“A Republican Ruse”

The Republicans haven’t taken over yet but they’ve made their plans known and it won’t come as much of a surprise that their top priorities are tax cuts. One of the very first changes will be gaming the system that tracks whether or not tax cuts work. By every legitimate measure, including common sense, they don’t. The Pubs are going to change all that.

AS Republicans take control of Congress this month, at the top of their to-do list is changing how the government measures the impact of tax cuts on federal revenue: namely, to switch from so-called static scoring to “dynamic” scoring. While seemingly arcane, the change could have significant, negative consequences for enacting sustainable, long-term fiscal policies.

Whenever new tax legislation is proposed, the nonpartisanCongressional Budget Office “scores” it, to estimate whether the bill would raise more or less revenue than existing law would.

***

[The] conventional estimates do not, however, include any indirect feedback effects that tax law changes might have on overall national income. In other words, they do not incorporate macroeconomic behavioral changes.

Dynamic scoring does. Proponents point out, correctly, that if a tax proposal is large enough, then those sorts of feedback effects can aim the entire economy on a slightly different path.

“Dynamic scoring” basically allows the injection of unjustified assumptions about the future performance of the economy. IOW, adding a baseline article of faith from Reaganomics that all tax cuts on the wealthy raise revenues and if they don’t, it’s because they weren’t deep enough.

Federal deficits are on an unsustainable path (as it happens, because of undertaxation, not excessive spending). Simply cutting taxes against the headwind of structural deficits leads to lower growth, as government borrowing soaks up an ever-increasing share of savings.

The most optimistic dynamic models get around this by assuming that the world today is in fiscal equilibrium, where the deficit does not grow continuously as a percentage of gross domestic product. But that’s not true. If you add the reality of spiraling deficits into those models, they don’t work.

To make these models work, scorekeepers must arbitrarily assume either that we tax more and spend less today than is really the case — which is what they did for the Camp bill — or assume that a tax cut today will be followed by a spending cut or tax increase tomorrow. Economists describe such a move as “making counterfactual assumptions”; the rest of us call it “making stuff up.”

Again IOW, they’re going to enshrine in law a faith-based assessment mechanism guaranteed in advance to justify both their rosy predictions and their brutal get-tough-on-the-poor cuts to human services along with their go-easy-on-corporations cuts to everything from the SEC to the FDA. They will now be able to point to government-authorized conclusions that everything is fine even as it collapses around ordinary folk not rich enough to protect themselves from it.

The Republicans’ interest in dynamic scoring is not the result of a million-economist march on Washington; it comes from political factions convinced that tax cuts are the panacea for all economic ills. They will use dynamic scoring to justify a tax cut that, under conventional scorekeeping, loses revenue.

When revenues do in fact decline and deficits rise, those same proponents will push for steep cuts in government insurance or investment programs, because they will claim that the models demand it. That is what lies inside the Trojan horse of dynamic scoring.

A win-win. When their tax cuts make the economy worse, their scoring model will demand more tax cuts as a fix.

Priority #2 is likewise financially related: further weakening if not killing outright Dodd-Frank, once again allowing banks to rig their own scams.

The Dodd-Frank financial reform law was supposed to curb speculation in swaps. But as The Journal has reported, hedge funds are increasingly using swaps to wager on whether weak firms will live or die. RadioShack, the troubled consumer electronics retailer, is one of several prominent examples. In December, RadioShack’s total debt came to about $1.4 billion, but swaps outstanding on the performance of the debt totaled $23.5 billion. Similarly, J.C. Penney, the ailing department store chain, had total debt of some $8.7 billion, but swaps outstanding on the debt totaled $19.3 billion.

Those gaps suggest excessive speculation, though it is hard, if not impossible, to gauge the precise exposure of funds to big losses. What is known is that a hedge fund that is betting on a company’s default has an incentive to push it over the edge. Conversely, a fund that is betting a troubled company will not default has an incentive to keep it afloat, at least long enough to avoid a big payout. Either way, the company becomes a pawn in a financial game.

Speculative activity is likely to increase. Last month, Congress repealed an anti-speculation provision of Dodd-Frank that would have prevented federally insured banks from conducting several types of swap transactions. In addition, the Federal Reserve recently gave the banks two extra years to meet a Dodd-Frank provision requiring them to sell their investments in private equity funds and hedge funds.

