Identity

" In a world where 2 billion more people have entered the workforce since 1989, the insecurity of those suddenly forced to compete that much harder was always bound to grow. If you’re one of the beneficiaries of this massive upheaval, you’re fine. But for the millions who fear they are losing out, and who see their town or country changing around them, including through immigration, it’s natural to hold on tight to, and fiercely defend, an identity that feels safe and familiar." Jonathan Freedland writing in the Guardian UK. 21 Nov 2014
    Cultural arguments are taking the place of what used to be bread and butter issues.  The Republican party has exploited this very cleverly, while they turn the bread and butter toward the very rich. When will the 90 % figure it out? And, when will the Democrats figure out that identity politics is where it's at.

Neo-liberals and the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA)

Cass Sunstein was appointed head of OIRA from 2009-2012 and led it to delay and eviscerate a host of environmental regulations.  Pres. Reagan created the office ostensibly to improve decision making by insisting on benefit-cost analysis of all rules, but industry used it to escape and delay regulation.  An example of its over-reaching and bizarre twists is to count lost pleasure from smoking as an off-set to health benefits of reduced smoking.  Besides, early death saves health care costs over the smokers' lifetime they claim! All of this is justified by the neo-liberal championing of what they call liberty-enhancement. If some want to kill themselves, they should be free to do so.  This is a neat trick that diverts blame from systemic corporate malfeasance to individuals. 
   This is documented in Robert Kuttner, "Obama's Obama" Harpers, December 2014." A must read by those interested in good government and avoidance of the siren song and paternalism of the neo-liberals. Obama does not come off well. Sunstein and Obama prove once again that smart and wise are not the same thing.

Virunga, Congo

Oil companies are circling Virunga National Park in the Congo, home to several endangered wildlife species such as mountain gorillas.  The oil company thugs stoop to bribery and murder.  The Government is silent saying they must support anything that will lift their people out of poverty.  One could be more impressed if they were putting a large part of their royalties into a trust fund for all its citizens, such as Alaska did.  
 The Congo has been home to natural resource exploitation by the Belgians for generations and where are the jobs it was supposed to create?  Any natural resource eventually runs out and the people who get rich are government officials and foreign companies.
Source: NYT 16 Nov 2014

Belief and Experience

A post-election message by Harry Cook

"How lovely it would be to trade belief and believing for experience and reason. That was the great contribution of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who birthed an America that, like the autumnal doe, takes care of its young, its weak and those however disadvantaged through no fault of their own.

It was not a hardcore belief system that informed Roosevelt. It was experience. Experience is a far better guide than belief. The former is rooted in what eye can see, ear can hear and heart can feel. The latter is rooted in abstraction and, as often as not, self-serving."

Obama Popularity

Why has Obama's popularity plummeted?  He has accomplished a great deal that is not getting talked about.  He is the victim of the press and his opponents (some racist) that keep chanting "Obama Care" is bad.  This seems to stop further thinking about actual consequences.  It reminds of Gov. George Romney whose campaign for the presidency coincided with the Vietnam War.  He went on a fact-finding mission and came back and said he had been "brain washed" by the generals.  Well, we can't have a president who can be brain washed and the press repeated this trope over and over again and Romney's quest for the presidency was over.  The press and many people did not want to know more. 
Culture is a strange animal that is hard to understand.  Words can enter the language, and no matter how misleading, they have a life of their own, albeit pushed along by opinion makers.  Why is not "Affordable Care" is easy to say as "Obama Care?"  But, then the opponents would have to admit that they simply don't want to give aid to the poor--they don't deserve it.

Why We Have No High-speed Rail Lines

America is the only rich country in the world with no high-speed rail lines connecting our major cities.  As any European tourist quickly notes,  fast trains such as the Euro-Star and the French TGV are comfortable and reliable and cheaper than flying.  And, you are not treated like a crimnal while boarding.
       Opponents of rail improvement argue that roads are self-sustaining via tolls and gas taxes.  But, in fact the US Treasury yearly transfers from its General Fund to the Highway Trust Fund huge sums that do not equal all of the Amtrack subsidies for the past 40 years.  Federal highway subsidies were $41 billion in 2013; aviation subsidies were $16 billion, while Amtrak received only $1.6 billion.  (Reported in Harpers, July 2014)  
       Wisconsin's Republican Governor rejected a Federal offer to build a high-speed rail line from Madison to Milwaukee.  General Motors and Exxon and the oil exporting countries must have cheered this stupidity. 

Why Do Many Embrace Inequality?

