Willard M. Romney breaks with Reagan regarding the "very poor", the working poor and extensions of the "safety net"

Mark Schmitt at The New Republic:

Let’s give Mitt Romney the benefit of the doubt: He didn’t really mean it when he said, “I’m not concerned about the very poor.” Or, let’s just say he cares about them no less than he cares about the rest of us. Only 41 percent of respondents in a recent poll said that Romney “cares about people like me,” so if the wisdom of crowds is any guide, the very poor are hardly unique as objects of his indifference.

"Battling for America's soul..."

Let’s look instead at Romney’s follow-up: That there’s a “safety net” for the very poor, and “if there are holes in it, I’ll fix them.” This isn’t just a walk-back of the “not concerned” comment. It represents a very real element of an emerging conservative argument, one that deserves to be taken seriously. In this antiquated vision of the economy, everything is fine for most people, but there is a slice of the “very poor” who might need some help. Poverty, in this vision, is the exception; prosperity and opportunity without government aid is the norm...

"Unto whom much is given, much is required..."

President Obama speaking at the National Prayer Breakfast:

At a time when it's easy to lose ourselves in the rush and clamor of our own lives, or get caught up in the noise and rancor that too often passes as politics today, these moments of prayer slow us down. They humble us. They remind us that no matter how much responsibility we have, how fancy our titles, how much power we think we hold, we are imperfect vessels.

We can all benefit from turning to our Creator, listening to Him. Avoiding phony religiosity, listening to Him. This is especially important right now, when we're facing some big challenges as a nation.

Our economy is making progress as we recover from the worst crisis in three generations, but far too many families are still struggling to find work or make the mortgage, pay for college, or, in some cases, even buy food.

Our men and women in uniform have made us safer and more secure, and we were eternally grateful to them, but war and suffering and hardship still remain in too many corners of the globe. And a lot of those men and women who we celebrate on Veterans Day and Memorial Day come back and find that, when it comes to finding a job or getting the kind of care that they need, we're not always there the way we need to be.

It's absolutely true that meeting these challenges requires sound decision-making, requires smart policies. We know that part of living in a pluralistic society means that our personal religious beliefs alone can't dictate our response to every challenge we face.

But in my moments of prayer, I'm reminded that faith and values play an enormous role in motivating us to solve some of our most urgent problems, in keeping us going when we suffer setbacks, and opening our minds and our hearts to the needs of others.

We can't leave our values at the door. If we leave our values at the door, we abandon much of the moral glue that has held our nation together for centuries, and allowed us to become somewhat more perfect a union.

Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Jane Addams, Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Day, Abraham Heschel -- the majority of great reformers in American history did their work not just because it was sound policy, or they had done good analysis, or understood how to exercise good politics, but because their faith and their values dictated it, and called for bold action -- sometimes in the face of indifference, sometimes in the face of resistance.

Let the games continue... UPDATED!

I'm sorry but I can't help myself. This is great news:

LAS VEGAS -- An advisor to Donald Trump says he will make a major announcement in Las Vegas tomorrow. Sources tell the 8 News NOW I-Team Trump will endorse Newt Gingrich.

According to Trump advisor Michael Cohen, "Donald J. Trump will be making a major announcement tomorrow at 12:30 p.m. at Trump International Hotel & Tower, Las Vegas, Nevada... The announcement will pertain to the Presidential race."


Gingrich enters the Nevada Caucus after getting beat by Mitt Romney in Florida. He has spent the day campaigning in Reno.

Last year, Trump decided not to run for the GOP nomination after attacking President Barack Obama over the validity of his birth certificate.

Update: "I don't know of anybody who does a better job of getting attention by announcing that he will presently announce something," Gingrich told the AP.

Update 2: Epic fail. The Titanic - against all odds - has sunk. We misunder-reported. The Ultra-Donaldest Maxi-Trumpalicious Uber-PsuedoMogul-Entity endorsed Mitt Romney. This, of course, is great news for Barack Obama! 

