One of the writers of the Family Guy told of the abuse he and other protestors took from the LAPD:

It was horrible to watch, and apparently designed to terrorize the rest of us. At least I was sufficiently terrorized. I unlinked my arms voluntarily and informed the LAPD officers that I would go peacefully and cooperatively. I stood as instructed, and then I had my arms wrenched behind my back, and an officer hyperextended my wrists into my inner arms. It was super violent, it hurt really really bad, and he was doing it on purpose. When I involuntarily recoiled from the pain, the LAPD officer threw me face-first to the pavement. He had my hands behind my back, so I landed right on my face. The officer dropped with his knee on my back and ground my face into the pavement. It really, really hurt and my face started bleeding and I was very scared. I begged for mercy and I promised that I was honestly not resisting and would not resist.

My hands were then zipcuffed very tightly behind my back, where they turned blue. I am now suffering nerve damage in my right thumb and palm.

NewScientist reports that an analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy. There is continuing evidence that economic inequality harms socieites. Both sides are taking in major donations from Wall Street, and Politifact points out that “a large majority” of candidates with the most money wins and the U.S. is the 6th most unequal country on the planet.

Yet support for redistribution has actually plummeted during the recession. Scientific American attributes this to a fundamental psychological loathing for being near or in last place, called “last place aversion,” a fear that can lead people near the bottom of the income distribution to oppose redistribution because it might cause those they identify as being lower than them to catch up or even pass them. Naomi Klein attributed it to the “the shock doctrine”: using the public’s disorientation following massive collective shocks – wars, terrorist attacks, or natural disasters — to achieve control by imposing economic shock therapy. I think there is something to that in Irving Kristol’s suggestion that Neo-Cons force Democrats to “tidy up” after them. The Republicans destroy the deficit with tax cuts and destroy the economy with deregulation then they get to sit back and alter between screaming at Obama to fix the economy and fix the deficit just as Bill Wilson was masturbating to the thought of forcing Obama to choose between paying social security or the armed forces. All the while Fox News-addled baby boomers start looking in desperation to terminate all the government departments that neither Perry nor the Republican base know enough to list on one hand to save money since “we’re broke.” Even Reuters is getting in on the act of blaming Occupy Wall Street on George Soros.

The economy and the deficit spending has done a lot better since Obama took over. Ezra Klein points out that a lot of the deficit comes from assumptions that we won’t let tax cuts expire. Paul Krugman plots out how nonresidential investment is a pure demand story.

Stock trader Alessio Rastani told how stock traders were looking forward to the possibility of a second big recession: “For most traders, it’s not about – we don’t really care that much how they’re going to fix the economy, how they’re going to fix the whole situation,” he said. “Our job is to make money from it.” And even when the inflation and long-term interest rates that people like Alan Greenspan predict don’t show up, they lament that, “This is regrettable, because it is fostering a sense of complacency that can have dire consequences.”

David Frum wrote a really interesting article about how the unbelievably horrible roster of Republicans is based on future shock:

This year we had a GOP figure candidate rise to the top of some polls by claiming that Obama was born in Kenya. He was replaced briefly by someone who has accused the President of trying to set up mandatory, Communist-style re-education camps for youth. She’s been replaced by a guy who calls Social Security a giant fraud.

Something has changed. Facts are elitist. Credibility is evolving into a liability and crazy has become a tactic.

…

Maybe we are in the process of redefining sanity. We have an abundance of reliable information to help us separate what is from what isn’t. But we are also being overwhelmed by shiny distractions. And it’s not just our omnipresent entertainment that is weakening our hold on what’s real. This wealth of accurate information is available inside an atmosphere in which reality is becoming perilously complex. Even the most common tools and devices that are woven into the fabric of our daily lives are now wonders beyond simple credibility.

With all the attacks on Republicans lately, some people have wondered why Frum still calls himself one. He gives a list of reasons, none of which are very compelling.

Paul Krugman suggests the reason Cain “is not an accident” is because you have to either be totally cynical or totally clueless to meet the basic G.O.P. requirements for running for president. Mitt Romney is a total cynic but a bad actor, so it becomes a perpertual runoff between him and those who are clueless enough to actually believe the stupid shit they’re saying.

A relative of mine recently sent me an article written about Jim Rogers, an American investor who shills for the free market theory of the Austrian School of economics. It read:

>President Barack Obama has tried to spend the economy back into recovery, which never helps, Rogers told Newsmax.TV in an exclusive interview.

Oh yeah, NewsMax. The leader in Obama birth certificate conspiracy news.

