Sirota calls b.s. on public pension 'crisis'

Sirota argues that states' public pension shortfalls are a manufactured crisis by conservatives and big business, caused by years of states' chronic under-funding of pension funds while giving tax breaks and subsidies to business:

Public pensions face a 30-year shortfall of $1.38 trillion, or $46 billion on an annual basis. This is dwarfed by the $80 billion a year states and cities spend on corporate subsidies.

As usual, conservatives' go-to "solution" for a "crisis" is more cuts.

Sirota cites one state example that I've mentioned already:

Perhaps the most famous illustration of the pervasiveness of this deceptive argument comes from Detroit, Michigan. When the city recently declared bankruptcy, much of the media and political narrative around the fiasco simply assumed that public pension liabilities are the problem. Few noted that both Detroit and the state of Michigan have for years been spending hundreds of millions of dollars on wasteful corporate subsidies.13 Worse, the very same political leaders pleading poverty to demand cuts to municipal pensions were simultaneously promising to spend more than a quarter billion taxpayer dollars on a professional hockey arena.

And now conservative idealogues in the states are treating everywhere like Detroit:

But as outrageous as the blame-the-pensioners mythology from Detroit is, it is the same misleading mythology that is now driving public policy in states across America. In Rhode Island, the state government slashed guaranteed pension benefits while handing $75 million to a retired professional baseball player for his failed video game scheme. In Kentucky, the state government slashed pension benefits while continuing to spend $1.4 billion on tax expenditures. In Kansas, the state government slashed guaranteed pension benefits despite being lambasted by a watchdog group for its penchant for spending huge money on corporate welfare “megadeals.” 

Sirota reveals a devilish bait-and-switch is at work here:

The goals of the plot against pensions are both straightforward and deceptive. On the surface, the primary objective is to convert traditional defined-benefit pension funds that guarantee retirement income into riskier, costlier schemes that reduce benefits and income guarantees, and subject taxpayers and millions of workers’ retirement funds to Enron’s casino-style economics. At the same time, waging a high-profile fight for such an objective also simultaneously helps achieve the conservative movement’s larger goal of protecting profligate corporate subsidies. 

The bait-and-switch at work is simple: The plot forwards the illusion that state budget problems are driven by pension benefits rather than by the far more expensive and wasteful corporate subsidies that states have been doling out for years. That ends up 1) focusing state budget debates on benefit-slashing proposals and therefore 2) downplaying proposals that would raise revenue to shore up existing retirement systems. The result is that the Pew-Arnold initiative at once helps the right’s ideological crusade against traditional pensions and helps billionaires and the business lobby preserve corporations’ huge state tax subsidies. 

Kentucky offers a good example of the real problem, what this bait-and-switch is meant to protect by means of distraction:

... Kentucky’s $760 million annual pension shortfall is far less than the $1.4 billion a year Kentucky spends so-called “incentive programs” – much of them classic corporate welfare. These programs have included subsidies of $300 million to Ford Motor Company, $205 million to Weyerhauser and $110 million to United Parcel Service. They also include a $560 million subsidy to the mining industry. Meanwhile, thanks to Kentucky’s loophole-riddled tax code, profitable Kentucky-based Fortune 500 companies like Yum Brands and Ashland Inc. have during one of the last few years paid no state income tax whatsoever.

Thanks to corporate lobbying, Kentucky converted its defined-benefit public pension system into a cash balance hybrid system, while keeping corporate welfare.  

Privatizing Social Security is their next aim, trust me!  

The Plot Against Pensions

By David Sirota

Institute for America's Future

URL: http://ourfuture.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Plot-Against-Pensions-final.pdf

Sirota: Higher education should be a right like high school

Following up on Matt Taibbi's expose of the scam that federal student loans have become, David Sirota offers us an alternative [emphasis mine]:

Just consider the critical difference between how high school and college education programs are funded.

The former is funded by broad-based taxes and few would ever suggest changing it to an individual tuition system. Why? Because we've come to view access to high school as a right. This view is based not just on notions of morality but also on an economic calculation. Basically, we know we need a workforce with as many high school graduates as possible, and we've decided that forcing young people to go into crushing debt to get a high school degree would deter many from getting the degree.

Yet, even though we know that higher education is also increasingly an economic necessity, we do not have the same funding model or outlook for college. Instead, we still predicate access to higher education on a student's wealth and/or their willingness to go into crushing debt.

[...]  No doubt, shifting our policies to treat post-secondary education as equally necessary as high school -- and therefore worthy of similar fiscal treatment -- requires a paradigm shift in thinking.

It requires us to see higher education as not just 4-year university programs, but also 2-year community college programs and vocational and technical education.

As I've been saying for years, we can give millions of Americans marketable, in-demand job skills without four-year colleges.  For too many, four years of college is an extravagant waste of time and money; they don't want or really even need to be there, (hurting the college experience for those who do); they just need a piece of paper at the end that generically qualifies them for gainful employment.

The College Degree Is Becoming the New High School Diploma -- A Minimum Requirement for Getting Even a Low-Level Job

By David Sirota

August 29, 2013 | Alternet

URL: http://www.alternet.org/education/college-degree-becoming-new-high-school-diploma-minimum-requirement-getting-even-low-level?paging=off

Sirota's prediction coming true as Boston bombers identified

It didn't take long for David Sirota's dire prediction to come true:

It will probably be much different if the bomber ends up being a Muslim and/or a foreigner from the developing world. As we know from our own history, when those kind of individuals break laws in such a high-profile way, America often cites them as both proof that entire demographic groups must be targeted, and that therefore a more systemic response is warranted. At that point, it’s easy to imagine conservatives citing Boston as a reason to block immigration reform defense spending cuts and the Afghan War withdrawal and to further expand surveillance and other encroachments on civil liberties.

