In a local newspaper I was reading the article In Roxbury, Romney hits Obama’s business message.

In the first 3 column inches of the printed story we read,

Mitt Romney on a visit to a Roxbury truck company Thursday slammed President Obama for suggesting profitable businesses owe their success to government.

Flanked by denim-clad workers in a garage bay at Middlesex Truck & Coach, Romney praised company owner Brian Maloney and his family, asserting “they did build this business.”

Romney’s brief address was a direct assault on a remark Obama made during a campaign event in Virginia last Friday. “If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that,” the president said. “Somebody else made that happen.”

20½ column inches later in the story, we read the following:

In Virginia, Obama’s blunt “you didn’t build that” was accompanied by, “There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive.”

As in all reputable newspapers, lies come first, truth comes later.

The story also points out about the founder of the business where Romney spoke:

In fact, the city and federal governments appear to have played at least some role in Middlesex Truck & Coach’s early growth.

Maloney founded his company as an auto body shop in Cambridge in 1966, while pursuing an MBA at Boston College. In the late 1970s, according to a 1986 Globe profile of the business, “he approached Boston city officials because a preferential bank loan was possible if his firm relocated to the Crosstown Industrial Park,” where Middlesex Truck & Coach remains to this day.

In its first year at the new location, Maloney’s company accepted a $560,000 federal government contract to overhaul 10 buses. Within a half-decade of the move, Maloney reported, his company had quintupled its annual revenue.

If it weren’t for the fact that I know Romney is just spouting political rhetoric, I would think that Romney suffered from terminal stupidity in pretending not to understand the meaning of what President Obama was saying.

In context, Democrats argue, Obama and Warren were simply noting that successful Americans have benefited from public investments — the roads that make delivery of goods possible, the schools that educate workers, the police and fire services that keep plants safe.

If Romney really doesn’t understand the role that government plays, then he should not take a position in government, should he?

Here is the third installment of what will be at least a four part series. The first two parts are in my previous post The Hunger Games Economy.

This multi-part interview from The Real News finally puts together in one place the picture of the American future that I have been talking about for the last 32 years. This goes beyond what Elizabeth Warren has talked about.

The main point of this installment is:

Obama understands what needs to be done but like the Republicans, he responds to the needs of big money.

Jeff Faux gives his main reason for voting for Obama instead of Romney in the upcoming election. It amounts to “at least Obama won’t be a complete disaster.”

The Business Week article Iran denies link to attack on Israelis in Bulgaria gives me a chance to comment on the recent propaganda attack on Iran from the United States government as well as Israel. From the article comes the snippet:

Iran on Thursday denied it was involved in a suicide attack against Israeli tourists in Bulgaria that killed at least seven people.

There have also been a spate of reports of interception of Iranian plots based in many other countries around the world.

Until proven otherwise, I will take these as efforts by our own government to spread disinformation to our own people, in contravention to the law.

However, let us suppose for a moment that Iran were plotting strikes against the United States and its allies.  Would this be surprising?  We are trying to strangle Iran economically until they concede to our demands to stop developing nuclear weapons that they may not even be developing.  They keep telling us they are not, as Iraq kept telling us before we went to war with Iraq and discovered that Iraq had been telling the truth all along.

If you were a country that was being strangled by a foreign enemy with an arsenal that dwarfs the rest of the world put together, you might just give in to their demands.  If you wanted to resist, you’d know that a conventional military resistance would be suicidal.  The only avenue left to hurt your enemy would be guerrilla attacks (the enemy will call them terrorist attacks).

Given the history of the United States overturning your democratically elected government and installing the tyrannical Shah of Iran, might you be more likely to fight than give in?

What must the directors of U.S. foreign policy be thinking?  Do they think that Iran will eventually cave and that Iran can make no other response?  Do they think that threats and coercion are the best way to get results? Does the present political climate in the U.S. make it impossible for even (or maybe especially) a Democratic administration to think upon diplomacy instead of actions leading to war?

With the war in Afghanistan looking like it might wind down, are we looking for other avenues to keep the military/industrial complex in full swing?  Maybe we can engage in a minor skirmish in Syria until we have ripened the situation in Iran.  After that we have North Korea, and if we  play our cards just right, we can go to war with Pakistan.  Maybe in between some of these other fights, we can work Venezuela into our schedule.

