Democracy is the problem: the uprising at Katherine Catherine Ferguson High School

Rachel Maddow has the story.

Amazingly, a columnist in the Kalamazoo Gazette defended the actions of the man who is running Detroit by asking whether we would rather have dictatorship or dysfunction. I think the state of New Hampshire answered that question for all of us who believe in the American system:

Added: Also note that the man closing the Catherine Ferguson Academy, Robert Bobb, was appointed by Democrat Jennifer Granholm.

Shame on her. Bobb is also closing the Day School for the Deaf. Shame on him.

Friday Cat Blogging

If you want to work, you have to join the Kochmunist Party

Mark Ames and Mike Elk, The Nation:

The Nation obtained the Koch Industries election packet for Washington State—which included a cover letter from its president and O, David Robertson; a list of Koch-endorsed state and federal candidates; and an issue of the company newsletter, Discovery, full of alarmist right-wing propaganda.
…
The election packet starts with a letter from Robertson dated October 4, 2010. It read: “As Koch company employees, we have a lot at stake in the upcoming election. Each of us is likely to be affected by the outcome on Nov. 2. That is why, for the first time ever, we are mailing our newest edition of Discovery and several other helpful items to the home address of every U.S. employee” [emphasis added].

For most Koch employees, the “helpful items” included a list of Koch-approved candidates, which was presented on a separate page labeled “Elect to Prosper.” A brief introduction to the list reads: “The following candidates in your state are supported by Koch companies and KOCHPAC, the political action committee for Koch companies. We believe these candidates will best advance policies supporting economic freedom.”

What the Kochs mean by “economic freedom” is explained on the next page. As the mailer makes clear, Koch Industries tailored its election propaganda to the state level, rather than focusing on national elections. Of the nineteen candidates that Koch Industries recommended in its Washington State list, sixteen were Republicans. The three Democratic candidates approved by the Kochs included two members of the “Roadkill Caucus,” Washington’s version of the conservative Blue Dogs.

Only two of the nineteen races on the list were for national office, and in both cases Koch Industries backed Tea Party–friendly Republicans: Dino Rossi, an antilabor candidate, who lost to incumbent Democratic Senator Patty Murray; and Jaime Herrera-Beutler, who ran in the Republican primary as a moderate, but who came out recently as a Tea Party radical, much to her constituency’s surprise.

After guiding employees on how they should vote, the mailer devoted the rest of the material to the sort of indoctrination one would expect from an old John Birch Society pamphlet (the Koch Brothers’ father, Fred Koch, was a founding member of the JBS). [for those who are too young to remember, the John Birch Society told us that the world was being dominated by a Communist conspiracy directed by the Soviets and the Chinese. When the Soviet Union fell and China went to state capitalism, they told us that those two countries were actually puppets in a larger world Communist conspiracy directed by The Cookie Monster. Or something like that].

So, the boss tells you who to vote for. In states with mail-in ballots, the boss can demand to see your ballot before you mail it in. They can do the same thing by making you vote absentee. Or they can just grill you on how you voted. If you answer wrong or don’t vote for the Party, they can fire and blacklist you. And they are trying to spread this to every workplace.

The Kochs are not significantly different from the real, actual Communists that they tell us we should be afraid of.

Higher Taxes Don’t Make Rich People Leave States

That’s right: Higher taxes don’t make rich people leave states. And courtesy of Gawker and the WSJ, here’s the proof from Stanford:

The study found that the overall population of millionaires increased during the tax period. Some millionaires moved out, of course. But they were more than offset by the creation of new millionaires.

The study dug deeper to figure out whether the millionaires who were moving out did so because of the tax. As a control group, they used New Jersey residents who earned $200,000 to $500,000–in other words, high-earners who weren’t subject to the tax. They found that the rate of out-migration among millionaires was in line with and rate of out-migration of submillionaires. The tax rate, they concluded, had no measurable impact.

The people most likely to leave were persons age 65 and older — in other words, people who were probably going to retire to sunnier, warmer climes anyway. People who were actually still running businesses and whatnot stuck around.

And there you go.

Show me the money, honey

Buttonwood, The Economist, via Ritholtz via Cashin (link not provided):

It is three years since Bear Stearns was pushed into the arms of J P Morgan and the fundamental debt problem has not been resolved. The debt has been moved around but not eliminated. This has undoubtedly bought time and I quite understand the point made frequently by my colleague on Free Exchange that governments and central banks have acted to protect workers from losing their jobs and to prevent consumption from collapsing. In this, they have had a fair degree of success.