Already conservatives are saying there is a larger Muslim (this time Chechen Muslim) jihadi conspiracy at work in the U.S.

Speculated conservative Judicial Watch: "There’s no telling how many of these Chechen terrorists have infiltrated the United States or how many opportunities the government has missed to protect the country by deporting them."

I'm sure Russia's President for Life Vladimir Putin is ROTFLHAO right now....

Actually FOX News published a story that was fairly fair-minded, dismissing a larger conspiracy, albeit with a provocative title as FOX is wont to do, but I'm sure it won't last, FOX and the rest of the conservative media will jump on the jihadi conspiracy wagon soon enough.... 

It's still Dubya's America and we're just living in it... including President Obama.

UPDATE (04.21.2013): Here's another anti-Muslim screed in reaction to the alleged Boston bombers from somebody named Andrew McCarthy at the respected National Review Online: "Jihad Will Not Be Wished Away." I still subscribe to elementary school writing lessons, when they taught us to end an essay with a call to action. Here's McCarthy's:

There are all kinds of Islam, including the supremacist kind that is far more widely held than we’re comfortable acknowledging. Until we get beyond that discomfort, until we are prepared to ask, “What Islam?” — and until we are prepared to treat Islamic supremacism as the pariah it should be — Boston’s hellish week will remain our recurring nightmare.

Everybody got that? Got any idea how to act on that?  Neither do I.  And that's why all such conservative op-eds and diatribes are stupid and ultimately racist and/or anti-Muslim, because all they do is stir up suspicion and hatred for innocent Americans who happen to be Muslim.

And here's another one from NRO by Mark Steyn, an on-air substitute for Rush Limbaugh: "The 'Co-exist' Bombers." Steyn jokes how disappointed David Sirota must be that the bombers were indeed immigrants and Muslims. Besides taking a lot of swipes at Massachusetts liberals, the only sensible thing Steyn wrote was this, again, at the end. (Why do conservative pundits always save their one cogent thought for the end?):

On Monday, [April 15], it didn’t feel Islamic: a small death toll at a popular event but not one with the resonance and iconic quality the big-time jihadists like — like 9/11, the embassy bombings, the U.S.S. Cole. After all, if the jihad crowd wanted to blow up a few people here and there IRA-style they could have been doing it all this last decade.  

Good point! Too bad more blood-and-guts American Islamophobes aren't thinking about this more deeply and honestly. Indeed, how do you draw the connection between the U.S.S. Cole in 2000 and these two kids in Boston in 2013? That's more than six degrees of Bacon, to be sure. 

See, that's a big problem for the neocons and Islamophobes, because it's their task to cast any terrorist attacks as part of a larger conspiracy, a global jihad. So far, it's working for many of them simply to make that bald assertion of jihad; but I think more & more folks are starting to wise up to this con that leads us nowhere... or even worse, leads us to places like Iraq.  

Sirota: 5 ways GOP can shrink government

Make GOP end the drug war

By David Sirota

March 5, 2013 | Salon

URL: http://www.salon.com/2013/03/05/beating_gop_at_its_own_small_government_game/

Sirota: U.S. Muslims more loyal than Evangelicals

They used to say the same thing about Catholics: when JFK was elected, non-Catholics were worried he'd take orders from the Pope in Rome. Nowadays it's Muslims' turn.

Why Many Evangelical Christians Are More "Un-American" Than US Muslims

By David Sirota

November 29, 2011 | AlterNet

If you have the stomach to listen to enough right-wing talk radio, or troll enough right-wing websites, you inevitably come upon fear-mongering about the Unassimilated Muslim. Essentially, this caricature suggests that Muslims in America are more loyal to their religion than to the United States, that such allegedly traitorous loyalties prove that Muslims refuse to assimilate into our nation and that Muslims are therefore a national security threat.

Earlier this year, a Gallup poll illustrated just how apocryphal this story really is. It found that Muslim Americans are one of the most — if not the single most — loyal religious group to the United States. Now, comes the flip side from the Pew Research Center's stunning findings about other religious groups in America (emphasis mine):

American Christians are more likely than their Western European counterparts to think of themselves first in terms of their religion rather than their nationality; 46 percent of Christians in the U.S. see themselves primarily as Christians and the same number consider themselves Americans first. In contrast, majorities of Christians in France (90 percent), Germany (70 percent), Britain (63 percent) and Spain (53 percent) identify primarily with their nationality rather than their religion. Among Christians in the U.S., white evangelicals are especially inclined to identify first with their faith; 70 percent in this group see themselves first as Christians rather than as Americans, while 22 percent say they are primarily American.

If, as Islamophobes argue, refusing to assimilate is defined as expressing loyalty to a religion before loyalty to country, then this data suggests it is evangelical Christians who are very resistant to assimilation. And yet, few would cite these findings to argue that Christians pose a serious threat to America's national security. Why the double standard?

Because Christianity is seen as the dominant culture in America — indeed, Christianity and America are often portrayed as being nearly synonymous, meaning expressing loyalty to the former is seen as the equivalent to expressing loyalty to the latter. In this view, there is no such thing as separation between the Christian church and the American state — and every other culture and religion is expected to assimilate to Christianity. To do otherwise is to be accused of waging a "War on Christmas" — or worse, to be accused of being a disloyal to America and therefore a national security threat.

