It’s Not a Fiscal Cliff, It’s an Austerity Crisis

It’s Not a Fiscal Cliff, It’s an Austerity Crisis

Washington is not known for the stunning clarity with which it frames and addresses tough issues. But has there ever been a debate so mired in confusion as the one around the so-called fiscal cliff?

The trouble starts with the term “fiscal cliff,” which misstates the nature of the problem and provides no hint of how to solve it. I prefer the term “austerity crisis,” which at least describes the real issue -- too much austerity, imposed too quickly. (This has the added advantage of sidestepping an increasingly inane discussion over whether the problem is really a “cliff,” “curb,” “slope” or perhaps a “bomb.”)

Here is the crux of it: Depending on what you throw into the pot, the sum of the expiring Bush tax cuts along with currently mandated spending cuts would equal somewhere between $500 billion and $700 billion in deficit reduction in 2013. That’s more than enough fiscal contraction to throw the U.S. into recession. The tax increases alone would reduce the average family’s take-home pay by more than 6 percent. Because everyone agrees that’s a bad thing, Congress could pass a law, tomorrow, preventing it. Done.

But Congress won’t pass that law. Although the problem may be too much austerity too quickly, most everyone in Washington is insisting that the solution should encompass much, much more. In theory, this crisis should be easily resolved: If you have too much austerity, lighten the load. The reason the austerity crisis has become so messy is that the connection between the problem and its solution has been severed.

Wrong Solutions

In fact, proposed solutions inevitably include four or even five distinct categories of policy. There are proposals to address the crisis itself -- to reduce the dangerous size and speed of the scheduled deficit reduction in 2013. There are proposals to replace the scheduled deficit reduction with a different set of deficit-reducing tax increases and spending cuts, to be phased in over a longer term. There are policies to redesign the tax code or reform certain entitlements. There’s the need to raise the debt limit, as the Treasury is expected to run out of borrowing authority in February. Finally, there are policies to increase the amount of short-term stimulus and boost infrastructure investment.

So while the proximate problem is too much austerity, too quickly, the solutions being offered address an array of other concerns. Meanwhile, amid these wide-ranging proposals, the conversation in Washington tends to focus exclusively on achieving deficit reduction -- even though the economic threat we face in January is too much deficit reduction.

A more sensible approach would deal directly with the problem at hand: the austerity crisis. And that could be defused fairly simply, without doing overly much to harm the deficit. The path would involve identifying policies that pack a big stimulus punch without significantly increasing the deficit. Such “mismatched” policies abound.

The liberal Economic Policy Institute estimates that continuing the payroll-tax cut would create 1 million jobs in 2013 at a cost of about $115 billion. By contrast, maintaining the Bush tax cuts -- yes, all of them, including those on income less than $250,000 -- would create only 600,000 jobs while costing $202 billion. Adding to the appeal of the payroll- tax cut is that it’s designed to expire once the economy has strengthened. The Bush tax cuts, once renewed, will probably continue costing the Treasury year after year.

This is what the public sees - we have to make balancing the budget a top priority and we have to make massive spending cuts. You know why the public sees the fiscal "cliff" in that frame, because the media have become hand maidens for the radical Right conservatives. Conservatives do not want to admit that we have a revenue crisis, another way of saying austerity crisis - because that would point to one somewhat simple solution -raising revenue from taxes on people who have so much money they ponder how many McMansions they feel like owning or whether they should have the chauffeur wash the Mercedes seven days a week or just every week day.

Values? That is When Wal-Mart Uses Layers of Foreign Contractors To Evade Responsibility

Values? That is When Wal-Mart Uses Layers of Foreign Contractors To Evade Responsibility

Bangladesh is half a world away from Bentonville, the Arkansas city where Wal-Mart is headquartered. This week, Wal-Mart surely wishes it were farther away than that.

Over the weekend, a horrific fire swept through a Bangladesh clothing factory, killing more than 100 workers, many of whose bodies were burnt so badly that they could not be identified. In its gruesome particulars — locked doors, no emergency exits, workers leaping to their deaths — the blaze seems a ghastly centennial reenactment of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire of 1911, when 146 workers similarly jumped to their deaths or were incinerated after they found the exit doors were locked.

The signal difference between the two fires is location. The Triangle building was located directly off New York’s Washington Square. Thousands watched the appalling spectacle of young workers leaping to the sidewalks 10 stories down; reporters and photographers were quickly on the scene. It’s not likely, however, that the Bangladesh disaster was witnessed by anyone from either the United States or Europe — the two markets for which the clothes made inside that factory were destined. For that, at least, Wal-Mart should consider itself fortunate.

The Bangladesh factory supplied clothing to a range of retailers, and officials who have toured the site said they found clothing with a Faded Glory label — a Wal-Mart brand. Wal-Mart says that the factory, which had received at least one bad report for its fire-safety provisions, was no longer authorized to make its clothing but one of the suppliers in the company’s very long supply chain had subcontracted the work there “in direct violation of our policies.”

