GOPCon Jobs Plan: Unemployment Ends in 2020 -- Ymmm!

JOBS, JOBS, JOBS, uhh, Medicare, Medicare, Medicare, uhh

 Who tracked this stinky mess into the living room?

The GOPCon "dog whistle marching band and hoopla circus" couldn't get enough of their "Jobs, Jobs, Jobs" ad campaign as they lurched toward the 2010 election.  Even the exalted leader, Boehner, felt obliged to squeeze this rancid little lie out from behind his tears.

Of course, it turns out that the GOPCons had less interest in jobs than a teen age drunk in a new Buick.  They had already received their marching orders from the "masters of the universe" on Wall Street.  Spending cuts, at any cost, would be the symphony of the day on all those greedy frightened faces still reeling from the embarrassment of the W's emergency bankster bailout.

However, the best laid plans often come to naught.  In this case, the "best laid plans" began to slump before the shiny new, tea bag name tags were even on the House offices.  Three, terribly unfortunate developments arose to cloud this otherwise promising horizon for the professional looters and their GOPCon servants.

First, the tea bags turned out to be far less manageable -- or, for that matter, literate -- than the oligarchs at first estimated.  Second, "young lion," Paul Ryan "stepped in it."  Big time.  After Ryan "stepped in it," terrified clutches of GOPCons desperately tried to "step out of it," only to discover that they were, instead, clumsily "stepping into it" even more than before.

In no time, "it" had been tracked into the Senate where GOPCon Senators immediately proceeded to "step in it."

However, the Third Issue may have turned out to be the mortal blow.

Following the looting festival which culminated in the 2008 economic collapse, the horrified GOPCons correctly realized that the onslaught of massive unemployment would become the electoral "enforcer"  way before the next election.  They immediately abandoned the 2008 election in favor of an early start to amassing a full load of incendiary "talking points" for the 2010.

This was the origin of the hilarious GOPCons "JOBS, JOBS, JOBS" line which we heard through the tears of the Boner.  However, a second, darkly depressing realization soon visited the otherwise gleeful GOPCons.  They weren't going to be able to do anything about unemployment.  Worse, they were now stranded, "hoisted on their own petard," tormented by the now horrendously unbelievable "JOBS, JOBS, JOBS" thing while continuing to suffer from the self-realization that they could not actually govern -- even in the best of times.

Please take a minute or two to read through the following article from Crooks and Liars.  All the links have been left enabled for MeanMesa visitors wishing to "read more."

May 27, 2011 11:00 AM

 By Jon Perr

 

The Jobs Gap: The Deficit That Matters Most 

While all eyes remain fixed on the Republican debt ceiling hostage drama in Washington, the deficit that really matters has all but disappeared from the American political debate. Even as Vice President Biden confidently predicted his bipartisan group of budget negotiators would slash $1 trillion in spending, forecasters are once again downgrading their estimates for second quarter economic growth. All of which means that with 9% unemployment and record-low labor force participation, the jobs deficit should be job number one for both political parties.

With first-time jobless claims edging back up and first quarter growth lowered to 1.8%, Macroeconomic Advisors dropping their Q2 GDP growth forecast from 3.2% to 2.8%. That prompted Paul Krugman was quick to join Brad Delong in sounding the alarm. It's "time to panic," Delong warned, adding that real second quarter GDP growth "looks slow enough to put no upward pressure at all on the employment-to-population ratio." Krugman, who ominously cautioned last year about "Third Depression" in the form of prolonged economic weakness, lamented that:

As Brad says, these estimates now suggest that we have now gone through a year and a half of "recovery" that has failed to make any progress toward closing the gap between what the economy should be producing and what it's actually producing.

That output gap, the Washington Post showed using a helpful interactive graphic last fall, explains "why it doesn't feel like a recovery." While U.S. GDP has now surpassed its pre-Bush recession level, the $900 billion divide between the amount the United States can produce and what it is actually producing "explains why we feel so miserable more than a year into what is technically classified as an economic recovery." Worse still, as the Post charted at the time, at current rates of population and productivity growth, the economy would have to expand at an average of 3% a year to reduce unemployment to 5% by 2020.

Right now, that's just not happening. While the recession officially ended in 2009, the current recovery is proceeding at a much more sluggish rate than usual. The result, as the thoroughly depressing chart which follows from the St. Louis Fed shows, is persistent joblessness hovering around 9%. Just as frightening, employment as percentage of U.S. population has nose-dived. (As the New York Times noted earlier this month, "men currently have their lowest labor force participation rate since the Labor Department began keeping track since 1948."

While all eyes remain fixed on the Republican debt ceiling hostage drama in Washington, the deficit that really matters has all but disappeared from the American political debate. Even as Vice President Biden confidently predicted his bipartisan group of budget negotiators would slash $1 trillion in spending, forecasters are once again downgrading their estimates for second quarter economic growth. All of which means that with 9% unemployment and record-low labor force participation, the jobs deficit should be job number one for both political parties.

With first-time jobless claims edging back up and first quarter growth lowered to 1.8%, Macroeconomic Advisors dropping their Q2 GDP growth forecast from 3.2% to 2.8%. That prompted Paul Krugman was quick to join Brad Delong in sounding the alarm. It's "time to panic," Delong warned, adding that real second quarter GDP growth "looks slow enough to put no upward pressure at all on the employment-to-population ratio." Krugman, who ominously cautioned last year about "Third Depression" in the form of prolonged economic weakness, lamented that:

As Brad says, these estimates now suggest that we have now gone through a year and a half of "recovery" that has failed to make any progress toward closing the gap between what the economy should be producing and what it's actually producing.

