All the old blogs
are gone now
or the people
are different.
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our potential has very little potential:
CATO's David Rittgers flies into a panic whining that we’re all terrorists now just because some Muslim lobbyists, anti-abortion activists, pro-abortion activists, environmental activists, Tea Party activists, NRA activists, anti-death peanlty activists, anti-war activists, third party voters, Ron Paul supporters, right wings, left wingers, and the over 1 million people on the TSC's Terrorism Watch List have all been labeled "potential threats" by the government.
As we're reminded by the events this week in Egypt, there's a strong argument to be made that we could in fact be a potential threat to the government, but we're Americans and even at our most activist can hardly get up off the couch to go to the window to look outside, let alone go there, so it's probably a gross and unfair exaggeration of our potential to say that we have any.
I think it's an instructive piece of empirical data to note that our Prime Citizens in the corporate sector have not made it onto any government Fusion Center watch lists. I suspect this is because, in the fine spirit of American anti-terrorism, they do terrorism backwards: they lobby to make killing Americans legal first, then they go ahead and let the mine safety lapse or poison the drinking water or bury a town under a radioactive slurry or feed rat shit to their chickens or whatever it takes to get the job done at a profit, as is right and proper.
If Al Qaeda had picked up on this trick we'd be promising them tax cuts in the state of the union.
:: posted by buermann @ 2011-02-02 20:41:41 CST |
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:: posted by buermann @ 2011-01-31 11:28:07 CST |
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obamanomics:
James Galbraith responded to Obama's state of the union speech with some alacrity 15 years ago:
New Keynesian acceptance of the New Classical theoretical structure reduces macroeconomic policy to the fringe role, that of large-scale intervention only in deep and lasting recessions. In all other circumstances, the macro authorities are warned off--as was Clinton himself during his brief Keynesian phase in early 1993.
What then can liberals do? The actual approach of the Clinton administration illustrates: Liberals can favor education, training, adjustment assistance, and other programs that upgrade skills and help workers move from one job to the next. They can support public investments in infrastructure, on the ground that these assist in the international competitiveness of the economy. They can support a combination of research and development assistance to advanced enterprises, alongside efforts to open foreign markets to American products, that help shore up the position of American companies in the world. ...
All of these are supply-side measures... Their purpose is to improve the long-term competitive performance of the American economy, on the thought that a more productive economy will generate higher average living standards. The further thought, that these higher averages will trickle down to low-paid production workers, is left as an assumption.
...
We are left with the unpleasant conclusion that the liberal mainstream has fallen into a self-deluding trap. The right has taken over the commanding heights of both fiscal and monetary policy, leaving liberals with token sums to spend on supply-side interventions.
Minus the "large-scale intervention only in deep and lasting recessions" part, anyway, Obama never had one of those. via.
:: posted by buermann @ 2011-01-27 14:39:16 CST |
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the barry does not fall far from the shrub:
The Bush Justice Department endorsed such proposals under Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Tomorrow's announcement demonstrates that the Obama Justice Department is following suit and appears to be its first public statement embracing mandatory data retention.
That aligns the Justice Department with data retention's more aggressive supporters among House Republicans and places it at odds with privacy advocates, civil libertarians, and the Internet industry. Those groups have questioned the privacy, liability, cost, and scope, including whether businesses such as coffee shops would be required to identify and monitor whoever uses their wireless connections.
Our glorious pundits will no doubt leap all over this as a job-killing invasion of privacy. Maybe they should do something about the banks' retention of our mortgages, eh?
:: posted by buermann @ 2011-01-25 14:16:56 CST |
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regressives:
The Center for American Progress has written up this very serious proposal for social security. Around the 750 word mark, with no proposal yet forthcoming, I began to think about how CAP got their seed capital out of the Golden West Financial goose egg that cost Americans oh god who knows how much. By the 1500 word mark, with still no word of the proposal, my mind began to wander back to the Clinton administration's attacks - back when CAP's John Podesta was chief of staff - on Social Security in the late 90s, pronouncing that the program needed saving and giving the GOP numerous quotes to attack it with during their subsequent efforts to destroy the program (Clinton's plan: invest the budget surplus in the market at the peak of the internet bubble).