And when the 2 yrs are up, the Fed will extend the deadline for 2 more yrs and then 2 more after that and so on and so on.

The Democrat minority will, of course, “compromise” by unconditionally surrendering when their corporate sponsors tell them to.

And so it goes.

David Brooks Finally Speaks Truth But Doesn’t Notice

The NYT’s block of editorial blockheads have had quite a week for themselves. First Tom Friedman embarrasses himself by writing about economics as if he knew what the word meant, and now David Brooks notices the country isn’t in very good shape after years of the austerity and corporate theft he’s been championing as solutions without actually realizing that’s what he’s doing. Pretty good trick for a normal person but a necessary skill for right-wingers. Without it their heads would explode collectively.

Wait for It…

O What a Funny World

A few little tidbits:

1) Thomas Friedman isn’t just an idiot, he’s ignorant too. But then he’s an ideologue and ideologues are professional morons.

2) The 1% can justify every single policy in their (financial) favor…but only if they lie their asses off.

3) Jeff Bezos has just made Amazon a CIA asset and himself The Bagman. In retrospect, it was predictable if not inevitable.

4)Exxon CEO and Frackmeister extraordinaire Rex Tillerson is a strong advocate, even a champion of fracking technology but only until it’s his backyard getting fracked. Then, not so much.

Rex Tillerson has joined a lawsuit to stop construction of a water tower near his $1.3 million estate on Dove Creek Road. That water would be used in fracking, a process to drill oil and gas.

Tillerson even appeared at a Bartonville Town Council meeting to speak against it.

The lawsuit claims the project would create a noise nuisance and traffic hazards.

Yah. Well. You know.

5) Budget hawks Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles – two of Pete Petersen’s most reliable anti-SocSec thugs, set up an anti-deficit group. In the Irony of Ironies category, this group is now, um, broke. (scroll down)

“We Don’t Hire the Unemployed”

The sterling-silver New York Times took a break from its long series of tear-stained stories covering the tragic consequences on the rich of our economic disintegration to notice – briefly – how destructive our attitudes toward the unemployed have become.

Ms. Barrington-Ward…was laid off from an administrative position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2008; she had earned about $50,000 that year. With the recession spurring employers to dump hundreds of thousands of workers a month and the unemployment rate climbing to the double digits, she found that no matter the number of résumés she sent out — she stopped counting in the thousands — she could not find work.

“I’ve been turned down from McDonald’s because I was told I was too articulate,” she says. “I got denied a job scrubbing toilets because I didn’t speak Spanish and turned away from a laundromat because I was ‘too pretty.’ I’ve also been told point-blank to my face, ‘We don’t hire the unemployed.’ And the two times I got real interest from a prospective employer, the credit check ended it immediately.”

Chickens, Roost – You Know the Drill

Apparently it’s finally dawning on Republicans that redistricting to win seats has its limitations. There comes a point when even your supporters have had enough destruction and death.

Their problems are threefold and intertwined. First, the GOP has become effectively agenda-less, advocating policies that lack popular support, and that they quite possibly couldn’t execute even if they controlled the government entirely.

Second, as Politico honchos Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen explain, “The party is hurting itself even more with the very voters they need to start winning back: Hispanics, blacks, gays, women and swing voters of all stripes.” That’s partially a consequence of theiragenda-less-ness, and partially a consequence of its members’ propensity to say things and advocate ideas that further alienate women and minorities.

Third, a combination of chance and poor decisions will turn the coming midterm into a referendum on issues custom tailored to energize Democratic demographics that tend to sit out midterms.

Actually there are four problems, not three. Number 4 is that it isn’t just that their policies “lack popular support”. It’s that their policies are batshit crazy and as destructive as a plague.

Economics 101: If You Take All Our Money, We Can’t Buy Anything

Twenty years ago, Michael Moore started asking, “If corporations won’t pay employees enough to live on, who do they think’s going to buy all the shit they make?”

The answer, when it came, was, basically, “The Chinese”. They thought “emerging markets” were going to take up the slack if they stopped caring about the home market, so they did. They froze wages and increased upper management incomes by some 800% in the last quarter of the 20th century and by more than 2000% over the past decade or so, most of which came directly out of the pockets of their employees. The middle class has been decimated and poverty has risen exponentially but so far there has been no corresponding rise in exports. Emerging markets have failed to emerge, at least they have failed to emerge in a way that would sacrifice their home consumers for the benefit of American corporations.