That output gap, the Washington Post showed using a helpful interactive graphic last fall, explains "why it doesn't feel like a recovery." While U.S. GDP has now surpassed its pre-Bush recession level, the $900 billion divide between the amount the United States can produce and what it is actually producing "explains why we feel so miserable more than a year into what is technically classified as an economic recovery." Worse still, as the Post charted at the time, at current rates of population and productivity growth, the economy would have to expand at an average of 3% a year to reduce unemployment to 5% by 2020.

Right now, that's just not happening. While the recession officially ended in 2009, the current recovery is proceeding at a much more sluggish rate than usual. The result, as the thoroughly depressing chart which follows from the St. Louis Fed shows, is persistent joblessness hovering around 9%. Just as frightening, employment as percentage of U.S. population has nose-dived. (As the New York Times noted earlier this month, "men currently have their lowest labor force participation rate since the Labor Department began keeping track since 1948."

For months, House Speaker John Boehner has insisted that "getting Americans back to work has been and will continue to be the number-one priority for our new majority." Of course, that promise wasn't just belied by Boehner's choices instead to fast-track draconian new anti-abortion legislation or his April declaration that repealing the Obama health care law was "our No. 1 priority." As the data show, the GOP has successfully transformed Americans' focus onto another issue altogether: the budget deficit. 

"Reagan," Vice President Dick Cheney famously declared in 2002, "proved deficits don't matter." Unless, that is, a Democrat is in the White House. After all, while Ronald Reagan tripled the national debt and George W. Bush doubled it again, each Republican was rewarded with a second term in office. But as the Gallup polling data show, concern over the federal deficit hasn't been this high since Democratic budget balancer Bill Clinton was in office. All of which suggest the Republicans' born-again disdain for deficits ranks among the greatest - and most successful - political double-standards in recent memory.

The triumph of the GOP messaging machine is reflected in an April Washington Post/Pew Research poll. In just the four months since the Republican majority took control of the House, the percentage of Americans believing the budget deficit is a major problem which must be addressed now catapulted from 70% to 81%. But even more revealing is an April Gallup survey which showed the deficit (17%) rivaling the unemployment (19%) and the overall state of the economy (26%). And as it turns out, those cyclical swings in budget angst reflect the complete victory of the conservative deficit narrative. 

The Republicans' misdirection on debt and deficits is reflecting in myriad other ways as well. Despite having voted seven times to raise the debt ceiling under President Bush (as well as for the Bush tax cuts the unfunded wars in Iraq and Afghanistan responsible for most of the nation's debt over the next decade), GOP leaders have bamboozled Americans by a 48% to 35% margin that raising the debt limit would be worse than the cataclysm of a U.S. default. And as the National Journal revealed last week, the shift from jobs to deficits in American political discourse is reflected in media coverage as well:

Major U.S. newspapers have increasingly shifted their attention away from coverage of unemployment in recent months while greatly intensifying their focus on the deficit, a National Journal analysis shows.

The analysis -- based on a measure of how often the words "unemployment" and "deficit" appear in major publications -- portrays a dramatically shifting landscape of coverage over the past two years, as the debate over how to fix the federal deficit has risen to prominence and the question of how to handle still-high unemployment has faded from the media's consciousness...

Mentions of unemployment have been dwindling since they spiked to 154 in the month ending August 15, 2010; over the month ending Sunday, there were 63. Deficit mentions, meanwhile, surged up to 261 in the month ending December 15, 2010, when the leaders of President Obama's deficit commission released their final report. Mentions of the deficit remained higher after the commission's work wrapped up and as House Republicans and then the White House unveiled dueling proposals. In the month ending Sunday, there were 201 mentions.

Writing in the Washington Post last month, Eugene Robinson fretted over "the word most politicians ignore: Jobs." What is it, he asked, "about the word 'jobs' that our nation's leaders fail to understand?"

Sadly, Republicans won't do anything about jobs and have made sure that Democrats can't. Despite GOP claims to the contrary, the Obama stimulus worked. (By last June, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated the Obama stimulus program had saved or created up to 3.3 million jobs, lowered the unemployment rate by as much as 1.8% and boosted GDP by 4.5%. For his part, former John McCain adviser Mark Zandi in August concluded that the combined federal interventions beginning in the fall of 2008 prevented the Great Recession from becoming Depression 2.0.) But as Paul Krugman predicted before and Ezra Klein explained after, the underfunding of and overly optimistic unemployment predictions for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act when it was being crafted ensured the perception of failure, thus guaranteeing there would not be a second. So much the simplest way to trim the budget deficit cited by the New York Times' David Leonhardt: cultivate growth.

In March, former Obama administration economic adviser Christina Romer called the lack of action on job creation "shameful."

'I frankly don't understand why policy makers aren't more worried about the suffering of real families. I think there are tools we have tools...that we can use, and I think it's shameful that we're not using them....If I have a complaint about policy these days, it's that we're not doing enough. That goes all the way up to the Federal Reserve, [which] could be taking more aggressive action. It goes to the Congress and the Administration - there are fiscal policy actions they could be taking."

Reacting to the latest GDP downgrades and the implication for the American jobs deficit, a panicked Brad Delong suggested what some of those actions might be. It is, he said, "time for pulling more spending from the future forward into the present, and pushing more taxes from the present back into the future." Writing in the New Yorks Times, David Leonhardt asked, "The economy is wavering; does Washington notice?" 

Sadly, the answer appears to be no. Unfortunately for the millions of unemployed, Republicans have intimidated Democrats and conned the American people into believing the budget deficit is the only one that matters.

Alan Grayson Interviewed on Medicare and Ryan

MeanMesa received the following transcript of the Grayson interview as an email.  The transcript -- and Grayson -- speak for themselves.

