What Herman Cain Doesn't Want Us to Know

Tonight there's another Republican debate, and since Herman Cain has been rising in the polls everyone expects the other Republicans to begin lynching him.

His 9-9-9 plan has come under heavy attack as being completely insufficient to pay for even the limited government Republicans endorse, with its constantly burgeoning defense budget. Cain may have even gotten the idea for it from SimCity 4, a computer game, though he of course denies this.

But Cain's got some real skeletons in the closet. Besides being a pizza magnate, he was a member of the Kansas City Federal Reserve and a member of the board of Aquila Inc.

Considering that huge swaths of the Republican Party believe that the Fed is the devil, this should put Cain on the seventh level of hell.

Aquila is more interesting, and much more telling. Aquila was basically Enron's envious little brother, right down to the pension scandal. Cain was on its board and endorsed employees investing their pension money in Aquila stock even as it was falling. Aquila pulled the same kind of gimmicks Enron did to inflate its stock price: selling electricity to a subsidiary, which then sold it right back to itself to inflate sales numbers. They also used the "ricochet" gimmick, buying power in California at a capped price, moving it out of state, then selling it back to California at an inflated price.

Cain also chaired the compensation committee at Aquila, which gave out $30 million in bonuses to the top five execs at Aquila in 2002, while the stock price was plummeting.


Aquila employees filed a class action against the company, naming Cain and other board members in the suit. The company settled for $10 million in 2007. Cain left the board in 2008.

Herman Cain is not an outsider or a small-business-friendly entrepreneur. He's worked for giant companies like Coca Cola, Pillsbury, Burger King and Godfather's Pizza. He never started a business of his own, he's always been a hired gun and part of the old boys' network. He's been on the boards of companies like Nabisco, Whirlpool and Aquila. He has always been in bed with self-dealing CEOs who think ever-soaring salaries are theirs by the divine right of kings.

Cain is the kind of guy that got us into the mess we're in today, with the salaries of regular folks dropping like rocks while CEOs who screw the pooch get richer and richer.

Tea Party Carjacking

A lot of comparisons are being made between the Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street movements. Both started from a sense of outrage over the bailout of the bankers who caused the collapse, while the rest of the country is sinking into a mire.

The right says that Occupy Wall Street is just a bunch of fruit cakes. But the Tea Party started out pretty much the same way. Instead of camping in the parks, though, they brought semi-automatic weapons to town hall meetings, or screamed bloody hell about keeping the government's grubby hands off Social Security and Medicare, which they appeared to not realize were government programs in the first place.

But the Tea Party was quickly carjacked by Fox News and the Republican Party, and people like Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, the Koch brothers and Clarence Thomas' wife. Fox News even falsified coverage to make Tea Party rallies seem larger than they actually were. Now the Tea Party is mouthing the Republican Party line of less regulation on Wall Street. They blame Barney Frank for somehow forcing banks to lend money to people who couldn't make the payments.

But what really happened was this: loan officers were paid by the head to get suckers into adjustable rate mortgages that started out affordable, but soon were beyond the ability of the borrowers to pay. These weren't just poor black folks. Everyone and their cousin bought houses they couldn't really afford, or bought multiple dwellings as "investments" that they would flip, or took out home equity loans to cash in on their real estate, which in the bubble mentality group-think would always skyrocket in value. In the tight market that ensued, speculators drove prices way up, forcing everyone to take out larger loans for overvalued properties. The guys who wrote the loans took their money and ran, dumping the loans on someone else.

Wall Street took those bad loans, intentionally making false assumptions about the borrowers' ability to repay, and then hid their poor quality by bundling them with good loans into giant packages of investment securities called CDOs. The rating agencies knowingly rubberstamped these as being AAA rated, because they were being paid by the banks to do so.

Then some of those investment banks created hedge funds that bet against the very same faulty securities that they had helped create. When doubt began to spread about these CDOs the whole house of cards began to collapse. Lehman Brothers was allowed to go bankrupt and that caused a real panic, resulting in the bailout and the mess we're in.

It's now at the point where even normally responsible people who are completely capable of repaying loans are just letting them go into default because they owe far more than the property is currently worth, because its value was driven into the stratosphere by speculators and overall economic conditions have deteriorated. Wall Street immorality is now business as usual for the rest of the country.

Under the Bush administration the regulation of Wall Street fell into disrepair and disuse, becoming a muddy, rutted road without any adult supervision. As the bankers' giant limousines race down Wall Street, they soak the average guy with the mud from the bailout and the increased "fees" they charge us just to get our money out of the bank. All the while the bankers sit in those limousines sipping champagne with their girlfriends who are all dolled up with jewelry from Tiffany's, paid for by giant bonuses that come out of our hides.

The Tea Party is now the tail wagging the dog of the Republican Party. But they've forgotten what got them mad in the first place, and have let nonsense like Obama's birth certificate and national health care distract them from the real problem: Wall Street greed and incompetence. Now they're demanding that even the meager regulatory improvements of Dodd-Frank that were made in the wake of the bailout be abolished and Wall Street be free to do it all over again.

But the Occupy Wall Street crowd is still mad at the bankers sneering at them from behind their tinted limousine windows.


Who are the real fruit cakes?

Another One Bites the Dust

The father of GOP hopeful Jon Huntsman had this to say, in today's Times, on the subject of the wealthy giving half of their money to efforts begun by Warren Buffet and Bill Gates.

I suggested 80 percent. A tremendous number of wealthy people haven’t given much of anything.

Wait, what? I thought the wealthy were very charitable and money trickled down from them as they sprinkled their magical job beans on all of us peasants. Yet the numbers say otherwise...

Of the world’s 1,200 or so billionaires, Mr. Huntsman is one of only 19, according to the wealth-watch monitors at Forbes Magazine, who have given away more than $1 billion.

I guess Jon Stossel was wrong. Here's something even more perplexing from the article.

Mr. Huntsman, the son of a rural school teacher, built the multinational Huntsman Corporation from scratch starting in the 1970s, a chemical company with most of its operations now overseas. He sympathizes with the Wall Street protesters. The political system, he agreed, is broken. Ethics have foundered.

A business owner sympathizing with the Occupy Wall Street crowd? Holy Shee-Aht!!! I don't get it. I thought any sensible business owner knows that being greedy, hoarding wealth, and creating even greater inequality in this country is the best way to cure our economy. In other words, the GOP platform. I'm shocked, I tell you, SHOCKED, that a man who started his own business actually thinks that the 99 percenters are right. What's the world coming to?

He argues that the rich, if they could be induced to greater generosity — and not simply be more stiffly taxed — could go a long way toward fixing things.

Isn't "induced" simply another word for "forced?" Oh, snap! And, if this wasn't bad enough...

“All men and women need a roof over their heads, and need to be fed and have proper health care,” he said. “I don’t know that I believed that, or even understood that, in the early days.”

AHHHHHHHHH!!!!! NO!!!!!!! Jon....Jon...Jon...now you are talking about (gasp!) wealth redistribution and helping people. Purity test=failed. A pox upon both your vacation homes! You are no longer one of them and are now a Marxist like me.

Another One Bites The Dust.

Finding Yourself In A Fantasy World

Paul Krugman's recent piece in the Times is very indicative of how I feel these days when I watch the GOP debates or talk to nearly everyone on the right. I'm Alice and I've gone down the rabbit hole. Thankfully, Krugman feels the same way.

And since economic policy has to deal with the world we live in, not the fantasy world of the G.O.P.’s imagination, the prospect that one of these people may well be our next president is, frankly, terrifying.

Terrifying, indeed. Common sense has been sacrificed in the name of orthodoxy.

In the real world, recent events were a devastating refutation of the free-market orthodoxy that has ruled American politics these past three decades. Above all, the long crusade against financial regulation, the successful effort to unravel the prudential rules established after the Great Depression on the grounds that they were unnecessary, ended up demonstrating — at immense cost to the nation — that those rules were necessary, after all.

This is what actually happened.

But down the rabbit hole, none of that happened. We didn’t find ourselves in a crisis because of runaway private lenders like Countrywide Financial. We didn’t find ourselves in a crisis because Wall Street pretended that slicing, dicing and rearranging bad loans could somehow create AAA assets — and private rating agencies played along. We didn’t find ourselves in a crisis because “shadow banks” like Lehman Brothers exploited gaps in financial regulation to create bank-type threats to the financial system without being subject to bank-type limits on risk-taking.

No, in the universe of the Republican Party we found ourselves in a crisis because Representative Barney Frank forced helpless bankers to lend money to the undeserving poor.