There's not a single detail about what CAP is proposing yet, 1500 words in, but something must be done. Not until around the 1,979th word - after 1,978 spent re-assuring us that they are indeed progressive and not setting out to dismantle the program and are just about to give us a real serious super modern plan to progressivate our primary social insurance program - do we get a proposal. I'm not sure why we needed 1,978 words of reassurance that they weren't going to undermine social security if they had a proposal that wasn't going to undermine social security.
As Dean Baker explains well enough what these really serious progressives eventually get around to proposing is a reduction in Social Security benefits for folks making a lifetime average of over $60,000 in household income, which is to say they want to slash benefits starting in the center of the middle class. This could really break new ground for opponents of the program who already attack it as a welfare program.
They also want to index the cost of living adjustments to "a more consistent and more accurate measure of inflation over time", which is another way of saying they want to slash benefits for everybody, because anytime inflation indexes are brought up by anybody with regard to social security it is an argument that the CPI exaggerates inflation. Due to a surplus in wingnut welfare the neoliberal and libertarian think tanks have whole stables of disinflation experts rested and ready to attack the COLA as too generous, the CPI a gross exaggeration, and the conservatives who have been raising panics over hyperinflation will turn right around and happily support them.
And last but not least they want to meet the privatization crowd in the middle and invest part of the trust fund in the stock market: this has been proposed over and over again and is never seen as a compromise by anybody who wants to privatize the program. The government investing in the stock market would be communism: the only way to privatize the program to their satisfaction is for the government to force people to contribute to individual investment accounts run by some private enterprise propped up by public monopoly that churns out profits made of graft and waste.
There's no reason for sincere reformers to open the program up for attack like this. The serious progressive plan to modernize social security and deal with a projected shortfall that doesn't start for another three decades is to simply lift the cap so rich people have to pay social security taxes like the rest of us and the program can continue paying out 100% of its benefits into perpetuity. Make payroll taxes a flat tax, problem solved! CAP only proposes lifting half the cap: a very progressive policy to retain a very regressive tax structure.
:: posted by buermann @ 2011-01-22 13:54:54 CST |
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as it goes in blurgistan so it goes:
I was reading along the mostly off-topic comments here, and I think Peter's at 6:32 is really a wonderful complaint:
Blogging's relative anonymity is essential to some far-right views. Some far-right are so politically incorrect that they cannot be discussed in non-anonymous settings. Examples include human biodiversity, homosexuality as an unnatural and unacceptable lifestyle, and some of the more extreme aspects of gender relationships such as de facto polygamy and the belief that high-I.Q. women are morally bound to produce as many children as possible.
While most of the respondants are celebrating their victory over communism or... something, I think maybe we could celebrate the ostracization of 'racism, homophobia, patriarchy, and eugenics' into the shadows of anonymity.
Apparently it's gotten so one can't so much as breath the words on the internets without occluding them behind confused technobabble-heavy neologisms.
Anyway, this Freddie character's complaint wasn't that there were no major commie bloggers, but that there were no major bloggers at the top of the long tail who were identifiably pro-labor (or 'anti-capitalist', though I'm not sure why the two are conflated, there hasn't been a shred of anti-capitalism in the American labor movement since Taft-Hartley created penalties for unions with a shred of anti-capitalism). I'm not sure why that should be shocking, though: there's no labor movement around anymore to provide major backing for pro-labor media of any kind, nevermind the fairly astonishing low public regard for what unions are left:
In 2009, for the first time ever, support for unions in the Gallup poll dipped below fifty per cent. A 2010 Pew Research poll offered even worse numbers, with just forty-one per cent of respondents saying they had a favorable view of unions, the lowest level of support in the history of that poll.
Maybe there's been some recent advance in anti-union PR or maybe the unions are doing something wrong.
:: posted by buermann @ 2011-01-19 15:46:37 CST |
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is it a free carthage or just another facelift?:
Congratulations to the people of Tunisia are probably in order for liberating themselves from the French and US backed dictatorship of Zinedine Ben Ali. I hope they're successful in electing someone who represents their own interests rather than the prerogatives of a bunch of haggard old colonial miscreants.
Marc Lynch thinks Al Jazeera deserves more of the credit than Wikileaks, but really the credit for the Wikileaks disclosures about the corruption of the first family should go to the US State Department, which published details so salacious that they are being credited in some corners for bringing down a 35 year old authoritarian regime. That they kept such gossip secret tells you all you need to know about their commitment to democracy.
