White House ~ 7 Things To Know about the Tax Deal

From the White House ~ a list of 7 important facts about the Fiscal Cliff tax deal:

The Bainport Sensata Tragedy in Illinois

pic via bainport.com
This tragedy in Illinois has been going on since back in the spring, actually, because the announcement was made then that a car parts plant in Freeport, Illinois, was going under, thanks to Bain Capital. When stories of Romney's connection to Bain came out during the Republican Primaries, many wondered if Mitt Romney would visit the workers at the Sensata car sensor plant. But of course he brushed them off and now is ignoring their continuing protests.

I'm sure he would say that they need to "pull themselves up by the bootstraps" or some kind of nonsensical old-fashioned phrase. I'm sure he thinks it is easy to watch your small town fall apart when a large business closes down. I think people like Romney forget that even the loss of a few jobs has a ripple effect as restaurants and stores close down, and schools suffer lack of tax funding (which is important, Mr. Romney, whether you care or not).

Many people might say that lots of folks in this economy have lost their jobs, what is so special about the people in Freeport? Well, not only are they victims of Bain, but they have the outrageous task of training their Chinese counterparts as Bain outsources their jobs to Asia, leaving them on unemployment. This sorry situation is what Romney wants to do to the whole economy in a nutshell - let venture capitalists sell it off piece by piece to the highest bidder, stash the money offshore in tax havens, and damn the consequences for the 47% or the 99%.

So tomorrow night in the debate when Romney points at Obama and talks about our debt held by China, I hope the President won't forget the workers in "Bainport."

From The Ed Show tonight on MSNBC:

Ed Schultz: So where does this leave all of these families? What's going to happen to Freeport, Illinois?

Worker Mary Jo Kerr: It's going to become a ghost town. That's one major company in Freeport. We really only have a few big companies and that's Honeywell, Sensata, and Titan Tires. And once Sensata goes down, it's going to be hard for anybody to find a job because there's nothing around there.

Ed: Normally when a company's not doing very well, the employees know it. Was it record profits for Sensata? Was it good, and that makes it hard to understand why this is happening?

Mary Jo Kerr: Yeah, we don't understand why this is happening. From my understanding, they liked Freeport. They liked the location. But it was 'we need more money.'

From the Freeport Rock River Times

FREEPORT, Ill. — U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., will visit “Bainport” in Freeport, Ill., at 9:45 a.m., Tuesday, Oct. 16.

Bainport is an encampment set up at Stephenson County Fairgrounds, 2250 S. Walnut Road, Freeport, by workers facing outsourcing at the Bain Capital-owned Sensata Technologies plant. Created in 2006, Sensata develops, manufactures, and sells sensors and controls for major auto manufacturers such as Ford and General Motors.

Workers at the plant have been training their Chinese replacements, who have been flown to Illinois by the company. The final layoffs are expected to be made in November. The plant employs 170.

Workers began to camp outside the plant to protest Bain’s decision to ship their jobs to China and increase the pressure on Republican presidential candidate and former Bain co-founder/CEO Mitt Romney — who still profits directly from Sensata — to help save their jobs. The workers plan to stay at the encampment until Romney agrees to help save their jobs, or, as stated in a release from the group, “until middle-class voters nationwide understand the dangers of a Romney economy for our country.”

From the Freeport Journal-Standard

Also visiting Freeport this week will be activist Reverend Al Sharpton. He is scheduled to appear at the Sensata camp on Saturday at 4 p.m. to speak to the employees. The appearances this week follow an active summer of rallies that saw the arrival of Illinois Governor Pat Quinn and former NAACP Chairman Julian Bond to Freeport.

The Sensata workers have also been involved in other acts of protest that include appearing at the Republican National Convention, a march at a fundraising event for Rep. Bobby Schilling that was attended by House Speaker John Boehner, and the attempted submission of petitions to both their employer and Romney, among other things.

