MAY 21, 2013 BY MARIO PIPERNI 

Item 1:
The Oklahoma tornado disaster has killed at least 24 people, left hundreds injured and caused millions of dollars in damage. But that has not stopped a senator from that same state from declaring that he will not approve federal aid for victims of the disaster unless the spending can be offset with cuts.

The tornado damage near Oklahoma City is still being assessed and the death toll is expected to rise, but already Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., says he will insist that any federal disaster aid be paid for with cuts elsewhere.

CQ Roll Call reporter Jennifer Scholtes wrote for CQ.com Monday evening that Coburn said he would “absolutely” demand offsets for any federal aid that Congress provides.

Coburn added, Scholtes wrote, that it is too early to guess at a damage toll but that he knows for certain he will fight to make sure disaster funding that the federal government contributes is paid for. It’s a position he has taken repeatedly during his career when Congress debates emergency funding for disaster aid.

Okay, let’s see if we can help Sen. Coburn and others who object to disaster relief spending without offsets find the cuts they want.

Item 2:
The most over-funded military in the world will purchase 2,443 F-35s at a cost of $138 million apiece.

The government now projects that the total cost to develop, buy and operate the Lockheed Martin Corp F-35 Joint Strike Fighter will be $1.51 trillion over the next 50-plus years…The Pentagon still plans to buy 2,443 of the new radar-evading, supersonic warplanes, plus 14 development aircraft, in the coming decades, although Air Force Secretary Michael Donley last week warned that further technical problems or cost increases could eat away at those numbers.

Purchase 7 fewer planes and that leaves about a billion dollars in the budget to spend elsewhere. In Oklahoma maybe? Probably not. For many in Congress, making defense contractors rich takes priority over victims of natural disaster.

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Monday, May 20, 2013

By Greg Palast for Vice Magazine

It wasn’t too difficult picking out the Fat Bastard in the crowd of Russian models, craven moochers and media mavens. Besides, Fat Bastard and I were both desperate for coffee and heading for the same empty urn.

(We’d both signed on for Kazakhstan’s annual Eurasia Media Forum, a kind of Burning Man festival for Eastern oilgarchs and their media camp followers.)

Now, it is my policy never to mention an interlocutor’s weight, nor question the legitimacy of their birth, given my own vulnerabilities. (A would-be groupie told me, “You could do a few sit-ups, you know.” Yes, I know.)

But this particular Fat Bastard is asking for it. I had tried to put the belly of this beast out of my thoughts, but I still had a New York Times story folded in my pocket that begins:

ATHENS – As an elementary school principal, Leonidas Nikas is used to seeing children play, laugh and dream about the future. But recently he has seen something altogether different, something he thought was impossible in Greece: children picking through school trash cans for food; needy youngsters asking playmates for leftovers; and an 11-year-old boy, Pantelis Petrakis, bent over with hunger pains.

Fat Bastard – or Theodoros Pangalos, leader of the Panhellenic Socialist Party (PASOK), Greece’s equivalent to UK’s  Labour Party – thinks the little Greek kiddies should stop belly-aching. Pangalos, as you can see from the photo below, is not bent over with hunger pains. In fact, he looks more likely to be bent over with labour pains, but in truth he probably just can’t bend over at all.

Pangalos is best known for blaming the working people of Greece for the horror and the hunger among the ruins of what was once Greece’s economy. However, it is, of course, not his fault; until last year, and through the core of the crisis, he was just Greece’s Deputy Prime Minister – why should he be held accountable for anything?

Minister Pangalos is much loved by Europe’s banking chieftains, by vulture speculators and by Prussian President Angela Merkel because they’ve got themselves a gigantic Greek who will mouth their mantra: that his nation’s sudden collapse can be blamed squarely on olive-pit-spitting, lazy-ass Greeks who won’t work more than three hours a week, then retire while they’re still teenagers to swill state-subsidised ouzo.

Pangalos leads the Fifth Column of Greeks calling to accept Germany’s terms of economic surrender: austerity, meaning cuts in food allowances, in pensions, in jobs. As of this week, more than one in four Greeks (27 percent) are out of work.

While we hunted for caffeine, Fat Bastard told me that anyone who complains about the austerity diktat, “Is a fascist or a communist or a conspiracy theorist.” He didn’t tell me which of these three categories the 11-year-old kids complaining of hunger pains fell into.

