Blog entry

Minnesota Dreaming

Rick Perlstein — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 15:49:54 -0500

Digby's done great work on the Republican National Lawyers Association, basically an organized election-stealing conspiracy. Here's what they're up to in Minnesota:

To grasp just how dishonest this project is, see here.

Should We Devote 40% of the Stimulus to Tax Cuts?

David Sirota — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 01:48:04 -0500

The Wall Street Journal reports this morning that President-elect Barack Obama is planning to devote roughly 40 percent of any new economic stimulus package to tax cuts. Arguing for the idea in the face of failed Bush tax cuts over the last eight years, his spokeswoman is quoted invoking the tired "pragmatic" meme, saying: "We're working with Congress to develop a tax-cut package based on a simple principle: What will have the biggest and most immediate impact on creating private-sector jobs and strengthening the middle class? We're guided by what works, not by any ideology or special interests."

Of course, tax cuts are a strange way to pursue "what works," because as CAF's Isaiah Poole long ago noted, evidence suggests spending - not tax cuts - is clearly "what will have the biggest and most immediate impact" in fixing the economy. Indeed, the Economic Policy Institute reports:

"Most of the money from the recent tax rebate was saved rather than spent, thus blunting its stimulative benefit. By comparison, other options—such as infrastructure spending, aid to states, food stamps, and unemployment insurance (UI) benefits—are much more cost-effective because they target the needs most likely to channel money back into the economy."

Likewise, Economy.com's Mark Zandi (himself a Republican) recently estimated that each dollar dollar of refundable tax rebates only boosts GDP by about $1.26, while each dollar of infrastructure spending could provide a $1.59 boost. Here's his chart on "what works":

The Wall Street Journal's subheadline suggests what's really going on with Obama's tax cut move: It's not pragmatic policy, it's political pandering "aimed at winning GOP support," and such pandering isn't even politically "pragmatic" because lots of Republican votes aren't even needed. After all, Democrats' vast congressional majorities, Obama's election mandate and the economic crisis should guarantee passage of whatever economic rescue package Democrats push. I mean, c'mon - are we really expected to believe that under these circumstances, a new president can't use pressure to get 3 or 4 Republican senators to back a robustly progressive spending package and that instead, he has to substantially weaken that package? Puh-leeeze.

So, then, why weaken good policy (ie. infrastructure spending) with bad policy in order to attract votes the new president shouldn't need? That's the enduring power of the right-wing's tax frame.

For 30+ years, the conservative movement has insisted that tax cuts are always better economic policy than public spending. And despite the fact that such rigid ideology has proven bankrupt over and over and over again, it still confines American politics, as evidenced by a new Democratic president already appearing to embrace the right's basic tax fallacies.

Breaking apart this tax paradigm is going to take a long time. As I showed in my latest book, progressives are making headway in reframing the tax debate in some of the toughest political territory in the country. But as I also showed in a recent newspaper column, in other places like New York and Washington, D.C., the anti-tax frame remains a powerful force.

Sure, it's good news that the stimulus will likely include a decent amount of public spending. And sure Obama seems intent on making some of his tax cuts progressive by targeting them down the income ladder. But again, he seems to be embracing the right's overall tax frame - and that's a problem.

God and Gaza

Rick Perlstein — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 20:17:39 -0500

We don't do Mideast politics here at Campaign for America's Future, so I just wanted to quickly point out an intersection where it abuts Big Con politics, and let people draw the conclusions they wish: before the U.S. let Israel do what it wanted to do with the Gaza Strip, it held political-cum-theological consultations with American doomsday Christians.

Greed Goeth Before a Crash?

Terrance Heath — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 22:43:32 -0500

If you haven't seen it yet, check the episode schedule and make sure you don't miss the History Channel's "Crash: The Next Great Depression?".

This one-hour special looks at the current economic meltdown in the US and compares and contrasts it with what led up to the Great Depression, the 1929 Crash, its immediate aftermath and what helped to bring us out of the Depression. Threading first person accounts with expert interviews, the special lets viewers understand how much history is repeating itself and what does history tell us about our future?

Tonight, it followed (appropriately enough) the "Greed" episode of the History Channel's series The Seven Deadly Sins.