Last weekend, 15 French workers from Samsonite, who lost their jobs to Bain Capital outsourcing in 2007, visited “Bainport” to show their support to the picketing workers. Sensata develops, manufactures, and sells sensors and controls for auto manufacturers. The closure of the plant will cost Freeport 170 jobs.

A Cornucopia of Debunking for GOP Theory that Obama Cooked Employment Data

pic by Brian McFadden
The jobless rate today went down to the lowest level since 2009 when Obama was sworn into office. And he gets full credit because the Republicans wouldn't lift a finger in Congress to help American get back to work.

U.S. Jobless Rate Falls to 7.8 percent

The rate declined from 8.1 percent because the number of people who said they were employed soared by 873,000 — an encouraging sign for an economy that’s been struggling to create enough jobs.
The number of unemployed Americans is now 12.1 million, the fewest since January 2009.

. . . The revisions show employers added 146,000 jobs per month from July through September, up from 67,000 in the previous three months.

The 7.8 percent unemployment rate for September matches the rate in January 2009, when Obama took office. In the months after Obama’s inauguration, the rate rose sharply and had topped 8 percent for 43 straight months.
. . . The September employment report may be the last that might sway undecided voters. The October jobs report will be released only four days before Election Day.

This is bad news for Mitt Romney, who wants everyone to believe the economy is in shambles and in need of a business guy like himself to take charge. Mitt would rather compare the U.S. to train wreck economies like Greece and Spain, and insist on cutting programs because we need "austerity." But he can't make that case if more people are going back to work.

So the conservative reaction has been predictable. As with the Poll numbers, they are attacking the messenger and attacking the humbers. The GOP is crying "Conspiracy" again because that's all they have.

From Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric:

Unbelievable jobs numbers..these Chicago guys will do anything..can't debate so change numbers
— Jack Welch (@jack_welch) October 5, 2012

Psychological projection much? Jack Welch was once accused of cooking the books for GE and at the time was described as a "modern day robber baron" much like Mitt Romney.

In fact, today all I can think about is Mitt's accountant - now there is a guy who knows how to cook the books.

Conn Carroll of the conservative Washington Examiner tweeted:

I don't think BLS cooked numbers. I think a bunch of Dems lied about getting jobs. That would have same effect.
— Conn Carroll (@conncarroll) October 5, 2012

Here are some others via BuzzFeed

This just proves what a criminal Obama is. He has lied & forced his labor dept to report 7.8% Unemployment with only 114,000 jobs created.
— Fritz Harrod (@bignels2) October 5, 2012

How do 800,000 people leave the work force; 114,000 jobs created and this is touted as good news...? Unemp rate is rigged!
— Barbara Foss (@b_bfoss) October 5, 2012

Another name for the Labor Dept's bogus "7.8 percent" unemployment number -- "Obama's October Surprise." Thanks, Hilda.
— Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) October 5, 2012

Yeah, sure ~ on the royal orders of Caesar Obama, the lockstep Bureau of Labor Statistics conspired to only call Democratic households to find out if anyone had gotten a job recently, and whoever answered the random phones in those households lied, every single one of them, because they knew Obama needed some good economic news two days after the first debate, which Romney was sure to win. *eyeroll*

Funny, ain't it, that we never heard a claim of statistics fraud when the numbers were bad for the last four years. And now suddenly they are all wrong, and everyone is shooting wildly at the humbers.

Matt Yglesias used logic to debunk attacks on the Bureau of Labor Statisticson Slate:

. . . Trustworthy economic data is a very valuable public good that serves as a useful production input for tons of private businesses. It also helps smaller-scale government agencies and nonprofits make smarter decisions. And last but by no means least, precisely because the BLS is credible presidents know that they'd take an enormous political hit if they were seen as manipulating it.

Keith Hall, former head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics said on Wall Street Journal that cooking the books is impossible, even the "Chicago Way" as Jack Welch insinuated:

“There’s nothing wrong with the numbers,” said Mr. Hall. “The only issue is the interpretation of the numbers. The numbers are what they are.”