This is the fantasy that has been created by the right that I hear every single day. To say this view is monumentally frustrating is a massive fucking understatement.

The G.O.P. has responded to the crisis not by rethinking its dogma but by adopting an even cruder version of that dogma, becoming a caricature of itself. It’s a terrible thing when an individual loses his or her grip on reality. But it’s much worse when the same thing happens to a whole political party, one that already has the power to block anything the president proposes — and which may soon control the whole government.

The way I see it, this is what the election is going to be about: reality or fantasy. The truly sucktacular part about all of this is that the Democrats are going to address this insanity and will likely be sucked into managing fantasies. This will give it legitimacy and then this kind of thinking will be in the national conversation. With millions of people operating solely on anger, hate and fear, many will embrace these crazy ideas. Of course, they could choose to ignore it but that would probably make it worse. We'd probably have more people believe this garbage...the great lie and all, yer know.

I suppose I could take some solace that people like me and Krugman are at least grounded in reality. But with so many irrational people that have completely taken leave of their senses, there's not really much to be happy about at all.

Another Black Eye for Rupert

Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp is at it again. A story published in The Guardian reveals that The Wall Street Journal in Europe has been selling papers for pennies apiece to companies in order to boost circulation figures. The papers are supposed to be distributed free to university students, but it's not clear that anyone really reads them. The papers constituted 41% of the Jouranal's circulation in Europe.

In essence, the Journal has been defrauding advertisers by claiming much higher circulation than they actually have. One would also assume that advertisers expect that business executives who make purchasing and business decisions are reading the Journal, not college freshmen using it to line their pet iguana's cage.

But it gets worse.

When one of the companies, ELP, complained that they weren't getting enough return for the money they were paying for the papers the Journal would also:

give ELP free advertising and, in exchange, the ELP would produce "leadership videos" for them; they would jointly organise more seminars and workshops on themes connected to ELP's work; but, crucially, [Andrew] Langhoff [the publisher of WSJ Europe] agreed that the Journal would publish "a minimum of three special reports" that would be based on surveys of the European market which ELP would run with the Journal's help.

But ELP still wasn't satisfied, so the Journal made a deal to funnel money back to ELP through third parties:

An email from Andrew Langhoff on 26 November 2010 includes a diagram that indicates money was channelled to ELP through two other middlemen. This suggests that Langhoff wanted €15,000 sent to ELP via a Belgian company called Think Media, which sells space on billboards. An invoice dated 2 December 2010, shows that ELP invoiced Think Media for €15,000. An email from 20 December shows that Think Media had paid the €15,000 to ELP. In a series of phone calls and emails to Think Media, the Guardian put it to the company that ELP had provided no goods or services in exchange for this payment, and that the payment was made at the request of the Journal. Think Media declined to respond.

A whistleblower reported the scam last year to Les Hinton at NewsCorp's headquarters in New York, but no action was taken and the whistleblower was dismissed ("made redundant" in The Guardian's quaint British parlance).

Nothing happened until the Journal got wind of the Guardian's investigation of the deals, which "caused a panic" and resulted in the resignation of Andrew Langhoff on Tuesday.

Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp is a corrupt organization. Its News of the World subsidiary hacked the voice mails of celebrities, terrorist victims and murdered girls. They bought the silence of former employees. They bribed cops. They bribed employees of other newspapers to steal their scoops. NewsCorp News America subsidiary is under investigation for computer hacking and predatory and anticompetitive practices. Fox News execs routinely require reporters to slant their stories to toe the Republican Party line, especially on politics and climate science. Fox is also fighting the FCC over its indecent programming standards. But what can you expect from a company run by a man who became an American just so he could own US TV stations?

When Rupert Murdoch went after the Wall Street Journal I was expecting this kind of thing. He's brought the British tabloid mentality to the Fox TV network, the Wall Street Journal and Fox News. NewsCorp is a giant multinational corporation that thinks it's above the law, ethics, and morality.

What's the Hurry?

Pundits everywhere are declaring Romney the winner of the Republican nomination. It's months before a single primary or caucus vote will be cast, so why is everyone is such a big rush to make the decision?

At this point in almost every recent election the front runner in either party other than a sitting president was not the ultimate nominee. If the Republicans decide on Romney this far in advance of the election, there will be a lot of unhappy people. Because as soon as the Republican nominee is decided, he will have to move to the center in order to seem reasonable and attract the independent voter.

And many Republicans already think Romney is way too liberal for them. Evangelicals don't like him because he's a Mormon. Most Tea Partyers don't like him for, well, everything he's ever done -- his religion, Romneycare, his altered stands on any number of social issues, being governor of a liberal state, his history as a corporate takeover artist. Libertarians don't like him for many of the same reasons. Pro-lifers don't believe his conversion away from his stated belief in a woman's right to choose.

Romney is the second or third choice for the vast majority of Republicans. He's just another big-business machine politician with good hair who strapped his dog to the top of his car on a family trip to Canada.

All the issues that the majority of Republicans like to holler about will basically be ignored for the next year as Romney tries to position himself to take the center. Yeah, he'll throw out a few red-meat lines in an attempt to rouse the masses. But they won't be convinced. He'll weasel-word most things to avoid looking like a kook in front of the swing voters.

Red-meat Republicans will sullenly vote for Romney because in their mind anyone is better than Obama. But they won't feel particularly motivated to hit the streets and work hard for him. They won't contribute to his campaign like they contribute to Ron Paul's or Michele Bachmann's. They'll feel that Romney is big business's candidate, and they'll be content to let them finance Romney's campaign and the outside issue groups that will be the loudest voices in the election.

Romney is hum-drum and boring. He doesn't raise any kind of enthusiasm in anyone.

If Republicans decide on Romney in December or January, they'll have buyer's remorse come March. When he dips in the polls they'll panic and worry that everything is lost. But by then the other candidates will have dismantled their campaigns and the whole Republican field will be in disarray.

And why Romney, anyway? Well, most of the people who have been running on the Republican side in this cycle are just not qualified. Palin, Perry, Bachmann, and Cain are idiots. Gingrich is damaged goods and disconnected from reality, with his huge Tiffany's bills and serial polygamy. Paul is just too old (older than McCain), and has too many wacky ideas for religious Republicans (legalize prostitution and drugs). Santorum? Seriously? Gary Johnson? Who's that? Huntsman and Pawlenty are passable but too boring and too liberal. They would have a chance with swing voters, but red-meat Republicans despise them.

Republican activists simply hate anyone who would make a credible candidate because they don't like people who have nuanced beliefs or think that government can do any good. And to be an effective president, you really do have to believe that your job is worth doing and that all your employees aren't worthless scum-sucking douche bags.

Anyway, why do we let voters in two or three states decide everything for us? What gives Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina the right to decide who runs for president? I can see why Florida and Nevada want to jump the gun and move their primaries up so they can get some of the campaign cash spent in their states. But this interminably long election season is not good for the country. If anything, we need to shorten the campaign to a few months, not lengthen it to a year and a half that is has become.

In the final analysis, issues that seem so vital at this stage of the campaign could be completely irrelevant by the summer of 2012, and Romney could easily be the wrong man for the job.

The Sowell Reflex

I was reminiscing recently about my long conversation over Facebook with Reverend Jim last spring. Our discussion on Thomas Sowell's Conflict of Visions has continued to resonate with me in an enormously frustrating way and I've finally figured out why.

I hadn't read Sowell's book since the late 80s so I dug out my old copy and re-read parts of it. As I chuckled at his insistence that the "constrained vision" relies on empirical evidence (see: The Economic Collapse of 2008 or how I learned to stop worrying and worship the free market), I realized that he was very sadly arguing this point (via Asimov):

My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.

In essence, the entire book is one gigantic #3-Projection/Flipping.

The fact is that most liberals do not look at human nature as being inherently good. This is a complete fucking straw man. In reality, most liberals (including myself) look at ALL of the ways human nature is colored. We start as blank slates and develop based on number of factors. Part of it is genetic...part of it is how we are socialized...how we interact with the people in our lives (family, friends, co-workers)...part of it is how we function within the institutional framework of our society. There is a mountain of empirical evidence that supports human development in each of these areas.

But Sowell and his followers don't want to look at this evidence. Instead, they jump immediately to dividing people into two camps: those that are naively optimistic and those who know how the world really works. Yeah...no bias there. Worse, his definition of "how the world works" (i.e. the constrained vision) is equally as ignorant as those who believe in utopias. I've talked about this before...the libertarian utopia is just as ridiculous as the socialist one.