Just for the record, those Greeks who can get a job, work 619 more hours per year (see table) than the average German (and way, way more than Britons or Americans as well).

But in the world according to Pangalos, Merkel and poobahs of the media, Greece went to hell in a handbag because the entire nation suddenly turned into work-shirking grifters.

But there’s another explanation for wrack and ruin: Greece is a crime scene. And its working people are not the perpetrators of the crime, they are the victims – scammed, defrauded, their national industries looted and their treasury drained by financial flim-flam.

In 2001, Greece dropped the drachma for the euro. The drachma was good enough for Aristotle and very good for tourism, Greece’s main industry. But when sun-and-fun was re-priced in euros, tourists swam across the Adriatic for kofte meatballs priced in dirt-cheap Turkish lira. Pre-euro tourist visits to Greece outnumbered those to Turkey by millions; but by last year, it was the just the opposite, with two-thirds of tourists tanning in Turkey.

With its Treasury bleeding hard currency, the government of Minister Pangalos’ PASOK joined together with the opposition in a complex international currency kiting operation to conceal the losses from the public and, most importantly, from the European Central Bank.

Why the cover-up of the deficit? The answer is that the euro is more than a currency: it is a straitjacket, a set of constricting rules that, for example, prohibit any euro nation from running a deficit of more than 3 percent of GDP.

That’s impossible in a recession – not to mention plain insane – as it requires cutting public spending when spending is needed most. The USA, China, Brazil, India – the nations that pulled the world from depression’s brink – all ran deficits way over the nutty 3 percent cap. I asked finance wiz Nomi Prins to calculate America’s debt-to-GDP ratio using euro rules, and she estimates that Obama’s deficits are now way down from recession’s peak – to 10.2 percent of GDP.

Greece, fearing expulsion from the euro loony bin, turned to Goldman Sachs. For a mere $400 million in fees, plus golden sacks of ill-gotten trading gain, the investment bank was willing to cook the nation’s books via a complex set of derivatives transactions. [For the particulars of the derivatives con, see How Goldman Sacked Greece.]

Since the con was busted open in 2009, the Greek public has had to pay cheated bondholders a premium to insure against default of the nation’s debts. The credit default insurance costs an average of $14,000 (£9,218) per family per year.

When I was a racketeering investigator working with the US Justice Department, in the days when we pretended America still had justice, we would have called the derivatives trick a “fraud on the market”. We’d handcuff the perpetrators, lock ‘em up, or, at the least, make them cough up their purloined profits.

So, should Goldman pay up? Not according to Pangalos, because – in the worldview of our rulers – the victims of the scam are as guilty as the victimisers. Pangalos even put it into a famous (or infamous) motto: mazi-ta-fagame. That’s Greek for “We all ate it together”.

But the visible evidence suggests Pangalos, not Pantelis – the kid doubled over with stomach pain – ate all the pies.

The mass privatisation of public property at wiener schnitzel prices has German speculators dipping in their spoons as well, though the Federation of German industry is complaining about Greece’s own “princes” gobbling up the assets.

I was going to invite Minister Pangalos to lunch to test his theories, but he left in a pachydermic huff when I asked him about Geir Haarde. Haarde, the former Prime Minister of Iceland, was found guilty of concealing his knowledge of the trickery used by Iceland’s banks before they melted that nation’s finances.

I asked Fat Bastard, “Do you think you should be in prison for” similar conduct in the Greek government?

Maybe that’s why Minister Pangalos didn’t want to go to lunch with me.

* * * * * * * *

Greg Palast’s book Vultures’ Picnic (Constable Robinson UK/Penguin USA), including chapters on Greece and Goldman, will be published in Greek in early fall by Livani.  Download the first chapter, Goldfinger, and videos at VulturesPicnic.org.

MAY 21, 2013 BY MARIO PIPERNI 

Milt Priggee

Don’t hold your breath waiting. Jon Favreau looks at how well this president handles crisis and detractors.

The handwringers and bed wetters in the D.C. punditocracy should know that Barack Obama will never be on their timeline. He does not value being first over being right. He will not spend his presidency chasing news cycles. He will not shake up his White House staff just because of some offhand advice offered to Politico by a longtime Washingtonian or a nameless Democrat who’s desperately trying to stay relevant. And if that means Dana Milbank thinks he’s too passive; if it means that Jim VandeHei will keep calling him arrogant and petulant; if it means that Chris Matthews will whine about him not enjoying the presidency, then so be it. He’ll live.

