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Saturday, October 29, 2011

My book, for the cost of a written review (optional)



I have been trying to sell my book on Amazon, and I've done pretty well, but I can't really afford any more marketing. So, given I am a professional marketer at the height of my skills <smirk>, I thought I'd get creative. Download my book for free; just comment on this post and include your email and I'll send you a link. If you like it (or frankly even if you don't) though, you must agree to go to Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004S2U0JC) and write an honest review.

OK? Cool.

Enjoy

Chris Hayes is a genius

Chris Hayes has a new weekend morning show called "Up, with Chris Hayes". I find Chris to be one of the brightest lights and smartest political science analysts around these days - and so, so good at explaining the current political climate or strategy or insanity in a clearly consumable narrative - a skill I particularly value. The video clip below is from todays show where Chris takes us through what he calls a "fictional Republican right-wing dystopia called Inequalistan".

Love it.

It makes so clear how deeply moronic and dysfunctional the current GOP position on economics and taxes is that I can't stop watching it. Love the Woody Allen bit and the snarky swipe at fictional Ayn Rand Libertarian hero 'John Galt'...which is always sporting. By the way, aren't all Libertarian heroes fictional?



More on Chris' Inequalistan here.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Friday, October 28, 2011

Scathing rebuke of GOP economics from Eugene Robinson

Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Eugene Robinson writes a scathing rebuke of GOP economics and recounts the salient points in a recent CBO study on income distribution. While the GOP likes to rail against income redistribution, Robinson points out they are just fine with it as long as it flows upward. He goes on to define equality of opportunity, mourn the lack of upward mobility, and ties it all to the resonance being gained by the Occupy Movement. And he takes a jab at Ayn Rand too - that snarky liberal!

Good read.

Fallon/Williams Slow Jam the Occupy Movement - Oh Yeah

Very funny - a pseudo-erotic view of the Occupy movement.

Oh Yeah.

Who knew Brian Williams was so funny.

Colbert nails the GOP stupidity on immigration

Alabama GOP leaders passed a harsh immigration policy and not surprisingly all the immigrants fled (as Colbert points out, stealing yet another thing American's want to do). Now crops are rotting in the fields.

When will GOP voters realize it feels good to rail against immigrants, but it's actually pretty pointless. When will they stop allowing GOP lawmakers to BS us about "securing the border first" and realize that a federal migrant worker program is only logical, gets tax revenue from migrant workers and allows farmers to hire the labor they need to pick their crops.

Why are you voting Republican? Beats me. Have you even thought about it?

Thursday, October 27, 2011

Young, Angry, and right

The time for this leaderless movement to find a leader is now. Momentum is building fast and leadership, a voice is a must.

Who will answer the call?

Morning Joe gets it, why can't Boehner-McConnell

I was happily shocked to see MSNBC's Morning Joe Scarborough, former GOP Congressman, lay out a plan for addressing the problem being protested by Occupy Protesters. It's about Wall Street gone wild, creating nothing, and getting rich in the process, while hard working educated builders in other sectors can't find jobs. It's about Washington being broken with campaign finance out of control.

What amazes me is that Joe sounds like a Democrat; Reform Wall Street, Get Control of Campaign Finance, Adjust the Tax Code to encourage investment in real business, not just Wall Street "financial instruments" that create nothing but risk for the vast majority.

Right Joe, that's called Glass-Steagall, the Warren Buffet Rule proposed by Obama, and the Constitutional Amendment proposed by Occupy Wall Street to make all elections Public and remove all private money.

Go Joe! You've seen the light!!



Occupy protesters need a national leader

It's time for the leader of the Occupy movement to find a national leader. Someone to speak for the great majority of views and demands of the protesters. The Martin Luther King of the disenfranchised, young, educated, powerless, jobless hordes thrown off by decades of Trickle Down delusions. Someone to encourage peaceful protest, to define the message, to make clear the demands, and to make good the threats if those demands are not met.

It must be someone young, educated, articulate, knowledgeable of the rules of peaceful protest, charismatic, and fearless.

Who is it? Is it you? Why not you?


The Class War has begun

Compelling read from Frank Rich in NY Magazine today. It is smart, recounts historically relevant protests from our past with eerily similar problems of wealth inequity and middle-class decay. How anyone can fail to see the problem being the rise of Financial Services - wherein labor results in people at the top making money from money - and making nothing else at all - and the complete lack of effective regulation on this industry. All this combined with the fact that these companies are too big to fail - IS THE PROBLEM.