On which note, I've been reading complaints about the silence of the White House, but it issued a brief but pointed statement on Friday: I'm sure those two paragraphs carry more moral weight than last year's dramatic escalation of hundreds of millions in military aid to the departing president-for-life.
:: posted by buermann @ 2011-01-16 12:25:51 CST |
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this may call for some skepticism:
CATO's Pat Michaels, climatologist and global warming denier, gets a mere 40% of his funding from the petroleum industry:
:: posted by buermann @ 2011-01-15 18:29:36 CST |
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in the spirit of the times we watch the spirit of the times:
I turned El Rushbo on for five minutes yesterday and got this:
This guy's preferred viewing list is liberal documentaries like Zeitgeist (which said 9/11 was planned by George W. Bush) and a whole bunch of other wacko leftist beliefs. This guy was a "truther." He was a nutcase left and right. His influences were all deranged leftist.
Rush Limbaugh, two days earlier, denouncing the Rush Limbaugh of two days later:
What I see is the Democrat Party, its representatives and its supporters on the American left attempting to take a genuine human tragedy, and their first instinct is to politicize it, and that desire, their political desire is to silence, to quiet people who they consider their opposition: me, people who do what I do, and Fox News. If that is not attempting to profit off murder, I don't know what it is. "But Mr. Limbaugh, that was very vicious to say it that way."
See, this is the problem. The truth is the great casualty.
It's sort of funny that he doesn't consider the actual casualties to be the great casualty.
Anyway, Zeitgeist. Zeitgeist is a mashup of every stupid conspiracy you could read about on the internet. Let's take just the bit about the Federal Reserve: it makes the same false claim as other manifestations of gold buggery that "most of the Senate" were at home for the holidays when they passed the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, and from that invention lays one fat one after another, all the while, without question, denouncing fiat currency in favor of the gold standard. The argument is 24 karat gold buggery, and I'm not sure where Jessie Walker found the Greenback Party position, but its not here.
From there Zeitgeist states that the federal income tax is unconstitutional (and takes "an average" of 35% all income, an absurd nonsense claim to make when 35% is the top marginal rate) with a string of resigned IRS workers who apparently never heard of the 16th amendment, all stating that after years of research they've been unable to discover the 16th amendment.
The international financiers who rigged up the federal reserve system love starting wars, the movie explains, and then complains that the US loans offered to nationalist China and Britain in the early stages of World War II were somehow against "international war rules" and, after condemning the US for taking sides against Japan, complains that American business took both sides in the war in Europe, seeming to endorse the distinctly isolationist policy in which the US would do no business of any kind with any nation in a state of war. It backs this theory up by not even attempting to explain how Pearl Harbor, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and the first Gulf War were all engineered by international financial interests.
Then there's this stupefying statement, "the education system in America continues its stupefying downward slide since the US government decided to take over and subsidize the public school system". The factoid presented are international comparisons that may indicate just as well that other countries have improved their educational systems, and the argument otherwise is the federal government is getting what it wanted and increasingly paid for "since": the kind of idiotic public that would waste an afternoon watching this shit.
From here it leaps to the North American Union and Amero nonsense, inserts a lengthy diatribe by Lou Dobbs, unequivocally denounces the idea without considering its merits and then, somehow, we leap from a supposed NAU to a One World Government. Then we get RFID chips implanted into our skulls, and then the movie finally strikes a liberal tone by telling us we are all one, before floating off into some sort of bizarre pastiche of new age nonsense and liberally plagiarizing Bill Hicks without credit.
The positions laid out in Zeitgeist, then: gold buggery, wars are engineered by international finance; the income tax is unconstitutional; isolationism; abolishing of the Department of Education; an extremely nationalist opposition to open borders of any kind for any purpose; and, finally, that the only decision we have to make, per Bill Hicks, is between fear and love.
These are all bugaboos from quarters of the old right, unless one mistakenly thinks of the Tea Party movement as "new", which is where you can also find right-wing 9/11 trutherism, with Bush's first secretary of labor Morgan Reynolds trumpeting trutherism from Lew Rockwell's website and so on. How one gets from this to the film maker's endorsement of Jacque Fresco's program for a technocratic global rationing system with "No Money, Barter, Trade or Property", a magical system somehow "free of political intervention" - a proposal that seems to have a strange currency in the David Icke/reptilian humanoid crowd - must be seriously bizarre. It also doesn't seem to tell us anything at all about why this kid went on a rampage. He's still alive though, sooner or later somebody will get around to asking him.
