If there is anything you get from reading this blog, it should be who is William Black and what has he said and done. All you have to do is search in the search box, at the right below the menu and above recent posts of the blog, for William Black. The preceding link will do it for you.
Politico has the story Senate jobless benefits deal reached.
The bill would be paid for by an extension of U.S. Customs fees established by the recent budget deal through 2024 and by making changes to federal pension programs over the next 10 years.
Who needs their stinkin’ Social Security or Medicare anyway? Let’s pit the unemployed against the old folk and see who wins. Either way, the rich win.
What is this baloney about paid for? Do these Senators have the foggiest idea that their government is sovereign in its own currency? As long as there is slack in the economy, there is no worry about how to pay for Social Security and Medicare (if we get a handle on big Pharma and private health insurance companies).
Why do we have to pit the unemployed against the elders, when the top 1% is holding 40% of the wealth of the country. We elders earned our benefits. What have the great bank robbers done to earn their wealth? Are they supposed to be rewarded for tanking the world economy. Are we that afraid of them?
Oh, and how do the Republican Senators think the FED payed for the $13 trillion in bank bailout money? They were shocked when Ben Bernanke told them he just typed it into the computer. What are these clowns doing making economic decisions for our country?
By clowns, I mean the Senators, Democrats and Republicans who are foolish enough to think that new spending has to be “paid for” by cuts in other programs. As for Ben Bernanke, his only clownishness was his failure to put an end to the big bankers accounting control fraud when he had the chance in the Bush Administration.
See my previous post Bill Black at TED Explains How Insiders Rob Banks and Cause Crises.
Thanks to MardyS for posting this on his Facebook page so I could get a head start in trying to beat this idea into the ground.
Alternet has the article WATCH: Daily Show’s Samantha Bee Nails Hypocrisy of Government Funding for Penis-Pumps—But Questioning Contraception Dollars.
ObamaCare is that insurance companies have to cover women’s health care needs including contraception. This has caused serious congressional debate with Republicans adamant that women ought to pay for their own individual sexual health choices.
Yet, on last night’s The Daily Show, Samantha Bee revealed that unlike the serious congressional debate targeting female contraception and reproductive healthcare in general, Medicare has spent $172 million on penis pumps in the last five years, which the mostly white, older, male members (sic) of Congress don’t seem to have a problem.
Now the dirty little secret is out. This must be why I am such a strong proponent of women’s equality in health care funding by the government. I don’t want to be a hypocrite.
Maybe the rallying cry ought to be “No penis pumps and no viagra unless female contraceptives are funded.”
Naked Capitalism has the article Bill Black at TED Explains How Insiders Rob Banks and Cause Crises.
This is a great piece to share with friends and who still aren’t sure why we had a crisis or are predisposed to blame it on greedy borrowers, as opposed to greedy and reckless financial services industry players.
If you don’t know who Bill Black is and if you haven’t read his book and if you have been ignoring my blog for the past 7 or 8 years, here is the bio that was posted along with the YouTube video below.
William Black is an associate professor of economics and law at UMKC. He has held many prestigious positions, including executive director for Fraud Prevention. He recently helped the World Bank develop anti-corruption initiatives and served as an expert for OFHEO in its enforcement action against Fannie Mae’s former senior management. He is a criminologist and former financial regulator.
Warning: If you would prefer to cling to your own idea of what caused the crisis because you are so sure you know what you know, then do not watch the video below. If, on the other hand, you entertain the possibility that the Tea Party funded by the Koch Brothers might have an ulterior motive in getting you to believe the government’s promotion of home ownership is the cause, then this video is for you.
Why aren’t we outraged enough to demand action from Obama and Holder?
A Developer’s Voice blog has the post I Hate Open Floorplans, It Makes Roger Come Out…
A couple years later I got married to my great wife (now mother of my two boys). She would sometimes call me at work and would get confused because I was so “angry” with her. I was disengaged and gave short answers. I was not the guy I was at home, and so she started referring me at work as Roger. She couldn’t figure out why I was sweet at home but distant when she called me at work. She was not a fan of Roger. Over the years I have talked to many other programmers and many of us seem to have this problem. We are not actually angry, we are just lost in our own worlds and are still waking up from it.
I provide a link to this article so Sharon can better understand what she has experienced with me for over 40 years.
