Author: Matthew G. Saroff

And Republican Wankertude Reaches New Heights

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Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell just filibustered his own bill:

My admiration for the Senate’s minority leader, the Hon. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, is limited. But his latest move took even me by surprise.

 In a tactic he thought would put the Obama Administration in an uncomfortable position, yesterday McConnell proposed a measure that would give the president, rather than the Congress, the responsibility for raising the federal debt ceiling.

 Then, when Democrats surprised him by being willing to bring it up for a vote, McConnell reacted in the way that comes most naturally to him: by threatening a filibuster. Attentive readers will recall that over the past six years, McConnell has been responsible for most of the filibusters in America’s 225-year Constitutional history. ………

If anyone wonders if the casual use of the filibuster has not gone over the edge, they need to understand this: The Senate Minority Leader filibustered his own bill.

I understand that their are people who legitimately believe that the filibuster, as well as other traditions make the Senate the “World’s greatest deliberative body,” but I think the fact that that proves that it is nothing more than, “A petri dish for narcissistic sociopaths,” because The Senate Minority Leader filibustered his own bill.

What part of, “The Senate Minority Leader filibustered his own bill,” don’t you understand?

Copyright Sanity Hits EU

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The EU is looking at what amounts to a compulsory licensing regime for orphan copyrighted works:

The European Parliament has agreed to bless draft proposals on orphan works that are similar to a compulsory purchase order with minimal compensation.

 It’s essentially an argument about using other people’s stuff without their permission.

 In May last year, the European Commission floated proposals to allow the “non-commercial” use of works for which the author can’t immediately be found, so long as they did a quick Google search first.

 The UK’s Parliament shot down similar proposals in 2010. But the European Parliament yesterday announced its support for the EC’s draft, which includes the Get Out of Jail Free search requirement. It only obliges the user to pay the creator if they show up, and punitive damages won’t be available. The draft is awaiting formal approval.

This is a very good thing.

Under the current copyright regime, neither the works of Shakespeare nor Herman Melville’s masterwork Moby Dick would be generally available or even generally known.

Rights issues would have prevented the publication of the first folio (The Bard died without issue), and Moby Dick saw mass printing because it was out of copyright, and there was a revival of interest in Melville’s work following the posthumous publication of Billy Budd.

Neither of these works would have been generally available without the public domain, and this sort of compulsory licensing is a good alternative.  (It is likely that the first folio would have been allowed to rot away, as are thousands of old films are at this moment)

Copyright is not about property, or is it about guaranteeing a revenue stream.  It is a law designed to promulgate the public interest by encouraging the creation of original art.

While this proposal may complicate licensing, there is no evidence that it will result in any significant reduction in the actual production of new works.

This might need some tweaking, but given the absolutist efforts of the content distributors, who will vociferously object to anything even vaguely resembling the public domain, or the right to fair use, an effort must made to pull the needle back to center, which requires overreach in the initial stages.

Weldome Senator Clayton Bigsby*

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Tim Scott(R) is favored to be appointed to replace Jim DeMint

So, JimDemint is resigning from the Senate in January to head the Heritage Foundation (read the link, it’s Charlie Pierce at his finest), and he is recommending that Tim Scott, who is arguably the nation’s most prominent African American teabagger,† be appointed to replace him by governor Nikki Haley.

My guess is that he realized that he is widely loathed by his fellow Republicans, he has been intimately involved in primary challenges against members of his party, and that it is unlikely that he would be in the majority, or that he would get a leadership position, and the presidency of the Heritage Foundation pays a lot more than being a Senator.

In my heart of hearts though, I’m hoping that it’s a gay sex prostitution scandal that got him to leave the Senate, but if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

*Clayton Bigsby is a character from Chapelle’s Show. He is a blind black man who is a white supremacist because he does not know that he is black.
†Yes, the role of “Nation’s most prominent African American teabagger” is not a particularly crowded field.

Canada Drops F-35

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The news that Canada has decided to cancel its purchase of 65 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters is a stunner.