Is the American voters’ hunger for war insatiable, or will the people finally stand up and say “Enough!”

This multi-part interview from The Real News finally puts together in one place the picture of the American future that I have been talking about for the last 32 years. This goes beyond what Elizabeth Warren has talked about.

Below are the videos from the two parts that have been published so far. Watch the link above to gain access to the other parts of the interview as they are posted.

Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren spoke at the John F Kennedy Presidential Library Forum to mark the one year anniversary of the opening of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

If you are concerned about your debt load, you need to listen to this speech. You may not really understand how you got helped to fall into untenable debt, but Elizabeth Warren has some eye opening information for you.

She also talks about what her Consumer Finance Protection Bureau is doing for you. You might also be glad to hear that organized people can make progress against the big money interests, and Elizabeth Warren tells you how.

Politico has the article The Democrats play hardball.

Obama told Democratic leaders he would refuse to entertain any talk about separating $550 billion in defense cuts from the overall $1.2 trillion in across-the-board spending reductions set by law to kick in next year — despite repeated demands from GOP leaders and the Pentagon to do so. The president reiterated there will be no compromising on extending Bush-era tax breaks for U.S. families that earn more than $250,000 annually.
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Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley said Democrats should “stick to our guns” and not buckle on the tax issue.

Andrews added: “If [Republicans] want to explain to their base why they permitted a $3 trillion income tax increase and a $500 billion defense cut, let them do it.”

But with so much at stake, some Democrats think their leadership — along with Republicans — will be forced to give in ahead of the year-end fiscal cliff given the risks to the U.S. economy.

“As we get closer,” said Senate Budget Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), “I think pressure is going to build.”

As Democrats across the nation sing out in unison, “it’s about time.”  Almost unison, anyway.  Perhaps Kent Conrad can be taken to the woodshed for a special delivery of the message. Maybe if he knew that the future of the Democratic party and this country rests on his sticking to the plan, he might find the courage to keep his mouth shut when appropriate.  When the Republicans are looking for the crack in the Democratic wall, there is no sense in holding up a red cape, and shouting “Toro, Toro.”  Don’t you just love those mixed metaphors?

For those of you who are too frightened of smart people to want one to be your Senator, please stop reading now.

Thank you for not reading the rest of this article. (I hope that when you seek out medical advice, you don’t hold the same prejudice.  All though there are many people that I know who are this consistent.)

For those of you still reading, I presume you won’t hold the following information against Elizabeth Warren.

On the way home from the Elizabeth Warren Ice Cream Social, one of the people in my car pool, MariaT, wondered if Elizabeth Warren had a PhD, since she was a professor at Harvard.
I thought she might have the equivalent of a PhD in the law profession which I figured was something called a J.D. (Juris Doctor).  After a little research, I found out what degree she has and what it might mean.

From her Curriculum Vitae or CV posted at Harvard, I found that she has a J.D. Rutgers School of Law, Newark, 1976

From Wikipedia,I found out some information about a Juris Doctor curriculum.

Standard Juris Doctor curriculum

See also: Law school in the United States#Curriculum

As stated by James Hall and Christopher Langdell, two people who were involved in the creation of the J.D., the J.D. is a professional degree like the M.D., intended to prepare practitioners through a scientific approach of analysing and teaching the law through logic and adversarial analysis (such as the Casebook and Socratic methods).^[87] It has existed as described in the United States for over 100 years, and can therefore be termed the standard or traditional J.D. program. The J.D. program requires a bachelors degree for entry. The program of study for the degree has remained substantially unchanged since its creation, and is an intensive study of the substantive law and its professional applications (and therefore requires no thesis, although a lengthy writing project is sometimes required^[88]). As a professional training, it provides sufficient training for entry into practice (no apprenticeship is necessary to sit for the bar exam). It requires at least three academic years of full time study. Strictly defined, the United States is the only jurisdiction with this form of a J.D., but the University of Tokyo (in Japan) and the University of Melbourne (in Australia) are attempting to follow this model closely. While the J.D. is considered a doctorate degree, lawyers usually use the suffix of “esquire” as opposed to the prefix “doctor.” Although calling a lawyer “doctor” would not be incorrect, it is more commonly employed overseas than in the U.S.

