1/ Some of you may think I am a little OTT about what I perceive to be the influence of the oligarchs on our politics, so it's nice to have a Nobel Prize winning economist with a column in the NYTimes agree with you.
Paul Krugman says it all about the events unfolding in Wisconsin, and I have copied his whole column below.....
Last week, in the face of protest demonstrations against Wisconsin’s new union-busting governor, Scott Walker — demonstrations that continued through the weekend, with huge crowds on Saturday — Representative Paul Ryan made an unintentionally apt comparison: “It’s like Cairo has moved to Madison.”
It wasn’t the smartest thing for Mr. Ryan to say, since he probably didn’t mean to compare Mr. Walker, a fellow Republican, to Hosni Mubarak. Or maybe he did — after all, quite a few prominent conservatives, including Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Rick Santorum, denounced the uprising in Egypt and insist that President Obama should have helped the Mubarak regime suppress it.
In any case, however, Mr. Ryan was more right than he knew. For what’s happening in Wisconsin isn’t about the state budget, despite Mr. Walker’s pretense that he’s just trying to be fiscally responsible. It is, instead, about power. What Mr. Walker and his backers are trying to do is to make Wisconsin — and eventually, America — less of a functioning democracy and more of a third-world-style oligarchy. And that’s why anyone who believes that we need some counterweight to the political power of big money should be on the demonstrators’ side.
Some background: Wisconsin is indeed facing a budget crunch, although its difficulties are less severe than those facing many other states. Revenue has fallen in the face of a weak economy, while stimulus funds, which helped close the gap in 2009 and 2010, have faded away.
In this situation, it makes sense to call for shared sacrifice, including monetary concessions from state workers. And union leaders have signaled that they are, in fact, willing to make such concessions.
But Mr. Walker isn’t interested in making a deal. Partly that’s because he doesn’t want to share the sacrifice: even as he proclaims that Wisconsin faces a terrible fiscal crisis, he has been pushing through tax cuts that make the deficit worse. Mainly, however, he has made it clear that rather than bargaining with workers, he wants to end workers’ ability to bargain.
The bill that has inspired the demonstrations would strip away collective bargaining rights for many of the state’s workers, in effect busting public-employee unions. Tellingly, some workers — namely, those who tend to be Republican-leaning — are exempted from the ban; it’s as if Mr. Walker were flaunting the political nature of his actions.
Why bust the unions? As I said, it has nothing to do with helping Wisconsin deal with its current fiscal crisis. Nor is it likely to help the state’s budget prospects even in the long run: contrary to what you may have heard, public-sector workers in Wisconsin and elsewhere are paid somewhat less than private-sector workers with comparable qualifications, so there’s not much room for further pay squeezes.
So it’s not about the budget; it’s about the power.
In principle, every American citizen has an equal say in our political process. In practice, of course, some of us are more equal than others. Billionaires can field armies of lobbyists; they can finance think tanks that put the desired spin on policy issues; they can funnel cash to politicians with sympathetic views (as the Koch brothers did in the case of Mr. Walker). On paper, we’re a one-person-one-vote nation; in reality, we’re more than a bit of an oligarchy, in which a handful of wealthy people dominate.
Given this reality, it’s important to have institutions that can act as counterweights to the power of big money. And unions are among the most important of these institutions.
You don’t have to love unions, you don’t have to believe that their policy positions are always right, to recognize that they’re among the few influential players in our political system representing the interests of middle- and working-class Americans, as opposed to the wealthy. Indeed, if America has become more oligarchic and less democratic over the last 30 years — which it has — that’s to an important extent due to the decline of private-sector unions.
And now Mr. Walker and his backers are trying to get rid of public-sector unions, too.
There’s a bitter irony here. The fiscal crisis in Wisconsin, as in other states, was largely caused by the increasing power of America’s oligarchy. After all, it was superwealthy players, not the general public, who pushed for financial deregulation and thereby set the stage for the economic crisis of 2008-9, a crisis whose aftermath is the main reason for the current budget crunch. And now the political right is trying to exploit that very crisis, using it to remove one of the few remaining checks on oligarchic influence.