:: posted by buermann @ 2011-01-15 16:14:28 CST |
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a conspiracy to put loony violent conspiracy theorists in control of the most powerful country on earth, etc.:
Loony, violent conspiracy theorists believe that Wikileaks indiscriminately published 250,000 diplomatic cables when Wikileaks has only published a couple thousand that it cleared through newspapers of record, including the grey lady with her government-approved redactions, because that's how our newspaper of record does such a fine job of informing the public: by gracing the first through third estates with the power of censorship over the fourth.
Also, loony violent conspiracy theorists who control everything also believe a bunch of other crazy shit. And they run your country! How did they get there? Is it because all of us are batshit crazy conspiracy theorists? Probably. With so much nonsense to believe you'd have a hard time not believing any of it.
:: posted by buermann @ 2011-01-12 23:38:59 CST |
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my entire construction of reality has been sent into a tailspin:
Set aside the fact that Jared Loughner was that rare variety of yahoo: a pro-life atheist gold bug, who had also glommed onto every last stupid conspiracy theory on the internet. What really disturbs me is that he was not an engineering student and may never have stepped a foot inside an engineering school. Yet he allegedly committed an act of terrorism. Is it possible he's been framed? Are the engineering schools already so powerful that they're exporting their vicious ideology of hatred into community college poetry courses?
:: posted by buermann @ 2011-01-10 16:33:58 CST |
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the never ending bailout:
Bank of America’s shares surged 6.7 percent yesterday, the most since May, to $14.19 in composite trading on the New York Stock Exchange. Citigroup Inc. jumped 3.6 percent to $4.90, JPMorgan Chase & Co. climbed 2.7 percent to $43.58 and Wells Fargo & Co. rose 1.9 percent.
Bank of America paid a premium, $1.28 billion, to Freddie Mac to resolve $1 billion in claims currently outstanding because the deal also covers potential future claims on $127 billion in loans sold by Countrywide through 2008, the Charlotte, North Carolina-based lender said in a presentation on its website.
It's really funny how the business press seems to be (almost) universally spinning this as a "loss" for BofA even as they report BofA's stock value going through the roof. The very important detail that this single deal gets BofA out of liability for that $127 billion is missing in a lot of the press, but the markets can apparently handle the rudimentary math it takes to understand that, if true, this is another massive backdoor bailout of Bank of America: only if you think the GSEs - which is to say Americans writ large - couldn't recover more than a few percent of the total potential losses on that $127 billion in Countrywide shitpile, or that the total losses are only going to amount to 0.76% on those holdings, is this not another transfer of wealth to BofA.
If the total losses due to fraudulent sales of Countrywide securities to Fannie Mae were a mere, say, 15%, then that's an $18 billion gift from you and yours to wall street.
:: posted by buermann @ 2011-01-08 12:54:05 CST |
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2011:
I posted my prediction three months ago and I stand by it, "so-called lame duck session" and all. Too, also: Barrack Obama will still don his magical golden hat to sick flying monkeys armed with incendiary devices upon hapless hicks from fly over country who happen to know a guy who knows a guy. Ben Bernanke will continue to ignore the advice of Ben Bernanke. Guantanamo will still not be closed, the fig leaf of reform will remain nauseatingly barren, and nobody much will very much care, or if they do they'll blame it on that other guy who is only pretending to care, so at least we'll all sleep soundly at night. Brett Favre will begin a new career after the release of an explicit video featuring one of Tiger Woods' ex-girlfriends. I will continue to have very little to add of any import or insight, but will regrettably continue to add it. Thankfully no one will notice.
:: posted by buermann @ 2011-01-03 03:21:07 CST |
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"that's what the big army calls the little army", or, atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant, Catholic Edition:
Set aside justice, then, and what are nations but the triumph of terrorism? What are the spoils of terrorism but little nations? For in terrorism, the hands of the foot soldier are directed by the commander, the confederacy of them is sworn together, and the pillage is shared by law amongst them. And if those organizations grow up to keep bases, build towns, possess cities, and conquer adjoining nations, then their organization is no longer called "terrorist", but graced with the eminent name of "nation", given and gotten, not because they have left their wicked practices behind but because they now practice them with a wicked impunity.
