Shoutingatmytv.com

A Hedge Fund Republic? - NYTimes.com

My point was that the wealthiest plutocrats now actually control a greater share of the pie in the United States than in historically unstable countries like Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guyana. But readers protested that this was glib and unfair, and after reviewing the evidence I regretfully confess that they have a point.

That’s right: I may have wronged the banana republics.

via www.nytimes.com

The wealthiest 1% of Americans own 34% or our national wealth. The next 9% own 37%. The other 90% own the 29% that's left.

We've tolerated this inequality because of two important pieces of our national identity; we are supposed to have greater social mobility than other countries, and supposedly, "a rising tide lifts all boats".

Here's the problem - neither of these components of our national mythology is true.

This isn't the first time this has happened in the US - it has happened before most of our economic disasters, and for the same reasons. FDR faced the same forces in 1932, and his intention was to save capitalism from itself. His cousin Theodore had already noted the same forces, and made one of the country's greatest speeches about it, in Osawatomie, Kansas, in 1910:

"The true friend of property, the true conservative, is he who insists that property shall be the servant and not the master of the commonwealth; who insists that the creature of man’s making shall be the servant and not the master of the man who made it. The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have called into being.

There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains. To put an end to it will be neither a short nor an easy task, but it can be done....

The absence of effective State, and, especially, national, restraint upon unfair money-getting has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power. The prime need to is to change the conditions which enable these men to accumulate power which it is not for the general welfare that they should hold or exercise.... We grudge no man a fortune in civil life if it is honorably obtained and well used. It is not even enough that it should have been gained without doing damage to the community. We should permit it to be gained only so long as the gaining represents benefit to the community. This, I know, implies a policy of a far more active governmental interference with social and economic conditions in this country than we have yet had, but I think we have got to face the fact that such an increase in governmental control is now necessary."

There's more, and it could have been written yesterday. Read it!

Quantitative Easing Explained

As good a synopsis of the financial situation as I've seen - enjoy!...

 

The Terminator vs. Big Oil - Thomas Friedman

The Terminator, a k a the Governator, is not happy. And you shouldn’t be either.

via www.nytimes.com

Read it all, but here's the nut: “We can wait to solve this problem as long as we want,” says Nate Lewis, an energy chemist at the California Institute of Technology: “But Nature is balancing its books every day. It was a record 113 degrees in Los Angeles the other day. There are laws of politics and laws of physics. Only the latter can’t be repealed.”

Sam Harris: Science CAN Answer Moral Questions

Please watch and consider this - it's worth it:

Commentary: I'm rich; tax me more | McClatchy

Commentary: I'm rich; tax me more | McClatchy.

Well here's a breath of fresh air. Some common sense from someone who has personally benefited from the low tax rates on high incomes, and who recognizes that they contribute to dangerous inequalities in wealth, stifle economic growth, and produce little or no additional investment. Read the whole thing, but the most important line may be:

What will change my investment decisions is if I see an economy doing better, one in which there is demand for the goods and services my investments produce. I am far more likely to invest if I see a country laying the foundation for future growth.

We have a demand crisis in the economy, and reducing the tax burden on those whose demand for goods is unrelated to their tax rate (wealthy people) won't solve it. What will solve it is making investments in infrastructure and research that can spur new economic growth, and improving the financial picture of the middle class that provides the bulk of the demand in our economy. Bravo to Garrett Gruener for recognizing that fact and speaking up about it (and a hat tip to my friend George for pointing it out!)

‘Environmentalism’ can never address climate change | Grist

Environmentalism: The word is not enough. In my opening statement at the debate the other night, I had 60 seconds to reach a half-drunk, half-interested crowd. In those circumstances, you realize pretty quickly that you have to cut straight to the core of things. I hadn't really thought it out in advance, but I realized just before I went on stage that the first thing I wanted to say is simple: I'm not an environmentalist and these aren't environmental challenges.

via www.grist.org

This is a great article by Grist's David Roberts, in which he points out that the issue of climate change requires too broad a change in our society to allow it to be pigeonholed as a purely "environmental" concern. He points out that environmentalists have taken an early lead in pointing out the perils of continuing on the course we have been on, but says the mindset of the environmental movement has been shaped by the movement's early successes as a purely regulatory issue (find polluters and prevent them or make them pay for polluting).