So will the attack on unions succeed? I don’t know. But anyone who cares about retaining government of the people by the people should hope that it doesn’t.
One of the strategies the Governor and the Koch brothers are doing in the Wisconsin standoff is to get the people affected fighting each other, thereby diverting attention from the issues. Divide and conquer - if they can pit private sector workers against public sector union employees, saying the unionised state employees are coddled and "they have it easy", the right will win. That's why it is heartening to see the union stand is still holding - the American people may, may be waking up to the fact this country is an oligarchy, and the middle class is irrelevant to the elites at the top.....
As stated, this is a pivotal moment folks......
2/ Matt Taibbi is one of the finest journalists in the country, and he has specialised in the fraudulent machinations of Wall Street - he was the one who coined the wonderful phrase for Goldman Sachs "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity".
Here he ponders why noone from Wall Street has gone to jail for the monstrous shell game that brought down the global economy......his article details the hopeless corruption at all of the regulatory agencies and the Department of Justice under the idiot Eric Holder.
There's nothing we can do folks. The game is rigged in favour of the corporate giants and they can steal billions with impunity. But if you're just one of the peons expect the full force of the law to crash down on your head for spitting on the sidewalk.....
By the way Obama is right in the middle of this web of corruption, so in case you had any doubts, any hope, any sense it will get better, forget it.
"Yes Virginia, there is an oligarchy"......
The rest of them, all of them, got off. Not a single executive who ran the companies that cooked up and cashed in on the phony financial boom — an industrywide scam that involved the mass sale of mismarked, fraudulent mortgage-backed securities — has ever been convicted. Their names by now are familiar to even the most casual Middle American news consumer: companies like AIG, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. Most of these firms were directly involved in elaborate fraud and theft. Lehman Brothers hid billions in loans from its investors. Bank of America lied about billions in bonuses. Goldman Sachs failed to tell clients how it put together the born-to-lose toxic mortgage deals it was selling. What's more, many of these companies had corporate chieftains whose actions cost investors billions — from AIG derivatives chief Joe Cassano, who assured investors they would not lose even "one dollar" just months before his unit imploded, to the $263 million in compensation that former Lehman chief Dick "The Gorilla" Fuld conveniently failed to disclose. Yet not one of them has faced time behind bars.
3/ You really can't be too careful when it comes to Muslims, as Brooke Alvarez of Onion News interviews a lady with some unusual views.....2 minutes of Fox-like footage.....
4/ Amusing as always, Gail Collins on Republicans, Nascar sponsorships and Angry Birds.....
But I digress. On Friday, the House was working its way through 129 amendments to its continuing budget resolution. There would have been 130, but Representative Steve Womack of Arkansas retracted his proposal to cut off financing for President Obama’s teleprompter.
The majority did vote, however, to eliminate money for a park in Nancy Pelosi’s district. The former House speaker has been demonized to the point that it’s safe to do anything to her short of kidnapping the family dog.
Let’s give Speaker John Boehner credit for keeping his promise to give members more chance to debate and offer amendments. Really, if things get any more open, the members will start throwing themselves off the balcony. But not such high marks on consistency. The newly ascendant Republicans have been howling that the deficit is so big, so threatening, that no target for cutting is sacred. “Everything is on the table. We’re broke,” said Boehner.
But the table is mainly crowded with stuff the Republicans didn’t like to begin with. Family-planning money and environmental protection, but not oil tax breaks or Nascar sponsorships. “Sesame Street” is fair game, but the Daytona 500 is untouchable.
“Spending is out of control,” cried Jim Jordan, the chairman of the Republican Study Committee, who argued for additional cuts in all nonsecurity discretionary spending — except aid to Israel.
5/ A wonderful song from Adele, the 22 year old British sensation with "The Voice".
This song is "Rolling in the Deep", described in EW as "a blues-soaked howl"......excellent singer......3 minutes....
