery in modern history.”) So, by Romney’s analysis, shelving health-care reform to pass a second stimulus would have slowed down the recovery even more.

Having stripped away the multiple layers of distortion Romney has coated onto his account, at the bottom there is actually an intellectually interesting question. Did Obama blow it by turning to health-care reform rather than passing a second stimulus? That’s the case Noam makes in his book (though it’s primarily a narrative rather than an argument), and has continued to press. If Obama loses his reelection bid, some version of this will become the primary liberal narrative: He failed because he neglected to get enough stimulus.

Romney cannot even get the facts about the Recovery Act (stimulus) correct. The CBO and the vast majority of economists think the economy would be in much worse shape down than if no Recovery Act was passed ( see chart above for differences in impact on GDP before and after stimulus) & here: CBO Director Demolishes GOP's Stimulus Myth. Another irony is that Romney is claiming he did not create many jobs as governor because he inherited a bad economy( from his conservative predecessor by the way) - Obama inherited the worse economy since the Great Depression so the worse Conservatives can say is that Democrats did not fix the giant cluster fu*k Republicans gave the country fast enough.

Mitt Romney Blames Others For His Dismal Jobs Record, Doubles Down With Some Unashamed Hypocrisy

Mitt Romney Blames Others For His Dismal Jobs Record, Doubles Down With Some Unashamed Hypocrisy

If there’s one thing Mitt Romney cannot stand, it’s when President Obama blames the economic situation he inherited from former president George W. Bush for the country’s current gloomy challenges.

“What he’s very good at is finding other people to blame,” Mr. Romney said at a fund-raiser in San Diego recently. At an event in Michigan, he mocked Mr. Obama for trying to evade responsibility for the economy by blaming “his predecessor, the Congress, the one  percent, oil companies, and A.T.M.s.”

So it was interesting to hear Mr. Romney’s own aides over the weekend try to explain some of the less flattering statistics from Mr. Romney’s time as governor of Massachusetts.

“He inherited a $3-billion projected deficit,” Ed Gillespie, a senior adviser to Mr. Romney, explained on Fox News Sunday.

[  ]...Mr. Obama’s team was incredulous. On a conference call with reporters, David Axelrod, a senior adviser to the president’s campaign, accused Mr. Romney’s campaign of “breathtaking hypocrisy” for using the same excuse that their candidate has been hammering the president for.

“Their answer to all of this was. ‘Well you really can’t include his first year because you know he inherited a really tough economic situation,’ ” Mr. Axelrod said. “They’ve painted themselves into a corner here. And now that double standard is clear and they’re going to have to explain it to the American people.”

In fact, the most serious attacks from Mr. Romney involve exactly the kind of focus on Mr. Obama’s first year in office that the Republican advisers were trying to avoid.

Mr. Romney frequently says that Mr. Obama has presided over an economy that has lost hundreds of thousands of jobs. In a recent news release, the Republican campaign said,  “Under President Obama, the nation has lost 552,000 jobs.”

But that statistic includes Mr. Obama’s first year in office, and especially the months of February, March and April, when monthly job losses from the economic collapse were at 700,000 or higher.

Just ignoring February of 2009, before any of Mr. Obama’s policies — including the economic stimulus — had been put into place, would wipe away all 552,000 lost jobs, giving the president a record of creating 172,000 jobs.

If Mr. Romney’s team were to ignore Mr. Obama’s first year in office — as Mr. Gillespie suggested should be done for Mr. Romney’s first year as governor — then the president would have added about 3.7 million jobs to the economy.

Of course, Mr. Romney’s campaign is unlikely to change its rhetoric or strategy. His bid for the White House depends on the idea that Mr. Obama has made the economy worse. Because the country has been adding jobs for nearly two years, Mr. Romney’s argument depends on the steep job losses in Mr. Obama’s first year in office.

But the campaign does need to find a way to defend Mr. Romney’s record as governor against the criticism that the state lagged behind the rest of the country in job creation while he was in office.

Also ironic is that Mittens predecessors were conservatives as well. So Conservative Republicans - in charge for 16 years could not create a sustainable base of jobs. Conservatives suck at creating jobs. 

How Bank of America Execs Hid Their Losses- emails show execs knowingly deceived shareholders


Criminal Gov Scott Walker(R) managed to get his friends to buy him an election, but the Wisconsin state senate seems to have been turned over to a Democratic majority.

