Note To Anonymous Posters

Over the last few weeks, there has been a plethora of anonymous posters on the blog. I've kicked around a bunch of ideas on the best way to deal with the confusion and frustration that results from this and here's what I have come up with for a solution.

Since pretty much anything goes in comments, I won't change the settings to restrict people from posting anonymously. From this day forward, however, I will no longer respond to anonymous comments regardless of their ideological bend. I'm also not going to respond to the person or persons that continually changes their moniker when it's clearly the same person.

I say "continually" because I know there are people that post under 2 different names. These individuals I will continue to respond to because they are at least attempting to be inventive in taking on a different persona. I liken this to having two different avatars or players in an online game so that's cool but the obnoxious rotation from "Sarah Palin Fantasy Perverts" to "Civil War Reenactors?" Nope.

I would urge all of you who post under the same name and continually have stood by your words to do the same. I can't force you, obviously, but I think this is in the best interests of the site so we know who we are addressing and people have a continuity as to who stands by their words. Granted, this may not be a perfect idea but we'll work the kinks out as we go.

Fact Checking Warren

Here is Politifact's piece on Warren Buffett's column from this week. Plenty of data and facts to examine...if you are willing, of course.

People Invest To Make Money

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, tax rates for the rich were far higher, and my percentage rate was in the middle of the pack. According to a theory I sometimes hear, I should have thrown a fit and refused to invest because of the elevated tax rates on capital gains and dividends.

I have worked with investors for 60 years and I have yet to see anyone — not even when capital gains rates were 39.9 percent in 1976-77 — shy away from a sensible investment because of the tax rate on the potential gain. People invest to make money, and potential taxes have never scared them off. And to those who argue that higher rates hurt job creation, I would note that a net of nearly 40 million jobs were added between 1980 and 2000. You know what’s happened since then: lower tax rates and far lower job creation.

We hear a lot of garbage from the right about how higher taxes will lead to lack of investment and job losses. These same people lapse into their ridiculous hubris and assume that anyone left of center doesn't know anything about how business works. They do, of course, despite all evidence to the contrary. The above quote is from someone who knows business a great deal more than most and has the wealth to prove it. Before I get to who it is, let's take a look at some more facts from his recent piece.

Since 1992, the I.R.S. has compiled data from the returns of the 400 Americans reporting the largest income. In 1992, the top 400 had aggregate taxable income of $16.9 billion and paid federal taxes of 29.2 percent on that sum. In 2008, the aggregate income of the highest 400 had soared to $90.9 billion — a staggering $227.4 million on average — but the rate paid had fallen to 21.5 percent.

So, their taxes have gone down and their wealth has gone up.Why they are bitching is a complete mystery. Why people who make 40K a year are proxy bitching for them is borderline insanity.

Last year about 80 percent of these revenues came from personal income taxes and payroll taxes. The mega-rich pay income taxes at a rate of 15 percent on most of their earnings but pay practically nothing in payroll taxes. It’s a different story for the middle class: typically, they fall into the 15 percent and 25 percent income tax brackets, and then are hit with heavy payroll taxes to boot.

Some of us are investment managers who earn billions from our daily labors but are allowed to classify our income as “carried interest,” thereby getting a bargain 15 percent tax rate. Others own stock index futures for 10 minutes and have 60 percent of their gain taxed at 15 percent, as if they’d been long-term investors.

The taxes I refer to here include only federal income tax, but you can be sure that any payroll tax for the 400 was inconsequential compared to income. In fact, 88 of the 400 in 2008 reported no wages at all, though every one of them reported capital gains.

Hmm...Nikto and I have been saying the same thing.

So who is the author who has clearly and factually related this information? It's Warren Buffett, one of the three richest men in the world.  Now, given that he is a shining example of success in the world of investments and business as well as knowing a thing or two about jobs, it follows logically that we should heed his advice: let's stop coddling the super rich....as in right fucking now.

If we are going to make spending cuts, we have to follow with an overhaul of how we collect revenue. That means no more subsidies, tax shelters for the wealthy, and the end of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. In short, a complete overhaul of the tax system. This is what has to be done to seriously address the issue of our debt and prop up the overall health of our economy.

The time for make believe and managing fantasies is over. We need to destroy the bizarre myths that the right have created regarding taxes. They must be exposed as the catechisms of true believers that they are and have no place in reality. They are holding us back from fixing our country and propelling us in a positive direction towards the future.

Without Comment

Loving the Government

Michele Bachmann recently won the Iowa Straw poll so it's only fitting that we take a day to shine the spotlight on her and see if lives up to her tough words. Does she really mean it when she says that President Obama is engaging in "fantasy economics" and that, if elected, she would abolish the EPA? Is the federal government the anathema that she says it is? A closer examination of the available evidence gives us the answer.

Let's start off by pointing out that Ms. Bachmann has personally relied on federally subsidized home loans. In addition, her husband Marcus's clinic relies on Medicaid payments.  Straight away, we can see that the federal government isn't really all that bad.