Image from the email

Dear MeanMesa,

Alan Grayson was on national TV on Friday night, attacking the Ryan Plan to end Medicare. The MSNBC host, Cenk Uygur, asked Grayson to explain why every Republican Presidential candidate has lined up in favor of the Ryan Plan. This is what Grayson said:

AG: “Listen, only 4 percent of all Americans ever vote in a Republican primary. That’s 4 percent. The other 96 percent are the normal Americans. The 4 percent are people who must never get sick, because they don't want to have Medicare. Now think about that. Every other industrialized country in the entire world not only provides health care for its seniors, but health care for everyone. And the Republican right wing is trying to tell us that somehow we can't afford health care for our seniors. We’ve got 40,000 Americans under the age of 65 who die every year, because they can't afford to see a doctor when they're sick. And now they want to extend that [tragedy] to the most infirmed, most victimized, sickest part of the population, our senior citizens, so that more will die. I honestly believe that if Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck announced one day that they were in favor of the Black Death, you’d see every Republican primary candidate for President go along with it.

CU: (Laughter). You know, it depends. If Obama said, “Hey I’d like to cure the Black Death,” they’d be like, “Oh, I don’t know, the Black Death sounds pretty good.” So, now look, I think they’ve done tremendous damage to themselves. The polls are 70 percent and higher. They’re on your side, Congressman Grayson. They say, “We don’t want you to touch our Medicare.” So what are they doing here? Do they have a plan? You know, is Rush Limbaugh or Fox News, are they doing some sort of strategy that we can't understand? Or are they just plain stupid?

AG: They are tools. It’s that simple. They are tools. You know, George Carlin said it back in 2005, they have made us ignorant, these people who own the country. They have made us ignorant and they have made us poor. And now the next thing they want to do is to take away our Medicare and our Social Security. He said that in 2005, and it's taken six year to make it obvious that that’s true. And God bless them, these Republicans like Ryan, you know, they may be cruel, they may be heartless, but at least they're honest. They’ve told us exactly what they want to do with the power that they have accumulated. They want to take away Social Security and Medicare from our senior citizens.

CU: You know, I think you nailed it. I think what it is, is corporations that have, you know, run amuck. It’s out-of-control greed. Whether it's the banks with all the risks that they're taking, it’s gonna crash our economy again. Whether it's the oil companies at the height of being the most profitable companies in the world, they still want to take billions in subsidies from the American taxpayers. And whether it's these guys trying to cut your Medicare so they can cut taxes for the rich. I think they got the note from the, you know, the richest people in the country, from the corporations who said: “Hit the gas pedal. We don't give a damn. We're going to out-raise these guys. We're gonna get more money, and this is the time to put ‘em away. Just tell ‘em what you’re going to do. It doesn't matter; we're just going to outspend them during the elections.” I think that's what's happening. Now the problem is they are going to outspend the Democrats in elections, so how do you deal with that problem?

AG: Well, it's apparent now that what these owners want is nothing from the rest of us except for cheap labor. And that makes the senior citizens particularly vulnerable to their plans, because the senior citizens don't work. So from the perspective of the owners of this country, they're useless. Their time in the economy is over and therefore they serve no purpose. But senior citizens still do vote and they voted in huge numbers in the last election, because the Republicans lied to them, and they told them that the Democrats wanted to take away their Medicare. Now they see that the Democrats are the only ones protecting their Medicare, and Republicans are out to destroy it. There’s a reason why we call Medicare “an entitlement.” It’s because you're entitled to it. It’s not Medicare any more if you are not entitled to it any more. They want to take away the privilege of Medicare. They want to take away the right to Medicare, and replace it with a piece of paper they know will not be enough to cover the costs of care. And that’s how malevolent they really are. So I will say to senior citizens of this country: “Now you see the truth. You see their true colors. And the only thing you can do about it is turn out and vote for the only people in this country who are actually trying to protect you and your interests: the Democratic Party.”

CU: Alrighty. Former Democratic Congressman from Florida, Alan Grayson, very clear as always. Thank you so much.

AG: Thank you, Cenk.

Alan Grayson, still telling it like it is.

2012 Part Two -- Collecting the votes

 Part two of a two part series regarding our preparations for the 2012 election.  "Where are the votes?" and, "How do we get them?"

 The Almost Invisible Subterfuge

MeanMesa visitors have already heard the grotesque and the bizarre issuing out from GOPCon radio and television pundits.  The Republican "talking points"  design of such media investments is exquisite.  The outrageous is carefully implanted under some gaseous cover of recent events, uttered boldly then immediately diluted back to some socially acceptable irrelevance.

Of course, stranded without a media, the Democrats do nothing.  There are no impassioned counter arguments or pointed refutations.  Even if there were, hardly any Americans would ever hear them.

These Republican verbal "emoticons" are not particularly credible even to the hill billies in the GOPCon base.  In fact, we can consider them to be around, say, 15% credible.  That means that only about 15% of that base actually believes all or even part of these carefully crafted incendiaries.

However, when the psychological backgrounds in the minds of the Republican base retain some tiny amount of such commentary and elevates it, subconsciously, to the position of "fact," a gradual, almost unbelievable, accumulation of "credibility" begins to materialize in a rather durable fashion.  Late at night, over cheap beer in an American Legion bar, these "talking points/facts" are regurgitated amid the grumping and burping to an enthusiastic response of "Yeah!  Yeah!"

It is at this point that more rational Americans wonder how in the world the country has become so divided.  Well, quit wondering and get busy.

In addition to these "talking points," a slightly more thoughtful crowd is also targeted by the media psycho-masters.  This is the second realm of manipulation -- the one ever so slightly more sophisticated than the outright "emoticons" mentioned before.

