Bowlesed over.

“For the Obama administration, Bowles has a number of qualifications. For one thing, Republicans adore him. Ryan has called him ‘my favorite Democrat.’ Appointing Bowles to be Treasury Secretary would ensure a smooth confirmation, and it would be interpreted as a sign of goodwill and ‘seriousness’ both by Republicans and by the media.“

Er…Not a single one of those are pluses. And neither the Republicans nor the media are in any way serious anymore, and they haven’t been for close to two decades. So why cater to them? In any case, Ezra Klein starts floating Erskine Bowles, one of the high priests of the deficit witchhunt, as the second term Treasury Secretary. Actually, Ezra, that’s a fucking terrible idea, because guess what? The deficit is not and has never been a real problem, and you should know that. Nonetheless, folks, start girding yourself for the Grand Bargain…Our president has made it patently clear that that’s the direction he plans to head should he be granted a second term. And this is pretty much why I won’t be posting about Election 2012 here all that often.

Keeping an Eye on the Ball.

“It sure sounds like a fair place for two hostile opponents to meet. Half the basketball-related income goes to the owners, half the basketball-related income goes to the players and millions of pro basketball fans celebrate their first victory of the season in the form of, you know, a season. But in the end, there’s nothing fair about awarding 50 percent of BRI to the people who amount to 100 percent of the reason there’s any BRI in the first place.“

This, this, a thousand times this. As talks continue and games disappear, Ian O’Connor summarizes the central issue of the NBA lockout: the owners bring no value to the table — they’re basically leeches on the system. “LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, Dirk Nowitzki, Dwyane Wade, Kevin Durant, Derrick Rose — they don’t play in the NBA. They are the NBA. The entire league. The workforce and the product. The owners? They’re just along for the ride.“

Now, the better owners, I think — Mark Cuban, say — understand this. They get that an NBA team is a luxury asset that makes most of its money when it it sold, not as a day-to-day enterprise. And they have a good time playing the owner game and getting to hang around with basketball players.

As an aggregate, however, the NBA owners here are the problem. They’ve been lying about their financial straits, and then trying to pin the “downturn” on their employees. Just because the employees are reasonably well-compensated in this instance doesn’t change the fact that this is classic bait-and-switch behavior by management.

If there’s a reason the NBA is doing poorly at the moment — which, again, is an open question due to all the accounting shenanigans — it’s because unemployment is at 9% and poverty is at 15%. We did not get here because Eddy Curry ate his way to the bottom of a ridiculous contract. Besides, it is not Curry’s fault that somebody wants to pay him $100 million a year for riding the bench anyway. It is the fault of whoever paid him – cough, James Dolan — that exorbitant price. So now, owners want to be bailed out by the powers-that-be for their own terrible business decisions? We’ve seen this movie before. Classic corporate-socialism at work.

I expect the players will probably fold in the end, since, like labor in most situations these days, they don’t have much leverage. But, however it all pans out, let’s remember: The players have the skill set. They create the product. There is no product without the players. In an perect world, the owners should give players a generous share of the revenues (since they’re 100% of the value of the operation), and then be happy they get to own a basketball team. Now, let’s play ball.

Update: “One is, historically, you’ve seen franchises appreciate in value and that appreciation has more than outstripped any cash-flow losses that you’ve had…Secondly, it’s a lot of fun to own an NBA franchise…[B]y and large, NBA franchise ownership has been a good investment. You can’t base long-run projections on how you did in the biggest financial downturn of the last 50 years. On that basis, there are no good investments out there.“

Karl Malone’s gonna play the way Karl Malone can. And Kevin Murphy’s gonna sort out this lockout like Kevin Murphy do.

Lithwick: It’s Not Us. It’s You.

“For the past several years, while the mainstream media was dutifully reporting on all things Kardashian or (more recently) a wholly manufactured debt-ceiling crisis, ordinary people were losing their health care, their homes, their jobs, and their savings.“

For the benefit of the willfully dense — i.e. all the telegenic denizens of the Village — Slate‘s Dahlia Lithwick explains the basic meaning behind Occupy Wall Street: “They are holding up signs that are perfectly and intrinsically clear: They want accountability for the banks that took their money, they want to end corporate control of government. They want their jobs back. They would like to feed their children. They want–wait, no, we want– to be heard by a media that has devoted four mind-numbing years to channeling and interpreting every word uttered by a member of the Palin family while ignoring the voices of everyone else.“

Calvin, Job Creator.

Also making the rounds on Facebook, this ancient Calvin & Hobbes strip anticipates the socialized-losses-for-me-but-not-for-thee mindset of contemporary “job creators.” Thank goodness they only have one-and-a–half major political parties behind them to back their play.

We’re the 99% (except Bruce Wayne).

Although, let’s be honest: Rorschach is more like the original Tea Partier, no? Anyway, it’s not just Calvin. By way of Mary Sue, comic book characters weigh in on Occupy Wall Street. Speaking for the 1%: Lex Luthor, Uncle Scrooge, Victor Von Doom, and, my evening alter-ego these days, Bruce Wayne…but he’s cool.

Decades of Divergence.

