Reader RichardH pointed me to The New York Times blog story, Newt’s Shop of Horrors.

Speaking of Newt Gingrich’s relationship to the Citizens Untied Supreme Court decision that visited all these horrors upon Newt, the article said:

Earlier, he’d sent out a video plea, saying, “Please join Citizens United and me in our fight for the First Amendment rights of every American.”

Yes, because every lone citizen’s voice is roughly equal to, say, the $3 million or so in negative advertising spent in Iowa to crush Gingrich. Those citizens who worked at corporations, or founded super PACs, were somehow denied their First Amendment rights, in the reasoning of the court and Gingrich. Money is speech, one and the same, in their world.

If Gingrich had any guts, or lasting principles, he would now sound alarms about the absurdity of a court decision equating the Norman Rockwell citizen standing at town hall to the anonymous millions that can kill a candidate in less than month. In Gingrich’s case, he fell 20 points in 20 days.

As I have pointed out before:

The logic behind corporations being people is based on a syllogism. If the Supreme Court and other Courts knew anything about logic, (gee should justice have anything to do with logic), they would be very wary of reasoning from a syllogism. It is fraught with the ease of coming to faulty conclusions

Here are some definitions of syllogism from the Free Dictionary:

Syllogism:

1. Logic, A form of deductive reasoning consisting of a major premise, a minor premise, and a conclusion; for example, All humans are mortal, the major premise, I am a human, the minor premise, therefore, I am mortal, the conclusion.

2. Reasoning from the general to the specific; deduction.

3. A subtle or specious piece of reasoning.

Perhaps the questioning of prospective judges, especially Supreme Court Justices, should always include the question, “Do you know what a syllogism is, and do you understand its pitfalls?”

By the way, definition 1 above uses an example syllogism that leads to a correct conclusion.

In The Philosophy of Socrates: Syllogisms, the authoer says:

At the simplest level, the syllogism consists of a deductive process involving two declarative statements and a conclusion. Three simple terms are used and these are combined with each other in the form AB, BC, therefore BC (or negative terms might be used). For example: all apples are fruit; no apples are vegetables, therefore no fruit is a vegetable. The conclusion cannot be challenged without contradicting one or both of the premises. This is the basis of much logical deduction up to the present day.

How about the statement that not all fruits are apples?  There may be a fruit that is also a vegetable.  All we know from the statements presented is that it won’t be an apple.

The article about Socrates goes on to say:

Socrates, however, used the syllogistic process in a somewhat different way. Indeed, his approach was one that caused many of his enemies or at least indifferent observers to label him as ‘sly’

Calling Socrates sly in a freshman college paper got me a D on that paper.  The professor did not understand the down side of syllogisms.  This was in a Humanities course at MIT.  I doubt I would have run into that problem if the course had been given in the Math department.

See my previous post The Corporate Pledge Of Allegiance for another discussion of  the Citizens United decision and syllogisms.

On her Facebook page, Tangelia Sinclair-Moore posted a link to the Psychology Today article Colorblind Ideology is a Form of Racism.

Racism? Strong words, yes, but let’s look the issue straight in its partially unseeing eye. In a colorblind society, White people, who are unlikely to experience disadvantages due to race, can effectively ignore racism in American life, justify the current social order, and feel more comfortable with their relatively privileged standing in society (Fryberg, 2010). Most minorities, however, who regularly encounter difficulties due to race, experience colorblind ideologies quite differently. Colorblindness creates a society that denies their negative racial experiences, rejects their cultural heritage, and invalidates their unique perspectives.
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The alternative to colorblindness is multiculturalism, an ideology that acknowledges, highlights, and celebrates ethnoracial differences. It recognizes that each tradition has something valuable to offer. It is not afraid to see how others have suffered as a result of racial conflict or differences.

We can see the same psychology today in a non-racial situation.  The bankers who made a fortune pushing mortgage traps on the unsuspecting and then taking their houses from them when the trap sprung, have a similar feeling today.

I can just hear the banker explaining the situation to the victim or the lawyer that the victim brings.