Finally, after almost 35 years of unfettered greed, the American business press (if not American business) is coming to the conclusion that it may just be possible that the deliberate corporate destruction of the American market by an American business theory that focused on short-term profits and dumped every other consideration was, well, just maybe, a mistake.

The fundamental law of capitalism is that if workers have no money, businesses have no customers. That’s why the extreme, and widening, wealth gap in our economy presents not just a moral challenge, but an economic one, too. In a capitalist system, rising inequalitycreates a death spiral of falling demand that ultimately takes everyone down.

Low-wage jobs are fast replacing middle-class ones in the U.S. economy. Sixty percent of the jobs lost in the last recession were middle-income, while 59 percent of the new positions during the past two years of recovery were in low-wage industries that continue to expand such as retail, food services, cleaning and health-care support. By 2020, 48 percent of jobs will be in those service sectors.

This from Bloomberg News, hardly a left-wing rag. What it means is that things have gotten so bad that even dyed-in-the-wool corporatists are at last attempting to face reality.

Be gentle with them. They’re new to it.

Fox Business Explains the Economy

FauxNews “critical thinker” Steve Toback (don’t take his self-description too seriously, this is Fox after all) has it all figured out. The economy sucks and we’re all broke because we spend all our money on – and this is his word, too – “crap”.

Requiem for America (Old Skool)

As Jim Hightower put it,

Step right up, folks, and take your chances in the Amazing New American Workplace. Constantly high unemployment! Low wages always! No employee bargaining power! A corporate paradise!

Indeed. They’ve got what they wanted: a paucity of jobs against a glut of workers making for a terrified workforce and a terminally insecure society, the destruction of the unions that were all that offered hope to laborers that they wouldn’t forever be trapped on the bony rack of the minimum wage, and a populace trained to think of corporate managers as heroes and Masters of the Universe even if the populace doesn’t particularly like to think of them that way.

Who Counts? Not You

OK, so you probably think that at least if you’re a dedicated cheerleader they won’t throw you under the bus even if you’re not their first priority. But you’re being naive.

Regardless of who wins the presidential election in November or what compromises Congress strikes in the lame-duck session to keep the economy from automatic tax increases and spending cuts, 160 million American wage earners will probably see their tax bills jump after Jan. 1.

That is when the temporary payroll tax holiday ends. Its expiration means less income in families’ pocketbooks — the tax increase would be about $95 billion in 2013 alone — at a time when the economy is little better than it was when the White House reached a deal on the tax break last year.

You don’t matter. The “deficit” they created matters. It’s your job to pay it off. This was never a priority, it was just a temporary gimme for show.

Independent analysts say that the expiration of the tax cut could shave as much as a percentage point off economic output in 2013, and cost the economy as many as one million jobs. That is because the typical American family had $1,000 in additional income from the lower tax.

But there is still little desire to make an extension part of the negotiations that are under way to avert the huge tax increases and across-the-board spending cuts, known as the fiscal cliff, that will start in January without a deal.

Nope. Nobody on either side gives a shit.

Many Republicans vehemently opposed its passage last year, as it would divert money from the Social Security program. Many Democrats fervently supported it last year but show no such enthusiasm now. Nancy Pelosi of California, the top House Democrat, has told reporters she thinks it should expire.

So don’t ever get your hopes up. No matter what happens, you’re never gonna be on anybody’s gift list.

The Crackpot Consensus

One of the most challenging aspects of adjusting to the NAO’s is the fact that so many of them are, well, stupid. Todd Akin’s absurd belief that women have some sort of magical control over their bodies if only they’d decide to use it is just the tip of a very large, annoying, and dangerous iceberg. The Times’ Timothy Egan gives a chapter and verse or two that barely scratch the surface but make the point quite clearly: many of the most powerful people in the country, all of them major puppets of the oligarchs, have demonstrated again and again that they have great faith but zero actual knowledge.

Low Taxes and Privatization: Failure Squared

Molly used to tell the story of her first day covering the Texas legislature for the Observer. She sat in the press box that morning watching the most powerful men in the state (they were all men in those days) enter the chamber, slap each other on the butt, and commence talking about what “a fine piece o’ tail” they had last night, you shoulda seen ‘er, some of them packing guns under their suit coats, and she thought, “This is going to be fun.” It was due to her reporting, at least in part, that the Texas legislature became a national joke.