Omigod! David Brooks reads another book...but doesn't really want us to know what it's actually about.

Brad DeLong catches David Brooks in another embarrassment - like not forthrightly telling his readers what the true subject of the book he's frothing over happens to be:

"David Brooks sure reads a lot of books."

Charles Murray's new book is called: Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.

Now David Brooks:

"The Great Divorce: I’ll be shocked if there’s another book this year as important as Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart.” I’ll be shocked if there’s another book that so compellingly describes the most important trends in American society…"

How can a book that explicitly leaves out Asian-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Amerindians, African-Americans, people of mixed race, and Arab-Americans possibly describe "the most important trends in American society"?

"Liberals play a central role in unfairness."

How can the New York Times editors publish a piece without asking David Brooks why he does not dare mention the subtitle of the book he is puffing?

Charles Murray, of course, is the right-wing "think-tanker" currently writing for the American Enterprise Institute and, notoriously,  co-author of "The Bell Curve" tome which argued that differences in intelligence were embedded in race.

About half-way into Brooks' latest adulatory column he notes that  Murray "is at his best" analyzing "behavioral differences" between the well-educated and the poorly educated and that "he’s mostly using data on white Americans, so the effects of race and other complicating factors don’t come into play." 

That Murray's entire study of "the most important social trends" is premised as a meditation on the circumstances of white Americans exclusively is rather conspicuously evaded by our deep-thinking gadfly, Mr. Brooks.

Update: A commenter at Brooks' NYTimes column site, Aaron Hamburger, offers this cogent observation:

Brooks writes "he’s mostly using data on white Americans, so the effects of race and other complicating factors don’t come into play." Why is "white" not a race? What are the other "complicating factors" that don't come into play?

And why do I get the feeling that this whole column reeks of nostalgia for a time when people who had "complicating factors" were kept at society's margins, not needing to be accounted for.

Three key regulators saw the warning signs of a serious financial crisis. All three were ignored. All were women.

Keith Chrostowski of The Kansas City Star:

Summers: "Issues of women's intrinsic aptitude?"

More people in positions of power — government regulators, especially — should have foreseen the subprime financial crisis coming.

They could have saved us from this mess.

But wait …

Three regulators did indeed ring warning bells — at the right time, in the right places, and loud enough for other banking and financial system overseers.

Brooksley Born

 All three were women: Brooksley Born, Sheila Bair and Susan Bies.

All three were ignored.

You may have heard before about the warnings issued by Born, the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in the 1990s, and Bair, the chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. from 2006 to 2011.

Bies’ concerns, however, came to light recently when the Federal Reserve released transcripts of its policy meetings from 2006, a full two years before the crisis exploded.

Susan Bies

Bies was a central bank board member from 2001 to 2007. Several times in the transcripts she said she was worried about the housing bubble.

Bies warned fellow board members that exotic mortgages — for instance, negative amortization loans in which balances become bigger and not smaller over time — were too dangerous for consumers.

Sheila Bair

She warned about the Wall Street-created securities backed by risky mortgages.

“I just wonder about the consumer’s ability to absorb shocks,” she said at Fed meeting in May 2006.

“The growing ingenuity in the mortgage sector is making me more nervous as we go forward in this cycle, rather than comforted that we have learned a lesson. Some of the models the banks are using clearly were built in times of falling interest rates and rising housing prices. It is not clear what may happen when either of those trends turns around.”

The Death of Glass-Steagall: a former top banking exec's "Mea Culpa" and a former Senator's "I told you so!"

Bill Moyers interviews John Reed, the former head of Citigroup - who was personally involved in the extinction of the Glass-Steagall Act, which for 70 years separated traditional banks from speculative investment banking, and now regrets it - and former Senator Byron Dorgan - who was one of the few in Congress to forcefully oppose the change and warn of great risks, predicting with almost eery prescience in 1999 that "within ten years" the country would come to regret this landmark deregulation.

Moyers & Company Show 103: How power and influence helped big banks rewrite the rules of our economy. from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.