Of course, a genuinely pluralistic America is one where — regardless of the religion in question — we see no conflict between loyalties to a religion and loyalties to country. In this ideal America, those who identify as Muslims first are no more or less "un-American" than Christians who do the same (personally, this is the way I see things).

But if our politics and culture are going to continue to make extrapolative judgments about citizens' patriotic loyalties based on their religious affiliations, then such judgments should at least be universal — and not so obviously selective or brazenly xenophobic.

Sirota: Dem leaders' predictable post-election blame of election-losing liberals

Can't believe I missed this one after the elections. Here it is. Sirota says it all.

Thank You, Dick Cheney, For Giving Me the Proper Words

By David Sirota

November 4, 2010 | Open Left

Like many of you reading these pixels, I've found myself in the last year burnt out on American politics, mostly because it has become a glorified red-versus-blue summer camp color war devoid of substance and logic. That kind of thing, which might have been fun as a kid in summer camp, is neither enjoyable nor mildly interesting as an adult muddling through day-to-day issues here in the real world. Sure, political junkies on cable TV, in the blogosphere and in the halls of power think the world revolves around political palace dramas, but as Jon Stewart so aptly put it, "Most Americans don't live their lives solely as Democrats or Republicans or conservatives or liberals -- most Americans live their lives that are just a little bit late for something they have to do."

The fact that so few in our political arena appreciate that truism is one reason I've really just had it. There's only a finite amount of time in a given day, and I -- like most Americans in the real world -- just don't have time or energy to contribute to the part of our culture that pretends D.C. gossip and the day's manufactured partisan controversies are monumentally important when, for the most part, they aren't -- at least not to those of us who are living here in a real recession-hammered world that both parties ignore.

The other reason I've become less interested is because the political arena has become less interesting. It is as if the drama of politics -- once vaguely provocative -- is now all pre-programmed. We know what Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are going to say. We know how progressive media is going to respond. We don't even have to tune in to know the reaction.

This is particularly true after elections -- and, in specific, when it comes to the mind-numbing "Future of the Democratic Party" debate. Indeed, I could have told you months ago that the week after the election would be marked by various self-appointed pillars of the Democratic Party coalition saying Democrats should do this or should do that to rescue their electoral future.

For example, I could have told you that a washed-up has-been like Evan Bayh would publish a New York Times op-ed insisting that Democrats "were too deferential to our most zealous supporters" (read: liberals) even after the Democratic Party crushed a public option, watered down Wall Street "reform," extended Bush-era civil liberties atrocities, escalated the Afghanistan War, further ballooned the defense budget and began moving to extend the Bush tax cuts.

Likewise, I could have told you that those careerists in D.C. who make their livelihood off this kind of pablum would publish a "strategy memo" in something self-importantly called "The Democratic Strategist". And I could have told you that this "strategy memo" would defend the bash-the-liberals meme with bromides about how "all of the major perspectives within the Democratic Party have a legitimate place and role in today's Democratic coalition" and about how "the present moment categorically demands a basic level of Democratic unity from every element of the coalition" (read: liberals shouldn't criticize the corporatists who destroyed the Democratic Party -- and the country).

I could have told you all of this because, as I said, it's pre-programmed. It's not spontaneous. It's not reacting to any reality out here in the real world. It's not responding to a changing country. It's pre-written, pre-conceived, pre-packaged feces sprayed at us in liquid form, all to justify a continuation of how it's always been -- and, frankly, how it probably will always be.

In the past, I may have contributed to some sort of organized pushback. But not this year. No, this time I can muster only one Cheney-esque response to the whole grotesque kabuki theater surrounding the inane "Future of the Democratic Party" debate: Go fuck yourself.

Evan Bayh and Third Way and The Democratic Strategist and the DLC and all the professional pundits and cable-TV zombies and D.C. spokesholes - all of you soul-raping corpses and shit-eating poindexters paid to appear on my television screen and scream at me about liberals ruining everything, please, I beg you on behalf of the silent irritated majority: Just go fuck yourself.

Go fuck yourself because all of your arguments are about what policies should be pursued to rescue Democratic politicians' electoral future, rather than about what policies are needed to rescue, say, the fucking country's future. Additionally, go fuck yourself because if you know so much about winning elections and if you are so sure conservadem-ism/Blue Dog-ism is the way to win said elections, how come it was the conservadems/Blue Dog candidates - not liberal candidates - who lost the most elections this year?

Also, go fuck yourself because the fact that you are even trying to create the same old bash-the-liberals debate exposes you not just as substantively wrong, but as professionally employed to despoil our culture with bullshit -- and specifically, with bullshit that you know is bullshit. That, really, everyone knows is bullshit.

The facts are painfully apparent. Though hundreds -- if not thousands -- of people in D.C. are professionally paid to pretend these facts require debate and analysis and parsing and speculation and press releases and pithy Tweets and Sunday Show roundtables and C-SPAN symposia and to-camera cable-TV rants and lengthy thousand-page books, they don't require any of that. The facts are simple. The facts are obvious. The facts are undeniable to anyone not paid fistfulls of sweaty money to lie or sensationalize:

1. The Democratic Party shit on its base with its policies, as noted above.

2. This demoralized the Democratic base, which responded by not turning out to vote. As CBS News notes, "Hispanics, African Americans, union members and young people were among the many core Democratic groups that turned out in large numbers in the 2008 elections (but) turnout among these groups dropped off substantially, even below their previous midterm levels."

3. In cause-and-effect style, the result of all this was, as the Washington Post reports, a freshman congressional class that is primarily made up of angry, white, lunatic-conservative assholes.

