This hasn't been a very good week for the one percenters, has it? Anti-NATO protesters chanting outside their cozy dinners, bloggers releasing the details of ALEC's latest schemes, people showing up at Timothy Geithner's door to bitch, bitch, bitch! Don't they know who he is - and who his friends are? I guess the National People's Action and National Domestic Workers Alliance don't really care:

Yesterday, more than 1,000 clergy, homeowners, students, family farmers, unemployed workers and community leaders with National People’s Action and National Domestic Workers Alliance went to Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner’s home to demand he support a Robin Hood tax and a thorough investigation of the bankers who caused the mortgage crisis.

“We didn’t want to be at Geithner’s house,” Bobby Tolbert of VOCAL-NY, an affiliate of NPA and a leader at the action. “But we want a treasury secretary that stands with people over bankers. Geithner has consistently undermined proposals for a Robin Hood tax and stalled the mortgage fraud task force investigation.”

Barb Kalbach, a family farmer and member of Iowa CCI, an NPA affiliate, said community leaders have met with Geithner before but little progress has been made to ease the crushing impact of the mortgage and financial crisis on the American people.

Geithner must “quit protecting the big banks, write down the mortgages and keep us in our homes and stop the foreclosure crisis around the U.S.,” Kalbach said speaking into a microphone while standing on Geithner’s driveway. “Right now, today, he continues to impede the process of investigating the banks that crashed our economy. And he’s blocking a tiny tax of less than half of one percent. It’s small change for Wall Street, but big change for America.”

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The most critical battle in this election year is the battle over Wall Street. Candidates all over the place, from the high profile candidates like Elizabeth Warren to a slew of others all over the country, are battling over who is on Wall Street’s side, who wants to keep bailing them out, and who is pushing them to go to jail. But nowhere is this battle being played out more prominently than in the race for the White House.

The Obama campaign is doing a major push in the coming weeks on Mitt Romney’s sordid history at the helm of Bain Capital. His fellow Republicans called it vulture capitalism, and they were right. Mitt bought companies (many of them doing just fine at the time he bought them), loaded them up with massive amounts of debt that Bain could write off on their taxes, in many cases destroyed and outsourced jobs and cut pay and benefits, and then frequently carved them up and sold off the pieces to maximize short-term profits. A few of these companies ended up surviving this brutal process and becoming more profitable, and we will hear a lot from Mitt about those examples. But way too many times, Mitt and Bain left these companies, and especially their workers, far worse for the wear, leaving behind a lot of shattered lives in the process, while Mitt and his fun-loving pals stuffed money in their pockets and walked away. High School wasn’t the only place Mitt brutalized those weaker than him, and he enjoyed doing it.

Bain Capital was Wall Street at its worst. But the cutthroat, anything-goes-in-the-pursuit-of-one-more-dollar culture at Bain has infected our entire banking system. The Obama campaign is right to attack on Bain and on the culture of Wall Street; it is in my view their single most powerful attack line. However, that attack will be undercut unless they buttress their own credibility on taking on Wall Street. Republicans aren’t going to hesitate coming after Obama hard on his ties to Wall Street (ironically with a lot of Wall Street money) in order to weaken the campaign’s credibility when they attack Bain, and we are seeing signs of that right now.

Look at how the issue has played out in recent days. Over the course of the last week, we have seen Jamie Dimon twisting himself into a pretzel trying to explain why his bank’s dangerous and irresponsible trades don’t merit any regulation, stories on how the Obama campaign is being hurt by not being tougher on Wall Street, like this one from Politico, a major new ad campaign by a Republican group attacking Obama for his ties to Wall Street, and new polling paid for by an anti-Wall Street coalition showing Obama’s numbers on housing/banking issues in swing states being pretty bad. These issues are clearly going to be huge in this campaign, and the Republicans will do everything in their power to exploit any Obama weakness in this area.

The Obama team, in the White House and in the campaign, in order to win on the Bain attack, needs to face—and turn around —the perception that the administration has been weak on Wall Street. They need to be willing to shed past caution and take Wall Street titans head on.