Thought for the day...on the GOP's Newtron Bomb

From John Heileman, who's been following Newt Gingrich on the campaign trail for New York magazine:

(S)o much has he come to despise Romney and the Republican Establishment that has brought down on him a twenty-ton shithammer in Florida, and so convinced is he of his own Churchillian greatness and world-historical destiny (that t)he same antic, manic, lunatic bloody-mindedness that has made him such a rotten candidate in the Sunshine State may be enough to keep him the race a good long time.

 You go, guy!

State and Local Budget Cuts Are Stalling Recovery

Jared Bernstein:

Sources: BEA, BLS

Last year, state and local squeeze shaved about 0.3% off of GDP and cost 266,000 jobs.  A simple regression of state/local job losses on the GDP contribution finds that for every point of growth that the states and locals take off of GDP, employment in the sectors falls around 700,000.

We generally recognize that GDP losses map onto job losses but the fit is not usually this tight—there are lags in the generalized relationship between growth and jobs and lots of other moving parts.  But that’s less the case in state and local governments.  Here, the chain of events is pretty obvious and pretty clear.  You squeeze their budgets, it shows up quickly and directly in growth and jobs.

Conversely, and here’s the policy part, were we to use federal stimulus to help relieve their budgets, we could get this relationship running in a better direction.

Update: The always righteous Larry Mishel (president of the Economic Policy Institute) points out that the job losses I’m citing above are only part of the story.  States and cities buy private services and contract with private firms.  Ethan Pollack writes: “For each dollar of budget cuts, over half of the jobs and economic activity lost are likely to be in the private sector.”

We need more federal assistance (aka "stimulus") to state and local governments. Of course, given the current Congress it's not going to happen.

Bill Maher wants to know: Who the F*** Is Saul Alinsky?

Newt Gingrich, trying to keep incoherent fear alive on the GOP campaign trail:  “The centerpiece of this campaign, I believe, is American exceptionalism versus the radicalism of Saul Alinsky,”

Once more: Fannie and Freddie did NOT cause the housing bubble!

"Fannie & Freddie's fault" fabulists.

Worth repeating, because the false narrative keeps getting recycled cynically - most recently by Mitt Romney in his desperate desire to become President at any cost to whatever integrity he might have had - another  debunking of the "Fannie and Freddie caused the housing bubble" Big Lie.  This one comes from, interestingly, Mark Zandi who is chief economist for the credit ratings agency, Moody's, which was itself a key player in marking up junk sub-prime mortgage securities so that unwitting investors would buy them. From the horses mouth, Zandi comments at the Washington Post:

There is plenty of blame to go around for the U.S. housing bubble, but not much of it belongs to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The two giant housing-finance institutions made many mistakes over the decades, some of them real whoppers, but causing house prices to soar and then crater during the past decade weren’t among them.

GOP Pols, Right-Wing Billionaires, Chinese "Communists" and the art of having it every which way in the citadels of Money & Power.

According to a 2008 New Yorker article on Sheldon Adelson - Newt Gingrich's financial angel in the GOP primaries and current poster boy for post-"Citizens United" unrestricted campaign spending - the cagy casino mogul knows well how the game of money and politics is played, and with much bigger stakes than the career of a disgraced former House Speaker.

In 2001 Adelson - well known for his right-wing views and close ties to GOP politicians - met with the mayor of Beijing in the course of promoting his Las Vegas Sands Inc. casino business to the Chinese ruling group. Adelson saw his entrprise as a perfect fit for the island of Macao, a former Portugese colony which is controlled as a "special administrative region" by China and which had been exempted from the Communist Party's bans on gambling.

Global gambling mogul Adelson

But the Beijing mayor brought up an apparently unrelated concern - legislation pending in Congress criticizing China's human rights record, that was targeted in opposition to Beijing hosting the 2008 Summer Olympic Games.  The official asked if the politically-connected Adelson could do anything to block this US legislation as a favor to the Communist Party-controlled government he was lobbying to open China's doors to his casino business?