It compares the 1929 crash with the 2008 Meltdown, and points out too many parallels to count — from the rampant deregulation and wealth concentration that preceded the 1929 crash, to a do-nothing Hoover administration determined to let the market work itself out — between what happened then and what's happening now. (The footage of Phil Gram quoting Abraham Lincoln even as he, back in 2000, made sure that the credit swaps that helped drive this meltdown stayed unregulated.)

Beyond that, it echoed just about everything progressives have been saying about the route causes of the current crisis, and the best way out of it. From what I can tell, its only flaw is that it payed at least a few minutes of lip service to conservatives' collective case of New Deal Denialism. At least that's what jumped out at me.

Still, it's definitely worth seeing. In fact, it's worth calling the rest of the family into the room to watch it, and calling your friends and telling them to watch it.

NIXONLAND in the New Year

Rick Perlstein — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 10:00:48 -0500

Milwaukee's WUWM recently rebroadcast what I think is the best radio interview I did on what NIXONLAND is all about, which reminds me to thank all my colleagues and readers here for your support that helped make 2008 such an exciting and humbling year for me. All told, NIXONLAND appeared on the following "Best Of" lists for the year:

• The Economist
• Amazon.com
• Los Angeles Times
• Stephen King's Entertainment Weekly pop culture column
• New York Times
• Christian Science Monitor
• Washington Post
• The Onion's AV Club
• TimeOut Chicago
• CNN.com's The Marquee Blog
• Entertainment Weekly
• NPR's Best Political and Current Affairs Book
• Reason magazine
• Louisville Courier-Journal

Today's Mail Brings a Novelty

Rick Perlstein — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 19:09:53 -0500

I'm used to receiving legal documents in the mail from people begging me to pay them money I owe them, but I've never had a creditor tell me they can't pay me. Then comes this from the owners of a certain daily fishwrap in Chicago to which I've occasionally contributed "content":

As an important supplier/vendor to Tribune Company [ed.: Thanks!], we are writing to inform you we have made a strategic decision to restructure our debt and to file for protection under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code. This business decision was necessary to strengthen Tribune's financial foundation for the future. Tribune will continue to operate while it restructures, and we are not going out of business.

Our partnership with our vendors is important to our success, and we are committed to maintaining strong relationships with our vendors for the long term.

We elected to file Chapter 11 in light of the dramatic and unexpected operating conditions we've encountered this year. We have had the perfect storm—a precipitous decline in revenue, and a tough economy coupled with a credit crisis that makes it extremely difficult to support our debt. Tribune is continuing to operate its media businesses, including its newspapers, television station and web sites.

The Bankruptcy Code provides a priority status for post-petition purchases, which means that we can and will pay for all goods and services received from your company after the date of the filing.... Unfortunately, bankruptcy law prohibits us from making payments from many goods purchased or services provided prior to the filing date at this time. Once a reorganization plan is developed and approved by the Bankruptcy Court, we will be authorized to make whatever payments or distributions are called for by that plan.

You will be notified when a deadline is set to file a Proof of Claim for any goods purchased or services provided prior to the filing. You can learn more about the company's filing at http://chapter11.epiqsystems.com/tribune. If you would like further explanation of the Chapter 11 process or have a specific question, please contact our vendor hotline at (888) 287-7568.

Thank you for your continued support. We look forward to working with you.

TRIBUNE COMPANY

In other news, a not-for-profit publication I've written for has informed me they can only afford to pay me a third of what they paid me last year. Welcome to the new era. Feel free to share your yuletide tales of financial woe in the comments.

Fox News: "Historians Pretty Much Agree" That FDR Prolonged the Great Depression

David Sirota — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 20:00:38 -0500

I appeared on Fox News to discuss both the Blagojevich flap and the imminent economic recovery package from the Obama administration. You can watch the clip here. As you'll see, on that latter issue, Fox News is starting its campaign to stop Obama's big spending plan by stating - as assumed fact - that "historians pretty much agree" that Franklin Roosevelt prolonged the Great Depression, and that therefore, Obama shouldn't try another New Deal.

When I say Fox News' assertion about historians is patently false, they literally laugh at me as if I've said something so clearly untrue, something Americans supposedly assume is so obviously stupid, that it's worthy of ridicule.

