Government and Business play two different but essential roles in our society.

Think of the government as the citizens banding together to do things in a cooperative, wholesale way what they couldn’t do at all or as efficiently as individuals. Some of these things cannot be done by individual companies either. Companies banding together as monopolies or oligarchies have extremely unfortunate consequences, so we frown on allowing that to happen without strict controls by the government (the people).

I’ll provide some examples, but do not intend to write a book in an attempt to cover everything.

Government provides infrastructure such as roads, sewers and sewage treatment, and flood control. These are large projects that consist of many pieces that must work together, but we don’t need multiple copies in competition with each other.

Government also provides services that have no short term payback, but have important long-term consequences. Education of the citizens and work force are important. Some of what citizens need to learn is related to making society work as a whole and have little to do with satisfying the needs of a company or business.

Companies have primary responsibilities to their owners/share holders. There are no national boundaries to where the owners live or where the company does business. We should not expect large, multinational companies to have an allegiance to only one country.

Government, on the other hand, has its primary responsibilities to its citizens and residents. We should expect the government to have a keen interest in the welfare of its residents.

One of the advantages of our economic system is diversification. It is very hard to predict which inventions will lead to new industries that change the world. With diversification of companies we get many different attempts to make a business out of an invention. Most fail, some succeed on a grand scale. Companies come into existence and go out of existence as the needs of people change over time. This is what makes our economy vibrant.

What the government provides should not come and go with quite the same rapidity. Health care, retirement, education, infrastructure, defense, currency, and many other things need to be dependable for the long run. Certainly they need to adapt to changing conditions, but they probably shouldn’t disappear altogether in one form to suddenly reappear somewhere else in another form.

I won’t go into any details, technical or otherwise, but the interaction between the federal government and the economy is hugely different from the interaction between even the largest companies and the economy.  Any national politician, who does not recognize and understand that difference, can only lead us to wrack and ruin.  We have plenty of evidence of that in the present let alone our most recent history.

When we realize these vastly different roles, we can see that being a great success in business does not necessarily make for great success as a politician – be that mayor, governor, senator, representative, or president. When we elect people to these roles, we don’t want them thinking just like business people. We want them to understand that they are taking on a different role and different responsibilities from what they did when they succeeded in private life. We should always ask candidates to explain their understanding of how the role of government is different from the role of business.

Business experience isn’t a bad thing for a politician. However, when running for office, we ought to demand that politician show us an understanding of how the new role will be different from the old one. If the politician does not recognize the difference, there is little hope that this politician will have a highly beneficial impact on the lives of the citizens/residents with respect to the large matters given to the care of the government.

The post Rescued from Real People, Boston’s De-Occupied Dewey Park Now Re-Landscaped for Passing Motorists has some very thought provoking ideas in it.

I’ll quote just three paragraphs.  You’ll have to read the article itself to fill in what came before and what came after.

So it was no surprise that the mostly young, idealistic and courageous occupiers were forced from day 1 to recreate government, to develop mechanisms to deal, face to face with drug abuse, violent/uncontrolled behavior, unemployment, homelessness, hunger and poor health.  It wasn’t all just marches and demonstrations and rallies and teach ins; it was also a daily struggle for human and humane survival.  And the fact this was happening was also a daily embarrassment to the city and a reminder of how badly our cities fail for so many of their citizens.

The occupation movement did not create these people or their problems — those who received the trillions in bailouts were far more responsible — nor did they  exacerbate any of their conditions.  Homeless, suffering people and conditions came to the occupation, and the movement did its best to deal with them.

None of those conditions are gone merely because tents will now be replaced with freshly mowed grass that almost no one will see or walk on.   The problems and the people who struggle with them are still there, dispersed to who knows where, mostly out of sight and hence mostly out of mind.  And that was probably the unacknowledged plan that compelled the good Mayor to lie.

I think the Occupy Boston movement was about far more than we imagined.

You hear about big losses that major companies suffer from patent and copyright violators  and the cost of theft of intellectual property.  Makes you wonder how much money they make because they have these patents and copyrights which most people do not violate.

The thought of posting this article, led me to do a little Google searching for support.  I found Patent Losses Trump ObamaCare Benefits which gives a slightly different aspect of the value of patents.  Just do your own Google search on “patent losses” for a whole raft of other articles.

If you Google search “intellectual property loss” you find articles such as Losses from intellectual property espionage: a trillion dollars a year.  Again, one has to ask about the money made from protection of intellectual property that the non-violators fork over.

