In of all places, The Wall Street Journal, we find Fossil Trove Sheds Light On a Stage of Evolution. Part of what is in the article is the video below.
Don’t be surprised to see this item featured here. In this day of Republican extremists even the word evolution is political.
I must say, that I never expected this out of President Obama. Here it is 7:05 PM and there is no sign of the President.
The most important address of his Presidency and he can’t even show up on time. What a planner he is.
If he ever does show up, I am sure I will eventually hear about it.
For those of you that have as short an attention span as I do when it comes to extreme right Republicans debating, here is just a little too much of last night’s debate.
In the article Facts That Strain Personal Incredulity, Paul Krugman states:
But back to my main point: if you just can’t believe I’m saying the things I say, at least consider the possibility that you’re the one who just doesn’t get it.
I have always had another way of putting it that makes the same point.
If you can’t imagine something to be true, perhaps it is a problem of your lack of imagination.
Perhaps I ought to turn this into another one of Greenberg’s Laws.
Of course, what we should really be saying is,
If you could give me a few minutes to explain, then perhaps you could imagine it.
The following tidbit from Obama Transition Team Member Explains Why Administration Chose Not to Prosecute Torture:
… if laws were enforced against Bush, Cheney, or their subordinates, the Republicans in Congress would retaliate by trying to block any useful piece of legislation.
provides an insight into Obama’s strategic thinking.
I would think that the threat of such prosecution could be used as a weapon to keep the Republicans in line. Instead, Obama thought that it could be used as a weapon against his initiatives by the potential targets of the prosecution. According to his biography, Obama decided to leave the field of community organizing to go to Harvard Law School so that he could learn where the real levers of power were. I think he wasted his money if Harvard taught him not to threaten to prosecute people because they might get angry at you.
Tonight the President explained in simple terms why we need his plan instead of the Republican plan.
He made it clear that the Republicans who really understand business know that no business executive is going to deploy the corporation’s huge amounts of spare cash when there are not enough customers to buy the goods they are already capable of producing.
So why do business oriented Republicans promote these strange policies? Having cut their operations in this country to match the size of the market in this country, large businesses are making fine profits and building huge cash reserves. Government policy of lower taxes and less regulation can certainly raise corporate profits with this low level of consumer demand. Business people don’t see much chance that something will come along to increase demand in this country, so they think they need policies that will make them more profitable in the current environment. They are also hoping demand in emerging markets, where they are making large investments, will suffice to grow their businesses. If this is how they measure the success of the economy, then it is marginally possible that their policy makes sense to them.
However, I am not President of the Corporations as People of The United States. I am President of the United States of Human Beings. I measure the success of the economy in how many people are gainfully employed compared to how many people would like to be gainfully employed. The economic policies that will make corporations richer given the anemic level of employment are not the policies that will raise the level of employment.
You don’t want a President who thinks like a corporate executive. You want a President who knows that this is a country of people who need to have jobs. Therefore, the main function of government policy in times of insufficient demand is get keep people employed. For 30 years or more this country has been under investing in maintaining our infrastructure. Infrastructure not only includes roads, bridges, power grids, water and sewer plants, and flood control. Our infrastructure also includes our educational system, the regulations to make sure the economy is being run honestly, and a tax structure that adds to the incentives for useful work instead of money manipulation schemes. The unnaturally profitable money manipulation schemes siphon off some of our best talent from solving the problems and inventing the products that our people really need.
Since this work that is the responsibility of government must eventually be done anyway, why not put a lot of emphasis on it when there is a high level of unemployment and large amounts of idle resources in plants and equipment?
Putting people to work to do this needed building and repair by contracting out the work to private industry will enlarge the size of the consumer market in this country. Eventually the corporations will join in to invest in increasing their productive capacity to meet this demand. This will create a self-sustaining job recovery. When this happens, the government can de-emphasize its own efforts at re-energizing the economy. With the reduced government spending and increasing levels of tax collection on increasing incomes and business profits, the government will be able to pay for the money it advanced to the economy to get it started again. Of course, we will also be enjoying the benefits of the investments that we made.
