Needlenose

Big debate in California right now is whether or not to tax out-of-state online purchases as if they were purchased locally. On the ‘pro’ side, Betty Yee argues that local brick and mortar retailers currently paying 8.5% sales tax can’t compete with online retailers residing in states with significantly lower, or non-existent tax rates.  A member of California’s tax board, she claims that we are thus ‘losing’ $1.2 billion in tax revenue for these purchases.  On the ‘con’ side is David Henderson, a Libertarian Lunatic from the far-right Hoover Institute corporatist “think” tank, argues that the lost amount is far smaller ($621 million/year), that tax competition between states is healthy and that California taxes its residents too much anyway as it offers too many unnecessary services, such as freeway building.  Seriously, he suggests that we should turn over our freeway system to private concerns who will make them into toll roads (somewhere at Stanford a clock is missing its cuckoo!).

Surprisingly lost in the debate is any discussion of ‘why’ the California legislators are contemplating a tax that would most likely get thrown out in Federal court (per a decision in 1967 ruling that a catalog retailer needs a local presence in order to be subject to local sales tax) – Prop 13!  A state like Oregon doesn’t need a sales tax to pay for their services as local assessors aren’t hamstrung by ludicrous legislation effectively ‘fixing’ the value of a property to the time of original purchase.

Of course an Oregonian e-retailer gets the 8.5% ‘edge’ over a California retailer provided our tax rate stays so ridiculously high.  But toss out the crazy cap on property value assessment and Blam!, California could easily make up it’s budget shortfall, reduce the sales tax rate and still have money to spare.

Rather than discuss the elephant in the room, the California Left and Right shift into preposterous positions (fighting establish Federal Law or turning our freeways into private toll roads) in a self-parodying attempt to address our state’s chronic budget woes.

As I mentioned before, California politics represents a microcosm of our woes at the Federal level, as now evidenced in the absurd showdown over the debt ceiling.  In that discussion, the Left argues that huge deficits are a good thing during an economic downturn, and that the Feds need to make up in spending what the consumers are not.  The Right, who didn’t care about deficit spending when they controlled Congress, trots out the same old trickle-down prescription of keeping taxes low on the wealthy, increasing fee-bases services for the middle class and cutting or eliminating social programs for the old, the poor and the disabled.

Seriously, there are plenty of things that could be cut out of the Federal Budget, like cutting hundreds of billions of dollars out of the Defense for unneeded programs, winding out of Shrubya’s legacy wars.  And on the other side, why not have a conversation about eliminating the NEA?  Trimming back the Department of Education?  Folding the ATF into the FBI (and similarly reducing redundancies)?  Encouragingly, there was some talk, albeit muted, of eliminating loopholes in the tax code, but not-surprisingly that seems to have gotten dropped from the Boehner/Obama capitulation.  And never discussed were some basic measures such as getting private interests to pay commercial rates for use of Federal land (ranching, mineral extraction, etc).

The underlying issue, though, is that addressing the deficit isn’t sufficient.  All our Free Trade deals have proven extremely successful at outsourcing manufacturing and even back-office work to Asia, in a perverse vindication of ‘trickle-down’ economics, as rich corporations ‘trickle-out’ of the country.  If the trickle-out continues, and the tax base continues to shrink, how can the Fed possibly spend its way out of our economic malaise?

Bottom line is that we are in absurdistan precisely because the Congressionals can’t/won’t go against their corporate campaign funders, either in the form of eliminating some tax loophole, collecting ‘fair use’ royalties on Federal land, eliminating a defense program that benefits a local defense contractor, or getting corporations to pay taxes on their overseas payroll or unrepatriated profits.  The Dems and the Repugs put on a little show but go back to business as usual – with the other 99% of us continuing to fall behind the other 1%.

Obama and Boehner crowing that they’ve reached a deal that includes ‘no revenues’ and 2 trillion in cuts.  Suspecting that my theory that Obama is a Republican “Manchurian Candidate” is correct.  Or the worst negotiator in history.

We still ain't gonna admit we wuz wrong!

U.S. baking in record hot temperatures.  Still no apology to Al Gore for mocking him on Global Warming from Rupert Murdoch’s minions.

Argument #1 for taxing the rich:

An ego you can see from space!

Also a compelling argument for getting off oil.

Rupert Murdoch, The Prince of Lies gets Pied.  Watch:

In recent days, a long-simmering scandal in the United Kingdom over unscrupulous journalism (specifically, the repeated hacking of cell phones owned by celebrities, politicians, and crime victims) by newspapers owned by billionaire Rupert Murdoch has exploded, with leading Murdoch executives being arrested and top British officials forced to resign over apparent complicity with the papers’ schemes.