I leave it to you to decide what this all means for your desire to see Elizabeth Warren as a Senator from Massachusetts.  For me, it only reinforces what I already knew about Warren – that I want her for my Senator.

Anybody who knows me well enough will hear the alarm bells going off at the mention of the Socratic method.  If the Socratic method is anything like what I read in Plato’s Republic, then I fully understand what is wrong with the current Supreme Court majority, and I hope that Elizabeth Warren is smart enough to know the pitfalls and fallacies involved in the Socratic method.  The Supreme court is frequently using logic based on syllogisms resulting in conclusions like “Corporations are people.” Well, actually, I just did some research to find out that what I am really upset with is a sorites.

A sorites  is a form of argument in which a series of incomplete syllogisms is so arranged that the predicate of each premise forms the subject of the next until the subject of the first is joined with the predicate of the last in the conclusion. For example, if one argues that a given number of grains of sand does not make a heap and that an additional grain does not either, then to conclude that no additional amount of sand will make a heap is to construct a sorites argument.

I suppose the next logical conclusion from the sorites above is that there is no such thing as a heap of sand.  And by further extension it would be easy to conclude that there is no such thing as a heap of anything.  How far does this argument have to go to say, “I cannot accept this conclusion as making any sense, so whether or not I can figure out what it is, I know that there is something wrong with your argument?”

This dislike of Supreme Court Justices when they use these kinds of arguments is not because they are too smart.  It is because they are not smart enough (or at least don’t think we are smart enough to see through them).

The Times of India has the story Chavez: Venezuela is no threat, Obama is a ‘good guy’.

There was a window to improve ties between Caracas and Washington after Obama took office in 2009 and promised more engagement with foes. Chavez toned down his tirades against the “Yankee empire” and shook hands with Obama at a summit.

But within months, Chavez said the U.S. leader was disillusioning the world by following his predecessor George W. Bush’s foreign policies, and he cranked up his rhetoric again.

On Friday, Chavez said Obama’s troubles began with that handshake. “They fell on him: saying he’s a socialist, a communist. … The personal war against Obama started, including looking for a way to get him out of office by any means.”

In my previous post Romney Wants A War With Hugo Chavez, I quoted an “expert” who was downplaying the threat posed by Chavez.

Experts in the region, though, called Obama’s comments reasonable. Chavez is “certifiable,” with a tremendous ego fueled by the power that comes from sitting on vast oil reserves – but he’s not as dangerous as the leaders of other less friendly regimes, said Riordan Roett, the director of Latin American Studies Program at the School of Advanced International Studies at The John Hopkins University.

In response to that statement, I noted:

Even the experts go overboard when they try to seem reasonable in comparison to the Republicans.  Unless this expert means that Chavez is certifiably correct in his assessment of the United States.

In the story noted in this blog post we have Chavez being more honest and candid about U.S. politics than Mitt Romney.  You have to wonder who is actually “certifiable”, or what the meaning of “certifiable” really is.

As for Chavez’s remark that Obama was “was disillusioning the world by following his predecessor George W. Bush’s foreign policies”, at the time he made those remarks he was exactly correct as far as identifying my disillusionment.

Here is a little light entertainment for your weekend.

While I am at it, I suppose I might as well include this cartoon sent to me by RichardH.

There is a lengthy description and praise for the book in the article America Beyond Capitalism: An “Evolutionary Reconstruction” of the System Is Necessary and Possible .

This is the first chapter in an exclusive Truthout series from political economist and author Gar Alperovitz. We will be publishing weekly installments of the new edition of “America Beyond Capitalism,” a visionary book, first published in 2005, whose time has come.

I guess it should not have come as a surprise that this article should praise the book’s foresight so much.  This article is written by the book’s author.  Nevertheless, it does offer insights into some tantalizing ideas for an “Evolutionary Reconstruction.”

Just keep in mind that no human enterprise is without problems.  As this new structure evolves, issues will arise and solutions will need to be found.  The lessons we learned from monocropping should teach us that we always need to have several alternative methods in operation so that we can adapt to changing circumstances.