Further, we see that she has sent several letters to Secretary Vilsack and Secretary LaHood requesting stimulus money for her district. You remember the stimulus aka the root of all evil? Here is a copy of one of those letters, asking for money for the Northstar commuter line. Hey, I guess there is a GOPer that likes choo choos...sweet!

In a private letter to Mr. Vilsack, she wrote, "Your efforts to stabilize prices through direct government purchasing of pork and dairy products are very much welcomed by the producers in Minnesota, and I would encourage you to take any additional steps necessary to prevent further deterioration of these critical industries, such as making additional commodity purchases and working to expand trade outlets for these and other agricultural goods."

Wow. Really? The government can make market's more efficient? Yes. Yes they can...especially if there is a crisis as there was with pork and H1N1 that year.

So, the government can and does help out in a wide variety situations. As President Obama said yesterday when he was visiting my home state:

Don't buy into this whole notion that somehow government doesn't do us any good; government is what protects us. The government is what built the Interstate Highway System. Government is what sent a man to the Moon. It's what invested in the research and development that created innovations all across this country.

Yet Another Voice In My Head

Just got back from lifting at the gym. While I was there, I got into a conversation about the state of our culture with one of my conservative friends named Erica. Recall that Edward, Sean and Katie are my other three conservative friends from the gym. Erica is one that I generally don't talk politics with as she has readily admitted that she "hates to read political books and just lets her husband give her the cliff's notes."

We were talking today about overweight children and how their parents seem to enable it. This led to an overall discussion about entitlement which led to her saying the following.

I mean...like...people who are on welfare have diamond rings and flat screen TVs...what's up with that?

When I said that corporate welfare was much worse, she gave me a quizzical look.

Ah yes, another Voice In My Head.

Sarah Palin's Arizona

(From a Discovery Channel press release scheduled for publication on Nov. 6, 2011)

The Discovery Channel announced today that it has begun production on a new reality series starring former Alaska governor Sarah Palin. Called Sarah Palin's Arizona, the series will air in the fall of 2012, during the heat of the presidential race.

Ms. Palin's previous show, Sarah Palin's Alaska, was discontinued because the former half-term governor of Alaska moved to Arizona to be closer to large media markets. A key factor in the move was the change in time zone, which allows Ms. Palin to appear with other talking heads on early-morning Fox News programs without having to wake up at 3AM. Said Ms. Palin, "I like sleeping in, and Alaska's time zone really sucks the big one. And Arizona doesn't use socialist Daylight Savings Time, dontcha know."

The Arizona production includes many new activities that Ms. Palin has taken up since moving to her new home state. These include trudging through the desert in smart dun-colored fatigues with matching automatic weapon accessories, making beef jerky, harvesting peyote buttons, and vegging out in front of the TV with the air conditioning on full blast saying, "At least it's the heat, and not the humidity!"

In the opening segment of the first episode Ms. Palin participates in a new game that's become popular on the streets of Maricopa County, something called "Wetback Bingo." Ms. Palin is challenged to decide whether random pedestrians are illegal aliens or real Americans. Those she decides are real Americans get to choose a square on a giant bingo board. Guest star Sheriff Joe Arpaio selects Bingo numbers and the lucky real Americans have a chance to win fabulous prizes if their number is chosen. The suspected aliens are given a free trip to historic Nogales, Mexico, courtesy of Sheriff Arpaio.

New fashion statements are being made as well, including the moistened floral bandana worn over the mouth and nose to guard against the smoke from the massive fires that have scourged Arizona in recent months, and the fine particulates from the dust storms that have also hit the state.

In one memorable scene, Ms. Palin refers to the Arab term for dust storm that raised a controversy earlier this year. Pointing to her chest she jokes, "The only haboobs the weatherman should be talking about are right here."

The most exciting segment filmed thus far is a helicopter chase of illegal aliens across the Rio Grande. In the sequence, spotters on the ground scare up a herd of aliens in the underbrush on the north bank of the river. The helicopter's powerful engine roars and the chopper swoops out of the sky, scattering the aliens into the muddy brown water. Ms. Palin leans out of the chopper door, hanging on to the frame with one hand while wielding a sequined machine gun in the other. As the copter banks sharply, its blades skimming the water, Ms. Palin cuts loose with a burst of suppressive fire. The rounds pound the water mere inches from the aliens as they splash madly back towards Mexico.

"I loved shooting that scene," Ms. Palin gushed. "I loved the way the mama grizzly so fiercely protected her young as she fought through the water with the baby on her back to get to the safety of her legal homeland. And did you see those big brown eyes on the baby? She was soooo cute!"

Critics of Ms. Palin attacked the episode even before it aired, pointing out that the Rio Grande River isn't in Arizona, pedantically insisting that the river flows from Colorado through New Mexico and then forming the border between Texas and Mexico. Said Ms. Palin, "These know-it-alls just don't get the real America. It's not about geography and facts, it's about the bigger truths, like Paul Revere and his famous charge of the Light Brigade. One if by land, two if by sea, and three if by air!"