I am not in any way trying to promote the idea of patents and copyrights, but what I am trying to show is the tremendous financial gain that major corporations and the “job creators” get from the government programs and laws of patent and copyright protection.  You’d think these entities would have some appreciation for the great benefit they are receiving and might want to pay some taxes to keep this benefit flowing to them.  What about the cost to the government of the courts and law enforcement that does help recoup some of the losses from patent and copyright violations?  Is there any appreciation for that. Apparently, according to what the Republicans say about taxing “job creators”, you would be wrong to think there is any appreciation commensurate with the size of the benefit.

Of course, any benefit to corporations and wealthy “job creators” they get from these protections is a loss to the people who pay the higher prices for these protected products.  This makes this all a double example of how the wealthy benefit from government, do not want to pay for it, and foist the costs on the other 99% of us.

If I were a wealthy person, I would be more careful about bringing up this whole topic of “class warfare”.  What if the 99% woke up to what the wealthy were getting for free and how much it was costing them to provide it to the wealthy?  They might decide the wealthy ought to pay for what they get or lose the benefit of the government sponsored protection.  If I were wealthy, I would shut up about this and be happy to take the free ride I was getting.

I guess the wealthy never heard the maxim, “Let sleeping dogs lie.“

I got a kick out of this political ad for Rabbi Jason.

As a bonus I’ll throw in a video about Jon Stewart’s War on Christmas. If the video doesn’t play for you, try this link.

Here is a story about Newt the historian. The article Palestinians tell Gingrich to learn history after ‘invented people’ claim is my excuse to comment on this issue.

In the article, Newt Gingrich is quoted as saying, “I think we have an invented Palestinian people who are in fact Arabs and historically part of the Arab community and they had the chance to go many places.”

I have had this discussion with my Jewish relatives and friends a number of times.

I try to put them in a different frame of mind by trying to reduce this argument to something more personal.

Suppose a refugee, who had suffered great calamities in their life and had been dispossessed of their home, came to you and said, “I need to live in your house.  I don’t want to hear any complaints because you have the choice to live in many other places.  I’ll even offer you some money to sell the place to me.  On top of that, I will remodel and make this place a nicer place to live than you have. Now get out and shut up.”

There is no right answer for playing this suppose game. If you carry out this exercise truthfully, you might find yourself having a conversation with yourself about the merits of both sides of the argument.

We can lose our moral compass when we only talk about this group of people versus that group of people.  I hope that we can regain our sense of direction when we can remember that groups are made up of individual people.

Does the article Barack Obama Plays the Teddy Roosevelt Card a Little Late prove that I was wrong in my assessment of Ideal President Obama Replacement?

Here are a couple of paragraphs from the Teddy Roosevelt article.

When in doubt, wheel on Teddy Roosevelt. It’s article one in every Democratic president’s playbook. Roosevelt was president from 1901 to 1909. He was manly; he ranched in North Dakota and explored the Amazon. He was a rabid imperialist, charging up San Juan Hill and sending the Great White Fleet round the world. And he loved the wilderness — so long as it was suitably cleansed of Indians. “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians,” he wrote in “The Winning of the West,” “but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.”
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Obama and his campaign advisers are obviously betting that there won’t be any excessive snickering at the sight of a president who is blithely denying that, during the worst economic crisis in 70 years, his economic team — Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Chief Economic Adviser Lawrence Summers — wasn’t determined to “return to the same practices that got us into this mess” and impede any serious economic reform of the institutions and practices that prompted the great crash of 2008.

You probably know what that last paragraph is trying to say. I have counted the number of negatives in that paragraph and I think the number comes out right to express what they wanted to express.

After reading what I wrote, I counted them again – snickering at – denying – wasn’t determined. Yep, I think that is right. See what you get when you count them.

I received some talking point to help rebut the phony ad against Elizabeth Warren.

I have been involved in a discussion over whether or not Abraham Lincoln had ideas that could be classified as socialist.  The other side of the discussion has denied that Abraham Lincoln ever said some of the quotes that I attributed to him.

I decided to see what the web had to say about  Abraham Lincoln  – First Annual Message December 3, 1861.  I leave it up to you to figure out if the American Presidency Project at the University of California at Santa Barbara would post false information.

It is not needed nor fitting here that a general argument should be made in favor of popular institutions, but there is one point, with its connections, not so hackneyed as most others, to which I ask a brief attention. It is the effort to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above, labor in the structure of government. It is assumed that labor is available only in connection with capital; that nobody labors unless somebody else, owning capital, somehow by the use of it induces him to labor. This assumed, it is next considered whether it is best that capital shall hire laborers, and thus induce them to work by their own consent, or buy them and drive them to it without their consent. Having proceeded so far, it is naturally concluded that all laborers are either hired laborers or what we call slaves. And further, it is assumed that whoever is once a hired laborer is fixed in that condition for life.