Roberts' article revisits a discussion from 2004, spurred by an article by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Schellenberger, entitled "The Death of the Environmental Movement", in which they too argued that the environmental movement has become moribund by getting lost in the tactics that brought it early success, and that it has consequently been weak at dealing with the backlash that has been stirring in the American public for the last thirty years. They too argued that the climate crisis is too broad and too important to be stuck with the same myopia. That article caused a lot of fuss when it was published, but it's an interesting discussion, and as Roberts' article indicates, one that deserves revisiting.

Google and Verizon carve up the internet...

Google Turns Its Back on Net Neutrality | Save the Internet.

Please read the whole thing, but here's the nut:

But blaming Google for finding ways to deepen their own pockets is like blaming a tiger for eating a goat. We can hold them to some modicum of social responsibility, but at the end of the day, they're a corporation - it's what they do.

It's ultimately up to the FCC to protect Net Neutrality, and we need to hold them and our lawmakers accountable to us. We need to fight back and speak up to tell the FCC that we want a completely open Internet.

If you value the innovation on the internet, as well as your ability to choose what you read, listen to, and watch, please follow both links and tell both Google and your legislators that you care what they do about this issue. Telecom companies are spending millions in lobbying money to get Congress and the FCC to allow them to control this public resource. Those lawmakers need to know there will be political costs if they get bought by this lobbying money, anmd Google needs to know there will be economic costs that are too high. They've gotten rich on the innovation on the web, and pulling up the ladder behind them to stop other innovators is not acceptable.

March 21, 2010 - March 27, 2010 | AmericanDad's Blog

Dear Conservative Americans,

The years have not been kind to you. I grew up in a profoundly Republican home, so I can remember when you wore a very different face than the one we see now.  You've lost me and you've lost most of America.  Because I believe having responsible choices is important to democracy, I'd like to give you some advice and an invitation.

via tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com

This is heartfelt, encyclopedically researched, and very good read. It's from someone who describes himself this way: "A 1960s/70s mainstream Republican, which makes me a 2010 socialist/communist fringe Lefty Democrat bent on destroying America. Go figure."

Jeffrey Sachs: Sow the Seeds of Long-Term Growth

The world economy is entering a new phase after the failure of fiscal stimulus to create a sustained recovery in either the US or Europe. In the US, consumers have retrenched, housing starts have crashed and a double-dip recession is possible. In Europe, fiscal retrenchment is underway after intense market pressures. A new approach to recovery is needed.

via www.huffingtonpost.com

Sachs is absolutely right. The most significant long-term problem our economy has is that it can't (and shouldn't) base its recovery on increasing consumer spending. The primary source of the catastrophe we've just been through is an overdependence on consumer spending to drive our economy, when that spending has been largely funded with debt. In short, and to use a somewhat archaic concept, we have a balance of payments problem that is at the heart of our financial woes.

Unemployment is a serious problem (particularly for those who are unemployed, but also for the economy at large), and extending unemployment benefits is a reasonable short term solution to it, but without investment to put those folks back to work, it's only a short term solution. Reinflating the housing bubble isn't a good answer, as we have more housing stock now than we can afford, and propping up other industries that no longer have international markets and exacerbate our dependence on fossil fuels doesn't help either.

We have serious structural problems with our infrastructure, and an inevitable transition from our dependence on fossil fuels to manage. Sachs' call for investment (both public and private) to address those problems (and along with them, our balance of payments) is the right approach.