If this were an isolated incident of Wal-Mart denying responsibility for the conditions under which the people who make and move its products labor, then the Bangladeshi disaster wouldn’t reflect quite so badly on the company. But the very essence of the Wal-Mart system is to employ thousands upon thousands of workers through contractors and subcontractors and sub-subcontractors, who are compelled by Wal-Mart’s market power and its demand for low prices to cut corners and skimp on safety. And because Wal-Mart isn’t the employer of record for these workers, the company can disavow responsibility for their conditions of work.

This system isn’t reserved just for workers in faraway lands: Tens of thousands of American workers labor under similar arrangements. Many are employed at little more than the minimum wage in the massive warehouses in the inland exurbs of Los Angeles, where Wal-Mart’s imports from Asia are trucked from the city’s harbor to be sorted and packaged and put on the trucks and trains that take them to Wal-Mart stores for a thousand miles around.

The warehouses are run by logistics companies with which Wal-Mart contracts, and most of the workers are employed by some of the 200-plus temporary employment companies that have sprung up in the area — even though many of the workers have worked in the same warehouses for close to a decade. Last year, the California Department of Industrial Relations, suspecting that many of these workers were being cheated, charged one logistics company that runs a warehouse for Wal-Mart with failing to provide its employees with pay stubs and other information on their pay rates. Wal-Mart itself was not cited. That’s the beauty of its chain of deniability.

A small band of these warehouse workers has been demonstrating for the past couple of months to bring attention to the bizarrely contingent nature of their employment and the abuses that flow from it. Their numbers were augmented Friday byactual Wal-Mart employees in stores around the nation, calling attention to the everyday low wages and absence of benefits that the vast majority of the company’s 1.4 million U.S. employees receive.

Other discount retailers — notably Costco and Trader Joe’s — pay their workers far more, train them more extensively, have much lower rates of turnover and much higher rates of sales per employee, according to a Harvard Business Review article by Zeynep Ton of the MIT Sloan School of Management. Costco is a very profitable business, but Wal-Mart maintains an even higher profit margin, which it achieves by underpaying its employees.

If Wal-Mart brought half their foreign contractor work back to America and paid employees at factories and at retail stores a living wage, they would still make billions in profits. What they are doing is doing their best to redistribute the fruits of labor to themselves and other wealthy investors. The radical anti-American conservative movement knows that this is the best way to weaken the economic and political will of the average American and make a lot of money doing it.

Fox says Thomas Ricks apologized for 'wing of the Republican party' comment; Ricks says no

9 Plutocracy Alert: Greedy CEOs Trying to Shred the Safety Net While Pigging Out on Corporate Welfare

There is nothing more harmful for the middle class than Republican Members of the House in districts that have been gerrymandered so that caricatures like Michele Bachmann (R-Homophobia) only fear in life is a primary challenge from an even more ridiculous Republican.

Fox News' Benghazi Madness Proves The Network Won't Change

What Does Mitt Romney Believe In? Obviously Not American Values, But Whatever Lie Will Make Him President

What Does Mitt Romney Believe In? Obviously Not American Values, But Whatever Lie Will Make Him President

I’ve been struck by the baldness of Romney’s repetitive lies about Obama — that Obama ended the work requirement under welfare, for example, or that Obama’s Affordable Care Act cuts $716 billion from Medicare benefits.

The mainstream media along with a half-dozen independent fact-checking organizations and sites have called Romney on these whoppers, but to no avail. He keeps making these assertions.

Every campaign is guilty of exaggerations, embellishments, distortions, and half-truths. But this is another thing altogether. I’ve been directly involved in seven presidential campaigns, and I don’t recall a presidential candidate lying with such audacity, over and over again. Why does he do it, and how can he get away with it?

The obvious answer is such lies are effective. Polls show voters are starting to believe them, especially in swing states where they’re being repeated constantly in media spots financed by Romney’s super PAC or ancillary PACs and so-called “social welfare” organizations (political fronts disguised as charities, such as Karl Rove and the Koch brothers have set up).

Romney’s lying machine is extraordinarily well financed. By August, according to Jane Mayer in her recent New Yorker article, at least 33 billionaires had each donated a quarter of a million dollars or more to groups aiming to defeat Obama – with most of it flooding into attack ads in swing states.

In early August, “Americans for Prosperity,” one of the nonprofit front groups masquerading as a charity, and founded in part by billionaire right-wingers Charles and David Koch, bought some $27 million in ad time on spots now airing in eleven swing states.

So Romney’s lying machine is working.

But what does all this tell us about the man who is running this lying machine? (Or if Romney’s not running it, what does it tell us about a man who would select the people who are?)

We knew he was a cypher — that he’ll say and do whatever is expedient, change positions like a chameleon, eschew any core principles.

Yet resorting to outright lies — and organizing a presidential campaign around a series of lies — reveals a whole new level of cynicism, a profound disdain for what remains of civility in public life, and a disrespect of the democratic process.

The question is whether someone who is willing to resort to such calculated lies, and build a campaign machine around them, can be worthy of the public’s trust with the most powerful office in the world.