One of the toughest problems they have to work through is that the most visible vehicle for action on holding Wall Street accountable is the financial fraud task force announced with great fanfare at the State of the Union. This task force raised hopes that an aggressive investigation was forthcoming, that perhaps some of the big bankers who intentionally pumped up the housing market and then dumped the securities, would be brought to justice. But the best case scenario (and that is only if things really start moving) is that indictments won’t start rolling out until September, and that is a very long time to wait given the narrative being written as we speak on the Wall Street issue. And even in terms of that best case scenario, unfortunately questions continue to be raised by sources I am talking to about whether the DOJ is slow-walking this investigation, whether enough resources are being given to the task force, and whether key staff at the White House are paying enough attention. Those questions ultimately won’t be answered until the task force starts to produce something tangible, and if we have to wait until the fall, these questions are going to keep building. The administration should act right now to give the DOJ much more in the way of staff resources to the task force, and the President and White House senior staff need to send signals that they care about what is going on and that this is a high priority for them. If, for example, the DOJ is slow-walking, the White House needs to lean hard on the DOJ to make sure they aren’t. It seems like politics 101 to me to make sure the task force has the person-power to be successful in its work, but they are failing the test.

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Credit: Wall Street Journal

After this week's election results in France and Greece, press, pundits and politicians on both sides of the Atlantic are questioning the future of draconian austerity policies in Europe. As well they should. Euro-region unemployment has reached its highest levels in 15 years. Across the channel, David Cameron's Tories have led the UK back into recession, with joblessness there forecast to increase through 2016.

But while the U.S. economy under President Obama continues to outperform the austerians in Europe, American growth and employment numbers could have been much better. Better, that is, if steep cuts by state and local governments hadn't undone the indisputable job creation benefits of the federal stimulus. Thanks to intransigent Republican governors and their obstructionist GOP allies in Congress, the shrinking American public sector has slowed the recovery from the Bush recession and added a full point to the U.S. unemployment rate.

That's the word from Tuesday's Wall Street Journal, where Justin Lahart explained that the "unemployment rate without government cuts: 7.1%." While the Labor Department's establishment survey shows 586,000 government jobs at all levels have been lost since December 2008, the more volatile household survey of unemployment suggests the total might be much, much worse:

In the three months ended April, it shows that there were an average 20.3 million people engaged in government work, 1.2 million fewer than the average for the three months ended December 2008. That is more than double the job losses registered by the establishment survey.

The unemployment rate would be far lower if it hadn't been for those cuts: If there were as many people working in government as there were in December 2008, the unemployment rate in April would have been 7.1%, not 8.1%.

Back in March, Paul Krugman expressed the same point, but with some inconvenient historical context for the Party of Reagan. "In fact, if it weren't for this destructive fiscal austerity," Krugman explained, "Our unemployment rate would almost certainly be lower now than it was at a comparable stage of the 'Morning in America' recovery during the Reagan era."

We're talking big numbers here. If government employment under Mr. Obama had grown at Reagan-era rates, 1.3 million more Americans would be working as schoolteachers, firefighters, police officers, etc., than are currently employed in such jobs.

And once you take the effects of public spending on private employment into account, a rough estimate is that the unemployment rate would be 1.5 percentage points lower than it is, or below 7 percent -- significantly better than the Reagan economy at this stage.

A month ago, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) showed how much better with the chart above. Noting that the private sector had gained 2.8 million jobs while federal, state and local governments shed 584,000 just since June 2009, EPI concluded that the public sector job losses constituted "an unprecedented drag on the recovery":

"The current recovery is the only one that has seen public-sector losses over its first 31 months."

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This is why we can't have nice things. Former Bain Capital executive Edward Conard--showing that the .01 percent have their finger on the pulse of America--wrote a book declaring that massive income inequality is actually a good thing.

Conard understands that many believe that the U.S. economy currently serves the rich at the expense of everyone else. He contends that this is largely because most Americans don’t know how the economy really works — that the superrich spend only a small portion of their wealth on personal comforts; most of their money is invested in productive businesses that make life better for everyone. “Most citizens are consumers, not investors,” he told me during one of our long, occasionally contentious conversations. “They don’t recognize the benefits to consumers that come from investment.”

