Democratic Rep. Brian Baird (WA-03) says he’ll vote against health care reform, no word on Rep. Adam Smith (WA-09). Brad Shannon has the story, along with a statement from Dwight Pelz encouraging members of the delegation to support reform.

Baird cited, among other things, wanting more information from CBO. Okay then. Let’s summarize the financial situation: trillions for empire, trillions for banksters, trillions for anyone but regular people who need a fair shake.

At a certain point you’re not even trying, you’re just kind of there because you’re there.

Yes, the health bill is flawed. Cry me a river. Our system boils things down to a dichotomy, and you have to choose.

Citizens have to choose every time we mark and mail our ballots, if we get around to it.

Ken Camp at NPI Advocate notices that Rep. Adam Smith (WA-09) and Rep. Brian Baird (WA-03) need to get some phone calls of encouragement regarding the pending health care bill. There might be a vote this weekend.

Feel free to click through to NPI Advocate for more information.

Separately, a reliable source tells me calls are being forwarded to Congressional offices by some group or other that is deliberately targeting seniors and trying to scare them, so why not take a few moments if you live in either district and make your own legitimate call to your elected representative? You’ll feel good about it all day, and then you will smile at other people.

The “free-market” means that a massive American corporation, propped up and majority owned by US taxpayers, can now do whatever the hell it wants.

Thousands of the 25,000 workers from Opel’s four factories are gathered in Ruesselsheim to protest at GM’s refusal to sell its European operations.

GM’s U-turn came just days before the agreed sale of a majority stake in Opel and Vauxhall to car parts maker Magna and Russian bank Sberbank.

Under that agreement, Opel workers were promised no factories would be closed.

Sure, this is “good news” for workers in the United Kingdom, just as workers in South Carolina had some pleasant news recently, when Boeing announced it would move a 787 production line to the non-union state. We’ll see how it works out in the long run.

What’s not good news is that nothing changed in terms of fixing the fundamentally unsound financial sector, because it’s still out there operating as if nothing had happened. Workers are being screwed! Wall Street approves! The mammoth banks are screwing consumers and creating “innovative” financial products! Yeah! This is the system that led us to the brink of worldwide financial calamity, and the very same people are back at it again, because they’re still in charge. The real power doesn’t lie in the White House anyhow, I think we all know that.

Decisions like the ones made by Boeing and GM are rational in terms of the zombie neo-liberal system, which rewards chasing the lowest common denominator, but in the process many regular people are stripped not only of autonomy, but in many cases the ability to earn a living. Not every western democracy has abandoned the basic rights of workers, either in law or culturally, and neither has every western democracy been subjected to the idiocy of Fox Noise and the associated conservative movement hate speech on a daily basis. It’s possible that one or more of these western countries may decide to fight back.

It will be interesting to see how German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has been played for an asbolute fool, reacts as the days go by. Sure, there will be strikes and such, but the biggest threat to the zombie economic order might be the regular people who don’t believe in it that much any more.

There have already been spontaneous rumblings such as the “credit card revolt.” Why risk getting bashed and gassed when there’s YouTube? BTW, there’s a plan afoot that would care of the troublesome tubes under the guise of “copyright reform,” but I digress.

But what if they threw an economy and nobody bought stuff? Seems to me we’re already half way or more to that point, with consumers de-leveraging in a nearly unprecedented fashion.

Real quick, it looks like America’s Vancouver may wind up with a new mayor.

City Councilman Tim Leavitt held a 1,750 lead over incumbent Vancouver Mayor Royce Pollard after initial ballots were counted Tuesday evening.

With perhaps 7,000 ballots left to be tallied in the coming days, it may be some time before we know the winner.

Yeah, I don’t know. That would be a lot to make up. Might be time for everyone to begin resigning themselves to the existing I-5 spans over the Columbia. We’ll see if there’s any movement in the election numbers as the days go by.

In America’s Vancouver, the big talking points in the mayor’s race often wind up being about stuff the city can only control on the margins. Like jobs.