According to The New Yorker (citing testimony in court documents filed in an eventual lawsuit when one of Adelson's presumed business partners alleged he had been ripped off by the casino mogul):

Adelson said in court he immediately made calls on his cell phone to Republican friends in Congress—including Tom DeLay, then the majority whip—who had received generous support from Adelson. DeLay told him that there was indeed a resolution pending about China and the Olympics.

Representative Tom Lantos, then the highest-ranking Democrat on the House International Relations Committee, had introduced a resolution opposing China’s Olympic bid, saying, “China’s abominable human rights record violates the spirit of the games and should disqualify Beijing from consideration.”

The Buffet Rule

Greg Sargent at Plum Line:

Picture this scenario. The Senate holds a high-profile vote on a proposal focused directly on implementing the Buffett Rule, one that would bring the current tax rate for millionaires paying lower rates on investments up to 30 percent. This, at at exactly the moment when the GOP is picking a nominee who is worth $250 million and is personally benefitting to an enormous degree from the current rate — one that’s lower than many middle class taxpayers pay.

It could happen...Senator Sheldon Whitehouse is set to announce a proposal to do just this...

The Politifiction of "Politifact"

Who checks the bogus "fact checkers" downgrading the President's State of the Union speech? 

 
Jared Bernstein does a pretty good job:

OMG…this is beyond preposterous.

Politifact—the self-anointed fact checkers—grade this statement from the President speech tonight as “half-true:”

“In the last 22 months, businesses have created more than three million jobs. Last year, they created the most jobs since 2005.”

This is not half true or two-thirds true.  It is just true.

So why, I ask you, why do they go where they go?  Because of this:

In his remarks, Obama described the damage to the economy, including losing millions of jobs “before our policies were in full effect.” Then he describe [sic!] the subsequent job increases, essentially taking credit for the job growth. But labor economists tell us that no mayor or governor or president deserves all the claim or all the credit for changes in employment.

Really?  That’s it?  That makes the fact not a fact?  I’ve seen some very useful work by these folks, but between this and this, Politifact just can’t be trusted. Full stop.

Citizens United!

Las Vegas Sands casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, who has bankrolled the Gingrich campaign to the tune of $10 Million.

The Bains of Capitalism

James Suroweicki, at The New Yorker, on the implications of presidential aspirant Willard Romney's particular business experience:

Willard Mitt Romney Front and Center at Bain

The real reason that we should be concerned about private equity’s expanding power lies in the way these firms have become increasingly adept at using financial gimmicks to line their pockets, deriving enormous wealth not from management or investing skills but, rather, from the way the U.S. tax system works. Indeed, for an industry that’s often held up as an exemplar of free-market capitalism, private equity is surprisingly dependent on government subsidies for its profits.

Financial engineering has always been central to leveraged buyouts. In a typical deal, a private-equity firm buys a company, using some of its own money and some borrowed money. It then tries to improve the performance of the acquired company, with an eye toward cashing out by selling it or taking it public. The key to this strategy is debt: the model encourages firms to borrow as much as possible, since, just as with a mortgage, the less money you put down, the bigger your potential return on investment. The rewards can be extraordinary: when Romney was at Bain, it supposedly earned eighty-eight per cent a year for its investors. But piles of debt also increase the risk that companies will go bust.

It's the demand, stupid...

Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers at Financial Times:

Government has no higher responsibility than insuring economies have an adequate level of demand. Without growing demand, there is no prospect of sustained growth, let alone a significant fall in joblessness. And without either of these there is no chance of reducing debt-to-income ratios...

The best chance for economic recovery involves governments working directly to increase demand and to augment business confidence.

