The Think Progress article Debunking The Right-Wing Meme That The Obama Administration Is Anti-Business  sums up the video thusly:

To sum up: In 2010, corporate profits hit an all-time high of $1.37 trillion, business spending increased at least 13 percent between 2009 and 2010, and businesses have been sitting on $2 trillion in cash reserves. Meanwhile, the stock market has performed spectacularly. Indeed, corporate and financial sector profits seem to be the only portions of the economy enjoying a significant recovery from the collapse, as employment, job growth, and housing continue to severely under-perform. As economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman pithily observed in January, this seems to be nothing more than a “Ma, he’s looking at me funny!” complaint over the president’s rhetoric and style.

The PBS television show Nightly Business Report is completely infected with this meme. They frequently predict the downturn of the stock market if the Democrats gain power despite all historical evidence to the contrary. This is why I watch the show to find out what happened in the world of finance, but I ignore their explanations of why it happened or predictions of what will happen in the future. For the last two parts of their content, they usually haven’t got a clue and wouldn’t know where to find one even if they cared.

I couldn’t have explained it better.

Just to make sure that you know the Republicans in Congress can keep us occupied with other stuff besides the economy, I found the article Franken rebukes marriage inequality: Straight people won’t suddenly ‘become gay’.

The catch phrase doesn’t really play that important a part of the video below:

The Washington Post has published the opinion piece What caused the financial crisis? The Big Lie goes viral.

Wall Street has its own version: Its Big Lie is that banks and investment houses are merely victims of the crash. You see, the entire boom and bust was caused by misguided government policies. It was not irresponsible lending or derivative or excess leverage or misguided compensation packages, but rather long-standing housing policies that were at fault.

Indeed, the arguments these folks make fail to withstand even casual scrutiny. But that has not stopped people who should know better from repeating them.

Here are just a few of the eleven causes mentioned in the article:

Derivatives had become a uniquely unregulated financial instrument. They are exempt from all oversight, counter-party disclosure, exchange listing requirements, state insurance supervision and, most important, reserve requirements. This allowed AIG to write $3 trillion in derivatives while reserving precisely zero dollars against future claims.

The Securities and Exchange Commission changed the leverage rules for just five Wall Street banks in 2004. The “Bear Stearns exemption” replaced the 1977 net capitalization rule’s 12-to-1 leverage limit. In its place, it allowed unlimited leverage for Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns. These banks ramped leverage to 20-, 30-, even 40-to-1. Extreme leverage leaves very little room for error.

Many states had anti-predatory lending laws on their books (along with lower defaults and foreclosure rates). In 2004, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency federally preempted state laws regulating mortgage credit and national banks. Following this change, national lenders sold increasingly risky loan products in those states. Shortly after, their default and foreclosure rates skyrocketed.

“Yes We Can Make Wall Street Pay” by Julie Matthaeu & Michael Hughes

Here are the links mentioned in the video above.

• www.MakeWallStreetPay.org
• Petition: Yes we can make Wall Street Pay at Change.org
• The U.S. Solidarity Economy Network (SEN) | Supporting & connecting the emerging U.S. solidarity economy movement at www.ussen.org
• Transformation Central at www.transformationcentral.org – This is a space for all dreamers who are working on economic, social, and environmental changes.

Here is the version for Occupy Wall Street

I suppose this is an example of what the top 1% consider to be student violence against the police. You watch the video and see if you can detect who is being violent and who is just asking the police to “Stop hitting students.”

Here is the ad that Karl Rove has created.

Since I urged Elizabeth Warren to acknowledge the Occupy movement (see previous post Elizabeth Warren: Markets Need to Be Regulated), I felt I needed to contribute to her effort to combat this inevitable type of ad.

I had warned her that giving any support to the Occupy movement would bring on these kinds of attacks. Now that she has committed herself, I can hardly wait to see how she counters this kind of attack.

One tack I might take in response, is to repeat the parts of the attack ad that showed the agreement with Warren’s claim that I created much of the intellectual foundation for what they do… and the ending question Intellectual foundation for what? She could step in and say, Well, I am so glad you asked. I did the basic research and wrote books and made speeches documenting how the ultra-rich rewrote the rules of economic activity over the last 30 years to create a radical redistribution of wealth to the top 1% of the wealthy. Armed with that knowledge, the Occupy movement is asking for their money back.

Robert Reich presents his version of The Corporate Pledge Of Allegiance.

But, hey, if the Supreme Court and regressive Republicans insist big corporations are people and want to treat them as American citizens, then why not demand big corporations take a pledge of allegiance to the United States?

I think that we are all missing a detail.  The Supreme Court decided that corporations are people.  Did they decide that they are American citizens?

Maybe we should have rules on how a corporation earns U.S. citizenship.  Do they get automatic citizenship if they are born in this country?  If they are not U.S. citizens, are they banned from influencing our elections?  If they are not citizens but lobby our government, do they have to register as foreign agents?