So yes, all of you who are wasting all of our time pretending this isn't the basic point-A-to-point-B story of the election -- and there are a lot of you out there -- please, if not for me, then for everyone else: Go fuck yourself.

We've got lives to lead, we've got struggles to struggle through, we've got bills to pay - in short, we've got to get through the shit you've created and continue to create. And as you now incessantly bitch about the alleged scourge of those evil election-losing liberals, as you whine and wail and cry from the cocktail and hors d'oeuvre paradise of TV studios and green rooms and congressional offices and party fundraising events, you've made quite clear you don't give a shit about the harsh reality we all face - the harsh reality we all face thanks to you.

Knowing all of that, I'll end just reiterate my one succinct request: All I ask is that as you continue your hard work to prop up the kleptocracy, as you continue to clog our last remaining democratic conduits with your viscous rhetorical shit bombs, please, do us all a favor and for the love of whatever god you worship - please just stop wasting our damn time and go fuck yourself.

Sirota: STEM education doesn't boost US employment

Pretty interesting interview:

Writer Debunks The 'Great Education Myth'
Michel Martin
September 28, 2010 | Tell Me More on NPR
URL: http://www.npr.org/130188617

And here is the article which spurred it:

The Neoliberal Bait-and-Switch
By David Sirota
September 10, 2010 | Salon.com

In simplistic, Lexus-and-Olive-Tree terms, the neoliberal economic argument goes like this: Tariff-free trade policies are great because they increase commerce, and we can mitigate those policies' negative effects on the blue-collar job market by upgrading our education system to cultivate more science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) specialists for the white-collar sector.

Known as the bipartisan Washington Consensus, this deceptive theory projects the illusion of logic. After all, if the domestic economy's future is in STEM-driven innovation, then it stands to reason that trade policies shedding "low-tech" work and education policies promoting high-tech skills could guarantee success.

Of course, 30 years into the neoliberal experiment, the Great Recession is exposing the flaws of the Washington Consensus. But rather than admit any mistakes, neoliberals now defend themselves with yet more bait-and-switch sophistry -- this time in the form of the Great Education Myth.

No doubt, you've heard this fairy tale from prominent politicians and business leaders who incessantly insist that our economic troubles do not emanate from neoliberals' corporate-coddling trade, tax and deregulatory policies, but instead from an education system that is supposedly no longer graduating enough STEM experts. Indeed, this was the message of this week's New York Times story about corporate leaders saying America isn't producing "enough workers with the cutting-edge skills coveted by tech firms."

As usual, it sounds vaguely logical. Except, the lore relies on the assumptions that 1) American schools aren't generating enough STEM supply to meet employer demand, 2) the education system -- not neoliberalism -- is driving this alleged STEM drought and 3) if America came up with more of such specialists, they would find jobs.

To know these suppositions are preposterous is to consider a recent study by Rutgers and Georgetown University that found colleges "in the United States actually graduate many more STEM students than are hired each year."
That debunks the supply-and-demand canard. But can we still blame the jobs crisis on schools failing to deliver more STEM graduates?

Nope.

As researchers discovered, many students are pursuing finance instead of STEM careers because Wall Street jobs "are higher paying" and offer "employment stability" and "less susceptib(ility) to offshoring."

This is the truth that the Great Education Myth aims to obscure. It's not that schools are ill-equipped to train STEM specialists. It's that the additional students who might boost our STEM workforce are choosing to avoid STEM majors because they see an economy that is more hospitable to careers in Wall Street casinos rather than in high-tech innovation -- a financialized economy based less on creating tangible assets than on encouraging worthless speculation.

[And from personal experience, I know a lot of MBA-Finance students who were engineers and IT guys who wanted higher pay and more job security - J]

This doesn't mean that our education system is perfect. But it does mean that without reforming the trade, tax and regulatory policies that reward high-tech outsourcing and incentivize careers in finance, our schools can never be an engine of value-generating information-age jobs.

Why, then, do neoliberals nonetheless press the Great Education Myth? Because it deliberately distracts from a situation that enriches neoliberals and the powerful interests they rely on.

Tariff-free trade pacts inflate the profits of transnational businesses by helping them troll the globe for cheap exploitable labor. Loopholes exempting foreign earnings from taxes encourage companies to move jobs overseas. And both deregulation and bailouts disproportionately balloon financial industry revenues.

The neoliberal corporate class makes big money off this status quo, and neoliberal lawmakers get their cut via campaign contributions. The last thing either wants is an honest debate about neoliberalism's downsides. And so they play to our lust for silver-bullet solutions, endlessly telling us that everything is the schools' fault.

As mythology goes, it's certainly compelling. If only the facts didn't get in the way.

Sirota: High taxes = high revenue = high growth

Maybe that's not what your TV or radio jock taught you, but that's what a study of American history will teach you. There's no getting around it.

Are low taxes exacerbating the recession?

By David Sirota

July 9, 2010 | SF Gate

URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/07/08/ED541EBDQD.DTL#ixzz0tJKPpY2V

Sirota: Questions on Obama's Afghan decision

Here's my favorite question for us to ponder:

"Which is worse - a stupid person like George W. Bush starting a dumb occupation, or a smart person like Barack Obama following the lead of that stupid person, but actually escalating that occupation?"


Some Simple Questions After Obama's Afghanistan War Speech
By David Sirota
December 1, 2009 | Open Left

Just a few quick questions to ponder after President Obama's speech announcing a massive escalation in Afghanistan - the very first being shouldn't we be able to honestly answer these queries before mindlessly cheering on a deployment of more troops to a Central Asian war zone?