Discovery Channel's initial order of six episodes of Sarah Palin's Arizona will begin airing Tuesday, October 9, 2012, and will conclude November 6 when Ms. Palin is elected president. The show will go on hiatus for two years, resuming when she resigns the presidency to write her memoirs and escape the toxic atmosphere of Washington and the liberal media that hounds her incessantly.

Bastardi!

When I was in college thirty years ago conservatives were making one of their regular attempts to discredit evolution. They called themselves "creationists" then, and their big "discovery" at that time was the laws of thermodynamics. The creationists said that evolution was impossible because the law of entropy forbade it. Entropy dictates that order will dissolve into disorder over time.

The problem with their argument was that they omitted key facts from the laws. Yes, order dissolves into disorder over time, in a closed system with no energy inputs. The earth, however, is not a closed system. It is an open system that constantly receives more than a kilowatt of solar energy per square meter.

It is this external solar input that provides that the energy for chemical and biological systems to grow and increase in complexity, and what makes evolution and life possible. This is not a violation of the laws of thermodynamics.

Well, the conservatives are back at it again. Weatherman Joe Bastardi was featured in a Fox News segment attempting to discredit global warming. He said, "It contradicts what we call the first law of thermodynamics. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. So to look for input of energy into the atmosphere, you have to come from a foreign source. It's already out there, carbon dioxide being part of it."

He lapses there into incoherence. Global warming does not contradict the laws of thermodynamics: the sun constantly pumps energy into our atmosphere. In fact, we are alive today because of global warming -- without an atmosphere containing greenhouse gases like CO2 and water vapor, the average temperature of earth (the blackbody temperature) would be much colder, somewhere around 1 degree Celsius or colder, depending on the albedo of the surface.

To his credit, one of the interviewers chimed in, "Maybe the sun?" was the source of the energy causing global warming. But Bastardi just ignored this, going on to talk about Le Chateliler's principle, which he says is the tendency of a system in distress tries to return towards normal.

But this idea of "normal" doesn't work if you change the basic rules of the game by overloading the system beyond its capacity. It's true that if the concentration of CO2 increases some carbon sinks will absorb more. But those sinks have a finite capacity. The ocean, for example, loses its ability to absorb CO2 as temperature increases. And ocean temperatures and acidity are increasing.

Furthermore, if you actually read what the studies found, temperatures did in fact increase in the last 10 years, just not as fast as they did the 30 years before (the infamous decrease in the rate of increase). Why? Several reasons: aerosols injected into the stratosphere by relatively small volcanic eruptions which climate modelers did not consider have moderated the increases somewhat, and substantial increases in sulfur particles that Chinese coal plants have been emitting in greater and greater quantities have further cooled temperatures. But that sulfur doesn't stay in the air: it eventually comes down as acid rain. There was also some unaccounted-for heat exchanges with the ocean.

These are not really surprises: the reason scientists are so hesitant to state things in the categorical black-and-white mode that conservatives always want to hear, is that reality is complicated. Scientists don't know everything and don't pretend to. But the point is that these new results don't disprove global warming; it's still true that global temperature will go up in the next 50 years; just not at the same rate some models predicted. Any number of things could happen that could increase or decrease that change: volcanic eruptions that emit a lot of aerosols of the right composition could slow down the warming, but another eruption emitting a lot of CO2 could accelerate it. The key thing is that we know our actions will have a bad effect if nothing else changes, so the conservative thing to do is avoid causing serious problems.

But back to the reality of greenhouse warming, which conservatives seem to discount on a visceral level. Consider Mercury and Venus. Mercury is 58 million km from the sun. The mean temperature varies from about -70 C to +70 C, depending on latitude, with a low of about -200 C and a high of +400 C. Venus is 108 million km from the sun, more than twice as far. But its mean temperature -- pretty much everywhere, all the time -- is 460 C. How can Venus be twice as far from the sun but so very much hotter? Well, Mercury has almost no atmosphere, while Venus is covered with a thick blanket of CO2 at a pressure of more than 90 atmospheres. It's the greenhouse effect on steroids. (And no, I'm not saying that Earth will turn into Venus. It just shows that the greenhouse effect exists and is not some made-up mumbo jumbo).

If you think of Mercury as a Mini Cooper zipping around on the freeway with the windows hanging wide open, and Venus as a Lincoln Navigator parked in the sun with the windows rolled up you get the picture. Earth is somewhere in between Mercury and Venus: we're parked in the shade, but slowly cranking the windows shut by pumping more CO2 into the atmosphere than the system can absorb.

But when you come right down to it, Bastardi's argument is the same as every other global warming skeptic's: they think that natural processes put out and absorb so much CO2 that the "tiny" amounts we puny and insignificant humans emit couldn't possibly affect the climate. But this drastically underestimates the number of humans alive today, and their impact on climate.

First off, climate is always a delicate balance. Systems do tend to equilibrium, but only within bounds. Natural systems don't have an overriding intelligence guiding them, they can't adapt infinitely. If you heat a pot of water it reaches equilibrium with the air by boiling out of the pot.