And now obvious questions are being asked:

… critics muse that Mr. Murdoch’s free-wheeling and politically conservative hand in British reporting may have influenced American journalism as well – particularly in the well-regarded Wall Street Journal, whose parent company Dow Jones was acquired by Murdoch’s News Corp. in 2007.

For its part, the Journal’s editorial page fired back about these charges in an editorial for Monday’s paper:

When News Corp. and CEO Rupert Murdoch secured enough shares to buy Dow Jones & Co. four years ago, these columns welcomed our new owner and promised to stand by the same standards and principles we always had…

… [regarding] Friday’s resignation of our publisher and CEO, Les Hinton, who ran News Corp.’s British newspaper unit during the time of the alleged hacking . . . on ethical questions, his judgment was as sound as that of any editor we’ve had.

To help readers understand what makes this such a galling non-denial denial, we pause here for a concurring opinion from the hereafter:

The WSJ editors lie without consequence

The above is from the suicide note of Vincent Foster, an aide to the Clinton administration who killed himself in 1993 after being savaged in a series of Wall Street Journal editorials during the preceding two months.

In other words, it wasn’t the Journal‘s editorial-page standards that anyone was concerned about when Murdoch took over.  The issue is whether Murdoch pushed the news operation into the op-ed section’s moral cesspool.

There have been, at my last count, roughly 379 posts in the last few days in the progressive blogosphere proclaiming the incoherence of President Obama’s strategy in the current debt-ceiling negotiations.  (I blinked while typing this, so a few more may have appeared by now.)

Yesterday, though, both Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias made the case that pursuing apparent austerity during an economic slump isn’t as insane as it seems — and, in fact, isn’t really pursing austerity in the short term, as Klein notes:

A big deficit deal could include mild stimulative measures such as unemployment insurance and an extension of the payroll tax cut. That’s not much, but it’s better than nothing. A small deficit deal, or no deficit deal, won’t include any extensions of stimulus.

… [Meanwhile, on spending cuts,] if you strike a deal that lasts 10 years, you can backload the savings to protect the recovery over the next three or four years.

The Prez himself alluded to this strategy during one of his 80 press conferences this week, when he explained that any tax increases he was seeking in the debt-ceiling talks wouldn’t take effect until 2013.

And I can see why he might have chosen this angle.  Of all the disappointments and botched opportunities that have marked Obama’s presidency to date, I will submit that there’s only one that truly damaged Barack O. politically: the stimulus package in early 2009 wasn’t nearly big enough to get the economy moving forward.

Yes, the failure to include a public option or other strong progressive elements in the health care bill is a strong runner-up.  If you ask me, though (and it’s my post, so I’m going to pretend you did), if unemployment had been a few percentage points lower, the Republican-esque health care legislation wouldn’t have kept Democrats from maintaining their majorities in Congress — and conversely, even a more populist health care bill wouldn’t have kept a GOP tide from swamping the Dems with the jobless rate as high as it was/is.

So, surveying the political landscape after the 2010 electoral fiasco, it shouldn’t be surprising if Obama came away with one simple conclusion: He needed to pass more economic stimulus, and he somehow needed to get it past a GOP-controlled House of Representatives.  Which, in effect, has meant wrapping it in spending cuts the same way you’d slip an unappetizing pill into your dog’s Alpo.

This is what Obama did in the budget talks to avoid a government shutdown a few months ago (including accepting the ineffective stimulus of the Bush tax cuts for the rich in order to keep better measures in the deal), and it would make some sense if that was what he’s trying to do now.

Sure, it would would be better if B.O. laid down a progressive gauntlet and challenged GOP budget priorities head on, daring them to oppose aggressive job-creating measures without any deficit-cutting camouflage.  But then, we all know that frontal assaults aren’t exactly Obama’s thing.

So instead we get the reluctant(?) endorsement of conservative budget frames, and a passive-aggressive approach to boosting the economy that might have been borrowed from a character in the old Popeye cartoons: “I’ll gladly pay you in budget cuts Tuesday for some stimulus today.”

Call it the Wimpy Deal.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

Could President Obama actually be prepared to hold firm to some position this time in his upcoming round of negotiations with the Congressionals?  Or is he some sort of Republican Manchurian Candidate who will just appear to have some sort of plan or convictions and then cave in on demands to cut social programs (as he did recently with the Bush Tax Cuts for the Wealthy)?  What with extending warrantless wiretapping, keeping Gitmo afloat, ‘surging’ troops in Afghanistan and keeping a sizeable number of troops in Iraq, Obama seems to be hell-bent on keeping the Bush Legacy alive!

