AP American Government

Stopping Corporate Welfare

One way to cut budget deficits is to stop subsidizing big, rich companies through tax subsidies.  See this article about how hundreds of huge corporations pay no taxes.  This is wrong.  Republicans and Democrats alike should stop allowing this to happen.

Americans' Distrust of Government at All-time High

A new public-opinion survey shows that Americans' distrust of the national government is at its highest level ever.  See here.  

Be sure to see the accompanying set of graphics, showing that Americans' approval ratings of Congress also have reached an all-time low, dipping into the single digits.

The Senate Filibuster

As part of our effort over the past couple of weeks to understand the U.S. Congress, we have discussed (among other things) the use of the filibuster by the minority party in the U.S. Senate

You may decide on your own what you think about the use of the filibuster in the Senate.  But I feel it is my obligation, as your instructor in this course, to be candid with you about my view of this: I think it is wrong, politically immoral, and ultimately destructive of democratic government for the Senate to allow this obstructionist procedural tactic to exist.  It is wrong when the Democrats use it; it is wrong when the Republicans use it.  It is wrong.

Please read this article from Wednesday's Washington Post about the failure of the Senate as at governing body.  

But also, please read this piece and this piece by James Fallows of The Atlantic magazine, explaining how the mainstream media, including the nation's two most prominent daily newspapers, in their effort to be "even-handed," fail to report the truth about what is going on in the Senate: the Republicans are using the filibuster far more assiduously than the Democrats ever did to obstruct majority will. 

 

A Moderate's Views of Congress's Problems

Please read this column by Joe Nocera from this morning's New York Times.  Nocera reports on a conversation he had with Rep. Jim Cooper, a Democratic congressman from Tennessee, who is one of the very few political moderates left in the House of Representatives.  That is, he's not a rabid conservative or a rabid liberal; his views are middle-pf-the-road. (That's Jim Cooper in the photo, at left.) Cooper's views about what is wrong with the contemporary Congress are the sort of thing we'll be talking about in a couple of weeks, when our attention turns to Congress. 

 

Republicans' Hopes Rise for Senate Control

This morning's Wall Street Journal carries a front-page article showing that the Republican party's chances of winning a majority of seats in the U.S. Senate in the 2012 elections are looking good.  Read the article to understand why.  Here's the graphic accompanying the article:

Reversing a Downward Slide

David Brooks is a conservative who writes a regular column for the New York Times.  In his column this morning, Brooks writes about what must be done to stop America's national decline.  

Get Rid of the Dollar Bill! And the Penny!

From Good:

According to a U.S. Government Accountability Office report released last Friday, if the United States were to replace its dollar bills with dollar coins, as much of the world has done, it would likely save the country $5.5 billion over the next 30 years. Because dollar coins are durable, capable of lasting decades, they're far more cost-efficient than dollar bills, which have a lifespan of about a year and a half. The report notes that though the initial transition would find the country incurring a loss for the first four years, each year beyond that would save the government millions. 

America has introduced a dollar coin before, but the GAO says those efforts failed because the government didn't also take the dollar bill out of circulation, as Canada and the United Kingdom did when they traded paper for metal. "Officials from both [Canada and the U.K.] told GAO that this step was essential to the success of their transition and that, with no alternative to the note, public resistance dissipated within a few years."

Strangely, the majority of the public stands opposed to the dollar coin. Even when told it could save the country billions, 64 percent of Americans surveyed said they wouldn't want to see the dollar bill go away.

Here's another piece on the same GAO report.

For more information on how to save money by changing our money, check out this great anti-penny rant below.

 

h/t to 

Bankers' Crimes and the Government's Complicity

You must read this truly disturbing article by Matt Taibbi in the recent issue of Rolling Stone.  It describes how Wall Street bankers have stolen billions of dollars with impunity, getting away with it because the lawyers from the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department who are supposed to be investigating these crimes are former executives of the very companies they are charged with scrutinizing.

The public gets screwed on an ongoing basis by the big investment banks and by government "regulators" who look the other way when they find wrongdoing. 

Read these first few paragraphs of Taibbi's article. Then do yourself the favor of reading the rest. 

Over drinks at a bar on a dreary, snowy night in Washington this past month, a former Senate investigator laughed as he polished off his beer.

"Everything's fucked up, and nobody goes to jail," he said. "That's your whole story right there. Hell, you don't even have to write the rest of it. Just write that."

I put down my notebook. "Just that?"

"That's right," he said, signaling to the waitress for the check. "Everything's fucked up, and nobody goes to jail. You can end the piece right there."

Nobody goes to jail. This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era, one that saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed hundreds of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world's wealth — and nobody went to jail. Nobody, that is, except Bernie Madoff, a flamboyant and pathological celebrity con artist, whose victims happened to be other rich and famous people.

The rest of them, all of them, got off. Not a single executive who ran the companies that cooked up and cashed in on the phony financial boom — an industrywide scam that involved the mass sale of mismarked, fraudulent mortgage-backed securities — has ever been convicted. Their names by now are familiar to even the most casual Middle American news consumer: companies like AIG, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. Most of these firms were directly involved in elaborate fraud and theft. Lehman Brothers hid billions in loans from its investors. Bank of America lied about billions in bonuses. Goldman Sachs failed to tell clients how it put together the born-to-lose toxic mortgage deals it was selling. What's more, many of these companies had corporate chieftains whose actions cost investors billions — from AIG derivatives chief Joe Cassano, who assured investors they would not lose even "one dollar" just months before his unit imploded, to the $263 million in compensation that former Lehman chief Dick "The Gorilla" Fuld conveniently failed to disclose. Yet not one of them has faced time behind bars.

See here for the rest of Taibbi's captivating piece in Rolling Stone. 

 

The "Culture of Exposure"

David Brooks's column in today's New York Times is smart and spot-on. Be sure to read it. Brooks deftly summarizes important changes that have occurred in the past forty years in the culture, especially in the relationship between reporters and government officials.

Krugman on the Degradation of Our Political System

Paul Krugman is a professor of economics at Princeton and a recent winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics.  He also writes a regular op-ed column for the New York Times.

In his column today, Krugman bemoans the changes that have occurred in American politics in the past four decades -- especially, (1) the vast expansion of corporate influence in the form of contributions to politicians' campaigns, and (2) the slide of the Republican party toward its more radical right-wing fringe.  As Krugman points out, these two things help explain why Congress is balking at health-insurance reform proposals that are more mild than those proposed almost four decades ago by Republican president Richard Nixon.