6/ Screw the poor. This seems to be the mantra in Washington, as Bob Herbert laments the 50% cut in funding proposed by Obama to an agency that is a lifeline for the underprivileged......
John Drew believes, quaintly, that we are our brother’s keeper.
President Obama does not seem to believe this quite as strongly. And, of course, many of the Republicans in Congress do not believe it at all.
Mr. Drew is the president of Boston’s antipoverty agency, called Action for Boston Community Development, which everyone calls ABCD. In today’s environment, people who work with the poor can be forgiven if they feel like hunted criminals. Government officials at all levels are homing in on them and disrupting their efforts, sometimes for legitimate budget reasons, sometimes not.
The results are often heartbreaking.
Community action agencies like ABCD are not generally well known but they serve as a lifeline, all across the country, to poor individuals and families who desperately need the assistance provided by food pantries, homeless shelters, workers who visit the homebound elderly, and so forth. They offer summer jobs for young people and try to ward off the eviction of the jobless and their dependents.
7/ Health insurance
I found this most instructive - a real world story of how difficult it is to get health insurance, even for someone [CEO of a software company] with ample funds. Despite the politico-speak nothing has changed yet. The insurance companies can't drop you as easily as before, but they've made it so only olympic athletes as healthy as a horse can get covered. Evil bastards.....
THIS isn’t the story of a poor family with a mother who has a dreadful disease that bankrupts them, or with a child who has to go without vital medicines. Unlike many others, my family can afford medical care, with or without insurance.
Instead, this is a story about how broken the market for health insurance is, even for those who are healthy and who are willing and able to pay for it.
Most employees assume that if they lose their job and the health coverage that comes along with it, they’ll be able to purchase insurance somewhere. The members of Congress who want to repeal the provision of last year’s health insurance law that makes it easier for individuals to buy coverage must assume that uninsured people do not want to buy it, or are just too cheap or too poor to do so.
The truth is that individual health insurance is not easy to get.
8/ Are you a boomer, and is your retirement plan a 401K?
The Wall Street Journal says you may be in for a bit of a shock - you may not have enough to live on when you need it.....
The 401(k) generation is beginning to retire, and it isn't a pretty sight.
The retirement savings plans that many baby boomers thought would see them through old age are falling short in many cases.
The median household headed by a person aged 60 to 62 with a 401(k) account has less than one-quarter of what is needed in that account to maintain its standard of living in retirement, according to data compiled by the Federal Reserve and analyzed by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College for The Wall Street Journal. Even counting Social Security and any pensions or other savings, most 401(k) participants appear to have insufficient savings. Data from other sources also show big gaps between savings and what people need, and the financial crisis has made things worse.
9/ Ah Florida......the Sunshine State is getting a little cloud cover....
I know we go on a bit about our new Governor, Big Rick, but this guy is dangerous to this state. It's not a joke - his latest decision turning down the federal funds for a high speed rail link between Orlando and Tampa will cost us about 20,000 well paying jobs and a piece of modern infrastructure that will serve visitors and residents alike. He has turned out to be a stealth Tea Partier, so if you voted for who you thought was a savvy [if a little crooked] businessman, you have got an ideologue with no common sense instead......
A/ A passionate blog about the Rickster.....quite good......and it just seems the Koch Brothers are everywhere......
I always thought that Rick Scott would manage to destroy Florida by the end of his term, but I was wrong. At the rate he’s going he’ll destroy it LONG before then.
In just under two months Scott has taken command of a state with Titanic potential, and actively sought out an iceberg to steer it into. Much like the Titanic, yesterday he hit the big one.
He not only flipped off voters, maybe a couple corporate donors, and his own party, he even seems confused about his own policies with yesterday’s rejection of high-speed rail. That decision has left many scratching their heads, and may have just convinced even the former doubters that he has become the Master Of Disaster for Florida. The only groups he seems to have catered to is that small minority of ignorant Tea Partiers who probably have trouble balancing their own bank accounts and think that fairies, not taxes, fill the potholes that are big enough for them to drive their pickup trucks through.
