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.
.
.
.
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.

Reader RichardH is bugging me about my stance on MIT and the Koch donation.  I decided to Google a little and found the March 2011 The New York Times article Cancer Research Before Activism, Billionaire Conservative Donor Says.

“I read stuff about me and I say, ‘God, I’m a terrible guy,’ ” he said. “And then I come here and everybody treats me like I’m a wonderful fellow, and I say, ‘Well, maybe I’m not so bad after all.’ ”

I wouldn’t be surprised if RichardH found the article to be nothing to get excited about.  The quote from David Koch above was enough to make me sick.

The thought that giving to MIT and being treated to a standing ovation there would be enough to wipe away any guilt that Koch might feel for his political activities is exactly what I feared that MIT might be doing for him.  The question of how much control he exercises over the hiring decisions and the curriculum at MIT ought to frighten everyone.  The fact that MIT thinks so highly of him that they do not feel the need to publicly clarify the amount of control he has, indicates to me just how little they care about his anti-social behavior as long as the money rolls in.

I can’t remember when I have been so ashamed of my connection to MIT.

At least the Boston.com article Pulling together in cancer fight says the following:

The Koch program provides $250,000 in unfettered funding for six to eight researchers over a three- to five-year period to encourage novel thinking. Recipients are required to be doctors who continue seeing patients and promise to bring new technologies swiftly to the bedside.

Of course, we don’t know what other restrictions may exist on who gets funded. This does show that the donor gets to place restrictions on the university long after the money has been donated.

Perhaps when the disease affects David Koch directly he can leave it up to the science to try to find solutions.  In other spheres such as global warming and economic fairness, science doesn’t seem to hold any significance if it stands in the way of money.  Well, at least we know that he values something more than his own money.

Your can read more about MIT Professor Michael J. Cima.

Prof. Cima was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2011.  He now holds the David H. Koch Chair of Engineering at MIT.

Does this mean that the Koch influence extends to all of engineering at MIT?

Here is an excerpt from the July 2012 article from WBUR The United States Of Koch.

As our nation celebrates its independence, two men are bending our government to their will. I speak, of course, of the Koch brothers. Here are 12 things to know about them.

1. They are the fringe 1 percent
2. They own practically everything
3. They think they own their employees
4. They back Scott Brown
5. Right from the start
6. They are already attacking the Court’s health care ruling
7. They are major polluters
8. They are in the climate change denial business
9. David Koch believes global warming is good
10. They were a major force in the Wisconsin recall
11. They host the rich and powerful
12. They are changing our government

Do you think this is the kind of stuff written about David Koch that makes him think he is a terrible guy? You notice that in the excerpt at the beginning of this blog post, Koch does not deny being a terrible guy. He does talk about sometimes feeling like he is a terrible guy and at other times feeling like he is not such a terrible guy.

I wouldn’t want you to think that everything written about the Koch brothers is negative. Here is the December 2012 article from Forbes Inside The Koch Empire: How The Brothers Plan To Reshape America.

Charles’ many critics on the left–including the President of the United States–accuse him of accumulating too much power and using it to promote his own economic interests through a network of secretive organizations they call the “Kochtopus.” Ironically, the Koch brothers believe they’re fighting against power, at least in the political realm. For the Kochs the real power is central government, which can tax entire industries into oblivion, force a citizen to buy health insurance and bring mighty corporations like Koch Industries to heel.

“Most power is power to coerce somebody,” says Charles, in a voice that sounds like Jimmy Stewart with a Kansas twang. “We don’t have the power to coerce anybody.”

The November elections–which David, in a separate interview shortly after the results were finalized, termed “bitterly disappointing”–seem to confirm Charles’ last point. Not even the Koch brothers, who spent tens of millions of dollars during this election cycle (they won’t disclose the exact amount) funding direct political contributions and issue-driven “nonprofits,” could coerce voters to back their candidates. Mitt Romney’s loss was a huge blow to them, both in terms of likely policy outcomes and personal reputation.

But those who think the brothers, older and chastened, will now fade away don’t understand the Kochs. Not a bit. Obama’s victory was just a blip on a master plan measured in decades, not election cycles. “We raised a lot of money and mobilized an awful lot of people, and we lost, plain and simple,” says David. “We’re going to study what worked, what didn’t work, and improve our efforts in the future. We’re not going to roll over and play dead.”

Does this description sound like the Koch’s are the type of people you want controlling your government? It dosesn’t seem like the majority of the electorate in the last presidential election wanted this kind of leadership.

Having watched Steve Forbes run for US President himself, you certainly aren’t thinking that his magazine is some kind of mouthpiece for the left wing.

The Daily Ticker has the story Extending jobless benefits is the right thing to do says Brookings analyst.

Melissa Kearney, who co-wrote a recent Brookings report “The Importance of Unemployment Insurance for American Families and the Economy: Take 2,” says extending emergency jobless benefits is the right thing to do in an economy where there are three unemployed workers for every job opening.

This is a case of using the right statistic in the right place. You can’t just go by the raw unemployment rate figure, which ought to be enough justification by itself. At the same rate of unemployment, if the number of job openings were significantly higher compared to the number of job seekers, then extending unemployment benefits might not be as wise.