This is the usual defense of the 1 percent. Conard, however, has laid out a tightly argued case for just how much consumers actually benefit from the wealthy. Take computers, for example. A small number of innovators and investors may have earned disproportionate billions as the I.T. industry grew, but they got that money by competing to constantly improve their products and simultaneously lower prices. Their work has helped everyone get a lot more value. Cheap, improved computing helps us do our jobs more effectively and, often, earn more money. Countless other industries (travel, telecom, entertainment) use that computing power to lower their prices and enhance their products. This generally makes life more efficient and helps the economy grow.

The idea that society benefits when investors compete successfully is pretty widely accepted. Dean Baker, a prominent progressive economist with the Center for Economic and Policy Research, says that most economists believe society often benefits from investments by the wealthy. Baker estimates the ratio is 5 to 1, meaning that for every dollar an investor earns, the public receives the equivalent of $5 of value. The Google founder Sergey Brin might be very rich, but the world is far richer than he is because of Google. Conard said Baker was undercounting the social benefits of investment. He looks, in particular, at agriculture, where, since the 1940s, the cost of food has steadily fallen because of a constant stream of innovations. While the businesses that profit from that innovation — like seed companies and fast-food restaurants — have made their owners rich, the average U.S. consumer has benefited far more. Conard concludes that for every dollar an investor gets, the public reaps up to $20 in value. This is crucial to his argument: he thinks it proves that we should all appreciate the vast wealth of others more, because we’re benefiting, proportionally, from it.

Let's hear it for the Chicago School of Economics claptrap. For thirty plus years we've been hearing this and it yet the economy gets worse and worse for not only the 99 percent, but for the country as well. We went to the biggest creditor nation to the biggest debtor nation. The economy isn't driven by innovation and risk, you selfish ass. Let's stop perpetuating this meme once and for all.

The economy is driven by demand. Period. Full stop. All the innovation and risk in the world means nothing if people can't afford to purchase the products.

As Thom Hartmann puts it:

The Republicans got what they wanted from Wanniski's work. They held power for thirty years, made themselves trillions of dollars, cut organized labor's representation in the workplace from around 25 percent when Reagan came into office to around 8 of the non-governmental workforce today, and left such a massive deficit that some misguided "conservative" Democrats are again clamoring to shoot Santa with working-class tax hikes and entitlement program cuts.

I am sick and tired of these wealthy, selfish elites getting a platform to rationalize their avarice when we have demonstrable proof that all this "job creators" and "innovators" driving the economy is nothing but bovine excrement. Where are the damn jobs? Why are wages stagnating? Why is it that in the wealthiest nation in the world 1 in 5 children are going to bed hungry or malnourished?

Tell me, Mr. Conard, what innovation did you provide to the country when you acquired and broke up companies? Yes, some products have reduced in price due to innovation (it's lovely if you can afford a big screen plasma TV for under a grand, or get a laptop for under $500...but the number of American families who can afford that are falling dramatically) but other costs have gone up dramatically, like health care and education. But those facts are inconvenient to Conard:

More to the point, Conard doesn't seem to understand the negative consequences of income inequality, certainly not in any form beyond an abstract red line on a graph. Viewing the economy simply as risk and reward divides the population into rich and not-rich, rather than increasingly wealthy and vastly expanding poor. It collapses the lower and middle classes into a monolith of moral distinction; they're simply "not innovators," a label that occludes everything awful about poverty, from quality of life to its cyclical and self-reinforcing nature. Conard's model also assumes lower prices are a financial salve in and of themselves. But simply because food is cheaper does not mean that someone living below the poverty line can afford enough of it, especially as median incomes decline along with prices. And Timothy Noah points out that while the prices of goods have declined in the past few decades, the prices of other, more important services, like higher education and health care, have gotten drastically more expensive. How a shrinking middle class, having to work longer hours to keep itself healthy and increasingly unable to afford education, creates a greater amount of innovators is something Conard doesn't address. Not only do innovators suffer when an enervated society can't afford to purchase their products, but innovators themselves have to come from somewhere. The income inequality that Conard endorses as the reward for innovators is the very same process that prevents future innovators from coming up. Conard waves many of these concerns away. He came from a solidly middle class family and built up a massive personal fortune, and suffers from the biographical delusions of many self-made men, roughly: I did it, therefore everybody else can, too.

