Naked Capitalism has the post The Three Card Monte of Generational Warfare by Yves Smith.

Stock speculator Jay Gould remarked, “I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.” That, sports fans, is the real foundation of the generational warfare propaganda effort.
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We have two events happening that may simply be coincident in time in their genesis, but they are working synchronistically in a nasty way. And the driver of one is unquestionably class, not generational. I can’t get over the way young people are falling hook, line and sinker for the efforts to divert attention from the real perps, which are overwhelmingly the top wealthy and their allies and operatives, such as CEOs and C-level executives at large companies, and the large cohort of neoliberal pundits. (Not all are on board; for instance, I know a private equity firm head who loves annoying people in his industry by telling them they need to pay a ton more in taxes and donates generously to “progressive” candidates, but people like him are few in number).

The first is that a small group of audacious, visionary, committed, radical conservatives set in motion a plan in 1971 to undo the New Deal and cut social safety nets back. They did this via a concerted effort to change values and deeply inculcate pro-business thinking, to give economic “freedom” primacy over democracy, and to train lawyers to think like economists (which is at odds with foundational legal concepts like equity) and over time, pack the courts with corporate-friendly judges. The key figures of this movement and its intellectual leaders were all born well before or during the Depression: former Nixon Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell, Henry Manne (founder of the law and economics movement), and of course, Milton Friedman. Its major funders included Birchers like the Coors family (which provided a large donation to help found the Heritage Foundation in 1973) and the Koch family.

You may find a number of familiar names in the list of people in that last paragraph.  I thought I would make my blog post so I can have a permanent link to the Yves Smith post.  It might come in handy some day.

Naked Capitalism has featured the article Death By A Thousand Cuts: The Silent Assassination Of European Democracy By Don Quijones.

As is gradually dawning on more and more people across the old continent, the European Union is riddled with fatal flaws and defects. Chief among them is the single currency which, rather than serving as the Union’s springboard to global dominance, could well be its ultimate undoing.

Another huge problem with the EU is its acute lack of transparency. Staggering as it may seem, in the last 20 years the Union has not passed a single audit. Indeed, so opaque is the state of its finances that in 2002 Marta Andreasen, the first ever professional accountant to serve as the Commission’s Chief Accountant, refused to sign off the organization’s 2001 accounts, citing concerns that the EU’s accounting system was “open to fraud.” After taking her concerns public, Andreasen was suspended and then later sacked by the Commission.

However, by far the EU’s greatest — and certainly most dangerous — structural flaw is its gaping democratic deficit. To paraphrase Nigel Farage, the stridently anti-EU British MEP, not only is the EU undemocratic, it is fundamentally anti-democratic.
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The inevitable result is that decisions that viscerally affect the lives of 500 million voters are now taken by anonymous, unaccountable bureaucrats rather than politicians responsible to their voters. As Obourne points out, “by a hideous paradox the European Union, set up as a way of avoiding a return to fascism in the post-war epoch, has since mutated into a way of avoiding democracy itself.”

How much of the 1930s/1940s experience are we going to repeat?  If we have a second dip recession, will WW III follow?

Interestingly, this topic did not appear in the 155 answers to the question 2013 : WHAT *SHOULD* WE BE WORRIED ABOUT?

TruthOut has the article The New Financial Scam Driving Workers Deep Into Debt.

This new loan scheme is being promoted as a “service” by unscrupulous employers working in cahoots with predatory lenders. The employee can ask for an “advance” and the loan is included right in the paycheck. These loans are great for the lender because payments come straight out of the employee’s paycheck. The loans are terrible for the employee because payments come straight out of the employee’s paycheck.

Workplace loans have very high interest rates, as much as 165% per year, and are repaid directly out of wages. So far only about 100,000 workers are being offered these scams by their companies, but at least half a dozen companies are marketing this “service” to employers.

This article goes into much more detail about why these practices are so harmful.  However, I know of cases where friends who have above average educations in things financial are so desperate, that they go looking for loans for people with bad credit.  I even checked to make sure he understood what a bad idea it was.