For decades conservative have claimed they are the party of values. America - some of us were - should have asked what kind of values. Romney and Paul Ryan seem to have nothing but contempt for anything resembling an honest campaign. No matter how many times the lies in Romney ads are shown to be mendacious lies, he and his billionaire buddies running pro Romney PACS, just repeat the lies over and over. So a Romney presidency would be based on a foundation of moral corruption from day one.

Who Built That? Fox Hypes Romney Op-Ed That Touts Businesses Receiving Government Money

Conservatives are trying to sell Americans the bizarre notion that we're moving towards socialism. Anyone who has studied poiltical science and economics can tell you that this is not what socialism looks like,

Corporate Profits Rebound But Household Income Falls In Wake Of Great Recession

The Mystery Candidate For King of America, Mitt Romney

The Mystery Candidate For King of America, Mitt Romney

Presidential candidates try as best they can to control their public image. But by modern standards, Mitt Romney has taken his quest for secrecy to extraordinary lengths. Here's all there is to know about what we don't know about Romney.

His Old Emails

Reporters looking for emails and other records from Romney's tenure as Massachusetts governor are out of luck.

In the final months of Romney's four-year stint as governor, as the Boston Globe reported, 11 of his top staffers purchased the hard drives in their government-issued computers, preventing state archivists from accessing any of their emails. In its final days, the Romney administration also replaced computers and scrubbed state government servers of all the administration's emails. As the top attorney for Romney's replacement, Deval Patrick, put it: "The governor's office has found no e-mails from 2002-2006 in our possession."

The Romney administration did turn over to state archivists hundreds of boxes of records, including memos, emails, and other communications among state agencies and cabinet members. However, the boxes containing those records were hand-picked and given over voluntarily by Romney's staff. It stands to reason that any embarrassing or revealing information—say, internal planning or deliberations about Romney's universal health care legislation—did not make it into the Romney administration's record dump.

Pam Wilmot, the director of Common Cause Massachusetts, the Bay State affiliate of the good-government lobbying group, says no previous administration went to the same lengths as Romney's to keep its communications secret from reporters and the public. "In retrospect, there does seem to be a substantial difference between [Romney's] administration and other administrations on transparency," Wilmot says.

Offshore Accounts

Mitt Romney might not see anything wrong with putting his money into offshore investment holdings to avoid US taxes, but he hasn't been especially keen on letting the public know how much he's done it. According to a recent story by the Associated Press, Romney failed to include more than 20 investment holdings on his federal financial disclosure reports. Of those, at least seven were in foreign countries.

The only reason the public knows about these financial instruments now is that Romney, under duress, finally released his 2010 tax returns, which showed the existence of dozens of investments, many of which were never included on his state or federal disclosure forms. Among them was Sankaty High Yield Asset Investors Ltd., which is based in Bermuda, a notorious tax haven. Romney used Sankaty, which he owned, as his partnership stake in many Bain Capital deals in the late 1990s. Sankaty was involved in Bain's takeover of Domino's Pizza and also controlled 50,000 shares of Global-Tech Appliances, the Chinese appliance firm that profited handsomely from the outsourcing of American jobs.
Romney never listed his ownership of Sankaty on Massachusetts disclosure forms when he ran for governor. And then, in 2003, Romney transferred Sankaty to his wife's trust the day before he was sworn in as governor of Massachusetts. The transfer did not have to be made public, and it allowed him to keep the investment secret by describing it in disclosure forms as simply part of a blind trust that held "various investments and securities," according to AP.

Romney's 2010 tax returns show that Sankaty doesn't have any assets at the moment, but tax experts told AP that it could still be used for future tax benefits with his remaining Bain investments. But he has refused to answer any questions about why he still has the Bermuda company, or what he plans to do with it.


Bundlers

The Obama campaign returned $200,000 dollars in February after the New York Times discovered it had been raised by two men whose brother was angling for a presidential pardon that would exonerate him for fraud and drug-related criminal charges. Despite the president's pledge not to take money from lobbyists, several of his big bundlers are connected to special interests in Washington. Former New Jersey governor Jon Corzine was one of Obama's biggest bundlers, but he has since come under investigation and the campaign has returned the money.

The reason we know all this is that Obama, like every other recent presidential candidate, discloses his bundlers—those well connected elites with the social ties to raise huge sums of money for their preferred candidate while getting around regulatory limits on how much one person can give. Romney runs ads attacking Obama as a "crony capitalist" for supposedly rewarding his most generous campaign contributors, but he will not say who his own bundlers are. Romney is not required by law to do so—but previous candidates have.


"Since bundling became one of the prominent means of raising money, the presidential candidates of the two main parties have released that list," says Meredith McGehee, policy director at the Campaign Legal Center, a group that supports campaign finance reform. "It's hard to assess who are the real kingpins in [the Romney] campaign."

Romney's stance makes it hard for voters to figure out what his donors might want in exchange for their cash, argues Kathy Kiely, managing editor of the Sunlight Foundation Reporting Group, which reports on transparency and campaign finance issues. "If someone's running for public office, the voters have an interest in knowing who's writing the big checks and how much they're writing," Kiely says. "If nobody knows that this person, or this company, has written you a seven-figure check, it makes it a lot easier to do them a favor."