The result of all of this is what I am now calling The Sowell Reflex, a condition that presents itself quite regularly these days in many political discussions. It's happened to me so many times in the last couple of years that I chuckle when his name (predictably) comes up. More often than not, as soon as a person questions the breadth of intelligence of ideologically right folks, Sowell is quickly mentioned as a shield and the "silly liberals" are told to go home with their tail between their legs. Yet, upon closer inspection, one can easily see that this is just another dodge that is summed up simply as this:

The Sowell Reflex is one gigantic excuse for continued and willful ignorance.

So True!

Republicans Now Hurling the C-word At Each Other

Robert Jeffress has made a big splash with his declaration at the Values Voter summit that Mitt Romney belongs to a "cult." He declared that Mormonism is not Christianity, even though the Mormon Church is called the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

But the Mormon Church is not the first to be called a "cult" by a pastor in the Southern Baptist Convention. Jim Smyrl, from Jacksonville, Florida, was calling the Catholic Church a cult since at least 2008.

Smyrl's contention in the video linked above is that Catholic Church is a cult based on doctrinal differences between it and the SBC. In particular, he singles out the transubstantiation of wine into the actual blood of Jesus Christ.

Smyrl's definition seems to be that if a religious group has any doctrine that seems creepy and weird to you, it's a cult. By that definition, Mormonism counts as a cult. It has a history of polygamy, which continues to this day in some sects. It holds that American Indians are a lost tribe of Israel. It has the doctrine of Exaltation, which posits that we can become gods and goddesses. Jews had to fight with the Mormon Church to stop the practice of baptizing Jews killed in Nazi concentration camps (this was apparently done to assist in exaltation). Non-Mormons may not attend weddings in Mormon temples. Mormons keep a cache of emergency supplies wherever they go in case the world ends. And they wear Holy Underwear +4.

And then there's the history of Joe Smith, who seems to have been a prototypical cult leader. He claimed to have translated the Book of Mormom from gold plates given to him by the angel Moroni, which he had to give back after showing them to some guys who signed affidavits that they really, really did exist. Smith was murdered in jail after declaring martial law in the town where he was mayor, shutting down the town newspaper and facing accusations that he was stealing other men's wives. His killers were acquitted.

But what is a cult, really? Generally, a cult is a religious group that has a centralized authority that dictates particular standards of behavior and morality, controls whom followers can marry, dictates with whom members can associate, ostracizes former members, demands large donations from followers, and in general limits exposure to outside influences to prevent "immorality," all in an attempt to maintain complete control over all aspects of the cult member's life.

But the Southern Baptist Convention has its own cultish characteristics. The Baptist Church was famous for forbidding dancing and drinking: that's why there are so many dry counties in the South. Some Baptist sects justified slavery by its mention in the Bible (the SBC apologized for this in 1995). They venerate the cross, the evil device of torture and murder used by the Romans to crucify millions of innocent victims, including Christ, which is more than a little creepy. They have the Trinity, which is really just some freaky nonsense to get around the fact that they actually polytheistic. Their cultishness is sufficiently advanced that Baptists sometimes feel the need to insist that they are not a cult.

But all religions started out as cults: small groups of adherents to a new religion with heretical beliefs. Early Christian cults had to worship in secret for fear of persecution and death.

Cults stop being cults when their numbers are sufficient to be considered mainstream, and their policies allow them to be integrated into the rest of society, by eliminating their exclusionary polices that alienate them from others.

But the real reason that the Baptists say the Mormon Church is a cult may be that the SBC is afraid of losing members to the Mormon Church. This is from an article in Slate from 2007 when the Romney question first arose:

In the early 1980s, Southern Baptist Convention leaders discovered—much to their horror—that 40 percent of Mormonism's 217,000 converts in 1980 came from Baptist backgrounds. More than 150 Mormon missionaries had descended on the northern Georgia area alone, a Southern Baptist magazine noted warily in 1982, and they found Southern Baptists among their most promising targets. When the Mormon Church built temples in the early '80s in Atlanta and Dallas, two of Southern Baptism's most important hubs, it was as if the Mormon Church had thrown down the gauntlet in an arms race between two of the most missionary-minded faiths. Mormonism was declaring its permanent presence in the American South, where Southern Baptism enjoyed status as the de facto religion.

So, what this may really boil down to is not religious doctrine or the saving of souls, but losing church members, the income from their donations, and the subsequent loss of religious and political power to a competing organization.

In other words, this tiff between Baptists and Mormons may all be about the money.

Wait, WHAT???!!!!

How the fuck did this make it through the propaganda machine?

The Mittster

Now that the GOP field has settled down, the nomination is Mitt Romney's to lose. In fact, I can't see anyone else getting the nod at this point. So, since it's Mitt vs. Barry next year, here are my initial thoughts.

First of all, I like Mitt Romney. I think it's cool that he is uncomfortable in some social situations. So what? It shows that he's a person with faults. I also think that if he wins the election next year, he won't govern any differently than President Obama. He talks a good game now on the campaign trail but the health care bill will remain law, we'll still be pursuing the same national security policies, and the economy will still be the same.

The central problem I have with Mitt is he's too Wall Street. That's going to turn a lot of voters off who blame Wall Street second (behind George W. Bush) for our economy. Moreover, the base is not going to take kindly to a Romney candidacy and some will stay home.

This says to me that the race is going to be tight. Polls right now say the president and Romney are tied 48-48 with 4 percent undecided. How will those 4 percent break and in what states? As is usually the case, it might come down to Florida and Ohio. But will the lack of conservative voters put Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico in play with its Latino population and anti-Mormonism. Or will the liberal base, smoldering from Obama's centrism, stay home as well?

It's going to be an interesting year, folks!

Who are the Real Republicans?

Is Michele Bachmann a Real Republican? She just introduced a bill in Congress that would create a federal mandate forcing pregnant women seeking abortions to get ultrasound examinations. I thought Real Republicans were against federal regulations that increase the cost of health care and intrude on the private relationship between a doctor and a patient.

Is Rick Perry a Real Republican? He signed a bill that mandated sonograms for all women seeking abortions in Texas. Portions of the bill were ruled unconstitutional by a judge in August.

Is John Kriesel a Real Republican? He's one of several Minnesota Republican legislators who recently announced that he will work to oppose the gay marriage amendment that will go before voters next year.

Is Ron Erhardt a Real Republican? He and five other Republican legislators in Minnesota voted to override Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty's veto of a transportation bill that increased gas and sales taxes after the 35W bridge collapse. They were summarily drummed out of the party, losing the party's endorsement over this single issue. Erhardt ran anyway as an independent, but barely lost to the endorsed Republican in a three-way race.


Tony Sutton, the GOP state chairman in Minnesota said that individual Republicans can disagree with the party stance on "some issues," but the marriage amendment would stay in the party platform. Apparently you can disagree with the party on gay marriage, but when it comes to raising taxes -- even if those taxes are used to keep bridges from falling down -- that is the holiest of holies, beyond the pale and a challenge to Republican Orthodoxy that can only be met with excommunication.

We Are

Over the last few weeks, a growing group of people have occupied Wall Street in protest of the greed and corruption that has run rampant there in the last few years. They have rightfully pointed the spotlight on the organizations most responsible for our economic malaise at present.

Behind all of this is the We Are The 99 Percent movement. . This is their credo.

We are the 99 percent. We are getting kicked out of our homes. We are forced to choose between groceries and rent. We are denied quality medical care. We are suffering from environmental pollution. We are working long hours for little pay and no rights, if we're working at all. We are getting nothing while the other 1 percent is getting everything. We are the 99 percent.

What we are seeing here is the beginning of a minority block that will likely eclipse the conservative base. Hell, some conservatives may end up joining them. We've had unemployment for quite a long time in this country and it was clearly a simple matter of time before they organized into a force with which to be reckoned. We may even be seeing the beginning of the end of the self defeating plutocracy that has grown over the last decade.

Now, I've got a few issues with these people that I'd like to get out of the way. First, they remind me a great deal of the WTO protesters (see: Protectionism). VERY bad idea. Look at the world 50 years ago and look at it today. Overall, we are better off. Lifespans are longer in Global South countries and it is because of liberal trade practices. If these people are concerned about world hunger and poverty, the best way to solve it is free trade. No tariffs, quotas, non tariff barriers, or any other government restrictions that impede the global market. This means that the labor pool is going to grow which means demand will be lower thus the growing pains. They are going to have to accept this if they want the world to be better off.