To cut spending on these important items of our responsibility when the cost of carrying them out is lowest makes absolutely no sense at all. Smart business people and investors, as the Republicans claim to be, know that you don’t get rich by buying high and selling low.
Surely, if the Republicans could see past their own short term interests in making the most money out of the existing situation as it is, then they would see the need to change the situation with the policies that I am recommending.
As voting members of this society, do not be fooled into accepting the dismal employment situation as it is given to you by past, so called business friendly politicians. Insist that the situation be changed for the better for all the people.
Something has to change the attitude of the “just say no” Republicans. It is clear that I cannot change their minds by myself. I need the voters to rally around the cause of fixing the economy. Make sure your elected officials know that you are watching them, and you will not be satisfied with inaction on their part. If they won’t act, start shouting your demands until they are forced to listen. I have finally come to realize that nothing less than citizen action will be able to change the minds in Washington.
The President seems to have forgotten that the first priority of his job is to educate the electorate to know why they need the policies he is recommending. He cannot succeed if he must fight the voters as well as the opposition party.
If the President spends most of his time of his speech on the laundry list of what he plans to do instead of explaining why we need these policies, then his speech will be a total failure. The smaller the list of specifics and the longer the educational part of the speech, the more likely it will be to have an effect.
If, after the speech, he runs around the country only repeating the laundry list, we will know he is doomed to failure and so is our economy.
Even worse, if the President does not even understand these reasons for the policy, then he will never be able to explain them, let alone fight for the policy.
As a business man, Romney most certainly would not invest in a new factory to make a product for which there is already an over supply, not enough customers, and many idle factories that could produce that product. Apparently he thinks we are stupid enough to think that is the way businesses are run.
It’s about time someone started attacking Romney’s insane ideas. I know his plan has been out for less than 24 hours, but the rebuttal shouldn’t be delayed 1 minute. Of course, it is my fault for waiting until Wednesday to post this item that happened last night.
The Rawstory article Robert Reich tears down Mitt Romney’s ‘job machine’ introduces the video below with this description.
University of California professor Robert Reich appeared Tuesday night on MSNBC’s The Last Word to discuss Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s job plan. The 59-point plan calls for tax cuts, cuts in the federal workforce and rollbacks in environmental, health and banking rules. Romney called his plan, “A job machine.”
Robert Reich’s call, in the video, for $500 trillion in spending this year must be a slip of the tongue. I am sure he meant $500 billion. There are reports that President Obama will call for $300 billion. He’ll be luck if the Republicans allow $100 billion, and they will insist on offsetting spending cuts. When this totally inadequate effort does not work, they will claim this proves Obama was wrong and that stimulus doesn’t work. Pretty clever ploy, huh?
This is not a dumb ploy on the Republicans’ part, because it always seems to work for them. What is dumb is Obama falling for it once more without making any effort to counter it.
Here is the letter featured in the article Angry House Dems Request Pre-Speech Meeting With Obama.
I have finally read the post Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult.
It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe. This trend has several implications, none of them pleasant.
I had seen this article on the truthout.org website for the past 3 days. I had a little trouble getting into it the first time I started reading it. When I read about it in the article A Must Read…It’s a cliche…but it’s true…, I decided to give it another try.
It’s long, but it really does lay it all out there.
The article Elizabeth Warren: America’s future depends on jobs on Raw Story has extracted some quotes from the video below.
Harvard Law School professor Elizabeth Warren suggested Monday that she was planning to run for the U.S. Senate during a speech at a breakfast held by the Greater Boston Labor Council.
“America’s future depends on jobs… but we can’t just made jobs out of thin air,” she said. “We need to build the kind of future that creates jobs, and that keeps creating them generation after generation. We need a future of growth and opportunity.”
With a little more practice on the campaign trail, I am sure Elizabeth Warren will polish her delivery style. However, I think she starts with a good set of fundamentals.
I am done predicting how people will do in office. All we can do is elect the people who appear to have all the possibilities and then hope for the best.
I do like her phrase “invest in the future” much better than Obama’s lame “win the future.”