Too bad that Conard's self-serving rationalizations actively prevent that from happening.

Once again, let's give huge hosannas to Up with Chris Hayes for having a conversation you won't see on the corporate media (suck it, David Gregory) and for having enough respect for both the subject and the audience to not try to give it a cursory "both sides" treatment for six minutes before moving onto another topic.

Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson set out to document the commonalities of struggling nations and hit on a single point with encompasses much of what we see as unrest in the rest of the world and the origins of the uprisings of the labor unions and Occupy protests here: the willful promotion of economic inequality by a small number of economic elites.

Acemoglu and Robinson’s answer is straightforward – it all depends on institutions. Successful nations have good institutions that are “inclusive” and “pluralistic” and create incentives for people to work hard and invest in the future. Unsuccessful states, on the other hand, are characterized by “extractive” or “absolutist” institutions that economically and politically benefit a small group of elites at the expense of everyone else.

I think this quote that Chris Hayes cites from the book is the money quote:

Poor countries are poor because those who have power make choices that create poverty. They get it wrong not by mistake or ignorance but on purpose.

While Acemoglu and Robinson focused on the developing world, there are clear parallels to the United States. While simultaneously being the wealthiest nation in the world, the US also bears ownership to the fact that one in three Americans lives at or near the poverty level, one in four children suffer from food insecurity and homelessness rates rising in major population centers. Clearly, that wealth is not trickling down, no matter what Milton Friedman theorized.

We see it in the nations trying "austerity" measures, which by and large burden the lower economic ranks significantly by cutting services to them with little to no sacrifice from those at the top of the economic ladder. Like the mitas in Peru, these are systems set up by elites to benefit them and with no protections to the workers. And they become institutionalized, used by whichever party is in power.

And that is once again (my pet meme) where our media fails us (Chris Hayes excepted, naturally). Because this growing inequality is NEVER discussed. These systems that hurt the economically impoverished are still discussed as potential solutions, even though we have historical evidence that they don't work. And never, ever are historical parellels, precedents or successes brought up. Bob Schieffer isn't going to bring up the New Deal works that got Americans working again, instead of tax cuts for the robber barons. David Gregory won't ask Republican strategists about how the Glass Steagall Act protected Americans' savings accounts for decades. There's no way Chris Wallace would point out that lowering the Medicare age eligibility could actually be a way to increase employment and dramatically stimulate the economy.

Happily for us, Acemoglu feels more optimistic about our outlook. We've pulled ourselves out of one great depression, and we can do it again. But it's going to take an uprising within the system to do so.

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Willard gave a speech Tuesday night in Manchester, New Hampshire that was more than fact-free than usual.

This President is putting us on a path where our lives will be ruled by bureaucrats and boards, commissions and czars. He’s asking us to accept that Washington knows best – and can provide all.

Reality: government jobs have decreased under Obama more than they did under Reagan. Strange way to "put us on a path" to the government taking over everything, isn't it?

We’ve already seen where this path leads. It erodes freedom. It deadens the entrepreneurial spirit. And it hurts the very people it’s supposed to help. Those who promise to spread the wealth around only ever succeed in spreading poverty. Other nations have chosen that path. It leads to chronic high unemployment, crushing debt, and stagnant wages.

This is just ahistorical. The top marginal tax rate during one of the most prosperous eras in US history -- the three decades after WWII -- was as high as 91 percent. The middle class thrived and the poverty rate declined. And for six years of the Reagan administration, the highest tax rate was 40 percent higher than it is now.

Willard might as well claim that America fought France during the Revolutionary War and that the slaves were freed by Zachary Taylor.

Also, tell Germany higher taxes and more government leads to rampant poverty. Tell Sweden.

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So, George Will actually said this on This Week:

WILL: We have a president who believes, because he says so, that ATMs and airport ticket kiosks cause unemployment. So that gives you some sense of his grasp of how the economy works.