In many epochs equilibrium climate states lasting thousands and millions of years were quite inhospitable to modern human life: there have been ice ages during human tenure on Earth, and there have been periods where the climate allowed three-foot long dragonflies, armadillos the size of houses and flying dinosaurs to flourish. Those were all "natural" climate equilibriums, but they would have been bad for technological humans because they make it hard for us to grow food and sustain a population of seven billion people.

Second, we control vast amounts of energy. If we detonated every nuke on the planet, there's no question we could make a big change in the climate, easily triggering an ice age with all the aerosols injected into the stratosphere. But if you look at the amount of energy we're using on a daily basis, it's equally staggering: the equivalent of hundreds of Hiroshima nukes detonated every day. We are using an incredible amount of energy, and generating nearly all that energy from coal, gas and oil, releasing an incredible amount of CO2 into the atmosphere that had been locked up in the earth's crust for billions of years. All released within a tiny span of a century, and most of that in the last 30 years.

Third, we just don't get how many people there are on this planet and what kind of an effect we can have on it. The United States is 3.79 million square miles in area. There are 310 million Americans. That means there's only about eight acres of land per person (given that there are 640 acres per square mile). Eight acres is one or so city blocks.

Even if all you had was an axe, you could cut down every tree on that block in a few weeks or months, and spend another couple of weeks chopping down the trees for your little kids and grandma. Or if you had a torch you could burn all those trees down in a day. We are so numerous and technologically adept that could intentionally deforest the entire continent in less than a year, drastically altering the climate.

And we can and have altered the climate. Just look at the Dust Bowl in the 30s, which Bastardi mentioned. That was caused by a drought in the plains states exacerbated by farmers plowing up the long-rooted grasses that held the soil down. Without us the dust bowl doesn't happen. We've been doing the same thing in the Amazon rain forest for decades, and there's some evidence that humans helped the Sahara get where it is today.

There are seven billion people on Earth. Humans are always bad at understanding big numbers, so let's put that in the same personal perspective. The total land area on this planet is about 56 million square miles, or 124 people per square mile, or just five acres per person. Yes, if you spread all of humanity out evenly across the entire planet, we would all still be within shouting distance of another person.

That's including all the land that's useless (the Sahara, the Antarctic, the sides of all those mountains in the Himalayas and Japan). That's not a whole lot of land for all the farming, and mining, and driving, and golfing that we like to do. Imagine what it'll be like in another 50 or 100 years. Conservatives love to knock Malthus, but there are obvious limits here, and we're fast approaching them.

We ourselves are now that big incomprehensible number.

They Really Aren't Any Different

There is a long history of conservatives inveighing against lazy lay-abouts. In the Bible sloth was one of the seven deadly sins. Amos complained of the rich committing lechery on ivory beds. In the 17th century authors such as Isaac Watts said that Satan finds mischief still, for idle hands to do. And American conservatives still revel in the Reagan trope of welfare queens and baby machines.

The problem, as conservatives seem to see it, with welfare benefits, unemployment and the social safety net is that they allow people to become lazy. If we don't have to be responsible for ourselves and rise or fall on own own initiative, people will naturally slough off. They will sit around doing nothing, leaching off the rest of us, simply pretend to be busy, or make half-hearted attempts to find work while wasting most of their time watching television or some such.

I was reminded of this while listening to Bethany McLean (author of All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis). The subject of corporate boards came up, and why they did nothing to stop the CEOs at the investment banks from making their hideously stupid mistakes. (Short answer: It's hard.)

She said they've tried all manner of incentives for CEOs to tie compensation to performance: huge pay packages, golden parachutes, stock options. And none of them have worked. She compared stock options to someone giving her five millions dollars, promising her another five million dollars in 10 years if she stopped eating chocolate.

Sure, there would be some incentive to abstain. But not a whole lot. You've got five million dollars!

That's the situation we have with CEOs. Most of them make so much money -- many in a single year and some even in a few days -- that they would be able to live out their entire lives never having to work another day. A single year's salary is enough to make them independently wealthy of the corporation, no matter how bad a job they do. (Democrats wanted some bonus claw-backs, but Republicans successfully beat that off.) In short, highly paid CEOs don't have any skin in the game any more.

These CEOS are far cozier than any welfare queen. No matter what mistake they make, they've already come out on top. Even if they break laws, they are usually able to cover everything up and buy their way out of it (like Rupert Murdoch and his various companies).

This self-satisfied complacency is the worst enemy of a good leader. Yet many turn themselves into pampered queens, with servants, maids and gardeners ready at their beck and call, private jets, million-dollar corporate apartments and gold toilet seats.

If you believe in welfare queens, then you have to believe in corporate queens: the logic is inescapable. The same human frailties and dynamics are at work for the welfare queen as the corporate queen. It's more insidious, though. The corporate queens have the appearance of respectability; everyone is fawning over them, constantly telling them how smart and fabulous they are, while everyone looks down on the lowly welfare queen. Welfare queens actually have an incentive to get off their duffs and do something to regain the respect of their fellows, and ultimately their benefits end (courtesy of Clinton era welfare reform).