It’s the first cancellation, and Canada is more than a customer, it is also one of the original 9 nations that formed the JSF consortium:

The F-35 jet fighter purchase, the most persistent thorn in the federal government’s side and the subject of a devastating auditor-general’s report last spring, is dead.

Faced with the imminent release of an audit by accountants KPMG that will push the total projected life-cycle costs of the aircraft above $30 billion, the operations committee of the federal Cabinet decided to scrap the controversial sole-source program and go back to the drawing board, a source familiar with the decision said.

This occurred after Chief of the Defence Staff Thomas Lawson, while en route overseas, was called back urgently to appear before the committee, the source said.

The decision is sure to have ripple effects around the world, as any reduction in the number of aircraft on order causes the price to go up for all the other buyers. Canada is one of nine F-35 consortium members, including the United States.

………

Last spring, Ferguson ignited a political firestorm when he reported that the top-line cost cited by the Conservatives in the 2011 election campaign — $9 billion for 65 planes, or $15 billion including maintenance and other life-cycle costs — was $10-billion below the Defence Department’s internal estimate.

Even the internal figure of $25.1 billion was suspect, critics said, because it assumed a 20-year life cycle. The longevity of the Lockheed-Martin-built aircraft, according to the Pentagon, is 36 years.

KPMG’s audit, due out next week, has confirmed the contention, long made by critics such as former assistant deputy minister (materiel) Alan Williams, that the F-35 program’s real cost would be much higher than any previously stated government estimate, sources say.

H/t Christina Mackenzie at the Ares blog.

Understand also that the KPMG analysis almost certainly ignored the elephant in the room, the fact that for any nation operating the F-35, they will be opening themselves up to potentially extortionate charges for support from from the prime contractor over the life of the program, because of the highly integrated, and completely closed, architecture of the aircraft:

It is not often that governments are afforded the luxury of looking into the future before they irrevocably commit to a course of action that will have momentous long-term consequences.

Yet, this is just what the debate about the future of Britain’s fleet of Apache attack helicopters provides, not just to its own government, but also to other European governments as they prepare to order, at great cost, the US-made F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

Britain’s problem is that it operates the AH-64D Longbow version of Apache, while the US Army is upgrading to the AH-64E Block III version. This means that “essential technical support for the British Apache fleet will be withdrawn from 2017,” as the Daily Telegraph reported Dec. 5, leaving Britain with the choice of either upgrading all or part of its Apaches to the new version, or retiring them after 2017 as they drift into early obsolescence.

………

Whether they realize it or not when they buy a US-made weapon, that is how the system works: US forces only support the weapons they operate, so it’s either keep up or drop out, and in this case either scrap your weapons or see them fade away into technical and operational irrelevance.

The other side of the coin, obviously, is that buyers of US weapons are always assured of having access to the very latest versions, improvements and upgrades decided by the US military.

………

Each time the US military decides a modification or upgrade to its F-35s, foreign customers will have to follow suit, at whatever cost Lockheed and the Pentagon decide, or else see their aircraft become obsolete as US technical support shifts to the newer version.

In fact, the situation will be infinitely more serious in the case of the F-35, as export customers will not have access to the aircraft’s source codes, nor to its more advanced maintenance methods and equipment, because all but the most basic maintenance will be carried out by Lockheed Martin in its own facilities in the United States.

Foreign operators of the F-35 will have to pay to play. But it is probable that European governments do not fully understand this consequence of buying into a major US program.

European buyers of the F-16 in the 1970s – which now all intend to buy the F-35 – were not faced with a similar situation because they had assembled their F-16s in Europe; because software source codes were not an issue at the time; and because the United States had a vested interest in keeping allies’ fighters as effective as possible during the Cold War, when profits took a back seat. None of these circumstances exist today.

Unlike the case of the UK’s AH-64Ds, the architecture of the JSF is such that if you opt out of the upgrade, and Lockheed will stops supporting that model of the aircraft, you won’t simply have an aircraft that is obsolete or obsolescent, you will have an aircraft which cannot fly, because the customer will not be allowed to have tools to maintain it.

