The Penguin Bar

And yet they want to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, which would cost $678 billion dollars without paying for them — and that’s just the cost of the tax cuts going to the top two percent of earners. In other words, the Republicans want to spend $678 billion in further giveaways for the wealthiest two percent, and they don’t care whether it increases the deficit.

By the way, the Republicans also recently voted against and defeated an amendment to strip Big Oil of its $25 billion in subsidies. Just thought I’d pass that along. Put another way, $678 billion in tax cuts for the wealthy? No problem. Deficit-shmeficit! But $34 billion in unemployment benefits for an out-of-work middle class at a time when companies aren’t hiring (say nothing of the aforementioned bullet-points)? Evil! Instead, the Republicans want to give almost as much money to Big Oil in the form of corporate welfare during the worst oil spill in American history while telling unemployed middle class families to piss off.

Do we have a clear picture in terms of who and what the Republicans care about?

It surely isn’t fiscal discipline or the deficit. And it surely isn’t the middle class. The Bush tax cuts, if extended, would add $2 trillion to debt, so it’s not that either. Throw in another policy started by the Republicans — the war spending (more of which was passed yesterday without any worries about CBO scoring or making sure it’s deficit neutral) — and there’s the vast majority of your deficit and debt for the next ten years. Not the stimulus or the bailouts. The long term budget impact of the wars and the Bush tax cuts literally dwarf the stimulus.

via Bob Cesca: The GOP Plot to Screw the Economy and the Middle Class.

Recessions are common; depressions are rare. As far as I can tell, there were only two eras in economic history that were widely described as “depressions” at the time: the years of deflation and instability that followed the Panic of 1873 and the years of mass unemployment that followed the financial crisis of 1929-31.

Neither the Long Depression of the 19th century nor the Great Depression of the 20th was an era of nonstop decline — on the contrary, both included periods when the economy grew. But these episodes of improvement were never enough to undo the damage from the initial slump, and were followed by relapses.

We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression. It will probably look more like the Long Depression than the much more severe Great Depression. But the cost — to the world economy and, above all, to the millions of lives blighted by the absence of jobs — will nonetheless be immense.

And this third depression will be primarily a failure of policy. Around the world — most recently at last weekend’s deeply discouraging G-20 meeting — governments are obsessing about inflation when the real threat is deflation, preaching the need for belt-tightening when the real problem is inadequate spending.

via Op-Ed Columnist – The Third Depression – NYTimes.com.

The new CBO data — the most comprehensive data available on changes in incomes and taxes for different income groups — also show the following:

* In 2007, the share of after-tax income going to the top 1 percent hit its highest level (17.1 percent) since 1979, while the share going to the middle one-fifth of Americans shrank to its lowest level during this period (14.1 percent).

* Between 1979 and 2007, average after-tax incomes for the top 1 percent rose by 281 percent after adjusting for inflation — an increase in income of $973,100 per household — compared to increases of 25 percent ($11,200 per household) for the middle fifth of households and 16 percent ($2,400 per household) for the bottom fifth.

* If all groups’ after-tax incomes had grown at the same percentage rate over the 1979-2007 period, middle-income households would have received an additional $13,042 in 2007 and families in the bottom fifth would have received an additional $6,010.

* In 2007, the average household in the top 1 percent had an income of $1.3 million, up $88,800 just from the prior year; this $88,800 gain is well above the total 2007 income of the average middle-income household ($55,300).

via Income Gaps Between Very Rich and Everyone Else More Than Tripled In Last Three Decades, New Data Show — Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

VERY well written summary – read the whole thing.

Thanks to the BP spill and the excellent coverage of it by people like Chris in Paris and a host of others, the relationship between the state and capitalism is coming under the microscope — a very good thing. This post offers a bit of orientation, and a small peek forward.

So let's look at three concepts and see how they interact. The first two are:

* The state (the federal government, the People's Republic, the Thousand-Year Reich, whatever)

* The owners of the means of production (capitalists, bankers, the “Big Boys,” that ilk)

The third concept to notice is the national interest (sometimes mislabeled “patriotism” or “chauvinism,” after M. Chauvin).

via AMERICAblog News: State capitalism & you.

The actions of BP are causing the oil to remain invisible, which is helpful both to BP and the US government, because it obscures the size of the problem.

Remember, only one below-surface slick is 10 miles long, 3 miles wide and 300 feet thick. There are many of them.

And the oil continues to flow at around 70 -80,000 bbls per day. All BPs attempts to date have failed.

Their disperants are hiding the problem. And huge dead zones will appear where the under water dispersant-oil mixture lingers, killing all in its path.

The tragedy is no less horrible than everyone has been saying. It is just that much of it will be invisible due to the US EPA-approved science experiment taking place 5000 feet below the surface of the sea, where BP continues to inject massive quantities of disperants with full government approval.

via Daily Kos: Vast Undersea Pollution – BP’s (invisible) Disaster.