It isn’t all that funny now. As one of the posters on a BBS forum I used to inhabit liked to point out, the agenda Bush brought with him to Washington originally was less a neocon agenda than the agenda of the Texas Republican Party, lifted from that quirky, ignorant, arrogant collection of blockheads, blind ideologues, batshit whackos, and corrupt “bidnissmen” to be transferred whole and unedited to the national stage like a small town minstrel show suddenly invading Broadway. That it has been an embarrassment to anyone who doesn’t piss in a box and a disgrace to what America used to stand for was, in hindsight, entirely predictable.

The two dumbest ideas Bush brought with him from Texas have to be a) the belief that you can slash taxes to the bone – especially corporate taxes – without hurting core social services like education and maintenance of the infrastructure, and b) the conviction that privatization of core govt responsibilities – like education and maintaining the infrastructure – would somehow be cheaper and more efficient despite the abysmal record of the corporatocracy in both areas, and despite the need to show massive profits to investors, a need the govt doesn’t have.

After nearly 7 years of untrammeled experimentation in both areas, what should have been clear from the beginning has now been proven beyond doubt: both these “policies” are dismal failures.

A. The Low-Tax Experiment

Mark Gisleson at Norwegianity links to a piece by Minneapolis Star-Tribune columnist Dave Hage titled “The damage done” in which Hage examines the effect of Minnesota’s experiment with a low-tax fiscal structure. It isn’t, as they say, a pretty picture.

Between 1997 and 2001, the Legislature passed five major tax cuts — not just temporary rebates but permanent rate reductions that reduced the state’s revenue stream by $1 billion annually and left state government, measured against the Minnesota economy, 10 percent smaller than it was in the mid-1990s.

***

Now an outside study has put Minnesota in a national context and confirmed those doubts about the low-tax experiment. Two analysts at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington identified 16 states that passed major tax cuts during the late 1990s, then studied their economic performance in the 2001-2006 recovery.

The results? On key measures such as job creation and unemployment, virtually all of the 16 lagged behind the 34 states that didn’t pass major tax cuts. Minnesota, though its economy picked up steam in 2006, still posted weaker job creation and income growth than the U.S. average over the five-year span.

“There’s just no evidence that moving to lower tax levels boosts your economic performance,” says Nicholas Johnson, one of the study’s authors.

But that isn’t all. Hage goes on to say that the price paid by citizens for a state run on the cheap extends way beyond the fact that it drains the economy of its potential vibrancy.

“While a low tax rate can be important, other things such as investment in education and health care also matter for the long run,” says James Nguyen of the Corporation for Enterprise Development, a business-sponsored research group that publishes a respected annual report card on the states. Minnesota routinely wound up on the group’s “honor roll,” even during its high-tax years.

This is precisely where Minnesota has paid a high price for the low-tax experiment. One reason Minnesota produced a surplus last year is simple austerity: General fund outlays are actually lower today than they were seven years ago, when adjusted for population growth and inflation. State aid to the public schools, adjusted for inflation, has gone down four years in a row. Thousands of families have lost eligibility for subsidized health insurance, and major transportation projects have been put on hold indefinitely.

No tax money invested in a state means less healthy citizens, more hungry ones, an education system that can’t afford to be much more than a baby-sitting service at the primary and secondary levels and a corporate job-training seminar at the college level, and an infrastructure that is falling apart due a lack of maintenance.

And all of those lacks have huge if invisible price tags attached to them: higher medical costs from the uninsured or underinsured being forced to wait until an illness reaches its critical stage to seek health care at an emergency room – the most outrageously expensive of all options; primary schools without nurses or arts programs and short on basic supplies (in the poorer communities in Massachusetts it has become fairly common for teachers to buy things like paper and pencils out of their own pockets because their schools can’t squeeze any more money past the 2 1/2% cap anti-taxers put into law 25 years ago); high schools with outdated textbooks, outdated lab equipment, outdated and inadequate computer resources, no arts programs, no elective courses, band and sports programs where parents have to pay for their kids’ uniforms and protective equipment; bridges collapsing, roads untravelable, local hospitals and clinics closing down, sewer leaks, water mains busting, and on and on and on.