Your $100 million dollar aircraft has become a door stop.

As an aside, one wonders whether there is will be an “off switch” on export models of the F-35.

Certainly, if I were directing foreign military sales at the Pentagon, I would demand such a feature, at least for those aircraft shipped to non NATO allies.

I Can’t F%$#ing Believe that I Said That to My Daughter

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It happened twice in a 24 hour period.

In the 2nd, and somewhat less alarming case, I was driving Natalie to an outing at the mall with her friends, and she needed some money, and I knew that she had money in her cash account, but I was not sure that I needed to go to an ATM, so I handed her my wallet, and asked her to count the cash in it.

And then it hit me, I just asked my teenage daughter to go through my wallet and count my cash.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? I handed my daughter my wallet, and I told her to count my money?!?!?

In the 1st instance, we were talking about relationships, and boys, and texting, and we were talking about how some of the kids in her school were making “impolitic” posts to their significant others.

I was trying to impress upon her that “sexting” was a really bad idea, because you never know when pictures like this will end up.

I ended my comments with the statement that, “If she wants to show her breasts to a boyfriend, she should do it in person, and not with a cell phone picture.”

And she looked at me.

And my wife looked at me.

And my son looked at me.

And I realized what I said, and, as a result, I probably looked like a cow that had just stepped on its own udder.

I am so not going to get a trophy for parent of the year.

Why the Return of Manufacturing to the US is a Mirage

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You may have heard it hyped as the, “Insourcing Boom:

For much of the past decade, General Electric’s storied Appliance Park, in Louisville, Kentucky, appeared less like a monument to American manufacturing prowess than a memorial to it.

 The very scale of the place seemed to underscore its irrelevance. Six factory buildings, each one the size of a large suburban shopping mall, line up neatly in a row. The parking lot in front of them measures a mile long and has its own traffic lights, built to control the chaos that once accompanied shift change. But in 2011, Appliance Park employed not even a tenth of the people it did in its heyday. The vast majority of the lot’s spaces were empty; the traffic lights looked forlorn.

 ………

 Yet this year, something curious and hopeful has begun to happen, something that cannot be explained merely by the ebbing of the Great Recession, and with it the cyclical return of recently laid-off workers. On February 10, Appliance Park opened an all-new assembly line in Building 2—largely dormant for 14 years—to make cutting-edge, low-energy water heaters. It was the first new assembly line at Appliance Park in 55 years—and the water heaters it began making had previously been made for GE in a Chinese contract factory.

 On March 20, just 39 days later, Appliance Park opened a second new assembly line, this one in Building 5, to make new high-tech French-door refrigerators. The top-end model can sense the size of the container you place beneath its purified-water spigot, and shuts the spigot off automatically when the container is full. These refrigerators are the latest versions of a style that for years has been made in Mexico.

 Another assembly line is under construction in Building 3, to make a new stainless-steel dishwasher starting in early 2013. Building 1 is getting an assembly line to make the trendy front-loading washers and matching dryers Americans are enamored of; GE has never before made those in the United States. And Appliance Park already has new plastics-manufacturing facilities to make parts for these appliances, including simple items like the plastic-coated wire racks that go in the dishwashers.

Rejoice! Rejoice! America is back.

Well, not so much:

American unions are changing their priorities. Appliance Park’s union was so fractious in the ’70s and ’80s that the place was known as “Strike City.” That same union agreed to a two-tier wage scale in 2005—and today, 70 percent of the jobs there are on the lower tier, which starts at just over $13.50 an hour, almost $8 less than what the starting wage used to be.

 U.S. labor productivity has continued its long march upward, meaning that labor costs have become a smaller and smaller proportion of the total cost of finished goods. You simply can’t save much money chasing wages anymore.