Stand by, We'll Define "Balanced"

For an example of these subtleties, just this morning, MeanMesa, as usual, was listening to Stephanie Miller (The Stephanie Miller Show, AM1350 KABQ, Albuquerque, 7 to 10 AM weekdays).  One guest, Eric Boehlert of Media Matters, made the following point as he discussed the statistical spread of guests on the popular Meet the Press.

Eric Boehlert of Media Matters (image source)

When the editorial staff of Meet the Press was criticized about the relative number of Republicans and Democrats invited to the show, the response was, well, predictable.  During the autocracy, many more Republicans were interviewed than Democrats.  The editorial staff explained that during the autocracy, all the parts of the government were controlled by Republicans, so their preponderance as guests was understandable.

The editorial staff continued, as Boehlert commented on the number of guests from the Democratic party being invited now, while the Democrats controlled two of the three parts of the government.  The editorial staff reply reveals much.

David Gregory of Meet the Press (image source)

"Our show continues to be balanced because we have invited an equal split of spokesmen.  Half and half.  Half from the Republican party and half from the Democratic party."

Further, this specific example is not the only one.  After the bin Laden killing, Meet the Press interviewed an almost exclusive "clutch" of guest  Republicans from the George II administration.  Why?  These were the same people who couldn't get to bin Laden after they spent a $ Trillion dollars and worked on it for six years.

The Republican media goals of both the outrageously low credibility stuff injected into the American Legion crowd and the ever so subtle stuff being injected into the slightly more aware crowd watching Meet the Press every Sunday morning, can be listed by a fourth grader.

The President becomes an "outsider."  The Democratic party is imaged as a forlorn, desperate "has been."  All the "important" and "news worthy" ideas are from Republicans.

Back to the 2012 Election

Singling out these two obvious examples of the field media preparation being conducted by the Republicans might be a legitimate lamentation for anyone trying to soothe the pain of losing yet another election in 2012, but such complaints must be reserved for some other posting.  This is about how to win the 2012 election, not explain why it was lost.

There is clearly little reason to expect a return to unbiased news reporting from the now terminally soiled domestic media.  The independence -- and credibility -- of the commercial  "Fourth Estate" is now as permanently extinct as the independence of its ownership and vanishing editorial honor. 

As Part One of this series divided the "lower" end of Republican voters into the American Legion bar crowd and fickle, "pseudo-issue" independents, a third group emerges.  The folks in this third group occasionally watch internet news coverage while generally dismissing the increasingly biased commercial media.  Democrats do very well with this third group.

So, where, exactly, is this reservoir of potential Democratic voters?

The answer is simple enough.  It resides in the "second group."  Voters in this part of the electorate are neither watching commercial media nor looking for information on the internet.  A large majority of this population is entirely ready to vote for Democratic candidates based on an intuitive background, and an effective campaign to collect this voting block must squarely face the challenge of augmenting that background inclination with information, developing it into material action.

But, without either the media or Democratic candidates with sufficient spine to actually speak to this group through any other channel, this second group remains abandoned -- that is, remains informationally disenfranchised.  The cast iron, ossified campaign mechanisms which have delivered mindless Democratic votes in past elections have died a slow death in the national division so carefully crafted by the Republicans and their slogans.

When no political party makes the effort to effectively communicate with them, they respond by simply not voting.  For a fundamental explanation of this, we, once again, return to the bad feeling voters get after they cast a ballot while remaining uncertain about whether or not they have voted for what they wanted.

There Is Absolutely Nothing To Be Done

MeanMesa won't buy this depressing possibility.

In a few weeks, this blog will post a campaign designed to counter this dismal forecast.  The current plan is to implement this in a few, low voting precincts in Albuquerque, but the idea may, in fact, be a bit more viral than this.

Across the country, we find an attractive number of precincts with the same problem.  They are filled with voters who are already inclined to vote for Democratic candidates, but who remain reluctant to vote at all because "no one has asked them for those votes."

In election cycles which have recently been decided by single digits of percentages, these votes can swing elections, most notably, the 2012 election.  The message here is straightforward indeed.  MeanMesa wants you, a valued visitor to this little blog, to consider just exactly how determined you might be to rid our country of the folks who intend to take over in the next election.


It's no time to be feeling hopeless.

It's exactly the right time to be making plans.

Stay tuned.

2012 Part One - The Trouble With 2010

A MeanMesa Note: This is the first part of a two part series on the 2012 election. Here we will examine what happened in 2010 a little more closely.  In the second part of this series, MeanMesa will introduce a 2012 election strategy to respond to this latest calamity.

Realism and Elections -- A Little History

Looking over a recent history of the performance of the two parties in the House of Representatives, the record is a predictably symmetric one.  If an additional "line" were to be created straight through middle of the bouncing curves, it would represent the Republican vs. Democrat ratios of a perfectly divided House of Representatives, and, at least theoretically, an equally "perfect" division of voters' priorities.

Yearly Majorities and Minorities in the House (source)

It's suspiciously attractive to lament the demise of the "good old days" when votes could be presumed to be the result of ballots cast on issues or a general "party" selection based on the "brand image" of the parties.  The development of voting blocks founded on these considerations led to conclusions about what to expect if one party of the other were to gain a majority.

Republicans developed a party image of being good for business and strong on national security.  Democrats developed a party image of being dedicated to the interests of middle class voters and cultural/social development.  If the issues arising from the "burning question of the day" failed to inspire voters, these general party brand background images stepped in to drive the decisions.

Running along with the causes of the respective majorities being elected into the House seats, are the consequences of those elections.  For the more analytical among MeanMesa visitors, these consequences can be mapped into the diagram above.

• The VietNam War ran from roughly 1961 to 1973.
• The Gingrich "Contract on America" was adopted at the beginning of 1994.
• Ronald Reagan initiated the fundamentals of the economic collapse during the 1980's with numerous middle class tax increases and anti-labor legislation.

