My better judgment tells me not to post this.  All I can say is “The devil made me do it.”

Naked Capitalism has the post Michael Hudson: The War on Pensions – The US Budget Anti-Pension Law. He uses the Teamster’s Pension Fund as an example of  how the recently passed US  budget attacks pension funds.

But let’s look more closely at the alleged source of the problem. It’s not just that there are so many fewer employees per retiree. The Teamsters Central States Fund is a prime example of Wall Street mismanagement. Goldman Sachs, Northern Trust and other firms make the decisions, not the Fund’s own board. A recent report has found that “Roughly a third of the pension system’s shortfalls — or almost $9 billion – can be traced to investment losses accrued during the financial industry’s 2008 collapse. These losses were in addition to more than $250 million in fees paid by the plan to financial firms in just the last 5 years.”

To my friends who think that what this country needs is more political compromise, I say this is what political compromise looks like.  If you are wiling to give up your retirement security to pay for the financial benefit of the ultra-wealthy, then you should be pleased that President Obama did not veto this compromise.

You may have noticed a pretty drastic change to the look of the blog.  After 7 years or so with one theme, I finally decided to move to a more modern one that unlike the old one is a responsive design and one that can take advantage of all of the new features of the latest WordPress software.

If you look closely, you might see some similarities with the Friends of the Joshua Hyde Public library web site.  I am using the same theme here as I use on the Friends site. A major difference is that the Friends web site is a general web site, not a blog.  That shows the flexibility of WordPress and this theme, which I did not appreciate until recently.

Let me know what you think about the new look and feel.  Tell me if there is any feature of the previous theme that I may have forgotten to transition to the new theme.  It is easiest if you comment on the Facebook link to this post.

Naked Capitalism has the article Bill Mitchell: Demystifying Modern Monetary Theory which presents the video below.

This talk is wide-ranging, and starts by pointing out that in key ways, Modern Monetary Theory incorporates basic concepts that have perversely omitted from mainstream macroeconomics, largely for ideological reasons. This conversation does not get much into central bank operations, which is the basis for MMT’s claim that it is a much more accurate representation of how monetary operations work for a fiat currency issuer like the US than textbook or popular press accounts that are based on outdated “gold standard” notions.

I can speculate on why other people have such a hard time accepting such simple explanations of how to fix the economy and what is wrong with our tightly held mythical beliefs about the economy, but I’d rather hear from readers who still cannot accept what has now become obvious to me.

Please comment on why you think what Bill Mitchell says cannot possibly be true.

Thanks to elizabeth Warren for posting this on Facebook.

An in-depth (but still brief) look at which members of Congress stood with Senator Elizabeth Warren in challenging the awful provisions written into this year’s spending bill. Courtesy of Because Finance Is Boring.

The more voters who see this story, the more likely they will remember who their friends in Congress are. When election time comes they ought to vote for the people who are on their side. Of course that presupposes that the Republicans will not succeed in purging the voting rolls of all the people who oppose them. (See my previous post The Secret Lists that Swiped the Senate.)

Greg Palast has the article The Secret Lists that Swiped the Senate on his web site.

No question, Republicans trounced Democrats in the Midterm elections.  But, if not for the boost of this voter-roll purge system used in 23 Republican-controlled states, the GOP could not have taken the US Senate.

Palast quotes some indicative numbers in his article:

• In North Carolina, Republican Thom Tillis upset incumbent Senator Kay Hagan by just 48,511 votes.  North Carolina’s Crosscheck purge list targeted a stunning 589,393 voters.

• In Colorado, Cory Gardner, the Republican, defeated Mark Udall by just 49,729 votes.  Colorado’s Crosscheck “potential double voter” list totals 300,842.

So while I chastise President Obama for his abysmal record of helping the bottom 90% of income earners, I should not forget the factor of how many of his likely voters were not allowed to vote.

I base this not on the presumption that the purge lists were faulty, but on the evidence Palast presents.  You have to look at  the chart he has in the article to see the justification for his statement:

If the Crosscheck lists truly identified fraudulent double voters, then we’d have to concede that the election results are legit.  But the ugly truth is, the lists are nothing more than racially-loaded lists of common names.

On first reading of the article, even I did not pay enough attention to the statement:

While state officials claimed that the criminal double voters were matched by social security number and other key identifiers, we discovered that, in fact, they only matched first and last name.  Nearly two million of the pairs of names lacked middle name matches.  Example:  James Elmer Barnes Jr. who voted in Georgia is supposed to be the same person as James Cross Barnes III of Virginia.

Where is the Department of Justice?  The Obama administration has two years to address these issues.  The Republicans are right about there being voter fraud, and they ought to know.  They are the ones committing the fraud.

As with the their vulture capitalist friends and their supporters who are executives at the top 5 financial institutions on Wall Street, the Republicans find that it is easy to win if you cheat and the authorities let you get away with it.  The national “authorities” in the Obama administration even hire the cheaters to take charge of managing the enforcement of the laws.  (That hiring record at the national level is Obama’s fault, so maybe the Democrats’ losses are just poetic justice, if not real justice.)

Well, I have just made my calculation of the end of the year financial results.  Comparing this to year end 2008, our net worth is up 90%.  Obama’s term in office has been pretty good to us. (For nefarious people who might be reading this, let me add that very little of our net worth is at our home.   Most of it is safely tucked away in the “bank”.)

I am worried about the welfare of the other 90% of the income earners below us that have not made progress at all or who have even lost ground.

We can pat ourselves on the back for having elected President Obama, twice.  We can also be very concerned that the gains have been limited to the top 10% of income earners. Should we be surprised that the enthusiasm of 90% of the voters is not as great for President Obama as it once was.  Of course The Secret Lists that Swiped the Senate might have had something to do with the lower turn-out for Democrats in the last election.

The Other 98% has this Facebook post.

The truly great police officers probably want the incompetent or corrupt ones out of the profession. They probably abhor bad police force management that allows this to go on.

These good police officers are not looked upon fondly by those who cannot or will not live up to these officers’ high standards.

Here is my public service announcement from the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, A New Year’s resolution to conquer your student debt.

Each year, nearly 5 million college students leave school with student debt. For most of them who graduated this past spring, their six-month “grace period” just ended and those first bills have just have arrived.

For all of you faced with student loan payments and crafting New Year’s resolutions to conquer your debt, we’ve put together some tips to help you navigate through the noise.

Whether you’re just starting out or if you’re worried you’re in too deep, taking action today can help you save money, build your credit, and get you on the road to being debt-free.

You can also find a link to the article on the CFPB Facebook post.

Thanks to Elizabeth St John for sharing this on her Facebook page.

The disrespect that the police showed to Mayor de Blasio is a perfect demonstration of the issue that has brought on such criticism of police behavior. The police will brook no disrespect aimed at them. You might say people get shot and killed for showing any hint of disrespect. Yet, the police show tremendous disrespect for the people that they bully while expecting the victims to just accept it. In contrast the Mayor did tolerate the police disrespect aimed at him even though he could have had all those policemen fired for insubordination. The Mayor showed an ability to de-escalate rather than escalate tension. The police who protested showed how to escalate rather than de-escalate. Seems there could have been a teachable moment here that nobody recognized.