“In its report, the budget office found that from 1979 to 2007, average inflation-adjusted after-tax income grew by 275 percent for the 1 percent of the population with the highest income…By contrast, the budget office said, for the poorest fifth of the population, average real after-tax household income rose 18 percent. And for the three-fifths of people in the middle of the income scale, the growth in such household income was just under 40 percent.“

A brand-spankin’ new CBO report concludes what we all already know: Income inequality has surged since 1981, and government, post-Reagan, has consistently failed to address the problem. “‘The equalizing effect of federal taxes was smaller’ in 2007 than in 1979, as ‘the composition of federal revenues shifted away from progressive income taxes to less-progressive payroll taxes,’ the budget office said.” But, hey, let’s sweat that deficit.

Bailout 2: BoA Boogaloo.

“This move reflects either criminal incompetence or abject corruption by the Fed. Even though I’ve expressed my doubts as to whether Dodd Frank resolutions will work, dumping derivatives into depositaries pretty much guarantees a Dodd Frank resolution will fail.“

Along the same lines, Naked Capitalism‘s Yves Smith responds to the disclosure that repeat offender Bank of America is trying — with the Fed’s help — to foist their more toxic assets into FDIC-backed accounts (meaning that taxpayers will eat the losses.) “[T]his move amounts to a direct transfer from derivatives counterparties of Merrill to the taxpayer, via the FDIC, which would have to make depositors whole after derivatives counterparties grabbed collateral.“

Continues Smith: “The FDIC is understandably ripshit…Bill Black said that the Bloomberg editors toned down his remarks considerably. He said, ‘Any competent regulator would respond: ‘No, Hell NO!’ It’s time that the public also say no, and loudly, to yet another route for running a drip feed from taxpayers to banksters.‘” (Cartoon via here.)

The Wisdom of the Deficit Owl.

“What fiscal crisis? The great unasked question in this summer of sound-and-fury is ‘why?’ The United States has many problems at the moment: a high-and-stubborn unemployment rate, a foreclosure catastrophe, a slowing economy that has not recovered and will not recover…and the ongoing challenges of infrastructure, energy and climate change. Fiscal crisis? The entire thing is a figment, made up of wise-men’s warnings repeated endlessly.“

James K. Galbraith, who warned of the deficit witchhunt a year ago, weighs in on the debt ceiling endgame currently playing out in Washington, as well as Obama’s role in it:

“[W]hat do we have, from a President who claims to be a member of the Democratic Party? First, there is the claim that we face a fiscal crisis, which is a big untruth. Second, a concession in principle that we should deal with that crisis by enacting massive cuts in public services on one hand and in vital social insurance programs on the other. This is an arbitrary cruelty. Third, a refusal to stand on the strong ground of the Constitution, against those whose open and declared purpose is tear that document and the public credit to shreds.“

Yep, that’s about it. When it became clear that Obama had fully inhaled voodoo economics and was once again going to give away the store in these needless negotiations, I said on Twitter: ““I’ll take [Boehner/Cantor/Lannisters/Littlefinger] at his word!” I just realized: Obama negotiates like Ned Stark. Now, winter is coming.“

But, really, that gives this president too much credit. He’s not a nobly deluded sap. He’s getting exactly what he wants: a Third Way-approved Grand Bargain that takes money out of a sputtering economy and needlessly slashes our social insurance system, all in response to a problem that is basically imaginary.

But, of course, the chatterers and the Serious People™ will applaud this bargain as being wise, centrist, and independent no matter what damage it causes — hey, only Nixon can go to China! And all the while the economy and labor market will continue to tank. What a fucking fiasco. [Rorschcat via here.]

There’s Money in the Memory Hole.

“The contrast in fortunes between those on top of the economic heap and those buried in the rubble couldn’t be starker. The 10 biggest banks now control more than three-quarters of the country’s banking assets. Profits have bounced back, while compensation at publicly traded Wall Street firms hit a record $135 billion in 2010. Meanwhile, more than 24 million Americans are out of work or can’t find full-time work, and nearly $9 trillion in household wealth has vanished. There seems to be no correlation between who drove the crisis and who is paying the price.“

As Bank of America pays a pittance to other banks for its malfeasance, former chair of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission Phil Angelides looks into how the winners are now rewriting the history of the 2008 financial collapse. “So, how do you revise the historical narrative when the evidence of what led to economic catastrophe is so overwhelming and the events at issue so recent? You and your political allies just do it. And you bet on the old axiom that a lie is halfway around the world before the truth can tie its shoes.” Attorney General Schneiderman, our nation turns its lowly eyes to you.

Sixty hours, and what do you get?

“Just counting work that’s on the books (never mind those 11 p.m. emails), Americans now put in an average of 122 more hours per year than Brits, and 378 hours (nearly 10 weeks!) more than Germans. The differential isn’t solely accounted for by longer hours, of course–worldwide, almost everyone except us has…a right to weekends off, paid vacation time, and paid maternity leave. (The only other countries that don’t mandate paid time off for new moms are Papua New Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Samoa, and Swaziland. U-S…A?)“

It used to be a central tenet of progressivism was working to shorten the work week. Now, even unemployment-soothing innovations like workshare go nowhere, and, as Mother Jones‘s Monika Bauerlein and Claira Jeffrey explain (with handy graphs), we are all victims of the Great Speedup…but not the beneficiaries. “For 90 percent of American workers, incomes have stagnated or fallen for the past three decades, while they’ve ballooned at the top, and exploded at the very tippy-top…In other words, all that extra work you’ve taken on — the late nights, the skipped lunch hours, the missed soccer games — paid off. For them.”