FROM: Mark Ganzer
TO: Doc Brown

Message flagged Tuesday, July 12, 2011 5:22 AM

Hi Doc - just to try once again to convince you how much fun I had the other night, I'm forwarding to you a letter I sent to Rachael, the ukelele player for H.O.T. Fox (Heart of the Fox), an astonishingly gifted duet which performs their own original work ... featuring the Uke (of course), a Flamenco acoustic guitar underpinning, and a lead female vocalist who makes sounds that can be heard only in mosques -- a not to be missed experience!

Again, thanks for being such a wonderful host, avid listener, and all round good person.

Mark Raymond Ganzer

----- Forwarded Message -----
From: Mark Ganzer
To: Rachael, vocalist and ukelele player with Heart Of The Fox
Sent: Tuesday, July 12, 2011 5:17 AM
Subject: An extraordinary open mic venue

Greetings Rachael,

It was such a treat to get to hear you two jamming with the players after the cut you off so early.

Thursday nights, you simply CANNOT MISS the open mic (starting at 7:00 p.m.) hosted by Doc Brown at Corkscrew Pointe. Doc is such a talent, but, as the man in charge of the open mic, he

(a) starts on time
(b) let's every one play
(c) works new folks showing up late into the rotation
(d) follows up with a thank you e-mail the next day

The venue is this incredible dimly lit back room, the martini room, which last Thursday seemed almost as if the assembled (Robin, the acoustic guitar soloist and her two lady friends, Doc, me, and the bar tender) group had been treated to a night at Xanadu hosted by Orson Welles and featuring the three finest musical players no one has ever heard of.

We later were joined by two young high-school aged ladies who sang an original duet, then each sang a solo. The father and mother of the one girl (who also plays the fiddle and has been commanded to bring the fiddle this Thursday upcoming, 14 July, 2011) own the music store in McHenry, and their eldest son runs it.

Later still, a retired postal worker came in and just delighted us with such levity and uplifting songs as "Love Begins with a Tube of Tooth Paste" (and ends the same way).

And even later still, we were joined by a dramatic reader, also named Mark - who read from Jimmy Durante's "Yes, We Have No Banannas," until he dropped his book, lost his place, and couldn't finish the last line! He then proceeded to read two actual letters, on from Ben Franklin, and the other, I believe from George Washington. Quite appropriate so near 4 July.

Hope to see you there this Thursday (they also hold an open mic on Tuesdays, same time, but I do not know the host). lThe owner of the bar uses the open mic to determine who to hire to play to the lunch and dinner crowds. Have I at least piqued your curiousity, darlin'?


Mark Raymond Ganzer

Perpetual War, Corporate Greed, & Austerity for the Masses Keeping it Real By Larry Pinkney

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
-Frederick Douglass

“Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience...Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves...[and] the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem.”
-Howard Zinn

As the corporate/military U.S. Empire, headed by the nominally black Barack Obama, with the complicity of his Democrat[ic] and Republican party political pimps, rumbles along, crushing the economic needs, human rights, and aspirations of everyday Black, White, Brown, Red, and Yellow people in this nation and around the world, conditions for just plain ordinary people are worsening and deteriorating at lightning speed. Only the avaricious, blood-sucking, bloated rich are financially benefiting from the increasing misery of the masses of ordinary people.

Meanwhile, the propaganda arm of the U.S. Government, i.e. the corporate-stream media, continues incessantly to peddle and parrot the distractions, distortions, omissions, and outright lies of its corporate masters to the enormous detriment of everyday people. At all costs, this corporate-stream media seeks to ignore, marginalize, or discredit those persons who are critical thinkers and who see the need for real systemic change.

The first casualties in this corporate/military government’s persistent war against everyday people are critical thought and political dissent. This nation has a president and other politicians whose de facto contempt for the pain and the common sense of everyday people is surpassed only by their arrogance, wars abroad, double-speak, and lies. Their actions repeatedly belie their phony and misleading rhetoric. They, like their corporate masters, are nothing more than political pimps and economic blood-suckers of the people, whom they treat as perpetual ping-pong balls and caged hamsters endlessly running on the spinning wheel to oblivion.

The U.S. corporate/military government is generally feared by the people of this nation, not held accountable by them. Until this fear is replaced by a collective, actualized, and unflinching demand on the part of everyday Black, White, Brown, Red, and Yellow people for transparency in government, full accountability, and economic parity, real change will not be forthcoming. Everyday people will remain as helpless, hapless pawns only as long as they/we allow ourselves to be.

Notwithstanding the odious genocide of indigenous people and the slavery of Black people that accompanied the founding of this nation, the U.S. Declaration of Independence pulled no punches when it correctly and explicitly stated that governments must derive “...their just powers from the consent of the governed,” and “That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and institute new government...” Undeniably implicit in the requirement that the “power[s]” of government be derived “from the consent of the governed” is the right of political dissent. Moreover, it is the explicit “right” of the people to “alter or abolish” any “form of government” that is not what the Declaration of Independence refers to as “just.”

The cynical and callous manipulation and domination of everyday people by the 1 or 2 percent corporate/military elite of this nation is by no means “just,” and it is an utter mockery and subversion of anything even near to deriving its powers to govern “from the consent of the governed.” Additionally, this corporate-government’s perpetual wars of empire, the ‘Patriot Act,’ ‘Extraordinary Rendition,’ trillion dollar give-aways to the multi-national Wall Street robber barons, the shredding of any meaningful constitutional rights, attacks on Medicare and Social Security, and other increasing economic austerity measures against everyday people, are further examples of precisely how the “consent of the governed” has been brazenly subverted by the corporate/military elite of this nation.

Inevitably, an increasing collective loathing for the dishonest and hypocritical internal and external policies and practices of this U.S. corporate-government may yet very well come to replace lethargy and the fear of said government. For the moment however, this corporate-government is relying upon its formidable ability to manipulate the masses of everyday people by using fear, lies, and constant subterfuge. Also. for the moment, so many people of all colors in this nation remain, in actual terms, the economic slaves, pawns, and cannon fodder of the U.S. Empire.

Whether it is the police throughout this country the FBI, CIA, NSA, TSA, etc., this nation’s corporate-government uses fear, subterfuge, and the suppression of political dissent as a means to perpetuate this political theatre of the absurd in order to manipulate, quash, and subvert the “consent” and will of everyday people. As a long time reader of The Black Commentator recently wrote concerning the present overwhelmingly insane and lethargic state of affairs in this nation: “The police have now niggerized any and everybody through fear! This may explain the theatre of the absurd that we are witnessing.”

In due course however, even fear must take a back seat to the increasing joblessness, homelessness, despair, and hunger, etc. of everyday people in this nation. And even the double-speak rhetoric of the wily Barack Obama and his Republicrat [i.e. Democrat and Republican] cohorts will prove to be of no avail in soothing the legitimate rage of the people. For in the words of Langston Hughes: “What happens to a dream deferred?”

Clearly, the entire U.S. government, its corporate-stream “news” media, and most other institutions of the United States of America are inextricably beholden to the dictates of the tiny, blood-sucking corporate elite of this nation. U.S. wars and military occupations and/or interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, and elsewhere have nothing whatsoever to do with the championing of so-called ‘democracy;’ and they invariably mean more pain and more death to everyday people both at home and abroad, while serving to enrich the bottomless, blood-drenched coffers of the corporate elite. The United States is a corporate plutocracy whose alleged political ‘leaders’ are the conscienceless bane of this nation and of humanity as a whole.

Hypocrisy, lies, and subterfuge continue to be the mainstays of this U.S. Empire, but only for as long as we, the people, allow it. Despite constant acts of subversion, distortion and subterfuge by the world-wide octopus-like tentacles of the U.S. corporate/military Empire to manipulate and subvert the legitimate needs and aspirations of everyday people around the world, our sisters and brothers in Haiti, Palestine, Egypt, Yemen, Tunisia, Mexico, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, and so many other places on Mother Earth are resisting corporate and/or military hegemony in ‘body and soul,’ and they are rising up as a part of the human family.

Perpetual wars, corporate hegemony & greed, and austerity for the masses of everyday people are absolutely unacceptable. The pillage of our precious planet Mother Earth is also totally unacceptable. It is time to make the people’s history. It is time to reclaim the narrative of everyday Black, White, Brown, Red, and Yellow people collectively. Whether we like it or not our futures on this planet are irreversibly bound together. The people’s struggle for freedom, justice, and systemic change, irrespective of color, whether it in this nation or anywhere else in the world, is a protracted one and cannot successfully exist and grow in a vacuum.

In the words of Malcolm X [el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz], “Any kind of movement for freedom of Black people based solely within the confines of America is absolutely doomed to fail.” Ours must be an international struggle for justice and human rights. Nevertheless, we must begin it right here in this nation, and link it to our sisters and brothers planet-wide. It’s certainly not easy nor is it short, but then, no serious and effective struggle ever is. As Frederick Douglass said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

Onward then my sisters and brothers! Onward!

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board Member, Larry Pinkney, is a veteran of the Black Panther Party, the former Minister of Interior of the Republic of New Africa, a former political prisoner and the only American to have successfully self-authored his civil/political rights case to the United Nations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. In connection with his political organizing activities in opposition to voter suppression, etc., Pinkney was interviewed in 1988 on the nationally televised PBS News Hour, formerly known as The MacNeil / Lehrer News Hour. For more about Larry Pinkney see the book, Saying No to Power: Autobiography of a 20th Century Activist and Thinker, by William Mandel [Introduction by Howard Zinn]. (Click here to read excerpts from the book.) Click here to contact Mr. Pinkney.