Of course, this doesn't mean that MNCs (multinational corporations) have leave to pillage and burn the world. A completely unrestrained free market easily slides into this due to the basic human impulse of greed. So, there does need to be consequences for those that abuse this freedom. Obviously, this is a very complex issue and I don't think the occupiers fully understand the various intricacies of it.

This brings us to another issue I have with the occupiers of Wall Street. Are they so anarchistic in nature that they can't see the benefits of banks and investments? They are the very backbone of our culture. No doubt, they have been abused by people but that simply means that they should be put in "pound me in the ass prison" for 6 months. That would end this bullshit immediately. That means regulators are going to have to grow a pair and get it done. Tearing down the whole system will make things worse.

The occupiers also seem to not have a central message or leader. That's fine for now, I guess. But they do need to figure how exactly they are going to effect the change they desire. The best way for them to do this is vote and, more importantly, get the 40 percent of the people in this country that don't vote out at the polls every year-including the odd years! It's pretty clear to me which party has more in common with them and that's who they should support. Certainly, there are some Democrats who have supported our slide to malaise in the last decade but it's the near entirety of the conservative base that is fighting tooth and nail to support our plutocracy. Their blind anger (similar to the Tea Party's) is keeping them from seeing this simple fact.

In his piece, "Keeping America's Edge," Jim Manzi talks about the importance of social cohesion. An entire section of his treatise on the sad state of our affairs is entitled "Inequality as a Symptom."

Economic inequality is likely to cause problems with social ­cohesion — but far more important, it is a symptom of our deeper ­problem. As the unsustainable high tide of post-war American dominance has slowly ebbed, many — perhaps most — of our country's workers appear unable to compete internationally at the level required to maintain anything like their current standard of living. And a shrinking elite portion of the American population, itself a shrinking fraction of the world ­population, cannot indefinitely maintain our global position.

There it is in a nutshell, folks. We will not continue to maintain our position in the world unless we take very serious steps to support the 99 percent. And by "we" I mean EVERYONE, not just the government (federal, state, local). Giving more tax breaks and less regulation to the wealthy people in this country is going to make things far worse. As Robert Reich said recently,

This isn't a zero-sum game. A lot of wealthy people are beginning to understand that they would do better with a smaller percentage of a rapidly growing economy than with a big chunk of an economy that's dead in the water.

Indeed they are. The Patriotic Millionaires Club is a fine example of what needs to be front and center in the discussion. People like Doug Edwards, a former Google executive, who stood up at a recent town hall with the president and said, "Will you please raise my taxes?" also need to come forward and demand common sense. Edwards was right when he expressed great concern for the future of federal student loans, infrastructure projects and job-training programs if the government does not obtain new revenue. We're not simply talking about our economy here. We're talking about the erosion of our hegemonic power in the world that has guided the global marketplace towards an LIEO (liberal international economic order).

Imagine if a country like China, for example, was the hegemenon. There's no way to sugar coat this, folks, and this isn't hyperbole: freedom would be lost. The intransigence against spending must stop. Clearly, we can't afford to spend like we did post World War Two but we can't go to the exact opposite of that and become maniacal cutters. We also have to cease the daily beat downs of government because this is the entity that has kept us a major power in the world and will continue to do so in the future. Without our federal government, the freedom of the global market that we created at Bretton Woods will be threatened.

I'm not sure that the 99 percenters see themselves as the large turning point that I do. Thankfully, I'm not the only one. E.J. Dionne, from his latest column

The anti-Wall Street demonstrators have created a new pole in politics. Americans have always been wary of concentrated power. The Tea Party had great success in focusing anxieties on what it argues is an excessively powerful federal government. Now an active and angry band of citizens is insisting that the concentrated power Americans most need to fear exists on Wall Street and in the financial system.

It's going to be very interesting to see what happens next.

Ah, Gip...

I came across this video recently and couldn't help but shake my head. Pay close attention to his story of the bus driver at around 12:30 and his question to the crowd at around 15:30.



I guess when Reagan calls for it, then it's not socialism:)

His caution at the end (about 17:30) sadly was not heeded.

Lake Woebegon Boardrooms

An article in the Washington Post shows that even when corporate performance is poor, CEO pay continues to skyrocket. Kevin Sharer, CEO of Amgen, earns $21 million a year, a raise of $6 million over last year. He also has two (2!) corporate jets.

The company lost 3% on its investment last year, and 7% over the last five years. Amgen has had to close plants and fire workers. Sure, times have been tough during the recession. A lot of us have had to cut back.

But not CEOs.

In fact:

Since the 1970s, median pay for executives at the nation’s largest companies has more than quadrupled, even after adjusting for inflation, according to researchers. Over the same period, pay for a typical non-supervisory worker has dropped more than 10 percent, according to Bureau of Labor statistics.

Why are these guys getting monster raises when everyone else is losing their jobs, or working 60 hour weeks, or staying in jobs that they absolutely hate but can't afford to lose their health coverage?

Corporate boards of directors are incestuous men's clubs: CEOs consider a third of directors on their boards to be personal friends. CEOs consider half the compensation committees to be their personal friends.

Corporate boards intentionally give raises that exceed the median CEO salary because they don't want to lose "valuable talent." Paul Volcker called the the "Lake Woebegon Effect," a reference to Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion, where all the children are above average.

Companies like Adobe, Discovery Communications and Countrywide Financial have official polices that CEOs should be compensated at 75 to 90% of peer companies.

This is completely nuts and totally unsustainable. It creates never-ending cycle of skyrocketing CEO pay. It's far worse than the cost of living raises built into Social Securiry and some union contracts, which these days is a few percent -- if at all.

The thing is, CEOs aren't above average. I've personally met half a dozen CEOs, and they're not brilliant masters of the universe. The vast majority are hired guns, and not entrepreneurs. They took no big risks and had no innovative ideas. They just know someone on the search committee, or got hired through the old boys' network.

It's not unreasonable for the founder of a company, say a Bill Gates or a Steve Jobs, to command high salaries: without them the company wouldn't exist. But hired CEOs are just employees, like the janitors, engineers and secretaries. (Even worse than hired CEOs are the heirs of corporate founders who take over daddy's job.) Hired guns are in no way special or indispensable to the operation of the company. As we've seen over and over again at hundreds of companies, CEOs are hired and fired constantly, and they don't really make any difference. They are as interchangeable as any assembly line employee.

Look at HP: they just hired Meg Whitman, the former head of eBay, who spent $160 million of her own money in her failed run for governor of California. She has no experience in HP's current line of business -- making computers, printers and scientific instruments -- which HP is going to ditch in favor of a new strategy to focus on "enterprise, commercial and government markets." That is, they're not going to make stuff anymore, but instead sell services to other companies and government.

Whitman's predecessor, Leo Apotheker, only worked there 11 months, but will receive $13 million in various compensation just for screwing the pooch. His predecessor, Mark Hurd, was fired for trying to screw Jodie Fisher, a marketing support consultant and former actress.

Finally, Carly Fiorino (who spent $5.5 million of her own money on an unsuccessful Senate campaign) resigned as CEO of HP in 2005 after a scandal where private investigators illegally obtained the phone records of journalists and board members.

HP's story is not unique, it is quite typical of corporate America. If you can get behind the wall of secrecy at any company you will find they have lots of skeletons in the closet.

• Rupert Murdoch's News of the World was in the news again for stealing stories from other newspapers by bribing their employees. This is separate from their phone hacking and police bribery scandal.

• The Koch brothers have been illegally selling equipment to Iran. Its French subsidiary has been bribing officials to win contracts and when Koch's investigator reported this she was taken off the inquiry and then fired.

So do you really think that private multinational corporations are more efficient and more trustworthy than a government where we have the power to hire and fire the CEO (president, governor, mayor) and the board of directors (Congress, state legislatures, city councils) at our whim?

A Teacher's Note

I came across this recently on the FaceBook page of Pastor Jim. Recall that Jim's wife was my first girlfriend and he and I regularly have political debates on his wall, some of which I reprinted here.

Clark's piece sums up exactly what instructors go through on a daily basis. The problem isn't really the schools, the teachers, the administrators or communist infiltration of our education system (I could barely type the last bit without laughing). It's the parents and what's become of them as a result of their own choices and our culture as a whole. So, what do they need to understand?