So, these guys, guys who are doing skilled manufacturing work where they interact with the engineers designers refining the design (read the whole article), are making about 20% over the 1969 minimum wage, adjusted for inflation, or about 40% less than the minimum wage adjusted for current wage levels.

This is not the return of the middle class manufacturing job, it’s about America becoming a low wage country. We are kind of the anti-Germany.

Even the hactacular Adam Davidson, who generally find ways to shill for the 1%, recognizes the fact that the employers are demanding higher and higher skill levels for less and less pay:

Eric Isbister, the C.E.O. of GenMet, a metal-fabricating manufacturer outside Milwaukee, told me that he would hire as many skilled workers as show up at his door. Last year, he received 1,051 applications and found only 25 people who were qualified. He hired all of them, but soon had to fire 15. Part of Isbister’s pickiness, he says, comes from an avoidance of workers with experience in a “union-type job.” Isbister, after all, doesn’t abide by strict work rules and $30-an-hour salaries. At GenMet, the starting pay is $10 an hour. Those with an associate degree can make $15, which can rise to $18 an hour after several years of good performance. From what I understand, a new shift manager at a nearby McDonald’s can earn around $14 an hour.

 The secret behind this skills gap is that it’s not a skills gap at all. I spoke to several other factory managers who also confessed that they had a hard time recruiting in-demand workers for $10-an-hour jobs. “It’s hard not to break out laughing,” says Mark Price, a labor economist at the Keystone Research Center, referring to manufacturers complaining about the shortage of skilled workers. “If there’s a skill shortage, there has to be rises in wages,” he says. “It’s basic economics.” After all, according to supply and demand, a shortage of workers with valuable skills should push wages up. Yet according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of skilled jobs has fallen and so have their wages.

 In a recent study, the Boston Consulting Group noted that, outside a few small cities that rely on the oil industry, there weren’t many places where manufacturing wages were going up and employers still couldn’t find enough workers. “Trying to hire high-skilled workers at rock-bottom rates,” the Boston Group study asserted, “is not a skills gap.” The study’s conclusion, however, was scarier. Many skilled workers have simply chosen to apply their skills elsewhere rather than work for less, and few young people choose to invest in training for jobs that pay fast-food wages. As a result, the United States may soon have a hard time competing in the global economy. The average age of a highly skilled factory worker in the U.S. is now 56. “That’s average,” says Hal Sirkin, the lead author of the study. “That means there’s a lot who are in their 60s. They’re going to retire soon.” And there are not enough trainees in the pipeline, he said, to replace them.

(emphasis mine)

Modern employers are not willing to train, not willing to pay, and underpay relative to lower management at McDonald’s, and they are surprised that they cannot find people willing to bend over and say, “Thank you sir, may I have another.”

Shocker that.

BTW, the decidedly non-hactacular Felix Salmon riffs on this matter as well.

Holy Crap Adam Davidson doesn’t pimp for the employers for once.

Obama Actually Takes a Stand on Michigan

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Unlike his hands off position in Wisconsin, Obama has actually come out against the Koch suckers’ right to work law in Michigan:

Union leaders warned that, if organized labor can be so battered in the union heartland of Michigan, it can—and may—be attacked anywhere. And the national significance of the move was highlighted by a statement from the Obama White House, which said:

President Obama has long opposed so-called “right-to-work” laws and he continues to oppose them now. The President believes our economy is stronger when workers get good wages and good benefits, and he opposes attempts to roll back their rights. Michigan—and its workers’ role in the revival of the US automobile industry—is a prime example of how unions have helped build a strong middle class and a strong American economy.

The problem is that following the 2010 debacle, Michigan is so f%$#ing Gerrymandered it’s not funny.

Another problem is that if there is a wave election that gives Democrats back control, the power brokers will ensure that too many of the Democrats will be faux Dems, and so repealing this will be put on the back burner.