In these example cases -- and there are, of course, many more -- the control of the House of Representatives shows a gradual migration for or against the party which was "held responsible" for the consequences.  

The reaction was seldom as dynamic as what we see in the 2006 mid-term election as the country recoiled from the issues originating in the autocracy.  The majority reversal in 2010 was significant, but not as decisive as the "pressing horror" of stopping Gorge II's plundering campaign in 2006.  

The speed of the voter response to "consequences" may be mapped into the question of "How fundamental to American ideals are the issues being changed by the consequences?"  When the issues of the government come closer to American fundamentals, voters respond more quickly.  When the "consequences" are longer term or more theoretical, voters are usually willing to wait an election or two to see how things will turn out in the longer term.

There have always been "base" voters on both sides of the elections, and there have always been "independent" voters in the center of the spectrum unwilling to commit much durable sentiment to the respective "brand image" of either of the opposing parties.  Although it is a mistake to attribute election success to any particular vote, these "fickle" independents have become increasingly important in recent elections because the "base" votes on either side have remained essentially equal.

MeanMesa Conclusion Number One

The 2012 election will show a return to voters responding to "party brand image."  The Republicans have not hesitated to promote their party's "brand image" continuously whether an election is approaching or not.  The Democrats will need to take this same approach as the 2012 election nears.

Independents like to pride themselves as voters who are responding to issues.  However, the "issues" being presented to them currently by the Republicans have become grotesque and increasing unpersuasive.  Further, the disparity between Republican performance and promise has grown larger and larger, moving fairly informed independents further from the Republican base.

Acting as an advantage to Republicans, the economic pain has been successfully "re-imaged" in a manner which can detach it from previous Republican performance -- at least when it comes to the Republican base.  When the "memory" and "information" levels of independents are introduced as "vote deciding" factors, the numbers change, not because independents particularly like the premises of the Democratic "party brand image," so much as because they are becoming increasingly frightened by the Republican "brand image."

2012 will mark a return to "party politics," whether we like it or not.  Democratic campaigns will have to return to the bold position of asking for votes based on the qualities of "being a good Democrat."  No more hiding away in "androgynous political positions."

The "Prize" Hidden In Otherwise Rational Elections

With the relentless ideological "grooming" of the Republicans, the "base" voting block of the party has become immune to persuasion.  There is essentially no reason for Democrats to expend campaign resources attempting to move Republican base voters from their election positions.  Although at first glance, this may seem to be an accomplishment of Republican strategists, a closer look reveals what may well be a typical Republican "over reach."

The original challenge to Republicans was to consolidate their party base with just enough ideology to firmly persuade base voters' loyalty while not alienating the fickle independents with the same thrust.  This first goal was fairly well realized some years back, but instead of tempering their ideological message -- and the party's performance -- Republican strategists became infatuated with these early successes at persuasion.

Rather than a strategic move toward the attraction of the independents, every Republican effort was made to further consolidate the mood of their party base.  At this point, this aim has been accomplished in spades.  The result is a Republican base who would rather cut off a foot than vote Democratic, but large numbers of independents who are looking askance at the prospect of "cutting off a foot" to be members of the Republican base -- even temporarily, that is, long enough to elect more Republicans in 2012.

So, who's left?  Where can Democrats find the votes they will need in 2012?

Happily, there are plenty of votes remaining "in play."  We can look at immense reservoirs of potential Democratic votes and the grisly selection of highly predictable Republican strategies to deny them to Democratic candidates.

The Democratic Voting Majority

Republicans accept as "written in gold" that the more Americans who vote in an election, the less likely a Republican candidate will win.  The subsequent conclusion seems to be the one with which they have a greater difficulty. 

That conclusion? 

There are more Democrats than Republicans in the United States. 

This isn't simply a MeanMesa dream, either.  The polls consistently reflect that more Americans are "nearly ready" to be Democrats than Republicans.

Yet, Republicans won in the 2010 election because Democrats did not vote.  The reasons why Democrats did not vote is absolutely central to our plans for the next election in 2012.  What, exactly, caused this phenomenal accomplishment on the part of the GOP?

The Republican party convinced these otherwise Democratic voters to either vote for "anyone else" or stay home during the 2010 election.  The media pundits attributed this to a high level of dissatisfaction with these voters with respect the the economy and to the Democratic leadership.  We'll deal with the leadership question first.

MeanMesa agrees.  The behavior of Democrats, especially Democrats in the House, could not be called anything else but a walking surrender to the media glacier forwarded by the Republicans.  The GOP used its ownership of the media and its bottomless barrels of cash very, very effectively.  By the time the election came up, the Democrats were acting as if the situation was hopeless.

 

Because of the Democrats, it was.

It was nothing new, either.  The Democrats had been acting as if the situation was hopeless for months prior to November.  The potential Democratic voter carried a very damaging question with him as he entered the polling booth.

"Why should I vote to elect a Democrat?"

The astonishing side of this was also simple.  No middle class American voter who was familiar with the facts would have ever voted for a Republican.  But why, then, do we now have a House of Representatives full of illiterate tea baggers?

Simple.  Voters were not "familiar with the facts" at all.  Most potential Democratic voters were still wondering why the economy hadn't been "fixed," why there were still no jobs, why his house was worth 60% of what he had paid for it and why Wall Street was still gleefully dancing the maranga on his retirement account.

The President, effectively abandoned by House Democrats who would have sold their mothers into sex slavery to survive the 2010, was looking like a forlorn battleship after ten days of strafing with no covering cruisers.  The fact the he was steadily accomplishing his campaign promises had died the "death of a thousand cuts" as it became an unspoken rule for House Democrats to never mention so much as word about it.