We are educators, not nannies. We are educated professionals who work with kids every day and often see your child in a different light than you do. If we give you advice, don't fight it. Take it, and digest it in the same way you would consider advice from a doctor or lawyer. I have become used to some parents who just don't want to hear anything negative about their child, but sometimes if you're willing to take early warning advice to heart, it can help you head off an issue that could become much greater in the future.

Yep.

Trust us. At times when I tell parents that their child has been a behavior problem, I can almost see the hairs rise on their backs. They are ready to fight and defend their child, and it is exhausting. One of my biggest pet peeves is when I tell a mom something her son did and she turns, looks at him and asks, "Is that true?" Well, of course it's true. I just told you. And please don't ask whether a classmate can confirm what happened or whether another teacher might have been present. It only demeans teachers and weakens the partnership between teacher and parent.

Yep.

And if you really want to help your children be successful, stop making excuses for them. I was talking with a parent and her son about his summer reading assignments. He told me he hadn't started, and I let him know I was extremely disappointed because school starts in two weeks.

His mother chimed in and told me that it had been a horrible summer for them because of family issues they'd been through in July. I said I was so sorry, but I couldn't help but point out that the assignments were given in May. She quickly added that she was allowing her child some "fun time" during the summer before getting back to work in July and that it wasn't his fault the work wasn't complete.

Yep.

Some parents will make excuses regardless of the situation, and they are raising children who will grow into adults who turn toward excuses and do not create a strong work ethic. If you don't want your child to end up 25 and jobless, sitting on your couch eating potato chips, then stop making excuses for why they aren't succeeding. Instead, focus on finding solutions.

Yep.

And parents, you know, it's OK for your child to get in trouble sometimes. It builds character and teaches life lessons. As teachers, we are vexed by those parents who stand in the way of those lessons; we call them helicopter parents because they want to swoop in and save their child every time something goes wrong. If we give a child a 79 on a project, then that is what the child deserves. Don't set up a time to meet with me to negotiate extra credit for an 80. It's a 79, regardless of whether you think it should be a B+.

Yep.

We know you love your children. We love them, too. We just ask -- and beg of you -- to trust us, support us and work with the system, not against it. We need you to have our backs, and we need you to give us the respect we deserve. Lift us up and make us feel appreciated, and we will work even harder to give your child the best education possible.

Yep.

Everything was so well said and exactly how I feel that there was nothing else to add.

Now, the question is...how do we change the behavior of the parents?

If Jesus were the nominee...

In their quest to achieve the emotional intelligence of a 13 year old girl, the conservative base are now begging Chris Christie to get in the race. He's mulling it over but honestly he should just say no. His chances will be better in 2016 when the race is wide open and (hopefully) the apocalyptic cult has been returned to the right wing blogshpere and short wave radio.

They are going to be sick of him in a week anyway. He's for civil unions, gun control and thinks that climate change is man made. That's three big strikes right there. He also supported the Islamic education center that was built a few blocks from the new WTC (B to the W, this is now up and running without a peep from anyone on the right...surprise, surprise). The other thing to consider is that he is very overweight. Many people will look at him and then look at Obama and say, "I'm not voting for the fat guy."

The simple fact is that if Jesus Christ was the GOP nominee, they'd hate him in a week as well. Bill Maher noted this last Friday night.



One has to wonder why these people should be put in charge when they can't seem to make up their mind about anything.

They Didn't Get The Memo

I guess GOP Senator Mark Kirk of Illinois and GOP Representative Peter King of New York didn't get the memo on being against everything Obama.

On a recent trip to Libya, Senator Kirk had this to say about the president.

This is a victory for the United States military, for our British and French allies, for NATO, for the president of the United States, but most importantly for the Libyan people. Unquestioned kudos goes to the president and his team, but the challenges are not over yet. 

This was a success by President Obama and his team. Any military conflict has ups or downs or things you might have done differently … but we have all the makings of a very strong U.S. ally in Libya.

And this from Representative King on the Al-Awlaki killing.

The killing of al-Awlaki is a tremendous tribute to Pres Obama & the men and women of our intelligence community.

You're damn right on both counts, boys, Kudos to both of you for daring to be "impure."

Well Done

When it comes to the issue of national security, President Obama has proven (once again) that he has been enormously effective in eliminating threats to this nation. In a significant new blow to al-Qaida, U.S. airstrikes in Yemen on Friday killed Anwar al-Awlaki, an American militant cleric who became a prominent figure in the terror network's most dangerous branch.

Al-Awlaki was directly responsible for planning the Christmas bomb attack that was foiled in 2009. Al-Awlaki had also exchanged up to 20 emails with U.S. Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the man behind the Ft. Hood rampage. Hasan initiated the contacts, drawn by al-Awlaki's Internet sermons, and approached him for religious advice.

This is one of the major reasons I voted for President Obama. The strategy by the Bush Administration against Al Qaeda was clearly the wrong one. This new strategy that combines intelligence gathering with surgical attacks has dealt Al Qaeda several serious blows since President Obama took office. It's ability to carry out any sort of significant attacks has been greatly marginalized and it's due the shift in policy.

Vaccines vs. Power Plants

Michele Bachmann raised a lot of questions -- mostly about her competence and judgment -- when she repeated a claim from "a woman in the crowd" who said that the HPV vaccine made her 12-year-old daughter retarded. Did Bachmann simply make this person up? She can't produce the woman, even though two scientists have offered a substantial reward for the girl's medical records.

Bachmann does voice a concern about vaccines that many people have. In 1998 a study by British doctor Andrew Wakefield et al. claimed a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. An American doctor, Mark Geier, also published several papers that claimed vaccines caused autism. Did these studies have any validity?

The preservative thimerosal, which has been used in vaccines since the 1930s, is an organic mercury compound. Mercury is known to cause birth defects and mental retardation. Mercury poisoning causes brain damage in adults as well. For this reason mercury is no longer used in dental amalgams. The phrase "mad as a hatter" has its origins in history -- hatters used mercury to cure felt. So it wasn't a stretch for Geier to propose that organic mercury could cause autism. But other scientists believed the concentration of thimerosal was too small to affect children vaccinated at that time in their development.

As it turns out, Wakefield falsified data for his paper, and the Lancet withdrew it in 2010. There was no link proved between autism and the MMR vaccine. Geier's medical license was suspended in 2011, for endangering the lives of autistic children with questionable (and expensive) treatments.

But, just to be on the safe side, the use of thimerosal in child vaccines was ended in 2001 (it's still used in some flu vaccines). It's also not used in Gardasil, the HPV vaccine used in Texas. The incidence of autism since thimerosal was removed from childhood vaccines has continued to climb since then, so it's fairly certain that it has little or nothing to do with autism.

The largest source of mercury that children are exposed to are emissions from coal-fired power plants and waste incinerators. Mercury is emitted into our air, lakes, rivers and seas, where it becomes concentrated in animals. People who eat fish and shellfish can accumulate potentially harmful levels of mercury in their bodies. That's why pregnant women, women trying to get pregnant, and nursing mothers are advised not to eat tuna, fish and shellfish, and everyone is advised to limit their intake of seafood with high concentrations of mercury.

(Interestingly, Bachmann has also campaigned against compact fluorescent light bulbs in part because they contain mercury.)

Bachmann did raise legitimate questions about Texas governor Rick Perry's financial and political ties to the pharmaceutical industry. One of his former aides was a lobbyist for the drug company that provided the vaccine to Texas, which Perry decreed all girls be vaccinated with, a decision that the Texas legislature overturned before it went into effect.

But this isn't really just about Michele Bachmann. She and the entire Republican Party are now on a tear about regulation.  They oppose "costly" regulations on coal-fired power plants that limit mercury emissions by requiring smokestack scrubbers and dictate the quality of coal burned.

Why do Republicans like Bachmann so often lend credence to discredited studies like Wakefield's, and rumor and innuendo, while completely dismissing the far greater and well-documented dangers from toxins like fine particulates, ozone, mercury, lead and benzene released into the environment by energy industries? Why do Republicans so often deride recycling programs that keep toxins like lead and mercury out of the environment and reduce the need for us to mine these heavy metals?

All the other Republican candidates pounced on Perry to decry the state mandate for the vaccine, apparently objecting that children be forced to receive injections of a substance that the vaccine doesn't actually contain.

But Texas parents would have been able to opt out of the vaccine program if they chose. Sadly, the only the way the rest of us can opt out of ingesting the toxic emissions the Republicans want to prevent the EPA from regulating is to stop breathing, eating and drinking.