So what, you are homeless, I am going to be blind to your situation and treat you like everyone else.  I expect you to keep your promise to pay back the mortgage in full even though I did not keep my promise that when the phoney teaser rate ran out, you could just refinance your mortgage.  Was I supposed to tell you about the danger of accepting the deal that I was telling you was so good for you?  No hard feelings, but you did sign your name to this promise and I was smart enough to not put my promise to you in writing.  Is it my fault I had 20 years experience in the banking business and this was the first house you ever bought?  You should have done your 20 years of homework before you bought.

I bet that same banker would be irate if he found out that a shady mechanic bamboozled him to pay far more than he needed to to get his car fixed.  This might be the mechanic’s answer.

It’s not my fault that the banker knew nothing about mechanics.  Why didn’t the banker take a professional level course in auto mechanics before getting his car fixed?

If you didn’t catch Marisa DeFranco’s appearance on the WGBH show Greater Boston, I have the video clip here.

You can access the DeFranco web site at www.marisadefranco.com and her Facebook page at www.facebook.com/DeFrancoForSenate. You can also follow her on twitter at twitter.com/#!/marisadefranco.

Not only do I like the message that she has about what her campaign is all about, but I also like the fact that she is not afraid to deliver it. She manages to explain, in the short amount of time that she is given, what she believes needs to be done and why it will work.

With her you know where she stands. She also explains the factors you may not have known that explain why her plan will work. The opposition will of course try to convince you of something else, but at least you have something to hang your hat on when you try to think whether or not DeFranco or her opposition is more likely to be right.

On this blog, I tend to focus on economic theory and sometimes try to make everyday analogies to explain what all that means. Marisa DeFranco has a way of just cutting to the chase and giving you what you need to know. That is why she is running, and I am not. (Of course there are many other reasons, too.)

From CNN comes this video:

Somehow she fails to mention that only about 6% of the Republican voters in Iowa took to her message. Well, she is true to her Bush heritage, never, ever admit you made a mistake.

This result would be comforting were it not for the fact that there are a slew of Republican contenders remaining that are almost as far off their rocker as she is.

In this video Bachmann says:

Our country is in very serious trouble and that this might be the last election to turn the nation around before we go down the road to socialism… President Obama and his socialist policies must be stopped … and I sought the nomination of the party of Reagan the party of Lincoln

I wonder how aware Bachmann is of Abraham Lincoln’s First State Of The Union Address in which he said:

Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights. Nor is it denied that there is, and probably always will be, a relation between labor and capital producing mutual benefits.

Sounds almost Socialist to me. I wonder if Reagan knew about Lincoln’s feelings when he fired the air traffic controllers. Of course, back in those days, the Republican Party and its Southern Strategy rarely if ever mentioned Lincoln. Maybe that is Bachmann’s problem in Iowa. Maybe they are now convincing themselves that Lincoln believed in States’ Rights and was on the side of the Confederacy. Maybe that great historian, Newt Gingrich, can explain how Lincoln was Robert E. Lee’s commander in chief. Does this mean that true patriots secede from the Union and then fire their guns on a Union fort? The Occupy movement is pretty mild compared to that.

I keep saying that I want a politician who can not only produce the best results that are politically possible, but I want one who can also change what is politically possible.

Even Senator Obama quoted President Franklin Roosevelt’s idea about what was needed to change the politically possible.  I mentioned it in my previous post A New Bush Era or a Push Era?

Back when Barack Obama was still just a U.S. senator running for president, he told a group of donors in a New Jersey suburb, “Make me do it.” He was borrowing from President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who used the same phrase (according to Harry Belafonte, who heard the story directly from Eleanor Roosevelt) when responding to legendary union organizer A. Philip Randolph’s demand for civil rights for African-Americans.

So, how could President Obama have changed the politically possible by making use of what he learned from President Roosevelt?

Let’s take the Health Care improvement debacle as a case study.

Previous Presidents would have put together a health care proposal and presented it to Congress.  President Obama was afraid that any proposal that his administration wrote would be instantly attacked by the opposition.  He decided not to make a proposal, but to let Congress cobble together something that he could decide to sign or not.  This strategy earned him a weak, inadequate proposal that will not reach his original lofty goals and is under attack by the Republicans with every means at their disposal even after it was passed into law.