The Supreme Court may rue the day they based their opinion on a silly syllogism.

WikiPedia has an explanation of syllogisms.

A syllogism  is a kind of logical argument in which one proposition (the conclusion) is inferred from two or more others (the premises) of a certain form.

…

The vast majority of the 256 possible forms of syllogism are invalid (the conclusion does not follow logically from the premises).

I leave it up to the reader to figure out exactly what kind of syllogism the Supreme Court used and to determine if it is one of the 24 valid ones.

Greg Palast Tracks the Predatory Vultures of the 1%: A Truthout Interview is with the author of the new book “Vultures’ Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates, and High-Finance Carnivores”

The interview has little gems like:

US media, Murdoch’d and bought, locks me out. But it’s not about me: it’s that they ignore and bury the facts that I uncover. Did Anderson Cooper tell you that BP had a blow-out, nearly identical to the one in the Gulf two years earlier in the Caspian Sea? Of course not, that would require him reporting the news instead of repeating the news.

and this one:

I mention that my Uncle Max, a mobster who competed with Capone (and lost) used to say, “The perfect crime is the one that’s legal.” I got my hands on the private emails of Timmy Geithner to Larry Summers, several confidential documents from inside the IMF [International Monetary Fund] and World Trade Organization and these things smoke. It’s the secret program for kicking the crap out of any national government (Brazil is their main target) that dares to stand in the way of the banks-turned casinos.

As a result of a conversation with  reader RichardH,  I did some web research on Norway’s economy.

I found a number of interesting articles of various vintages.  Below, I provide links to the articles and some snippets from them.

In a way, situations like Norway’s gives us a glimpse at how the issue in my previous post, Imagine – Total Automation could be resolved to most people’s benefit. When the amount of wealth generated by the economy far exceeds the work needed to generate it, the fruits of that wealth can be distributed to the citizens by making essential services to be free.  This thought is exemplified by the snippet from the last article below.

To many in this country, the thought of the government owning such a large share of private enterprise through the investments by its sovereign wealth funds would seem like Socialism. Well, yes, that is exactly what it would be.

Imagine if we considered the Social Security Trust Fund to be our sovereign wealth fund. We could get started toward an economy like Norway’s tomorrow.

How To Avoid The Oil Curse – NPR story broadcast by WBUR – September 6, 2011

So, that’s Norway’s secret: At every step of the way, do the opposite of basic human nature.

Tell powerful oil companies, you can’t get the oil right away. Tell taxpayers, you won’t get the money from the oil right away. And tell campaigning politicians, you know that half a trillion dollars we have just sitting there in our oil fund? You’re not allowed to talk about it.

Norway’s sovereign wealth fund: £259bn and growing – September 20, 2009

Created in 1990, the Norwegian Government Pension Fund is the world’s third-largest sovereign wealth fund, after the funds of Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia, according to the California-based Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute (this ranking, however, appears flexible: a 2007 UBS report puts the Norway fund in second place).

Commonly known as the oil fund, it invests the country’s oil and gas income in stocks and bonds to save for future generations, when the hydrocarbons run out. Investments are made abroad to avoid overheating the economy.

Outside of crisis times, only 4% of the fund, the estimated long-term rate of return, is used in the state’s national budget. The government made an exception this year, tapping into the oil fund to finance a package worth nearly 5% of gross domestic product to boost the economy.

The oil fund has become one of the most important issues of political debate in Norway. Although most parties agree to the 4% rule, the largest party in opposition, the populist Progress party, wants to spend more of the oil money for research and building infrastructure.

Norway wonders what to do with its oil wealth –  September 6, 2010 – I don’t think they wonder.  They seem to know.

Norway was one of Europe’s poorest countries when oil was discovered off its coast 40 years ago. Now its citizens are considered the wealthiest in the world according to the UN Human Development Index.
…

For the past 15 years, the profits from oil have been paid into two sovereign wealth funds. Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global invests in stocks and bonds around the world. It’s now worth over 500 billion euros.

As the leader of Norway’s second largest political party, Siv Jensen is not alone in her belief that more of the country’s oil wealth should be invested at home. But Norway already has the highest wages in the world and ranks second after Japan for high cost of living. Pumping oil wealth into infrastructure projects would lead to sky-high inflation making Norway uncompetitive on the world market.

Norway: Lighting up Europe – November 2009

At the same time, the country is still in the process of liberalizing and consolidating the banking and financial services sectors. Despite the advantages that oil has provided Norway, the precious resource also remains one of the biggest stumbling blocks on Norway’s path to becoming a diversified economy. Norway is working to achieving that balance by developing a well-rounded technological industry. On the positive side, the country’s healthcare system is considered to be one of the best in the world and education is free.