So, what's behind the increase in the autism rate? It's a non-trivial issue. One part is that it's simply being diagnosed more frequently: parents often lobby for an autism or ADHD diagnosis to get special treatment for their kids. Asperger's Syndrome, a mild form of autism, is sometimes called the Geek Syndrome. Some would argue that Asperger's and milder ADHD not real diagnoses, they're just personality types. Another theory is that children of older fathers are more prone to autism, and Americans are having children at an older age. But most theories posit that autism is due to some kind of environmental insult. One theory links pesticides to autism and another one links them ADHD.  Others variously blame rain, unemotional mothers, lack of vitamin D, mercury, lead, excessive hygiene, and so on. Short answer: who knows?

One thing we know for certain is that even minute concentrations of chemicals and hormones can disrupt the fetus at critical stages of development. Toxins that don't hurt adults can cause tragic birth defects. If the Republican Party is really the pro-life party, how can they so cavalier about exposing those precious children to environmental toxins?

Six Questions

I came across this piece in my local paper regarding climate change. The six questions that Lenfestey proposes we ask political candidates could really be asked of anyone. So I've decided to put these to my readers and see what kind of responses I get.

1. Do you understand the science of climate change?

Obviously, some people don't.

2. Are you aware that President George W. Bush's administration found the evidence for climate change convincing? Have you read his report, "Scientific Assessment of the Effects of Global Change on the United States," published in 2008?

Actually, I haven't. Has anyone out there read it?

3. Are you aware that in May 2011, the nation's most esteemed scientific body, the National Research Council, reaffirmed the international scientific consensus on the human causes of climate change and made clear that sustained effort must begin immediately to deal with those adverse consequences? That the question of climate change is "settled science," and the impacts are already evident around us?

Well, this has got to be the toughest nut to swallow for the deniers. What exactly do you say to these findings?

4. If you do not accept the conclusions of these careful scientific assessments, what scientists do you listen to? What reports have they issued that you find more convincing? Where do you get the information that you find more persuasive?

Yes, which ones? No right wing blogs. No oil company shills. Let's see the reputable scientists who have examined the data and reached a different conclusion.

5. Let me put this another way. Texas is on fire. Pennsylvania faces record floods. Joplin, Mo., is reeling from epic tornados. Shorelines are eroding in the Carolinas. None of these events can be directly blamed on climate change, but all are predicted by known climate-change trends.

Such events will only worsen if the climate continues to warm, as it will under business-as-usual scenarios. Do you support a business-as-usual model or do you have a plan to stem the trend toward a hotter, more volatile planet?

Well, I can answer that for those on the right. Do nothing. It's the same solution they have for health care.

6. Candidates Perry and Bachmann: Both of you have said the Environmental Protection Agency is a major problem in America, and you would seek to eliminate it if elected, particularly its mandate, affirmed by the Supreme Court, to regulate carbon emissions.

How then would you address the flaw in private markets that attaches no economic value to waste that falls as a burden on the general population -- for example, sewers that flow into waters that cross state lines, or carbon wastes that warm the atmosphere around the world? Without the EPA, how would you propose to address pollutants that cross state and international boundaries?

I'm very interested in the answers to this last one...if there are any. Honestly,  I don't think there are because the right doesn't think this is a problem. Like many problems that require federal government solutions, they just turn away and pretend it doesn't exist and completely rip the left for trying to do anything.

They want them to fail because having no solution is a failure from the very beginning. And we can't let them "win" now, can we?

Obama Jobs Plan=Thumbs Up

Here is a consensus on the American Jobs Act.

President Barack Obama’s $447 billion jobs plan would help avoid a return to recession by maintaining growth and pushing down the unemployment rate next year, according to economists surveyed by Bloomberg News.

The legislation, submitted to Congress this month, would increase gross domestic product by 0.6 percent next year and add or keep 275,000 workers on payrolls, the median estimates in the survey of 34 economists showed. The program would also lower the jobless rate by 0.2 percentage point in 2012, economists said.

So, again, I must ask...which is more important: the economy or making the president a one termer?

Not Qualified

As we continue to witness new depths of conservative ADD in their nomination process, I think it's important to note these words.

You have to feel in your heart and in your mind that you’re ready for the presidency. And there are lots of people who will run just because the opportunity presents itself.

That’s not a reason to be president of the United States. You have to believe in your heart and in your soul and in your mind that you are ready and I don’t believe that about myself right now. So that’s why I said I won’t run and I can’t imagine that changing.

That's current Belle of the Ball, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, from last February. I'd take him at his word. He's not qualified at all.

He has also stated many times that he is not running. Yet our country, according to a woman in the audience at Christie's Reagan library speech yesterday, "can't take four more years of this" so Christie must jump in and save us. Oh, Lawdy! Four more years of what, exactly? Our country being eroded due to Republican extremism? Oops! I forgot...#3 Projection/Flipping....it's all Obama's fault!

Even if Christie does get in the race, the base would tire of him just like they have with all the rest of the candidates. Why? Because they aren't capable of putting together coherent and detailed policy. All they really have is "We have a spending problem" combined with the relentless pursuit of proving Democrats wrong in the most childishly dishonest fashion. Once Christie talks of compromise (as he has already done), they'll hate him too and then it will be on to someone else.

The simple fact that the Republican Party is behaving this way should raise some serious red flags. What exactly is their agenda?

Little Brother Is Watching, and Won't Stop

Chuck Schumer is on a rampage against OnStar. He's calling for an investigation into OnStar's actions after their announcement that they would continue to track former customers even after they canceled their subscriptions. From Wired:

OnStar began e-mailing customers Monday about its update to the privacy policy, which grants OnStar the right to sell that GPS-derived data in an anonymized format.

People are always so worried about government intrusion into their privacy, but the real threat is companies like OnStar. Nothing except their "privacy policy" actually stops them from selling non-anonymized data to your ex-wife's divorce lawyer.

In the United States, nothing really stops companies like Yahoo, Google or Microsoft from selling your query history, except the threat of angry customers. Facebook is about to start telling everyone you know about everything you do everywhere. How long before these companies decide to start monetizing this information? Many states already make millions of dollars selling drivers license information to insurance companies, companies screening job applicants and companies like LexisNexus and ChoicePoint Services, Inc.

ChoicePoint is a private espionage agency that become notorious when it erroneously scrubbed thousands of African-American voters from the voter rolls in Florida before the 2000 presidential election.

But it's worse than this. Pretty much any company you do business with has sensitive personal information on you, especially the banks issuing your credit cards. Law enforcement has to get a warrant to get this information, but what is really stopping the companies from selling the information to anyone who's willing to pay for it? They're supposed to tell you what they're doing in their privacy policies, but these can be written ambiguously and almost no one reads or understands those things. And even if they're not actively hawking it, how many thousands of employees at these credit card companies can browse your purchase history at their whim? How is access to this history controlled? Are these accesses logged, so they can track down employees who are getting this information on the sly and selling it to your ex-wife's lawyer?

We don't really know, because companies don't have to report the details on their activities when we ask them about it. They can claim that their business practices are protected information, and divulging them would hurt their competitiveness and put them at a disadvantage.

We can find out that states are selling our drivers license information because we run the states, and have the right to know what our government is doing. But companies? Ironically, we have no absolute right to find out what a private business is doing with our private information.

And The GOP Nominee Is...

After the recent butt rip of Rick Perry, I've come to the conclusion that conservatives don't want anyone to be president. Of course, this makes sense on the one hand because they'd rather have the private sector run everything.

But their continual excitement followed quickly by derision and dismissal of every candidate that jumps into the race really has me wondering...who exactly do they want? At this point, I think it's just NOT OBAMA. This makes perfect sense to me in a whole "proving the opposition wrong" and "winning the argument" kind of way.

Or maybe it's that they have this fantastical vision of their perfect candidate...a former CEO...wealthy...a "job creator"...perhaps an ex-Governor from the South...a vehement hater of all social programs...someone who wants to privatize education and increase defense spending...pro life...pro death penalty...pro gun...pro Bible...pro Wall Street...Health care repealer...and someone who will benignly neglect the population of the country.

Does such a person exist?

It's The Audience, Stupid

Forget about the candidates. The story so far in the race for the 2012 GOP nomination is the audience. First, we had the cheers at over 200 hundred executions. Then we had the shouts of "Yeah" to letting a man without insurance die. Now we have this.



Booing a solider who is serving our country simply because he is gay?

From now on, the networks who run these debates should just turn the cameras on the audience and let the world see the conservative base in action.