Papers and books describe the widening inequality in our society.  They provide little understanding of why the 99% put up with it.
          The explanation of Prof. Justin Friesen  et. al. suggest that "When we feel a lack of personal control, we compensate by looking for order or predictability in our environment.  So we desire and perceive governments and gods to be particularly powerful.  Those who suffer inequality often even defend the social system responsible,  rather than accept that life has been unjust." (reported in the NYT June 22, 2014)
       The constant litany in our press and TV emphasizes that capital provides jobs, and we can't threaten it or it will go away.  This slogan translates into no protest against the favorable treatment of capital gains and low effective tax rate for the super rich. 
    It is just as true that labor provides opportunities for capital, but this is seldom noted.  Our political energy is captured by the Tea Party who rails against big government (whatever that means) and ignores inequality with the lame excuse that doing anything about it would mean more government (whatever that means).
           

Inequity and Hierarchy

“When we feel a lack of personal control, we compensate by looking for order or predictability in our environment.  So we desire and perceive governments and gods to be particularly powerful.  Those who suffer inequity often even defend the social system responsible, rather than accept that life has been unjust.” 

Based on Friesen and Kay as reported in NYT 22 June 2013

Case in point, the popularity of Putin in Russia and popular working class support for the Republicans who are anti-labor in US.

Sacred Ground

People are talking of “sacred ground” at the opening of the Holocaust Museum.  It might better be called scared ground.  It feeds our fears and supports wasteful spending on airport security.  Do we really think terrorists will attack airplanes again, when there are plenty of other easy targets such as shopping centers as is being done in many countries?  My heart goes out to the victims’ families, but we need to stop crying and ask why it happened.  Why are we so hated that people are willing to take their own lives to harm us? We are arrogant, militaristic bullies.

The New Abolitionists

The exchange value of a particular commodity is a matter of property rights.  Exchange value is not an immutable fact, but rather an artifact.  Change the rights and it changes exchange values.  An existing exchange value cannot be used to justify the property rights that produced it.  Rather it is a moral question about what kind of world we want to live in.

Chris Hayes writing in The Nation (May 12) draws a parallel between the loss of wealth of slave holders after the Civil War and the potential loss of the value of coal and petroleum reserves if we reduced mining and pumping.  He calls supporters of carbon regulation “The New Abolitionists.”  Before we shed crocodile tears for the dramatized losers, let’s ask what would have happened if humans had had the right to be free of slavery and now carbon emissions.  What compensation would you require to become a slave?  The cotton plantation owners could not afford to buy out these humans. 

Likewise, what compensation would environmentalists require to sell the right to pollute?  The oil companies and the strip miners could not afford to buy them.  Hayes calls our attention to the losses to them and assumes they own the right to pollute and drive people and their earth support system to extinction.  Property rights are the issue to be decided and no dollar signs that are produced by assuming one side owns are relevant.  It is ultimately a moral question and cannot be deduced from any exchange values.

Quantitative Easing

Quantitative Easing, don’t you love that term?  It is meant to be psychic balm.

The idea behind it is that the central bank can buy Treasury Notes and mortgage-backed  securities and thus increase their prices and drive down long term interest rates. The low rates are supposed to enable firms to borrow and provide employment.

      In 2012, the Bank of England (BOE) issued a report that said that the Bank of England’s policies of quantitative easing (QE)– similar to the U.S. Fed’s – had benefited mainly the wealthy.

Specifically, it said that its QE program had boosted the value of stocks and bonds by 26 percent, or about $970 billion. It said that about 40 percent of those gains went to the richest 5 percent of British households.

        Many said the BOE's easing added to social anger and unrest. Dhaval Joshi, of BCA Research  wrote that “QE cash ends up overwhelmingly in profits, thereby exacerbating already extreme income inequality and the consequent social tensions that arise from it."

     "The question is whether putting more profits into the hands of the top 5 percent will really generate jobs for the rest of America. So far, the evidence is not promising."

Robert Frank, CNBC

According to an article in Wikipedia, “Central banks in most developed nations (e.g., the United Kingdom, the United States, Japan, and the EU) are prohibited from buying government debt directly from the government and must instead buy it from the secondary market. This two-step process, where the government sells bonds to private entities which the central bank then buys, has been called 'monetizing the debt' by many analysts.  The distinguishing characteristic between QE and monetizing debt is that with QE, the central bank is creating money to stimulate the economy, not to finance government spending."  Got that distinction?

     This is double-speak, as if government spending in recessions does not stimulate the economy. The term “monetizing the debt” is meant to be a take-out stopping further thought. Young economists are taught that monetizing the public debt is bad.  Further, they are taught that helping banks is good and helping people without jobs is bad.  It makes labor lazy, but not bankers.  Got that?