To my amazement, not one person at that table blinked an eye or even attempted to make a correction. It was amazing to see Will get away with that little snarky meme which is entirely untrue.

So here's my correction, just for the record. This is what Barack Obama said about ATMs and airport ticket kiosks in his major economic speech in Kansas last December. The one that was so powerful and true that the right wing had to focus on this one section, take it out of context, distort it, then use their Fox News tool to mock it along with the right wing blog network out there:

Today, over 100 years later, our economy has gone through another transformation. Over the last few decades, huge advances in technology have allowed businesses to do more with less, and it’s made it easier for them to set up shop and hire workers anywhere they want in the world. And many of you know firsthand the painful disruptions this has caused for a lot of Americans.

Factories where people thought they would retire suddenly picked up and went overseas, where workers were cheaper. Steel mills that needed 100 -- or 1,000 employees are now able to do the same work with 100 employees, so layoffs too often became permanent, not just a temporary part of the business cycle. And these changes didn’t just affect blue-collar workers. If you were a bank teller or a phone operator or a travel agent, you saw many in your profession replaced by ATMs and the Internet.

This is what he said, and it's true. Every word of it. Don't take my word for it, wingers. You can read it in one of your favorite publications, BusinessWeek. And it's not going to stop with bank tellers, directory assistance operators and travel agents. As I write this, ALEC is working alongside many state legislatures to make teachers obsolete, or at least, teachers who belong to a union. I cite as evidence their most recent "School Report Card," a 140-page document which includes model legislation and bragging rights to how they're changing the entire landscape of public education. This report card was funded by Richard Mellon Scaife's Allegheny Foundation alongside the Gleason Foundation, another right-wing school choice private foundation.

After grading each state on whether its education policy comports with the privatization movement's idea for union-busting and efficient, market-based education, ALEC argues passionately for the value of online learning. Indeed, online schools are a huge focal point of the entire report. Here's just a little taste:

Around the country, states and localities are trying to do more with less. Many lament the need to cut spending on education, wrongly assuming that more money is the key to student achievement. The good news is that increasing the use of information technology to support or provide instruction can significantly improve efficiency and lower governments’ costs for teaching students.

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Rick Santorum has finally sauntered off the big stage, leaving him with plenty of time on his hands to harass high-school girls about their skirt length and bark at the moon about its nocturnal promiscuity.

You'd think it would be high times for Team Romney. But you'd be wrong.

What once seemed like it would be the GOP's race to lose, or at the very least a spirited general election contest, has seen Mitt Romney and what remained of his party's brand deconstructed and defenstrated. To put it in Yogi-Berra parlance, for the Romney Campaign,"it got late early out there."

Sure Santorum is technically gone, but he'll be with Romney for the rest of this race. Every time the former Massachusetts Governor has to answer to independent women in the Milwaukee or Philadelphia suburbs about why he'd "get rid" of Planned Parenthood," and explain to Latino families in Las Vegas and Phoenix why he'd "veto" the Dream Act, the ever-cherubic apparition of Santorum will be smiling gaily over his shoulder.

There is no doubt that some things are beyond Romney's control. The falling unemployment rate. The Dow's hitting and now hovering around 13,000. The delay in creating those 3 jobs building the car elevator thingy that takes you to the stadium-sized basement in Romney's 3rd house. These were all unexpected.

But not putting Santorum away early even while outspending him like 9:1, so that the social-issue firebrand could stick around and pull the primary so far right that Vladimir Zhirinovsky would have seemed moderate. Mitt has only himself and his severely marvelous personality to thank for that.

The end result—because of Santorum's squatting in the race as long as he did, while taking a rhetorical hatchet to Romney in much the same language as Democrats have—Romney is so unpopular right now if his dog Seamus were still around he might put Romney in the dog kennel on top of the car.

According to CNN polling, the Governor will be the only presidential candidate since 1996 to exit the primaries with a net negative approval rating. If you want the thumbnail sketch, just take a look at North Carolina.