(In case the link won’t load, it’s a link to a final Columbian article where challenger Tim Leavitt and supporters accuse incumbent Royce Pollard of wishing small business and jobs and anything good would rot and die, and Pollard says “No, no,” and the simple truth that national policies are responsible for the horrendous economic disaster is not really mentioned. If nothing else, Leavitt gives good press conference.)

At any rate, it’s possible a winner will be declared tonight!

It’s also possible that things will be too close to call, and weeks and weeks will go by, as a virtually tied race is slowly, slowly updated, day after painful day, until nobody, not even the candidate’s families and pets, really cares any more. People will still be losing their homes and jobs, and since mayors are not the Federal Reserve, it will still suck.

And then it will be 2010, an even-numbered election year! Yeah! At any rate, today is “Election Day.” You’re smart enough to figure out what to do with your ballot.

Apparently $3.2 billion in tax incentives over 20 years and everything else the state has forked over isn’t good enough.

This is partly about neoliberal corporate executives chasing non-union low wages, as Charles Mudede alluded to at Slog yesterday, but it’s also an attack on unionism itself. This isn’t about economics, it’s about an ideology that long ago concluded the very existence of unions is an affront. Face it, there are many, many people in our society who would gladly abolish unions if they could, but since they can’t, the next best thing is to create conditions where forming unions is next to impossible and put an Orwellian moniker like “right to work” on them.

So while the taxpayers of Washington state got to pay and pay and pay in a somewhat futile attempt to appease Boeing, now the citizens of South Carolina get to pay and pay and pay. Hell, we’ll all probably wind up paying still, because Republicans and the bidness guys and gals are already preparing to use this as an attack issue, claiming without any credibility that Washington state is somehow a bad place to do business, when numerous measures rank us fairly high. Plus we’ll all get to continue to pay for military work done by Boeing. (Earth to powerful US Senators, come in US Senators…)

Notice that in this “free market” economy, the transfer of wealth is from regular people to giant corporations, their shareholders and officers, and that tax dollars are extorted from all of us to make it so. Then when the system nearly crushes everyone and a neoliberal has to resort to extraordinary means to avert a world-wide cliff dive, he is attacked as an authoritarian tyrant in order to keep the peasants divided, even as he and his predecessor fork over billions of taxpayer dollars to prop up the decayed neoliberal order. It’s “socialism” if regular people get routine medical care, but it’s “free market” economics if corporations are not only awarded huge profits but literally paid off.

Capital, of course, is prized in our system above all else. Land, ie property and the means of production, also enjoys a high status. Labor is semi-disposable, and nothing infuriates neoliberals like workers who don’t realize their place in the pecking order. Boeing is putting labor in its place, both out of pique and as a warning to anyone who would challenge the existing order of things.

I’m quite certain skilled politicians instinctively understand the situation, and the interesting question is: now what? Boeing supposedly will still have a large presence in the state, and it needs a transition time to get the South Carolina facility up and running.

Since one of Boeing’s complaints is a lack of qualified engineers in Washington state, what say they pitch in now and help offset those massive tuition increases from last session? Surely Boeing won’t need all of that $3.2 billion in tax incentives over the next fifteen years or so, seeing as the people of South Carolina are being so generous.

So the GOP’s brilliant new plan to derail health insurance reform is to “ACORN” the AARP. (Pausing while that sinks in a moment)

You know, the AARP, the really, really powerful lobby that is really really powerful and represents the group of Americans who vote the most–seniors.

The slime is already pouring from the right-wing noise machine, a sure indicator of impending wingnut baying and howling.

But wait, it gets even better. One of the GOPoodles leading the charge is none other than Rep. Dave Reichert, R-WA 08. From TPMDC:

The GOP has gone further than rhetoric as well. Rep. Dave Reichert (R-WA) claims to have launched an investigation into AARP in his home state. Reichert says his “ongoing” investigation focuses on whether AARP should be classified as an insurance company because of its revenue from royalties the group gets from licensing its brand for insurance products. AARP says it’s not aware of the investigation, and Reichert suggested to reporters Monday that it was essentially stalled. But the question of whether AARP is an insurance company or not is at the center of the GOP messaging on the group.

I didn’t know a Congressman could make such determinations at the state level. My guess is he can’t, which is probably why his “investigation” is stalled.

