Monthly Archives: February 2010

Road To Recovery

This entry was posted in SteveG's Posts on by

You seldom see published the following graph:

job loss history

Follow this link to the page on OFA web site that makes the case for what President Obama has already accomplished.

One year in, the evidence is clear – and growing by the day – that the Recovery Act is working to cushion the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression and lay a new foundation for economic growth.

  • According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the Recovery Act is already responsible for as many as 2.4 million jobs through the end of 2009
  • As a result, job losses are a fraction of what they were a year ago, before the Recovery Act began

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act:

  • Cut taxes for 95 percent of working families through the Making Work Pay tax credit
  • Cut taxes for small businesses
  • Provided loans to over 42,000 small businesses
  • Funded over 12,500 transportation construction projects nationwide, ranging from highway construction to airport improvement projects
  • Made multi-billion dollar investments in innovation, science and technology that are laying the foundation for our 21st century economy
  • Provided critical relief for state governments facing record budget shortfalls, including help to prevent cuts to Medicaid and creating or saving over 300,000 education jobs

Economists on the left and the right have stated that the Recovery Act has helped avert an even worse economic disaster.

Follow this link to the CNN story Stimulus created jobs, controversy, backlash which reports on the above posting and adds some information of its own.

Mike Pickett, CEO of Onvia, a Seattle, Washington, firm that advises clients who may be looking to bid on contract work and tracks government contract spending, told CNN the stimulus so far is a mixed bag.

Picket estimated “roughly $68 billion have actually reached contractors and sub-contractors. We estimate that has delivered… or saved about 500,000 jobs.”

“It looks like the majority of the remaining funds — some $200 billion — will leave Washington and reach contractors this year. And that should increase the jobs created or saved number to around 1.6 million. And I think that’s where it’ll cap.”

Yet, despite the majority of the stimulus funds for job growth not having been spent yet, the nay sayers are repeating the lie that the stimulus is over and it’s all down hill from here.

I guess the Obama administration has decided that if the press won’t report the facts, they will have to do it themselves.  The poll cited in the CNN article shows the public holding onto badly misinformed ideas.  And who helps the public to remain misinformed?

David Rogers on Passing Major Social Legislation and Compromise

This entry was posted in RichardH's Posts and tagged social security on by

David Warsh (Economic Principals, 14 February 2010) points to two articles by David Rogers (POLITICO) related to passing major social legislation such as a health care bill. The key is to compromise to get “a” bill passed, which can provide a beach head for future modifications and enhancements.

The first Rogers article, Dems want to seize historical moment (POLITICO, 5 November 2009), comments on the passage of Social Security, the Civil Rights Act, and the non-passage of Bill Clinton’s health care program.

On Social Security in the ’30’s:

House Appropriations Committee Chairman Dave Obey (D-Wis.) resurrects the saga of a long-forgotten, four-term Wisconsin [Republican] progressive [Gerald Boileau] who backed Social Security in 1935, only to be undercut by angry seniors stirred up by the promise of getting the same benefits free. …

[Y]ears after [Boileau] lost in the 1938 elections, … [he told Obey why he had lost the ’38 election]. Social Security proved a major factor, and Boileau ran afoul of an activist California physician, Francis Townsend, who wanted to give all seniors $200 a month outright. President Franklin D. Roosevelt insisted that the elderly contribute to Social Security to make it more sustainable. And the fight — which spawned Townsend Clubs to organize seniors — dovetailed with a larger struggle between New Dealers and critics like Huey Long or that forerunner of modern bloggers and talk shows, “radio priest” Rev. Charles Coughlin.

For Obey, the great lesson is that so much is now forgotten, while Social Security endures and is embraced by the elderly.

“It just goes to show you that the little differences that we think are so important at the time, little shortcomings … don’t seem important. What’s important is, you have a terrific social insurance program,” Obey said. “So my point is whether we have the strongest public [insurance] option or the second-strongest public option [in the current health care bill], we’re still going to have a damned good product in comparison to what we have now.”

On the Civil Rights Act in the ’60’s:

[House Majority Whip Jim] Clyburn (D, SC), who came out of the civil rights struggles of the ’50s and ’60s, has reminded his caucus that nothing so big was ever done in a single bill.