Despite Having a Democrat in the White House We Already have a Mitt Romney Economy

Despite Having a Democrat in the White House We Already have a Mitt Romney Economy

What should be done about the economy? Republicans claim to have the answer: slash spending and cut taxes. What they hope voters won’t notice is that that’s precisely the policy we’ve been following the past couple of years. Never mind the Democrat in the White House; for all practical purposes, this is already the economic policy of Republican dreams.

So the Republican electoral strategy is, in effect, a gigantic con game: it depends on convincing voters that the bad economy is the result of big-spending policies that President Obama hasn’t followed (in large part because the G.O.P. wouldn’t let him), and that our woes can be cured by pursuing more of the same policies that have already failed.

For some reason, however, neither the press nor Mr. Obama’s political team has done a very good job of exposing the con.

"... for all practical purposes this is already a Republican economy."

What do I mean by saying that this is already a Republican economy? Look first at total government spending — federal, state and local. Adjusted for population growth and inflation, such spending has recently been falling at a rate not seen since the demobilization that followed the Korean War.

How is that possible? Isn’t Mr. Obama a big spender? Actually, no; there was a brief burst of spending in late 2009 and early 2010 as the stimulus kicked in, but that boost is long behind us. Since then it has been all downhill. Cash-strapped state and local governments have laid off teachers, firefighters and police officers; meanwhile, unemployment benefits have been trailing off even though unemployment remains extremely high.

Over all, the picture for America in 2012 bears a stunning resemblance to the great mistake of 1937, when F.D.R. prematurely slashed spending, sending the U.S. economy — which had actually been recovering fairly fast until that point — into the second leg of the Great Depression. In F.D.R.’s case, however, this was an unforced error, since he had a solidly Democratic Congress. In President Obama’s case, much though not all of the responsibility for the policy wrong turn lies with a completely obstructionist Republican majority in the House.

That same obstructionist House majority effectively blackmailed the president into continuing all the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, so that federal taxes as a share of G.D.P. are near historic lows — much lower, in particular, than at any point during Ronald Reagan’s presidency.

As I said, for all practical purposes this is already a Republican economy.

As an aside, I think it’s worth pointing out that although the economy’s performance has been disappointing, to say the least, none of the disasters Republicans predicted have come to pass. Remember all those assertions that budget deficits would lead to soaring interest rates? Well, U.S. borrowing costs have just hit a record low. And remember those dire warnings about inflation and the “debasement” of the dollar? Well, inflation remains low, and the dollar has been stronger than it was in the Bush years.

Put it this way: Republicans have been warning that we were about to turn into Greece because President Obama was doing too much to boost the economy; Keynesian economists like myself warned that we were, on the contrary, at risk of turning into Japan because he was doing too little. And Japanification it is, except with a level of misery the Japanese never had to endure.

So why don’t voters know any of this?

Part of the answer is that far too much economic reporting is still of the he-said, she-said variety, with dueling quotes from hired guns on either side. But it’s also true that the Obama team has consistently failed to highlight Republican obstruction, perhaps out of a fear of seeming weak. Instead, the president’s advisers keep turning to happy talk, seizing on a few months’ good economic news as proof that their policies are working — and then ending up looking foolish when the numbers turn down again. Remarkably, they’ve made this mistake three times in a row: in 2010, 2011 and now once again.

At this point, however, Mr. Obama and his political team don’t seem to have much choice. They can point with pride to some big economic achievements, above all the successful rescue of the auto industry, which is responsible for a large part of whatever job growth we are managing to get. But they’re not going to be able to sell a narrative of overall economic success. Their best bet, surely, is to do a Harry Truman, to run against the “do-nothing” Republican Congress that has, in reality, blocked proposals — for tax cuts as well as more spending — that would have made 2012 a much better year than it’s turning out to be.

For that, in the end, is the best argument against Republicans’ claims that they can fix the economy. The fact is that we have already seen the Republican economic future — and it doesn’t work.

by Paul Krugman. Reprinted for educational purposes.

There is no economic historical record that links unemployment with deficits. It is more conservative voodoo economics to say that deficits cost jobs - especially when the economy for working class Americans is practically at a stand still. Could Obama have done more. Even though conservatives hold a minority in the Senate ( they are the majority in the House) conservatives threaten to filibuster every jobs bill - they have killed at least four. Romney's answer to the problem is to make the middle-class and blue collar workers pay more taxes and have lower safety net benefits  - which will crate more poverty - as he cuts taxes for the wealthy. If low taxes created jobs we'd be at 1% unemployment.

5 Facts About The Massachusetts Economy Under Mitt Romney. If you threw a pebble into a crowd it would likely hit someone who is a better job creator than Romney.