Mitt's Correspondence Gap

George Romney, Mitt's father, relished the letters he exchanged with his four children. The elder Romney's archives—nearly 450 boxes of letters, clippings, microfilm, and more held at the University of Michigan—include a trove of letters between him and his children who were at college, on their Mormon missions abroad, or who had moved out of the family home.

Romney wanted details on everything: from his children's academic progress to their living arrangements and even their love lives. In a November 3, 1959, letter, Romney writes to Scott, then an undergraduate at Stanford University, that he was "always interested in the girls you are dating." George Romney continues, "Have you looked up that little blonde girl over at church—the Driggs girl?…Are there any good-looking Mormon girls going to Stanford?" In another letter to Scott, Romney chides his son for failing to maintain regular correspondence, a source of annoyance for Scott's mother, Lenore.

Yet all but absent from the Romney archives is correspondence with Mitt. The lone letter of note is one from Mitt to his parents while Mitt worked in France as a missionary. The letter's cheery tone belies the fact that Mitt had nearly died in a car crash one month earlier near the village of Beaulac. The wife of Duane Anderson, president of the Mormon mission in France and a mentor for Mitt, died from injuries sustained in the crash.

In the letter to his parents, Mitt writes that his missionary work "is going really well." He ends by urging his parents to share "his letters" with his siblings, suggesting that other letters exist. But those other letters aren't included in the Romney archives.

George Romney's archives span the years 1939 to 1973. It's unclear why so few of Mitt Romney's letters made it into his father's archive, or who possesses the letters today. What is apparent is that, in the sole public archive that his beloved father wanted the public to remember him by, Mitt is glaringly absent.

Tax Returns

Romney has released only one year of tax returns, and has said last year's return, once finalized, is as much as he's willing to disclose. He fears that the information in previous years' returns could be used against him by Democrats: "The opposition research of the Obama campaign is looking for anything they can use to distract from the failure of the president to reignite our economy," he told National Review. "I'm simply not enthusiastic about giving them hundreds or thousands of more pages to pick through, distort, and lie about."

Partisan attacks may be a risk of Romney releasing more tax returns—but his eschewing transparency raises questions about what the GOP candidate wants to hide. Previous presidential candidates have released multiple years of tax returns, either during the presidential race or prior runs for public office.

"If you don’t want people…to be suspicious, be open about it, and if you don’t want to be open about it, why are you running for public office?" Kiely says. "You've made a contract with the public: 'I'm asking you to trust me, so I should put my stuff out there.' So to the extent you're not doing that, I think it raises suspicions."

IRA Details

According to financial-disclosure firms he's filed, Romney's Individual Retirement Account—a tax-advantaged retirement plan—is worth at least $20.7 million and as much as $101.6 million. It grows tax-free. But it's unclear how Romney's IRA grew so large. The annual limit for contributions to an IRA is currently $17,000, which employers can match if they choose. The limit for personal and matching contributions combined was around $30,000 per year when Romney was at Bain, suggesting that the most he could have put into his IRA was around $450,000. But his IRA could be worth 200 times that. (Even if Romney released several years worth of tax returns, it may not explain why his IRA grew so large.)

Some financial and tax experts believe Romney may have used a complicated, highly technical tax dodge called a "blocker corporation" to get such a large amount of money into the IRA. Others have suggested that Romney put in some of his partnership shares in Bain Capital itself and valued them at zero because they represented future income—another obscure tax maneuver unavailable to most Americans. It's impossible to know for sure, because, as with so much else, Romney won't talk about it.

All of this sleazy behavior is fine with conservative Republican voters. Look back at the history of who conservatives vote into Office: Nixon- Watergate/self sabotaging peace talks with the North Vietnamese. Reagan - Iran-Contra ( using arms smuggling profits to make for hostage release), the HUD scandals, the second worst recession since 1929. They voted in known criminal Rick Scott as governor of Florida. They believed every lie Bush 43 told about Iraq even though there was plenty of information available that said he was greatly exaggerating and lying. Conservatism is the culture of moral corruption, so of course morally corrupt candidates don't bother conservative voters. It even seems that the sleazier their candidates are the more they like them. There is nothing remotely patriotic about that.

The Pravda Chanel or as some call it, Fox News is "Doubling Down" On Deceptively Edited Comments

Fox News accused President Obama of "doubling down" on comments they helped characterize as "insulting" to business owners, but in doing so, Fox itself doubled down on its campaign to strip Obama's statements out of context to further a political agenda.

Obama spoke at a campaign event and pointed out how benefits such as American infrastructure factor in the success of small businesses. Fox deceptively edited the president's remarks to accuse him of telling small business owners that if they have a business, "you didn't build that."

This morning, Fox returned to the scandal they helped to manufacture, reporting that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney called Obama's comments "insulting" to business owners. Fox then turned its sights on another campaign event and accused President Obama of "doubling down." Here's the portion of the remarks that Fox chose to play as evidence:

    OBAMA: We did not build this country on our own. We built it together. And if Mr. Romney doesn't understand that, then he doesn't understand what it takes to grow this economy in the 21st century for everybody.