“The civil rights community, Whitney Young, Roy Wilkins, Martin Luther King Jr. — all these people were for a big, comprehensive Civil Rights Act,” Clyburn told the caucus. “Johnson realized he couldn’t get in one fell swoop all that they were asking for and made it very clear to them in the negotiations: ‘If you want me to put this bill on the floor, I’ll put the bill on the floor, but it’s not going to pass. If you want to pass something, then we have to go into this bill to see what will pass.’”

The voting rights provisions came out and didn’t pass until 1965, after the presidential election. And while the 1964 law outlawed discrimination in the private sector, it wasn’t until 1972 — when Clyburn was on the staff of a South Carolina governor — that the same requirement was imposed on state and local governments, which had resisted the federal mandates.

“I didn’t want anyone to think that if you don’t get everything you want in this health care bill right now, that’s the end of the game,” Clyburn said. “What we need to do is lay a foundation. Get passed what we can pass that will have a meaningful impact on people’s lives — not put too many of our people in jeopardy — and then build upon it later. It’s a long road.”

The second Rogers article, Can Judd Gregg help White House save health bill? (POLITICO, 11 February 2010), discusses the motivations of retiring Senator Judd (R, NH) and Rogers’s hopes that Judd will play a constructive role before and during the Obama “televised sit-down with Republicans on Feb. 25 on how to break the current stalemate [on the health care bill].

-RichardH

Snowstorm And Climate Change

This entry was posted in SteveG's Posts on by

Follow this link to the article in the Los Angeles Times.

This states the case for the fact that snow in Washington DC and the lack of snow in Vancouver BC do not contradict the theory of global climate change.

All you need is cold air and moisture to meet each other to make snow, said Jay Gulledge, senior scientist for the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. And with global warming, the opportunities to do that should be more frequent.

Scaring People Stupid

This entry was posted in SteveG's Posts on by

Follow this link to the editorial on the McClatchy News web site.

The author discusses our two party system - the party of hope and the party of nope

He has concluded that one tactic the party of nope will use to insure electoral success is to scare people stupid.

Rahm Emanuel: We’re Not Re-Litigating the Past

This entry was posted in SteveG's Posts on by

Follow this link to the article posted on the Legal Schnauzer web site.  The introductory paragraph says:

A profile of Attorney General Eric Holder in the current issue of The New Yorker contains a quote from Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel that should be troubling to all citizens who care about justice issues.

I’ll be reading the referenced The New Yorker article next.

Until then, I leave it to you to decide if the article on the Legal Schnauzer web site is overwrought or not.  The article does have very good things to say about Attorney General Eric Holder.

Time to Tax Financial Speculation

This entry was posted in SteveG's Posts on by

Follow this link to the article about the idea of taxing financial speculation.

I have not thought through the ramifications of such a tax, but the above article points to a study of such ramifications.  I’ll read the study to see if I still like this idea.

On first blush, it sounds like an excellent idea.  Rather than add more complex laws that only lawyers could love, why not just tax behavior that you want to cut down on?

Now that Fidelity has cut my transaction cost to $7.95 per trade, I could afford to pay the tax.  Actually, as the article points out, for the number of trades that I do per year, the tax wouldn’t even be noticed by me.  The kind of trading I do is not the kind that needs to be discouraged.

Management Secrets of the Grateful Dead – Joshua Green

This entry was posted in RichardH's Posts on by

In the March 2010 issue of The Atlantic, Joshua Green wrote Management Secrets of the Grateful Dead.

The Grateful Dead Archive, scheduled to open soon at the University of California at Santa Cruz, will be a mecca for academics of all stripes: from ethnomusicologists to philosophers, sociologists to historians. But the biggest beneficiaries may prove to be business scholars and management theorists, who are discovering that the Dead were visionary geniuses in the way they created “customer value,” promoted social networking, and did strategic business planning.

I confess that, unlike many of my friends, I was never a fan of The Dead, preferring instead Janis Joplin and The Rolling Stones. Their music was just okay, their singing was not. Theirs was a cheerful, white-bread band whose concerts were the embodiment of Peace, Love, and Pot. Their songs were interminable but for their stoned, ecstatically-twirling audience, it was Nirvana.

They were a phenom. Their fans (‘Deadheads’) were absolutely devoted to them. The colorful and fanciful promotional art for them (and for all the San Francisco bands) was gorgeous.

