Chris Christie - No Ordinary Liar

April 10th, 2012

When New Jersey Governor Chris Christie announced he was killing the The Trans-Hudson Passenger Rail Tunnel, a project 20 years in the making, he framed as some incredibly responsible and brave decision making on his part. It represented the new, post Tea Party GOP brand. The project was wasteful and something New Jersey simply couldn't afford!

As it turns out, nearly every metric he pronounced to defend this move was a flat out lie. Ahead of a new GAO report to be released this week detailing his many falsehoods, the NY Times reports:

"Canceling the tunnel, then the largest public works project in the nation, helped shape Mr. Christie’s profile as a rising Republican star, an enforcer of fiscal discipline in a country drunk on debt. But the report is likely to revive criticism that his decision, which he said was about “hard choices” in tough economic times, was more about avoiding the need to raise the state’s gasoline tax, which would have violated a campaign promise. The governor subsequently steered $4 billion earmarked for the tunnel to the state’s near-bankrupt transportation trust fund, traditionally financed by the gasoline tax."

You see? He did do exactly what needed to be done. For himself. The congestion of physical interstate commerce the project would have alleviated extends far beyond New Jersey or New York.

Steve Benen is appalled:

"Even at the time, Christie's decision on this project in 2010 was hard to understand. Conservatives, who've become increasingly hostile towards American infrastructure improvements, cheered the move, but from a substantive perspective, the governor's decision was fairly characterized as "destructive and incredibly foolish."

But this new report casts that decision in an even more damaging light. The Government Accountability Office is a non-partisan research/audit arm of Congress, and it's reporting this week that Christie's rationale for his strange decision wasn't even true. It was a mistake to scrap a major public works project during a weak economy; it was a bigger mistake to explain the move with dishonest claims."

This is big stuff. Gov. Christie, in an act of supreme political selfishness, quite literally damaged a whole sector of the American economy. On purpose.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons the Governor thought better of entering the 2012 race for POTUS.

The War On The Poor, cont...

Dec 12th, 2011

It's often the timing of two seemingly unrelated stories that gets to me. Yesterday, Robert Miga reported for the AP on the likelihood of a terrible Winter for our nation's vulnerable citizens, seniors in particular:

"Thousands of poor people across the Northeast are bracing for a difficult winter with substantially less home heating aid coming from the federal government.

"They're playing Russian roulette with people's lives," said John Drew, who heads Action for Boston Community Development, Inc., which provides aid to low-income residents in Massachusetts."

This should surprise no one. We've been hearing the doomsayers in D.C. all year as they have ranted about how everything has to be on the chopping block.

"Several Northeast states already have reduced heating aid benefits to families as Congress considers cutting more than $1 billion from last year's $4.7 billion Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program that served nearly 9 million households.

Families in New England, where the winters are long and cold and people rely heavily on costly oil heat, are expected to be especially hard hit. Many poor and elderly people on fixed incomes struggle with rising heating bills that can run into thousands of dollars. That can force them to cut back on other necessities like food or medicine.

"The winter of 2011-12 could be memorable for the misery and suffering of thousands of frigid households," New Hampshire's Concord Monitor newspaper said in an editorial. "Heating oil prices are expected to hit record highs, and federal fuel assistance may reach a record low for recent years."

Defenders of these moves would have us believe that such austerity is our only option. They behave as if we can't possibly find any other way to cut from the federal budget.

For the moment, let's put aside the question of how such an exceptional nation can't find an alternative. Let's also skip the debate over why we refuse to limit predatory commodities speculation which has displaced traditional supply and demand as the driving force in energy markets.

Instead, let's look at another little gem that hit the wires last week. Reporting for Business Insider, Robert Johnson wrote:

"We produce so much military equipment that inventories of military robots, M-16 assault rifles, helicopters, armored vehicles, and grenade launchers eventually start to pile up and it turns out a lot of these weapons are going straight to American police forces to be used against US citizens.

Benjamin Carlson at The Daily reports on a little known endeavor called the "1033 Program" that gave more than $500 million of military gear to U.S. police forces in 2011 alone."

The Pentagon is so overstocked that they're literally giving stuff away. They are doing so in a program that provides heavier hardware for our own police to aim at us. Of course, it does serve to deplete those stocks from the ledgers the Pentagon takes to the Armed Services Committee. That way we can order more. It's worth noting that the "1033 program" is estimating a 400 percent increase in such transfers next year.

Anyone who can look at these stories back to back and not admit there is an obvious solution has no place in government. Period.

Government Contractors And The Big Fix

Oct 7th, 2011

Ordinary Americans react to the Project On Government Oversight's recently released study exposing shocking waste and abuse in the government's deals with private contractors. The unnecessary cost to taxpayers is in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

Worth 1,000 Words

Sept 19th,  2011

Meet the world's largest employer... and still growing.

Via The Economist

How They Think

April 15th 2011

Meet Douglas Holtz-Eakin. If you are unfamiliar with his work, he was formerly the head of President George W. Bush's budget office. He also served as a key economic advisor to the McCain-Palin campaign. Although he is a backer of Paul Ryan's Path To Poverty, he recently and very openly acknowledged its flights of fiscal fancy.


