I have always thought that the there is a reason why Republicans know how to pick the most awful thing to accuse the Democrats of wanting to do so that public emotions will be stirred up to reject the idea. They just pick something that they want to do that they would most like to hide from the public.
I am now getting to an age where that grandma and grandpa that go over the cliff could be Sharon and me.
I found the above clip on the pages of Rawstory.com
According to Paul Krugman’s piece, Making Things in America the answer seems to be not much.
First, what’s driving the turnaround in our manufacturing trade? The main answer is that the U.S. dollar has fallen against other currencies, helping give U.S.-based manufacturing a cost advantage. A weaker dollar, it turns out, was just what U.S. industry needed.
Yet the Federal Reserve finds itself under intense pressure from the right to make the dollar stronger, not weaker. A few months ago, Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, berated Ben Bernanke for failing to tighten monetary policy, declaring: “There is nothing more insidious that a country can do to its citizens than debase its currency.” If Mr. Bernanke had given in to that kind of pressure, manufacturing would have continued its relentless decline.
This follows the thesis that I have been presenting here on this blog that in order for our manufacturing industries to become competitive again, our costs have to start to balance out with the competing countries.
I can think of two ways to make this happen.
One way is to let the value of the dollar fall. That will cut into everyone’s wealth that is denominated in US dollars. However, the decline in wealth will be relative to people in other countries and will be little noticed by people here. The workers and the super rich will all share in the decline.
Another way is to drastically lower the wages in this country in terms of a strong dollar whose value is not declining. This will be rapidly be noticed by the workers in this country as their debts will stay at fixed amounts, while their resources to pay those debts will decline. This seems to have the nice effect for the rich in that the money owed to them is not losing purchasing power. As with the housing bubble, they seem to forget that it makes no difference if the money owed to you stays constant when the people who owe it to you cannot pay it back. I cannot understand how people who are supposed to be capitalists have such little grasp of this elementary principle of capitalism.
The Kochs Take One On The Chin is a little article by Jim Hightower.
It’s always good to see a corporate bully get popped right in the snout by those it’s bullying – and what bully is more deserving of a comeuppance than Koch Industries?
James Fallows has an article On The Atlantic web site. He highlights the following two charts:
These charts come from the report from Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Economic Downturn and Bush Policies Continue to Drive Large Projected Deficit.
Related info can be found on the White House web page in the article Moment of Opportunity: President Obama on the Middle East & North Africa.
While I felt that the message that President Obama presented about his vision for the Middle East was a strong one, I often wondered about applying this vision in the USA.
I noted a number of ideas in his speech that could use application here.
Promote open access to the internet. In 21st century information is power. Will oppose any group that tries to restrict the right of others and tries to hold power through coercion and not consent.
Relates to the insistence of net neutrality in this country. This is strongly opposed by Republicans and their big corporate backers.
Broaden our engagement beyond elites. Reach the people who will shape the future, particularly the young people. Expand education. Combat disease. Connect with and listen to the voices of the people.
Ideas also opposed by Republicans who just want to take care of the elites. They want to diminish support for educational opportunity. They do not support health care for all.
Respect for the rights of the minorities. All faiths are respected. Rights of women. Child and maternal health.
None of the above are firmly supported by the opposition in this country.
The President mentioned concern for Young people are well educated but cannot find a job.
The opposition in the US is more concerned with blocking women’s rights to health care than they are about creating jobs.
Greatest untapped resource is the talent of its people. Economic growth to solidify the accomplishments of the street. Success of democratic expansion depends on growth and broad-based prosperity.
How about some of that broad-based prosperity here? Taking an average where the top few percent have most of the prosperity is not a good measure of how we are doing here.
He talked about the importance of financial stability
.
Our opposition here wants unbridled and un-policed capitalism despite the instability and havoc that this causes.
Can’t have a dialog when parts of the peaceful opposition are in jail.
What about the civil rights of Bradley Manning who has not been convicted of anything, yet? How about stopping his torture that serves no useful purpose let alone the illegality and immorality of such torture?
What the President proposed for the middle east seems down-right un-American by the standards of the elites of this country. Maybe we need to look at ourselves with a little of the humility Obama proposed for our actions in other countries.
In the article, The Great Switch by the Super Rich, Robert Reich has made a very interesting point.
Forty years ago, wealthy Americans financed the U.S. government mainly through their tax payments. Today wealthy Americans finance the government mainly by lending it money. While foreigners own most of our national debt, over 40 percent is owned by Americans – mostly the very wealthy.
This great switch by the super rich – from paying the government taxes to lending the government money — has gone almost unnoticed. But it’s critical for understanding the budget predicament we’re now in. And for getting out of it.
By paying the rich to fund the government we are giving them an opportunity to make money without putting in any effort at productive economic activity.
