The Royal Treatment – Private jet.

Don’t blame me for this. RichardH made me do it.

Greg Palast’s web site has the article Fracking: New Dangers.

I haven’t posted anything from Greg Palast in a while. Here is an interview from the above article. The interview takes place in Dublin, Ireland where he is investigating and speaking about the dangers of proposed fracking in Ireland. The implications for the United States are just as frightening.

Is there a safe way to frack? Probably: but not profitably; and certainly not within the geology of a little emerald isle. I am weary of appearing at scenes of death and destruction when cement fails, pipes crack and tremors spew poisons only to hear a gas or oil company executive’s PR flack issue an apology. I doubt those apologies will sound better in Gaelic.

All that natural gas that has been found in the United States and that will make us energy independent will come at a horrendous ecological cost.

Here is the President’s speech that he gave a few moments ago at noon on August 3, 2012. There is also an article Extending Middle Class Tax Cuts for 98% of Americans and 97% of Small Businesses.

Rebuilding our economy starts with strengthening the middle class. Extending tax breaks on 98 percent of families now would give hard working Americans the security and confidence they need.

He noted something that I have been sharing ever since I saw the comment on the web. The tax cut on the first $250,000 of income is for everyone, not just the middle-class. That means you can make considerably more than $250,000 and your tax bill would still be lower than it would if we let all the Bush tax cuts expire.

The President failed to point out that tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy to invest in non-productive financial derivatives actually hurts the economy. Some of these people would be job creators during more normal times. With the middle-class under financial pressure, there is no reason for the wealthy to create jobs now. There aren’t enough customers for the people who already have jobs.

It is anticipation or the actual appearance of more customers in the economy that drives job creation. Otherwise the “job creators” just park their money in these financial derivatives until they see an uptick in the economy. It is middle-class behavior that spurs the “job creators” to create the jobs.

At the moment, it is not high taxes and it is not regulation that keeps jobs from being created. At the moment it is solely a lack of demand from the middle-class.

This is to say that at some other moment in the future, the factors that the Republicans keep harping on may be relevant. We should only be so lucky. We will never get to that happy moment when taxes and regulation are holding back the economy if we never get the economy moving in the first place. I say that will be a happy moment, because high taxes and over-regulation are problems that the Congress has the power to solve.

If you want to know more about what ALEC does, this cartoon may help.

“ALEC Rock”
Produced by Mark Fiore (http://www.markfiore.com) and the Center for Media and Democracy (http://www.prwatch.org), which is the creator of ALECexposed (http://www.alecexposed.org), and co-produced by the Alliance for a Better Utah (http://betterutah.org) to help expose ALEC.

The Orlando Business Journal has the article Obama weighs in on tax cuts, reducing deficit at Rollins College visit .

I’m not going to pay for a massive tax cut for folks who don’t need it by gutting the investments that have always kept us at the forefront and have always kept our middle class strong.”

I like this way of stating the consequences of giving tax cuts to people who do not need them and who won’t put them to work stimulating the economy.  It wouldn’t hurt to emphasize my second point.  Besides the issue of fairness, it just would not be good for the economy to keep taxes low on the top 2% so that they can invest the money in non-productive financial derivatives.

The bottom 98% will spend a larger fraction of their tax cut on consumption which will spur job growth to meet the demand of this increased consumption.  To get an even larger fraction of the money into economic stimulus would require direct government spending.  This better path to economic recovery has gone through such an onslaught of negative propaganda, that maybe the President thinks it would be too tough a sell in this election year.

The Real News has a multi-part series called What a Single Payer Health Insurance Plan Looks Like. I will post the two videos that are available right now.  You can check the above link for more parts as they become available.

Part 1: What a Single Payer Health Insurance Plan Looks Like

The above video explains why the insurance companies make more profit if they drive some customers away. Once you think about the explanation, you realize that it is something you already knew, but may not have thought about it quite so vividly.

Part 2: What a Single Payer Health Insurance Plan Looks Like

The New York Times has the op-ed piece Mitt Romney’s Search for Simple Answers written by Jared Diamond. Jared Diamond wrote the book Guns, Germs and Steel, … which Romney used to justify his racist comments about Palestinians, Mexicans, and others.

MITT ROMNEY’S latest controversial remark, about the role of culture in explaining why some countries are rich and powerful while others are poor and weak, has attracted much comment. I was especially interested in his remark because he misrepresented my views and, in contrasting them with another scholar’s arguments, oversimplified the issue.

It is not true that my book “Guns, Germs and Steel,” as Mr. Romney described it in a speech in Jerusalem, “basically says the physical characteristics of the land account for the differences in the success of the people that live there. There is iron ore on the land and so forth.”
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That’s not the worst part. Even scholars who emphasize social rather than geographic explanations – like the Harvard economist David S. Landes, whose book “The Wealth and Poverty of Nations” was mentioned favorably by Mr. Romney – would find Mr. Romney’s statement that “culture makes all the difference” dangerously out of date. In fact, Mr. Landes analyzed multiple factors (including climate) in explaining why the industrial revolution first occurred in Europe and not elsewhere.
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Mitt Romney may become our next president. Will he continue to espouse one-factor explanations for multicausal problems, and fail to understand history and the modern world? If so, he will preside over a declining nation squandering its advantages of location and history.

If Romney would look at Mexico’s history of concentration of wealth in the hands of a small number of land owners, he might realize that he wants to take the United States down the exact path that is part of the explanation for Mexico’s poor economic situation compared to the United States.

In case you didn’t know about this change, here is a flyer to inform you.

This is from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart – Democalypse 2012 – National Geogaffe-ic – Romney Abroad.

Video Link in case the above video does not play.

I guess I am not the only Jew who can see ridiculous anti-Palestinian prejudice when I see it.

I couldn’t help pass this one on as suggested by RichardH. In the article That’s Mitticulous!, Matt Miller coins a term that is sure to go viral almost instantaneously.

Mitticulous means that what Romney does is thoroughly ridiculous yet in its own way very precise — that is to say, Romney is literally “meticulous” in his inanity.

If the media could take a doctored film clip and replay it repeatedly to prove that Howard Dean was an angry man, surely we can use this new word over and over again to show what Mitt Romney really is.