Barack Obama understands his own limitations and the limitations of his office. He has made mistakes and he will likely make more. But this is a president who has seen the nation through many serious and consequential crises, and he has done so without losing the core of who he is or why he ran for this job in the first place. In the end, those are the qualities that will serve him well—the qualities that will serve us well—in the months and years ahead.

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Posted by Andy Borowitz

• 

 

 

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—President Obama’s handling of controversies about the I.R.S., the Justice Department, and Benghazi has raised “grave doubts” about his ability to cope if he ever became involved in an actual scandal, prominent Republicans said today.

“If this is how he handles this stuff, Lord have mercy on him if he ever has to deal with a real scandal,” said newly elected Rep. Mark Sanford (R-S. Carolina). “Quite frankly, I don’t think he has what it takes.”

“The true test of a leader is this,” Rep. Sanford added. “When he gets in a fix, does he have the presence of mind to lie about his whereabouts? Sadly, I don’t think President Obama passes that test.”

Mr. Sanford’s concerns mirror those of another leading Republican lawmaker, Sen. David Vitter (R-Louisiana).

“If President Obama honestly thinks he’s dealing with scandals right now, I’m pretty sure he doesn’t know what a scandal is,” Sen. Vitter said. “And that’s very worrisome.”

“When you get that three A.M. phone call, and it’s a reporter claiming that a prostitute said you like to dress up in a diaper, are you prepared for that call?” Sen. Vitter said. “In the case of President Obama, I am afraid that the answer is no.”

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Photograph of Mark Sanford by Rainier Ehrhardt/AP.

Corporations Are Stealing Billions in Tax Breaks, While the Confused, Screwed Citizenry Turn On Each Other

As global capital becomes ever more powerful, giant corporations are holding governments and citizens up for ransom — eliciting subsidies and tax breaks from countries concerned about their nation’s “competitiveness” — while sheltering their profits in the lowest-tax jurisdictions they can find. Major advanced countries — and their citizens — need a comprehensive tax agreement that won’t allow global corporations to get away with this.

Google, Amazon, Starbucks, every other major corporation, and every big Wall Street bank, are sheltering as much of their U.S. profits abroad as they can, while telling Washington that lower corporate taxes are necessary in order to keep the U.S. “competitive.”

Baloney. The fact is, global corporations have no allegiance to any country; their only objective is to make as much money as possible — and play off one country against another to keep their taxes down and subsidies up, thereby shifting more of the tax burden to ordinary people whose wages are already shrinking because companies are playing workers off against each other.

I’m in London for a few days, and all the talk here is about how Goldman Sachs just negotiated a sweetheart deal to settle a tax dispute with the British government; Google is manipulating its British sales to pay almost no taxes here by using its low-tax Ireland subsidiary (the chair of the Parliamentary committee investigating this has just called the do-no-evil firm “devious, calculating, and unethical”); Amazon has been found to route its British sales through a subsidiary in low-tax Luxembourg, and now receives more in subsidies from the British government than it pays here in taxes; Starbucks’ tax-avoidance strategy was so blatant British consumers began boycotting the firm until it reversed course.

Meanwhile, At a time when you’d expect nations to band together to gain bargaining power against global capital, the opposite is occurring: Xenophobia is breaking out all over.

Here in Britain, the UK Independence Party — which wants to get out of the European Union — is rapidly gaining ground, becoming the third most popular party in the country, according to a new poll for The Independent on Sunday. Almost one in five people plan to vote for it in the next general election. Ukip’s overall ratings have risen four points to 19 per cent in the past month, despite Prime Minister David Cameron’s efforts to wrest back control of the crucial debate over Britain’s relationship with the European Union.

Right-wing nationalist parties are gaining ground elsewhere in Europe as well. In the U.S., not only are Republicans sounding more nationalistic of late (anti-immigrant, anti-trade), but they continue to push “states rights” — as states increasingly battle against one another to give global companies ever larger tax breaks and subsidies.

Nothing could strengthen the hand of global capital more than such breakups.

By Jayati Ghosh, Professor of economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and the executive secretary of International Development Economics Associates. Cross-posted from Triple Crisis.