Meaning, of course, Reichert is just being a grandstanding fool. People who have followed recent elections in WA-08 won’t be surprised by this, unless they’re political reporters from The Seattle Times. In that case this is a shrewd move by a sensible moderate who has grave concerns blah blah blah blah blah diploma.

For everyone else it’s a sign that Reichert has now performed a triple-shark jump, replete in leather jacket with Pinky dressed as Santa Claus. The crowd goes wild, folks.

Hey, here’s an idea, Dave. If you want to “ACORN” the AARP, why don’t you dress up in a mini-skirt and go filming yourself at some AARP offices? I bet you’ll get on Fox!

Brian:

I respectfully request that you endorse the robust public option and get on board with what would be a significant and meaningful improvement in the lives of ordinary Americans.

Your ideas about reforming the tax system and the health care system at the same time, as expressed in your recent Seattle Times op-ed, have found no traction nationally or in the district.

Now is the time to act. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Your friend,

Jon

To absolutely nobody’s surprise, PDC complaints have started flying in the race for mayor of America’s Vancouver. It’s standard operating procedure for conservatives in Clark County to throw bogus charges right about this time in a campaign, you can practically set your clock by it.

And lo and behold, challenger Tim Leavitt’s campaign is making accusations but not actually filing formal complaints, according to the Columbian. Way to have the courage of your campaign handlers, Timmy. Just like he’s against tolls on a new bridge unless he’s for them, Leavitt is being wronged but he isn’t actually filing a complaint, he’s just complaining.

A friend has started calling this “the Don Benton playbook,” and that’s about right. Equal parts pugnaciousness and victimhood, with a soupçon of “free market,” government-is-a-business seasoning, the playbook demands accusing one’s opponent of all sorts of unseemly associations and intentions during the crucial ballot marking period, counting on the local newspaper to deliver the accusations in such a way the opposition cannot respond quickly. And what better way to do that than by using an agency that conservatives don’t even believe should exist?

Fortunately incumbent Royce Pollard’s campaign seems ready to fight back, most likely because Pollard isn’t running for the state Senate as a Democrat, he’s running for the non-partisan mayoral spot again, thus freeing him to anticipate entirely predictable moves that conservatives have made in campaigns around here since the last century.

Next up from the Leavitt-Benton playbook: more conserva-whining. Without their victim status, conservatives are nothing.

Down here in Vancouver the hotly contested race for mayor is providing the lamest example of conservative victimology I’ve ever seen during a campaign, and that’s quite a low bar to crawl under. If you’ll recall, long-time incumbent Royce Pollard is squaring off against sitting council member and mayoral candidate Tim Leavitt in the race.

Today Leavitt is complaining that people are canvassing (!) and that someone out on the east side, um, didn’t feel comfortable about it. A Columbian article details the non-staggering revelations, including this hilarious tidbit:

Another call came last weekend from a resident of the Fircrest neighborhood, who called to complain of what his wife described as odd behavior by a door-beller.

The wife, who declined to give her name, told The Columbian that the man asked her whether she was a Leavitt supporter. She said yes. “He asked if we’d voted, if we’d gotten our ballots. I said yes. He asked if I’d filled them out and if we needed help filling out the ballots. I said, ‘I think we can handle it.'”

She said the man was not aggressive, but she felt uncomfortable as the conversation continued. “I know enough to know you can call a campaign office and ask for assistance, but people don’t go door to door and offer to fill out your ballot.”

Please excuse me for a moment, I’ve been on the fainting couch for a while now, this kind of outrageous canvassing caused me to reach for the smelling salts.

Notice that the person making the claim won’t even put their name in the local newspaper, which tells you all you need to know.

Lots of people get uncomfortable about people knocking on doors in their neighborhood, often because they are selling cleaning sprays, conservative ideology or some other scam.

What’s even more interesting is that the big money for canvassing appears to be in the form of a third-party expenditure on behalf of Leavitt. According to PDC documents provided by the Pollard campaign, the labor union Unite Here, Local 9, is spending $30,000 on behalf of Leavitt for canvassing and printing expenses. So you kind of wonder why the Leavitt campaign is trying to stir the shit about canvassing, other than as a cover for their “union thugs.” (Snark alert!) That way if any of their people get out of line, they’ve issued a preemptive justification for all the petty sign destruction and other baloney that accompanies campaigns.