The Depression issue was brought up by conservative pundit Monica Crowley - not surprising since this is the conservative talking point du jour ever since the "center-right nation" meme started looking humiliatingly idiotic and ever since fringe-right-wing bloviator Amity Shlaes published her since-discredited book claiming FDR essentially created the Great Depression. Crowley supported the "FDR ruined the country" meme with the very authoritative-sounding statement that "based on all kinds of studies and academic work done on the great depression" she knows that the New Deal's "massive government intervention prolonged the Great Depression."

Of course, she doesn't offer up a single study or "academic work" as any kind of proof, and yet, when I say her assertion is absurd, Fox News anchor Greg Jarrett starts laughing at me - as if my assertion that FDR's New Deal helped end the Great Depression is so fantastical as to prompt guffawing. Jarrett proceeds to state that historians "pretty much agree" that FDR prolonged the Great Depression, and resorts to insisting that he knows that's true because "it's in the books" - whatever the hell that means. Indeed, Fox wants us to believe that what was only very recently the deranged propaganda of a handful of conservative political pundits is now such a consensus opinion among historians that to say otherwise is to evoke laughter.

Now, it's true - back in 2004, two UCLA professors published a little-noticed report claiming the New Deal's government intervention prolonged the Great Depression. But that assertion has been subsequently eviscerated by, ya know, actual data.

Here's University of California historian Eric Rauchway:

For a start, New Deal intervention saved the banks. During Hoover's presidency, around 20 percent of American banks failed, and, without deposit insurance, one collapse prompted another as savers pulled their money out of the shaky system. When Roosevelt came into office, he ordered the banks closed and audited. A week later, authorities began reopening banks, and deposits returned to vaults.

Congress also established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which, as economists Milton Friedman and Anna Jacobson Schwartz wrote, was "the structural change most conducive to monetary stability since ... the Civil War." After the creation of the FDIC, bank failures almost entirely disappeared. New Dealers also recapitalized banks by buying about a billion dollars of preferred stock...

The most important thing to know about Roosevelt's economics is that, despite claims to the contrary, the economy recovered during the New Deal. During Roosevelt's first two terms, the U.S. economy grew at average annual growth rates of 9 percent to 10 percent, with the exception of the recession year of 1937-1938...

Excepting 1937-1938, unemployment fell each year of Roosevelt's first two terms. In part, the jobs came from Washington, which directly employed as many as 3.6 million people to build roads, bridges, ports, airports, stadiums, and schools -- as well as, of course, to paint murals and stage plays. But new jobs also came from the private sector, where manufacturing work increased apace.

This basic fact is clear -- unless you quote only the unemployment rate for the recession year 1938 and count government employees hired under the New Deal as unemployed, which conservative commenters have taken to doing.

So, as Rauchway says, the hard data about bank closures, job creation and overall economic growth rates proves the regulations and spending of the New Deal helped end the Great Depression. In fact, Rauchway notes that the data actually suggests that the major, data-driven criticism of the New Deal is that it didn't spend enough money fast enough.

But, OK - let's say you want to cherry pick the unemployment numbers like a right-wing pundit. Let's say that, as Rauchway notes, you are a conservative dittohead totally comfortable dishonestly "quot[ing] only the unemployment rate for the recession year 1938 and count[ing] government employees hired under the New Deal as unemployed." Shouldn't you be blaming conservative ideology, and not New Deal-ism, for those numbers? After all, as Paul Krugman recently explained to a stunningly ignorant George Will on ABC News, 1937-1938 was the period Roosevelt dialed back the New Deal in the name of conservative demands that he stop spending:

By 1937 things were a lot better than they were in 1933. Then [FDR] was persuaded to balance the budget or try to and he raised taxes and cut spending and the economy went back down again and then it took an enormous public works program known as World War II to bring the economy out of the depression.

So with all of that data, let's go back to Fox News' main assertion: Is it really true that "historians pretty much agree" that the New Deal's government intervention prolonged the Great Depression? Of course not, as New York Times economics writer Daniel Gross says:

It was only with the passage of New Deal efforts--the SEC, the FDIC, the FSLIC--that the mechanisms of private capital began to kick back into gear. Don't take it from me. Take it from Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, who wrote the following in Essays on the Great Depression: "Only with the New Deal's rehabilitation of the financial system in 1933-35 did the economy begin its slow emergence from the Great Depression."...