This is corrupt, and It Would Be a Political Winner for Republicans, and I Want Them to Pursue This

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Naked Capitalism has been writing for some time about how the SEC’s chief of enforcement, Robert Khuzam, has been hostile to the idea of actual enforcement, particularly with regards to reports from whistle blowers, but the latest case is indisputably corrupt:

Two days ago, we said it was time to fire the SEC’s chief of enforcement Robert Khuzami, who has not provided the tough policing warranted by the biggest financial crisis in the agency’s history. Our call was based on compelling evidence of failure. Specifically, a year and a half after Dodd Frank created a $450 million whistleblower fund, which Khuzami confirmed had produced hundreds of high quality leads, the agency had taken only one referral far enough to merit a payout, that of a measley $50,000. We stressed that this was an astonishing lapse:

… whistleblowers are insiders and therefore should in many cases have access to the sort of internal documents that would serve to substantiate conduct and save the SEC a ton of time. In other words, this should be a prime, potentially its best, source of leads, since the SEC would be further along in case development if any of these tips had meat (ie, both damning info and on target with a clear violation).

We didn’t anticipate that the story of Khuzami’s negligence would blow so big so quickly. Today, the Financial Times reported that three separate whistleblowers charged that Deutsche Bank had mismarked up to $12 billion in exposures to make it look healthier in 2008 and 2009 than it was, yet the agency had not acted on these allegations. And this level of window dressing most assuredly would make a difference.
………

 Khuzami’s position is hopelessly conflicted. He was general counsel for the Americas for Deutsche from 2004 to 2009, so this behavior took place on his watch. Although he has recused himself from this probe, that’s inadequate. Recusal does not work when the people working on the matter in the end have the party with the conflict as their boss. They can’t pursue any real dirt that could implicate him without hurting themselves. If it came to naught, they’d still fear the risk of reprisal if he survived. And if he were forced to leave, they’d be faced with a new boss who might not be at all to their liking.

 The only way to have an effective investigation is either to have Khuzami resign or to have the matter handed off to a completely independent firm (and even that’s a stretch, both from the agency side, and from the dearth of firms with decent securities law expertise that would be willing to face off against a major bank. Just as with the bankruptcy bar, you either work for the banks [the creditors] or against them [for the debtors]). It’s also a wee bit too cozy that Deutsche’s current general counsel is also a former SEC head of enforcement. And KPMG, the accountant that blessed all this highly dubious financial footwork, and Fried Frank, which led an investigation initiated by Deutsche and apparently found nothing much wrong, also don’t come out looking very good.

When you look Republican investigations of alleged Obama corruption, what is clear is that they are trying to gin up a false bullsh%$ like Benghazi and “Fast and Furious”.

This one is real, and it’s an accusation that would serve to benefit the Republicans politically, and unlike the investigatory theater that Darryl Issa favors.

Additionally, such an investigation might lead the white house to get tougher with the banksters, because it is clear that one of the administration’s conceits, notwithstanding the rapidly spinning revolving door (Elizabeth Fowler anyone?), is that they are a model of probity, and this, along with the political consequences, might produce some meaningful action.

Damn, This is Heavy

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A man in the process of breaking up with his wife, and alleged that she was involved with laundering money transfers to Switzerland, and the bank got him committed to a mental hospital for ten years:

A German man committed to a high-security psychiatric hospital after being accused of fabricating a story of money-laundering activities at a major bank is to have his case reviewed after evidence has emerged proving the validity of his claims.

In a plot worthy of a crime blockbuster, Gustl Mollath, 56, was submitted to the secure unit of a psychiatric hospital seven years ago after court experts diagnosed him with paranoid personality disorder following his claims that staff at the Hypo Vereinsbank (HVB) – including his wife, then an assets consultant at HVB – had been illegally smuggling large sums of money into Switzerland.

Mollath was tried in 2006 after his ex-wife accused him of causing her physical harm. He denied the charges, claiming she was trying to sully his name in the light of the evidence he allegedly had against her. He was admitted to the clinic, where he has remained against his will ever since.