This is a state President Obama barely won in 2008, bringing it into swing state territory for the first time in a generation of electing right-winger Jesse Helms to the Senate consistently. Changing demographics have moved the state to the Left, no doubt, but going into this election most observers would call it a lean-Republican state if they were being honest.

Yet, at this point, Obama is up 5 points, 49 percent to 44 percent. But it is the internals of this poll, which must look to Romney like they've been infected by Ebola, that tell the story of how badly Romney is doing. He only is viewed positively by 29 percent of voters in the Tarheel State, with a whopping 58 percent viewing him unfavorably.

Basically, he'd have to make a pretty steep climb just to reach the favorability level of Kanye West, or Encephalitis.

It is not over yet for Romney, as there are many unpredictable things that can happen (think terrorist attack, economic crash, or mass hypnosis of American voters). But one thing is for sure—he'd better start Etch A Sketching, stat.

This piece was first published at Al Jazeera English

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Herman Cain released yet another "Sick of Stimulus" commercial Friday, and it's as bizarre as the first two.

In the commercial, a farmer is feeding his chickens and is attacked by the birds in a scene that could be straight out of a Hitchcock movie. The farmer is then pecked to death.

"This is the average American taxpayer feeding big government," says the same little girl who appeared in the previous two commercials.

It seems the metaphor is to liken "Big Government" to the chickens, with the government's need for taxes as ravenous as the chickens' appetites.

I'm sure sick of Republicans complaining about "Big Government" when it comes to raises taxes on the rich and then "crickets" when asked if legislation requiring trans-vaginal ultrasounds isn't also big government.

As in previous Cain commercials, the young girl closes out the commercial by asking, "Any questions?" A macabrel depiction of the farmer's corpse raises his bony hand.

The first Sick of Stimulus spot was released in February and showed the same little girl throwing a goldfish on the ground.

"This is the economy," the young girl says. As the fish flops around on the ground, the girl then throws water on the fish and says, "This is the economy on stimulus." The commercial also ends with the girl asking, "Any questions?" Cain stated the goldfish was not harmed.

In the second commercial, the girl places a bunny into a straw bed and says, "This is small business under the current tax code." The rabbit bed then hurls the bunny (now replaced by a fake bunny) into the air. Similar to skeet shooting, the fake bunny is then shot by an actor dressed in a suit.

This spot also ends with the girl asking, "Any questions?"

All three commercials close with a shot of Cain standing on a bluff, staring out over an animated barren rocky landscape, head turned away from the camera.

These are not the first unusual commercials Cain has released. Campaign manager Mark Block ended a spot by puffing on a cigarette and blowing smoke toward the camera in a now much-parodied commercial.

The former CEO of Godfather's Pizza, who withdrew from the presidential campaign after allegations of infidelity, is also organizing an event called "Cain's Revolution on the Hill" in Washington on April 16 to protest the tax code.

Cain has endorsed fellow Georgian Newt Gingrich for president.

Now that the Dow is 60 percent higher than when Obama took office and the jobs picture is getting better every month, Republicans have a problem. They can't simply talk about how terrible the economy is, because all the headlines are saying it's getting better.

So Willard introduced a new twist. The economy is recovering from the Bush/Cheney Recession, he said, but not because of Obama.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said today President Barack Obama’s policies have harmed the U.S. economy, hindered its recovery and may cause damage for years.

“The Obama administration’s assault on our economic freedom is the principal reason why the recovery has been so tepid,” Romney said in a speech at the University of Chicago the day before the Illinois primary, which polls indicate he’s favored to win.

“If we don’t change course now, the assault on freedom could damage our economy and the well-being of American families for decades to come,” he said.

One wonders which "assault" on our "economic freedom" Willard finds most worrisome. Do you think it's the historically-low taxes, the record corporate profits, or the health care law that was modeled after his own, that doesn't take effect until 2014?

At any rate, I'm sure the answer is more tax cuts for rich people. And of course, fewer regulations.

“Day by day, job-killing regulation by regulation, bureaucrat by bureaucrat, he’s crushing the dream and the dreamers,” said Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts and co-founder of the Bain Capital LLC private-equity firm.

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