Now there is no such relation between capital and labor as assumed, nor is there any such thing as a free man being fixed for life in the condition of a hired laborer. Both these assumptions are false, and all inferences from them are groundless.

Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights. Nor is it denied that there is, and probably always will be, a relation between labor and capital producing mutual benefits. The error is in assuming that the whole labor of community exists within that relation. A few men own capital, and that few avoid labor themselves, and with their capital hire or buy another few to labor for them. A large majority belong to neither class–neither work for others nor have others working for them. In most of the Southern States a majority of the whole people of all colors are neither slaves nor masters, while in the Northern a large majority are neither hirers nor hired. Men, with their families–wives, sons, and daughters–work for themselves on their farms, in their houses, and in their shops, taking the whole product to themselves, and asking no favors of capital on the one hand nor of hired laborers or slaves on the other. It is not forgotten that a considerable number of persons mingle their own labor with capital; that is, they labor with their own hands and also buy or hire others to labor for them; but this is only a mixed and not a distinct class. No principle stated is disturbed by the existence of this mixed class.

I found this web ad hidden away on Elizabeth Warren’s web site:

Help make this ad go viral. The 1% have the money, but the 99% have the people.

Arm yourself with some knowledge before going on the counter-attack. Make sure you see Elizabeth Warren’s explanation of how ridiculous this attack ad is. Republicans seem to know what is the worst thing they can accuse someone of doing by just accusing them of doing what the Republicans actually did and the person actually fought against.

Facebook makes it extremely difficult to share what Elizabeth Warren said about this ad on her Facebook page, so I will just have to quote it here.

I expected Wall St. to throw everything they had at me in this race; I helped found the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to curb their abuses, after all. But I never did imagine they’d fund an ad attacking me as being their own ally. Watch me discuss the irony of their latest attack on Lawrence O’Donnell last night. What do you think?

Simon Johnson has written about Karl Rove’s Latest Attack on Elizabeth Warren.

Ms. Warren became chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel (COP) for TARP, precisely because people in Congress – on both sides of the aisle – trusted her to provide an honest and professional check on the support provided to financial firms.  She did her highest profile work during the Obama administration, bringing relentless pressure on the Treasury and other agencies who just wanted to prop up big firms without any conditions.

What Elizabeth Warren did was “bringing relentless pressure on the Treasury and other agencies who just wanted to prop up big firms without any conditions”  yet “the ad attempts to blame Ms. Warren for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and for bank bailouts.”

When Rove can accuse her of being for something that she fought against tooth and nail, this is something that all the people who know the truth must shout down as loudly as they can.

Remember The top 1% have the money, the other 99% have the people. Start putting in your effort to shout this down.  Use this opportunity to make it very well known what Elizabeth Warren really did.  Make sure that every one knows that the Rove ad is a lie.

Don’t sit idly by while the 1% lie about the most effective advocate of the 99% that we have ever had the chance to elect to the Senate.  If you fall for this lie or don’t help save other people from the lie, how will you look yourself in the mirror?

I’ll try to keep track of some of the items I find on the web that refute the ad.

Ad Twists Elizabeth Warren’s Role as TARP Watchdog – ABC News

What the ad doesn’t mention is that the Congressional Oversight Panel, under Warren, became known for reports that were critical of the way the Treasury Department implemented the bailout program, who received funds, and the lack of transparency.

Warren Strikes Back at Karl Rove on TARP Ad – ABC News

“I can’t find the right words to describe how wrong that is, factually wrong and morally wrong,” Warren told the Boston Herald today. ”Karl Rove is not telling the truth, and I think anyone who is not telling the truth shouldn’t be running ads in this race.”

Elizabeth Warren slaps down Karl Rove, latest attack ad – BostonHerald.com

The poll found that her unfavorable ratings rose by 9 percent due to attack ads.

Brian McGrory: Political mudslinging: A reason to change the channel – The Boston Globe

The latest television attack ad against Elizabeth Warren, a spot funded by an outside group that is so unapologetically cynical, so full of absurd distortions, that it should stand apart from everything else going on these days. Problem is, it fits right in.