This squeeze goes on even in smaller areas. The last time we had a bad winter, for example, the skimpy appropriations for road salt and plowing that are all the tax cap would allow in most communities ran out right after the first of the year. Towns and cities all over the state had to pay premium, height-of-the-season prices for salt and sand, as well as being forced to hire private construction companies at sky-high prices to clear the roads because so many municipal workers had been laid off that there weren’t enough available to do the job.

The only reason right-wing tax radicals have gotten away with this short-sighted and selfish insistence on putting their own pocketbooks ahead of the public good is that for years liberals consistently put tax money into improving education, health care, the infrastructure, etc. When the virulent anti-taxers came along, all those things were in pretty good shape and the amount of money it took to keep them up to spec was falling, allowing more investment in growth and improvements at all sectors of the economy. Instead of improving, though, we have suffered a long-term deterioration in the public sphere that is going to wind up costing us 20 times as much as maintaining what we had would have. Mark notes the sheer childishness of this approach to public un-spending:

Constructive conservatives have always known better, but the head in the sand CUT TAXES NOW! folks can’t see anything past their own bottom line, and they don’t even see that very clearly. Like children allowed to pick their own food, they can’t seem to understand that a diet of candy and cake washed down with soda pop will exact a price down the road.

And in this case, it isn’t even a price they’re paying. It’s a price they’re making us pay.

B. Privatization

A long, must-read article by Scott Shane and Ron Nixon in today’s NYT explains in exhaustive detail what outsourcing govt responsibilities to private contractors has meant.

In June, short of people to process cases of incompetence and fraud by federal contractors, officials at the General Services Administration responded with what has become the government’s reflexive answer to almost every problem.

They hired another contractor.

It did not matter that the company they chose, CACI International, had itself recently avoided a suspension from federal contracting; or that the work, delving into investigative files on other contractors, appeared to pose a conflict of interest; or that each person supplied by the company would cost taxpayers $104 an hour. Six CACI workers soon joined hundreds of other private-sector workers at the G.S.A., the government’s management agency.

Without a public debate or formal policy decision, contractors have become a virtual fourth branch of government. On the rise for decades, spending on federal contracts has soared during the Bush administration, to about $400 billion last year from $207 billion in 2000, fueled by the war in Iraq, domestic security and Hurricane Katrina, but also by a philosophy that encourages outsourcing almost everything government does.

The results?

¶Competition, intended to produce savings, appears to have sharply eroded. An analysis by The New York Times shows that fewer than half of all “contract actions” — new contracts and payments against existing contracts — are now subject to full and open competition. Just 48 percent were competitive in 2005, down from 79 percent in 2001.

¶The most secret and politically delicate government jobs, like intelligence collection and budget preparation, are increasingly contracted out, despite regulations forbidding the outsourcing of “inherently governmental” work. Scott Amey, general counsel at the Project on Government Oversight, a watchdog group, said allowing CACI workers to review other contractors captured in microcosm “a government that’s run by corporations.”

¶Agencies are crippled in their ability to seek low prices, supervise contractors and intervene when work goes off course because the number of government workers overseeing contracts has remained level as spending has shot up. One federal contractor explained candidly in a conference call with industry analysts last May that “one of the side benefits of the contracting officers being so overwhelmed” was that existing contracts were extended rather than put up for new competitive bidding.

¶The most successful contractors are not necessarily those doing the best work, but those who have mastered the special skill of selling to Uncle Sam. The top 20 service contractors have spent nearly $300 million since 2000 on lobbying and have donated $23 million to political campaigns. “We’ve created huge behemoths that are doing 90 or 95 percent of their business with the government,” said Peter W. Singer, who wrote a book on military outsourcing. “They’re not really companies, they’re quasi agencies.” Indeed, the biggest federal contractor, Lockheed Martin, which has spent $53 million on lobbying and $6 million on donations since 2000, gets more federal money each year than the Departments of Justice or Energy.

¶Contracting almost always leads to less public scrutiny, as government programs are hidden behind closed corporate doors. Companies, unlike agencies, are not subject to the Freedom of Information Act. Members of Congress have sought unsuccessfully for two years to get the Army to explain the contracts for Blackwater USA security officers in Iraq, which involved several costly layers of subcontractors.

Yet in spite of abundant proof that privatization is a miserable and expensive failure, radical Republicans simply won’t learn from their mistake. They’re pushing for even more privatization.