The argument that the New Deal's efforts "perhaps had prolonged, the Depression," is a canard. One would be very hard-pressed to find a serious professional historian--I mean a serious historian, not a think-tank wanker, not an economist, not a journalist--who believes that the New Deal prolonged the Depression. (emphasis added)

In other words, it's the opposite of what Fox News says. "Historians pretty much agree" on one thing when it comes to Roosevelt: The New Deal helped end the Great Depression. But I would go even further than that, and agree with economist Brad DeLong who said that whether you are a historian or not - to argue what Jarrett and Crowley argued today is to publicly declare oneself as divorced from the facts as the most ridiculed conspiracy theorists. As DeLong says, "A normal person would not argue that the New Deal prolonged the Great Depression."

But, then, these are not "normal people" - those making these arguments are right-wing automatons whose claim that we shouldn't look at actual data, we should simply accept the truth of their claims because they insist "it's in the books!" or they've supposedly seen "all kinds of studies and academic work" that proves their hysteria true.

Of course, the good news is what I said on Fox News before they cut me off: While the right's historical revisionism is dishonest, it's doing progressives a big favor.

If the right wants to try to stop a serious economic recovery package and financial regulations by trying to vilify one of the most popular presidents and popular policy programs in American history, then I'll say what George Bush once said: Bring it on. Every high school civics class teaches the broad truth about Roosevelt, the New Deal and how it helped end the Great Depression, and if the conservative movement has gone so off the deep end that they want to make crazy-sounding arguments that even high schoolers know are silly, then the progressive movement is in an even better position than we may have thought.

Maryland's Water Main Drama

Terrance Heath — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 16:25:03 -0500

What was that about investing in our crumbling infrastructure, again?

I ask because a water main somewhere in Montgomery County, Maryland, ruptured today and washed out much of my day. Though my experience was nothing compared to what some people had to deal with.

Watching that rescue, I'm glad were weren't driving down that particular load when the massive water main rupture happened. We'd have definitely had the kids with us.

A massive underground pipe rupture flooded River Road with four feet of rapidly swirling water this morning -- trapping motorists, blocking a major commuter artery linking Washington with the Maryland suburbs and leading to the dramatic helicopter rescue of a woman and a child from one of the vehicles.

The break caused "widespread water outages" in school buildings across lower Montgomery County, officials said, affecting the heating system in some cases as well. As a result, all schools will close 2 1/2 hours early this afternoon, the school system announced just after 11 a.m.

The aging, 66-inch water pipe burst shortly before 8 a.m., sending a four-foot wall of water onto River Road near Congressional Country Club in Bethesda and trapping 15 people in about a dozen vehicles. Most got out of their cars on their own and reached dry land with help from rescue crews, boats and ropes, officials said.

But "as the water became more and more turbulent," five others had to be evacuated from their vehicles, said Richard Bowers, acting Montgomery fire chief.

Before today, infrastructure needs in our area hadn't hit any closer to home than the end of our block, where water main improvements have been going on since last week. Not that we're complaining. After all, the water mains in our neighborhood are at least 40 years old, and are too small for the present-day population. So, maybe the improvements mean that our neighborhood won't lose water as often.

Our street is small potatoes compared to what's next with the water main break, let alone repairing the road, etc. Just like the disruption in my day consisted of leaving work early and racing home to be there when our son got off the bus after his school closed early, instead of being rushed to the hospital with our kids.

My guess is that conservatives wouldn't label water main repairs "pork," but I probably shouldn't speak too soon, since one of our Senators has already taken a lesson from today's events: Maryland's infrastructure needs work.

Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) has already drawn a lesson from the water main break that is still sending frigid water gushing down Montgomery County's River Road. The takeaway: Montgomery County needs more federal money for infrastructure.

After complimenting first responders for pulling trapped drivers out of harm's way, he noted during an interview with MSNBC that "this water main wasn't that old," but added that "these are the types of projects we want to see addressed" in President-elect Barack Obama's upcoming economic stimulus package.

"These are exactly the types of programs we want to get started," he said, suggesting that the scale of the accident will mean "special attention to Montgomery County" will be paid by the next Congress.

If there's infrastructure work to be done in Maryland it's likely that — as in other states — there's not much money for them. The schools in our state just took a $38 billion hit, some of them are closing — taking more than 900 jobs with them — and another 67,000 state workers are getting furloughed, with layoffs possible down the road.