We simply must regulate these industries, and I believe force banks out of gambling with our money (Glass-Steagall) and back to making money from banking alone. I also believe we must break up these banks and create smaller, less risky (small enough to fail) entities.



These steps alone are not negotiable - and are at the heart of the Occupy Wall Street anger. Time for Obama to tie this movement to his moniker of Hope and Change.

Think Global, Act Local: I for one am moving my money from a large bank to my local credit union right away - in solidarity with the movement.

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Too big to fail = too risky to exist

Robert Reich calls for the reinstatement of Glass-Steagall and the breaking up of the large banks. He doubts it will happen because Democrats are still too beholden to Wall Streets political contributions...


"I doubt the president will be condemning the Street's antics, or calling for a resurrection of Glass-Steagall and a breakup of the biggest banks. Democrats are still too dependent on the Street's campaign money.
That's too bad. You don't have to be an occupier of Wall Street to conclude the Street is still out of control. And that's dangerous for all of us."
...which is why the #1 most important demand of Occupy Wall Street is...wait for it...public funding of all elections, the overruling of Citizens United with a Constitutional Amendment, and the removal of private money from all federal elections. Amen brother.

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Ya' can't fix stupid

This today from Ezra Klein of the Washington Post:


Gavyn Davies of the Financial Times pegs it at about $6 trillion in lost output, even if the U.S. economy grows at 3.8 percent clip between now and 2016 (which is an awfully sunny forecast):
“GDP will remain far below potential for several more years, and the unemployment rate will remain considerably above the structural unemployment rate. Put simply, there will be a massive further wastage of economic resources. A rough calculation suggests that the cumulative loss of GDP from the Great Recession of 2007-16 will amount to $5,900 billion, of which about $2,200 billion is still to come in the next five years.”

The U.S. Commerce Department will release its report on third-quarter GDP on Thursday.
So Presidential elections matter. Said another way, the full cost of electing the incompetent George W. Bush to the Presidency (twice) is almost $6 trillion in future lost output. Please remember that the next time you go in the voting booth. As comedian Ron White says, "You can't fix stupid", (Warning: Video R Rated) and many among the current GOP crop are, well, less competent than they need to be. To put it mildly.

Friday, October 21, 2011

Cain 9-9-9 and now Perry Flat Tax disasters

The old southern pejorative phrase, "All Hat, no Cattle" comes to mind whenever I listen to Rick Perry. His ideas are vacuous. I don't think Herman Cain expected anyone to take him seriously and therefore hasn't really worked at his so-called "9-9-9" plan in any real depth. For instance, Jared Bernstein posted this chart today that shows that everyone's taxes go up, but only the top tiers go down....way, way, way down. Do you think the GOP candidates listen at all to the Occupy Wall Street folks ("We are the 99%") as these types of regressive tax plans take a terrible tax situation on wealth distribution favoring the rich, and injects it with steroids. It will cause riots if such a plan is passed.


Monday, October 17, 2011

The struggle for who we are as a nation

I don't think it's hyperbole to say that we are in the grips of a struggle to decide who we are as a nation. What is more important to us?

Do we insist on low taxes on the wealthy? After all, as Americans partaking in the great American dream, we too might one day be wealthy and will want our taxes low. Do we buy into the argument that raises anyone's taxes is a bad idea? Do we buy into the argument this it is especially bad to allow the Bush tax cuts to end and let rates return to Clinton-era averages? Do we care that the middle-class is under attack and that large percentages of the middle-class are falling back into poverty. Do we care that the wealthy have taken the lion's share (and then some) of income and done so well this past 20 years, yet we refuse to force taxes higher on this group to ease us back out of recession?

Do we want to pay down the cost of our safety nets by removing social programs that have given a level of security to Americans who don't get wealthy? Or is it more important that most of us can work hard, save as best we can, and retire without the threat of homelessness or poverty, in other words are social safety nets worth the very real costs they require?

Reasonable people can disagree about this and both be right. But there are limits to this view. No safety nets is immoral, selfish, and foolish (for the wealthy). When in the past greed has ruled the writing of our policy, the poor always climb up and force change from the wealthy - restoring a semblance of equity - at least for a time.

I read David Brooks recent column on empathy and find myself wondering where people like Brooks live - what planet, what conscious plane. I fear it is a place where other people don't matter, only they and those like them.

Mr Brooks sees Nazi soldiers weeping when they slaughter innocents, and instead of blaming the authority that commanded them to do it, he blames their own empathy. Something is deeply wrong with this mindset, and Brooks is not alone.

Here's a particular coherent comment on the article.

