Rolling Stone magazine has the article Inside the Koch Brothers’ Toxic Empire.

Together, Charles and David Koch control one of the world’s largest fortunes, which they are using to buy up our political system. But what they don’t want you to know is how they made all that money.

As much as I have come to realize the evil nature of the Koch brothers, I don’t think I had an inkling of how bad they were.  If you read this, make sure you have a jaw strap to keep your jaw from dropping on the floor. (And if you want to make a verbal safety recommendation as I have written it above, make sure you pronounce the name of  the safety device carefully.)

New Economic Perspectives has the article The New York Times Claims that Opposing EU Austerity Leads to Anti-Semitism by William Black.

It turns out that opposition to austerity is a key cause of Anti-Semitism – at least in the imagination of NYT reporters.

“With Europe still shaking from a populist backlash against fiscal austerity, some Jews speak of feeling politically isolated, without an ideological home.”

That sentence is odd on multiple dimensions. First, there is the question of what is “shaking” Europe. The NYT thinks it is opposition to austerity – not austerity – that is “shaking” Europe. That reverses reality. The troika’s infliction of austerity forced the Eurozone back into a gratuitous Second Great Recession and much of periphery into a gratuitous Second Great Depression. It has now pushed Italy into a third recession and the eurozone as a whole into “stagnation” – eight years after the bubbles burst and six years after the most acute phase of the financial crisis. Eurozone austerity is one of the great crimes against humanity.

This is just another reason why I have trouble understanding why Jews of any foresight would still believe in The New York Times, fiscal austerity, or any Ayn Rand philosophy extolling the greed of oligarchs.

The realization the other day that fundamentalist Muslims seem to be the most adamant opponents of the ills caused by unfettered capitalism, leads me to the following transition.

It is one thing to want to support Israel, but when it comes to turning a blind eye to the cause of the Palestinians, we are treading dangerously near to being on the wrong side of the class war. The support for Israel and the resultant blame put on the Palestinians sounds to me too remarkably close to the arguments of the 1% against the 99% in this country and the world in general.

If you blame the downtrodden for all of their problems without realizing who is doing the treading, then you may be on the wrong side of the argument. Whatever little logic you may have on your side will be hardly noticed when the downtrodden finally rise up.

The Boston Globe has the column Charlie Baker saved Harvard Pilgrim. Can we stop debating it? by Shirley Leung.

It’s true that Baker raised rates by a lot, but so did other insurers at the time. The increases, however, weren’t onerous enough to prevent Harvard Pilgrim from growing. Membership rose from a low of 750,000 to more than 1 million on his watch.

Yes, Baker was well paid, but his compensation package was in line with his peers in 2008, the last full year he was CEO. He still doesn’t hold a gold coin to Ted Kelly, who made out with nearly $50 million a year as CEO and chairman of Liberty Mutual.

As for Baker rescuing Harvard Pilgrim, let’s get this straight because you’re going to hear a lot from Martha Coakley, the attorney general and Democrat gubernatorial candidate who will tell you Charlie was no hero. He got a state bailout. Slashed jobs. Hiked prices. Is this leadership?

So this is what you need to know: After serving in the Weld and Cellucci administrations, Baker went off to work in health care, and in 1999, he was brought in to fix a company in deep trouble. He did so with a plan, a firm hand on the rudder, and grit. He pulled out of Rhode Island. He cut jobs, even outsourced them. He invested in technology to improve customer satisfaction.

By the time he left, Harvard Pilgrim was rated the best health insurer in America in annual rankings conducted by a respected nonprofit. So give the guy credit where credit is due.

So we get the idea that Charlie Baker should be governor because his health insurance rate increases were not any worse than the other insurance companies at the time.  Being a firm believer in the law of supply and demand, we are to conclude that Shirley Leung isn’t purposely leaving out the other side to the story of Harvard/Pilgrim’s increasing enrollment that would offset the increase in rates.

We can praise Charlie Baker for being no more rapacious than other executives when it comes to his compensation package.  I’m supposed to consider voting for Baker because he is not nearly as bad as Ted Kelly?