But recent evidence brought to the attention of state prosecutors shows that money-laundering activities were indeed practiced over several years by members of staff at the Munich-based bank, the sixth-largest private financial institute in Germany, as detailed in an internal audit report carried out by the bank in 2003. The report, which has now been posted online, detailed illegal activities including money-laundering and aiding tax evasion. A number of employees, including Mollath’s wife, were subsequently sacked following the bank’s investigation.

………

Asked why the bank kept the report to itself and did not approach the authorities, the spokeswoman added: “In 2003 HVB initiated extensive investigations via internal audits in response to information provided by Mr Mollath on transactions that had taken place a long time before … It was determined that employees had acted contrary to their instructions regarding Swiss banking transactions”.

But while the findings, it said, had resulted in sackings, the audit “did not produce sufficient evidence indicating criminal conduct … that would have made a criminal charge seem appropriate”.

If you believe that the banks had nothing to do with his commitment, you are naive.

This is Bavaria, the heart of the German right wing, and doing the banks’ bidding is pretty much a requirement for civil servants there, so I have no doubt that Hypo Vereinsbank decided to act like Stalin’s NKVD.

H/t Naked Capitalism.

Big Brother is Arlington Hewes*

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Verizon has just patented a set top box with cameras that spy on you so that they can serve up targeted ads:

Verizon has filed a patent for a DVR that can watch and listen to the goings-on in your living room. In the application, the company proposes to use the technology to serve targeted ads appropriate to whatever you’re doing in the, uh, privacy of your own home—fighting, cuddling, or hanging out with your cats.

Verizon is far from the first company to think of this unassailably creepy use for a set-top box. Comcast patented similar monitoring technology in 2008 for recommending content based on people it recognizes in the room; Google proposed yet another patent for Google TV that would use audio and video recorders to figure out how many people in a room are watching the current broad

I am appalled by the very concept, and I am also appalled by the fact that the USPTO granted a patent for a television that spies on you, when George Orwell published this idea in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four published in 1949.

The estate of Eric Arthur Blair should sue.

*The President’s Analyst, James Coburn, Godfrey Cambridge, 1967. Arlington Hewes is the president of The Phone Company, which is involved in an evil conspiracy.

The House of Saud Tried to Buy Our Elections

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This is the natural result of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United Decision:

The “American” in American Petroleum Institute, the country’s largest oil lobby group, is a misnomer. As I reported for The Nation in August, the group has changed over the years, and is now led by men like Tofiq Al-Gabsani, a Saudi Arabian national who heads a Saudi Arabian Oil Company (Aramco) subsidiary, the state-run oil company that also helps finance the American Petroleum Institute. Al-Gabsani is also a registered foreign agent for the Saudi government.

New disclosures retrieved today, showing some of API’s spending over the course of last year, reveal that API used its membership dues (from the world’s largest oil companies like Chevron and Aramco) to finance several dark money groups airing attack ads in the most recent election cycle.

Last year, API gave nearly half a million to the following dark money groups running political ads against Democrats and in support of Republicans:

• $50,000 to Americans for Prosperity’s 501(c)(4) group, which ran ads against President Obama and congressional Democrats.

• $412,969 to Coalition for American Jobs’ 501(c)(6) group, a front set up by API lobbyists to air ads for industry-friendly politicians, including soon to be former Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA).

• $25,000 to the Sixty Plus Association’s 501(c)(4), which ran ads against congressional Democrats.

Jack Gerard, the president of API, was a close ally to the Mitt Romney campaign. Like the US Chamber of Commerce, API is one of several large trade associations that has spent heavily in support of Republican candidates.

Seriously, I’d rather have Greece’s Fascist Golden Dawn party involved in our politics than the House of Saud.

This is About a Political Rear Guard Action

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There is a context to the Republican moves in Michigan to pass a right to work law.

When you see increasing levels of rejection by the electorate, along with an increasingly radical and delusional base pushing in the other direction, your only alternative is to direct your actions toward political advantage by things like Gerrymandering, and going after your opponents’ power base, and you dry to prevent them from voting.

That’s why you see Republicans going after labor unions, plaintiff’s lawyers, and actively suppressing voter turnout.