So what could Obama have done differently?

Even before a proposal was written, he could have gone to the public with the outlines of the minimum that the public should be demanding.  He should have warned the public that this proposal would be severely attacked by the vested interests who would stop at nothing to prevent such a bill from passing.  He would then have advised the public that unless they made it crystal clear that they would not accept anything less, the opponents would have a good shot at preventing the bill from passing.  He would have helped organize a grass roots campaign of protest rallies in cities across the country demanding health care reform as he had outlined.

When it was then crystal clear to the news media and every politician that was watching that the public was solidly behind health care reform and that the public was actively engaged in making sure it would happen, the President Obama could have rolled out his proposal.

At that point the opposition would have to play catch-up.  They would have to debate on the turf that the President had set.  Rather than the lobbyists being able to scare politicians to vote for what the lobbyists wanted and against what the silent public wanted, the lobbyists would have faced a completely different situation.  What was politically possible at that point would have been changed dramatically from the actual situation that President Obama faced as the Congress was putting together the bill and as they tried to get it passed.

Instead of this kind of tactic, the President is constantly putting the cart before the horse.  He waits for the political climate to be changed against him and then tries for the best he thinks he can get given that political climate.  He then even goes so far as to convince himself that he should compromise before he gets started and only try for what he is absolutely sure he can get.  All this tactic earns him is even less than what he thought was the minimum.

I think that The New York Times is implying that the message from the 2012 New Year’s baby is I Just Got Here, but I Know Trouble When I See It.

Sunday Business asked the six economists who write the Economic View column to do a little blue-sky thinking on issues as varied as the Fed, Europe and housing. You won’t find stock tips. But if 2011 was any guide, the best advice for 2012 may be this: Hold tight.

Even the economist who was an adviser to Mitt Romney did not say that tax cuts for the wealthy was a solution to our problems.

Perhaps Christina Roemer had the most balanced view.

But even better would be measures that increase employment today, while also leaving us with something of lasting value. Because many people worry about increasing the role of the federal government, why not give substantial federal funds to state and local governments for public investment? Tell them that the money has to be used for either physical infrastructure like roads, bridges and airports, or for human infrastructure like education, job training and scientific research. Then let the states, cities and towns figure out what would work best for their citizens.

Even this proposal bows to what she sees as the political reality.  Let the states and towns do it, not because that is the best way economically, but because this is the best we can hope for politically.

I am still looking for the candidate who will both do what is politically possible now and change what is politically possible.  Barack Obama said he would be that politician, but either he had no clue on how to change the politically possible, or he never intended to do that when he won the election.

I see no national politician, even one on the horizon, that can be the politician I seek.  We will just have to take the best that is available and try to figure out how to grow the one we want.  I think that growth process starts with movements like the Occupy movement.  I am not sure there has ever been an example of the rise of that desired politician without being preceded by some lasting protests of  the citizens.

By the way, the clue that Obama should have had is that he needed to promote citizen action as a way to strengthen his hand politically.  President Roosevelt knew that.  Obama even quoted Roosevelt’s remarks that showed it.    So maybe I was wrong.  President Obama had a clue at one time.  He just did not follow up with the necessary action.  He seemed to go out of his way to negotiate with the opposition in private and starting way too late making it impossible for the citizens to force the issue.

Tangelia Sinclair-Moore pointed me to the article How America And The Mainstream Media Got Breitbarted On NDAA to demonstrate to me that I got “Breitbarted On NDAA.”

The article shows the original video clip which we were shown to give us the impression that Carl Levin claimed the administration was pushing for permission to allow indefinite detention provisions be allowed to apply to U.S. Citizens.  Another video is shown of Carl Levin making his final pitch before the entire Senate in support of the bill.  It seems pretty clear from this much longer video that if Carl Levin ever believed what we thought he said in the other video, he does not believe it now.  It would have been more definitive to have showed us how that original video was manipulated to give us a false impression.  However, I am convinced until somebody can show me that the original video did not give a false impression.