It is so very tempting to offer help in such a situation.  However, I have also learned how you can get dragged down into situations you avoid by people who do not have the means to avoid them.

When I was a youngster, my parents actually explained to me what this song was all about. I guess I took it seriously.

The Rachel Maddow Show segment is labelled  The right presses on for welfare drug tests.

It is quite an interesting segment even though it has a lot of logical flaws. Let me point out a few that I can remember.

She probably spends more time touting what she says is starting to look like a success of Obamacare enrollments after a slow start than she does on the headline issue. She also compares the Obamacare enrollment record to that of Massachusetts’ experience with its law at start up. Massachusetts’ startup was even slower in its first three months. Part of the implication is that a measurement at three months is barely starting to show the possibilities.

When she finally gets to Florida’s experience with its drug testing law, she makes a big deal of its failure even while explaining that a court decision ended the implementation of the law after three months. No irony here.

She also makes the case for Florida’s failure that they have found that welfare recipients were found to be using drugs at one quarter the rate of the general population. I am at a little bit of a loss as to why this figure is so significant logically. Let’s say that someone thought that the general population were using drugs at a rate that was 1,000 times too great. Would it be a failure of common sense to want to stop part of the population that was “only” using it at a rate 250 times too great, when that was the population that you might have the most influence over? (1,000 and 250 were just numbers I picked to make a point. I make no claim that they represent any real situation.)

Perhaps I picked those numbers because of my experience buying low salt products in the grocery store. Most regular soups give you on the order of 900 mg of salt per serving. That is more than ⅓ of your total daily recommendation in one serving of a component of one meal. Low or reduced salt versions of these soups have as much as 600 mg of salt. That way you only get ¼ of your daily recommended amount from one component of one third of your meals. I think low salt is about 50 mg of salt per serving. So the store’s low salt is over 10 times as much salt as I consider low.

Rachel Maddow’s segment is a bit long. Perhaps she could have left out the easily attacked leaps in logic to make a more compact and more powerful indictment of the people she was ridiculing.

This may also be an example of why such “left wing” shows are not as popular among the “left” as the “right wing” shows seem to be among the “right”. Some of us on the “left” don’t really like defenses of our principles that are logically flawed, when in fact logically sound arguments could be made, and were made by Rachel Maddow.

The New York Times story US economy comparatively strong, study asserts begins with the following paragraph:

Academic heavyweights have been debating whether the United States economy is so sluggish because of too much government stimulus, …

I am confused about which New York Times published this article.  Was it the one in New York City, The United States of America, The Earth?

I don’t think it is my planet where “Academic heavyweights have been debating whether the United States economy is so sluggish because of too much government stimulus,…”

I’d love to see a list of those academic heavy weights.  I  bet I can come up with a far longer list who think the economy is sluggish because of far too little government stimulus of the right kind.

Comparing this crisis to recoveries from similar crises may prove that we have done fewer idiotic things in response to this crisis than in previous ones.  It doesn’t necessarily show that we have done as many smart things as we could have.  Had we had less stimulus than we did, we might have followed more closely the paths after similar crises in which there was a double dip.The loss to the economy is not measured by how less badly we did than in the past.  The measure is how far below crisisless trend we are.  Where would we be if we had been able to avoid the crisis with proper government regulation, less insane deregulation, less political cow-towing to the ultra-wealthy, and less concerted efforts to suppress labor unions?

Firedoglake has the article Top 10 Proofs People Can Be Completely Manipulated Without Hypnosis.

1. Any article listing the top 10 of anything will be widely read.

I guess we have been had.  There are actually some interesting items, not that #1 isn’t true and interesting.

4. According to U.S.ians the greatest threat to peace on earth is a nation that hasn’t threatened any other, and hasn’t attacked any other in centuries, a nation that suffered horrible chemical weapons attacks and refused to use chemical weapons in response, a nation that has refused to develop nuclear weapons but been falsely accused of doing so by the U.S. government for decades. That’s right: a bit of laughably bad propaganda, regurgitated in variations for 30 years, and the smart critical thinkers of the Land of the Free declare a nation with a military budget below 1% of their own — Iran — the Greatest Threat to Peace.[4] Edward Bernays is cackling wickedly in his grave.