Thanks to João Geada for posting this on his Facebook page.
Yves Smith has the Naked Capitalism article Trans-Pacific Partnership Reveals Deadly Cost of American Patents.
While US news stories occasionally mention the breathtaking cost of some medications, they almost always skirt the issue of why American drugs are so grotesquely overpriced by world standards. The pharmaceutical industry has managed to sell the story that it’s because they need all that dough to pay for the cost of finding new drugs.
That account is patently false.
First, part of the story the drug industry chooses to omit is that a substantial portion of drug R&D, and the riskiest part (basic research) is heavily funded by the National Institutes of Health and other government agencies. It’s hard to put all the data together, but the latest estimates I’ve seen put the total funded by the government at over 30%.
Second, Big Pharma spends more on marketing [than] on R&D. And it markets in the highest cost manner possible: in person sales calls to small business owners (doctors). The fact that it is worth it to sell in such an exceptionally high cost manner is proof of fat margins (the marginal value of a sale supports such a costly sales effort).
Third, and this is where the foreign debate over the TransPacific Partnership comes in, one of the big reasons US drugs are so costly is we allow drug companies to milk patents to a degree that is unparalleled elsewhere.
And this is only the beginning of the article before she gets really revved up.
When I first heard politicians telling us that we need treaties protecting our “intellectual property” rights, it sounded like a plausible story. The politicians implied that those nasty people in other countries were most uncivilized not to respect our “intellectual property” rights.
It is becoming more and more clear what an abusive concept we have in our American style “intellectual property” protections. When even President Obama repeats this malarkey, just do your own internal translation to “intellectual property” abuse.
The Boston Globe has The New York Times story Soviet-style propaganda in media fueling crisis.
In the past week, as the crisis in Crimea deepened, similar images have been running on Russia’s state-run television. Even for the Kremlin’s master propagandists, it is a tenuous stretch — but that’s of no matter. The enemy has been identified: It is the West, allied with “fascist mercenaries” in Ukraine.
The scale of Russia’s propaganda effort in the current crisis has been breathtaking, even by Soviet standards.
That’s rich. The master of American propaganda calling out Russia on propaganda. Wasn’t it the false stories in The New York Times that promoted us into invading Iraq?
The Russians couldn’t possibly worry about the fake threat of missiles being launched at their territory from their former satellites that have been enticed into NATO like the Americans were worried about Russian missiles in Cuba being launched at us in the 1960s.
And those neo-Nazis that we are supposedly befriending in Ukraine – unfortunately that’s not propaganda, that’s true. I’d call the denial of that factor in Western Ukraine is the propaganda. Didn’t we just read about this in an OpEd piece in The Boston Globe yesterday. (See my previous post Vladimir Putin’s enemies aren’t all good guys.)
It’s Our Economy has the post A Healthy Economy Cannot Rest on Financialization.
Given this data, a reasonable person might conclude that the financial sector is two to four time too large. Therefore, we could either dramatically reduce the financial sector to one quarter to one half its current size, or cut its profits, salaries and bonuses by 50 to 75 percent without harming the economy.
This also means that progressives need to be more radical in our demands if we truly wish to tame financialism.
To paraphrase Grover Norquist, our goal should be “to shrink [Wall Street] down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”
What the Republicans call the job creators are in fact the job killers. This article presents the evidence. As soon as more people figure this out, the Republican’s political power will be gone.
The Boston Globe has an excellent OpEd article Vladimir Putin’s enemies aren’t all good guys.
One of the biggest mistakes of US Cold War policy from Latin America to Central Asia was the use of broad labels that allowed little room for complexity. Everyone who opposed the Soviet Union — be they freedom fighters, dictators, or, as in Afghanistan, future members of Al Qaeda or the Taliban — was America’s friend, and anyone who disagreed with those friends was a Communist.
This paradigm, while convenient, ignored the fact that most nations do not split cleanly into teams of good guys and bad guys. It also sowed the seeds of future conflicts. If we want to avoid repeating the mistakes of history, a good place to start would be dispensing with sweeping Cold War assumptions — and being careful in Ukraine.
Excellent article that presents some nuance about the situation that is rarely seen in any of the US media.
Ironically there is a small piece of the article that falls prey to this very nasty media habit of suppressing some information in order to make a point.