The other group that’s happy about Scott’s decision? Why that would be a libertarian “think tank,” the Reason Foundation, which wrote the so-called report Scott relied on to base his decision on rather than an upcoming study from the Florida Department of Transportation he claimed to be waiting for. Counted among the he Reason Foundation’s Board of Trustees is none other than David H. Koch, of Koch Industries, and yes, one more rather large can of worms.
B/ A mid-February report on Scottie's performance from the St. Pete Times......
Perhaps a brief review is in order. Over the space of just a few short weeks, newbie Gov. Rick Scott, R-Lurch, has managed to:
• Alienate vast swaths of his own Republican Party by treating the Florida Legislature with all the respect and collegiality of the baptism scene in The Godfather.
• Invite the legislative black caucus over to the Governor's Mansion for lunch, only to serve up a steaming plate of arrogant, dismissive, condescending hooey worthy of a plantation overseer.
• Recoil against the state's long-standing open government laws as if they were inspired by the Communist Manifesto, Soledad Brothers and Mao's "Little Red Book."
• Scuttle Florida's high-speed rail effort that would have meant tens of thousands of jobs by rejecting $2.4 billion in federal funding based on the financial due diligence equivalent of consulting a Wikipedia entry, a matchbook cover and Rush Limbaugh's website.
C/ A very good political analysis of some of the forces at work here in Florida, and the agenda that is being followed in Florida and other tea Party states - oh yes, the extreme right wing agenda is alive and well, and leading to idiotic decisions like cancelling the rail link.....
The tea party Republican drive to turn the red states into 19th century Ayn Randian corporate fiefdoms with low paid, non-union workers, outdated infrastructure (can the horse and buggy be next?) limited control by women over their own reproduction, negligible science education and harsh laws forcing non-white people to constantly prove their citizenship is in full gear across the country. And in former swing states that fell to tea party control last November, the shock is finally kicking in.
In Florida, it turns out Gov. Rick Scott isn’t so much governing as he is taking dictation from tea party groups, with whom he convened before turning down $2.4 billion in federal funds for high speed rail (which Scott’s communication team is now trying to brand as “Obamarail” to maintain the indoctrination of the faithful) and before whom he presented his budget. From CBS News:
Republican C.C. “Doc” Dockery, former chairman of the Florida High Speed Rail Commission, told the Tampa Tribune that today was “a great day for the citizens of California, who will be getting billions of dollars that Florida didn’t want and the thousands of jobs that come with the money.”Dockery blamed the Tea Party for the decision. Indeed, the Miami Herald reports that Scott announced his decision after meeting with tea partiers in his office who urged him to reject the federal funding.
It also turns out Scott used a so-called “feasibility study:” from a libertarian think tank to come to his decision that rail was unworkabe in Florida — a conclusion he quite coincidentally shares with virtually every other newly elected tea party governor.
Scott’s decision is directly contradictory of what more than a dozen Florida Republicans are on record saying about high speed rail. And few economists would argue that such projects would immediately create thousands of jobs — something Scott himself has yet to put forward a plan to do, though he promised 700,000 jobs over 7 years in his “777″ plan during the campaign.
D/ And our final story on Big Rick is an editorial no less from the NYT, saying the high speed rail decision was pure pandering politics.....
There is no sound economic justification for the decision by Gov. Rick Scott of Florida to reject $2.4 billion in federal financing for the vital Tampa-to-Orlando high-speed rail project. Political pandering to his Tea Party supporters is the only explanation we can come up with.
10/ An surprisingly beautiful trailer for a documentary coming in the autumn about snowboarding....."The Art of Flight".....3 minutes of incredible alpine snow and some very cool music.....
11/ Healing a wounded credit score. Some common sense advice on how to rebuild your credit and also what to avoid doing, like listening to those stupid radio ads......good article....
Millions of consumers have fallen out of favor with the credit scoring gods.
Some lost their jobs or were just overwhelmed by mounting debt. Others got caught up in the real estate bubble or had major medical bills. Whatever the reason, the rising number of foreclosures, short sales, late credit card payments and the ultimate credit sin — bankruptcies — have left black marks on credit reports most everywhere.