Let’s return for a moment to Texas, the birthplace of mindless corporate control of govt. Gov Rick Perry announced last week that he wants to sell off to a private company the single most lucrative revenue stream in Texas history: the state lottery. San Antonio Express-News columnist Carlos Guerra explains why this is such a dumb notion.

[T]he idea is to sell the Texas Lottery for a huge wad of cash, all at once. Of course, the state would also relinquish Lottery revenues forever — or, at best, for a very long time.

***

[H]ow wise would it be to sell a lottery that has generated more than $13 billion for the state since 1992, $5 billion of which has gone to schools since 1997, when all of its revenues were earmarked for schooling Texas’ children?

That $5 billion may be only a small part of the miserly sum Texas spends on public schools.

But if we sell the lottery, how exactly will we replace that money once the big up-front payment has been blown? What will be next?

Will we then sell off future property tax or sales-tax revenues, or future revenues from hunting and fishing licenses?

That may sound silly but to Texas conservatives like Perry and Bush, nothing’s off the table. It is an article of faith with them that all privatization, no matter how idiotic or counter-productive, is ipso facto better than govt control.

Caught between these two deadly conservative illusions, we – the people, the taxpayers – are going to be stuck with the bills for boosting stratospheric corporate earnings out of our pockets that the investor class will transfer to its own already-bulging wallet while at the same time suffering a steady decline in services and programs for us and our kids. In other words, we pay a lot more and get a lot less.

That’s insane.

That’s About the Size of It

Unclear on the Concept

Even the brightest of left-wing commentators can’t seem to see the forest for the trees even while they’re explaining what a forest is. Apparently our vaunted “reality-based community” just can’t get its head around the reality of the Dem sell-out to Wall Street.

Take Glenn Greenwald, a very smart guy who’s come closer than most to admitting the obvious.  Here he has little difficulty figuring out the reasons for Republican pro-corporate policies.

There are few more bitter ironies than watching the Republican Party — controlled at its core by the very business interests responsible for the country’s vast and growing inequality; responsible for massive transfers of wealth to the richest; and which presided over and enabled the economic collapse — now become the beneficiaries of middle-class and lower-middle-class economic insecurity.

(emphasis added)

Yet when it comes to the Dems, he just can’t bring himself to admit what it is so easy to see in the Pubs.

That crisis presented a huge opportunity for Obama and the Democrats to bring about real change in Washington — the central promise of his campaign — by capitalizing on (and becoming the voice of) populist anger and using it to wrestle away control from Wall Street and other financial and corporate elites who control Washington.  Had they done so, they would have been champions of populist rage rather than its prime targets.  But, as John Judis argues in his excellent New Republic piece, they completely squandered that opportunity.  Rather than emphatically stand up to the bankers and other oligarchical thieves, they coddled and served them, and thus became the face of the elite interests oppressing ordinary Americans rather than their foes.  How can an administration represented by Tim Geithner and Larry Summers — and which specializes in an endless stream of secret deals with corporate lobbyists and sustains itself with Wall Street funding — possibly maintain any pretense of populist support or changing how Washington works?  It can’t.

My dear Glenn, it isn’t supposed to. OK, it “maintained a pretense” for a number of years and still does play the kabuki you see through like glass when Republicans do it, a sort of pretense-dance that doesn’t fool anyone. So why can’t you see through it when the Dems do it and understand that the reason is identical: the New Democrat is owned and controlled by the exact same interests who own and control the GOP. Otherwise, nothing Obama and the New Dems have done makes any sense whatever, as you said yourself.

But the Democratic Party’s failure/refusal/inability to be anything other than the Party of Tim Geithner — continuing America’s endless, draining Wars while plotting to cut Social Security, one of the few remaining guarantors of a humane standard of living — renders them unable to offer answers to angry, anxious, resentful Americans.

“Failure/refusal/inability”? Just can’t bring yourself to say it out loud, eh? That’s too bad because your and other progressives’ failure/refusal/inability to face the Awful Truth about the New Right-wing Dems is simply going to prolong the agony.

Pretending It’s All Normal

Oh, dear. Well, we knew it was going to take a while for people to start recognizing that the transfer of wealth to the top by the political class was neither an accident nor mere incompetence but a deliberate sell-out masquerading as one, the other, or both. A couple of examples provided by Mark at Norwegianity should suffice to make the point.