So, either we can make an investment in our infrastructure, or wait for the next water main to burst.

At least we don't live near any levees. I think.

Toyota Republicans Should Cut Their Own Pay

Leo Gerard — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 10:56:17 -0500

President Bush took to the TV Friday to announce that he wouldn’t walk past the financial crash of America’s Big Three automakers and do nothing to save their lives.

Refusing resuscitation, Bush said, would be irresponsible during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

A week earlier, 31 GOP Senators, mostly from Southern states, voted to avert their eyes and allow American auto companies to die. They opposed $14 billion in federal loans for GM and Chrysler, revealing that their loyalty lies not with America, not even with their own states, but with South Korea and Germany and Japan.

They are Toyota Republicans.

Toyota has non-union manufacturing plants in Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi and Texas — states whose senators led the GOP quest to slay the Big Three American auto manufacturers — Richard Shelby, R-Ala.; Mitch McConnell, R-Ky, and John Cornyn, R-Tx. Here’s the Republican from Mississippi, Sen. Thad Cochran, explaining why he’d vote against the loans, “Things have changed. It’s not just the Big Three anymore,” he said, pointing out that Nissan and Toyota employ more Mississippians than General Motors, Ford and Chrysler. But, he said, the foreign companies would not share “in the benefits of that automobile bailout program.”

No. But Mississippi did give Nissan and Toyota more than $650 million to entice them to locate in the state. GM, Ford and Chrysler didn’t share in those benefits, Sen. Cochran.

The Toyota Republicans are all for helping the rich with tax breaks and shelters, and they’re all for aiding foreign auto manufacturers with billions worth of tax forgiveness and government-paid infrastructure improvements.

But their disdain for the working class couldn’t be clearer as they organized defeat of loans to the Big Three under this command: “Republicans should stand firm and take their first shot against organized labor.”

They haven’t gotten the message sent out by the electorate in November. Voters rejected politicians prolonging the same old policy of protecting themselves and the rich. The nation’s voters want selfless leaders who will perform in the best interests of the entire country. They want change.

Clearly the allegiance of the 31 Republicans who opposed the loan to save GM and Chrysler is not with the United States of America, which would lose 900,000 jobs if just GM closed, and more than 2.1 million if the Big Three did. Those job losses would occur during the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. In November, the 11th consecutive month of job losses, another 533,000 people were thrown out of work, swelling the pool of unemployed to 10.3 million. The Toyota Republicans were willing to increase that.

They voted against the interests of their own states as well. Consider what would happen in a few of those Southern States whose senators led the charge against preserving the Big Three. If just GM collapsed, Kentucky would lose 20,000 jobs; Alabama, 21,000; Georgia, 23,000, and Tennessee, 29,400, according to calculations by the Economic Policy Institute.

Sen. Cochran just didn’t think it was right for the U.S. government to aid its auto industry. But apparently he’s fine with foreign governments providing subsidies to the transplant automakers in his state. And, apparently, he’s okay with spending state and federal money to help foreign automakers locate manufacturing plants in the U.S.

Korean and Japanese automakers — including Nissan and Toyota with plants in Cochran’s Mississippi — benefit from manipulation of currencies by their governments, a factor that, according to EPI estimates, reduces their costs by between 10 and 20 percent. In addition, nationalized health care in countries such as Japan and Germany serves as a subsidy.

Also, the Toyota Republican opposed federal money for American companies but supported state and federal money for foreign auto makers estimated at $3.6 billion.

Shelby, for example, got $3 million in federal funds to improve roads near the Hyundai plant in Alabama after the state gave $250 million to the Korean automaker.

Shelby opposed loaning one federal cent to the U.S. automakers, though, telling “Face the Nation” that they should die: “Companies fail every day and others take their place... There's not a bank in this country that would loan a dollar to these companies.”

But for foreign auto companies, his home state of Alabama couldn’t provide enough taxpayer cash — more than three quarters of a billion. In addition to the quarter billion it gave the Korean automaker, it handed another quarter billion to German Daimler for a Mercedes-Benz plant, nearly a quarter billion to Japanese Honda and $29 million to Japanese Toyota.

Similarly, Jim DeMint, another senator who led the Toyota Repubicans’ rebellion against the loans to GM and Chrysler, told the “National Review” recently, “Government should not be in the auto industry.” Yet, his state, South Carolina, got into the auto industry with nearly a quarter billion — $230 million — in gifts to a German auto company — BMW.