Eye of the Newt

"Eye of newt, and toe of frog, Wool of bat, and tongue of dog...
For a charm of powerful trouble, Like a hell-broth boil and bubble."
                                        Macbeth (IV, i, 14-15)

Newt Gingrich is a chameleon-like charlatan who appears to constantly reinvent himself for his audience du jour, in variations on his persistent grandiosity, pretensions to power and ambition to accumulate wealth. His conduct in the GOP debates has been a study in resentment honed into startlingly effective demagogy. But there's really  nothing new here. Lest we forget one of his more shameless recent-but-pre-GOP-primary moments of shabby moral dissolution - having nothing to do with ex-wives - Charles Blow, at The New York Times, reminds us:

In September 2010, he told the National Review Online that President Obama followed a “Kenyan, anti-colonial” worldview. Gingrich continued, “I think he worked very hard at being a person who is normal, reasonable, moderate, bipartisan, transparent, accommodating — none of which was true.”

Gingrich was commenting on a Forbes article by Dinesh D’Souza, the president of the King’s College in New York City. In the article, D’Souza said of President Obama:

“Our president is trapped in his father’s time machine. Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s. This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anti-colonial ambitions, is now setting the nation’s agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son.”

Gingrich called the article the “most profound insight I have read in the last six years about Barack Obama.”

Ironically, what Newt was offering us was a profound insight into his own lack of intellectual integrity or moral boundaries, which would come to full fruition in his more recent conduct as a presidential aspirant.

"The crisis raises legitimate questions about the system itself"

Mohamed El-Arian - the chief executive of a major global investment firm, PIMCO - asks some serious questions about the  capitalist system itself, HERE @ Financial Times: "four years into the crisis, little has been done to repair the damage coherently and comprehensively and to safeguard the real victims, let alone counter the risk of further costly dislocations."

Economists at Sea...

Economist Robert Johnson suggests some ways to salvage the reputation and relevance of his profession in the wake of multiple economic crises and an increasing sense that the "experts" have been either bought off or are clueless:

As the Oscar-winning documentary Inside Job illustrated, there is a very lucrative market for false visions of financial-market behavior that legitimate the desires of participants to be unshackled and make more money. But good policy prescriptions are public goods that represent the social good and not just the concentrated financial interests. Unfortunately, as economists beginning with the work of Adam Smith have repeatedly shown, public goods are under­provided in the marketplace. In addition, the reputation of the economics profession is itself a collective good, and those who have tarnished it are not adequately penalized for the damage they do to their fellow professionals when they accept large sums of money in return for marketing a perspective that benefits vested interests.

These are problems that some within economics have been aware of for a long time, but the discipline as a whole has been unable to address them. The onus is on the profession to face these challenges and help lead society off the rocks.

How to Save Economics

"For God So Loved The 1%"

Historian Kevin Kruse at the NYTimes:

IN recent weeks Mitt Romney has become the poster child for unchecked capitalism, a role he seems to embrace with relish. Concerns about economic equality, he told Matt Lauer of NBC, were really about class warfare.

“When you have a president encouraging the idea of dividing America based on the 99 percent versus 1 percent,” he said, “you have opened up a whole new wave of approach in this country which is entirely inconsistent with the concept of one nation under God.”

Mr. Romney was on to something, though perhaps not what he intended.

"Supply Side Jesus" courtesy of Al Franken

The concept of “one nation under God” has a noble lineage, originating in Abraham Lincoln’s hope at Gettysburg that “this nation, under God, shall not perish from the earth.” After Lincoln, however, the phrase disappeared from political discourse for decades. But it re-emerged in the mid-20th century, under a much different guise: corporate leaders and conservative clergymen deployed it to discredit Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.

During the Great Depression, the prestige of big business sank along with stock prices. Corporate leaders worked frantically to restore their public image and simultaneously roll back the “creeping socialism” of the welfare state. Notably, the American Liberty League, financed by corporations like DuPont and General Motors, made an aggressive case for capitalism. Most, however, dismissed its efforts as self-interested propaganda. (A Democratic Party official joked that the organization should have been called “the American Cellophane League” because “first, it’s a DuPont product and, second, you can see right through it.”)

Realizing that they needed to rely on others, these businessmen took a new tack: using generous financing to enlist sympathetic clergymen as their champions. After all, according to one tycoon, polls showed that, “of all the groups in America, ministers had more to do with molding public opinion” than any other.