But the only way these comments can be portrayed as doubling down on an insult to business owners is to completely strip them of context. In the portion of Obama's speech that Fox chose to ignore, it's clear that he  explicitly touted the "drive and ingenuity of Americans who start businesses" as crucial to "what makes us such a robust dynamic economy." Here is what Obama actually said:

    OBAMA: As I said, I believe with all my heart that it is the drive and ingenuity of Americans who start businesses that lead to their success.  And by the way, that's why I've cut taxes on small businesses 18 times since I've been President.  (Applause.)  I believe the ability for somebody who is willing to work hard, and sweat and sacrifice to turn their idea into a profitable business, that's what makes us such a robust, dynamic economy.  We prize that.

    But I also believe that if you talk to any business owner -- small or large -- they'll tell you what also helps them succeed alongside their hard work, their initiative, their great ideas, is the ability to hire workers with the right skills and the right education.

    What helps them succeed is the ability to ship and sell their products on new roads and bridges and ports and wireless networks.  What helps them succeed is having access to cutting-edge technology, which like the Internet often starts with publicly funded research and development.  (Applause.)  And what helps them succeed is a strong and growing middle class, so they've got a broader base of customers.

Why is every Republican with access to the media distorting President Obama's reality based comments? Simple, conservative cannot win elected office without lying. That should tell every American something about the deep moral corruption and anti-Americanism of the Republican movement.

Jewish Voters, Republican Chutzpah

Mitt Romney Wants To Stack His Administration With The Same Corrupt Plutocrats Who Crashed The Economy. Republicans See Corruption As A Virtue

Mitt Romney Wants To Stack His Administration With The Same Corrupt Plutocrats Who Crashed The Economy. Republicans See Corruption As A Virtue

In May, Mitt Romney suggested a new eligibility test in the U.S. Constitution requiring that the President first "spend at least three years working in business." It was bad enough that America's would-be second Harvard MBA President forgot the disastrous record of the first. Now, Mitt has chosen the worst possible week to announce that President Romney's Cabinet will feature people who had "real jobs" and "have experience in the real world, in the private sector." After all, while Romney's campaign was getting battered by mounting questions over his AWOL tax returns and mysterious tenure at Bain Capital, some of the biggest banks on both sides of the Atlantic were revealed to be cheats, gamblers and frauds. And as it is turns out, recent studies suggest those abysmal business ethics are not exceptions to the rule.

To be sure, the Republican nominee and his former firm weren't the only ones to be on the receiving end of headlines like "50 Shades of Bain" and "Did Romney Make a False Statement on His Financial Disclosure?" The mushrooming scandal over Barclay's rigging of the crucial London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) came to the U.S. with word that the New York Fed knew of manipulation in the UK dating back to 2008. (That scandal has already claimed the job of Barclay's CEO Bob Diamond, a man who was to have co-hosted Mitt Romney's upcoming fundraising event in London.) On Friday, JP Morgan once again found itself the under the microscope as the bank reported its growing losses from bad bets placed by the notorious "London whale" may have cost the firm $7 billion. That same day, the New York Times reported that "MasterCard, Visa and major banks, including JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America, agreed to pay more than $6 billion to settle accusations that they engaged in anticompetitive practices" in processing credit card payments to retailers. Meanwhile, the nation's largest bank, Wells Fargo, beat earnings expectations on Friday even as it announced a $175 million settlement with the Justice Department over "accusations that it discriminated against some minority homeowners seeking loans from 2004 to 2009."

Reflecting on the LIBOR scandal, University of San Diego Law School professor Frank Partnoy lamented, "I wish I could say I'm shocked, because it is shocking, but regulators have not been particularly effective or aggressive in the past two decades of finance." Simon Johnson summed up the banking scandal that may have impacted $800 trillion worth of business and consumer credit transactions with this powerfully simply headline:

    "Lie More, as a Business Model."

Conservative Republicans like Mitt have be successful in repealing most of the financial regulation that would have prevented the Great Recession. What regulation we had left they were negligent about enforcing. If terrorists had done this much damage to the USA conservatives would be back in shrill paranoid mode. Instead they're asking to help elect more congressmen, senators, governors and a president so they can commit some more domestic terror on working and middle-class America's finances.

Fox's Latest Attempt To Deflect Blame For Recession Away From GOP

To Mitt Romney Apologists Having Blind Investments is The Same Thing as Hiding Money in Switzerland and The Cayman Islands

The book cover is related to this essay at The Root, How Did Blacks Travel During Segregation? - The Negro Motorist Green Book was helpful for navigating Jim Crow America.


To Mitt Romney Apologists Having Blind Investments is The Same Thing as Hiding Money in Switzerland and The Cayman Islands

Mitt Romney and his right-wing media allies appear to be going into full-panic mode over the Obama campaign's increasingly successful efforts to define Romney as a hopelessly out-of-touch multimillionaire.

Obama is leading in swing states where the president's campaign and pro-Obama super PAC Priorities USA have run ads attacking Romney's record as a corporate predator who put Americans out of work by sucking the life out of their companies and sending their jobs overseas.