And let’s face it, in all campaigns people get all worked up and accuse the other side of stuff, and conservatives seem to do it in rote fashion as standard operating procedure. From national tickets down to the most modest races, conservative are never accountable for their own actions, they’re being wronged by the wrong kind of people! It’s always someone or something–the media, the gays, the black people, the unions, the terrorists, the environmentalists, the people ringing doorbells, whatever. You kind of wonder what happens when a conservative needs car repairs, because it must be exhausting trying to figure out which group to blame for that bad muffler.

It’s all so utterly predictable. This may be a non-partisan race, but Leavitt is running the classic GOP Clark County campaign perfected by folks like Sen. Don Benton, R-Vancouver. They try to stir up the conservative base through resentment and claims of being wronged, while campaigning as hard as anyone else. Frankly I’m expecting a ginned-up PDC complaint from the Leavitt camp any day now, it’s what Benton always does. It usually drops on a Friday, so that by the time a reporter can reach someone at the PDC, nobody cares and the public sees a headline about some supposedly nefarious action which is promptly forgotten when the election is over.

If people wonder why regular folks get disgusted by politics, it’s partly because of the stupid antics. It’s too bad Leavitt has thrown in with the local BIAW types and will apparently do or say anything to get elected, but then, that’s how the BIAW rolls. For strictly ideological reasons, the people who build houses apparently don’t want a new bridge that would make their customers’ lives better.

At least Pollard is a stand-up individual, even if one doesn’t agree with him on every last thing. It’s fascinating to watch a moderately pro-business mayor be exposed to the same tactics Democrats have to put up with on a routine basis.

Brian Baird pens a curious guest editorial that includes how to pay for health insurance reform; Chris at Politics Is a Blood Sport calls it what it is: a Value Added Tax, and it’s regressive and unfair as hell.

If this is some kind of trial balloon, I’ll be hiding in the attic over the garage eating some snacks.

Over the weekend, the NYT had an article featuring Rep. Earl Blumenauer, the Portland congressman they hold up as a spokesman for the “Frustrated Left.”

Instead of forging ahead, Mr. Blumenauer, 61, finds himself fighting to retain one of the touchstones for liberals this year, a public insurance option in the health care overhaul, and is watching his hopes of curbing global warming grow cold in the Senate. Mr. Blumenauer, a seven-term congressman, is bracing for a tough vote on sending more troops to Afghanistan while he frets about the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay remaining open.

“It has been a hard landing for a lot of the people that I represent,” Mr. Blumenauer, referring to his largely liberal constituency, said as he assessed the first months of the Obama administration.

While Blumenauer is fairly diplomatic towards the administration, blaming circumstances rather than the president, it’s kind of hard to avoid coming to the obvious conclusion: this president is likely looking at one term only, and it ain’t because he’s “Jimmy Carter,” it’s because he’s Herbert Hoover. America didn’t elect a president of Goldmann Sachs, but that’s what we got. And when the next foreclosure crisis hits, and it’s coming, all hell is going to break lose.

The batshit insane right demands purity of their officials, who scramble over each other to genuflect in the directon of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck on a daily basis. It doesn’t matter how insane their base gets, they at least get that the base needs attention.

OTOH, we demand little to nothing of Democrats, being all pragmatic and stuff, and nothing is what we get, over and over and over and over. This administration thinks nothing of screwing over key constituent groups, it’s ready to expand a land war in Asia, and it just generally has its head up its ass. I guess tearing off people’s heads and shitting down their necks only works on HBO comedy shows, or when you shit down the necks of your enemies. What we didn’t grok is that in Rahm-world, we are the enemy.

Fuck, the administration should actually hire Jeremy Piven, at least he’s funny.

I guess I don’t know how to spell this out more clearly for the Democratic Party: stop fucking the regular people over, or you’re done. And don’t tell us you “don’t have the votes;” you had the votes for all sorts of dumb-ass shit like condemning Move On and declaring a brain dead woman alive, so I’m not buying it any more.