This will kill the US economic competitiveness faster than any other economic policy that has been tried in our history.
Why not focus on the damage that this tax policy is causing to our economic health?
Just like grape vines make for better wine when they undergo a little stress, capitalists make for better economic growth when they have to work a little to make money.
For proof of this last point see my previous post, Higher Marginal Tax Rates Spur Economic Growth.
I found the article BREAKING: Jerome Corsi’s Birther Book Pulled from Shelves! on the Esquire Magazine web site. The article starts with the following introductory paragraph:
In a stunning development one day after the release of Where’s the Birth Certificate? The Case that Barack Obama is not Eligible to be President, by Dr. Jerome Corsi, World Net Daily Editor and Chief Executive Officer Joseph Farah has announced plans to recall and pulp the entire 200,000 first printing run of the book, as well as announcing an offer to refund the purchase price to anyone who has already bought either a hard copy or electronic download of the book.
I sent a message to the PBS NOVA show.
I have been unable to watch NOVA since I discovered that the show is sponsored by David H. Koch.
Try as much as my mind would like, my heart just won’t let me tune in the show anymore.
There can’t be any doubt about the sponsorship. Look to the bottom of their web page to see:
If you don’t follow politics much and don’t know who David H. Koch is, try putting the
word Koch into the search box at the upper right side of this web site.
Besides this post and anything I might add in the future, you will find the following articles:
Rename the David H. Koch Theater
2,000 Protesters March On Koch Industries’ D.C. Office
Bill Moyers: “Welcome to the Plutocracy!”
May 28, 2011 – 12:55PM
I received a response from nova@whbh.org.
Dear Steven,
WGBH is committed to the editorial integrity of all our programs, adhering to the strictest journalistic standards. To maintain that integrity, and the trust of our audiences, funders are prohibited from any involvement in the editorial process.
NOVA, like all WGBH programs, maintains complete, independent editorial control of its content.
Best regards,
NOVA
Did I say anything about editorial control being the problem?
Here is my response to their response.
Dear NOVA,
Loss of editorial control is not needed for my heart to prevent me from listening to anything that David H. Koch uses to redeem his immortal soul from the devil work he does elsewhere.
/Steve
May 19, 2011
It is one thing to try to atone for past sins. It is quite another thing to try to hide behind good works while continuing to commit these sins. That is what makes the behavior of the Koch brothers and their collaborators in reputation cleansing so worthy of protest.
See my previous post, Rename the David H. Koch Theater.
Halberstam’s ‘Best-Brightest’ Blunder is a very interesting article from Consortium News.
The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam shaped the American narrative of the Vietnam War, making it a cautionary tale about the folly of action-oriented intellectuals who surrounded President John F. Kennedy and whose hubris supposedly plunged the nation into a destructive war. But is Halberstam’s widely embraced storyline correct? In this analysis of the 1972 book, James DiEugenio argues that Halberstam got the history fundamentally wrong, missing Kennedy’s resistance to a wider war and ignoring the fateful change in U.S. policy after JFK’s assassination in 1963.
This article really makes you wonder about what we really know and what we don’t. Either this guy is right and I was horn-swoggled by Halberstam’s book or the exact opposite.
This has tremendous importance even to this day. When Obama touted his intellectual prowess over the village idiot that preceded him, I always had the nagging questions in the back of my mind, “but what about the people in the Kennedy/Johnson administration as described in The Best and The Brightest? If these smart people could have been so wrong, how do we know that Obama’s smart people will do better?”
This article does not completely negate some of those questions. After all, some of the smart people in the Kennedy/Johnson administration did make some awful decisions. The “fact” that Kennedy was smart enough to try to get around these people at least makes the case some educated people can figure out how to use their knowledge of history to the world’s advantage. If I were a prejudiced person, I would gladly lay all the blame on that darn Texan, Lyndon Johnson, instead of the Cantabridgian Kennedy.
May 20, 2011
I just found Part 2 of the article. The closing paragraphs of the article say:
Halberstam’s book covers up this fact: that while the powers-that-be are indeed often overrated, Kennedy was not one of them. That was a truth too radical for someone like Halberstam, who was never the kind of writer who pushed the envelope.
Yet, what makes his iconic book even a worse travesty is that he never tried to amend it, even after more declassified documents revealed that Kennedy was intent on withdrawing and that Johnson reversed that policy. That failure, I think, speaks to Halberstam’s intent.
In my view, Halberstam’s deception was purposeful. Therefore, this is not just an obsolete book. It is an intentionally misleading one.
The closing sentence about the author of this article reads:
James DiEugenio is a researcher and writer on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and other mysteries of that era.
I leave it up to you to decide if this description has any bearing on the credibility of the article.