The Real News has the story Gar Alperovitz: When it comes to banking and other critical sectors, public ownership is the only solution.
According to Gar Alperovitz, there was a time when even the most conservative economists in the Chicago School (where Milton Friedman later rose to infamy) advocated this approach.
The Elizabeth Warren campaign is holding an Ice Cream Social on Sunday, July 15.
Central MA Ice Cream Social
However, do not believe the map or the address on the above web page.
Here is where Google thinks the actual address is. We just drove by it today and it is on the left side going east on Route 20. That is because Google has the even and odd sides reversed. It also has the location a little misplaced.
View Teamsters Union Local 170 in a larger map
If you trick Google by giving it the address 361 SW Cutoff, then it will put the pin in the correct place and on the correct side of the road. If you zoom in, where Google tells you United Rentals is, that is where the Teamsters Hall really is. The Teamsters Hall is actually across the street from United Rentals. If you look at the street view and find United Rentals, then swing the view to the other side of the street, you will see the driveway entrance to the Teamsters Local Hall.
Here is the picture of the driveway entrance. In the background, the brick building is the Teamsters Hall.
The CBS web site has video and transcript for Obama: Romney not necessarily qualified to think about “economy as a whole”.
I feel like I could have written President Obama’s script. This is exactly the point I have been wanting him to make. Knowing how to run even a very large business is quite different from knowing how to run a country with an economy as large as the U.S. economy. Not only are the goals different as the President points out, but the feedback effects that national economic policies (as opposed to corporate policies) have on the economy itself are orders of magnitude larger than anything Romney has even thought about.
The Romney’s and the Republicans’ thirst for war seems never ending as evidenced in the article Romney, GOP howl over Obama’s remark about Hugo Chavez.
Republicans, led by Mitt Romney and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, pounced on President Barack Obama on Wednesday after he told a Miami TV anchor that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez does not pose a “serious” national security threat to the United States.
.
.
.
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.
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.
We tried to assassinate the guy and yet he still sent discounted heating oil to help out our citizens that we can’t even take care of ourselves. What is he trying to do, kill us with kindness? How dare he!
It used to be that the party out of power did not conduct their own foreign policy during a Presidential campaign. They recognized that such interference might damage sensitive diplomatic efforts. I guess this all ended when Ronald Reagan negotiated with the Iranians for them to hold onto our hostages until Jimmy Carter had transferred the Presidency to Reagan. By any definition, these negotiations of the Reagan camp should be called treason. Then again, Democrats don’t want to make a scene.
In a pure coincidence, after writing the above, I stumbled across the article Shamir’s October Surprise Admission.
But Shamir had a startling assessment of the larger October Surprise issue. “I know about all the efforts of the Carter administration,” he said. “And, well, I read this interesting book of Gary Sick’s,” a reference to the 1991 book, October Surprise, in which former National Security Council aide Gary Sick made the case for believing the Republicans had disrupted the hostage negotiations before the 1980 election.
With the topic raised, one interviewer asked, “What do you think? Was there an October Surprise?”
“Of course, it was,” Shamir responded without hesitation. “It was.”
Admittedly, I may be suffering from confirmation bias. There is an interesting discussion in the comment section of the article.
Truth Out has the article Can a Financial Transactions Tax Work in America? An FTT FAQ.
A financial transactions tax is a small tax on financial transactions. One long-standing form of an FTT is the local real estate transfer tax that most Americans pay when buying or selling a house.
.
.
.
Most concrete proposals for an FTT include an FTT on stocks and bonds of 0.5 percent or less of the amount traded and an FTT on foreign currencies and derivatives of 0.1 percent or less of the amount traded.
.
.
.
A well-designed FTT would discourage speculation and computer-driven high frequency trading in financial instruments. That would reduce market volatility and increase access to capital markets for ordinary borrowers and investors. Even if an FTT raised no money, it would still improve the economy.
This sounds like such a good idea that you know it doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in summer.
The talk about how the tax works in London does not seem to acknowledge what I have heard. One of Great Britain’s strongest issues with European Common Market proposals is the argument over an FTT. They claim that such a proposal is an attack on the London financial center. I’ll have to look into this.
The UK Guardian has the article Scientists attribute extreme weather to man-made climate change.
Last year’s record warm November in the UK – the second hottest since records began in 1659 – was at least 60 times more likely to happen because of climate change than owing to natural variations in the earth’s weather systems, according to the peer-reviewed studies by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the US, and the Met Office in the UK. The devastating heatwave that blighted farmers in Texas in the US last year, destroying crop yields in another record “extreme weather event”, was about 20 times more likely to have happened owing to climate change than to natural variation.
I don’t purport to have the expertise to pass judgment on this story. I am sure the story will raise controversy from the miniscule number of “authorities” who are climate change deniers. The deniers may even be right, but I wouldn’t bet the farm on it.
Well, to be perfectly honest, I’d be hesitant to bet the farm on the validity of the human caused global warming claims either. However, it would make sense to take reasonable steps to diminish human caused global warming.