So what can these people do to repair their credit?
The simple answer is to focus on the information that is used to generate the all-powerful FICO score — the measure used most frequently by traditional lenders to determine creditworthiness.
12/ As well as sounding really interesting, I was most amused by the title of this book - "Moby Duck". It's a story of an author following the path of a container ship's cargo of plastic bath toys that went into the sea, and what he saw along the journey....
On Jan. 10, 1992, a container ship traveling south of the Aleutians, in the region once quaintly known as the Graveyard of the Pacific, en route from Hong Kong to Tacoma, Wash., took a steep roll and lost part of its cargo. The incident had near-mythical repercussions. Among the lost merchandise were 7,200 packs of bathtub toys. Each four-piece set included a blue turtle, a green frog, a red beaver and a yellow duck. This came to be erroneously understood as the story of 29,000 rubber duckies set adrift and washing up all over the globe.
..............................
Here’s an important point about Mr. Hohn’s many and varied subsequent travels and observations: He was not one of those journalists who dream up make-work projects and seek out exploits that can be turned into amusing reading. “Moby-Duck” makes him sound genuinely open-minded, inquisitive and eager to expand his own understanding of the freakish event on which he’d grown fixated. And he was eager to enhance his secondhand ideas about how the world works with firsthand images and experiences, which he eagerly incorporates into “Moby-Duck.” As he puts it, he was not someone, like the explorers of old, who sought to turn the world into a map. “Quite the opposite,” he says. “I wanted to turn a map into a world.”
In a book that works as a lively travelogue as well as a voyage of discovery and a philosophical inquiry of sorts (How did toy animals evolve into children’s playthings? And why are beloved, clichéd toy ducklings yellow when most species are not?) Mr. Hohn begins by taking a series of public ferries from Washington to Alaska, commenting as he goes about the ups and downs of that journey. (The ride was miserable, but it took him to wondrous, cruise-ship-free Alaskan vistas.)
13/ We'll close with Tom Tomorrow, and a review of the "World of Crazy" in 2010, part 1......
Todays businessmans' joke
How to truly impress a client
I was in the airport VIP lounge en route to Seattle a couple of
weeks ago.
While in there, I noticed Bill Gates sitting comfortably in the
corner, enjoying a drink.
I was meeting a very important client who was also flying to
Seattle, but she was running a little bit late.
Well, being a straightforward kind of guy, I approached the
Microsoft chairman, introduced myself, and said, "Mr. Gates, I
wonder if you would do me a favor."
"Yes?"
"I'm sitting right over there," pointing to my seat at the bar,
and I'm waiting on a very important client.
Would you be so kind when she arrives as to come walk by and
just say, 'Hi, Ray,'?"
"Sure."
I shook his hand and thanked him and went back to my seat.
About ten minutes later, my client showed up.
We ordered a drink and started to talk business.
A couple of minutes later, I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was
Bill Gates.
"Hi, Ray," he said.
I replied, "Fuck off, Gates, I'm in a meeting."
I was in the airport VIP lounge en route to Seattle a couple of
weeks ago.
While in there, I noticed Bill Gates sitting comfortably in the
corner, enjoying a drink.
I was meeting a very important client who was also flying to
Seattle, but she was running a little bit late.
Well, being a straightforward kind of guy, I approached the
Microsoft chairman, introduced myself, and said, "Mr. Gates, I
wonder if you would do me a favor."
"Yes?"
"I'm sitting right over there," pointing to my seat at the bar,
and I'm waiting on a very important client.
Would you be so kind when she arrives as to come walk by and
just say, 'Hi, Ray,'?"
"Sure."
I shook his hand and thanked him and went back to my seat.
About ten minutes later, my client showed up.
We ordered a drink and started to talk business.
A couple of minutes later, I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was
Bill Gates.
"Hi, Ray," he said.
I replied, "Fuck off, Gates, I'm in a meeting."
Todays golfer joke
Tim and Janice met on a singles cruise and Tim fell head over heels for her.