Death But No Taxes

One of the mantras of Rick Perry is that government is bureaucratic, incompetent, corrupt, unwise, foolish and self-serving. Perry, who was ghoulishly cheered at the Tea Party debate  when Wolf Blitzer mentioned that he had presided over 230-odd executions, thinks we can't trust government bureaucrats to regulate carcinogenic benzene emissions from oil refineries or mercury emissions from coal plants in order to save lives.

But he thinks those same bureaucrats can be trusted to fairly administer the death penalty. Yeah, that's right. The same state and federal governments that are too incompetent to regulate slaughterhouses should be able to kill you.

On Wednesday Troy Davis was executed in Georgia for the murder of police officer Mark McPhail. Davis became a cause celebre because of the doubt surrounding his conviction. There wasn't any hard evidence and most of the eyewitnesses recanted their testimony, saying that they couldn't really tell who did the shooting, but that the cops had pressured them into fingering Davis.

And this isn't an isolated case. DNA testing techniques have improved and more than a hundred people have been proved innocent and released from death row since 1973. There are literally thousands of cases where cops have lied, coerced witnesses and planted evidence; prosecutors have knowingly used perjured testimony, hid evidence from defense attorneys and prosecuted innocent people in order to seem tough on crime; and judges have accepted  bribes or knowingly allowed travesties of justice to improve their chances of reelection.

The basis of our legal system is that we are innocent until proved guilty. This tradition goes back to English common law, and Blackstone's formulation: "Better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer."

But it seems that people like Perry would rather see ten innocent persons executed than get blamed for releasing a prisoner who later commits a crime. That happened to Mike Huckabee twice: he pardoned Wayne DuMond in 1999, who later raped and killed a woman, and Maurice Clemmons in 2000, who killed four police officers in 2009. Mike Huckabee's aspirations to become present are now dead.

I don't know the legal and evidentiary details of the Huckabee cases, and whether these two men should have been released. But I do know one consideration that Huckabee should never have used: their jailhouse professions of Christian faith. Mouthing platitudes about Jesus is the easiest way to feign rehabilitation, but outward piety is no indication of peaceful intent. Osama bin Laden spouted volumes about god.

I'm no sucker for a sob story about a bad childhood, inner rage, societal injustice, too many Twinkies or God's Will. The death penalty is wrong, not because it's immoral or unethical, but because it's irrevocable. Since there's always going to be some kind of doubt, or some kind of mitigating circumstance, it just doesn't make sense to execute criminals.

I personally give no credence to the idea that crazy or mentally deficient people shouldn't be executed. If you kill people it doesn't matter if you were impaired, or crazy or sane: you kill people. You're dangerous, and if you're permanently mentally impaired you always will be dangerous. Yeah, Jared Loughner is crazy. But he killed or wounded a dozen people in front of dozens of other people and was caught red-handed. If anyone should be executed, it's him. But he's crazy and was operating under diminished capacity, so in our system he's not a candidate for the death penalty. The problem is, anyone who intentionally kills innocent people is mentally ill: by definition they're psychopaths.

Someone who gets drunks and kills someone in a bar fight, or runs over a pedestrian with their car, is far more dangerous to society at large than a woman who methodically poisons her husband for insurance money. Yet the drunk will get a few years in jail for manslaughter in Texas, while the black widow will get the needle.

Because our justice system is so fraught with human frailties -- laziness, poor judgment, prejudice, ambition, self-promotion -- the government has no business killing people. Judgments over which cases should be prosecuted as capital crimes and whether extenuating circumstances should mitigate the punishment can never be uniformly applied by thousands of different with their own prejudices and hangups. If someone is thrown in the slammer for life prosecutorial errors can be rectified, some semblance of justice can prevail and compensation can be made to the unjustly convicted. But there's no fixing dead.

Why aren't advocates of execution worried about misapplication of the death penalty? I speculate that the logic runs like this. Troy Davis might have been innocent of the killing he was executed for, but he'd had other problems with the legal system. Advocates apparently assume Davis was surely guilty of something else, so what's the big deal?

The big deal is this: when you execute the wrong person the hunt for the real killer ends. The police, prosecutors and judges involved will fight any attempts to reopen these cases because it calls into question their competence and integrity.

The death penalty is supposed to bring closure to victim's friends and relatives. But in the case of Mark McPhail's murder, there will always be lingering doubts that justice was truly done.

It also leaves the murderer free to kill again, undermining one of the core justifications of the death penalty: a deterrent to future murders.

Deterrence is the last refuge of death penalty advocates. They are convinced that the only thing stopping a plague of murder is the prospect of execution. But the numbers don't hold up: murder rates are more than four times higher in Texas than they are in Vermont, which doesn't have the death penalty. In fact, in 2010 the murder rate in death penalty states was 4.6 per 100,000 and only 2.9 in non-death penalty states. It's hard to pin down cause and effect here, but the death penalty is having very little deterrent effect in Texas and Louisiana, a death penalty state with a murder rate ten times higher than Vermont.

Which brings us to Lawrence Russell Brewer, who was also executed on Wednesday. Brewer was a white supremacist who with two buddies dragged a black man, James Byrd, Jr., to his death in East Texas. It was a particular grisly crime, in which the victim's body was first thought to be animal road kill.

Obviously Brewer was undeterred by the death penalty. He was a stupid racist who apparently thought blacks were subhuman and that he'd never get caught. And that's the problem. People who commit murder usually do so in the heat of the moment. They're drunk, high, deluded, enraged, or just stupid, and they're in no condition to consider the consequences. Or they're criminals who have in fact considered the consequences, and decided that murder was their best option: "If I leave this witness alive, he'll finger me and I'll go to jail. If I kill him he won't be able to testify and I might get away."

But I don't know. Maybe death penalty advocates really are deterred from committing crimes by the threat of punishment. Me, I don't commit murder or steal because it's wrong and it hurts people. But there are people who insist that they have the right to carry concealed and loaded weapons in public, and are more than willing to shoot anyone they fee threatened by, or steps on their lawn or knocks on their front door uninvited. Are those people so close to committing murder that the severity of the punishment is the only thing stopping them?

People like Perry should be the first in line to end the overreaching grasp of a corrupt and inept governments that have convicted so many innocent people. Forget about picayune legal technicalities and ask yourself a moral question: how can government have the power to take our lives if it doesn't even have the right to save our lives by imposing a fine if we refuse to buy health insurance?

A New Solution for Unemployment

Republicans now have three knee-jerk responses to anything President Obama says: cut spending, cut taxes, cut regulations. The problem the nation is facing, though, is unemployment.

Cutting government spending means cutting the government workforce, which puts more people out there looking for jobs. Those furloughed government workers compete with unemployed private sector employees, creating more unemployment and a glut of labor, which drives down wages, reduces our standard of living and damages the retail sector, which is the engine of our economy.

Cutting taxes has been tried, and it doesn't work. Taxes are at their lowest in 50 years, and corporations are still sending jobs overseas rather than hire Americans. Why would they build factories in the United States when they can pay Chinese workers $12 a day? Companies preferentially hire immigrants for jobs in the United States (especially in programming and engineering) because these legal immigrants will work for less. And that's not even counting the millions of illegal immigrants that thousands of companies are still employing.

Cutting regulations is the latest mantra. But what effect does it have on employment? One study examined this, and found that it's minimal. Regulations create jobs in addition to destroying them -- regulators are needed and people are needed to perform the pollution abatement. Regulations that require mining operations to clean up and restore the area create jobs in forest and landscape management and toxic waste disposal.

One thing that Republicans don't mention is that companies are always involved in writing the regulations for their industries, especially during the Bush years. Many regulations are put in place to entrench the existing players and make it more difficult for new startups to compete.

What the study didn't examine is the other savings that the regulations have. Environmental regulations, in particular, are imposed specifically to reduce the number of deaths due to cancer, respiratory disease, heart disease, as well as birth defects. Since medical costs these days are so high, and Medicare and Medicaid wind up paying the bills for the sickest people, the health consequences of environmental regulations should be explicitly considered.

EPA did exactly that for the ozone rule that Obama recently deferred:

The EPA also noted that while compliance with the new rule would cost polluters between $19 billion and $90 billion a year by 2020, the benefits to human health will be worth between $13 billion and $100 billion every year.