And yet, Green reports that The Dead were great businessmen. “Without intending to—while intending, in fact, to do just the opposite—the band pioneered ideas and practices that were subsequently embraced by corporate America.” They treated their most loyal fans royally. Telephone hotlines announced pre-publicity schedules, ticket prices were capped, the most loyal could secure great seats, they didn’t discourage individuals from taping concerts which would increase the band’s familiarity and fame. The Dead were early “social networkers” and built a large and loyal community. Coupling the community loyalty with closely controlling their merchandise and franchise, The Dead could capitalize on their growing audience and generous personae. Business Professor Barry Barnes said, “The Dead were masters of creating and delivering superior customer value.” The Dead was one of the most profitable bands ever, which Barnes attributes to their “strategic improvisation.”

Green also links to a 1994 Wired article The Economy of Ideas: A framework for patents and copyrights in the Digital Age. (Everything you know about intellectual property is wrong.) by John Perry Barlow, internet guru and former lyricist for the Grateful Dead. Green couples The Dead’s generosity (or lack of greediness) with Barlow’s earlier insight [Barlow’s words below],

Familiarity has more value than scarcity. With physical goods, there is a direct correlation between scarcity and value. Gold is more valuable than wheat, even though you can’t eat it. While this is not always the case, the situation with information is often precisely the reverse. Most soft goods increase in value as they become more common. Familiarity is an important asset in the world of information. It may often be true that the best way to raise demand for your product is to give it away.

The Grateful Dead has made its extensive archives available to and through The Grateful Dead Archives at the University of California at Santa Cruz. “Go Slugs!”

The Grateful Slug

And you might be interested in Dead Central, a blog for the UCSC Grateful Dead Archive and the source of the above image of the Deadhead Banana Slug (talk about “mellow yellow”!).

Enjoy.

-RichardH

A Better Way To Get Our Democracy Back

This entry was posted in SteveG's Posts on by

Coincidentally to RichardH’s previous post, Lawrence Lessig-How To Get Our Democracy Back, I received an email that is more in line with my thinking of how we get our democracy back.

It uses the power of the electorates’ numbers to fight the wealth of the special interests. It requires fewer legal entanglements, but it does require the people to pay the price of using the time and efforts of the many to counter the wealth of the few.

If we don’t have faith that the many can overrule the few, then do we truly believe in democracy?

Organizing for America
Steven —

As we head into an election year, the new strategy for killing reform is claiming that members of Congress who vote for it will suffer at the polls.

For months, our opponents have spread lies about reform to scare voters away. But the simple truth about what reform would actually do — save jobs, guarantee all Americans affordable, stable coverage, and significantly reduce the deficit — is something most Americans strongly support.

The question is, come November, will the voters know the facts?

OFA supporters have asked for a way to show every member of Congress that if they fight for reform now, we’ll back them up this election season.

That’s why we’re launching “You fight, we’ll fight” — a volunteer pledge bank where you can commit your time to back up candidates and officials who fight hard for health reform.

We’re shooting for 1,000,000 hours pledged to spread the word to fellow voters. And if we get there, we’ll publish the total hours pledged in USA Today, so there will be no doubt that health reform is both good policy and good politics.

Can you pledge right away?

Pledge to volunteer

President Obama has made it crystal clear that he has no intention of walking away from health reform — and this movement has made its desire to fight on just as clear.

And many members of Congress are already working hard by his side to get the job done. But for those on the fence about whether or not to proceed, knowing you are there to back up a courageous stand can make all the difference.

Your volunteer hours can have a huge impact no matter where you live. You can make calls into critical districts where health reform champions are in jeopardy, write letters to the editor, volunteer for nearby campaigns, or even just talk to friends, family, and neighbors to help cut through the special interest spin.

We’ll offer lots of ways to get involved between now and the elections in November, and you can decide which are right for you — the important thing right now is to publicly show your commitment to fight for those who make health reform a reality.

Please help us hit our ambitious goal of one million volunteer hours pledged:

http://my.barackobama.com/YouFight

We’ve certainly faced setbacks in this fight. But as President Obama told OFA supporters last week, that only means we need to work that much harder.

Thanks for making it possible,

Mitch

Mitch Stewart
Director
Organizing for America

Paid for by Organizing for America, a project of the Democratic National Committee — 430 South Capitol Street SE, Washington, D.C. 20003. This communication is not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.

This email was sent to: steve@ssgreenberg.name