As one who was able to compare the distorted video clips of what Rev. Wright said to the entire video that contained his remarks, I have no doubt that it is easy to turn somedody’s ideas completely up-side-down by diabolical editing.

The web site above even quotes a Mother Jones article to the effect that:

    It does not, contrary to what many media outlets have reported, authorize the president to indefinitely detain without trial an American citizen suspected of terrorism who is captured in the US. A last minute compromise amendment adopted in the Senate, whose language was retained in the final bill, leaves it up to the courts to decide if the president has that power, should a future president try to exercise it. But if a future president does try to assert the authority to detain an American citizen without charge or trial, it won’t be based on the authority in this bill….

The language in the bill that relates to the detention authority as far as US citizens and permanent residents are concerned is, “Nothing in this section shall be construed to affect existing law or authorities relating to the detention of United States citizens, lawful resident aliens of the United States, or any other persons who are captured or arrested in the United States.”

To me, this all means that I can give President Obama a pass on not vetoing the NDAA as he suggested he would.

The Real News network does it again. Is the Euro Crisis Over? is a conversation among William K. Black, Paolo Manasse, and John Weeks where they discuss the Euro and the danger of global recession. The interviewer is Paul Jay of The Real News.

There is one dissenter in the panel about the issue of Germany’s Beggar Thy Neighbor policy that has had much discussion in other interviews and posts on The Real News. For Paolo Manasse who emphasizes productivity gains in Germany versus a Beggar Thy Neighbor policy, I think that a discussion of his definition of these productivity gains would have shown that there is really no disagreement on what happened. They did not have time to go into it, but I bet that Manasse is talking about productivity as the amount produced per unit cost of labor, not per hour of labor.

If that were the case, then what Germany did to get that productivity is exactly a Beggar Thy Neighbor policy. They cut their wages so that they could produce more cheaply than their neighbors despite agreeing not to do that. They then transferred their unemployment and slow growth problems onto their neighbors in order to only solve their own problems. (We do have such competition among states in this country when it comes to state taxing policy, labor policy, and state subsidies to entice businesses to move from one state to another.)

For balance, you can watch the entire video.

However, for my purposes, I’ll just quote something that William Black said in the video. This is from the transcript provided by The Real News. Let me start off with the description of who William Black is:

William K. Black, associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, teaches White-Collar Crime, Public Finance, Antitrust, Law & Economics. A former financial regulator, he held several senior regulatory positions during the S&L debacle. Black is the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One (2005) which focuses on the role of control fraud in financial crises. Black developed the concept of “control fraud” – frauds in which the CEO or head of state uses the entity as a “weapon.” Control frauds cause greater financial losses than all other forms of property crime combined.

Now, for what it is he said in one segment of the video.

BLACK: The new credit facility provides exceptionally low-cost funds to banks, well below supposed market rates. And it’s a way of transferring wealth to the banking sector. And I agree with both of my colleagues, there’s absolutely no reason to do it this way except ideology about the role of the ECB. Obama is correct that Europe has more than ample funds to deal with the crisis, but it has allowed it to twist slowly in the wind, and it has exposed the fact that the leading proponents of ever closer union, France and Germany, didn’t really mean it. In other words, once Greece got in trouble, well, it was the damn Greeks that got in trouble; it wasn’t my fellow countrymen analog in the United States, say, when New Orleans has a hurricane. You know, you bail out Louisiana, whether or not you particularly like Louisiana. But Europe is not a united nation. It’s not close to a united nation. And Germany is imposing policies that are exceptionally destructive to the rest of Europe. And so, ultimately, it is completely ideologically driven. You have insanity, after all, going on, where if you go to Ireland, the official policy mandated by the rest of Europe is to cut your wages so that you can out-export the Portuguese. But if you go to Portugal, the strategy is to slash working class wages so you can out-export the Irish. And this is the road to Bangladesh strategy. And it is quite clear that France, Germany, Netherlands are quite willing to saw off the periphery of Europe. They just can’t figure out a way to do it without hurting their own banks.