Corporate queens enjoy the envy of others, who all lust for the same easy life. They gain coteries of sycophants who echo what the queens want to hear. Real criticism is silenced; only fools contradict the man in charge. Anyone who's worked at a big company knows what I'm talking about. The VPs who regularly sneak out for one o'clock tee times. The CEOs who take three-hour liquid lunches. The sales guys lounging in luxurious corporate boxes at Knicks games. The execs who always manage to book business trips to Florida and Hawaii in the winter. These guys don't actually do any real work, after all. It's not like anyone is going to miss them.

Corporate governance has been abysmal in recent years. Boards have tried everything to get some kind of responsibility out of their execs, except one thing: paying them less. If a CEO actually depended on the company for his future income, odds are he would do a better job. But if you give him enough money in a single year to make him independently wealthy, what hold do you have on him? He doesn't need your job, and he knows a hundred other companies would snap him up in an instant. Even when CEOs do screw up, the disaster is usually covered up because it will reflect poorly on the company. These guys are rarely called to account, and go on to wreak havoc over and over.

CEO compensation relative to average worker salaries has gone through the roof in the last 40 years. But CEO performance is certainly no better, and is probably much worse. That's a lot of money that companies could use to make better products, make their products more competitive (reducing prices to consumers), or at least return to the shareholders.

If we can scream bloody murder about overpaid Wisconsin teachers who make all of $50,000 a year, can't we take a little umbrage at the guys caused the financial meltdown, or filled the Gulf of Mexico with oil, and are still pulling in tens of millions of dollars a year?

14 Points

Cynthia Boaz's recent post regarding the 14 propaganda techniques used by Fox News to brainwash Americans should be extended to the entire right wing pundit machine...especially the right wing blogsphere. Here are a few that jumped out at me.

3. Projection/Flipping. This one is frustrating for the viewer who is trying to actually follow the argument. It involves taking whatever underhanded tactic you're using and then accusing your opponent of doing it to you first. We see this frequently in the immigration discussion, where anti-racists are accused of racism, or in the climate change debate, where those who argue for human causes of the phenomenon are accused of not having science or facts on their side. It's often called upon when the media host finds themselves on the ropes in the debate.

Hilarious! And very true. This happens on my site constantly and when it occurs from now on, I'm simply going to respond by cutting and pasting this paragraph. In fact, many of her points are salient when it comes to some of my regular readers so I foresee much cutting and pasting in the future.

Here are some other notable mentions.

4. Rewriting History. This is another way of saying that propagandists make the facts fit their worldview. The Downing Street Memos on the Iraq war were a classic example of this on a massive scale, but it happens daily and over smaller issues as well. A recent case in point is Palin's mangling of the Paul Revere ride, which Fox reporters have bent over backward to validate. Why lie about the historical facts, even when they can be demonstrated to be false? Well, because dogmatic minds actually find it easier to reject reality than to update their viewpoints. They will literally rewrite history if it serves their interests. And they'll often speak with such authority that the casual viewer will be tempted to question what they knew as fact.

Several of my readers suffer from this but this is part and parcel to the adolescent power fantasy.

All in all, I found her points to be completely accurate and an excellent summation of the conversational framework with the right these days. Sadly, I don't see it changing any time too soon but her points have inspired me to summarize something that has been kicking around in my head right now.

Why is that the money of wealthy people is "hard earned" yet the money of poor people, who often work two or three jobs, is not?

Crandall and Putnam

People of the same trade seldom meet together, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some diversion to raise prices.

---Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations.

A recent post by Nikto entitled "The Tax Cut Experiment" provoked an interesting discussion in comments and it made me think of the quote above. Clearly, Smith was well aware of corporate force even that long ago. The comments in that post also sparked a memory of the phone call between Robert Crandall, president of American Airlines, and Howard Putnam, president of Braniff Airways, in 1982.

Crandall: I think it's as dumb as hell...to sit here and pound the #$%#$ out of each other and neither one is making a $%#$ dime.

Putnam: Do you have a suggestion for me?

Crandall: Yes, I have a suggestion for you. Raise your #$%#$ fares 20 percent. I'll raise mine the next morning.

Putnam: Robert, we...

Crandall: You'll make more money and I will, too.

Putnam: We can't talk about pricing!

Crandall: Oh, ##$%$, Howard! We can talk about anything #$%$ thing we want to talk about.

If Crandall were around today, he'd be running a Tea Party organization.

The simple fact is, folks, that the government can sometimes improve markets. Never is this more true than with the airlines. Time and again we see that if left to their own devices they will collude against the public and produce a market that is not efficient...in other words, less consumer surplus.

In so many ways, this accurately describes the problem we have right now. We have a decided lack of aggregate demand with consumers (two thirds of our economy) not spending money. The main reason for this is prices from food to gas to health care are completely ridiculous.

With government effectively ball less (vasectomy courtesy of the Tea Party), it's only going to get worse.

If The Tea Party Ran Things...