Elegant and excellent was that terrorist's answer to the great Macedonian Alexander the Great, who had captured him; the King asked him how he dare molest the seas, so he replied, "How dare you molest the whole earth? Because I do it only with a little army I am called terrorist: but you with your squadrons of flying killer robots are called leader of the free world."
And then at great length the esteemed author goes on to argue quite convincingly that the Gods of Door Hinges have quite fantastically failed to relieve us of squeaky hinges, and rather less convincingly goes on to profess that his particular terrorist organization -- which worships not the God of Door Hinges but the God That Does Nothing for Hinges Which Hinges Don't Do For Themselves -- is the nation to end all nations.
Rome having recently kicked the shit out of the Visigoths, you see, proved once and for all that Rome's God was better than theirs. Rome's sacking a few years later by the same bunch of heathens, who, you know, were defenders of the same faith, and who were subsequently conquered by followers of the same God by way of a different prophet, and so on, might be seen as temporary setbacks for said faith or as a routine passing of the torch, as pertains to the ultimate justice and authority of the God That Does Nothing for Hinges Which Hinges Don't Do For Themselves. But in the eyes of this particular court intellectual, it was The End of History. Thank heavens, it's all such a repetitive bore.
:: posted by buermann @ 2011-01-03 01:35:35 CST |
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less skills mismatch than misplaced workers:
About two years ago I mentioned that inconsistencies in labor market data suggesting that lower demand for employment or structural unemployment due to skills mismatch are responsible for the high unemployment rate are intuitively consistent with the increased labor immobility due to 10 million or so underwater mortgages affecting 16 or so million workers, coincidentally the same number as are unemployed. The argument that increased labor immobility is responsible for said labor market aberrations also comes with the added benefit of having any evidence at all to support it, unlike, say, some imaginary lack of skilled labor.
Rather than simply presume that just because as many Americans are underwater as there are unemployed that there must be some significant overlap of unemployed Americans unable to move for a new job because they are underwater on their mortgage, one might run numbers, but due to a skills mismatch I wasn't going to. Via Mike Konczal's response to an awful bit of reporting by Reuters' Nick Carey, here's one study that suggests some 30% of the increased rate in unemployment during this recession has been due to the Obama administration's broken promise to support mortgage cramdowns. The International Monetary Fund estimates nearly the same figure.
It's a very hopeless situation. We elected the candidate who supported the creation of a legal recourse for underwater borrowers to get back in the boat without facing the senseless, hypocritical opprobrium and moral indignation of the dominant culture - nevermind the credit rating agencies - for home owners who sensibly walk away from the ponzi scheme. He carried out his mandate by quickly ditching the plan in favor of stringing them along instead, and that's probably cost a couple million jobs. Obama earned his shellacking.
:: posted by buermann @ 2010-12-17 13:41:47 CST |
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there are, after all, trees in that forest:
Kevin Drum asks why the financial industry has been so profitable even when it isn't just making the easy money on $4 trillion in interest free loans from the public purse, and concludes that "somehow, all this financial engineering was based on skimming money away from everyone else." Maybe it starts with not paying people, and trickles its way up from there.
It's not that the sector is monopolized or that financial markets aren't competitive - it's that the laws in place to protect the bank's customers are weak, ineffectual, and rarely enforced, while they have had a free hand to predate because the laws constraining their behavior were gutted. They've got the monopoly of the state on their side, in other words. Why "regulatory capture" didn't make an appearance near Mr. Drum's befuddled "somehow" is really the only mystery, considering that it's no mystery to Mr. Drum.