Since her death, many eulogies of Thatcher have spoken of her as a revolutionary. Thatcherism (along with the associated Reaganomics) is seen as a radical transformative agenda that changed the face of economy and society. But seen from the developing world decades later, much of this agenda appears familiar, in the form of structural adjustment policies that have been forced upon different countries at different times by international institutions.

Given the broad contemporaneity of these strategies, it is a moot point who “inspired” whom, or just how original those ideas were. But it is certainly true that they contributed to shaping policy dialogue in fundamental ways, and thereby left a continuing (if unfortunate) legacy. Consider just five significant elements of this legacy, most features of which are now found across the world and especially in developing countries.

First, and possibly the most well-known: the attack on organised labour and the resulting drastic reduction in workers’ bargaining power. This occurred not just through the instrument of unemployment (or fear of it) used to discipline workers, but through regulation and legal changes as well as changing institutions. This is now an almost universal feature, except in societies such as in Latin America where recent political changes have generated some reversal.

Second, financial deregulation and significant increases in the lobbying and political power of financial agents. This has led to the massive expansion and then implosion of deregulated finance, with the crisis affecting the real economy in terrible ways. It has also contributed to deindustrialisation and the rentier economy. The UK today is clearly one, with its focus on the City of London as its most prominent “industry” – but this is increasingly the fate of countries that are much lower in the development and per capita income ladders.

Third, the triumph of private gain over social good and the aggressive delegitimisation of public provision. Quite apart from the adverse effects on the long term (in terms of inadequate public investment for the future or for meeting current social needs) this has terrible effects on society, creating not just injustice but small-minded and petty individualism as a dominant social characteristic.

Fourth, the weakening or destruction of notions of the rights of citizens, particularly social and economic rights. Most citizens of the developing world are still struggling for these to be recognised, so the rapid derecognition of such rights in the post-Thatcher era has been a setback for everyone – and is only too obvious in much of Europe today.

Fifth, sharply increasingly inequalities of assets, incomes, opportunities, which has become socially and economically counterproductive everywhere and increasingly politically destabilising as well.

Was Thatcherism then all that new? No – it was essentially a reversion to an older, Dickensian (if not even Hobbesian) variety of capitalism, bringing back into significance those more unpleasant features of the capitalist system that were supposed to have been abandoned in the forward progress of human history.

Jayati Ghosh is professor of economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and the executive secretary of International Development Economics Associates.

This piece first appeared in the Guardian. 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

MAY 18, 2013 BY MARIO PIPERNI 

If you’re new to right-wing think, here’s an easy to remember rule of thumb to help you along; any and all evil in the world can be attributed directly to President Obama and/or homosexuals. Really. Every stinking evil. If it isn’t Obama’s fault, then blame it on the gay.

Blue Texan over at C&L notes that the AFA needs smarter bigots. I agree, but I’d take it one step further and suggest that the entire conservative movement needs smarter bigots. The current crop are dumber than a box of rocks.

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Posted by Andy Borowitz

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Today Speaker of the House John Boehner issued the following letter to the American people:

Dear American People,

Yesterday, your hardworking House Republicans tried, once again, and failed, once again, to repeal Obamacare. And I really thought we had a good chance this time.

That’s because we were all united in our hatred for this infernal and takes-too-long-to-read law. Every last one of us cast his vote to strike it down, from crazy little Paul Ryan to that arrogant bastard Eric Cantor.

And I wish you could have seen the faces of those freshman Republicans as they voted to repeal Obamacare—so innocent, so full of hope and wonder. As I told them yesterday, “You’ll never forget your first time.”

It’s important for you to know that even as scandals swirl about the cesspool known as the White House, some folks in Washington are still working hard for the American people.

It was a gruelling week for me, what with popping up in front of the TV cameras every five minutes saying, “Who’s going to jail?,” plus trying to rid our land of Obamacare. But I don’t want your thanks. Save that for the dedicated House Republicans who have now voted thirty-seven times to repeal. You can’t put a price tag on that kind of performance. Well, actually, you can: it’s cost the taxpayers over fifty million dollars.

And worth every million, damn it.

One last thing. I know some of you are probably thinking that after suffering this latest defeat, we House Republicans are just going to take our bat and ball and go home. Well, there’s an old saying where I come from: the thirty-eighth time’s the charm.

Courage,

John Boehner

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Photograph by Chip Somodevilla/Getty.