nick peelman

Link Dogged pursuit of austerity benefits…guess who?

wilwheaton:

As Radhika Balakrishnan, executive director for Rutgers’ Center for Women’s Global Leadership, pointed out on Thursday’s All In, the financial sector is doing better than ever under austerity.

“What we’re seeing is the financialization of the economy,” she said. “The economy is run by finance capital. It is not manufacturing, not working class unionized jobs that actually give people money to be able to buy things, but it’s finance capital. And profit is at an all-time high.”

This suggests another, even greater, factor driving austerity: Finance capital is not only insulated from the consequences, but stands to reap massive rewards. In Europe, for example, the ECB is using austerity to pressure the Greek government into removing labor market controls and break the country’s labor unions. They also demanded that the country institute a six-day work week. Such “reforms” open the door for international companies to provide low-wage, precarious jobs to the Greek people and extract substantial profits from their labor.

In the United States, austerity has resulted in mass public sector firings, to the detriment of public sector unions. The public sector is, of course, the last real citadel for organized labor in the United States, and by launching a prolonged assault on that citadel, the American right has successfully chipped away at what remains of the country’s organized left wing. In the place of public services and public employment, state and local governments have been forced to turn to private investment. No more so has this process been more extreme than in Michigan, where non-elected Emergency Managers have launched an orgy of privatization, sometimes going so far as to put entire school districts in private hands.

From the perspective of the financial industry and major private investors, austerity has in fact been a rousing success.

Emphasis mine.

I’ve long thought that the goal of the austerity movement isn’t balancing budgets or reducing deficits, but giving the wealthy and powerful an ongoing excuse to practice disaster capitalism. I think I may be right.

And at this point, I’m not sure that the government as we know it today is capable of fixing itself and correcting this terrible trajectory. We have a legislature that is distracting the public with bullshit social questions, while also tying up both the executive and judicial branches, neither of which should have any influence over the matter anyway. All the while we are stuck with a media obsessed with ratings and profits, and a public who simply is too apathetic and demotivated, or too concerned with the social issues to care about smart policy decisions.

Link CPAC Participant Defends Slavery At Minority Outreach Panel: It Gave ‘Food And Shelter’ To Blacks

Disgusting doesn’t begin to describe…

After the presenter, K. Carl Smith of Frederick Douglass Republicans, answered by referencing a letter by Frederick Douglass forgiving his former master, the audience member said “For what? For feeding him and housing him?” Several people in the audience cheered and applauded Terry’s outburst.

…

At one point, a woman challenged him on the Republican Party’s roots, to which Terry responded, “I didn’t know the legacy of the Republican Party included women correcting men in public.”

What a fucking dickhead.

Link The Small-State Advantage in the United States Senate

The Constitution has always given states with small populations a lift, but the scale of the gap has grown in recent decades.

Link Lawmaker in Georgia doesn't understand Internet. Also, water is wet.

He just turned one funny image into thousands, if not millions. I can see the comment threads now:

First (amendment)!!!

Dumbass.

Link OK, joking aside, this is important. Republicans have invented a history in which it has been fiscal irresponsibility all along — and far too many centrists have bought into the premise.

wilwheaton:

The reality is that we had low debt and no fiscal problem before Reagan; then an unprecedented surge in peacetime, non-depression deficits under Reagan/Bush; then a major improvement under Clinton; then a squandering of the Clinton surplus via tax cuts and unfunded wars of choice under Bush. And yes, a surge in debt once the Great Recession hit, but that’s exactly when you should be running deficits.

The point about the fake history that expunges the Clinton years is that it turns the budget into a story in which nobody is at fault because everyone is at fault, and the problem is a generic issue of runaway spending. No, it isn’t; we would have come into this crisis with very little debt if the GOP hadn’t always insisted on tax cuts.

This is not complicated.

Agreed. Especially with the part about it not being complicated.

Link Man Goes Grocery Shopping With Loaded AR-15 Assault Rifle — Because He Can | The New Civil Rights Movement

wilwheaton:

bostongrits:

Gun nuts.

This is going to get worse before it gets better, and one of these lunatics is going to end up killing someone.

This type of shit should be just as illegal as going into a crowded movie theater and yelling FIRE!

There are real, honest-to-$diety threats out there, and idiots like this make it impossible to distinguish them.