But the debt is still there. It must be eliminated by growth, inflation or default.

This is what I do not get. Yes, debt has been moved around. I’m not even clear that it has been eliminated from balance sheets, since my understanding of the Federal Reserve’s actions is that it swapped a lot of good debt for bad, but that the originating institutions remain responsible for whatever the Fed holds. The whole point of the bailout was to give the banks time to earn their way out of the debt overhang. Then there’s debt that has been moved from the Treasury’s balance sheet onto the Feds’. That would include, for example, defaulted mortgages held by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, but also the deficit created by 9% unemployment and the ongoing wars, which is most of the deficit. This debt has to get moved back onto the Treasury’s books, but–assuming that the country has a will to raise the necessary revenue in taxes– there’s no rush.

The problem arises not so much because of the current situation but because of how it limits the federal response in case of a further crisis and because the wealthy have made it clear that they are not willing to pay off the deficits that their actions created.

Now, I haven’t made a lot of money lately, because I see a lot more risk in the market than most participants. As I see it, the risk is not, as the gold bugs would have it, of inflation in the near term, but of a second, deeper dip to the recession brought on by a renewed crisis. In such a situation, interest rates could rise even as prices of gold, silver, and other commodities tanked. The rise in interest rates would not be brought about by inflation, but by fear that there would not be any repayment. In such a situation, cash becomes king, and stodgy stocks like utilities become queen. Stocks and bonds in trade surplus countries are also desirable holdings. Inflation could come later, as desperate steps are taken to address the crisis, but probably not until the crisis had at least stabilized.

I’ve been wrong for 18 months. Is there something that I am not seeing?

Projection: It’s Not Just for Movie Theaters

The Detroit Free Press reports that a demonstration planned for Good Friday outside a mosque in Dearborn, Michigan was organized by Frank Fiorello, who calls Islam a “perverse ideology [that] just preaches violence”.

On his Facebook page, Fiorello talks about violence, saying “danger and death are but my playthings.” A rock band he plays guitar in, Crude Legacy, has anti-Muslim rock songs he posts on his group’s Web site.

In one song, the band declares, “We’ll hack through Turkish flesh and bone, watch the minarets fall down.” In another, “Mosque of terror, minarets in flames, they bring the horrors, so we’ll do the same.”

Fiorello also says he’s peaceful and doesn’t want to see Muslims attacked. I’d kind of like to know how hacking through flesh and bone and setting minarets on fire aren’t attacks — for that matter, how exactly he explains that the planned protest outside the mosque isn’t an attack on the worshippers there.

The encouraging aspect of this story is that a coalition of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim religious leaders plan to counter the hate by staging their own rally outside the mosque on Thursday.

The morality of Paul Ryan and the Republican Party

Phoenix Woman has plowed this field before, but it should never be forgotten that the “conservative” movement has at the center of its morality the murder and dismembering of a 12 year old girl.

Via Think Progress and Thom Hartmann.

Republicans Are Whiners: Mitch Berg Tea Party Edition

Every time I think Republican blogger, Twin Cities low-wattage radio personality and media ref-worker Mitch Berg can’t sink to a new low, he proves me wrong. BSP catches him not only playing fast and loose with numeric comparisons between two recent rallies at the Minnesota State Capitol (kinda like how a fellow Republican, National Review’s James Pethokoukis, does when trying to pretend that far more people showed up to cheer Sarah Palin last Saturday at Madison than to boo her), but being that most mocked of Midwesterners, an honest-to-goodness weather wimp.

Here’s how Mitch Berg described his appearance at the Tea Party rally that was held at the Minnesota State Capitol last Saturday:

It was 33 degrees at noon, when I spoke, and there was snow on the ground, and a cold wet wind was howling from the north giving wind chills in the teens. Not prime rallying weather. More like Valley Forge.

This was how Berg excuses the fact that fewer than a hundred people bothered to show up for the Tea Party rally — a fact that probably ticked off the handful of food vendors who’d set up shop on the Capitol grounds; if any of those poor schmoes made $20 that day I’d be greatly surprised.

You’re crooks. And besides, you’re not paying us enough.

That would probably be the Culture of Truth distillation of a news story involving Tenet Healthcare and Community Healthcare, had he come across it. Don Jeffrey of Bloomberg:

Tenet Healthcare Corp. (THC), after rejecting Community Health Systems Inc. (CYH)’s unsolicited buyout offer, said it sued that company for allegedly overbilling Medicare in admitting patients to its hospitals. Community Health Systems shares plunged.