For the record, House Republican leader John Boehner, GOP Chairman Michael Steele and the organizers of the Tea Party rally condemned the slurs. Steele suggested the movement and the party should not be linked with “idiots out there saying stupid things.”

Stupid things? Try Rep. Randy Neugebauer, R-Texas, shouting “baby killer” when Rep. Bart Stupak, an anti-abortion Democrat from Michigan, was outlining his conviction that the bill would not result in federal funding of the procedure – and right after unruly House members had been admonished to stop yelling during the debate. Neugebauer claimed Monday that his exact words were “it's a baby killer,” and were directed at the measure, not at Stupak – which would make his outburst less stupid only by slight degree.

Stupid things? How about the House Republicans who cheered two hecklers who were ushered out of the public gallery by Capitol Police on Sunday. Or the GOP lawmakers who kept going to the House balcony during the debate to wave clenched fists and handwritten signs at the crowd and helped ensure it remained whipped into a frenzy.

Stupid things? How about the steady stream of rhetorical excesses during the debate. They warned of the death of freedom, of a coming era of totalitarianism, of a “fiscal Frankenstein.”

via GOP fans flames of health care reform hatred.

“One of the disturbing facts of history is that so many civilizations collapse,” warns anthropologist Jared Diamond in Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Many “civilizations share a sharp curve of decline. Indeed, a society’s demise may begin only a decade or two after it reaches its peak population, wealth and power.” Now, Harvard’s Niall Ferguson, one of the world’s leading financial historians, echoes Diamond’s warning: “Imperial collapse may come much more suddenly than many historians imagine. A combination of fiscal deficits and military overstretch suggests that the United States may be the next empire on the precipice.” Yes, America is on the edge. Dismiss his warning at your peril. Everything you learned, everything you believe and everything driving our political leaders is based on a misleading, outdated theory of history. The American Empire is at the edge of a dangerous precipice, at risk of a sudden, rapid collapse.

via collapse-of-the-american-empire-swift-silent-certain: Personal Finance News from Yahoo! Finance.

In May, 2002, Jerome Mitchell, a 17-year old college freshman from rural South Carolina, learned he had contracted HIV. The news, of course, was devastating, but Mitchell believed that he had one thing going for him: On his own initiative, in anticipation of his first year in college, he had purchased his own health insurance.

Shortly after his diagnosis, however, his insurance company, Fortis, revoked his policy. Mitchell was told that without further treatment his HIV would become full-blown AIDS within a year or two and he would most likely die within two years after that.

So he hired an attorney — not because he wanted to sue anyone; on the contrary, the shy African-American teenager expected his insurance was canceled by mistake and would be reinstated once he set the company straight.

via Insurer targeted HIV patients to drop coverage | Reuters.

Our so-called leaders are bad enough, but it gets almost worse at the level of the American public, who of course also bear the burden of choosing these abysmal presidents, on top of their own crimes. These latter include utter negligence in maintaining the gift of American democracy, complete laziness in the most basic of civic duties, mass corruption of social, political and personal values, and a reliance upon every form of cheap magic or distraction to avoid basic personal and civic responsibilities.

And, always, it’s about having everything. At once. For nothing. The same idiots who have been seduced by cigarette-money-sized tax cuts for themselves, used to justify a massive slashing of the burden once carried by the rich, are now bitching as government services implode. The New York Times is reporting that citizens of Arizona – one of the most regressive states in the union – are now unhappy because their highway rest stops have been eliminated due to the state’s fiscal crisis. I just want to grab these people and shake them by the shoulders, politely suggesting to them that next time they have to pull over in the desert sands between Tucson and Phoenix and squat by the side of the road, they might want to give a thought or two to all the money they pissed away in another desert, this one in Mesopotamia. Likewise, people are now also starting to whine about schools closing and prisoners being released from jail, also because of budget slashing. And I just want to ask those bright folks whether they still think all those tax cuts for the already outrageously wealthy plutocracy were such a good idea in retrospect, after all.

via The Regressive Antidote – To Hell In A Handbasket.

The wealthy countries repeatedly find new ways to screw Africa. They're purchasing the fishing rights and denying locals the rights to fish the sea or selling more guns or owning profitable enterprises that ought to be owned locally. In this case, buying fertile land and denying it to locals is sick. The local governments aren't much better for allowing it but the countries to the north appear to have forgotten about their disastrous colonial legacy.

This is another example of the new wave of colonialism that is blocking Africa from making progress. Even worse, part of what is driving the effort is fuel. How many more examples like this do we need to see before people stop using food growing land to generate fuel? Instead of encouraging this, it's time to tax the hell out of these plans that are taking food away from people.

via AMERICAblog News: Rich buying farm land and water rights in Africa while locals go hungry.