The "low" part of the description "low information voter" had reached, well, a new "low."  If there remained a "questionable issue" in the mind of a potential Democratic voter, it had been thoroughly bathed in day old mayonaise and added to some dated bologna.  Every one of the "questionable issues" had been ruthlessly addressed by the Republican talking machine.  The Democrats had said practically nothing.

Certainly not anything which might have countered even the littlest fish in the torrent of lies.

Low information voters don't feel good when they vote with too many "questionable issues."  In fact, they feel so bad, that not voting feels better than walking out of a polling booth wondering if one has just slit his own throat.  Democrats were too busy doing, well, something else, to make even a low octane effort to remedy this, and they paid the price.

We all paid the price.  We are all still paying the price.  The people in charge of the House of Representatives have no idea how to run a government.  Their adolescent meanderings may seem funny at first, but our ankles will be bleeding well before 2012.

Would you prefer to lay on your belly to do this bleeding or try it on your feet?

Stay tuned for Part Two.

Demanding Obama the War Monger

I Hate Green and All the Other Colors Are Awful

Most of the more stable, rational citizens among us grew quite tired of the autocrat's war mongering habits.  Stranded amid agonizing, relentless evidence of one policy failure after another, George II predictably slithered to the last possibility of a rehabilitated role as "Commander in Chief" as a desperate refuge for the wreckage of his "legacy."  Adding the GOPCon's base -- the hill billies  and bigots among us -- to the mix, the inevitable "war mongering" expanded to include a grisly dose of, also inevitable, "fear mongering."

Like anxious whores with complexion problems, the American media adopted "looking the other way" as a full time day job.

With memories like a marble in a mayonaise jar, Americans seemed to have no choice other than to measure the next (and current) President by the vacuous character pathology of the last one.  It is no surprise that the media critique of Obama's view of the role of Commander in Chief is littered with precisely the questions  which should have been asked a decade ago, that is, all the "commentary" which turned out to comprise the "afterbirth" of George II's murderous, Biblical efforts.

All the conclusions are present, each one amplified by this very, very suspicious press.  The questions which should have been posed during the military rampage of the autocrat now surface as somehow suspiciously legitimate  and provocative concerns for his successor.   Even the usually mild tempered BBC news anchors have mounted the band wagon like love starved lumberjacks..

What Questions?

(image source)

"Who will Obama kill next?"

The wing nuts seized on national race fear after the bin Laden killing.  To terrorize the wheel chair crowd, Obama was painted as a frightening minority killer who had just found his pace.  Like a rogue bear after eating his first delicious human, there would be no limit to the arbitrary killing spree once the black man's appetite had been whetted.

"Why isn't the US in the 'lead' in the NATO attack on Libya?"

Okay all you American geriatrics, look for the pill vial marked "super power palliatives and mood stabilizer."  We didn't like it when the country acted unilaterally in the Bush Oil Wars.  Even the tragic collection of international extortion victims unwillingly filling the ranks of our teetering "coalition" fell far short of shaking the "unilateral" label.

Most of the sensible ones left as quickly as possible after the timing became "polite."

Back then we didn't like being "in the lead."  Now, because, by the way Obama is black, we don't like being "out of the lead."  When the autocrat was "in the lead," attacking the wrong country, we were mildly skeptical.  When war policy under the thoughtful Obama is "out of the lead," we are confronted with outrageous evidence that US "super power" status is faltering.

It is.  Still, as Americans, it is entirely reasonable to demand that "we have it both ways."

"If Libya, why not Syria"

The local autocrat in Syria has murdered more of his citizens than Gaddafi has.  Granted, dictator Bashar al-Assad, has shown an internationally reconciling appetite to do the dirty with single bullets instead of Gaddafi's Howitzers, but numbers count.  

The invitation to the "hypocrisy party" was engraved in pure silver as far as the wing nuts and media were concerned.  The implication was that American military force was to be applied based on the whimsy of the body count, and that any other, more pensive reaction only marked indecisiveness and leadership failure. 

After all, a thundering, self-validating show of force would have been the way that George II would have approached the matter.  Shuddering, we can only guess what our autocracy might have considered a "proportional response" to the crimes in the Syrian streets.

US force was exercised in the Libyan desert as a result of a UN mandate.  We can either have a reactionary, half-baked "shoot first" policy or something much more mature and effective.  We made that clear choice in the 2008 election.

Obama and Netanyahu

"Eeeek!  Why is Obama throwing Israel under the bus?"

Past Presidents, luxuriating in the domestic bliss of being supported by domestic Israeli PAC dollars, have benefited greatly from the political and financial convenience of an endless war between the parties of Golan and Gaza.  Americans might have had a few passing moments of reflection as we watched the Jerusalem crowd humiliate the Palestinians for profit and glory, but, thanks largely to our "media," we never saw anything which might seriously pique our ideas of fairness.

George II had no problem with a dawdling repetition of the long tradition of ineffective tid-bits of international meddling.  Why couldn't Obama just "stick with the script?"

MeanMesa has posted on this topic plenty.  Most recently,

The Tragedy of Stasis and the Fear of Change

The Earth has moved under Israel's feet.  It has also, with the advent of the "Arab Spring," also moved under our own feet.  The script has changed, and no amount of Israel PAC dollars can move the Earth back to the Old Testament closet where it has been dreamily stored all these years.

George II might have attempted to remain on the moving soil, but Obama is clearly not satisfied with the choices contained in the low risk, "low hanging fruit."  The President assumes, correctly, that we Americans are now insisting on something far better than that.

Further, these examples represent only a sample of the onslaught.  The GOPCon "talking points factory" has not missed any opportunity to promote their insinuations of distrust and alienation when it comes to the President.  Happily, the ranks of the questionably "avid" and the "uninterested" have continued to dwindle.