Neighbor vs. neighbor as homeowner fights get ugly As more are unable to pay homeowners' fees, associations pit neighbor against neighbor

In this June 15, 2011 photo, an empty park bench and rusting pipe sit near the swimming pool at the Inlet House, in Fort Pierce, Fla. The complex was an affordable place that the 55-and-older set aspired to. But now the Homeowner's association has levied a $6,000 assessment on every homeowner and then foreclosed on seniors who did not owe the bank a dime but could not afford the association bill. (AP Photo/J Pat Carter)

Michelle Conlin and Tamara Lush, AP Business Writers, On Sunday July 10, 2011, 3:46 pm EDT
The Inlet House condo complex in Fort Pierce, Fla., was once the kind of place the 55-and-older set aspired to. It was affordable. The pool and clubhouse were tidy, the lawns freshly snipped. Residents, push-carts in tow, walked to the beach, the bank, the beauty parlor, the cinema and the supermarket. In post-crash America, this was a dreamy little spot. Especially on a fixed income.

But that was Inlet House before the rats started chewing through the toilet seats in vacant units and sewage started seeping from the ceiling. Before condos that were worth $79,000 four years ago sold for as little as $3,000. And before the homeowners' association levied $6,000 assessments on everyone -- and then foreclosed on seniors who couldn't pay the association bill, even if they didn't owe the bank a dime.

Normally, it's the bankers who go after delinquent homeowners. But in communities governed by the mighty homeowners' association, as the sour economy leaves more people unable to pay their fees, it's neighbor versus neighbor.

"What the board is doing is trying to foreclose on people to force people out the door," says Mike Silvestri, 75, who stopped paying his dues at Inlet House in protest over what he considers unnecessary and unaffordable assessments.

He and others say there were cheaper ways to deal with the rat infestation and leaky sewage that led the board to order up a costly plumbing overhaul. "They are bamboozling old people. I'm old, but I'm not senile," he says.

In the past, housing associations have gained infamy for dictating everything from the weight of your dog (one mandated a diet for a hound) to whether you can kiss in your driveway (not if you don't want a fine). Homeowners' associations have served as the behavior police, banning lemonade stands, solar panels and hanging out in the garage. One ordered a war hero to take down his flag because of a "nonconforming" pole. Another demanded that residents with brown spots on their lawns dye their grass green.

Now, past the faux regal gates, beyond the clubhouses, many property owners in associations owe more than their homes are worth. Some are struggling to pay their bills after they lose a job. Others have had their pay cut. So they've stopped paying their association dues.

To combat the rise in delinquencies, boards are switching off utilities, garnishing income and axing cable. They are yanking pool passes and banning the billiard room. And, in the most extreme cases, they are foreclosing.

"The treacherous part is that homeowners' associations are acting like a local government without restraints, and they have this extraordinary power," says Marjorie Murray, a lawyer and founder of the Center for California Homeowner Association Law.

Today, one in five U.S. homeowners is subject to the will of the homeowners' association, whose boards oversee 24.4 million homes. More than 80 percent of newly constructed homes in the U.S are in association communities.

And of the nation's 300,000 homeowners' associations, more than 50 percent now face "serious financial problems," according to a September survey by the Community Association Institute. An October survey found that 65 percent of homeowners' associations have delinquency rates higher than 5 percent, up from 19 percent of associations in 2005.

Associations set rules for their communities. They levy monthly dues, typically between $200 and $500, and cover the costs of services that a municipal government usually takes care of: road repair, streetlights, sewage systems. If an association's budget is strained or major repairs need to be done, the board can levy a "special assessment" on top of those dues. And when one homeowner doesn't pay those fees, all the other homeowners have to pick up the cost.

The rise in delinquencies comes as banks are taking over foreclosed homes and then leaving them vacant more often than ever. Taken together, these shortfalls are resulting in higher fees for all of the other homeowners -- and massive financial angst for association boards.

Before now, associations rarely, if ever, foreclosed on homeowners. But today, encouraged by a new industry of lawyers and consultants, boards are increasingly foreclosing on people 60 days past due on association fees, says Evan McKenzie, a former homeowner association attorney who is now a University of Illinois political science professor and the author of the book "Beyond Privatopia: Rethinking Residential Private Government."

The government does not keep statistics on how often homeowners' associations initiate foreclosures. But a nonprofit research group found that association-initiated foreclosures in the Houston area jumped from 500 in 1995 to 2,200 in 2007. Most association-related foreclosures in Texas do not go through the judicial process, so the group's analysis represented only a fraction of the foreclosures that housing associations have initiated.

In exchange for adhering to the rules, homeowners got safe communities with clubhouses, pools and tennis courts. But what many didn't realize when they bought their homes was that the fine print gave the association the right to foreclose -- even over a few hundred dollars in unpaid dues.

All the association board has to do is alert its attorney to place a lien on the property to start the process. The home can then be auctioned by the board until the bank eventually takes ownership. Homeowners typically have no right to a hearing.

"These are banana republics," McKenzie says.

The problems in some communities are resulting in more scrutiny. In Nevada, the FBI is investigating corruption in elections of association boards. In Utah and Arizona, legislators are trying to pass bills that would root out the use of debt-collectors who are alleged to have used thug-like tactics to strong-arm residents into paying fees.

State legislatures in California, Arizona, North Carolina, Texas and Florida have taken up legislation that would clamp down on foreclosures.

Not everyone thinks the tactics are out of line, though.

"When people are not paying their assessments, they're not shortchanging some giant multinational corporation. They are taking money directly out of the pockets of their neighbors," says Andrew Fortin, head of government affairs for the trade group the Community Associations Institute.

So the neighborhood feuds are escalating. At Inlet House, one resident claims her fellow senior citizens have turned into vigilantes, vandalizing her car in retaliation for not paying her dues.

In all, 17 of the 60 units are in various stages of delinquency. Paul Gray, a fastidious budgeter, paid off his mortgage long ago and paid all but $2,500 of the Inlet House assessment. The association initiated foreclosure proceedings. A few days after he received the foreclosure notice, Gray suffered another stroke, three friends say. Now he is in a nursing home. He has since paid off the $2,500. His home, worth $89,000 in 2006, is for sale for $18,500.

In the meantime, the board, facing $172,000 in costs from nonpayers, has had no choice but to raise dues by an extra $50 a month to an average of $375. Between the assessment and increased dues, some residents complain that they pay more than they would to rent a plush oceanfront spread down the street at the posh Fontainebleau condo complex. Association manager Janice Stinnett, who is also an Inlet House resident, says she isn't to blame, the nonpayers are.

"It's unfair that everyone is paying extra to cover these deadbeats," she says.

The board is continuing to make the plumbing repairs that made the assessments necessary to begin with. It will soon issue another special assessment to cover the costs.

To homeowners who opposed the repairs on the grounds that they were too expensive, the entire picture adds up to a crime. Says Silvestri, "What these associations are doing is illegal. It's a fraud."

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00Robert 2 minutes ago Report Abuse
This is just another HOA's should be banned nation wide, unless, of course, you prefer to live in a non-democratic society where someone else can tell you what to do, when to do it and how to do it. Sure HOA's have some benefits such as someone else doing the yard work (their way), more secure living (once in a while), etc. The greed and insanity of the selfish control freaks has to stop, HOA's should just be completely outlawed and those neighborhoods returned to the Land of the FREE.
Reply

00Scott 2 minutes ago Report Abuse
Your vice president said to count yourself lucky when you can pay your fare share. Hey we live in Obamanation, get used to the tax if no one cares about spending.
Reply

00Crafashion.Com 3 minutes ago Report Abuse
polo tshirt ，gucci prada lv chanel ，handbag， shoes ，online 33 usd look my name 67
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10Anonymous 3 minutes ago Report Abuse
That is why, I would NEVER live in a community with an HOA. I've done that, and all they do is take your money and do nothing for it, except tell me how I should live in my own house. I understand that some people like the idea of uniformaty, but, alot of these HOA a**hole see it as a way to impose their way of thinking on everyone else, and get money to do it. If it ever come to the point of renting or living in a HOA community, I'll take renting, they tell you want you can and can't do, cause they own the building yoy are living in. These are hard times for everyone, people are out of work and are barely scraping by. Those people are being a little rediculous, emphasis on the 'DIC'.
Reply

10Roger 4 minutes ago Report Abuse
ive been thinking about buying a house , but buying one with H O A is know way out , of what i want , after reading this , i had no ideal about the H O A having this kind of bull , i have a feeling that some people that run the H O A are going to get hurt !!! a realator was trying to get me to buy a house that the h o a said needed a roof, i said if i buy it , ill wait and theres soo many that cant aford it , whats the H O A going to do , the realator , said yea what can they do , goes to show she knew that thye could o this and just wanted to sell the house , realators are vampires , her names talia from brandon florida , ill look for no H O A and hope they get what coming to them , what ever that may be , hope the people can chase them out !!!
Reply

00Alien Jesus 4 minutes ago Report Abuse
USA, where people will actually pay to be told what to do as long as it makes them feel like they're getting to tell someone else what to do... it's a greedy hell bent power mad society and most of the people who bought into this crap in the first place deserve whatever they have coming.
Reply

00Jerry 5 minutes ago Report Abuse
When the hell did it become other peoples business what you do on your own property? Everything stays within the parameters of the law how the freaking hell can they do this? I've never heard of anything so outrageous here in central/northern New York.
Reply

10Fat 6 minutes ago Report Abuse
blame the citys that allow hoa. they don't write rules to govern them and they just suck up the taxes . city arent any different that hoa.I wish that if you live in a hoa you didn't have to pay property taxes. you get nothing from the city when you pay property tax.JMHO
Reply

20H.Busch 9 minutes ago Report Abuse
I think our country is being run by an H O A.
Reply

00Jerry 10 minutes ago Report Abuse
Just how do they get away with making such ridiculous rules? This can't be fully legal. I've heard of some far-fetched things but some of that is incredible. The weight of your dog, kiss in your driveway...seriously? No way can they have full legal authority to enforce this and fine 'offenders'.
Reply

Hanging onto houses

Introduction


Reed Saxon/Associated Press
.
In his column on Monday, Paul Krugman said that the Obama administration has done almost nothing to help troubled homeowners. Of $46 billion set aside for mortgage relief, less than $2 billion has been spent.