Remember, I am not saying this is the whole story. You have to spend the time to watch the video or read the whole transcript, if you want the whole story.

Watch Marisa DeFranco Wednesday evening when she will be interviewed by Emily Rooney on WGBH’s Greater Boston! The show airs on Ch.2 at 7pm and is repeated at midnight. That’s tomorrow night, January 4th, 7pm!

See her web site at Marisa DeFranco for U.S. Senate.

If I’d heard you  say, “Who is Marisa DeFranco?”,  I would have directed you to this previous post.

The New York Times blog has the piece When Romney’s Reach Exceeds His Grasp. In it, David Firestone discusses Mitt Romney’s love of the song America The Beautiful.

“O beautiful, for patriot’s dream, that sees beyond the years,” he said, discussing the fourth verse and asserting that this dream referred to political and especially economic freedom. “The freedom to choose one’s course in life, to be an opportunity nation, a merit-based society” – that, he suggested, conflicts directly with the president’s vision of America as an entitlement society, where everyone is equal and thus more impoverished.

If, over time, this turns out to be his rebuttal to the president’s new campaign theme of reducing economic inequality, he will have to do better than “America the Beautiful,” because that is not at all what the song was originally about. The lyrics were written in 1894 by the Massachusetts poet Katharine Lee Bates, an ardent feminist and lesbian who was deeply disillusioned by the greed and excess of the Gilded Age.

Her original third verse was an expression of that anger:

America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
Till selfish gain no longer stain
The banner of the free!

Of course, what do poets know of visions of America?  It does seem to show that Mitt Romney’s vision of America is different from the author’s.  If Obama’s vision of America is anything like mine, the describing it as an entitlement based society shows that Romney doesn’t understand what this vision of society is all about.  If the word entitlement belongs in my vision at all, it is that I do not believe that wealth and power entitle you to steal what I am entitled to by way of me being  a human resident of this country.

Maybe this election campaign really will get down to the nitty, gritty differences between the two visions.  One favors the accumulation of wealth whereas the other side favors justice wherever that may lead.

When a mortgagee loses a home to the bank in a foreclosure because the bank had a clever salesperson that knew the trap that was being set for the mortgagee, but the unsophisticated mortgagee could not foresee the trap, would Romney consider this to be an outcome based on merit?  The salesperson had a better grasp of the rules of real-estate transactions and was able to use that to his advantage to dupe the unsuspecting buyer into signing a disadvantageous contract.  You see it is all a game that is won by the person who can play the rules to his or her best advantage.  Of course, the homeowner who is now homeless and the family’s children that will go hungry and might lose there chance for a good education, consider it more than just a game.  Economics and business is not only about playing the game of who gets more points measured in dollars, but it also affects the noncommercial aspects of human life.  Perhaps the true capitalist doesn’t believe that there are any noncommercial aspects of human life.

The Occupy Movement and I consider the mortgage transaction to be a con job that ought to land the con artist and the con artist’s knowing employer before a judge and a jury for adjudication as to where justice lies.

There is one game that has rules about special knowledge.  In the game of contract bridge, one side is not allowed to have bidding systems where certain bids mean something to the partners that the opposition does not know about.  If the team is going to use a bidding system with out of the ordinary meanings, then they are duty bound to disclose these meanings to the opposition before play begins.

In commercial transactions the creditor has protection from the debtor via laws against fraudulent conveyance.

“Actual fraud” typically involves a debtor who as part of an asset protection scheme donates his assets, usually to an “insider”, and leaves himself nothing to pay his creditors. “Constructive fraud” does not relate to fraudulent intent, but rather to the underlying economics of the transaction, if it took place for less than reasonably equivalent value at a time when the debtor was in a distressed financial condition.

How come the rich and powerful never think of protecting the weak from fraudulent conveyance on their part, but they are keen on making laws that protect them from the poor and weak?  That is part of the merit based society from which Mitt Romney made his fortune.  No wonder he wants to be President to protect those  rules that promote the merit of the con artist over the naivete of the pigeon.