Well, there’s that, there’s the fact that they, as Lee Atwater said, scream N***er, N***er, N***er, albeit with increasingly sophisticated code words.

If this passes, and it almost certainly will, then when the Democrats get power back in Michigan, repealing this is the first order of business.

I Love Ed Asner*

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Ed Asner narrated a video for the California Federation of Teachers, which, among its images, had the 1% pissing on the rest of us.

Well, professional idiot Sean Hannity took offense, and he sent a producer to ambush interview Mr. Asner, who then offered to demonstrate the principal by pissing on the producer ::

Emmy Award-winning The Mary Tyler Show actor Ed Asner recently asked a Fox News producer if he could “piss on” him after he was confronted about a California Federation of Teachers video that showed cartoon rich people urinating on poor people.

Fox News host Sean Hannity and other conservative pundits first began attacking Asner on Tuesday after the animated ad that he narrated appeared on the federation’s website to explain how rich people used tax evasion, tax loopholes and tax cuts to become even richer.

On Wednesday, Hannity announced that he had sent an ambush producer out to confront the “left-wing Hollywood actor” outside his job at a New York City theater over the “disgusting hit piece.”

“I don’t remember a thing I said on it or a word I said on it,” Asner told the producer. “But I agreed to do it for California teachers. I approve this message.”

“There’s a part of it where talking about things trickling down and they have like rich people peeing on poor people,” the producer explained.

“How disgusting,” the actor snarked. “It should be reversed.”

“So you don’t remember that?” the producer pressed.

“Do you have any money?” Asner later asked.

“Ah, yeah,” the producer replied.

“Can I piss on you?” the actor quipped.

Heh.

H/t DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

*In a 110% purely heterosexual kind of way, of course, as the General would say.

I am in the Wrong Line of Work

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Dick Armey just got an $8 million golden handshake from FreedomWorks:

Dick Armey left the deep-pocketed tea party group he helped build over a clash with a top lieutenant who Armey and others in the organization believed was using the group’s resources to pad his pockets, POLITICO has learned.

Armey received an $8 million buyout to step down as chairman of FreedomWorks at the end of last month, but the dispute between him and the group’s president, Matt Kibbe, is still straining the organization.

An $8 f%$#ing million severance?

I need to become a conservative Republican rat f%$#er.

The money might be worth my immortal soul.

The Goal is Not Recovery, It’s the Dismantling of the Social Safety State

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That’s what the right wing push for austerity is all about.

Case in point, the chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, who is saying that since austerity is further depressing the British economy, it has become necessary extend austerity until at least 2018:

Britons, many already weary of government austerity budgets that some economists say are impeding the country’s recovery, are going to have to wait even longer for relief.

The architect of the austerity program, George Osborne, the chancellor of the Exchequer, told Parliament on Wednesday that the government had missed one of its self-imposed debt-cutting goals and would have to extend the belt-tightening into 2018, a year longer than previously promised.

Although Mr. Osborne maintained that the debt reduction plan was still on track, his presentation drew heckling and laughter from some opposition lawmakers, particularly after he argued that new tax measures would show that “we’re all in this together.”

The next general election in Britain will take place in 2015, well before the end of austerity measures that have included cuts in welfare services and the elimination of tens of thousands of public sector jobs.

On Wednesday, the Office for Budget Responsibility, a nonpartisan body that is monitoring the economy, said it now expected full-year data to show that the economy shrank 0.1 percent this year, instead of growing 0.8 percent, as the office had previously forecast.

It also said the economy would grow 1.2 percent next year as opposed to the 2 percent predicted earlier.

“It’s a hard road but we are getting there,” Mr. Osborne told Parliament. “Britain is on the right track. Turning back now would be a disaster.”

The evidence is clear: Austerity in a depressed economy further depresses the economy, and reduces tax revenues.

Austerity is not about creating growth, nor is it about reducing deficits.  It is merely camouflage for an assault on social insurance.