It has been more than six months since a bipartisan Congressional report called the government's effort -- called the Home Affordable Modification Program -- "a failure."

Since then, new foreclosure filings have slowed significantly -- down by a third nationally -- because of a large backlog in cases, greater caution by lenders after the "robosigning'' scandals and more aggressive defenses by homeowners whose mortgages are in jeopardy because they lost their job.

But housing experts expect the pace of foreclosures to pick up again. What changes can be made in the program to make it work more efficiently -- for homeowners, mortgage holders and taxpayers?

-----------------------------------------------------------
How We All Suffer

July 11, 2011
Kim Luu is the editor of Money and Risk and a principal at an independent brokerage firm specializing in retirement and 401(k)s.

The federal Home Affordable Modification Program was badly designed, overly complicated and poorly communicated. Borrowers suffered through horrendous paperwork for months and years. People ran through their retirement savings during the process, and then lost their homes anyway. Meanwhile, banks are saddled with billions of dollars in losses and inventory that still need to be auctioned.

Bank loan losses translate into lower stock prices and lower retirement account values for everyone.
For the thousands of homeowners dropping out of or failing to qualify for HAMP, it has obviously not been a success. People in foreclosure are not the only ones affected. We all suffer because bank loan losses translate into reduced stock prices and lower retirement account values.

If we are asked to pay billions for another rescue, we need a simple-to-execute program that protects the homeowners, the banks and the investors.

The solution doesn't have to be radical. I'm not a proponent of lowering the mortgage amount. When someone enters into a contract to borrow money, it is a commitment to be honored. They should be held responsible for paying it back as the money that they borrowed came from the bank deposits of their neighbors. Cutting mortgage debt because home value dropped encourages speculation now and in the future.

Adjust the payment schedule to the individual's specific situation without absolving responsibility for the debts.
The primary issue for troubled borrowers is variable payment size -- not variable interest or loan amount. Whether they went into a low starter payment to buy a house that they knew full well they could never afford, or whether they are 50 years old and got laid off and now making 50 percent less, HAMP should have addressed this issue with a meaningful solution.

Here's one proposal: adjust the payment schedule to the individual's specific situation without absolving responsibility for the debts. There is nothing wrong with a 40-year amortization if you plan to live in your home for life. Review the loans periodically and adjusted rates and payments back to market as income improves. Homeowners can request a review for adjustment up at any time. During unemployment, payments are deferred on negative amortization or are switched to interest only.

Give people the chance to work through financial distress with personal dignity and pride. Help those who are committed to staying in their homes. Let the speculators suffer foreclosure.
-------------------------------------------------------------------


The Cost of Delaying Foreclosures

July 11, 2011
R. Kelley Pace is the director of the Real Estate Research Institute and a professor in the E.J. Ourso College of Business at Louisiana State University. Shuang Zhu is a doctoral candidate in the department of finance there.

Providing cost effective and useful aid to struggling borrowers, while not creating any unintended adverse consequences, is the holy grail of foreclosure prevention programs. Even if a program's design achieves this goal, the actual performance depends on its implementation.

Prolonging the process provides additional free rent to defaulting borrowers and thus increases the benefit of default.
For example, a program seeking to reduce strategic default (a borrower with sufficient income who defaults because the mortgage balance exceeds the house price) might rely on an estimated house price (appraisal). However, appraisals are performed by appraisers who not long ago were cast as villains.

As villains they were biased and inaccurate. Now when working for the program, these heroes will be unbiased and accurate. In reality, appraisers also encounter difficulties in estimating prices for imperfect houses in low volume markets.

In a study of New Orleans foreclosures, we estimated that unspecialized, licensed appraisers might have an average error rate of around 10 percent. This means that about 4 percent of the properties would have appraisals that are either 20 percent too high or too low. Such appraisal inaccuracies could result in random borrower qualification and aid amounts.

A relatively low "cost" means of preventing foreclosures is to add delays to the process. For example, Massachusetts added a 90 day right-to-cure period as part of a revamp of their foreclosure rules. However, foreclosure delays provide additional free rent to defaulting borrowers and thus increase the benefit of default.

Actual foreclosure delays have been increasing. In 2003, none of the 16 states that we examined had over 12 months of delay. By 2008 (still before the documentation crisis), 50 percent of the states had a delay of over one year. In our research on this topic, we found that foreclosure delays had a statistically and economically significant impact on default.

For higher risk loans, imposing a three-month foreclosure delay had almost the same effect as increasing the average loan-to-value by 10 percent. Although increasing delays reduce the explicit cost of foreclosure prevention programs, they do impose costs on investors. By raising the risk of owning residential mortgages, mandated foreclosure delays potentially affect the access and cost of credit.
------------------------------------------------------------------

The Unemployment Factor

July 11, 2011
Morris A. Davis is the academic director of the James A. Graaskamp Center for Real Estate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The Home Affordable Modification Program is designed to prevent foreclosures caused by mortgages with exploding payments. The program creates incentives for banks to refinance these mortgages.

Don't reduce the principal -- that only rewards people who took on the most debt. Extend loans to unemployed homeowners instead.
The past two years of data suggest exploding mortgage payments are not the cause of the foreclosure crisis. Prime mortgages account for the majority of mortgage defaults. Instead, there are two “triggers” that cause foreclosures.

The first is when the value of the house is less than the mortgage amount, and homeowners cannot sell their house (unless they write a check at closing). The second trigger is when the homeowner experiences some disruption to income, like unemployment. Why? In most states, maximum monthly unemployment benefits are less than or not much larger than average mortgage payments. In a recent survey from Freddie Mac, the most frequently cited reason for “hardship” among borrowers was “Unemployment or Curtailment of Income” at 57 percent.

HAMP continues to fail because it does not address the root causes of foreclosures. Twenty percent of all residential properties with mortgages are under water; unemployment rates are high; and no one forecasts a quick recovery to house prices or employment. An effective foreclosure-prevention policy would directly address one of the two triggers. Some proposals under discussion require that banks write down mortgage principal. Other proposals suggest direct assistance to unemployed homeowners to help them make their mortgage payments.

I dislike the idea of principal reduction because it transfers wealth to people that took on the largest amount of mortgage debt relative to their home value. I would instead recommend the federal government institute the Boston Fed plan, which extends loans to unemployed homeowners. Homeowners would be offered a loan for a certain number of months while unemployed and would repay the loan over time once employed.

I like the Boston Fed plan because it directly addresses the unemployment trigger, and it is a loan which mitigates some moral hazard issues. Further, the program might directly benefit all U.S. taxpayers. After a foreclosure, the average loss to the holder of the mortgage is about $100,000. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac insure against these losses on many mortgages. Any program that reduces foreclosures also reduces losses incurred by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, whose costs are now covered by U.S. taxpayers.
===================================================================================

How We All Suffer

July 11, 2011
Kim Luu is the editor of Money and Risk and a principal at an independent brokerage firm specializing in retirement and 401(k)s.

The federal Home Affordable Modification Program was badly designed, overly complicated and poorly communicated. Borrowers suffered through horrendous paperwork for months and years. People ran through their retirement savings during the process, and then lost their homes anyway. Meanwhile, banks are saddled with billions of dollars in losses and inventory that still need to be auctioned.

Bank loan losses translate into lower stock prices and lower retirement account values for everyone.
For the thousands of homeowners dropping out of or failing to qualify for HAMP, it has obviously not been a success. People in foreclosure are not the only ones affected. We all suffer because bank loan losses translate into reduced stock prices and lower retirement account values.

If we are asked to pay billions for another rescue, we need a simple-to-execute program that protects the homeowners, the banks and the investors.

The solution doesn't have to be radical. I'm not a proponent of lowering the mortgage amount. When someone enters into a contract to borrow money, it is a commitment to be honored. They should be held responsible for paying it back as the money that they borrowed came from the bank deposits of their neighbors. Cutting mortgage debt because home value dropped encourages speculation now and in the future.

Adjust the payment schedule to the individual's specific situation without absolving responsibility for the debts.
The primary issue for troubled borrowers is variable payment size -- not variable interest or loan amount. Whether they went into a low starter payment to buy a house that they knew full well they could never afford, or whether they are 50 years old and got laid off and now making 50 percent less, HAMP should have addressed this issue with a meaningful solution.

Here's one proposal: adjust the payment schedule to the individual's specific situation without absolving responsibility for the debts. There is nothing wrong with a 40-year amortization if you plan to live in your home for life. Review the loans periodically and adjusted rates and payments back to market as income improves. Homeowners can request a review for adjustment up at any time. During unemployment, payments are deferred on negative amortization or are switched to interest only.

Give people the chance to work through financial distress with personal dignity and pride. Help those who are committed to staying in their homes. Let the speculators suffer foreclosure.

==================================================================================

Broken Promises

July 11, 2011
Neil Barofsky is an adjunct professor at New York University School of Law. He was the special inspector general of the Troubled Asset Relief Program from 2008 to 2011.

The Home Affordable Modification Program, announced in February 2009 after Treasury abandoned its original promise to use Troubled Asset Relief Program funds to purchase and then modify up to $700 billion in mortgages, has been a failure.

At the time, President Obama promised that through incentive payments to mortgage servicers, investors and borrowers, HAMP would help three to four million American families stay in their homes through permanent, sustainable mortgage modifications. Nearly two and a half years later, that promise lies in tatters, with far more failures than successes, and estimates that, at best, the program will achieve only one-fifth of the upper end of its goal.