Here they are in no particular order:

- What percentage of those kids in the West Point audience will die because of this decision?

- Would you be OK sending yourself or a loved one over to face combat and potentially death for the mission Obama articulated in Afghanistan? If not, how could you support sending other people?

- Why do so many pundits and pro-Obama activists continue to focus on how "hard" and "difficult" and "trying" this decision is for President Obama, rather than on how "hard" and "difficult" and "trying" this will be for the soldiers who are killed? Doesn't Obama get to make this decision, and then go home to the comfortable confines of a butlered White House, while thousands of Americans will be sent 7,000 miles from home to face their potential deaths? Isn't the latter "harder" than the former?

- Where's the antiwar movement and the marches and the organizing and the protesting? Where's all those well-funded groups that protested George W. Bush's war policy? Or was all that really just about hating George Bush and embracing blind Partisan War Syndrome?

- In the days and weeks after this speech, will the White House's cynical new spin get ever more desperate and become, hey - at least an Afghanistan escalation holds out the possibility of making sure military combat casualties start outpacing military suicides?

- Simple budget question: Should we now believe that escalating the Afghanistan War at the same annual cost of universal health care will save more than 45,000 Americans a year (ie. the number of Americans who die every year for lack of health insurance)?

- Did CNN really turn a move to send thousands of Americans to potentially die in Central Asia into an over-stylized, hyper-marketed television show called "Decision Afghanistan?" Is the media really that soulless, or did my eyes betray me? Because it's really hard for me to believe that even in this cynical age, a television network tried to make a cheap reality-TV show out of life-and-death decision that could affect tens of thousands of people.

- Which is worse - a stupid person like George W. Bush starting a dumb occupation, or a smart person like Barack Obama following the lead of that stupid person, but actually escalating that occupation?

- The "we're going to escalate war to end war" refrain throughout the speech - have we heard that before somewhere? It sounds sorta like "we'll burn down the Vietnam villages to save them." Just curious if that's what we're talking about here - because, ya know, that worked out really well.

- Are we really expected to believe that massively escalating a war is the way to end a war? I mean, really? Like, is the public really looked at like we're that stupid? And a follow-up question: Are we really that stupid?

- If Obama's Afghan War strategy about escalating a war to end a war was a self-help strategy for, say, alcoholics, wouldn't it prescribe drinking more whiskey to stop drinking - and wouldn't we all laugh at that?

- How many pundits will insist that bowing down to the Military-Industrial complex and escalating this missionless war somehow shows "resolve" and "strength" and "toughness" and "leadership" and not embarrassing weakness?

- Would the Obamaphiles now telling us to "give President Obama a chance" with this decision and/or defending Obama's escalation - would these same people be saying we should "give President McCain a chance" and/or defending President McCain's escalation if he was the one in office making this decision?

- I'm confused: Is this hope or change?

Sirota: America is zombie-crazy!

Zombies are always around, we just don't always notice them....

The Zombie Zeitgeist

By David Sirota

October 9, 2009 Creators.com

What's with all the zombies lately?

That could be a question about one of the hippest retro fads that pop culture has going these days. Inspired by horror genres of past, zombies have lurched back to pre-eminence in books like "World War Z," video games like "Left 4 Dead" and blockbuster films like "Zombieland." Even the highbrow producers at National Public Radio recently devoted a segment to a University of Ottawa study entitled "Mathematical Modeling of An Outbreak of Zombie Infection." Indeed, the undead have become so popular, they've spurred "zombie walks" in cities and spawned Weird Al-ish parodies through Jane Austen knock-offs like "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" and bands such as the Zombeatles (with their hit "Hard Day's Night of the Living Dead").

Frighteningly enough, though, that question about zombies could also be asked of America's political culture.

It was only a year ago that "zombie" first entered the colloquial economic lexicon during the collapse of the financial institutions that were cannibalizing the economy. From a balance-sheet perspective, many of these firms were dead. But they were quickly reanimated as zombie banks with trillions of taxpayer dollars.

Like a typical zombie outbreak, the initial plague spread.

On Wall Street, we have zombie executives — those who destroyed the economy but nonetheless kept their same jobs and now continue paying themselves huge bonuses. At the White House, President Obama hired zombie advisers whose zombie economic ideologies and records manufacturing recession conditions should have killed their careers, but who now sit in high government office letting out moans in support of the zombie banks.

On Capitol Hill, the scene this Halloween season looks like Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video. Decrepit zombie politicians with the funk of 40,000 years stalk Congress with the very zombie lobbyists that the election was said to disempower.

Lately, they are working in tandem to construct zombie health insurance companies — for-profit corporations eternalized by public subsidies, customer mandates and almost no regulation or competition. At the same time, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that should have already concluded keep plodding on with an unchanging zombie strategy — all while media zombies push zombie myths about death panels and birth certificates, effectively feasting on the last functioning lobes of the American brain.

Call me a zombie pundit, but I agree with "World War Z" author Max Brooks' suggestion that the concurrent rise of zombie pop and political cultures is no coincidence.

"Zombies are an apocalyptic threat, we are living in times of apocalyptic anxiety (and) we need a vessel in which to coalesce those anxieties," he says.

In fact, I'll go out on a severed limb and take it further: If zombies specifically represent the apocalyptic downsides of immortalized mindlessness, then today's zombie zeitgeist is not merely a result of scary quandaries created by stupidity. It is a reaction to both those problems and the sense that they can never be thwarted.