The same is true in Kentucky, home of Sen. Mitch McConnell, who said of loans for the Big Three, “Government help is not the only option. It’s not even the best option.” But government help was fine when Kentucky was providing grants for Toyota, which got $371 million from taxpayers since 1986.

It’s clear that the real problem was not a philosophical one. All of these lawmakers were willing to flick free market capitalism out the car window like a cigarette butt if their states could use taxpayer dollars to buy a foreign auto plant. No, what really gags them about the Big Three is that they pay good, middle class wages and benefits as a result of contracts with the United Autoworkers.

Repeatedly, the Toyota Republicans insisted that UAW members bear the brunt of the cost of the bailout. The senators insisted that UAW wages be lowered to match those of non-union auto workers at foreign-owned manufacturers. Toyota Republican Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee, wrote an amendment to the bailout bill that would have required UAW members to accept pay cuts by a specific date in 2009. When Republicans defeated the bailout, DeMint blamed that on the union, saying, “It sounds like the UAW blew up the deal.”

The Toyota Republicans then conferred the American auto industry to bankruptcy. They said they favored bankruptcy because it would enable the Big Three to break pledges made in labor contracts and promises for health care and pensions made to retirees. The Toyota Republicans want the wages of American workers pulled down. To them, UAW members making an average of $28 an hour, accounting for less than 10 percent of the cost of a car, are earning just too much money.

The Toyota Republicans did not, however, make that claim about the white collar workers on Wall Street who got this country into the financial fiasco that led to the dire circumstances for automakers. And not just for American ones. Domestic car sales declined by 40 percent last month, but Asian producers’ sales dropped too — by 35 percent.

The average salary of white collar, Wall Street employees — workers in “securities, commodity contracts and investments” — is four times that of those laboring in the rest of the economy. Remember, these are the guys who are so smart that they took down Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Washington Mutual, AIG and Lehman Brothers – in less than a year — and ultimately required $700 billion from taxpayers to bail them out.

The top executives of Wall Street banks receive billions of dollars in year-end bonuses. The New York Times detailed those at Merrill Lynch in a story Dec. 17 entitled “On Wall Street, Bonuses, Not Profits Were Real.” In 2006, the firm gave its top executives between $5 billion and $6 billion in bonuses, which means, for example, a trader earning $180,000 a year got a $5 million bonus.

Merrill’s $7.6 billion earnings that year turned out to be bogus. The company’s losses now have exceeded all of the profits it earned over the previous 20 years. To prevent collapse, it sold itself to Bank of America in September. But then, Bank of America took $15 billion of that $700 billion in bailout money. Despite the gift of taxpayer dollars, the CEO of Bank of American has not publicly announced that he will decline a bonus, and Bank of America plans to tell Merrill Lynch workers the amounts of their bonuses beginning Friday, the New York Times reported Thursday.

When those Toyota Republicans voted in favor of providing $700 billion for Wall Street — including both of Tennessee’s senators, Bob Corker and Lamar Alexander; Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell; Georgia’s Saxby Chambliss and Johnny Isakson; South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham, and Texas’ Kay Bailey Hutchinson and John Cornyn — none asked for high-paid white collar workers to take pay cuts or give up their million dollar bonuses. There was a feeble attempt to limit the pay of chief executives, but that applied only to firms that received federal money under one particular method, and the treasury decided not to hand out the $700 billion that way.

And no lawmaker asked white collar workers or executives who got billions in bonuses based on false profits to return them.

But those Toyota Republicans want middle class, blue collar workers who don’t get year end bonuses, who don’t celebrate with five-figure dinners, to take wage cuts. They want autoworker pensioners to lose the monthly benefits they earned with a lifetime of labor.

And at no time did those Toyota Republicans suggest that they should cut their own salary or top-notch, government-paid health benefits or pensions. Like the reckless speculators on Wall Street, Congress bears responsibility for the crisis condition of the American economy because it deregulated financial markets.

In 2002, during a downturn in Japan, the House of Councillors reduced the pay of Diet lawmakers by 10 percent, and ended the transportation allowance, portrait-painting and pension given senior lawmakers.

If the Toyota Republicans believe the Japanese way of pay is so great for autoworkers, they should first impose it on themselves.