The Treasury Department has engaged in nothing more than political theater in addressing the universal criticism of its failed mortgage relief program.
Even if it is now too late to meet the president’s original promise, the lull in both HAMP modifications (with a six-month average monthly net addition of fewer than 21,000 permanent modifications) and foreclosures (which have been delayed following discovery of widespread documentation failures by mortgage servicers) present Treasury with an opportunity to respond to the program’s failures. Treasury should use this time – and the tens of billions of TARP dollars still obligated to HAMP – to improve the program before the next wave of anticipated foreclosures hits.

Unfortunately, Treasury has showed no willingness to address the program’s deep structural flaws. Despite Secretary Geithner’s concession to Congress earlier this year that its incentive payments to the mortgage servicers who effectively run the program have “not been powerful enough” to maximize participation, Treasury has done nothing to address this defect.

Similarly, although acknowledging the “abysmal” performance of those same mortgage servicers, Treasury refuses to sanction them meaningfully, portraying itself as impotent in the face of the servicers’ willful disregard of their contractual obligations.

Instead, in an obvious attempt to blunt near universal criticism of its velvet glove approach, last month Treasury took largely meaningless action against just three of the servicers by temporarily withholding payments until they stop violating the program's rules -- something to which they had largely already committed in a previous unrelated settlement with their regulators -- and then paying them in full. This action, which one servicer said “mean[t] very little” to it, is not even a slap on the wrist; it is political theater.

Although the president recently acknowledged that the housing efforts to date have been "not enough" and promised to go back to the "drawing board," Treasury has thus far shown no interest in trying to fix the program (a senior official of the Troubled Asset Relief Program promised a room full of cheering mortgage servicers earlier this year that it would only “tweak” HAMP around the edges), it could and should take steps to make the program more effective.

First, it should re-examine its incentive structure to fix the problems acknowledged by Secretary Geithner. Second, it should adopt a recommendation SIGTARP made last year, and make principal reduction mandatory in instances where it results in the best economic outcome for both the borrower and the owner of the mortgage. Finally, Treasury should live up to a promise it made in November 2009 to impose meaningful “monetary penalties and sanctions” on servicers, both to compensate for past violations and to ensure better compliance going forward.

No, We Can’t? Or Won’t? By PAUL KRUGMAN

If you were shocked by Friday’s job report, if you thought we were doing well and were taken aback by the bad news, you haven’t been paying attention. The fact is, the United States economy has been stuck in a rut for a year and a half.

Yet a destructive passivity has overtaken our discourse. Turn on your TV and you’ll see some self-satisfied pundit declaring that nothing much can be done about the economy’s short-run problems (reminder: this “short run” is now in its fourth year), that we should focus on the long run instead.

This gets things exactly wrong. The truth is that creating jobs in a depressed economy is something government could and should be doing. Yes, there are huge political obstacles to action — notably, the fact that the House is controlled by a party that benefits from the economy’s weakness. But political gridlock should not be conflated with economic reality.

Our failure to create jobs is a choice, not a necessity — a choice rationalized by an ever-shifting set of excuses.

Excuse No. 1: Just around the corner, there’s a rainbow in the sky.

Remember “green shoots”? Remember the “summer of recovery”? Policy makers keep declaring that the economy is on the mend — and Lucy keeps snatching the football away. Yet these delusions of recovery have been an excuse for doing nothing as the jobs crisis festers.

Excuse No. 2: Fear the bond market.

Two years ago The Wall Street Journal declared that interest rates on United States debt would soon soar unless Washington stopped trying to fight the economic slump. Ever since, warnings about the imminent attack of the “bond vigilantes” have been used to attack any spending on job creation.

But basic economics said that rates would stay low as long as the economy was depressed — and basic economics was right. The interest rate on 10-year bonds was 3.7 percent when The Wall Street Journal issued that warning; at the end of last week it was 3.03 percent.

How have the usual suspects responded? By inventing their own reality. Last week, Representative Paul Ryan, the man behind the G.O.P. plan to dismantle Medicare, declared that we must slash government spending to “take pressure off the interest rates” — the same pressure, I suppose, that has pushed those rates to near-record lows.

Excuse No. 3: It’s the workers’ fault.

Unemployment soared during the financial crisis and its aftermath. So it seems bizarre to argue that the real problem lies with the workers — that the millions of Americans who were working four years ago but aren’t working now somehow lack the skills the economy needs.

Yet that’s what you hear from many pundits these days: high unemployment is “structural,” they say, and requires long-term solutions (which means, in practice, doing nothing).

Well, if there really was a mismatch between the workers we have and the workers we need, workers who do have the right skills, and are therefore able to find jobs, should be getting big wage increases. They aren’t. In fact, average wages actually fell last month.

Excuse No. 4: We tried to stimulate the economy, and it didn’t work.

Everybody knows that President Obama tried to stimulate the economy with a huge increase in government spending, and that it didn’t work. But what everyone knows is wrong.

Think about it: Where are the big public works projects? Where are the armies of government workers? There are actually half a million fewer government employees now than there were when Mr. Obama took office.

So what happened to the stimulus? Much of it consisted of tax cuts, not spending. Most of the rest consisted either of aid to distressed families or aid to hard-pressed state and local governments. This aid may have mitigated the slump, but it wasn’t the kind of job-creation program we could and should have had. This isn’t 20-20 hindsight: some of us warned from the beginning that tax cuts would be ineffective and that the proposed spending was woefully inadequate. And so it proved.

It’s also worth noting that in another area where government could make a big difference — help for troubled homeowners — almost nothing has been done. The Obama administration’s program of mortgage relief has gone nowhere: of $46 billion allotted to help families stay in their homes, less than $2 billion has actually been spent.

So let’s summarize: The economy isn’t fixing itself. Nor are there real obstacles to government action: both the bond vigilantes and structural unemployment exist only in the imaginations of pundits. And if stimulus seems to have failed, it’s because it was never actually tried.

Listening to what supposedly serious people say about the economy, you’d think the problem was “no, we can’t.” But the reality is “no, we won’t.” And every pundit who reinforces that destructive passivity is part of the problem.

Vocationalism, Academic Freedom and Tenure By STANLEY FISH

July 11, 2011, 8:30 PM

In her new book, “The Faculty Lounges: and Other Reasons Why You Won’t Get the College Education You Paid For,” Naomi Schaefer Riley brings together two subjects that are usually treated separately in the literature.

The first is the increasing tendency, on the part of students, legislators, administrators and some faculty members, to view higher education in vocational terms and to link questions of curriculum and funding to the realization of career goals. The second is the debate about academic freedom: what is it, who should have it, should anyone have it? What Riley does is take the standard rationale for academic freedom seriously and then argue that the ascendancy of vocationalism, in combination with other factors she names, undermines that rationale and leaves very few college teachers in need of, or deserving of, academic freedom.

The standard rationale for academic freedom is that the business of the academy is to advance knowledge by conducting inquiries the outcomes of which are not known in advance. Since the obligation is to follow the evidence wherever it leads rather than to a “pre-stipulated goal” (a phrase Riley takes from my writings), researchers must be free to go down paths as they suggest themselves and not in obedience to a political program or an ideology. That is why (and again she is quoting me) “the degree of latitude and flexibility” that attends academic freedom is “not granted to the practitioners of other professions.”

But, Riley observes, “a significant portion of [the] additional degrees that colleges have added in the past few decades have been in vocational areas,” and those areas “simply do not engage students in a search for ultimate truths,” but instead have pre-stipulated goals. “Do we need,” she asks, “to guarantee the academic freedom of professors engaged in teaching and studying ‘Transportation and Materials Moving,’ a field in which more than five thousand degrees were awarded in 2006?”

Riley makes the same point about “vocational courses” that have been around for a while. Freshman composition, for example, “does not demand that faculty ask existential questions.” Ditto for courses in “Security and Protective Services,” and “Business Statistics.” These are, she says, “fields of study with fairly definitive answers” and it would be hard to argue that they are “essential to civilization.” Those who teach these and similarly vocational subjects “don’t really need the freedom to ask controversial questions in discussing them.”

Another category of courses that Riley believes does not merit academic freedom includes “area, ethnic, cultural, and gender studies.” Here the issue is not an absence of intellectual content, but an intellectual content that goes only in one (leftward) direction. Often, she complains, “the entire premise of the discipline … rests on a political agenda.” Courses “often appear to be a series of axes faculty would like to grind.” Since “the endpoint of their academic study is predetermined,” the departments that offer them “are advertising their lack of a need for academic freedom.”

Now, one might think that by looking askance at vocational and political instruction, Riley is calling for a return to traditional liberal arts education with its emphasis on open-ended inquiry and intellectual risk-taking. But in fact she is preparing the way for an argument against tenure.

It goes like this. Tenure, like academic freedom, depends on a certain picture of what goes on in college and university classrooms — high-level discussions tied to cutting edge research into intellectual problems. Tenure protects the freedom of instructors to engage in such research. But in many classrooms, dedicated to vocational or corporate or political goals, that’s not what’s going on, and the instructors who preside over those classrooms need neither academic freedom nor tenure. Only those engaged in the “search for ultimate truths” do.

But wait (I mimic the key moment in late-night infomercials), there’s more. So-called “advanced researchers,” who by this argument alone merit academic freedom and tenure, are churning out work with no connection to a real social need. Riley quotes approvingly the judgment of educational theorist Richard Vedder: “…most of the research done to earn tenure is darn near useless. On any rational cost-benefit analysis, the institution of tenure has led to the publication of hundreds of thousands of papers that are … read by a dozen people.”

So it turns out that the very people who, under traditional definitions and standards, would be protected by academic freedom and tenure, shouldn’t be in colleges and university classrooms in the first place because they are selfishly pursuing their own narrow interests and contributing little to the well-being of either students or society. The entire machinery of tenure is based on the imperative “to say something new,” but, Riley contends, there aren’t very many new things to say, especially in the humanities: “With thousands of PhDs being minted every year, topics are drying up by the minute.”