Here we are, a year after a financial implosion that should have driven a stake in the heart of free market fundamentalism. Here we are, a year after an election that was supposed to pour holy water on Wall Street vampires, exorcise the economy's demons and challenge the ancient mummies of neoconservative foreign policy. Yet here we are, with virtually nothing changed, watching the same zombie crises indomitably stumble forward.

And so what do we do? We flee to entertainment venues that let us enjoy the campy thrill of confronting the undead — even though we've lost the ability to do that in real life.

"The zombie is a way for us to explore massive disasters in a safe way," Brooks says. "You can't shoot the financial meltdown in the head, but you can do that with a zombie."

Sirota: Bloomberg, Yankees, & socializing risk

Concludes Sirota: "In the new Gilded Age, socializing risk and privatizing profit has become the standard." While Joe the Plumber and teabaggers may think that spreading private risk among taxpayers while keeping profits private began with Obama, the truth is that it's been going on for decades. Both parties are guilty. All those rich people and corporations don't give fat campaign contributions for nothing! They're not dumb: U.S. oligarchs expect a nice return on their investment.

The House That Taxpayers Built

By David Sirota

May 22, 2009 | Creators.com

Somewhere, likely in a basement, the next great documentarian is scavenging YouTube for clips of congressional inquisitions, Wall Street perp walks, and CNBC rants for a future Oscar-winning film about the times we're living through. I'm hoping this future star calls her film "Wall Street II: Cataclysmic Boogaloo," and more importantly, I'm hoping she gets footage of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, preferably wearing a top hat and monocle.

Even amid CEO testimony, Bernie Madoff grimaces and Rick Santelli diatribes, nothing better captures the moment's destructive greed than a billionaire politician using the municipal office he bought to defend charging $2,500 a ticket to a new Yankee Stadium he forced the public to finance. If there is a single act showing how kleptocracy and let-them-eat-cake-ism are systemic and local rather than momentary and exclusively federal, Bloomberg turning the House that Ruth Built into the House That Taxpayers Built is it.

Foreign oligarchs use guns to confiscate citizens' wages. American oligarchs rely on government to give theft the aura of legitimacy, and Manhattan's richest man is no exception. As an investigation by Assemblyman Richard Brodsky (D) documents, Bloomberg used various public agencies to extract between $1 billion and $4 billion from taxpayers and then spent the cash on a new stadium for the Yankees, the wealthiest corporation in sports.

The move followed a Bloomberg-backed 2005 initiative giving infamous investment bank Goldman Sachs $1.6 billion in taxpayer-financed bonds to construct its new headquarters — and amazingly, this encore rip-off is more spectacular. Mimicking tax cheats' deliberately complex transactions, the city owns the stadium, leases it to an agency, which then leases it to a corporate subsidiary, which then leases it to the Yankees. At the end of the Ponzi scheme, the team is permitted to use the taxes it already owes to pay off the mortgage on its new chateau.

New Yorkers might be celebrating if these giveaways delivered verifiable returns to taxpayers.

But Brodsky's report notes that "there is little in new job creation, private investment, or new economic activity" from the expenditure. Taxpayers don't even get affordable seats. According to Newsday, they get a stadium charging the highest ticket prices in baseball — $2,500 for "premium" views (since reduced to "just" $1,250) and $410 for a family of four in the cheap seats.

Like Wall Street firms insisting that trillion-dollar bailouts are a small price for economic stability, Bloomberg first justified everything first by saying taxpayers "put next to nothing" into the stadium. (In fairness, a media-mogul mayor who is the planet's 17th wealthiest man may genuinely believe a few billion is "next to nothing" — but, for comparison, it's more than all the devastating cuts to police, firefighting, school and infrastructure budgets that he proposed in his budget).

Then Bloomberg offered the same laissez-faire paean that financial CEOs cite in opposing executive pay caps. "Don't ever think sports is anything but a business," he said, joining bankers in selectively forgetting that arguments for free-market "business" ring hollow when government is propping up said "business."

If this tale of the House that Taxpayers Built was some anomaly, it might be vaguely funny. But while Bloomberg sets milestones for avarice, the bailout-ism he espouses is the norm.

In Washington, "The Obama administration has broken all records in the distribution of taxpayer dollars to American businesses, primarily banks, automobile manufacturers and insurance companies," reports the Huffington Post. At the local level, lawmakers trip over themselves to throw giveaways at corporate campaign donors.

In the new Gilded Age, socializing risk and privatizing profit has become the standard — as American as General Motors, Bank of America and, yes, the New York Yankees.

Sirota: 'Too big to fail' means too big to be private

Or, as Nassim Taleb said, if it might have to be bailed out tomorrow, nationalize it today.  As Sirota explains, there is free-market thinking behind this prescription.  It's about keeping a clean separation between what is government's, and what is the private sector's, without all this quasi-national bailout baloney and airs of "protecting capitalism" with no-strings government financing.

If It's 'Too Big To Fail,' Then It's Too Big To Be Private

By David Sirota

March 3, 2009

 

I appeared yesterday at the top of Neil Cavuto's Fox News show to discuss the potential for financial industry nationalization. You can watch the clip here. I tried to use the opportunity to float a fairly simple - and old-fashioned - concept: If something is "too big to fail," then it's too big to be in private hands.

The term "too big to fail" is a euphemism for any institution that is so important to the entire nation's most basic well being, that society cannot let that institution fail. This is why one of the foundational principles of civilized society has always been nationalization - ie. government control - of the institutions that are "too big to fail": institutions like the military, whose failure would mean a basic loss of national security; law enforcement, whose failure would mean a basic loss of civil order; and infrastructure construction, whose failure would mean the crumbling of commerce. The government, as the most powerful representative of society as a whole, runs these institutions/services because they are too important to be allowed to fail.