“Yet when Hillary Clinton likens Vladimir Putin to Hitler, as she did in a March 4 speech, she makes all those eastern Ukrainians appear to be Nazi sympathizers.”
I am not a fan of Hillary Clinton, but that does not mean that I want to accept lies about her. If you hear more of her remarks than the conveniently edited audio that the Globe published in its article about her remarks, then you find what she said was not as odious as they represent it.
The more complete audio can be found at http://bcove.me/ugo8sgvm and in my previous post
Hillary Clinton Compares – Examining the Similarities and the Differences. In fact, I will insert that audio below because it is so important to the issue.
She did not liken Vladimir Putin to Hitler. What she did was compare some of his actions to some of Hitler’s actions. In this context “compare” means she didn’t only talk about the similarities, but she also highlighted the differences. From the tone of her voice, you also understand that she was explaining the part of the comparison that has other people all upset, but not what is upsetting to her.
I know that once this Clinton meme is firmly implanted in peoples’ minds, no amount of correcting the record will erase the idea. That is what is so dangerous about the propaganda machine that our main stream press has become.
I had no intention of voting for Hillary Clinton as the candidate of my party for President in 2016 before this incident, but I do not want her rejected for spurious reasons. There are enough valid reasons not to want her, that we don’t have to make stuff up. And we don’t want to prevent people from speaking sensibly for fear that their remarks will be distorted.
By the way, I agree with one of the comments on The Boston Globe web site.
Mila Kunis is the Ukraine’s greatest export ever.
The Daily Kos has the story from 2014/03/01, Sarah Palin, Wall Street Journal rewrite history of Russia-Georgia war.
After 9/11, however, President Bush changed the policy toward Georgia, introducing two elements that developed into serious strategic disadvantages. Mr. Bush not only made Georgia into a partner in the “war on terror,” but he promoted Mr. Saakashvili and Georgia into a centerpiece of his “promotion of democracy.” In Tbilisi in 2005, Mr. Bush proclaimed Mr. Saakashvili’s Georgia “a beacon of liberty.”
Even as President Bush became increasingly aware that he needed the Kremlin’s help in Iran and for other American interests, he was kept a prisoner by this exaggeration of Georgia’s importance for U.S. foreign policy.
Senior officials of the Bush administration claim they warned Mr. Saakashvili against using force against Russia. But having invested so much ideological importance in the Georgian president, Mr. Bush couldn’t warn him publicly — or, as it turned out, stop him. Having become so dependent on Mr. Saakashvili’s success, the United States lost the political influence to stop him.
As Wikileaks revealed in December 2010, the U.S. position was made worse by the fact that the Bush administration–and its allies like John McCain–gullibly believed everything Saakashvili told them. The leaked cables from Tblisi, the New York Times explained, “display some of the perils of a close relationship”:
A 2008 batch of American cables from another country once in the cold war’s grip — Georgia — showed a much different sort of access. In Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital, American officials had all but constant contact and an open door to President Mikheil Saakashvili and his young and militarily inexperienced advisers, who hoped the United States would help Georgia shake off its Soviet past and stand up to Russia’s regional influence…
The cables show that for several years, as Georgia entered an escalating contest with the Kremlin for the future of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, two breakaway enclaves out of Georgian control that received Russian support, Washington relied heavily on the Saakashvili government’s accounts of its own behavior. In neighboring countries, American diplomats often maintained their professional distance, and privately detailed their misgivings of their host governments. In Georgia, diplomats appeared to set aside skepticism and embrace Georgian versions of important and disputed events.
By 2008, as the region slipped toward war, sources outside the Georgian government were played down or not included in important cables. Official Georgian versions of events were passed to Washington largely unchallenged.
The last cables before the eruption of the brief Russian-Georgian war showed an embassy relaying statements that would with time be proved wrong.
Proved wrong, that is, just like John McCain and Sarah Palin.
The connection between the incident in Georgia and the Ukraine seems to be the common thread of former member countries of the USSR trying to entice the USA into supporting them in their disagreements with Russia. Our problem seems to be our belief that we must solve all problems in the world, even ones that are so complicated it is hard to judge who is more right and who is more wrong. Of course, when oil and US political ideology get mixed in, it is hard to figure out what our own motives are.
When we get involved, we seem to encourage foolish actions on the part of our allies that they would not have the courage to undertake if we weren’t there.