There is, however, one aspect of that investment that Sachs misses, and in that miss, he shares a position with many who have been advocating as he has. That miss is that like many, he wants us to invest in high-speed rail.

High speed rail is all very well, and I'm for as much of it as the traffic will support, but before we make that sort of investment, we should simply repair the vast system of normal rail routes that have been languishing for decades. That fix is cheap, it's "shovel ready", and it would promote a far less consumptive mode of travel than any of those we are currently using. The argument is made that if rail travel isn't at high speed, it won't draw any business travelers, but if long distance rail were equipped with wi-fi stations, so that businesspeople could work on their way to their destinations, I don't think that's true.

Our air travel system is in desperate shape, and it's in that shape because even with the vast hidden subsidies it enjoys (airport construction costs are huge, growing, and almost completely supported by governments at various levels), it's losing a lot of its business to teleconferencing and more to the simple fact that traveling by air is getting progressively more inconvenient, as both fuel costs and security requirements increase. In relatively short order, the system will finally collapse, and when it does, we'll need a way to get goods and people around the country efficiently and comfortably on a large scale (the most interesting ads running on out television over the last year have been those noting that a rail line can move a ton of freight over 460 miles on a gallon of diesel fuel).

We used to have such a system, and its skeleton is still there, rusting in the sun and waiting for us to wake up and repair it. We should begin now.

Rachel Maddow Shreds the White House for Getting Sucker Punched by Breitbart & Fox News - Again!

Before I saw Rachel Maddow's show last night, I was ranting about Andrew Breitbart's complicity in the mugging of Shirley Sherrod, who was fired from her job as a regional director of the USDA's development program yesterday for being a racist, after a videotape of her was posted on Andrew Breitbart's "Big Government" site that ostensibly showed her voicing a bias against white people (Ms. Sherrod is black).

In an utterly unsurprising development, it turns out that the tape was carefully misleadingly edited and the accusation was wholly false (Ms. Sherrod was telling a story about how she came to see that the problem she was confronting had nothing to do with race). Before the lie had a chance to be revealed, though,  Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack sacked Sherrod - within hours of the story breaking (if this sounds familiar, it's because Breitbart also had a hand in the ACORN story, which has also been revealed as a complete fraud):

The NAACP has now released the full video of the speech that got Ms. Sherrod fired, and it's clear that Breitbart is complicit in a vicious hatchet job on an innocent woman who was describing an incident 25 years ago that changed her perspective about race. It's telling that Breitbart felt no need to see the rest of the video before passing his judgment that Sherrod and her audience are racists, and it speaks volumes about the quality of that judgment. Sherrod should be apologized to and immediately rehired by the USDA, which got stampeded by a cheap con, and the next time Breitbart claims to have damning evidence in support of his peculiar theories, we should remember this lie and his part in it.

Breitbart now claims that he was making the case that the racism of the NAACP audience, not Sherrod, was the reason he posted the videotape, and that he feels sorry that "the media has misconstrued" the story to make it about Ms. Sherrod, and not her audience. Leaving aside the laughable implication that Breitbart isn't part of "the media", you'd have to be really naive to believe that anyway, but even if you did, the point Breitbart says he's making is completely unsupported by the unedited tape.

Naturally, I didn't do as well as Maddow did in summarizing the story - here's a clip from her show last night:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Amen, and apart from the editorial comments (with which I couldn't agree more), it's a breath of fresh air to see some actual journalism being practiced on TV. Once again, the administration needs to right this wrong, now, and remember this and other lies the next time it gets harangued by these propagandists about some "damning evidence" they claim to have. Shoveling the sort of propaganda Fox does is execrable journalism, and falling for it repeatedly is terrible, spineless politics.

The Internet Invades The World: Slang And Memes IRL (PHOTOS)

via www.huffingtonpost.com

How to get cyber-geeks into a bar...