If you’re looking in the mirror and thinking about your next contributions from the financial “services” industry and the “health care” industry, I’m talking to you. Fight the stupid Blue Dogs and show the people you have a spine for once, on health care, on gay rights, on Afghanistan, on everything.

Or. You. Will. Lose. Big. And you can blame “liberal purists,” all you want, but the people who will be voting you out will be all the regular Americans who are fed up with weak-willed, sell-out shitheads who send their kids off to die and steal their tax money to give it banksters, health insurance executives and defense contractors.

Down here in Clark County it seems there may be a wee problem, and that the problem has gone on for a very, very long time:

Allegations surrounding the firing of a black manager from Clark County’s jail portray a workplace where racism is tolerated or ignored, a state civil rights official said.

The graphic charges were detailed in an internal investigation by the county sheriff’s office and a series of legal claims against the county last month.

The result: a “toxic climate” that has led employees of the county sheriff’s office to “take sides” against one another, said Earl Ford, a local NAACP leader.

And if you click through and read the entire Columbian article, it appears that it’s not just white people who are accused of saying and doing racist and sexist things.

The other thing worth noting is that the local NAACP is being very deliberate and sensible about how it approaches this. While Clark County has its share of problems, like anywhere, it also has some pretty terrific community leaders who will try to address these thorny issues in a positive manner. Nobody wants to squash anyone’s right to free speech, but there are limits regarding what is professional conduct in the workplace. Racial and sexual taunts are clearly out of bounds, no matter who makes them.

Wells Fargo is jacking up its credit card rates.

The Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act (CARD), which was passed by Congress earlier this year, will limit how credit card companies can raise interest rates on consumers when the second part of the legislation takes effect next year. But before that can happen at least one bank has chosen to increase consumers’ rates in a step many feel is in response to the new law.

Last week Wells Fargo announced that it would be raising the rates on many of its customers by 3 percent, but the company says the rate change is not a reaction to the legislation.

“This is something we’ve been contemplating for quite a period of time,” Kevin Rhein, head of card services for the bank told Bloomberg, following the announcement.

This at a time when interest rates are at or near near zero.

Rates on three- and six-month bills have been below 1 percent for months, reflecting a campaign by the Federal Reserve to push down short-term borrowing costs in an effort to help the economy emerge from the longest recession since the 1930s.

Fed officials at their meeting last month left the federal funds rate, the interest that banks charge each other, at an all-time low of zero to 0.25 percent. The funds rate has been at that level since December.

Obviously, the best consumer advice anyone can heed is to just not use credit cards, or when you do, pay them off. Easier said than done for a lot of folks during bad economic times.

If you want to understand the populist outrage that exists in this country, the financial sector is a good place to start looking. Whether Wells Fargo is acting ahead of new laws or not, it’s acting directly ahead of the Christmas shopping season. That can’t be good for retailers.

It’s not the responsibility of ordinary consumers who play by the rules to help gigantic banks gain profits to offset the financial calamity caused by the housing bubble or the absorption of failed institutions. I’ve never cut up a credit card and mailed it back to a bank, it’s easier to just not use it. Sure, consumers are sometimes pretty much forced to have a credit card when renting a car or hotel room, but other than that, cash will do.

I still don’t understand why there seems to be little questioning of the right of big banks to pay incredibly crappy interest rates to regular depositors, yet charge consumers multiples of 10 or twenty times that interest rate. Then they tack on fees that more than negate any interest rates they pay to regular folks. But I guess you need an MBA to understand why this is good for business, because it seems to be good for only one set of businesses, and that would be the big banks.

Sure, banks should make some money on the interest rate differential, but wouldn’t logic dictate it be more like five percent or something? Would ten percent be enough? I mean, it’s all gravy, they get the gravy for being big and being a bank and getting to borrow money for free.

Where’s the gravy for the little people? I would please like to borrow eleventy trillion dollars at zero percent, and then I will be a big bank and I will charge people five percent interest, and I will be rich beyond my wildest dreams. I’ll even throw in free toaster ovens, maybe some calendars. The Fed knows where to find me, I’m sure.