The American "War Dream"

It is unsettling that the act of killing bin Laden, along with the other rather well designed diplomatic moves the President has taken lately, have served to shore up Obama's popularity.  More substantial accomplishments, perhaps because they are also more complicated, have been "set aside" in favor of a thoughtless regression back to the old, hackneyed WWII Victory March mentality.

Obama's "faltering leadership" has shown its colors to all who are even a little willing to see the facts.  The US "ship of state" has been artfully navigated through this last round of threatening seas by a Commander in Chief with irrefutable competence -- especially when compared to the man he replaced in the Oval Office.

Two important facts are in the full light of day.  

First, unlike the effeminate George II, Obama is man enough to take chances.  Granted, the fearful geriatric crowd doesn't particularly like such things, but most of the rest of us are convinced that living in this modern world requires such boldness.  The history of this moment is not written for the timid.

This "risk taking" productivity isn't isolated with military and diplomatic action, either.  The same flavor of the moment has been issued from this Presidency minute by minute since the Inauguration.  Health care, Wall Street regulation, energy policy, disaster responses and other elements of essential politics have been handled by this man even in the midst of relentless savage attacks by the media and the wing nut knuckle draggers. 

Second, we face the unavoidable question of "class."  Obama has clearly dispatched the constant temptation of the bully pulpit to engage in political "cat fights" as he faces his scurrilous detractors.  The President is making his own "high class" demands on the Americans.

"Grow up.  We Americans have a much greater challenge than one which can be met more coarsely with unbridled fear and manipulation.  Those days are in the past.  Now, we all have to actually think.  What do we want?  What do we stand for?  What are we willing to do about it?"

MeanMesa's compliments to the President.

When Rape Becomes Irony

 A Third World Economic "Bad Habit"

Littered across the globe, we see a troubling collection of "developing economies" which stand today as a grisly reminder of Friedman style economic development.  The scenario repeats itself on practically every continent (not Antarctica, so far).  Awash in the wake of Friedman economics, each case is equally tragic.

MeanMesa has its own view of "just what happened."

From the Presidential palaces strewn about in all these now forlorn "victim states," the view a decade ago was clear enough.  The developed world was revelling in its economic success with every feature of a healthy economy, a satisfied population and a bright future.

However, things at home were not so bright.  Even in countries which were showing a strong foundation for a metered sort of development in the near future, conditions remained so harsh that the population was anything but satisfied.

Worse, the current "warlord in charge," being a "President" or simply an undocumented strong man, had developed his own appetite for the rewards of development.  The Cold War had introduced "incentive assistance," but the fruit of such agreements was usually directed at the military -- an expensive military.  With a national economy unable to finance the paving of roads, all those jet fighters gradually became an impossible luxury.

This left the "head man's appetite" facing a rather meagre menu once the super combatants quit injecting war dollars -- or rubles.  There were always a few bucks for international aid, but most of that came with strings.    What was left was an autocrat surrounded by a few loyal, but stingy local oligarchs and a dwindling budget.

The icing on the cake was a country full of citizens wondering why things never seemed to get better.  All those unwashed locals -- who could see the aid dollars arriving but never getting past the local oligarchs -- wanted services.  A few programs were trotted out as a meagre palliative.  These became popular and the locals began to ask for more.

In no time, the government services has increased to an unsustainable level, that is, unsustainable as they negotiated a budget where almost all of everything still had to go to the top.  For whatever really bad reason, the clutch of wealthy "own everythings" appealed to the "experts" in the US to help make sense out of the mess and to the IMF to figure out some sort of "loan" to finance it.

In rolled folks such as the now famous Dominique Strauss-Kahn, or, as he is lovingly called in the American press with a long tradition of disliking people with hyphenated names, DSK.  The IMF had a "cookie cutter" approach to solving such economic difficulties.  That secret recipe was the Friedman Economic Model.

The Friedman/IMF Country Saving Plan

Step one was to "loan" the troubled country what it needed to keep going, that is, to "keep going" with consistently less and less of the "services" which had "caused the trouble" in the first place.  But, loans had to be repaid.

So, step two was to a.) impose a national austerity program beyond any proportion to the actual problem, and b.) lay out an essentially military regime to nationalize everything, that is, every nut and every bolt, every feather and every whistle, of the country's economy.  The "ownership" of all this  newly nationalized stuff would be "split" between the local oligarchs and the IMF Loan Repayment Bureau.

DSK was famous for arranging some wonderful ratios in the "splits."

The IMF had roamed far an wide through African and Latin American states in the 80's and 90's, almost always leaving the predictable debris of Freidman planning in their wake.  In more recent decades the IMF has "engineered" the "austerity" programs for "news covered" places such as Egypt, Greece, Ireland and Portugal.

The resulting street riots are apparently acceptable collateral damage when viewed from the "cloud city" of IMF headquarters.  (The story is told that all these greedy poor people and workers in the street had "sucked the country dry."  Actually, all the "missing" money could generally be found in the pockets of the local oligarchs.)

Let's just say that this long, grisly list of IMF actions -- most recently led by DSK -- amounted to little more than international "gang rape."  For any MeanMesa visitor who suspects such psycho-sexual hyperbole to be an exaggeration, Google away.

Well, now the lip licking "captain" of the "rape squad" has apparently shown his true colors.

From Common Dreams

 Published on Monday, May 16, 2011 by The Progressive

 

The IMF Chief’s Rape Charge: 

Metaphor for the IMF’s Abuse of Power

by Matthew Rothschild

I don’t like using the word rape as a metaphor, but the charge against the head of the International Monetary Fund is almost a perfect metaphor for the IMF’s role in the world.

IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn is accused of attempted rape against an African maid in a luxury hotel in New York City.