Krugman and the Neo-Hooverites

Paul Krugman wrote this piece in the NY Times yesterday, and my cousin sent me the link. It's a keeper, and I posted it on Facebook, with the comment that I couldn't have put it better myself, which was undoubtedly part of why I don't have a Nobel prize in economics.

That led my friend Bart to reply; "not really a starve the beast guy, eh?", which set me off on the following rant:

"No, not so much. I think that the mantra that government can't work is most often proven by those who repeat it, and I think that putting people in charge of government who disagree with government on principle is a great recipe for regulatory disasters (see Wall St, BP), the "privatization" of priceless public assets at fire sale prices, and the pillaging of the public purse by ideologues and opportunists (see Blackwater, Halliburton, Jack Abramoff, etc., etc.)

Apart from that problem (in case that's not enough by itself), I notice that advocating for "starving the beast" has NEVER actually reduced the deficit by so much as a nickel, because those who get elected chattering about how bad all these government programs are realize they will be voted out of office in a heartbeat if they actually cut those programs the public finds both useful and efficient. Consequently, when those "deficit hawks" get elected, the only real policy prescriptions are tax cuts, and the national debt immediately explodes.

Finally, as Krugman alludes to, cutting government spending during a recession is a spectacularly stupid thing to do from a macroeconomic standpoint. When aggregate demand is low because everyone is worried about keeping a job, cutting taxes on those who do have jobs does very little to stimulate the economy and does nothing to provide for either our economic future or those who are suffering now.

We have huge structural economic problems in this country, including (but not limited to) dangerously outdated and failing infrastructure, an abysmal energy drain on our economy, and most important, a balance of payments problem that will sink us if we let it. Significant parts of those problems can be laid at the feet of those who have spent the last thirty years encouraging us to cut our taxes instead of paying our bills.

Recessions are when sane governments spend money to prime the pump, but not on tax cuts, which return about half of what they cost to the economy. Unemployment benefits, by contrast, produce about 150% of their cost in economic activity, and investments in solving the aforementioned structural problems have multipliers that are even higher in the long term.

Uncle Sam can still borrow cheaply (the T-bill rate is relatively low, historically speaking), but as Krugman says in his piece, that won't be true forever, particularly if the rest of the world becomes convinced that we're borrowing to make it easier to concentrate wealth in progressively fewer hands, and not to invest in things that will drive long term growth.

Those private interests that have been the beneficiaries of all that tax cutting have done little or nothing to invest in the broader public welfare, and we're in danger of turning the most productive and egalitarian society in history into a banana republic. Lenders don't think much of banana republics - they tend to send their national wealth out of the country, instead of paying their debts.

We've had neo-Hooverite, militarily adventurous, tax-cutting "disaster capitalists" in charge for much of the last thirty years, during which time, in the absence of a clearly defined military enemy, our military spending has tripled and the rest of our bills have gone unpaid, so that the wealthiest among us can get orders of magnitude wealthier. That's the "beast" I'd like to see starving, before it completes the job it's begun of wrecking our economy, and teaches a new generation what a "Hoover flag" is."

See, no Nobel prize...

Mayberry Machiavellis: Obama Political Team Handcuffing Recovery

Under the leadership of President George W. Bush, science, empirical evidence and expert advice struggled to be heard above the din of politics. It's one thing to prioritize politics over good policy; it's quite another to let bad politics drive the agenda. But that's what the Bush administration did during its Terri Schiavo era and his congressional majorities paid the price.

via www.huffingtonpost.com

Taking sensible policy positions during the campaign did the president a lot of good, and had the benefit of also being the right thing to do. If he fails to do the same thing now, he'll do his party significant political damage and the country even more significant economic damage. This article provides the most cogent analysis (from both political and policy perspectives) of the choice before him that I've seen yet.