    [I]n toss-up states, 16 percent say Bain is a reason to support Romney, while 32 percent say it's a reason to oppose him. More people have an opinion on Romney's business record, too. In February, 36 percent said Romney cut jobs while 32 percent said he created them. Now 40 percent say he cut them and 36 percent say he created them.

Today, Romney began hitting back against the Obama attacks. Well, "hitting back" might be too strong a term.  "Nanny-nanny boo boo" is more accurate:

    No you’re the “outsourcer-in-chief.”

    In what has become a signature move for Mitt Romney, Republicans are trying to rebut attacks against their nominee by accusing President Obama of doing the exact same thing. Or something vaguely related to it.

The substance (for want of a better term) of the Romney counter-slap is his claim that money from the American Recovery Act allegedly went to companies that employed some foreign workers. 

In addition to the candidate's pushback, at least one right-wing media outlet is trying to help Romney deflect criticism of his personal finances, including questions about his unreleased tax returns, and the vast sums of money he is reported to have hidden away in tax havens such as Bermuda and Switzerland. 

The Weekly Standard is out with a report that it apparently hopes will expose Rep. Debbie Wasserman Shultz as a hypocrite for demanding that Romney come clean about his finances.  The website's scoop: that the DNC chair has some of her own money invested in "Swiss Banks, Foreign Drug Companies, and the State Bank of India:"

    But disclosure forms reveal that in 2010, Wasserman Schultz invested between $1,001-$15,000 in a 401k retirement fund run by Davis Financial Fund. As the fund discloses, it is invested in the Julius Baer Group Ltd. and the State Bank of India GDR Ltd., as well as other financial, insurance, bank institutions.

The report does not appear to be a satire. The Weekly Standard is seriously suggesting there is an equivalence between a few thousand dollars in a managed 401k and hundreds of millions of dollars shielded from U.S. taxes in Swiss bank accounts and offshore shell corporations.

This panicked, flailing reaction tells you everything need to know about the narrative Obama is crafting against Romney:  it's working.

UPDATE

Right on cue, the wingnut blogosphere is all, "Yeah, so THERE!!1!"

PJ Tatler:

    If overseas investments are “toxic” for Romney, they’re also toxic for the Democrat Party chairman hand-picked for that role by President Barack Obama.

Daily Caller (Jim Treacher):

    Overseas investments are bad except when they’re not. And one way to tell they’re okay is when they’re made by Democrats.

    Oh, and DWS won’t release her tax returns, either. Again: she’s a Democrat. The same standard doesn’t apply to her. Duh.

These right-wing Anti-American nitwits want everyone to believe that Mitt Romney is a financial genius that knows what he is doing - that means he knows that hiding funds in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands is very different from the people who handle your 401k have a diversity of investments. Hiding money versus investments. See how simple that is. If they were the same thing we would use the same WORDS to describe them. When the average person puts money into their 401k do they think they are hiding money in foreign accounts.

Memo to Republicans... Entrepreneurship is Actually Declining Thanks to Policies Like Yours

Mitt Romney or Mr Morality, lied about leaving Bain in 1999

In Their Political Witch Hunt of Attorney General Holder Republicans Show Contempt for America

In Their Political Witch Hunt of Attorney General Holder Republicans Show Contempt for America

Congress is on track to find Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt. Given how contemptuous most Americans are of Congress -- only 17 percent approve, an all-time low -- this week's mostly party line vote will be the political equivalent of the congressional pot calling the attorney general kettle, well, black.

Here's what's really going on.

The dispute between the House Oversight Committee and the Department of Justice, coming to an absurd boil, has an inverse relationship between ferocity and substance.

At first, Republicans demanded every document on the misguided Fast and Furious "gun walking" investigation. Nine months later, they abandoned that tactic and requested only correspondence about how the Justice Department first reacted to congressional oversight. The Department accommodated more and more of their requests. That is, the parties were seemingly on the verge of striking a deal.

Then it exploded. Why? Politics, of course.

As Republicans narrowed their requests for information from the Department, they moved farther away from their role of reforming policies that led to failed plan and closer to a more political question of whether the Department was massaging or manipulating facts.

Just read the committee transcripts. There was little discussion about how the Department should be protecting the border from gun and drug violence, how the law should be enforced or how prosecutions and agents ought to conduct themselves. If they did, they would be fulfilling their oversight role and improving national policy.

Instead, they raised the ante on what certain key officials at the Department of Justice and the White House may have said to each other about how to talk to Congress about what were already acknowledged as mistakes.

A legitimate and far-reaching inquiry into how best to protect the American people devolved into the kind of crass political theater that the American people despise.

