What more proof do you need that this never was about the budget deficit, providing jobs or anything even remotely connected to the economy, and is just a continuation of the Culture Wars of the past 2 decades?

I’m going to do this over the next few days so bear with me!

*Update 8/15/11* I’m at just over a $314 billion dollars and I haven’t finished up with Pentagon boondoggles yet, much less gotten to the wars!  Note that the Super Congress is only looking to save $2 trillion over a period of 10 years –  extrapolated over ten years, we’re probably already past $3 trillion…

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%.

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.)

*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.

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.)

Spy buddy sends me this guest post on a similar ‘mass surveillance’ system used to spy on folks abroad:

Mass Surveillance by the US Intelligence Agencies

Here is a greatly disturbing post (sounds like the stuff my schizophrenic cousin would say when he wasn’t on his meds) that summarizes a portion of Project PM Wiki. Smith describes a mass intelligence surveillance program with no government oversight that is funded by the US government and operated by federal agencies and US companies called Romas/COIN. According to Smith, Aaron Barr had a leadership role in the putting together the team of companies that bid on this contract. (Remember Barr? He resigned from his own firm after he was discovered to have planned a full-scale information war against political activists at the behest of corporate clients.)

Ms Smith describes a sophisticated mass surveillance campaign called Romas/COIN- soon to be replaced by a similar program known as Odyssey. For two years, the U.S. has been conducting mass surveillance and data mining against the Arab world. What is interesting is that despite listening into phone calls, monitoring activities of individuals, and reading emails the Intelligence community was surprised by all the uprisings in the Arab world. Hmm, they really know how to use this stuff.

Most importantly Smith notes that this program was headed up by agencies, individuals and corporations who seem to have no government oversight-despite US taxpayer funding- while having carte blanche to monitoring the public.