*Update* California is a crazy bi-partisan microcosm of the Great American Stalemate.  However, under Jerry Brown’s stern governance, we’ve somehow managed to move forward on a budget before our bonds became Junk.  That’s a mixed omen, with a ray of light indicating that budget deals are possible, however the budget was largely an exercise in painful cuts to education and social services.  It wasn’t all bad, though, as it seems like Jerry was still able to piss off a few Reactionaries – some of the more radical counties want to split and form their own Hicksylvania.  I’d be all for it were it not for the creation of two more Repug Senators.

Consider yourselves warned.  You can only hide for another week.  Because next Friday, July 15, Sarah Palin’s hired hagiographic film The Undefeated (sadly, probably not based on the Iggy Pop song of the same name) will be released in multiple cities across the United States.

If the trailer (see video above) is any indication, the pseudo-documentary is chock full of the same unintentional self-parody that has made Palin herself so popular on the left side of the political spectrum.  Really, with the melodramatic opening music and silent titles proclaiming “DAUGHTER – WIFE – MOTHER – WARRIOR,” what viewer can help wondering if we’re about learn that Palin is secretly a programmed-from-birth assassin (sort of The Manchurian Candidate meets Hanna)?

You also have to love that first spoken words in the trailer are, “Like a marine, she runs toward the danger” — this about a woman whose most notorious achievement is quitting midway through her term as governor of Alaska to market herself and her family as reality-TV fodder, and who is too terrified of unscripted questions to appear in anything but the most staged public settings.

Meanwhile, in other faux-populism news, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Death to Medicare) — last seen being portrayed as a heroic, humble man of the people attending town halls in Wisconsin — got caught Wednesday night in a fancy Washington, D.C. restaurant sharing a couple of $350 bottles of wine with two “economists” (who may or may not turn out to be lobbyists).

Ryan later claimed not to have realized the wine was anywhere near that expensive, even though the waiter’s presentation of it was so elaborate that it drew the attention of nearby diners (who took photos to document Ryan’s high living).  Fortunately, one of the diners apparently confronted the congressman in time for him to pay for one of the bottles — even though he purportedly hadn’t ordered it himself — and thereby avoid trouble for accepting an illegal gift.

Kind of like those fancy clothes the Republican National Committee forced on Palin in the fall of 2008 without her knowledge, I guess.  I tell you, there’s danger everywhere when you’re a culture warrior fighting for the common folks.  But y’know, leaders like Ryan and Palin are so fearless they can’t help running toward it.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

A disheartening report from Glenn Hurowitz at Grist a couple of days ago:

Most underplayed economic story of the week: European aircraft manufacturer Airbus “trounced” the traditional U.S. behemoth Boeing at the Paris Air Show, booking a record $50 billion more in orders for new planes. The reason: commercial plane buyers’ demands for high fuel efficiency and low emissions….  Airbus racked up a whopping 730 new plane orders compared to a measly 142 for Boeing….

That giant sucking sound you hear is approximately half a million well-paying American jobs leaving Boeing factories in Seattle and other parts of America and heading to Airbus facilities in Toulouse, Seville, and Hamburg…

… As Rick Perlstein wrote in his seminal essay “The Stockticker and the Superjumbo,” Boeing is still paying for abandoning its once-successful strategy of long-term investments in innovative, groundbreaking products like the 747 jumbo jet in service of short-term profits meant to goose its quarterly earnings. Meanwhile, Airbus has maintained a decades-long commitment to the kind of painstaking, long-term R&D that helped it deliver the star of the Paris Air Show, the hyperefficient A320neo.

And it gets worse:

I wish I could report that the president was providing a counterweight to this anti-innovation attitude, in the same way he has signaled that he’s going to force American auto companies to achieve moderately ambitious increases in fuel efficiency. But just as Airbus was drubbing Boeing at the Paris Air Show, the Obama administration took the opportunity to announce that it would insist that Europe-bound flights on U.S. carriers be exempted from European laws requiring them to cut their emissions. If you can’t beat ‘em, unleash the lobbyists.

Of all the many, many disappointments the Obama administration has brought us, this personally ranks pretty high.  As a candidate, Barack Obama really seemed to grasp the potential of a “green recovery” to make economic and environmental progress at the same time — more so than the mere expedience of being a political candidate seemed to require.  But despite ongoing noises in that general direction, there has been the all-too-familiar lack of results.

When short-sighted corporate thinking meets weak-willed politics, the outcome is rarely good for the rest of us.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)