There are four reasons this fight became so aggressive and acrimonious:

    First, Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa announced his intention to move to contempt at The National Rifle Association's annual convention, To the already locked down and secured audience, Issa declared that the Obama Justice Department views the tragic death of a border agent as an excuse for more gun laws.
    Second, returning the favor, the NRA announced that it intended to "score" the contempt vote in Issa's committee, signaling they would put their muscle - votes and money -- behind this attack on the the Department. The defenders of the Department's position on documents -- lawyers, constitutional scholars, a smattering of interest groups -- are a political cricket next to the NRA's gorilla.
    Third, every hour of every day that Attorney General Holder is preparing fastidiously for nine hearings on the Hill at which Fast and Furious is in play, he is not out in the country talking about protecting the United States and about achievements on behalf of the American people. This is the most devious and insidious misuse of oversight authority and the right wing -- from their own viewpoint -- are kicking ass in this respect.
    Fourth, this coordinated attack is really about the priorities of Attorney General Holder and President Obama. The conservatives on the Committee are furious that Holder has not rolled over as access to voting is restricted across the country, which has a devastating and disproportionate effect on minority voters. They are furious at his lawsuits against Arizona and other states with newly draconian anti-immigrant laws. They are furious that he sued Sheriff Arpaio, that his Civil Rights Division aggressively prosecutes hate crimes and policy brutality, that the Environmental and Natural Resources Division is alive again and that the Anti-Trust Division says 'no' to some business mergers and deals.

Simply put, the right wing has been at Holder's throat from the very beginning, which is odd, given that Holder is the most qualified person in decades to be attorney general, having been an attorney at DOJ, a judge, U.S. attorney, and deputy attorney general. No one has ever had more experience with and devotion to the Department of Justice than Eric Holder.

Unfortunately, because of a political mismatch, this battle's messaging is lopsided. Conservatives wrap themselves in the honor of a tragically slain border agent and the completely fabricated but nonetheless compelling stench of "cover-up," while the administration finds itself in the muck talking about documents and something called "the deliberative process privilege." It is easy to see why the politics are irresistible for the GOP.

We are likely, but not guaranteed, to see a contempt vote on the floor of the House of Representatives this week. The vote will greatly satisfy Rush Limbaugh and the membership of the NRA. It may cause the White House to make its institutional and political interests the priority and leave the attorney general to take a hit like this. It will cause countless progressives, and much of black and Latino America, to wonder why the first contempt citation to make it through the House will be directed at the first black attorney general. It will lead to more cynicism about the true nature of Congress and whose interests it serves.

A 17 percent favorability rating means never having to say you're sorry.

Imagine these events were taking place in a court of law instead of Congress and the court of public perception - Republicans would be found pants down with no evidence. As it is they can toss around all the ginned up conspiracy theories they like. The NRA says it is all about some secret desire to tighten gun control. Guess how many gun related laws have been presented by Democrats or suggested by President Obama? ZERO. Government is broken and it will remain that way as long as there are conservatives in Congress. Republicans are in Congress to make sure government is not by and for the people.


The NRA does gone bonkers - NRA Acts Like Finger Pointing Punks, Says Obama's Routine Executive Privilege Claim Proves Our Crazy Fast And Furious Conspiracy Theory.

Mitt Hypocrite - Romney Bashes Stimulus, Then Fundraises In Home Of Stimulus Recipient

Romney Bashes Stimulus, Then Fundraises In Home Of Stimulus Recipient

Mitt Romney spent this morning in Florida trashing the stimulus, saying the Obama administration “borrowed almost a trillion dollars but used it to protect government.”

But just hours after the speech, Romney boarded a plane to Tennessee to fundraise with a beneficiary of Obama’s stimulus funds.

Romney will spend Tuesday night at a $10,000-a-head fundraiser at the house of Orrin H Ingram II, Chairman of the Ingram Barge Company — which received $130,000 in federal stimulus money. Ingram Barge Company is a private company, not a government entity.

Romney has a record of saying one thing and doing another when it comes to the stimulus. He once even attacked the stimulus at a college that took stimulus funds.

Romney, never having done an honest day's work in his life considers himself a "success". No wonder he says the stimulus did not work, but will take funds from a business that benefited from the stimulus. Inside Romney's head is a full-time fairy tale machine that makes everything make sense to Romney and his supporters, yet seems like what it is to normal Americans - the insular world of a true elitist where no one has ever told hum he is wrong.

Fox's Karl Rove Accuses Obama Campaign Of Attempting To Buy The Election

On Sean Hannity's radio show today, Fox contributor Karl Rove said that the Obama campaign will attempt to win the election by "trying to take their wallet and buying it."

Karl Rove, of course, is the co-founder of a large Republican Super PAC. In an interview with Reuters in April, Rove said he intended to spend $300 million through his Super PAC during the 2012 election cycle: [emphasis added]

    This year, thanks to the American Crossroads "Super PAC" organization that he co-founded, Rove will have vast resources to fertilize Romney's campaign: a massive wallet, one of the loudest megaphones in conservative media, and close ties to Romney's campaign.

Karl Rove has the usual Conservative Republican standards - toss out all honor, all truth, all integrity, all genuine patriotism - what matters is the radical anti-American agenda of conservatism.