Civil Wars

The new year is marked by numerous civil wars (not so civil actually) including Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, South Sudan, Afghanistan, Egypt, and Indonesia that the U.S. is powerless to contain.  So much for Bush's shock and awe.

Minimum Wage again

The following from Robert Reich, with whom I agree completely"
"The President agrees that the minimum wage should be raised to $10.40 an hour but, unsurprisingly, Republicans oppose any increase. In this as in many other dimensions, the conservative mind is remarkably flexible. The minimum wage must not be increased, they say, lest employers lay off millions of low-wage workers. But record levels of CEO pay must not be tampered with because corporations need to attract top talent. The poor must have less if they are to be adequately motivated, but the rich must have more in order to ensure their maximum effort. Food stamps and unemployment insurance must be curtailed to prevent laziness among the needy, yet special tax loopholes that subsidize the wealthy (such as "carried interest" for private-equity and hedge-fund partners) must be retained. The 22 percent of American children now in poverty don't merit free school lunches or health care, but it is necessary and just that the richest 1 percent of children receive $10 million free of estate taxes."

Osama bin Laden

May 2, 2011, the US killed Osama bin Laden, President Obama's top priority. The US has a tendency to believe that one leader is responsible and if he can be killed, the terrorist threats would be eliminated.  Instead bin Laden's assassination created  even more hatred and zeal in terrorists groups and now there are dozens all around the world.  

Gridlock

Congressional Gridlock is not so bad.  There would be none if Romney were President with a Republican Congress.  But can you imagine the havoc that would create?

Class Warfare

Whenever anyone calls attention to extremely unequal income distribution, the radical right screams "class warfare" as if the label should stop all further discussion. But in fact, there is class warfare by some of the rich on the poor and middle class.  The attack on unions and the call for much less government spending and austerity is a cover for getting rid of anything that helps the less fortunate.  These  rich simply want the poor to disappear--certainly not vote.  The rich can provide for their own good life.  It reminds me of the aphorism, "One for all and one for all" said the elephant as he danced among the chickens!

Spy who came in from the cold

John LeCarre comparing today's undercover operations with those when he wrote his famous spy novel:
"Today, the same man, with better teeth and hair and a much smarter suit, can be heard explaining away the catastrophic  illegal war in Iraq , or justifying medieval torture techniques as the preferred means of interrogation in the twenty-first century, or defending the inalienable right of closet psychopaths to bear semiautomatic weapons, and the use of unmanned drones as-a risk-free method of assassinating one's perceived enemies and anybody who has the bad luck to be standing near them. Or, as a loyal servant of his corporation, assuring us that smoking is harmless to the health of the Third World, and great banks are there to serve the public."
      We have not learned a thing!  LeCarre asks, "How far can we go in the rightful defense of our Western values without abandoning them along the way?

China Teaches Us

China has had phenomenal growth that slowed and now is continuing. The New York Times reports "the renewed growth has been fueled by rapidly mounting debt, as state-owned banks and the central bank have funneled hundreds of billions of dollars in additional lending to state-owned enterprises and government agencies to finance further investment projects."  We could do this too.  Our Federal Reserve could loan money to the national and state and local governments to build much needed infrastructure.  We are mired in old thinking that austerity is the answer to unemployment.  The debt of Chinese state-owned banks and the central bank is only a bookkeeping phenomena of no consequence. Central bank debt is just an accounting matter.  It can go on until the economy can not produce further goods. The limit is the real capacity of the economy.  Does anyone doubt that our economy can produce more?

Romney enriches himself

Romney received over 15 million from the government bailout of GM and its Delphi parts supplier.  A hedge fund that Romney invested in bot the bonds of Delphi at a discount and then received more than they paid for them when Delphi was saved from bankruptcy.  The trust fund moved most of the jobs to China and watched Delphi's stock price rise when it repudiated its pension funds obligations to its domestic workers.  Of course in Republican fashion, it conducted a multi-million dollar TV campaign claiming Obama  gave a handout to labor.  All of this is reported in The Nation magazine of Nov 5.

What is our biggest problem?

The two chairs of the Commission appointed to develop a plan for reducing the Federal deficit agreed that the debt was the nation's biggest problem and unsustainable. We have to cut defense, social security and medical care they say. But, they know it won't happen.

This has become conventional wisdom. Why does not anyone raise the question of what the real economy of people and factories is capable of producing. Have we lost the knowledge needed to produce? Have the factories rusted?

No. This is an institutional failure, not a physical problem. There is an alternative to borrowing more money in the market. The Treasury could borrow from the nation's own bank,the Federal Reserve. Tell me why it is OK to create money every time a private corporation borrows money from a bank, but not OK if the government does the same thing??