Wouldn’t it make more sense, Riley asks, to hire broadly educated persons who made no pretense of “advancing knowledge” to teach most of the courses? “Wouldn’t someone who has spent more time on that broad education and less time trying to find some miniscule niche on which to write a dissertation be the better teacher for most of those classes?”

In other words, let’s get rid of the research professors for whom academic freedom and tenure make some sense, at least historically, and have a teaching corps that understands itself to be performing a specific task (the imparting of basic skills to undergraduates) and can be held to account directly when their superiors determine that their performance is inadequate. In short, we need more instructors who don’t merit tenure, and once we have them Riley’s conclusion is inevitable: “There is no reason why tenure shouldn’t be abolished at the vast majority of the four thousand degree-granting colleges and universities in the United States.” There is no reason because every reason usually given in support of tenure and academic freedom has been shown to undermine itself in the course of this quite clever argument.

By calling the argument “clever” I don’t mean to signify agreement with it. My admiration is for the performance of the argument, not its content. Yet I welcome the content too, although for a reason Riley would probably not approve: it demonstrates the practical and political necessity of defining academic work in a way that justifies the resistance to monitoring by external constituencies.

What Riley shows is that vocation-oriented teaching, teaching beholden to corporations and politically inflected teaching do not square with the picture of academic labor assumed by the institutions of tenure and academic freedom. She says that, given the direction colleges and universities are going in, faculty members have little claim to the protection of doctrines that were fashioned for an academy that holds itself aloof from real world issues, either political or mercantile.

I say, and have been saying for years, that colleges and universities should stop moving in those directions — toward relevance, bottom-line contributions and social justice — and go back to a future in which academic inquiry is its own justification.

In Defense of Murdoch By ROGER COHEN

July 11, 2011

NEW YORK — Fair warning: This column is a defense of Rupert Murdoch. If you add everything up, he’s been good for newspapers over the past several decades, keeping them alive and vigorous and noisy and relevant. Without him, the British newspaper industry might have disappeared entirely.

This defense is prompted in part by seeing everyone piling in on the British hacking scandal, as if such abuses were confined to News International (we shall see) and as if significant swathes of the British establishment had not been complicit. It is also prompted by having spent time with Murdoch 21 years ago when writing a profile for The New York Times Magazine and coming away impressed.

Before I get to why, a few caveats. First, the hacking is of course indefensible as well as illegal. Second, Fox News, the U.S. TV network started by Murdoch, has with its shrill right-wing demagoguery masquerading as news made a significant contribution to the polarization of American politics, the erosion of reasoned debate, the debunking of reason itself, and the ensuing Washington paralysis. Third, I disagree with Murdoch’s views on a range of issues — from climate change to the Middle East — where his influence has been unhelpful.

So why do I still admire the guy? The first reason is his evident loathing for elites, for cozy establishments, for cartels, for what he’s called “strangulated English accents” — in fact for anything standing in the way of gutsy endeavor and churn. His love of no-holds-barred journalism is one reason Britain’s press is one of the most aggressive anywhere. That’s good for free societies.

Murdoch once told me: “When I came to Britain in 1968, I found it was damn hard to get a day’s work out of the people at the top of the social scale. As an Australian, I only had to work 8 or 10 hours a day, 48 weeks of the year, and everything came to you.”

So it was easy enough, from 1969 onward, to rake in the media heirlooms. Along the way he’s often shown fierce loyalty to his people — as now with Rebekah Brooks, the embattled head of News International — and piled money into important newspapers like The Times that would otherwise have vanished.

The second thing I admire is the visionary, risk-taking determination that has placed him ahead of the game as the media business has been transformed through globalization and digitization. It’s been the ability to see around corners that has ushered him from two modest papers inherited from his father in Adelaide to the head of a company with about $33 billion in annual revenues.

Yes, there have been mistakes — MySpace, the social media site just sold for a fraction of its purchase price is one. But I’d take Murdoch’s batting average. He’s gambled big on satellite TV, on global media opportunities in sports, and on the conflation of television, publishing, entertainment, newspapers and the Internet. British Sky Broadcasting and Fox alone represent big businesses created from nothing against significant odds.

A favorite Murdoch saying is: “We don’t deal in market share. We create the market.”

Of course, his success makes plenty of people envious, one reason the Citizen Kane ogre image has attached to him. (He would have endorsed Kane who, when asked in the movie how he found business conditions in Europe, responded: “With great difficulty!”) His success has caused redoubled envy in Britain because there he is ever the outsider from Down Under. (America doesn’t really do outsiders.)

The Times, which I’ve found a good read since moving to London last summer, has impressed me with its continued investment in foreign coverage, its bold move to put up a pay wall for the online edition (yes, people should pay for the work of journalists), and with the way the paper plays it pretty straight under editor James Harding. The Telegraph to the right and Guardian to the left play it less straight.

British Sky Broadcasting is emphatically not Fox. It’s a varied channel with some serious news shows. Overall, the British media scene without Murdoch would be pretty impoverished. His breaking of the unions at Wapping in 1986 was decisive for the vitality of newspapering. He took The Times tabloid when everyone said he was crazy. He was right. He loves a scoop, loves a scrap, and both the Wall Street Journal and The Times show serious journalists can thrive under him.

But Murdoch’s in trouble now. An important deal for all of British Sky Broadcasting hangs on his being able to convince British authorities News Corp management is in fact reputable. He’ll probably have to sacrifice Brooks for that. Politicians who fawned now fulminate. Prime Minister David Cameron is embarrassed. Both Murdoch and his savvy son James Murdoch (of more centrist views than his father) are scrambling.

I’d bet on them to prevail. When I asked Murdoch the secret of TV, he told me “Bury your mistakes.” The guy’s a force of nature and his restless innovations have, on balance and with caveats, been good for the media and a more open world.



You can follow Roger Cohen on Twitter at twitter.com/nytimescohen.

Chernobyl’s Lingering Scars By JOE NOCERA

July 11, 2011

Oddly enough, the 25th anniversary of the worst nuclear accident in history has been marked by journalism about animals. Two magazines, Wired and Harper’s, have published lengthy articles about the rebirth of animal life in the so-called exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine.

All well and good, but given the recent Japanese nuclear accident, wouldn’t you rather know what has happened to the, er, people who were affected by Chernobyl?

I know such a person. Her name is Maria Gawronska. Thirty years old, smart and attractive, Maria is a native of Poland who moved to New York in 2004. I met her through my fiancée maybe four years ago. She always wore a turtleneck, even on the hottest of days.

Maria’s hometown, Olsztyn, in northern Poland, is more than 400 miles from Chernobyl. She was 5 years old in April 1986 when the reactor melted down, spewing immense amounts of radioactivity upwind, where it spread across Ukraine, Belarus and, yes, northern Poland.

“At first,” Maria said, “they said it was an explosion but it wasn’t dangerous.” But within a few days, the Soviet Union grudgingly acknowledged the accident. Maria recalls that everyone was given iodine tablets, and told to remain indoors. She stayed in the house for the next two weeks.

She also remembers hearing people say that it would be years before Poles knew the health consequences of the accident. Among other things, radiation can wreak havoc on the thyroid gland; that is why people take iodine tablets, to minimize the amount of radioactive iodine that their thyroids absorb.

Sure enough, over the course of the last quarter-century, there has been an explosion of thyroid problems in Olsztyn. Maria told me that entire hospital wings are now devoted to thyroid disease. This is no exaggeration. Dr. Artur Zalewski, an Olsztyn thyroid surgeon, confirmed that his practice had seen a huge increase in thyroid operations since the early 1990s. Some people have cancerous thyroids, but many more have enlarged thyroids, or thyroids that have stopped functioning properly.

Dr. Zalewski also cautioned me, though, that there was no scientific proof connecting thyroid disease to Chernobyl. Partly because of Soviet intransigence, and partly because of what The Lancet would describe as “considerable logistical challenges,” epidemiological studies were never begun that might have helped link the disaster to Poland’s thyroid problems.

The studies that have been done have focused on cancer. According to The Lancet, it is possible that increases in childhood leukemia and breast cancer in Belarus and Ukraine can be attributed to Chernobyl. But because of “flawed study design,” these studies are not definitive.

When I e-mailed Maria’s mother, Barbara Gawronska-Kozak, however, she was adamant: “I am convinced that Chernobyl increased thyroid problems.” Barbara, a scientist herself (though not an epidemiologist), told me that this was what the “average citizen of Poland” believed. She herself required a thyroid operation a decade after the accident. Her mother had two thyroid operations. Her best friend had a thyroid operation. An old high school friend recently had a goiter removed. Maria told me that her father was the only family member who had not had a thyroid problem.

Around five years ago, it was Maria’s turn. Gradually, her thyroid become so enlarged that it impinged on her trachea, making it hard to breathe in certain positions. The unsightly growth, of course, was why she always wore a turtleneck. A specialist in New York told her that he had never seen anything quite like it, and that the operation to correct it was high risk and could possibly damage her vocal cords. So Maria decided to return to Poland and have the operation in her hometown. She did so earlier this year.

Just as in Chernobyl’s case, it will be years before we know how the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station will affect the health of those who lived nearby. Although much less radiation escaped, it did leak into the water, and traces have been found in the food supply. It makes one wonder how to deal with nuclear power, which offers the tantalizing prospect of clean energy — along with the ever-present risk of disaster should something go wrong. These are not simple questions — as we are reminded whenever there is an accident like Fukushima Daiichi. Or Chernobyl.

For Maria, at least, the story ends happily. Dr. Zalewski, who operated on her, didn’t flinch when he saw the size of her thyroid. The operation was a success. Her vocal cords are just fine. She has more energy than she has had in years.