Despite The Media Narrative, Obama Was Right About Private Sector

Why President Obama was right even if his choice of words was not perfect. The Private sector is doing well and the public sector is under assault, thus slowing the recovery, America’s Hidden Austerity Program

Why is the recovery from this recession different from recoveries from past recessions? In the previous two recessions, it took 32 months for nonfarm employment to reattain its June 1990 peak, and 48 months for it to reattain its January 2001 peak. Assuming the economy keeps adding nonfarm employment at the current rate, it will have taken 88 months to reattain its January 2008 peak. The explanation most often heard is that “financial crises are different”: after a debt crisis, shaken consumers are reluctant to spend and shaken firms are reluctant to hire, slowing private-sector job growth even after the recession has bottomed out.

There is some truth in this, but it is not the whole story. In fact, while the latest recession was particularly deep, the recovery in private-sector employment, once it finally started, has not been particularly slow by recent historical standards. In the 27 months since the start of the current employment recovery, the private sector has added 4.3 million jobs, fewer than the 5.0 million it added in the 27 months after February 1992 but not many fewer than the 4.5 million it added in the equivalent period after August 2003.
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

But there is something historically different about this recession and its aftermath: in the past, local government employment has been almost recession-proof. This time it’s not. Going back as long as the data have been collected (1955), with the one exception of the 1981 recession, local government employment continued to grow almost every month regardless of what the economy threw at it. But since the latest recession began, local government employment has fallen by 3 percent, and is still falling. In the equivalent period following the 1990 and 2001 recessions, local government employment grew 7.7 and 5.2 percent. Even following the 1981 recession, by this stage local government employment was up by 1.4 percent.
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

Who is losing these local government jobs? In 1981 it was mostly teachers. Now, the losses are shared by teachers and other local government workers alike.

State government is much less important than local because it is a much smaller share of total nonfarm employment: 4 percent versus 10 percent. Nevertheless, a similar story can be told there. This far into each recession since 1955, state government employment had grown. Since the start of the latest recession, state government employment is still down 1.2 percent.

Without this hidden austerity program, the economy would look very different. If state and local governments had followed the pattern of the previous two recessions, they would have added 1.4 million to 1.9 million jobs and overall unemployment would be 7.0 to 7.3 percent instead of 8.2 percent.

This post is just pissing in the wind. The Conservative Republican media has already written its narrative and turned a poor choice of words into what they see as one of the biggest gaffes ever. The private sector has been growing. Corporate profits are still high. Executive pay is still very high. At the same time public sector employees are being laid off. Some teachers and police can find other work, but those are specialty skills. If you trained to be a teacher that does not translate into easily find a job in engineering or programming, and the same is true for police and firefighters.

Stimulus funds are still creating some jobs- FTA Deputy Administrator McMillan Joins Missouri and Illinois Officials to Kick Off Eads Bridge Rehabilitation Project.

The Crazy Anti-Americans at National Review Cling To Fantasy That Obama Is A Secret Radical

In The World of Shadowy Campaign Cash, Mitt Romney, Who has The Values of a Thug, Rules

Scott Brown(R-MA)'s Email Revelations Make Him The Corrupt Puppet of the Week

Scott Brown(R-MA)'s Email Revelations Make Him The Corrupt Puppet of the Week

In Massachusetts' closely-watched U.S. Senate race, incumbent Sen. Scott Brown (R) frequently boasts that he was "the tie-breaking vote on Wall Street reform." There are a few problems with the claim, including the fact that when a bill passes 59 to 39, no one cast the "tie-breaking vote."

But the point of the claim is that Brown wants voters to perceive him as someone who's willing to challenge the financial industry, and who won't do Wall Street's bidding. What the campaign claims don't include, however, is the fine print.

    Senator Scott Brown has trumpeted his role in casting the deciding vote in favor of the 2010 Wall Street overhaul, but records show that after he voted for the law, he worked to shield banks and other financial institutions from some of its tough provisions.

    E-mails between Brown's legislative director and US Treasury Department officials show that Brown advocated for a loose interpretation of the law so that banks could more easily engage in high-risk investments.

    While the law, known as Dodd-Frank, sets broad parameters for how the financial industry must behave, the interpretation of the law, and the rules that follow, will govern Wall Street's daily business.

Brown, who has benefited from the remarkable generosity of Wall Street donors, took a particular interest in the Volcker rule, which the Massachusetts Republican weakened in the Senate before the vote, and then urged the Treasury Department to loosely enforce after the reform package became law, urging regulators to interpret the rule "broadly and to offer banks some leeway to invest in hedge funds and private equity funds."

Simon Johnson, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund and now a professor at MIT, told the Boston Globe the positions outlined in Brown's e-mails amount to a "significant loosening of the regulations and absolutely serving the interests of people who do not want to have meaningful reform.'' Johnson added, "This is a treatise on how to gut the thing."

Pat Garofalo recently added, "According to the Center for Responsive Politics, employees from the securities and investment industries have given more money to Brown than those of any other industry. Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase, which just lost billions of dollars on the sort of trading that the Volcker Rule was originally meant to curtail, are amongst his top ten donors."

Bank robbers and other thieves should fellow Scott Brown's example. he and his Wall Street pals are responsible for stealing trillions in assets from the middle-class. Brown thinks he should be rewarded with another term so he can help special interests steal some more. They don't use a gun to steal, they use influence pedaling.