>”We cannot quadruple our debt every four or five years. We cannot print staggering amounts of money every four or five years. So there’s going to come time when we’ve shot all of our bullets, and it’s going to be a big mess.”

Obama has not quadripled the debt. Reagan tripled the debt then Bush tripled it again. Why is it Republicans are allowed to overspend on tax cuts when there’s no reason to believe super-rich corporations need extra money to invest, but Democrats aren’t allowed to spend money on people who need it when the economy is depressed?

>Japan refused to let troubled financial institutions go under in the early 1990s and as a result, spent two decades mired in sluggish recovery.

Their Lost Decade comes from policies that were too-little-too-late, not from spending too much. When our stimulus came around, Krugman argued it was too little. The response was we can always get another stimulus if we need it, but Krugman responded that no, if the stimulus didn’t completely recover the economy, then that would be used as proof that the stimulus failed. Sure enough, that’s what happened. The bipartisan fact-checker Politifact has shown that the stimulus did work for the money that was put into it. The non-partisan CBO also says we need to spend more money. The economic basis goes back to Keynes, who correctly predicted that if the Germans were forced into austerity for reparations by France during the Depression that it would open their politics up to radicalism. Keynes was also right that by spending tons of money on WW2, it stimulated the economy enough to get us out of the Depression.

>Scandinavia took the opposite approach when it ran into an economic downturn and today is healthy, Rogers points out.

You know an argument is full of crap when they tell you to look to Sweden, Norway, and Denmark are models of right-wing economics!!! Scandanavia is one of the few places on the planet that doesn’t have a huge gap between the rich and the poor because of their extremely high tax rates. So yeah, they didn’t need to pay for a stimulus because 1) they did the right thing from the beginning and 2) the safety net was already there!!! I’ve supported Sweden’s bailout model since I first heard about it 3 years ago. The important thing to know is they didn’t let the banks get away with it. The government took over the banks and they took their pound of flesh from the stockholders. The banks actually had to write down their losses and issue warrants to the government. The people pushing this “no-stimulus” stuff like Newsmax are the same ones who say the banks were forced to lend money to minorities when the fact is they were really trying to hide how much of these loans went to minorities from the government.

>On top of hundreds of billions of dollars in stimulus measures the administration has rolled out, the Federal Reserve has pumped $2.3 trillion into the economy via quantitative easing, which are asset purchase from banks that critics describe as printed money with little backing that in the end threatens to push up inflation rates.

I agree that we shouldn’t use QE. It does expand the economy, but it also increases the wealth gap, which has been a major part of the problem since 1978. The problem isn’t that banks don’t have money to loan, it’s that they see no way to profit since they are the only ones who have any money now.

Media Matters also has a short story about Larry Summers. He once brought up a story about talking to a girl who was protesting the World Bank’s annual meeting, saying : “And so I asked the girl: ‘What is this new system that you want? Tell me about it!’ And the girl had nothing. Nothing! She had no fucking clue what this magical new system was supposed to be. No one is saying that there aren’t problems with the world economy the way it is today. But these kids out there — they don’t know what they want!”

Zack Exley, a political and technology consultant, the Chief Community Officer at the Wikimedia and Co-Founder of the progressive New Organizing Institute, replied: “Mr. Secretary. You’ve got 50 economics PhDs in this room who pretty much run the world economy. And you’re asking that girl for a better system? Aren’t the solutions your job? You admit billions are living in hell, but it’s up to that girl to fix it?”

Jon Stewart did a great piece on how the pilgrims were better informed about the pagan history behind Christmas than Fox News anchors.

But let me end on Joe Arpaio, the self-proclaimed “toughest Sheriff in America”, who in the past made headlines for his hard-line stance toward immigration. He’s recently admitted that his office’s botched investigations of over 400 sex-crimes cases. One might think that it came from spending too much time helping Steven Seagal kill a puppy and hundreds of roosters by driving a tank into a home for…. what was it again? Oh yeah: animal cruelty.

That’s the actual headline:

Actor Steven Seagal Sued for Driving Tank into Arizona Home, Killing Puppy

The story reads:

Seagal told a local radio station that animal cruelty was one of his pet peeves, and since the bust was an animal cruelty bust – which apparently requires the use of several armored cars, a tank, and dozens of sheriff’s deputies in full riot gear – Seagal decided to go along for the ride…and kill hundreds of roosters and a puppy in the process.

Seagal is being sued for $100,000 by the illegal immigrants. Merry Christmas, everyone.