When they discovered they lived in neighboring cities only a few miles apart
Tim was ecstatic. He immediately started asking her out when they got home.
Within a couple of weeks, Tim had taken Janice to dance clubs, restaurants, concerts, movies and museums.
Tim became convinced that Janice was indeed his soul mate and true love.
Every date seemed better than the last.
On the one-month anniversary of their first dinner on the cruise ship,Tim took Janice to a fine restaurant.
While having cocktails and waiting for their salad, Tim said, "I guess you can tell I'm very much in love with you. I'd like a little serious talk before our relationship continues to the next stage."
"So, before I get a box out of my jacket and ask you a life-changing question, it's only fair to warn you, I'm a total golf nut. I play golf; I read about golf, I watch golf on TV. In short, I eat, sleep, and breathe golf. If that's going to be a problem for us, you'd better say so now!"
Janice took a deep breath and responded, "Tim that certainly won't be a problem. I love you as you are and I love golf too; but, since we're being
totally honest with each other, you need to know that for the last five
years I've been a hooker."
"Oh wow! I see," Tim replied.
He looked down at the table, was quiet for a moment.
Deep in serious thought he added, "You know, it's probably because
you're rolling your wrists over when you hit the ball.....
Todays Scottish joke
Scottish Sheep Farmer
A Scotsman buys several sheep, hoping to breed them for wool.
After several weeks, he notices that none of the sheep are getting pregnant, and phones a vet for help.
The vet tells him that he should try artificial insemination.
The farmer doesn't have the slightest idea what this means but, not wanting to display his ignorance, only asks the vet how he will know when the sheep are pregnant.
The vet tells him that they will stop standing around, and instead will lie down, and wallow in the grass, when they are pregnant.
The man hangs up and gives it some thought. He comes to the conclusion that artificial insemination means he has to impregnate the sheep himself.
So, he loads the sheep into his Land Rover, drives them out into the woods, has sex with them all, brings them back, then goes to bed.
Next morning,he wakes and looks out at the sheep. Seeing that they are all still standing around, he deduces that the first try didn't take, and loads them in the Land Rover again.
He drives them out to the woods, bangs each sheep twice for good measure, brings them back, and goes to bed exhausted.
Next morning, he wakes to find the sheep still just standing around.
"Try again." he tells himself, and proceeds to load them up, and drive them out to the woods.
He spends all day shagging the sheep, and upon returning home, falls knackered into bed.
The next morning, he cannot even raise himself from the bed to look out of the window.
He asks his wife to look, and tell him if the sheep are lying in the grass.
"No,"she says, "They're all in the Land Rover, and one of them is beeping the horn."
A Scotsman buys several sheep, hoping to breed them for wool.
After several weeks, he notices that none of the sheep are getting pregnant, and phones a vet for help.
The vet tells him that he should try artificial insemination.
The farmer doesn't have the slightest idea what this means but, not wanting to display his ignorance, only asks the vet how he will know when the sheep are pregnant.
The vet tells him that they will stop standing around, and instead will lie down, and wallow in the grass, when they are pregnant.
The man hangs up and gives it some thought. He comes to the conclusion that artificial insemination means he has to impregnate the sheep himself.
So, he loads the sheep into his Land Rover, drives them out into the woods, has sex with them all, brings them back, then goes to bed.
Next morning,he wakes and looks out at the sheep. Seeing that they are all still standing around, he deduces that the first try didn't take, and loads them in the Land Rover again.
He drives them out to the woods, bangs each sheep twice for good measure, brings them back, and goes to bed exhausted.
Next morning, he wakes to find the sheep still just standing around.
"Try again." he tells himself, and proceeds to load them up, and drive them out to the woods.
He spends all day shagging the sheep, and upon returning home, falls knackered into bed.
The next morning, he cannot even raise himself from the bed to look out of the window.
He asks his wife to look, and tell him if the sheep are lying in the grass.
"No,"she says, "They're all in the Land Rover, and one of them is beeping the horn."
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