Mr Brooks--a Republican--has perhaps here articulated a fundamental flaw in the worldview of the present-day American conservative movement. He equates empathy with money. Empathy is compassion. Parents feel empathy for a distressed child, but so do strangers. I do not have to have a physical handicap to feel empathy for someone who does--it comes naturally. This makes me a larger human being--because I can relate to another human being who is not myself. And this is what makes human beings good. Republicans mock compassion as a weakness. This disavows the single greatest basic tenet of Christianity(or Buddhism etc). A homosexual who serves in the US military is booed by Republicans because he is homosexual. This is the way to savagery. This essay by Mr Brooks is both prescient and disturbing. I walk to work to save 80 cents every morning to save money for a Novice Monk named Onsi in Laos. My empathy makes his life better. In return, I get a form of grace. Grace, and a friendship that is beyond money, beyond corporations, beyond politics. Is is plausible to posit that Republicans are verging on becoming evil? Evil means unhuman. Empathy makes us human.


Who are we going to be, as Americans, 10 years from now. Do you care?

The beautiful word "Compromise"


Dana Milbank of the Washington Post posits that the 2012 election will not end the gridlock. I think he's right, but I also think we are starting to see the emergence of a theme for the 2012 election. This theme is embodied in the Occupy Wall Street anger, has similar origins to what began the Tea Party, and can even be glimpsed in some of the views of lawmakers in Congress. People want our elected officials to fight the good fight, but in the end they MUST come to a conclusion that moves us forward. That means compromise.
My own view is that the GOP has made compromise a dirty word - at least they have made compromising with Democrats a "sin" (in their own parlance) and therein lies the problem. The GOP chose to make a full-stop in legislation after the 2010 mid-terms. Can you name a single bill that the House has passed? Almost all of the House bills die because they are symbolic base-stirring BS - bills which allow them to point to the "fight" they are fighting on behalf of extreme ideologies of the GOP base - mostly around abortion limits, and the GOP has taken the filibuster to records in terms of invoking it. This latter effort means that even if the GOP gains the Senate, the GOP has set a precedent that the minority party can block anything and everything with the filibuster. This is not governance, this is an insurgency that sacrifices the country in favor of extreme partisanship and fringe ideology. This from Milbanks' article on this topic:
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell seems to grasp this in his more candid moments. He has argued that a divided government provides “the best time, and some would argue the only time, to do really hard things, because really hard things done on a partisan basis cannot be accomplished” without creating “a wipeout in the next election.”
That’s certainly true: If Republicans were to win the White House and the Senate and then use that power to rewrite Medicare and Social Security without Democratic support, the backlash would make the Tea Party look genteel.
But just as often, McConnell gets swept up in the wait-’til-next-year logic, as when he said that defeating Obama is “the single most important thing we want to achieve.”
Similar wishes drove Paul Ryan, the House budget committee chairman, to forgo a debt compromise with Democrats in favor of a partisan plan that cuts spending without tax increases. “We need to accentuate” differences, Ryan said, “to give the country a real clear choice” in 2012.
But Americans have already made a clear choice, repeatedly: They want their representatives to compromise. In the new Washington Post-ABC News poll, 64 percent said lawmakers should attack the debt problem with a combination of spending cuts and tax increases. But only 25 percent thought that lawmakers will agree on a plan.
The lack of faith that lawmakers will do the obvious, necessary things goes a long way toward explaining why Congress enjoys an approval rate of 14 percent. In this case, good things do not come to those who wait.
The Tea Party started because people were angry at the Wall Street bailouts. Occupy Wall Street has very similar seminal roots. Americans are polled repeatedly that they want our lawmakers to compromise. Given the GOP intransigence, isn't it time to vote these extremists out of office? I think it is.

Friday, October 14, 2011

Regulations costing billions of jobs

John McCain spouted the usual line on regulation killing jobs - clearly misspeaking saying "billions and billions of jobs". Anyway, I am so tired of this line from the GOP. While there are some regulations that were introduced with bipartisan support (like Sarbanes-Oxley) and no party is solely to blame for this - it has become standard Obama-attack to blame him for all the "job killing" regulation. The GOP controls the House, if you want a moratorium on regulation, introduce a bill. For crying out loud, stop whining about it and pass it.

But the larger point is this; regulation is certainly a factor in job creation, but clearly the ONLY real problem is lack of aggregate demand. One can read literally dozens of economists who agree; one can read recommendations from a group of leading CEO's published recently who agree. For the love of Pete, even the staunchly-GOP-favoring National Chamber of Commerce agrees.