...our country would look like Kemp, Texas. The town of Kemp recently had its water turned back on after residents experienced several days without running water. Apparently the town turned to prayer rather than raising taxes to pay for new pipes. As John Thorpe put it in the second link

Aah yes, prayer — the last refuge of the truly desperate. Perhaps these Texans could try something the rest of the civilized world does, and raise tax revenues to pay for infrastructure improvements. Why? Their infrastructure dates back to the 1930s. Most of the water system's 30 miles of pipes haven't been updated in decades.

I'm wondering why they didn't turn to the job creators, captains of industry, or wealthy fellow Texans to help them out. I have been assured by the right that some sort of invisible hand will always be there to help out.

What makes this story even more interesting is that Kemp is located in US Congressional Representative Jeb Hensarling's district. Hensaring is a Tea Party darling who firmly believes in less government spending. I guess we can see now the result of less government spending. NO FUCKING WATER.

Oh, and Mr. Hensaring has just been named to the 12 person Super Congress charged with tackling the debt.

Super. Not.

Victory?

Today I'm wondering where the victory is that both sides are claiming in the recall elections in Wisconsin last night. The Democrats fell one short of the three elections they needed to take back the Senate and the GOP lost two seats. Yet both sides are claiming victory.

The only victory I see is a win for polarity. Take a look at the results from last night's election. Granted, this is a special election which means only the most dedicated turn out but I think we can see from the numbers how evenly split the state is when it comes to politics.I suppose the saving grace in all of this is that the Democrats are more mobilized going into 2012. And they did take two seats away from the GOP so I guess that's something.

A victory in my eyes would be for all the working class people who voted for the person with the R next to their name realize two things. One, Republicans and the "job creators" that support them are not going to shower you with magical job dust because they don't believe in middle class driven economies. To put it simply, they don't give a shit about you and have brainwashed you into your vote. Two, you are not going to someday be one of these people and then have to fend off poor people trying to steal your money.

Your anger and fear are being manipulated into hate. Time to wake up, folks!

The Tax Cut Experiment

Last month the Republicans inadvertently conducted a test to see how tax cuts affect pricing. The result undercuts their own arguments.

Last month the FAA's authorization to collect taxes on airline tickets lapsed. According to who you ask, this was the result an argument over welfare for rural airports or another of the right's never-ending attempts to destroy unions in America.

When the tax was removed, the airlines quickly raised ticket prices to their previous levels, pocketing the tax money instead of passing the savings on to consumers. Now that agreement has been reached in Congress, the FAA has been reauthorized and the ticket tax has been restored, airlines have been rolling the fare increases back, so that ticket prices remain the same.

The airlines have essentially swallowed the tax increases, reducing their own profits. There are lots of reasons for this, but the simple fact is that companies generally charge as much for things as they can get away with.

The larger lesson is that raising corporate taxes does not mean that the companies will automatically raise prices for consumers, or that the companies will go out of business, or they will flee to other states and countries.

Pricing is a very sensitive issue. Prices cannot rise too high otherwise demand will crater. Most people do not have to fly on airplanes: people can vacation closer to home, and businessmen can choose to use teleconferencing instead of meeting clients face-to-face. So airlines constantly monitor and tweak fares to maximize profit, keeping the planes as full as possible while keeping costs like fuel as low as possible.

Profitability at corporations varies widely. Some industries don't have intense material or capital costs. Lady Gaga can reduce the price of her latest album from $8 to a buck on amazon.com and still make millions, while a grocery store chain's ability to sell food cheaply depends on weather, colony collapse disorder in bees, immigration law, political instability in the Middle East and oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico. Legal and financial products are even more flexible: they're intangibles that only have the value that we arbitrarily assign them.

What this means is that taxes on highly profitable industries that don't have large capital expenses can be raised without really affecting their prices, because they have the flexibility to reduce salaries but their prices are already maxed out. For example, law firms that charge $1,000 an hour could easily pay much higher taxes by cutting the salaries of lawyers who make 10 times what an average person makes. The financial industry could easily pay higher taxes by cutting salaries of hedge fund managers who make millions of dollars a year and pay taxes at the outrageously low capital gains rate of 15%.

All tax cuts and tax increases are not created equal. Since the US economy is driven by consumer spending, tax policies that put more money in the hands of more people provide the biggest boost.

The Bush tax cuts have not done that. The S&P downgrade acknowledges this. The stock market understands this. Everyone knows these things are true, but the Republicans stubbornly refuse to acknowledge reality purely for political gain.

To fix our problems some taxes have to go up, government expenditures (especially defense and entitlements) have to come down , as does the cost of medical care, and more money has to wind up in the hands of the bottom 90% of the US population, instead of just lining the pockets of the wealthy.

He Is Not Hu Jintao

As the world watched the Dow plunge over 600 points today, most of the blame has centered on President Obama. This blame is coming from all sides of the political spectrum and, in particular, the left, who think that he needs to lead more strongly. The right is currently skipping with glee as their central mission (Obama must fail), in their eyes, is working. Neither of these perceptions are accurate reflect reality, of course.