Elizabeth Warren blasts ‘ridiculous’ charge in ad by Karl Rove group – The Los Angeles Times

Amazingly enough I had to find out about this rebuttal ad from The Los Angeles Times

Winning the argument – The Washington Post

The ad also alleges — as a negative — that Warren went on a “charm offensive” with Wall Street fat cats. That’s a reference to a Politico article on a U.S. Chamber of Commerce event, where Warren sought common ground with top business figures at a moment when they were furious with her.

Elizabeth Warren versus Karl Rove and the one percent – The Washington Post

But Warren seems determined to hit back hard, and to seize on these attacks to reframe the race on her own terms — as her versus Wall Street and its crew of political henchmen and errand boys.

Super PAC Crossroads GPS takes swipe at Elizabeth Warren’s response to latest ad – Masslive.com

In an interview with the Boston Herald, Warren said that Rove along with then President George Bush helped craft the Troubled Asset Relief Program from the beginning, a claim the PAC disputes.

“Professor Warren’s response shows how asleep at the switch she was when the Democrat-led Congress passed the Wall Street bailouts in 2008 and 2009 and put her in charge of overseeing them – more than a year after Karl Rove had left the White House,” Steven Law, president and CEO of Crossroads GPS, said in a statement.

The Democratic led Congress was stampeded by Bush’s Treasury Secretary Henry Paulsen a former CEO of Goldman Sachs into passing an emergency measure to prevent global financial collapse. Maybe Karl somehow forgot this.

Rove’s Hit Job for Scott Brown: The Year’s Most Ridiculous Attack Ad – Huffington Post

Karl Rove is spending a lot of money trying to help his close friend Sen. Scott Brown, but his ads just aren’t passing the laugh test. Just last week, an ad from Rove’s Crossroads GPS was saying Elizabeth Warren was too radical because she was so close …

Crossroads: Elizabeth Warren responsible for bank bailouts – CBS News

In a 2009 interview with the Daily Beast, Warren emphasized her opposition to allowing banks to get “too big to fail.”

“There are a lot of ways to regulate ‘too big to fail’ financial institutions: break them up, regulate them more closely, tax them more aggressively, insure them, and so on. And I’m totally in favor of increased regulatory scrutiny of these banks,” she began. “But those are all regulatory tools. Regulations, over time, fail. I want to see Congress focus more on a credible system for liquidating the banks that are considered too big to fail.”

Of the “charm offensive,” the Crossroads GPS ad points to a March 2011 Politico article describing Warren’s efforts to find “common ground” with the Chamber of Commerce and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), a consumer watchdog agency created with the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform bill. Warren, who conceived of the CFPB and had at one point hoped to head it, reached out to a number of CFPB critics in an attempt to win over the opposition.

Still, she did not apologize for her pro-regulatory stance.

Elizabeth Warren and Sen. Scott Brown both denounce latest Crossroads GPS ad – MassLive.com

Democratic Senate hopeful Elizabeth Warren and rival Republican Sen. Scott Brown‘s campaign have both denounced the latest negative ad released by the Karl Rove backed Crossroads GPS political action committee, although Brown added a barb for the Harvard professor.

“Senator Brown has made it clear that he wishes third-party groups on both sides would keep their negative ads out of Massachusetts,” said Jim Barnett, Brown’s campaign manager. “Regrettably, Professor Warren has cheered on negative attack ads against Scott Brown, and refuses to join his call for outside groups to stop interfering.”

Warren said previously that she believes “a blanket notion that nobody talks except the two candidates is not within the spirit of how democratic elections work.”

Brown, however, called for all outside groups to keep out of the Senate race in Massachusetts.

Elizabeth Warren, Wall Street Shill – Mother Jones

I see that Karl Rove’s PAC unveiled a preposterously deceptive ad yesterday claiming that Elizabeth Warren is unfit for the Senate because she’s….wait for it….too close to Wall Street. Yes, you read that right. Here on Earth Prime, of course, Warren is perhaps one of the financial industry’s most loathed figures. Saying she’s too close to Wall Street is sort of like saying Ralph Nader is too close to General Motors because, you know, he spent a whole year researching a book about the car industry.

Karl Rove Super PAC: Elizabeth Warren Is A Class Warrior AND She’s Too Cozy With Wall Street – Business Insider

Conservatives know that they don’t like Elizabeth Warren, but they can’t seem to decide why.

After weeks of slamming the Democratic Massachusetts Senate candidate as a radical class warrior, Republicans are trying a new line of attack. Crossroads GPS, the Karl Rove-funded super PAC, is out with a new ad this week that slams Warren for abandoning the middle class to get cozy with big banks.