Krugman: Plutocrats Feeling Persecuted

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: September 26, 2013

Robert Benmosche, the chief executive of the American International Group, said something stupid the other day. And we should be glad, because his comments help highlight an important but rarely discussed cost of extreme income inequality — namely, the rise of a small but powerful group of what can only be called sociopaths.

For those who don’t recall, A.I.G. is a giant insurance company that played a crucial role in creating the global economic crisis, exploiting loopholes in financial regulation to sell vast numbers of debt guarantees that it had no way to honor. Five years ago, U.S. authorities, fearing that A.I.G.’s collapse might destabilize the whole financial system, stepped in with a huge bailout. But even the policy makers felt ill used — for example, Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, later testified that no other episode in the crisis made him so angry.

And it got worse. For a time, A.I.G. was essentially a ward of the federal government, which owned the bulk of its stock, yet it continued paying large executive bonuses. There was, understandably, much public furor.

So here’s what Mr. Benmosche did in an interview with The Wall Street Journal: He compared the uproar over bonuses to lynchings in the Deep South — the real kind, involving murder — and declared that the bonus backlash was “just as bad and just as wrong.”

You may find it incredible that anyone would, even for an instant, consider this comparison appropriate. But there have actually been a series of stories like this. In 2010, for example, there was a comparable outburst from Stephen Schwarzman, the chairman of the Blackstone Group, one of the world’s largest private-equity firms. Speaking about proposals to close the carried-interest loophole — which allows executives at firms like Blackstone to pay only 15 percent taxes on much of their income — Mr. Schwarzman declared, “It’s a war; it’s like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.”

more

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/27/opinion/krugman-plutocrats-feeling-persecuted.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130927&_r=0

Goodwill Fires &Presses Felony Charges Against employee For Giving Discounts To poorest

By Jonathan Vankin, Fri, September 27, 2013
Goodwill Industries says its mission is to help people, but sometimes there’s a limit on how much good will is enough.

When an employee at Goodwill’s store in Naples, Fla., started handing out freelance discounts to the shops poorest customers, Goodwill not only fired the young man, the company called the cops and now has him up on felony theft charges.

"I wasn't actually stealing,” 19-year-old Andrew Anderson told TV station WBBH. “Goodwill is a giving and helping company, so I took it upon to myself to be giving and helping because I feel people deserve it.”

Anderson worked behind the counter at the Naples Goodwill outlet. He would often see the community’s poorest people come into the store, looking to buy clothes but with only a few bucks to their name.


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http://www.opposingviews.com/i/society/goodwill-fires-presses-felony-charges-against-andrew-anderson-19-giving-discounts-stores

Friday TOON Roundup 5 - Pope

Friday TOON Roundup 4 - Guns

Friday TOON Roundup 3 -Economy and Food Stamps

Friday TOON Roundup 2 -G-Dope

Friday Toons: Pablum Cruz

Gov. Beshear of Kentucky: "Get over it ... and get out of the way so I can help my people."

My State Needs Obamacare. Now.
By STEVE BESHEAR
Published: September 26, 2013

FRANKFORT, Ky. — SUNDAY morning news programs identify Kentucky as the red state with two high-profile Republican senators who claim their rhetoric represents an electorate that gave President Obama only about a third of its presidential vote in 2012.

So why then is Kentucky — more quickly than almost any other state — moving to implement the Affordable Care Act?

Because there’s a huge disconnect between the rank partisanship of national politics and the outlook of governors whose job it is to help beleaguered families, strengthen work forces, attract companies and create a balanced budget.

It’s no coincidence that numerous governors — not just Democrats like me but also Republicans like Jan Brewer of Arizona, John Kasich of Ohio and Rick Snyder of Michigan — see the Affordable Care Act not as a referendum on President Obama but as a tool for historic change.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/27/opinion/my-state-needs-obamacare-now.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130927&_r=1&

Mt. Flushmore

Five possible ways around the Debt Ceiling

They know this because there were at least four other options that were offered in the blogosphere and the news media during the 2011 debt limit crisis, three of them at CNN, that a well-informed White House might have been expected to know about. The four options were:

1. a selective default strategy by the Executive, prioritizing not paying for things that Congress needed, and perhaps not paying debt to the Fed when it falls due and working with the Fed to get the $1.6 Trillion in bonds that it was holding canceled;

2. an exploding option involving selling a 90-day option to the Fed for purchasing some Federal property for $ 2 Trillion. Then when Congress lifts the debt ceiling, the Treasury could buy back the option for one dollar, or the Fed could simply let the option expire;

3. using the authority of a 1996 law to mint proof platinum coins with arbitrary face values in the trillions of dollars to fill the Treasury General Account (TGA) with enough money to cease issuing debt instruments, and even enough to pay off the existing debt; and

4. using the authority of the 14th Amendment to keep issuing debt in defiance of the debt ceiling, while declaring that the debt ceiling legislation was unconstitutional because it violated the 14th Amendment in the context of Congressional appropriations passed after the debt ceiling mandating deficit spending.

Since, the summer of 2011, beowulf has offered yet a fifth option for getting around the debt ceiling by issuing consols. Consols are debt instruments that pay a fixed rate on interest in perpetuity, but never promise principal repayment at a maturity date.

The debt ceiling law is written in such a way that what counts against the ceiling is the principal repayment guaranteed by the instrument. Since consols provide no principal repayment, one can have unlimited consol issuance without increasing the debt-subject-to-the-limit.

more

http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2013/09/ezra-terrified-framing.html