. . . The unemployment rate estimate is derived from a survey of households, which came up with an estimate that 863,000 jobs were added for the month.

But the separate establishment survey from which the official payrolls number is derived reported a more modest seasonally adjusted gain of 114,000 jobs in September. That was below the consensus forecast of 118,000, though the previous two months were revised higher.

. . . “The household survey is much smaller. When you look at something like labor force and employment levels, the uncertainty of those numbers is much larger,” said Mr. Hall. “Within two months, the household survey could show the unemployment rate eking back up.”

Unfortunately, the debunking is coming too late for Republicans who saw "Morning Joe" on MSNBC this morning, when Scarborough spent several minutes muttering "These numbers just don't add up. It doesn't make sense."

Video via Media Matters


He seems to have missed the part about these being "revised numbers." Doh!

Mark Halperin tried to talk him down, also via Media Matters

If you go just based on Twitter right now, and the people I follow who are conservative - they're about to make a huge mistake. They're gonna say BLS numbers are horrible, some people are already saying the numbers are made up to help the president politically. They have to find a way to talk about the economy and why Governor Romney would be better, not to try to - it's exactly what they did with the polls the last two months, to attack the methodology. These numbers are good. They're not only good symbolically, they represent the economy moving in a better direction.

I'm sure we will hear more of this, the last desperate gasp of a dying party.

Paul Krugman ~ It's Depression, Not Recession

Paul Krugman in a keynote speech yesterday at the Netroots Nation Convention 2012 in Providence, Rhode Island (my slightly edited transcript).

A Recession is when things are headed down. A Depresssion is when things are down.

It's not as bad as the Great Depression but it's incredible awful. If you don't know people who are suffering then you must be living in a very rarified environment - with the Romney clan or something.



Every time I hear some politician saying we need to think about the Debt and the burden on the children, I think what about the young people right now who can't get their lives properly started?"

None of this has to be happening....We didn't have a plague of locusts. We were not hit by a tsunami. There wasn't some act of God that created this terrible situation. It was acts of man. And perhaps more importantly right now, it's easily solvable. We've seen this movie before. We know how this worked.

You tend to think that people who are demanding that we solve this thing quickly must be crazy idealists who are defying the wisdom of economic knowledge. But it's actually the other way around. It's actually the people in charge who are refusing to end this thing quickly, who are ignoring the lessons of history and rejecting economic knowledge that we know from history.

There are lessons that I thought we had learned really well like Do not slash government spending and lay off hundreds of thousands of workers in the middle of a Depression. I thought we knew that, and yet we've been ignoring all of that hard-earned knowledge.

I have seen an advance copy of the New York Times Book Review of my book . . . and the reviewer is shocked at the lack of respect I show for 'highly respected people' like Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson. There's a phrase I picked up . . . "Very Serious People" - capitol V-S-P, and we've been living under the tyranny of the Very Serious People who are partly defending class interests and partly just plain getting it wrong. Just going with their prejudices instead of what we know from textbook economics, what we know from 80 years of historical experience, and are messing this up.

We could solve this. Solving this Depression is not fundamentally an economic problem. It's a political problem. It's a problem of getting those Very Serious People out of the way and doing what we actually all ready know, which is why gatherings like this are important. Thank you all.

Paul Krugman Demolishes the Ryan Plan

Remember Eric Fehrnstrom, the hapless surrogate for Mitt Romney who made the etch-a-sketch gaffe? Well, today he was out of his depth once again on ABC's "This Week" trying to debate economics with the master, Paul Krugman, who deftly squashed the idea that the Paul Ryan budget makes economic sense, referring to it as a "fraud" and "imaginary."




And what's so delicious is that George Will also pushes and gets Fehrnstrom to admit that Romney backs the scorched-earth Ryan Plan. You'll recall that last weekend, the conservative Will expressed frustration with Romney for cozying up to "bloviating ignoramus" Trump, for which The Donald called him the "most overrated journalist alive." George got a little revenge today, helping to put Fehrnstrom on the hot seat so that Krugman could move in for the coup de grace. Politics really does make strange bedfellows these days. Who knew that George Will and Paul Krugman could be a tag-team?