 

Unfortunately, the hard-right and center-right ideologues who ran the government for the last 30 years gutted the basic laws and enforcement mechanisms (financial regulations, anti-trust prosecutions, etc.) that prevented a myriad of financial institutions from becoming "too big to fail."

 

The American Insurance Group is the best example of this - a company that, as the New York Times notes, essentially based its business on a risky scheme to sell insurance to other corporations against colossal housing market failure. This allowed huge banks and investment houses to effectively offload their own absurdly risky housing investments by "insuring" those investments against loss with AIG - a shuffling of paper and deep-frying of books that let those banks leverage themselves even more, sans regulation. When the housing bubble burst and the banks called in their insurance, AIG was asked to pay up, and it couldn't, because it never expected to have to back up its insurance policies. But because AIG was so big - because it had so singularly cornered the market on such insurance and had essentially become the insurer of last resort - it couldn't eventually pay up, its failure would result in a cataclysmic ripple effect of defaults.

 

So now everyone is focused on the short-term question: Should we temporarily nationalize AIG and the biggest banks, or should we keep forcing taxpayers to get all the downsides of nationalization (ie. throwing money at the companies) without any of the upsides (i.e. ownership of the companies, power to throw out management, etc.)? Obviously, I'd say the former, but I'd go a step further: When it comes to an AIG - a company that is effectively ensuring the rest of the economy against loss - we shouldn't temporarily nationalize it, we should permanently nationalize it, or at least its core functions.

 

As I wrote in an earlier post, we shouldn't be afraid of permanent nationalization, because it is - thankfully - already all around us. Indeed, in some sectors of the economy, we have embraced nationalization thanks to an era where our government at least considered the possibility that if a function or service or entity is too big to fail, it is too big to be private.

 

That era's government believed a minimum retirement benefit and health insurance for the elderly is a "too big to fail" kind of function - too important to be subjected to the whims of the private marketplace. So we now have government-run Social Security and Medicare. That era's government also created the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, which nationalized the catastrophic insurance of pension plans. It forces corporations to pay premiums that underwrite a fund that pays out the pensions of companies that go bankrupt. The government deemed that function - catastrophic pension insurance - as a "too big to fail" kind of function, understanding that if the service was in private for-profit hands, there would be a risk of that private venture overleveraging itself, and then failing when it needed to pay out retirement benefits to millions of Americans.

 

Now, clearly, it's time to resurrect the principle that if something is too big to fail, it's too big to be private. We can resurrect that principle both through far tougher regulation that prevents individual private institutions from ever becoming so singularly important to our nation,* and by nationalizing the few core functions and services that are probably best left to the government as insurer of last resort. In the former category, that means much stronger financial regulation, and in the latter category it means some kind of nationalization of basic market insurance (and, I might add, health insurance).

 

If ever there was a time that the country was ready for this kind of back-to-what-made-us-great argument, that time is now.

 

* A key point here is the word singular: There is some safety in diversification and numbers - for instance, if a crucial function of the economy is handled by multiple businesses, then the failure of one of those businesses should (theoretically) pose much less danger to the overall economy than if that business was so singularly or monopolistically crucial as in the case of AIG.

Sirota: Busting myths about Great Depression

And after you read this, check out this more detailed analysis by Sirota, including U.S. Census data: "The Forgotten Math: Pre-WWII New Deal Saw Biggest Drop In Unemployment Rate in American History."

 

 

Busting myths that FDR prolonged Great Depression

By David Sirota

January 5, 2009  |  BillingsGazette.com

 

If you're like me, you sometimes find yourself speechless when confronted with abject insanity.

 

If you're like me, for instance, you were dumbfounded when "Forrest Gump" beat out "Pulp Fiction" for best picture; when HBO's "The Sopranos" received more accolades than "The Wire"; and when George W. Bush insisted that Iraqi airplanes were about to drop WMDs on American cities.

 

So if you're like me, you probably understand why I was momentarily tongue-tied last week after running face-first into conservatives' newest (and most ridiculous) talking point - the one designed to stop Congress from passing an economic stimulus package.

 

During a Christmas Eve appearance on Fox News, I pointed out that most mainstream economists believe the government must boost the economy with deficit spending. That's when conservative pundit Monica Crowley said we should instead limit such spending because President Franklin Roosevelt's "massive government intervention actually prolonged the Great Depression." Fox News anchor Gregg Jarrett eagerly concurred, saying "historians pretty much agree on that."

 

Of course, I had recently heard snippets of this silly argument - right-wing pundits are repeating it everywhere these days. But I had never heard it articulated in such preposterous terms, so my initial reaction was paralysis - the mouth-agape, deer-in-the-headlights kind. Only after collecting myself did I say that such assertions about the New Deal were absurd. But then I was laughed at - as if it was hilarious to say that the New Deal did anything but exacerbate the Depression.

 

Afterward, suffering pangs of self-doubt, I wondered whether I and most of the country are the crazy ones. Sure, the vast majority of Americans think the New Deal worked well. But are conservatives right? Did the New Deal's "massive government intervention prolong the Great Depression?"

 

Ummm ... no.

 

New Deal revisionism

Upon deeper examination, I discovered that the right bases its New Deal revisionism on the short-lived recession in a year straddling 1937 and 1938. But that was four years into Roosevelt's term - four years marked by spectacular economic growth. Additionally, the fleeting decline happened not because of the New Deal's spending programs, but because Roosevelt momentarily listened to conservatives and backed off them. As Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman notes, in 1937-38, FDR "was persuaded to balance the budget" and "cut spending and the economy went back down again."