:: posted by buermann @ 2010-12-16 14:50:16 CST |
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we've got everything perfectly backwards, ass-end up, hair on fire:
In Glenn Greenwald's post about Bradley Manning's pre-trial confinement while he waits for his court-martial for allegedly leaking classified documents pertaining to the US invasion of Iraq, Glenn cites the 1890 SCOTUS decision IN RE MEDLEY, 134 U.S. 160, a passage from which reads like an artifact from some ancient, civilized people:
Solitary confinement, as a punishment for crime, has a very interesting history of its own, in almost all countries where imprisonment is one of the means of punishment. In a very exhaustive article on this subject in the American Encyclopedia, vol. 13, under the word 'Prison,' this history is given. In that article it is said that the first plan adopted, when public attention was called to the evils of congregating persons in masses without employment, was the solitary prison connected [134 U.S. 160, 168] with the Hospital San Michele at Rome, in 1703, but little known prior to the experiment in Walnut-Street Penitentiary, in Philadelphia, in 1787. The peculiarities of this system were the complete isolation of the prisoner from all human society, and his confinement in a cell of considerable size, so arranged that he had no direct intercourse with or sight of any human being, and no employment or instruction. Other prisons on the same plan, which were less liberal in the size of their cells and the perfection of their appliances, were erected in Massachusetts, New Jersey, Maryland, and some of the other states. But experience demonstrated that there were serious objections to it. A considerable number of the prisoners fell, after even a short confinement, into a semi- fatuous condition, from which it was next to impossible to arouse them, and others became violently insane; others still, committed suicide; while those who stood the ordeal better were not generally reformed, and in most cases did not recover sufficient mental activity to be of any subsequent service to the community. ... The article then gives a great variety of instances in which the system is somewhat modified and it is within the memory of many persons interested in prison discipline that some 30 or 40 years ago the whole subject attracted the general public attention, and its main feature of solitary confinement was found to be too severe.
Solitary confinement is too severe an additional ex post facto punishment, the court is saying, to add to a prisoner's sentence to execution by hanging such convict by the neck until he shall be dead. So they let the guy walk.
There's something pathetic about a country and a people who will sink to the depths of barbarism by even 19th century standards while simultaneously being total fucking pussies about it.
Anyway, you should probably contribute to the kid's defense fund, as by the time he stands trial he probably won't be able to contribute much himself to his defense.
:: posted by buermann @ 2010-12-16 13:43:48 CST |
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I too remember the golden era of Russian capitalism when the common man could cruise down to the mines in his Bentley:
"Turn down your thermostats?" [Don Blankenship] once scoffed. "Buy a smaller car? Conserve? I have spent quite a bit of time in Russia and China, and that's the first stage. You go from having your own car to carpooling to riding the bus to mass transit. You eventually get to where you're going by walking. That's what socialism and the elimination of capitalism and free enterprise is all about."
:: posted by buermann @ 2010-12-10 10:43:15 CST |
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Hardly inaccurate:
Conservatism, in brief, calls for dismantling the entire government while simultaneously controlling the most intimate decisions of a person's life. Contradictory? Sure: like cutting taxes, increasing defense, and balancing the budget, all at the same time!
:: posted by buermann @ 2010-12-09 11:20:40 CST |
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watching GM employees get a hummer with teeth makes Malcolm Gladwell hard:
Malcolm Gladwell celebrates the glorious achievements of GM ex-CEO Rick Wagoner, and makes an utter hash of this:
The 2007 deal also transferred all responsibility for paying for the health care of G.M.’s retirees to a special fund, administered by the U.A.W. It is hard to overstate the importance of that second provision. G.M. has five hundred and seventeen thousand retirees. Between 1993 and 2007, the company paid out a hundred and three billion dollars [7 billion a year, maybe 3.5% of their total revenues] to those former workers—a burden unimaginable to its foreign competitors.
This makes it sound as though GM's competitors aren't paying for the health benefits and pensions of their former employees, which is perfectly wrong. The national health benefits and pension systems in those foreign countries are in fact paid for by GM's foreign competitors when they and their employees pay their taxes. GM suffers under a crushingly inefficient health care system that costs double what its competitors pay.
GM's unimaginable burden was the public policy environment it in part created: it was at the forefront of pushing private pension plans and private health insurance instead of the more efficient Hayek-approved solution of social insurance that its competitors enjoy. Under Wagoner it devoted it's public energies - making massive investments in political lobbying and public astroturfing - to attacking the environment when it should have been leading a business lobby campaign to reform the insurance sector.
All Gladwell is celebrating here is that GM has shifted its unimaginable burden onto its employees, while savagely undercutting their living standards with unimaginable pay cuts despite the fact that their productivity has doubled in the past 15 years.
:: posted by buermann @ 2010-11-17 15:28:18 CST |
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if only dirty fucking hippies were more fiscally responsible:
I bet they stayed home because they were angry about deficit spending:
Hispanics, African Americans, union members and young people were among the many core Democratic groups that turned out in large numbers in the 2008 elections, propelling Mr. Obama and Democratic House candidates to sizable victories. In 2010, turnout among these groups dropped off substantially, even below their previous midterm levels.