Read and learn, children. This is how we do it:
Transcript from Crooks and Liars:

KRUGMAN: Well, the economy is weak. It's not terrible, but it's weak. The bitter irony here has to be for Obama, certainly for people like me, is that if the Republican answer is "let's slash spending, let's have low taxes," that's actually the policy we've been following. It's amazing, actually. Especially if you look at the last couple of years, what we've actually seen is sharply...

(CROSSTALK)

STEPHANOPOULOS: Let me show you -- we have a chart in your blog this morning.

KRUGMAN: Yeah, this is...

STEPHANOPOULOS: We created it. It shows the point you're making.

KRUGMAN: Yeah, this is real government spending, so it's federal, state and local combined, deflated, you know, adjusted for population growth and inflation, and it is plunging. It's plunging mostly because of cutbacks at the state and local level, because the aid that they were receiving in the stimulus has run out, but also because unemployment benefits have been expiring because Congress won't -- you know, Republicans in Congress won't extend them.

So in effect - and, by the way, if you extend that chart backwards, there's been nothing like this since the demobilization after the Korean War. We're actually practicing government austerity on a scale that we haven't seen in 60 years. It's not the president's policy. In effect, we've already got the policies that Republicans say they will impose if they take the election, and yet, of course, it may lead to the defeat of this president.

STEPHANOPOULOS: And that's the point Stephanie was making, so bringing it back to you, what would Governor Romney do right now -- not in the future -- right now, to get the economy moving again?

FEHRNSTROM: Well, it's not just, as Paul says, tax policy. That's part of it, of course, but it's also spending policy, it's regulatory policy. It's confronting China on their unfair trade practices. It's -- it's a whole -- it's labor policy, George.
The governor has laid out very detailed plans. People can go to mittromney.com and learn about them for themselves. But I think what we really have here...

(CROSSTALK)

KRUGMAN: ... ...I know from detailed plans and there is nothing there. There is not...

CUTTER: ... he's going to deregulate Wall Street, which we know how that turns out. We're going to go back to risky financial deals that crashed our economy. And on China, you know, we've been hearing this blustering on China for quite a while now. What exactly is the governor going to do? There's...

(CROSSTALK)

STEPHANOPOULOS: ... I want to bring in George Will.

FEHRNSTROM:  He'll do what this president has failed to do in China, which is to declare that China is a currency manipulator. Look, we're all in favor of free trade. In fact, we don't think this president has done enough to reinvigorate trade talks -- trade talks with our friends, but China is -- is robbing us blind. They're stealing...

(CROSSTALK)

KRUGMAN: I was very much for that. I've been demanding that we declare -- but the window for that has passed. Right now, the Chinese economy is tanking. So if you were thinking you were going to get a big boost out of beating up on the Chinese now, two years ago I thought was really a good time to do that. But my god, now that is totally out of date.




WILL: On another matter, I didn't hear a robust answer to George's question. Where does the governor stand, Governor Romney, on the Ryan plan? Does he endorse it?

FEHRNSTROM: Oh, he's for -- he's for -- he's for the Ryan plan. He believes it goes in the right direction. The governor has also put forward a plan to reduce spending by $500 billion by the year 2016. In fact, he's put details on the table about how exactly he would achieve that. So to say he doesn't have a plan to -- a plan to restrain government spending is just not true.

KRUGMAN: Can I say, the Ryan plan -- and I guess this is what counts as a personal attack -- but it isn't. It's not an attack on the person; it's an attack on the plan. The plan's a fraud. The plan is a big bunch of tax cuts, some specified spending cuts, basically for poor people, and then a huge magic asterisk which is supposed to turn into a deficit reduction plan, but, in fact, if you look what's actually in it, it's a deficit-increasing plan.