 

You can credibly argue that the New Deal had its share of problems. But overall, the numbers prove it helped - rather than hurt - the macroeconomy. "Excepting 1937-1938, unemployment fell each year of Roosevelt's first two terms (while) the U.S. economy grew at average annual growth rates of 9 percent to 10 percent," writes University of California historian Eric Rauchway.

 

What about the New Deal's most "massive government intervention" - its financial regulations? Did they prolong the Great Depression in ways the official data didn't detect?

 

Nope.

 

Financial system rehab

According to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, "Only with the New Deal's rehabilitation of the financial system in 1933-35 did the economy begin its slow emergence from the Great Depression." In fact, even famed conservative economist Milton Friedman admitted that the New Deal's Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. was "the structural change most conducive to monetary stability since ... the Civil War."

 

OK. If the verifiable evidence proves the New Deal did not prolong the Depression, what about historians - do they "pretty much agree" on the opposite?

 

Again, no.

 

As Newsweek's Daniel Gross reports, "One would be very hard-pressed to find a serious professional historian who believes that the New Deal prolonged the Depression."

 

But that's the critical point I somehow forgot last week - the truism we must all remember in 2009: As conservatives try to obstruct a new New Deal, they're not making any arguments that are remotely serious.

Was Perot right, and Clinton wrong?

Was Ross Perot Right?
By David Sirota | Creators Syndicate

"Ross Perot was fiercely against NAFTA. Knowing what we know now, was Ross Perot right?"

That's what CNN's Wolf Blitzer asked Hillary Clinton at last week's Democratic presidential debate. It was a straightforward query about a Clinton administration trade policy that polls show the public now hates, and it was appropriately directed to a candidate who has previously praised NAFTA.

In response, Clinton stumbled. First she laughed at Perot, then she joked that "all I can remember from that is a bunch of charts," and then she claimed the whole NAFTA debate "is a vague memory." The behavior showed how politically tone deaf some Democratic leaders are.

To refresh Clinton's "vague memory," let's recall that Perot's anti-NAFTA presidential campaign in 1992 won 19 percent of the presidential vote — the highest total for any third-party candidate since Teddy Roosevelt. That included huge tallies in closely divided regions like the Rocky Mountain West, which Democrats say they need to win in the upcoming election.

A Democrat laughing at Perot on national television is a big mistake. Simply put, it risks alienating the roughly 20 million people who cast their votes for the Texas businessman.

But Clinton's flippant comments and feigned memory lapse about NAFTA were the bigger mistakes in that they insulted the millions of Americans (Perot voters or otherwise) harmed by the trade pact. These are people who have seen their jobs outsourced and paychecks slashed thanks to a trade policy forcing them into a wage-cutting war with oppressed foreign workers.

Why is Clinton desperate to avoid discussing NAFTA? Because she and other congressional Democrats are currently pushing a Peru Free Trade Agreement at the behest of their corporate campaign contributors — an agreement expanding the unpopular NAFTA model. When pressed, Clinton claims she is for a "timeout" from such trade deals — but, as her husband might say, it depends on what the meaning of the word "is" is, since she simultaneously supports the NAFTA expansion.

Of course, this deviousness is precisely why it is worth asking about Perot's predictions: to make sure America has an informed and honest discussion about impending new trade policies before they are enacted.

And so without further ado, let's answer the question Clinton ducked: Was Ross Perot right?

In 1993, the Clinton White House and an army of corporate lobbyists were selling NAFTA as a way to aid Mexican and American workers. Perot, on the other hand, was predicting that because the deal included no basic labor standards, it would preserve a huge "wage differential between the United States and Mexico" that would result in "the giant sucking sound" of American jobs heading south of the border. Corporations, he said, would "close the factories in the U.S. [and] move the factories to Mexico [to] take advantage of the cheap labor."

The historical record is clear. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace reports, "Real wages for most Mexicans today are lower than when NAFTA took effect." Post-NAFTA, companies looking to exploit those low wages relocated factories to Mexico. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the net effect of NAFTA was the elimination of 1 million American jobs.

Score one for Perot.

What about immigration? In 1993, the Clinton administration pitched NAFTA as "the best hope for reducing illegal immigration." Perot, by contrast, said that after NAFTA depressed Mexican wages, many Mexicans "out of economic necessity" would "consider illegally immigrating into the U.S."

"In short," he wrote, "NAFTA has the potential to increase illegal immigration, not decrease it."

Again, the historical record tells the story. As NAFTA helped drive millions of Mexicans into poverty, The New York Times reports that "Mexican migration to the United States has risen to 500,000 a year from less than 400,000 in the early 1990s, before NAFTA," with a huge chunk of that increase coming from illegal immigration.

Score another one for Perot.

Clinton may continue to laugh at Perot and plead amnesia when asked about trade policy. And sure, she and her fellow Democrats in Washington can expand NAFTA and ignore the public's desire for reform. But these politicians shouldn't be surprised if that one other Perot prediction comes true again — the one accurately predicting that Democrats would lose the next national election if they sold America out and passed NAFTA.

Foreshadowing that historic Democratic loss in 1994, he warned, "We'll remember in November."

Yes, indeed, Ross. America probably will.

David Sirota is the bestselling author of "Hostile Takeover" (Crown, 2006). He is a senior fellow at the Campaign for America's Future and a board member of the Progressive States Network — both nonpartisan research organizations. His daily blog can be found at www.credoaction.com/sirota.