But make no mistake, he is the kind of guy who puts the "arch" into "arch-conservative."

Last week, Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) was faced with a very serious problem while trying to pass his cruel and vindictive spending bill. Many Republican house members were in revolt. They felt they had been duped. It seemed that the bill was not sticking it to the poor and vulnerable nearly as much as they had been promised. It was time bring in Doug.

From TPM:

"The GOP defections came after news reports revealed that the legislation will only cut $350 million in immediate spending -- not the $38 billion that had been advertised. Indeed, the defections may have been worse if Republican leaders hadn't enlisted the help of Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former director of George W. Bush's budget office, to explain the massive discrepancy to skeptical members Thursday morning. Holtz-Eakin ran through his presentation again Thursday afternoon on a conference call with bloggers.

He asked the conservative advocates on the line to engage in a thought experiment. If the Department of Education's only responsibilities were paying employees and buying books, its annual budget might not reflect both expenditures because books take time to process and deliver -- and might not be paid for until the next fiscal year. A spending cut deal like this one, he argued, prevents the Department of Education from buying more books -- and thus the savings don't materialize right away." EMPHASIS OURS

See? Just be patient, he was arguing. It might not be that great now, but it'll keep 'em from buying nasty, wasteful things next year! Nasty, wasteful things like books.

"It's activities like that, that span fiscal years, that make it hard to get the full impact in one year," he said. "I'm perfectly willing to speculate that there are some who would be happy to take advantage of that confusion."

This is exemplary of Neoconomist thought. It actually makes sense to men like Holtz-Eakin to promote fiscal policy by framing books for our nation's children as waste. It does not occur to such men that this might be construable as as unseemly. Or immoral. And it is just such men who are essential for the current Republican leadership to sell their wares to their own outliers in a pinch.

The next time you hear a contemporary, elected Republican speak about "the children" or "the future" or intone about "compassion," I beg of you to remember Mr. Holtz-Eakin's contribution to the budget battles of 2011. 

20 years ago, a pronouncement by a celebrated member of either party in America that was this extreme would have led every news cycle. In our current climate, however, it doesn't appear that very many people have noticed it at all.

But it is how they think.

Fighting The Fighter

Feb 16th, 2011

F-35 Publicity Still

Having railed long and hard for the total abandonment of the F-35 Fighter program, it was pleasing to read today that there is finally some momentum in congress against the project. 

Elise Foley reports for HuffPo:

"More than half of the House Republicans voted on Wednesday to earmark $450 million in funds for a duplicative fighter-jet engines that the Department of Defense has repeatedly said it does not need. But a bipartisan coalition, including just over half of GOP freshmen, voted against the F-35 engines, approving an amendment to strip an expenditure long bemoaned as pure pork, but defended by members of Congress from the states who would benefit from the project." EMPHASIS OURS

Well, it's a start. The real goal for both the budget conscious and the military brass should be to mothball the program completely. No endeavor in the last 20 years has better embodied President Eisenhower's perennially unheeded warnings about "the military-industrial complex." The total cost for the the targeted fleet of 2500 planes is now at a whopping $382 Billion dollars. 

The F-35 is a radar evading plane designed to battle an enemy that not only does not currently exist, but one that can't possibly be created by any potential adversary for decades. No other country in the world has an air-force at this time that can match our existing F-22 Raptor fleet. In fact, to suggest that our air supremacy is at risk in any form at all, including from a potential future Chinese threat, is as patently false an assertion as can be made.

The project is also a boondoggle. In developing the program, which is beset by cost overruns and spiraling charges of mismanagement by Lockheed Martin as well as other vendors, our country has engaged in an arms race without an opponent. Indeed, the so-called "second engine program" which congress took aim at today was only conceived in an attempt to grapple with the failure to meet targets for the first engine. Another pressing concern is that the F-35 is just not particularly well designed.

Alas, we have far to go before cutting this and so any other weapons systems which are at the very root of our nation's fiscal crisis. 

GOP Budget Insanity, ctd.

Feb 9th, 2011

James R. Horney writes for The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities providing an analysis of the GOP's proposed spending cuts announced last week:

"Under the plan, non-security programs would shrink, on average, by 15.4 percent below current funding under the continuing resolution (which expires on March 4) and 19.4 percent below what President Obama proposed for fiscal year 2011.  Programs and activities that face the risk of such cuts include funding for K-12 education, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Centers for Disease Control, and food safety inspections, and a number of programs that serve low-income children, seniors, and people with disabilities."

Take a very close look at their plans for defense. Their intention is to raise it. The one department of government which literally misplaced 2.3 trillion dollars just before the 9/11 attacks will get higher funding without any greater oversight. The one government agency which awarded over 280 Billion dollars in contracts between 2007 and 2009 to private contractors convicted of defrauding the American taxpayer is the only body that will have it's purse increased without any new demands for accountability.