And while the truth of this allegation remains for the legal system to sort out, screwing helpless people over in the Third World (and Eastern Europe: see Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine”) is what the IMF is all about.

For decades now, the International Monetary Fund — this instrument of the U.S. Treasury and global capitalism — has required developing countries that are in financial trouble to devalue their currency, slash employment in the public sector, and slash government subsidies for such essentials as food and fuel.

If the countries refuse to follow this advice, they don’t get the IMF’s bailout money and their economies continue to go down the drain.

This is coercion of the worst sort.

It results in drastic cuts in the living standards of millions of people literally overnight. It leads to mass unemployment— and often to food riots.

And while the IMF twists the arms of these developing countries, it also demands that they open up their economies to multinational corporations and banks, which imperils their sovereignty.

The IMF abuses power to get its way.

And that’s what the IMF’s chief is accused of doing, too.

Keeping the Interest at Home - Introducing the US "Debt Bond"

Waiting for the Milk Train

MeanMesa watches in awe as House GOPCons quietly maneuver their way through the wreckage of the economy as they set the stage for their big "looting come back" scheme, now perched, ready to launch, at the fist sign of the national numbers indicating an imminent recovery. 

GOPCons win elections talking about jobs.  But then GOPCons prepare for the next election by focusing solely on spending cuts, the task assigned to them by their oligarch masters.  In the meantime, GOPCon days are filled with less important tasks such as protecting the subsidies for oil companies, chasing birth certificates and practising a subtle racism just sophisticated enough to provide "plausible deniability."

As soon as there is so much as a single, unspent dollar in the Treasury, their perpetual "tax cuts for the rich" schemes will resume with a fervor.

Note to the Middle Class:  

"Put Your Tax Payments in the Leaky Bucket"

Most tax paying Americans, that is, Americans who have absolutely anything else to do besides pulling the Congressional "puppet strings" from their atmospheric mansions, are quite comfortable with the idea of paying taxes for roads and schools and the like.  The problem is that the taxes go on while the roads and schools go down.

Money which is theoretically targeted at such "commons" is routinely diverted to, you guessed it, more tax cuts for their cronies.  In fact, the very common sense approach to handling the deficit, increasing revenues by raising taxes, is essentially no more than a "straw man attempting to swallow a live red herring."

If tax revenues were to increase -- tax revenues from increasing the taxes rationally -- the money would simply be immediately transferred to the oligarchs in the form of more tax cuts (tax cuts, tax expenditures and subsidies).  The national debt would never decrease, the economy would get even worse and the GOPCon wet dream of unseating Obama would move even closer to fruition.

It's a very clever set up, indeed.  The GOPCon plan is now revealed in all of its splendor.  Rack the deficits up sky high under cover of the autocracy, absolutely prohibit any talk whatsoever of increasing revenues and then, while the "masters of the world" are lounging around counting their take, endlessly repeat the chorus of GOPCon "mouth junk" about "job creators" and "small business."

The only real cost to the GOPCons is for the purchase of more day old horse adrenalin with which to saturate the "mouth junk."

Granted, a chorus of amateurs such as Boehner, Cantor and Ryan, all tapping the now dilapedated tune of party leadership like McConnell and Gingrich, is hardly a persuasive  masterpiece, but, repeated often enough, it still might work.  The GOPCons only need 50% of the votes less what they can steal with phony machines and crooked Secretaries of State.

The problem is that tax paying Americans, although they have no particular problem with paying what's needed to keep the country going, cannot get so much as a single nickle of their tax money directed to the things which are important to them.

The GOPCons have no difficulty playing the "school bully" who steals the lunch money so efficiently that the entire third grade is losing weight.

Absolutely Nothing Can Be Done

Oh, maybe there is one thing which could be done.  Here comes MeanMesa's proposal to straighten the whole thing out in a few months.

The national US Citizen Debt Bond.

The plan is simple enough.  Get a bill authorizing the sale of massive numbers of US Citizen Debt Bonds through the Congress and onto the President's desk.  Once the thing becomes law, a major part of the $250 Billion annual interest payments we are now making to all of our creditors would be "re-directed" back into the domestic economy.

Of course, at the first mention of such a plan, GOPCons such as Boehner and McConnell would instantly be on the phone to their billionaire bosses on Wall Street and in the super secret hedge fund bunkers.

"WOOO-HOOO!  Thar's money flowin' inta the Treasury agin!  Git out yer deposit slips 'n call yer off shore bankers! All yew billionaires kin 'xpect more tax cuts commin' at ya' in a week or two!"

Wait a minute.

For this plan to actually work, there are going to have to be some rules.  You know, rules about spending all the money that will be raised.

The Debt Bond revenue will have to be directed to infrastructure rehabilitation.  That means both good jobs -- local jobs -- and better infrastructure down here on the ground where we live.  No tax incentives or subsidies will be required.  Just pay to fix the country's current train wreck of 1950's projects.

"1950's projects?"

That was about the time that most of the US national infrastructure was built.

The Debt Bond revenue won't be used to pay for more tax cuts, spending cuts or "deficit reduction" (GOPCon translation: "tax cuts").  Let the main economy sort all that stuff out, which it will, given time.  Let the Debt Bond "economy" supply what's necessary to keep the country running in the meantime.

Debt Bonds couldn't be traded a "commodities futures," investment derivatives, bank bail outs or siphoned into the ridiculous morass of Medicare shortfalls.

Finally, about the "faces" appearing on MeanMesa's suggested graphics for the physical bonds.

These are the faces of the debt mongers.  Regardless of the latest GOPCon media flatulence about emergency spending cuts and national debt, these are the faces of the men who managed the extraction of $7 Trillion dollars worth of cold cash from the public wealth of the country.

Of course their faces need to be on the Bond issue.