Tenet seeks to compel Community Health Systems to disclose how it admits patients to hospitals for “financial rather than clinical purposes,” according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing today in which Tenet said it filed the lawsuit in federal court in Texas.

Community Health, the largest publicly traded hospital company in the U.S., bid $6 a share in cash and stock, or $7.3 billion, in November to acquire Tenet. Tenet rejected the offer in December, saying it wasn’t “remotely fair.”

As Jonathan Weil, also on Bloomberg says, this is like Snooki of Jersey Shore calling someone else on the cast a trashy boozer:

Grand acts of self-immolation aside, what makes this lawsuit comical is Tenet’s own history of ripping off the government, as well as its own shareholders.

Here’s a company that paid more than $900 million as part of a 2006 settlement with the Justice Department, after the government accused Tenet of fraudulently overbilling the nation’s Medicare and Medicaid programs. (The settlement was structured so there would be no formal finding that Tenet had engaged in illegal behavior.)

Tenet paid a $10 million fine to the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2007 to settle accounting fraud claims. That was about a year after the company agreed to a $216.5 million class-action settlement with Tenet investors.

[...]

And yet Tenet, the third-largest publicly traded U.S. hospital operator, has the audacity to accuse the second-largest chain of running a crooked outfit.

Tenet Healthcare’s board includes that paragon of virtue, Jeb Bush (and, as if to show that the corruption is bipartisan, former Sen. Bob Kerrey). The crooks at Community Health Systems are less well known.

(note: I edited out of Weil’s otherwise reasonable rant a comment that attempted to characterize the euthanasia of patients in New Orleans during Katrina as an example of Tenet corporate culture. The medical staff acted in what they believed was the best interest of the patients. That is precisely not the kind of attitude that Tenet’s corporate culture represents)

Moneyed Interests: Better to Starve Your Grandma than Raise Our Taxes!

The countless tens of millions Pete Peterson and many of his fellow billionaires and zillionaires have spent over the decades to promote the destruction of Social Security, combined with the effects of the Citizens United ruling causing Democrats to feel they must suck up to the same rich entities Republicans commonly do in order not to be swamped in all future elections, are giving us obscene spectacles like this:

Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) said on Sunday the “Gang of Six” senators is “very close” to a deal on deficit reduction, suggesting the plan would impact Social Security that most Democrats have said is off limits.

[...]

Asked by host Bob Schieffer to clarify that the group will take on Social Security, Warner said, “Part of this is just math: 16 workers for every one retiree 50 years ago, three workers for every retiree now.”

Senator Warner is spewing Pete-Peterson-promoted irrelevant nonsense. Here’s the truth:

Myth: Social Security is a victim of the aging baby boom, reflected in the ratio of workers to retirees, which used to be 16 to 1, is now 3 to 1, and in 2030, will be 2 to 1.

Reality: Today’s projected deficit has nothing to do with the size of the baby boom or worker to retiree ratios. The 16 to 1 ratio is a meaningless factoid, plucked from 1950, a year when Social Security was expanded to cover millions of new workers. The ratio never influenced policy in the slightest. It is the kind of ratio experienced by all pension plans, public and private at the start when few workers have yet qualified for benefits; the 2 to 1 ratio is meaningful and does translate into higher costs, but those costs were addressed decades ago. Congress has enacted ten significant Social Security bills since 1950. Every enactment has taken into account the baby boom, and each has left the program in long-run actuarial balance. The most recent enactment was in 1983, when the program was in balance through 2057 – the year the youngest boomers, those born in 1964, will turn 93. How social security went from a projected surplus through 2057, when most of the baby boom will be dead, to today’s projected deficit involves a number of factors, mainly related to changes in assumptions about wage growth, productivity and disability rates. The change from surplus to deficit is totally unrelated to the number of baby boomers, as one would surmise. After all, no new baby boomers have been born since 1983.

So why is Mark Warner, who should know better, spouting garbage like the Ratio Myth?

The only answer that makes sense is his desire to rake in the campaign cash from all the rich people and corporations that love the Bush tax cuts and want to keep them — as well as all the rich corporations like GE that through having bought off enough legislators to change the law, legally pay no or nearly no taxes whatsoever. Even for those rich people whose tax obligations haven’t been officially made to vanish, the IRS has been made so weak in their regard as to allow them to skip paying taxes with near impunity.

(Crossposted to Renaissance Post.)