In other words, EPA proposed regulations that would save thousands of lives and improve the quality of life for all Americans -- breathing cleaner air -- with an additional net impact of costing between $6 billion or saving $10 billion. Now I'm going to make a Republican assumption: given the nature of health care and the fact that so much of it is under the purview of government (Medicare, Medicaid and the VA), it's a good bet that good old American ingenuity will find cheaper ways to cut ozone emissions than the EPA assumed, and that health care costs will continue to increase unabated. So emissions cuts would likely save us more money across the economy than they would cost.

I was at this point in this line of reasoning when I finally saw the light: the true genius of the Republican stance against regulation. Regulation saves lives. Living people need jobs. Eliminate all regulation and more people die. Bingo! Unemployment problem solved!

Follow the logic: premature deaths from pollution-induced disease, workplace injuries, poorly designed products, and tainted food are actually a three-fold blessing:

1) Dead people reduce the unemployment problem in the most direct fashion possible.

2) Sick people need medical care, increasing the number of jobs needed in health care -- the fastest growing sector of the economy. Injured people sue, providing more jobs in the legal and private eye fields.

3) Dead people increase the number of jobs required in the burgeoning fields of mortuary science, gravedigging and cemetery maintenance.

It's not all that far-fetched an argument. It's the same one Philip Morris made when they said that smoking was a net benefit for the government of the Czech Republic. Cigarettes provide immediate tobacco tax revenue and kill smokers before they can retire, allowing the government to collect payroll taxes from young smokers who would never use that money.

It's ironic that the same people who were screaming about death panels two years ago are now blithely demanding the elimination of environmental regulations that have saved literally millions of lives over the last forty years.

Do Nothing

Many people are jumping on the president these days for his energy policies (or lack thereof). Politico has an interesting piece on all of this that I found to be an excellent summation.

Under pressure from Republicans, he embraced offshore drilling — just weeks before the BP oil spill. He offered support for nuclear power, only to watch a disaster unfold in Japan. Gas price hikes in the spring disrupted his economic message. Feeling the heat from Republicans again, he infuriated his green base by bailing out on a long-promised ozone standard.

Essentially, every time he heads down the path of towards sort of energy policy, he gets cracked in the jaw. Nearly all of this is beyond his control anyway (Libya, Tsunami, China's solar drive vs. Solyndra). At this point, I'd say he's pretty gun shy anyway so why not simply give up.

I'm serious. There's not much that he really needs to do. The world's energy market is heading towards green technology whether people (see: the right)like it or not. With the supply of oil and coal limited, the next fifty years are going to see a shift to new forms of technology. As the cost of processing these new forms of energy drops due to more investment from multinational corporations, the free market will do what it always does.

If he feels the urge to do anything, he should simply funnel it all through the Department of Defense. The strides in innovation they are taking are amazing and can easily be supported by defense dollars-something that the GOP would never dare cut.

So, the president should simply like his wounds, learn from his mistakes, and focus on jobs and the economy. Tackling energy has always been a disaster for him and his goals are going to be realized even if he does nothing.

The Choice

The way I see it, conservatives have a choice right now and its pretty clear. President Obama has now presented his jobs plan and his plan to reduce the deficit. Both plans contain items that the GOP has said are needed and will help the economy. The question is...do they pass them? Even just the parts that they support?

Because if they do and the economy improves, the president will do better in next year's election. If the economy gets better, the president will probably win. According to Mitch McConnell, their number one goal is to "make Barack Obama a one term president." I don't think you can both help the economy and make the president a one-termer.

So, I'm putting the question to all my conservative commenters: what would you do? Help the economy by passing even the parts of the plans that you support OR do nothing which will be better for your election chances next year? What matters more to you?

Liberal commenters: please feel free to prognosticate if you so desire.

Turn Up That Hearing Aid

These days, it seems like the media likes to report on politics in two ways. The first is the WWE mentality which showcases inter-party squabbles based on ridiculous statements and talking points (death panels, Ponzi Schemes etc). The second is the centrist cop-out or the Cult of Both Sides (the dems have their crazies too!).

So, when something happens like the President signing the America Invents Bill which enjoyed broad bipartisan support, the media largely ignores it. Folks, this is a big deal for a couple of reasons.

The first is that this country can actually work together on important issues like this one. It's not all acrimony. The bill was proposed by a very liberal senator and a very conservative one, Patrick Leahy and Lamar Smith, respectively. This is something I need to remind myself as well:) More importantly, the America Invents Bill will help small businesses and start up entrepreneurs turn their ideas into products faster. Thousands of would be patent holders having been clogging up the courts due to the glacial pace of the now former patent system. No longer.

If we are going to seriously compete in the global marketplace, we need to address more concerns like this. We are massively over regulated in some areas. There is no denying this. It's just as much of a fact as the reality that we are under regulated in the financial sector. Passing this bill was a vital first step and it shows that bipartisanship isn't dead, folks.

The Thought That Won't Go Away

The other day this idea popped into my head and it hasn't gone away, sticking with me like a hang nail that just won't drop. After sharing this idea with my wife, she thinks I'm insane (not the first this has happened:)) Yet I can't help but think that it's the best and only solution for our nation during these troubled times.

I think that all liberals, progressives, Democrats, RINOs, and anyone who isn't "pure" should completely and utterly capitulate to the right wing extremists that are currently running the show that is the conservative base in this country.

I mean it. I'm not kidding. All of us who have been trying to reason with these people should hand the keys over to the Apocalyptic Cult/20th Century Europe Authoritarian Regime (copyright: Mike Lofgren and henceforth named Lofgren's Syndrome) and let them run the show for whatever amount of time they see fit to fix this country. The way I see things, this is the only way that we are ever going to break this nonproductive statelemate. I've examined the potential outcomes and here is why I truly think this is the best course of action.

The first possible outcome (very unlikely) is that most or all of their policies and ideas will work. If so, that means a stronger country, right? So, that's a good thing. Unlike their mindset, I'm not so filled with hubris to think that there is no possible way any of what they are proposing will work. Never say never, obviously...

More likely of an outcome, however, is that a few proposals might work to a certain degree but most will fall short of fail outright. At this point, we would see some cracks in their ideological armor and some leaders would likely cave and ask for our help. This is when we would need to stay strong and refuse to help. My hope here is that they would adapt and change, thus dispensing with their intransigence forever. Some, of course, would not admit defeat (due to Lofgren's Syndrome) but this would likely result in some infighting and some sort of breakdown in power which would also result in change. Like the first outcome, this is also a good thing.

Given the fact, though, that so many suffer from severe cases of Lofgren's Syndrome, the most likely outcome, in my opinion, would be disaster. Their eternal pride would reach to a long and painful height before their massive fall. This is why my wife thinks I'm nuts because our country would likely fall apart. But, honestly, this is the only way to be rid of this mindset forever. Faced with the stark reality of a country in ruins, Lofgren's Syndrome, like polio, would be eradicated from our country forever. The rest of us would pick up the pieces and finally be able to solve the problems of reality.

Obviously, destroying something in order to save it is somewhat insane but I don't see any other recourse. Right now, we are wasting a lot of time and there really is no other logical choice. You can't reason with someone who is a true believer. The only way to do so is to do to them what Gorbachev did to us in the late 1980s...deprive them of an enemy. What ever will they do if they have no one to prove wrong and no argument to win?

They'll have to actually govern.

A Sunday Lesson

Since today is Sunday, I found a great quote from the Bible to go along with the Asimov quote that I put up recently.

Out in the open wisdom calls aloud,
she raises her voice in the public square;
on top of the wall she cries out,
at the city gate she makes her speech:
“How long will you who are simple love your simple ways?
How long will mockers delight in mockery
and fools hate knowledge?
Repent at my rebuke!
Then I will pour out my thoughts to you,
I will make known to you my teachings.
But since you refuse to listen when I call
and no one pays attention when I stretch out my hand,
since you disregard all my advice
and do not accept my rebuke,
I in turn will laugh when disaster strikes you;
I will mock when calamity overtakes you—
when calamity overtakes you like a storm,
when disaster sweeps over you like a whirlwind,
when distress and trouble overwhelm you.

---Proverbs 1 V 20-27

A nice set up for a climate change post later in the week.

Life in the Bubble

While I thought Keith and Bill didn't do the greatest acting job, this was truly amazing. It's exactly what it's like talking to the right these days.

Powerful Words

A while back, one of my colleagues had this chart in his class. I got one and put it up in mine and it has made a ton of difference in the writing skills of nearly all the students I come into contact with on a daily basis. Several other instructors have this up in their rooms now as well.

One of my central goals has always been to push students past the basic knowledge and comprehension level of learning and into analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. It's small tools like this that direct students towards this goal in a more efficient manner.