The GOP simply MUST stop talking about this minor issue, and focus on driving demand - which is what the White House Jobs Act does.

Shut up and pass it.


Thursday, October 13, 2011

Summary of GOP candidates ideas

This from EJ Dionne of the Washington Post today:



So let’s see: The solution to large-scale abuses of the financial system, a breakdown of the private sector, extreme economic inequality and the failure of companies and individuals to invest and create jobs is — well, to give even more money and power to very wealthy people, to disable government and to trust those who got us into the mess to get us out of it.


That’s a brief summary of the news from the Republican Party this week. It’s what Republican candidates said during the Post-Bloomberg debate Tuesday night, and it’s the signal Senate Republicans sent in voting as a bloc against President Obama’s jobs bill. Don’t just do something, stand there.

When will this lack of willingness to move the country forward hurt the GOP? 

Why is anyone okay with this level of selfish party line obstruction?

Thursday, October 6, 2011

Occupy Wallstreet is mainstream

Do even most self-described Tea Partiers, and self-proclaimed Republicans support the general idea that Wall Street is to blame for our financial woes, that many of the millionaires on Wall Street and elsewhere in our society have been given a free pass for too long on taxes as a percentage of their income, and that millionaires and billionaires should be asked to pay the same percentages of taxes as everyone else? Do these millionaires also believe they should pay more?

The answer to all of that above appears to be "yes". This is the popular uprising from the disenfranchised, under attack, the real victims of class warfare, the middle-class - taking back their fair share of the American dream and of their piece of the financial pie.

Will it help Democrats and hurt Republicans if the current entrenched positions of GOP leaders in Congress persist? I think it will and I think these insurgent GOP lawmakers, whose only goal seems to gain power, even at the expense of the country, know it will hurt them if they don't moderate their positions and help create jobs and fix this economy now. Not later, now.



Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Debunking the GOP business confidence meme

Larry Mishel points us to the American Enterprise Institute response to his paper debunking the regulatory uncertainty meme. It’s quite something, because there’s nothing there.

Mishel coherently points out that [believing] this “regulatory uncertainty” argument requires its proponents to have a particularly peculiar form of amnesia, given that the worldwide economic collapse we are now experiencing is due to a failure to sufficiently regulate financial markets.

http://www.epi.org/publication/regulatory-uncertainty-phony-explanation/

Sunday, October 2, 2011

Book Review: This Land is Their Land



I am in the middle of reading a book that gets my blood boiling. It's called This Land is Your Their Land. It chronicles the recent, ongoing, and purposeful crumbling of the middle class, the slide back into poverty for millions, and the strategic policy making that allows redistribution of wealth upward. From the lack of regulation that caused the 2008 financial collapse, to the Bush Tax cuts, the money is moving upward.

Why is that ok with you?

In the first chapter already, sentences like this make me want to quit my job and run for public office. Well, ok perhaps not that extreme just yet. But it does make me want to share this book, its message, and to do my part to re-estabilish our society as one where everyone can live without fear of hunger and homelessness, while maintaining the right of those who can to create great wealth for themselves. That is the balance we want, we need, and we still have if we work to save it.

"It wasn't just a "shift", of course, governed by impersonal geological forces. The rude hand of human intervention could be felt in 2001...in [a series] of deft upward redistribution of wealth, the adminstration cut taxes for the wealthiest Americans while cutting back on services and programs, such as financial aid, for everyone else. We had never had a gang in Washington as noisily committed to "Christian values," and yet they had managed to stand core bibilical teachings on their head."

and further on...

"There was a connection, as most people suspected, between the massive buildup of weath among the few and the anxiety and desperation of the many. The money that fueled the explosion of gluttony at the top had to come from somewhere or, more specifically, from someone. Since no domestic oil deposits had been discovered, no new seams of uranium or gold, and since the war in Iraq enriched only the military contractors and suppliers, it had to have come from other Americans. In fact, the greatest capitalist innovations of the decade were in the realm of squeezing money out of those who had little to spare: taking away workers' pensions and benefits to swell profits, offering easy credit on dubious terms, raising insurance premiums and refusing to insure those who might ever make a claim, [outsourcing millions of jobs with tax credits to boot], downsizing workforces to boost share prices, even falsifying time records to avoid paying overtime."
I read on, I recommend you read it too. It's not too late for us to restore balance, to temper the greed, to save the middle-class, and for all of those uber-rich, and even the merely affluent like myself, we will save not only our nation, but ourselves.

Buy the book at Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0805090150?ie=UTF8&tag=washpost-opinions-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=0805090150