Maria told me that while she was in Olsztyn, she sought out old friends. As soon as they heard why she had returned, she said, “They all laughed and pointed to their own scars.”

When I saw her not long after she returned to New York, I couldn’t help noticing her own small scar. She wasn’t wearing a turtleneck.

Ideology Trumps Economics

There is a huge gap in logic at the heart of the Republican intransigence on a debt-ceiling deal, and President Obama helped to illuminate it on Monday.

The party claims, as an article of faith, if not evidence, that the government’s growing debt is the reason for persistent unemployment and economic stagnation. And yet Republicans are spurning the president’s compromise offers to reduce that debt by trillions over the next decade because he is sensibly insisting that any deal include some increase in tax revenue.

“Where are they?” Mr. Obama asked at his news conference. “I mean, this is what they claim would be the single biggest boost to business certainty and confidence. So what’s the holdup?”

The holdup, of course, is that Republicans are far more committed to the ideological goals of cutting government and taxes than they are committed to cutting the deficit. They rejected several compromise offers by the White House, even though any revenue increases would be far outweighed by spending cuts.

Republican rejectionism was on clear display Saturday night when John Boehner, the House speaker, was forced to abandon a plan he and the president had discussed to reduce the deficit by $4 trillion over 10 years.

The plan would have gone much too far in cutting discretionary spending and entitlements, taking too much money from the economy at a time when it desperately needs government investment. But it would have been better than the slashing and burning the Republicans have been demanding because it would have raised from $700 billion to $1 trillion in additional revenue beginning in 2013 by ending tax breaks and deductions for corporations and the rich, or by ending the Bush tax cuts for families making $250,000 or more.

The House Republican leader, Eric Cantor, insisted to Mr. Boehner that his members, shackled to antitax pledges, could not accept it, or anything similar. Now negotiators are trying to reach agreement on a deal to lower the deficit by $2 trillion or so over a decade. But the consequences for the economy and Americans’ lives would be just as disastrous if all of those “savings” come out of essential government programs, with no additional revenue.

Mr. Boehner’s refusal to push back against his party’s ideologues is only feeding their worst impulses. Many House Republicans have gone even further than Mr. Cantor and have rejected any deal that raises the debt ceiling, whether it contains revenue increases or not.

Representative Michele Bachmann and Reince Priebus, the Republican national chairman, airily and irresponsibly insist that the government will find some other way to pay its bills. That’s dangerous nonsense. And as the president forcefully noted, a default could propel interest rates skyward, throw millions more Americans out of work, and create another recession.

It was good to see Mr. Obama challenging the Republicans’ illogic and pushing them to make a deal before it’s too late. But we fear the sort of deal he is willing to consider, based overwhelmingly on spending cuts, could still consign the country to more years of economic stagnation.

The president spoke about the need to create an infrastructure bank, to maintain unemployment benefits, and to protect the elderly and the poor. But keeping those goals will be nearly impossible with a debt deal that cuts three times as much spending as it raises revenue. A balanced plan, like the one Senator Kent Conrad is circulating among Senate Democrats, would cut spending and raise revenue equally, and would make it possible to pay for programs that kick-start the economy.

Americans need to hear the hard economic truth that there is no way to both cut the deficit and revive the economy without finding additional sources of revenue. As the president himself said on Monday, “If not now, when?”

Preview: Hiding Behind the Troops By Jeff Huber Monday, July 11, 2011

You’re at a convenience shack or a grocery barn or wherever Old Century-style place it is you go where you have wait in some kind of line to pay for stuff in person and talk to an actual check-out person who hasn’t been replaced by a machine that’s smarter than your college sophomore kid yet. You look around while you’re waiting for the one or more of the latter-day luddites in front of you to write a check instead of swiping a credit card because a) they don’t believe in the 21st century or b) they never heard of it. (I can think of no contemporary scenario more Chaplin-esque—maddening, hilarious and heart-breaking at the same time—that the one that contains the bit of dialogue that goes: Darn it, I can never find that pen, it’s the one I always use, I know its in my purse somewhere, I always keep it there, it was an anniversary present, you know. Oh, I hope I didn’t leave it someplace.)

Mixed in among the displays of designer kid’s candies that are more addictive than crack cocaine and tabloid periodicals that are worse for you mind than modeling glue, maybe right next to the cash register, you see a presentation that proudly features one of those old-oak-tree ribbon thingies with a logo you can’t quite read yet. It’s not the pink one that wants you to save the ta-tas, no, and it’s not the one that wants you to adopt pound puppies and kitties or have them neutered or clean up their poop or whatever—that one’s brown isn’t it? No, this is the yellow one, you can read what it says now: SUPPORT OUR TROOPS!

If you tack a dollar onto the tab for groceries or your beer or your giant box of Jujubes, “a portion” of it will go help our troops overseas who are protecting us and keeping us safe and are making all the sacrifices in our War on Evil while we sit at home and don’t make hardly any sacrifices at all. This particular come on promises to make sure every troop—that is, every troop who wants one, or asks for one, or fills out a ten page application form and writes a 500 word essay and then wins the drawing—will receive a gift on the next Christian holiday that he or she spends away from home that includes a personalized Hershey bar that reads “Go, Troops, Go!”

At this point, you hopefully ask yourself why, if we the taxpayers have ponied up over a trillion dollars for our woebegone wars in Iraq and the Bananastans, why should any of us pull another dollar out of our pocket to make sure our troops get a candy bar for Christmas? And gee, those tens or maybe hundreds of billions we poured into Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan that disappeared like an old lady’s pen, wouldn’t they alone have bought a lifetime supply of personalized Christmas Hershey bars for just about every person in the world who celebrates Christmas and most of the ones who don’t as well?


And you hopefully want to scream when you fail to toss a buck into the pot when you check out and the cash register professional pouts and says, “Don’t you want to help the troops? The old lady who lost her pen did.”

Catch the rest tomorrow…

Fiasco in Edwardsport Reversal of Fortune for Duke Energy By JOHN BLAIR

In a shocking reversal of position, the Indiana Office of Utility Consumer Counselor (OUCC) has reversed its support for the Duke Energy Edwardsport power plant fiasco.

Just last November 3, OUCC head, David Stippler gave the plant and ratepayer support for it his glowing endorsement during a "technical hearing" before the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission (IURC). On July 1, his office reversed that endorsement and said that ratepayers should no longer be on the hook for the massive cost overruns the construction of the beleaguered plant which is now said by Duke to cost more than $3 billion, a figure that does not include carbon capture and sequestration.

David Stippler, Indiana Utility Consumer Counselor had a change of heart and a change of direction regarding Duke Energy's Edwardsport power plant.

Since the plant's inception in 2005, the OUCC has been a leading promoter of the plant, following the lead of Indiana governor, Mitch Daniels who has made the plant the centerpiece of what he calls "home grown energy," since it will presumably use Indiana coal to fuel its electrical generation. At that time Duke claimed the plant would cost $1.2 billion and would incorporate carbon capture and storage technology within that cost.

In fact, last September, the OUCC entered into a "settlement" regarding the plant along with Duke and a group of Duke's industrial customers that would have placed a cap on the costs that ratepayers would have been required to fund at nearly $2.9 billion. At that time, it was only the coalition of health, consumer and environmental advocates including Valley Watch, Save The Valley, Citizens Action Coalition and the Sierra Club that continued to stand in opposition to the plant.

David Lott Hardy could face jail time for his cozy indiscretions with Duke Energy executives as revealed in numerous emails reviewed by the Joint Intervenors in the unfolding scandal. In the Energy Summit of Southwest Indiana, where this photo was taken, Hardy enthusiastically endorsed the Edwardsport project without having analyzed the evidence.Photo © 2007 John Blair

But shortly after the settlement was announced it began to fall apart as a major scandal developed surrounding Duke's hiring of the Chief Administrative Law Judge for the IURC, Scott Storms. Storms had presided over numerous dockets regarding the Edwardsport plant and his employment by Duke set off a storm of protests and inquiries by private and public agencies, including the FBI, which led to the release of hundreds of emails which showed an extremely cozy relationship between Duke and the IURC and especially its chairman, David Lott Hardy, a former lawyer for Duke's predecessor, Cinergy and Public Service Company Indiana.

Hardy, it seemed enjoyed taking advantage of Duke executive's largess including not only expensive breakfasts at exclusive Indianapolis eateries with Duke CEO, Jim Rogers but also repeated social engagements with other Duke execs on their private yachts in Lake Michigan as revealed in publicly released emails.

After the cozy relationships become public knowledge, Hardy was fired by by Governor Daniels in an attempt at damage control since it has been clear that Daniels and Hardy were in lockstep concerning the Duke plant since it was first envisioned. In fact, the day after the public hearing on Edwardsport in late August 2007, Hardy and Daniels both appeared at what was billed as and "Energy Summit" in Evansville giving their enthusiastic endorsement of the Edwardsport facility, well before the IURC had vetted the evidence presented during the hearing or during the formal IURC proceeding.

It was not until November, 2007 that IURC gave Duke the go ahead to force their Indiana customers to assume the risk of building the plant which opponents had very precisely warned would cost far more than the $1.9 billion the IURC approved.

All during this time, the Office of Consumer Counselor was also in lockstep with the Governor and Hardy on their promotion of the plant and remained so until last week when they issued their explosive testimony telling IURC they should no longer require Duke's customers to pick up the cost of the massive overruns Duke had allowed to happen. In fact, in that testimony, they left open the possibility that Duke's mismanagement and concealment might lead them to ask for ratepayer exposure to be even less than the $2.35 billion already approved by the IURC in March 2009.