And so to say that -- just tell the truth that there is really no plan there, neither from Ryan, nor from Governor Romney, is just the truth. That's not -- if that's -- if that's being harsh and partisan, gosh, then I guess the truth is anti-bipartisanship.

FEHRNSTROM: So may I ask you, Paul, do you prefer the president's plan? KRUGMAN: Oh, yeah. I mean, the president -- at least it's -- you know, I don't approve of everything, but there are no gigantic mystery numbers in his stuff. We do know what he's talking about. His numbers are -- you know, all economic forecasts are wrong, but his are not -- are not insane.

These are -- these are just imaginary.

Economy Strains While "Constipation Congress" Ignores Business

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 274.88 points on Friday after the government released a lackluster unemployment report. Employment didn't fall, but it didn't go up much either.

This isn't good news for President Obama, and Mitt Romney and his surrogates will blame the weak economy on the Obama administration.

But what about members of Congress who get nothing done because they are stymied by constant filibusters, rants, nonsensical abortion laws, and other trivia from the Republicans?

In a speech in Manchester, New Hampshire, Democratic Governor Martin O'Malley of Maryland coined a colorful new term today: "Constipation Congress." And he had a few other piquant things to say as well. Washington Post reports:

“We have a constipation Congress. These Republican obstructionists wouldn’t pass gas if they thought it might help our president heal our economy...

Job creation is up. Unemployment is down. And while we still have a lot more work to do, because of President Obama’s leadership General Motors is alive and hiring and Osama bin Laden is not!

Could our nation’s jobs recovery be happening faster? Sure it could. but that would require compromise, practicality, and a focus on the common good — three concepts which the newly radicalized tea party Republican Congress is now totally incapable of grasping."

O'Malley's speech goes along with President Obama's Weekly Address entitled "It's Time for Congress to Get to Work," Obama also put the blame on the stonewalling of Congress on nearly every issue, but especially jobs programs.

Right now, this country is still fighting our way back from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The economy is growing again, but it’s not growing fast enough. Our businesses have created almost 4.3 million new jobs over the last twenty-seven months, but as we learned in this week’s jobs report, we’re not creating them fast enough. And just like last year at this time, our economy faces some serious headwinds. Gas prices are starting to come down again, but when they spiked over the last few months, it hit people’s wallets pretty hard. The crisis in Europe’s economy has cast a shadow on our own. And all of this makes it even more challenging to fully recover and lay the foundation for an economy that’s built to last.

But from the moment we first took action to prevent another depression, we knew the road to recovery wouldn’t be easy. We knew it would take time, that there would be ups and downs along the way. But we also knew that if we were willing to act wisely, and boldly, and together; if we were willing to keep at it, and never quit, we would come back stronger.

. . . I sent Congress a jobs bill last September full of the kinds of bipartisan ideas that would have put our fellow Americans back to work and helped reinforce our economy against those outside shocks. I sent them a plan that would have reduced the deficit by $4 trillion in a way that’s balanced – that pays for the job-creating investments we need by cutting unnecessary spending and asking the wealthiest Americans to pay a little more in taxes.

Since then, Congress has only passed a few parts of that jobs bill, like a tax cut that’s allowing working Americans to keep more of your paycheck every week. That was important. But Congress hasn’t acted on enough of the other ideas in that bill that would make a difference and help create jobs right now. And there’s no excuse for that. Not when so many people are looking for work. Not when so many people are struggling to pay the bills.

So my message to Congress is, get to work.

Excellent Anti-Bain Ad

Made by Crashing Vor on Daily Kos.

I'll let him do the talking . . .

Obama and Romney Fight Battle of the Bain

It's Dueling Videos today and all about the Steelworkers. The Obama campaign released a video called "Steel" about Bain Capital's negative effect on a company named GST. As a counter-punch, the Romney folks released a vid called American Dream about a company called Steel Dynamics which was created with Bain start-up money.