July 11, 2012
The Boston Globe gave this story the headline, Not all weather woes are tied to climate change. Who says you can’t squeeze your political views into the headline of a news story?
Truth Out has Bill Moyers’ video and transcript, Bill Moyers: The Cowardly Lions of Free Speech.
Speech is already rationed in America. On your playing field, those who have no money have no speech. And just who do you think is doing this “speaking”? Hello, poor people, are you there? It’s your election, too. All 50 million of you; Hello, we can’t hear you. Better get a Super Pac and speak up!
Poor people haven’t lost their voice. They can’t afford a voice. And every day working people: universal laryngitis, the chronic absence of money. As for children – children who have a big stake in our elections but no vote – for them to be heard they would need piggy banks the size of Wal-Mart heirs. Or the Koch brothers for uncles.
Politico has the story headlined Schumer drops objection to Obama tax plan.
Pelosi announced her support in a press release Monday afternoon.
“Today, President Obama once again stood firmly with America’s middle class and small businesses,” she said. “Democrats and the President have always fought for an extension of the tax cuts for middle-income families to offer greater relief and economic certainty to all working Americans. Once again, Republicans must decide: will they continue to hold middle class tax cuts hostage to tax breaks for the wealthiest or will they agree to pass the middle class tax cuts we all agree should become law?
Obama press secretary Jay Carney was also quoted:
Carney also said a White House push could actually help to get the tax cuts through Congress despite suggestions otherwise.“What we’ve seen in the last year or so, the last 10 or 12 months, when the president makes a public case for policy that is sensible, that’s broadly supported by the American people and he continues to make that case when we see the kind of movement that initially seems unlikely in Congress and hopefully that’ll be the case here.”
And to think, it has only taken them almost 4 years to figure out that Obama has to push a policy to get it through Congress. The White House used to think that Congress would just present Obama with good legislation that he could sign.
Then we get to the Republican reaction:
Republicans weren’t buying the show of unity — or the notion that Obama wasn’t pushing a broad tax increase.
“Americans are struggling in a ‘zombie economy’ and President Obama’s only answer is to pass one of the largest tax hikes in history,” said Amanda Hennenberg, a Romney campaign spokesperson. “President Obama’s tax increases on families and job creators will create more economic uncertainty and fewer opportunities for struggling middle-class families. From Day One, Mitt Romney will take action to lower marginal rates, help middle-class Americans save and invest, and jumpstart economic growth and job creation.”
Have you had it with the so called job creators yet? They are sitting on trillions of dollars in liquid assets, but they don’t create any jobs with that money. And why should they? They can “invest” those assets in fancy financial instruments and make more money that they can in hiring people to do work for which there is no demand. And why is there no demand? Because the wealthy suck up all the money and “invest” it in financial derivatives and don’t buy anything that requires workers to produce it. They also don’t let any money trickle down to the workers so that they can buy stuff.
The only solution that will work is to extract some of those liquid assets by taxing them, and then putting those assets to work with government investments in education, research, and fixing our crumbling infrastructure. When that infrastructure crumbles into dust, it is going to have to be replaced anyway. Why not do it now when workers are begging for jobs? Would we rather that the government try to do this during times of full employment when they would have to pay top dollar to get the work done?
I saw the pointer to the ad shown below on Rachel Maddow’s web site in the article On the offensive on women’s rights.
Rachel Maddow writes:
But let’s not miss the forest for the trees. This new campaign ad hammers Romney for wanting to overturn Roe, outlaw abortions, and scrap aid to Planned Parenthood — and Obama’s re-election campaign wouldn’t put a spot like this together unless it knew the American mainstream agrees with the president’s position.
Indeed, it’s of particular interest that the spot will be airing in Virginia, a Southern state where social issues tend to cut against Democrats, but where state Republicans drew national outrage for pushing a forced-vaginal-ultrasound proposal.
It also occurred to me that maybe others on Obama’s side have been withholding donations as I have because of his weak defense of our ideals. He finally realizes that he has to excite his base if he is going to get the support he needs. Another lesson in how to avoid being taken for granted.
Truth Out has the article After Five Years: Report Card on Crisis Capitalism by Richard D Wolff. Here is a nice summary from the article:
Lets summarize: (1) capitalists decided in the 1970s to computerize and increasingly relocate production overseas; (2) that enabled them to impose wage stagnation and greatly increase surpluses and profits; (3) financial capitalists lent to consumers and built a speculative bubble based on consumer debt; (4) when rising consumer debts exceeded what stagnant wages could afford, the system crashed; (5) capitalists got trillion-dollar bailouts while lending government the money for those bailouts; and (6) now, capitalists make entire populations pay for the crisis and bailouts by directing politicians to impose austerity. This capitalist system not only fails to “deliver the goods,” it dumps ever-more-outrageous bads.
I am not ready to buy into the solutions this author poses. I guess I still have some nostalgic feelings for the good, old fashioned, mixed, capitalist society.