OUCC's position today is wondrously close to the position of the Joint Intervenors, the collection of consumer, health and environmental organizations that have warned of the exact scenario that has occurred with overruns and mismanagement since the very beginning of the Edwardsport fiasco. The main difference between the tow positions at this time is that the Joint Interveners believe the plant is not needed now or in the future and that the 618 Megawatts of pwoer the plant is to produce could be achieved less expensively and with less pollution through the adoption of strong demand side management techniques and efficiency measures instead of building baseline capacity.

In the past, the IURC has shown great deference to the position of the Office of Consumer Counselor. Time will tell if they decide to protect the interests of consumers over the interests of Duke Energy.

Among the testimony filed by the OUCC on the case on July 1 are the following quotes:

From Barbara Smith, OUCC Director of Resource Planning and Communications Division – See: http://www.in.gov/oucc/2625.htm

• "First, he OUCC supported withdrawal of the Agreement ( settlement) because it learned that DEI had improper ex parte communications with the then-chairman of the Commission during the negotiations. This fact raised the possibility that DEI had not negotiated the settlement in good faith."

• "Duke has not demonstrated any budgetary constraints on this project. There appears to be a lack of responsibility or accountability on the part of those causing these multi-million dollar cost overruns… The escalating costs have been borne solely by ratepayers, with the benefits going to the shareholders."

• "There is little incentive for Petitioner to be cost conscious since the risk of cost overruns is borne solely by the ratepayers… Consumers should not be required to support additional economic burdens due to unjustifiable project changes."

• "Rejection of Petitioner's request IS warranted because Duke has failed to demonstrate that the requested project cost increase from $2.35B to $2.88B is prudent. Duke should no longer have a direct and endless line of project funds supplied solely by the ratepayers. Duke shareholders should bear some of the risks."

• "Our recommendation that Duke be denied any cost recovery over $2.35B should not be interpreted to mean that the OUCC believes Duke is entitled to recover all costs up to $2.35B. Our testimony in this Phase only addressed cost recovery between $2.35B and $2.88B. The OUCC reserves the right to argue in Phase II, which addresses Duke's conduct since the inception of this project, that Duke is entitled to considerably less than $2.35B."

John Blair is a Pulitzer Prize winning photographer who serves as president of the environmental health advocacy group Valley Watch in Evansville, IN. He is a contributor to Red State Rebels: Tales of Grassroots Resistance from the Heartland, edited by Jeffrey St. Clair and J

The War on Everything Stupid Democrats, Stupid Republicans By DAVID MICHAEL GREEN

There are precious few things that Republicans and Democrats can agree on, but one of them is that Barack Obama is a liberal.

That rare manifestation of consensus might ordinarily be occasion for celebration (according to conventional wisdom, at least – though certainly not mine – which celebrates consensus), except for one pesky problematic detail: the notion is utterly ludicrous.

Consider a batch of recent headlines as merely the most proximate examples of a phenomenon that’s been on display since before the president was inaugurated.

Last week, the New York Times ran a front page piece, entitled “U.S. Pressing Its Crackdown Against Leaks”, in which it was noted that, “The Justice Department shows no sign of rethinking its campaign to punish unauthorized disclosures to the news media, with five criminal cases so far under President Obama, compared with three under all previous presidents combined. This week, a grand jury in Virginia heard testimony in a continuing investigation of WikiLeaks, the antisecrecy group, a rare effort to prosecute those who publish secrets, rather than those who leak them.” Though the article doesn’t mention it, we should also note here that the Obama administration is also all but Gitmo-style torturing Bradley Manning, the soldier accused of releasing documents to Wikileaks.

The article does allude, however, to the gross inappropriateness of the charges in many of these cases, a sentiment that is even joined by several conservative commentators and national security experts. In particular, the White House is bringing down the hammer on individuals who appear to be fully patriotic public servants, who acted as whistle-blowers in order to live up to their own patriotic standards. In other words, the secrets they were publicizing had no effect in terms of jeopardizing national security, unless one defines protecting the nation as covering up malfeasance, corruption or waste in government. No doubt some people do define it as exactly that, since, by some purely random coincidence, doing so happens to serve very well their own interests. Evidently the big liberal now in the Oval Office concurs.

In general, Obama’s record on civil liberties is so flat-out abysmal that it has caused a friend of his to publicly repudiate the president for his disastrous undoing of the Constitutional protections he is sworn to uphold. This week, law professor Geoffrey Stone published a New York Times op-ed that began like this: “As a longtime supporter and colleague of Barack Obama at the University of Chicago, as well as an informal adviser to his 2008 campaign, I had high hopes that he would restore the balance between government secrecy and government transparency that had been lost under George W. Bush, and that he would follow through on his promise, as a candidate, to promote openness and public accountability in government policy making. It has not quite worked out that way. While Mr. Obama has taken certain steps, notably early in his administration, to scale back some of the Bush-era excesses, in other respects he has shown a disappointing willingness to continue in his predecessor’s footsteps.”

Stone goes on to detail the many ways in which the Obama administration has matched Bush/Cheney in its eagerness to shred the Bill of Rights, detailing how the great liberal in the White House has not only “followed its predecessor in aggressively cracking down on [whistle-blowers for] unauthorized leaks”, but also “followed Mr. Bush in zealously applying the state secrets doctrine ... asserted the privilege in litigation involving such issues as the C.I.A.’s use of extraordinary rendition and the National Security Agency’s practice of wiretapping American citizens” and, most remarkably, blocked legal recognition of a journalist-source privilege which is essential to any hope of investigating government crimes and failings: “In what seems to be a recurring theme, Senator Obama supported the Free Flow of Information Act, but President Obama does not. In 2007, he was one of the sponsors of the original Senate bill, but in 2009 he objected to the scope of the privilege envisioned by the bill and requested that the Senate revise the bill to require judges to defer to executive branch judgments”.

In many ways, Stone is actually too charitable, because in many ways Obama has gone even further than the Bush administration in trampling on people’s rights and very lives in pursuit of the “War on Everything” which now seems to be the modus operandi for American policy, both foreign and domestic. Obama has radically increased the number of drone strikes in Pakistan, wantonly killing civilians there, and he has claimed the right to assassinate American citizens whom he alone deems enemies of the state.

And, oh boy, we do have a lot of enemies under Barack Obama. Liberals were sickened, as they should well have been, when Boy George lied the country into a war in Iraq that had little to do with anything beyond ameliorating his own massive and well-deserved personal insecurities, and when he promulgated a far too vague, misguided and misguiding ‘war on terrorism’, which was of course in fact really a war on anyone who wouldn’t play ball with corporate-controlled Washington, DC. (Truth be told, tin-pot potentates could use any tactics or weapons they wanted to, or not do so, and that was irrelevant to whether they would end up on the bad guys’ list. It was all about playing ball with the money guys. Ask the once-favored Saddam. Ask Noriega.) In any case, if you put it all together, Bush had us fighting three simultaneous wars, which I’m pretty sure is a personal best, even for a country as addicted to war as America. Or, I should say, it used to be a personal best.

Not to be outdone by a mere actual Republican, Barack Obama has now fully doubled Bush’s prodigious achievement. As Tom Engelhardt reports, we are now fighting “Six Wars and Counting”: “With the latest news that the U.S. has launched a significant ‘intensification’ of its secret air campaign against Yemeni tribesmen believed to be connected with al-Qaeda, the U.S. is now involved in no less than six wars. Count ‘em, if you don’t believe me: Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, and what used to be called the Global War on Terror.” It is, of course, a measure of the sickness of our times that we can be fighting six wars at once. But it is even worse that nobody even particularly notices. And it is truly bizarre that those on the left and those on the right would no doubt agree that liberal Barack Obama runs a much less militarist foreign policy than George W. Bush, even whilst fighting double the number of simultaneous wars. Say what?

Well, okay. Maybe Obama is just a captive of the military-industrial complex like every other American politician, and therefore has no latitude to move on any of these fronts, and blah, blah, blah... (I say that not, in the slightest way, to mock this notion of iron triangle control either in concept or in application. It’s very real and very powerful. It’s just that, what’s the point of being president if you’re not going to do the hard things?). But at least this progressive president, this socialist chief executive, can move boldly on social issues, right? I mean, we’re talking about stuff where the military doesn’t have a dog in the race, and – most importantly – there are no Wall Street weenies to control the national agenda so that they can purchase their eighth yacht. So, Kapow!, right? Slam! Bash! Isn’t social policy where this presidential product of the civil rights movement can run hard, knees churning high, knocking over any obstacles in his way?

Try again. Here’s another New York Times headline for you, from an editorial last week: “Gay Marriage: Where’s Mr. Obama?” Where, indeed? Ya wanna know where he was while New York was doing something truly historic (if ridiculously overdue)? Cashing in on the issue without remotely committing to it, that’s where: “On Thursday night, when same-sex marriage in New York State was teetering on a razor’s edge, President Obama had a perfect opportunity to show the results of his supposed evolution on gay marriage. Unfortunately, he did not take it, keeping his own views in the shadows. The next night the Republican-led New York State Senate, of all places, proved itself more forward-thinking than the president on one of the last great civil-rights debates in this nation’s history. Speaking to the Democratic Party’s LGBT Leadership Council at a fund-raiser in New York, Mr. Obama ran through the many efforts he has made on behalf of gay rights, including his decision to end the government’s legal support of the Defense of Marriage Act, which forbids federal recognition of same-sex marriage. The act should be repealed, he said, since marriage is defined by the states. Mr. Obama’s legal formula suggests he is fine with the six states that now permit same-sex marriage, and fine with the more than three dozen other states that ban it. By refusing to say whether he supports it (as he did in 1996) or opposes it (as he did in 2008), he remained in a straddle that will soon strain public patience. For now, all Mr. Obama promised was a gauzy new “chapter” in the story if he is re-elected, and his views remain officially ‘evolving’.”