Arianna Huffington: PolitiFact Embraces Equivocation, the Truth Gets Squeezed

Whenever I speak about the future of media, I get the most positive reaction when I talk about the urgent need to create an online tool that makes it possible to instantly fact-check politicians and commentators as they speak (a bubble pops up, containing the actual facts supporting or contradicting what's been said). Truth 2.0.

via www.huffingtonpost.com

PolitiFact is a great idea, but Huffington's right that if it minces words about its own findings, its value will be severely diminished. There are probably legal reasons why PolitiFact's owners (The St Petersburg Times) don't want to take on Halliburton or BP, but surely an artful way can be constructed for a news organization to say something along the lines of "This hasn't been proven in court, but it sure looks true to us so far."

The Fear Factor

In an interesting article in Slate, Dahlia Lithwick asks; "What happens to democracy when everyone's too scared to show up?" Apparently, several witnesses in legal proceedings around the gay marriage issue in California have claimed they are too afraid to testify (and have successfully petitioned the US Supreme Court to prevent a local judge from allowing any video coverage of the trial at all), and in one case in Washington, have asked the courts to suppress the public record of the list of signatories to a petition to put a repeal of gay marriage rights on the ballot.

I understand that some supporters of these repeal efforts have been subjected to physical threats, intimidation, and vandalism, and that's clearly wrong (though there's an inescapable irony in the fact that the cause of that ill treatment is their advocacy of the position that it's OK to mistreat others). I'm not aware, though, that anyone has actually been physically harmed in such circumstances (unlike the dozens of people who have been beaten or killed by those who want to lock their gay and lesbian neighbors back in the closet).

On the other hand, one of the complaints from those who supported California's Prop. 8, and those who would like to put a similar measure on the Washington ballot, is that they're being subjected to financial damage from those who will no longer patronize their businesses. Sorry, but that's not a sufficient threat to make me believe that a public record should be made private. While it's not something I say at all often, I agree wholeheartedly with Justice Scalia, who said during oral argument in the California case; "'The fact is, running a democracy takes a certain amount of civic courage."

They shouldn't be subjected to physical violence or threats of that violence, but if those who want to change the laws aren't willing to stand up and be counted (and risk the rejection of their fellow citizens for their beliefs), they should sit down and shut up.

Missionaries of Hate

Uganda has been considering and continues to consider legislation that would make homosexuality a crime punishable by imprisonment or death. This is a documentary on Current TV about the legislation and the influence that American evangelicals have had in promoting it. The same people who are responsible for inciting outpourings of irrational hatred in this country are hard at the same work in Africa, with what appears to be even greater success.

Those same evangelicals are now distancing themselves from their own work, saying the Ugandans have taken their condemnations of gays too far, but their objections are tellingly limited, and make no attempt to recognize the promoters of the bill as the hatemongers they are. This legislation would criminalize people who are doing harm to nobody, solely on the basis of their homosexuality. It is evil, and not to speak out loudly against it is to be complicit in that evil. Watch:

Madness.

Regional Fed Chiefs Lining Up To Support Tough Derivatives Provision, Obama Admin. Still Opposed

"In a letter dated Thursday, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas President Richard W. Fisher wrote Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Blanche Lincoln in support of her measure that would significantly change the way Wall Street's financial behemoths sell and trade a type of financial derivatives product."

via www.huffingtonpost.com

This is the upside of Blanche Lincoln's victory on Tuesday night. If she hadn't been primary challenged by progressives, this amendment wouldn't exist at all, and if she had lost, you can bet it would have been withdrawn on Wednesday morning. To that administration official who couldn't resist mouthing off about how much money "the unions wasted" this spring, welcome to the Democratic party.

Crude Greed

One of my favorite songwriters, David Wilcox, has just written a new song.

Africa '09 Photographs

It took too long, but I finally posted a sampling of the photos I took in Africa last summer. Please either go the link below, or check them out here:

  

Laser AC - Sayville YC

Watched a short, but fairly wooly Laser class Atlantic Coast Champs in the Great South Bay this weekend, and got a few pix before the boat got too wet to keep a camera in my hands...

More in the gallery linked lower left...