:: posted by buermann @ 2010-11-03 11:56:29 CST |
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idiot nation:
According to this Yale study 85% of Americans believe cars and trucks contribute to global warming (Q26), 80% believe burning fossil fuels for heat and electricity contribute to global warming, 74% believe deforestation contributes to global warming, large majorities also falsely believe that aerosol sprays (76%) and toxic waste (66%) contribute to global warming.
Somehow 42% reject anthropomorphic climate change (Q4) altogether, even though at least a third of those in denial think driving their kids to soccer is contributing to global warming.
:: posted by buermann @ 2010-10-20 11:24:54 CST |
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:: posted by buermann @ 2010-10-20 10:51:24 CST |
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sotu:
Everybody should follow Justice Alito's whiny example and stop attending them. The President, in return, should follow Brett Favre's, and just text an image of his or her genetalia to the country once a year.
:: posted by buermann @ 2010-10-17 19:34:20 CST |
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fraud all the way down:
Joseph Tauke has an entertaining cliff notes version up at daily caller:
Wells Fargo wanted to foreclose on a condo unit which had multiple mortgages attached to it. Wells Fargo also owned one of those second mortgages. So Wells Fargo spent money to hire a law firm and file suit against the irresponsible lenders at Wells Fargo. Then, Wells Fargo spent money to hire a different law firm in an understandable effort to defend Wells Fargo from the vicious legal attack coming from Wells Fargo. The second law firm even prepared a legal statement for Wells Fargo which called into question the dubious claims being made by Wells Fargo. Sadly, Wells Fargo won the case, crushing the hopes of Wells Fargo.
Ha ha. It gets better, of course:
For financial institutions, the problem isn't the "missing" documents. It’s the missing documents—the real ones, which say much different things than the "missing" ones, and which the banks can't seem to get their hands on. Everyone in the financial industry has been looking for them in more places than kids look for Carmen Sandiego, and they still can't seem to find the X that marks the spot. There's good reason for that—the industry destroyed the papers a long time ago. On purpose.
Banking officials happily told the Florida court system in 2009 that the documents had been shredded. At the time, lenders were trying to prevent some foreclosure rule changes, so they sent a letter to the Florida Supreme Court. Among other things, the letter stated that it was standard practice to destroy mortgage papers once the mortgages were sold into MERS in order to avoid confusion.
And so on. It would be interesting to know how many foreclosure auctions have been held for the wrong bank, were it even possible to know who actually had the right to foreclose. The banks have a solution: allow them to seize anything, regardless of whether there's a mortgage on the property or not. Better seize the banks before they seize you, I guess.
:: posted by buermann @ 2010-10-16 20:17:09 CST |
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:: posted by buermann @ 2010-10-16 15:16:10 CST |
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:: posted by buermann @ 2010-10-14 20:21:27 CST |
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south fulton:
kevin carson:
[H]aving one’s house auctioned off for nonpayment of taxes is more common than house fires, and that it entails just as much of an effective loss of your house as having it burn down. The modal statist alternative, as practiced in most places, is to fund fire services with mandatory taxes — and unless taxation is backed in the last resort by punitive measures almost as harsh as having your house burn down, it’s prone to exactly the same moral hazard problems as a voluntary payment system.
:: posted by buermann @ 2010-10-13 12:21:11 CST |
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We've known that the banks had majorly fucked up the doc trail for over half the mortgage market for at least three years, I don't understand why there's all this sudden shock and surprise at this massive tumor in the bowel of market capitalism.
That there is and we're getting a piecemeal 40-state wide investigation rather than any federal action - aside a unanimous voice vote in the senate for more or less disemboweling the property rights of home owners entirely - just confirms once again the massive incompetence of the banks that run it.
:: posted by buermann @ 2010-10-13 11:24:13 CST |
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like a hummer with teeth:
My General Motors made 1996 Saturn manual transmission SL1, with 100,000 miles on it, gets about 40 miles to the gallon. The recently bailed out automotive company that long ago destroyed their single fuel efficient product line by trying to turn it into some sort of shitty entry level sports car has now revealed the apex in plug-in electric hybrid technology, the Chevy Volt starting at just $41,000, and it almost gets the same mileage as my 15 year old jalopy. Almost. It's like the future was yesterday.
:: posted by buermann @ 2010-10-12 11:45:54 CST |
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