Bold Barack. Brave Barack. He’ll come speak moving words to your caucus. You know, shit about “bending the arc of history”, and “we’ll get there together”. He’ll take your money. And then, when it comes to actual policy decisions, where it counts, his position will be so lame that he’ll manage to be outflanked by Republicans, even the thuggish freaks who are more or less the only kind of Republicans there are in 2011. Brilliant. And so liberal.

And about as sadly ironic as it gets. The heterosexual Obama on gay rights – unquestionably the central civil rights issue of our time – reminds me of nothing so much as the Caucasian Dwight Eisenhower or John Kennedy trying to fudge the moral imperative of the African American civil rights movement that was shoved in their faces in the Fifties and Sixties, pathetically splitting hairs, trying to placate their racist constituents while history was happening all around them, much to their chagrin. Imagine if, by some certain quirk of science fiction, that Barack Obama had been president then. What would he have done, as his own people demanded justice, prosperity, freedom and democratic rights? He would have done what he is doing to gays today. And for that matter, what he is doing for racial minorities today (which is nothing), an issue on which he has been the most silent president of my lifetime. I’m not joking about this. Even if it were his own people whose lives and fortunes and destinies were in the balance, blacks would have gotten Mr. Bigtalk at the campaign fundraiser, but Mr. Laylow in the Oval Office.

Ah, but timidity is far less the issue with Obama than sometimes seems apparent, and that interpretation of the guy’s politics is a fundamental mistake made by most of those Democrats who at least once in a while have the good sense to be disappointed by their president. Think about it. When you’re timid, you don’t fight six foreign wars at one time. You don’t claim the right to assassinate American citizens for their rhetoric. You don’t shred the Constitution.

The thing about Obama that neither Democrats nor Republicans understand is that this guy is fundamentally regressive in his politics. That is the essence of his presidency, though – astonishingly – very few people get that. Look at the litany of issues addressed above. If you honestly asked yourself for each of them what, in the abstract, would a progressive president do, and what would a regressive president do, you can immediately decipher the true nature of Barack Obama. A progressive president wouldn’t triple American forces in Afghanistan and launch three new wars abroad, but a regressive president would. A progressive president wouldn’t out-do Dick Cheney in wrecking the Bill of Rights, but a regressive president would. A progressive president wouldn’t follow behind the lead of Republicans on civil rights issues, but a regressive president would.

And that’s just what this regressive president has done, all down the line. Never mind that we’re just getting started here. We could go on and on with this, issue after issue. What do you think a regressive president would do about the planetary nightmare of global warming? Nothing, perhaps? Gee, does that sound familiar? How about giving out unprecedentedly gigantic oil tracts off the Atlantic coast? Or multiple rounds of additional tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy? Hey, where have I heard that before? Even Obama’s signature ‘liberal’ issue, his health care plan, was just dandy from the perspective of the insurance industry, with whom he cut a deal at the very beginning of the legislative process. I’m sorry, but if those guys are happy with the bill (maybe – I’m just wildly guessing here – because it forces about 35 million people to buy their expensive and useless product?), what does that tell you about the legislation, and about the president who crafted it?

Democrats are stupid about this. They still mostly like Obama, to the tune of about 75-80 percent job approval, though they might grumble here and there about this or that perceived failing of the president’s. It is a measure of their abysmally low standards and our pathetic national political discourse that policies like Obama’s can satisfy his base, so much so that he won’t even face a primary challenger from his left. We saw the same thing with Clinton as well, who first sold out the party of the New Deal and Great Society. Idiotic Democrats still adore Clinton to this day, not realizing that he was more Reagan than Reagan when it comes to economic policy, including the deregulation of banks that created the current deluge under which so many non-elite Americans are drowning, while the rich are fatter than ever.

These attitudes are also a measure of bias as well, or what one might describe as a sort of political tribalism of the uninformed. On the rare occasion where you might hear an exasperated Republican say of Obama’s supporters, “If George Bush did the exact same thing, they’d string him up for it”, he or she has got it right. As clearly demonstrated above, Obama actually out-Bushes Bush in many areas – imagine, if you can do so without hurling, what a Dick “Dick” Cheney presidency might have looked like – and yet brain-dead Democrats still support their guy.

Why? I suppose some of it is because he’s black. And some of it is because he’s young and articulate and energetic and photogenic. Mostly, though, I think it’s because he’s a Democrat, and people are so tuned out from public affairs – despite what public affairs policy decisions are doing to their lives right now – that they simply go with that in-group vs. out-group rubric: “Democrat good, Republican bad”. Chances are they got that from their families and communities, along with their religion and nationalism and so on. Of course, to a certain extent, one of the key functions of political parties has always been simply to serve as precisely that sort of short-hand. Don’t know who Smedley Goodfinger is, the candidate for local dog catcher? That’s fine, just check his party label and vote accordingly.

But there is a point at which such guiding assistance can cross a line into negligent laziness. More importantly, as in our time, there is a very real danger that today’s Democrat is far from being your father’s Democrat. At which point, using party labels to make otherwise blind decisions about politics becomes not just laziness or negligence, but complicity in a crime. And a crime where you’re one of the victims, no less.

We have been at that point since at least 1992 – and arguably 1976 – when “New Democrats” threw the program of FDR and LBJ overboard, but continued to benefit from the inertial habits of well-trained traditional Democratic voters. Bill Clinton was, historically speaking, every bit as great a national disaster, if not greater, than Ronald Reagan. At least with Reagan you had a clearer sense of his real politics and values. What Clinton and now Obama have been successful at doing is getting Democrats to support them while nevertheless running policies that favor the same plutocratic constituencies as a Reagan or a Bush would. Let’s be honest, individuals like Geithner and Summers and Rubin could have just as easily served in a Republican administration as a Democratic one, and their policies would have fit just as well. Or look at Bob Gates, who not only could have done this, but in fact did.

In short, Democratic support and defense of Barack Obama is a sad joke. This guy is no liberal. He is, in fact, using liberal votes to join the Gingriches and Cheneys and Palins of this world in the project of destroying liberalism and its great achievement of massively widening the middle class and sharing national prosperity. Hey, not a bad gig, if you don’t mind the whole cynicism part, and the whole spending eternity in Hell thing.

Republican haters of Obama are every bit as guilty of negligent laziness, of course, but for them there is an added element of sickness. They could never admit it, but one simply cannot dismiss all the rhetoric of foreignness and other forms of fundamental illegitimacy they revel in when it comes to Obama. You know... He wasn’t really born here. He’s a secret Muslim. He’s a socialist. He’s going to take away our guns. He’s not really an American. He bows to foreign princes. He hates America and its core values. He goes around the world apologizing for his country. He’s actually really dumb, and can only sound intelligent because he uses a teleprompter. His health care bill is a nefarious plot to kill off grannies.

This shit is so stupid it’s embarrassing. Or, it would be, if the folks trading in these tropes were capable of embarrassment. Beyond the fact that they, like Democrats, are unable to decipher Obama’s obvious political commitments with the slightest degree of accuracy, despite the plainness of these for all the see, Republicans add to the mix their equally transparent personal insecurities when it comes to Obama. It’s not just that he’s black and sitting in their White House (though, now that you mention it, that’s not right!), or that he’s a Democrat that bothers them. What makes them go ballistic is that he is so clearly more mature and responsible in his mien. That undermines their license to be reckless and irresponsible – and to favor national policies that are the same – with impunity. That’s what they loved so much about Bush, and what the codes words of “the politician you’d most like to have a beer with” really meant. It’s the guy who doesn’t threaten your greed and laziness and prejudice and stupidity, as Obama kinda does. It’s the guy who doesn’t make you think, the guy who provides political cover for your worst instincts.

I think that’s the real reason why regressives hate Obama so, despite the fact that his politics are exactly their politics – yes, even including the extravagant spending, where Obama is merely replicating the crimes of Reagan and Bush, though for slightly more defensible reasons.

It’s not a good sign when so many people – basically all of us – have politics which are so flat-out wrong. And if these feel like the worst of times politically in America, that is not such an exaggerated perception, notwithstanding the country’s more overt crises throughout the past two or three centuries. There are significant differences now, however. One is that the national trajectory is manifestly downward, really for the first time ever in US history. Another is that our body politic is so diminished that it can no longer recognize basic political facts anymore. Nothing is more emblematic of that than the case of Barack Obama. Democrats love him for being a good old liberal Democrat. Republicans hate him for the same reason. Both are so politically dumbed-down that neither can recognize how absurdly wrong they are on such a central question as the politics of the country’s chief executive.

But, of course, the biggest single problem facing the polity is that nobody is talking about the biggest single problem facing the polity. The country has been hijacked by hyper-greedy elites, who have demonstrated that there is absolutely no bottom to what they are willing to do to the rest of us, and to the country, to milk it and bilk it of every last remaining penny of value. There have always been people like that, of course, but where in the past they have been effectively countered by those with a sensible and public-oriented agenda, no such beast exists anymore, at least outside of Vermont and one or two odd congressional districts. Your choice at the ballot box today will be between a Democrat who bends you over and screws you with a smile and a modicum of foreplay first, or a Republican who dispenses with such niceties and just gets the job done, to the glee of every insecure cracker cheering from the sidelines, not realizing which end of the pelvic thrust he himself is actually on as well.

But that’s not actually the worst news. If you think about it, every disaster facing the country today has been a product of insane right-wing politics deployed over the last thirty years. But, truly remarkably, every such disaster has then produced public acquiescence, if not support, for a yet more regressive response to address the mess made by the initial one (what was it that Einstein said about the literal definition of insanity?).

Keep that in mind while contemplating the fact that our current trajectory is completely unsustainable. Bad conditions are about to get much worse.

Given such a track record, which way do you think the American public will be turning when the shit really hits the fan?

Yeah, me too.