To a certain degree, some people will always blame the president. Those that don't like him anyway didn't give him credit when the Dow surged over the time of his presidency so why would they now? It's ridiculously predictable that they will now blame him when it falls. He loses with these folks no matter what he does. The people that do like him seemingly want him to lead in a king like fashion and begin executing jobs plans as well as ordering a single branch overhaul of the economy.

Someone needs to throw some cold water on these folks and make them realize that the president is not Hu Jintao. People from the left and the right complain that he doesn't "have a plan." It's not his fucking job to have a plan. That's the job of Congress. The people on the right are doing it because it helps them in their mission to see him fail. The people on the left are doing it because they want more government control over our country. Again, neither can happen. Again, Barack Obama is not Hu Jintao.

We don't live in a centrally planned economy, folks. Oddly, both sides think we do.

This might be a good time to decimate the lie that has been floating around the right wing blogsphere that President Obama hasn't delivered a budget for the last two years. He has and the evidence for it is right here. Let me repeat this again for those that have trouble hearing. President Obama has delivered a budget every fiscal year since he has been in office. 

The problem with the budget is the same problem with our economy and it's a big reason why the stock market is falling off a cliff right now: Congress. In 2010, Congress failed to adopt a budget resolution because of political cowardice. That's on the Democrats. in 2011, Congress failed to adopt a budget resolution for 2012 because of the true believers running the House presently. That's on the Republicans.

So, Congress is a big part of the fucking problem, folks and, by extension, that means us. We all love our Representative but hate everyone else. Current approval ratings of Congress are in the teens but nothing will change. We can't vote for other districts. We can only work within our own which means Tip O'Neill was right: All politics are local. Until we stop loving our guy no matter what (AKA completely lacking in motivation to change), we should expect the same results.

Honestly, though, much of our economy is beyond the control of the government so Congress isn't the only reason why we are at fault. It is a free market, after all. A big part of our economy (nearly two thirds) is consumer confidence and that's very low at present. Yet we still can't offer this as a substantive reason for why things are all balls right now. So why do we blame the government?

Because we're lazy and we worship rich people. Nothing is ever our fault so why should we have to work to fix things? And being critical of the wealthy these days is tantamount to asking a black guy why he likes to hang out on the porch all day eating fried chicken and watermelon.Most of us lack the ability to seriously reflect on what has to be done to fix the problems we have. Blaming the president and, to a certain degree, blaming Congress for the Dow dropping over 600 points makes no sense when you consider these things, Essentially, we have become Frito Pendejo from the film Idiocracy.

Go away...'batin'...

Oh, Really?

Citigroup Plutonomy Reports No Longer Available at CPS News.

Now I wonder why that is? Could it be because it contained the following paragraph?

Economic growth that is powered and consumed by the wealthiest upper class of society. Plutonomy refers to a society where the majority of the wealth is controlled by an ever-shrinking minority; as such, the economic growth of that society becomes dependent on the fortunes of that same wealthy minority.

With many people in this country still carrying water for them, it's no wonder they want to squash it.

Name Change

I've been thinking about this for awhile and decided that it was time to retire the "Notes From The Front" moniker. This site started out as an email list in the days following the 9-11 attacks. At the time, we all felt like we were on the front lines. Things have changed in ten years and, in keeping with that change, a different name was in order.

Although the name "Markadelphia" does have my name in it, the new name is not meant to be me. It's simply meant to a place where politics, religion, and sex are always polite to discuss..just like it was under the old banner. This was the original intent of the email list and then later the site. This new name seems more in keeping with that and parallels my continued commitment to let anyone say whatever they want (minus span for boner pills, financial scams, and porn...unless it is home made by a readers:)) without fear of having their comment deleted.

Welcome (again) to Markadelphia, folks. With an average of 200 unique daily readers and rapidly approaching 100,000 page loads since I started, I thank you all from the bottom, baby...from the bottom...

Downgrade

As many expected, Standards and Poors downgraded the United States' credit rating to AA plus. The other rating agencies (Moody's and Fitch) have kept the United States at AAA. So, what does all this mean? Here are my initial thoughts.

First of all, S&P can go fuck themselves. Where were they during 2007, for example, when losses on $340.7 million worth of CDOs issued by Credit Suisse Group added up to about $125 million, despite being rated AAA by Standard & Poor's? S&P are paid to rate the debt of companies so they are honestly more beholden to the private sector than the government.

S&P also made a two trillion dollar error in their latest assessment of US Debt but they still didn't change the rating. My opinion is that they were hell bent on the downgrade regardless of what sort of deal was made in DC. To put it simply, their rating should be taken with a grain (ton) of salt.

All of this being said, their criticisms are fair. The deal that was made was not enough. As President Obama stated plainly several times, it needed to be larger and include revenues. Due to Republican extremism, the political sedimentation that resulted played a heavy role in S&P's decision.

“More broadly, the downgrade reflects our view that the effectiveness, stability, and predictability of American policymaking and political institutions have weakened at a time of ongoing fiscal and economic challenges to a degree more than we envisioned when we assigned a negative outlook to the rating,” S&P said.