Although Iran’s reputed support for Hezbollah in Lebanon might be considered a threat to someone.  So I have to wonder who is being manipulated,  the people who believe that Iran is a threat or the people who believe #4 that Iran is not a threat?

I started out liking this article, but I must be waking up from my hypnotic trance. So maybe even the title is misleading.

Alternet has the article originally from Truthout A Simple Economic Truth America’s Super Rich Don’t Want Us to Know About.

The lie is that raising income taxes on rich people and hugely profitable companies hurts economies and even leads to unemployment. The truth is that raising income taxes on rich people and hugely profitable companies actually helps economies and causes companies to hire more and more people, thus lowering unemployment.

I was wondering if i could come up with a sampling of posts on my blog that have made a similar point.

Why We Must Raise Taxes on the Rich August 2011, Buffett Mocks Norquist Idea on Taxes Thwarting Investment November 2012,  Higher Taxes Hurt Job Creators? That’s Malarkey October 2012,  Call Kerry Now: Deficit Panel Seeks to Defer Details on Raising Taxes November 2011, and  How the GOP Became the Party of the Rich November 2011.

This last one is where I decided to stop the list. There is The Wall Street Journal article  1993 Deficit Reduction: a Lesson on Tax Policy mentioned in the post Who Raised The Debt Ceiling. Here is one quote from The Wall Street Journal article.

Reality: Raising taxes on the wealthy is much more likely to reduce the deficit and make more money available to proactively solve America’s problems—and save money in the long run. In addition, it may have absolutely no negative effect on economic growth, jobs or wages.

I wonder how many times this has to be said before the big lie loses its effect.

I wonder if anybody else in Sturbridge has had the need to send a similar  letter to the Town Administrator and the Head of The Public Works Department

This is the third time this season that snow plows have taken out my newspaper box.

That wouldn’t be so bad, but my mailbox is another story. It is on a swing away arm and the box itself is 1/8 inch steel plate.  Not only is the box knocked silly on its arm, but the edge of the box takes a direct hit from the snow plow blade each time.  I have to use vice-grips to bend the edge of the box in order to get the door to open.

In the almost 8 years I have been here, I have never seen it so bad.

At almost 70 years old, I am not sure how much longer I can keep up repairing the damage as fast as the damage is caused.

Is there some distance from the edge of the road that I can expect the snow plow blade to not intrude?  The mail box is already 2 feet from the edge of the road.

Notice that this is only January 3rd.  At this rate by the end of the season, I will have bent back the edge of my mailbox so many times, it will probably break off.  When I lived in Bolton, I saw a mailbox attached to the end of an antique artillery piece.  I wonder if a snow plow would keep away from something like that.

Here is a picture of the type of installation that I have.

Naked Capitalism has the article Quelle Surprise! New Report Show How Outsourcing State and Local Government Services is About Looting.

As we’ve seen with mortgage servicers, and the Out of Control [report] confirms, one of the approaches used by private companies to meet their profit targets is to cut corners on compliance with the rules and with service levels. And when outsourcing is motivated not by ideology or a belief that savings can be achieved, but by service problems, all too often there’s reason to suspect that the legislation that the supposedly underperforming bureau is executing is cumbersome or poorly thought out. In other words, the problem is being treated as one of government execution, when it’s actually one of bad drafting or overly complicated requirements that won’t go away by fobbing them off to a private company.

Read the full report here – Out of Control.

Keep this in mind when your government local, state, or federal claims that it can save money by outsourcing.  It defies all logic that a private company can perform a service more cheaply and also make a huge profit without taking unconscionable shortcuts.  If it were possible to do this, then the government ought to be able to figure out how to perform the service more cheaply by eliminating the profit and doing the job itself.  If a government run service is not meeting legitimate efficiency criteria, then it should be fixed rather than outsourced.  Whatever incompetence was originally responsible for the failure of the government provider will just be repeated in the letting of the outsourcing contract.  Moreover, the outsourcing contract will be used to hide the malfeasance that could not be hidden under whatever sunshine laws apply to the government entity.