This should be a wake up call to the intransigent people in Washington DC. You are going to have to start thinking outside of the box and come up with innovative solutions. Repeating the same old tired lines about spending isn't going to cut it. In fact, I'll go as far to say that all available and traditional economic theories should be thrown out the window.

We need to say goodbye to trickled down, supply side, and yes, even Keynesian economic theory. Either these theories have never worked, completely failed, or don't belong in the new global economy. A call should begin today for innovative and "width of vision" economic thinkers who are not tied to old dogma.

Any volunteers?

Pre-1967?

Remember all that hoopla a while back about President Obama throwing Israel under the bus?

TV: Israel agrees to negotiate over pre-'67 lines

Oh, really?

In a dramatic policy shift, Israel's prime minister has agreed to negotiate the borders of a Palestinian state based on the cease-fire line that marks off the West Bank.

Up to now, Benjamin Netanyahu has refused to spell out his plan for negotiating the border. A senior Israeli official would not confirm outright that the prime minister was now willing to adopt the cease-fire line as a starting point, but said Israel was willing to try new formulas to restart peace talks based on a proposal made by President Barack Obama.

As I suspected a couple of months back, there was (and still is) a lot of local Israeli politics involved in this and not the "throwing to the wolves" that was inaccurately relayed by the faux outrage machine of the right.

As much of an Israeli supporter as I am, they need to budge a little on these issues and they are the ones right now that are holding up serious movement towards peace in the region.

Will The New Carl Sagan Please Stand Up?

A recent opinion piece in the Christian Science Monitor echoes some things I have been saying recently about climate change skeptics. As is often the case with their other views, the climate change skeptic locks in and does not waver. There is no point in bringing up evidence, facts, peer reviewed journals or any other information grounded in the scientific method. They will always have an answer that contradicts because that's what true believers do.

Instead, heed the points of Andrew Hoffman. He begins be defining the playing field.

One of the strongest predictors of an American's beliefs about global warming is political party affiliation. According to a 2009 Pew survey, 75 percent of Democrats believe there is solid evidence of global warming compared with only 35 percent of Republicans.

Climate change has been enmeshed in the culture wars where beliefs in science often align with beliefs on abortion, gun control, health care, evolution, or other issues that fall along the contemporary political divide. This was not the case in the 1990s and is not the case in Europe. This is a distinctly American phenomenon.

I find this terribly sad but it is true. Moving on....

For skeptics, climate change is inextricably tied to a belief that climate science and policy are a covert way for liberal environmentalists and the government to diminish citizens' personal freedom.

True but that's how they are with everything. They's a comin' to gin us!

A second prominent theme is a strong faith in the free market, an overriding fear that climate legislation will hinder economic progress, and a suspicion that green jobs and renewable energy are ploys to engineer the market.

This is even more prevalent than the first point. Odd, because one would think that an emerging market would be something they would get behind. Of course, they wouldn't if it meant they were proved wrong about something.

The most intriguing theme is strong distrust of the scientific peer-review process and of scientists themselves: "Peer review" turns into "pal review," and establishment scientist-editors only publish work by those whose scientific research findings agree with their own. Scientists themselves are seen as intellectual elites, studying issues that are beyond the reach of the ordinary person's scrutiny. This should not come as a surprise, although it seems to have mystified many climate scientists.

This is what I hear the most on here. It's an excellent example of propaganda and extremely disappointing that many people have fallen for this. That's what you get with Jupiter size hubris.

So what do we do about it?

The focus of the discussion must move away from positions (climate change is or is not happening) and toward the underlying interests and values at play. It must engage at the deeper ideological levels where resistance is taking place, using new ways to frame the argument to bridge both sides.

For example, when US Energy Secretary Steven Chu refers to advances in renewable-energy technology in China as America's "Sputnik moment," he is framing climate change as a common threat to economic competitiveness. When Pope Benedict links the threat of climate change with threats to life and dignity, he is painting it as an issue of religious morality.

When the Military Advisory Board, a group of retired military officers, refers to climate change as a "threat multiplier," it is using a national-security frame.

And when the Pew Center refers to climate change as an issue of risk management, it is promoting climate insurance just as homeowners buy fire insurance. This is the way to engage the debate; not hammering skeptics with more data and expressing dismay that they don't get it.

Completely true. If we frame the issue as one of economic competitiveness, morality, national security, and insurance, we take the reality of what is happening into realms that clearly affect people's lives. Having a socially awkward person of science trying to explain climate change to your average citizen-especially one who believes we are becoming Russia-will fail every day. If, however, they see how our society's various institutions are reacting to this and they hear it from someone who is socially easy to deal with, the paradigm shift we need will occur.

As Hoffman says, we need another Carl Sagan.

Oh, and as a simple PS, I thought I would throw in this quote from his piece.

I and many of my colleagues are regular recipients of climate-skeptic hate mail and a few of us have even received death threats.

Hmph. Must be another "Voice Inside My Head."