As far as Charlie Baker being a job creator, Leung says “He cut jobs, even outsourced them.”  Let’s also praise Baker because “He invested in technology to improve customer satisfaction” after he decimated morale amongst his workforce with draconian job cuts.  OK, so that last part is only my interpretation.  Doesn’t the world have a problem that corporations can save money by replacing workers with automation, and feels a need to apportion the benefits of increased productivity to only its top management and share holders?  The Charlie Baker’s of the world are the problem, not the solution.

Charlie Baker must be a genius to have rescued Harvard/Pilgrim with his own ingenuity (and a “state bailout”).

Now, consider the responsibilities of a governor.  Suppose you manage to run the government by keeping within your budget, cutting taxes, and laying off people, but the state has a higher unemployment rate, crumbling infrastructure, declining education achievements, and higher rates of poverty.  Can you simply say that the negatives are just not my job as you could when you were in private business?

Let’s hope we never elect a governor who thinks that running a state is just like running a business.

A news story on WBZ-TV made it clear to me that there were already services in operation that had some similarity to the idea I have been pushing. See the previous post Monetizing Internet Content – One More Time.

I could not find the WBZ story on line to look up the services they mentioned, but it gave me the idea to search the web.

Infoq has the article How to Pay the Author: Flattr Micropayment Service.

Here is the video that the company, Flattr, has put up on YouTube.

Flattr is a revolutionary social micropayment system. This how it works. Visit us at www.flattr.com

I also found references to Tiny Pass and a zillion others.

Here is Paul Weyrich laying it all out for us from a 1980 video clip.

Paul Weyrich, “father” of the right-wing movement and co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, Moral Majority and various other groups tells his flock that he doesn’t want people to vote. He complains that fellow Christians have “Goo-Goo Syndrome”: Good Government. Classic clip from 1980. This guy still gives weekly strategy sessions to Republicans nowadays.

I was going to ask the rhetorical question of whether or not this is what the average follower of the Heritage Foundation or the Moral Majority accepts as an underlying philosophy. I then realized that I have read a number of letters to the editor and comments on the internet to realize that at least some of these people are thoroughly aware of this, and that they approve of it.

Here is a very interesting way to look at how we give consent to be governed by our Constitution.  After the lecturer knocks down the usual explanations, he comes up with a perspective on the Constitution that I had not considered quite this explicitly before.

It changes a lot of my ideas when I think that the Constitution is meant to restrict what the government may do, not what the people may do. So not everything that the Constitution says the government must avoid doing is something the Constitution wants the people to avoid doing.

I wonder what my readers will have to say about this. I am sure that at least some of them have a much more refined understanding of all this than I do.

There was a fabulous comment on the article I mentioned in my previous post A Bottom-Up Solution to the Global Democracy Crisis.

I’ll quote a little bit of the comment:

A true democracy, however, would always be able to step on the rights of a minority: as the old saying goes, a “democracy” is two wolves and a sheep voting on what’s for supper.

If you are the two wolves, you have to convince the sheep that he lives in a “democracy” and he should submit to the will of the majority, or perhaps you will just disenfranchise the sheep, telling him he can’t vote so it really doesn’t matter what he thinks, anyway. This can be done in various ways: you can make more and more petty crimes into felonies thereby precluding the sheep’s right to vote (ah, I say old boy, I think you entered the wrong pasture–that ain’t your grass); you can gerrymander pastures such that other sheep cannot be included, and thus cannot vote; you can demand that the sheep show an ID issued by the wolves and you can always dress a wolf up in sheep’s clothing so that he can make speeches to the other sheep about why it is in their best interest to follow the edicts that the wolves lay down. He will explain on his radio show (or TV program) that not to follow his advice would expose the whole herd to unknown dangers. At least this way, a few at the time can be picked off and the herd as a whole will consider itself “safe.”

Some of the links in the comment are also great.  I think I’ll make separate blog posts of those.

Naked Capitalism has the article Christie Team Digging Deeper Hole in Pension Fund Scandals.  What caught my eye was the connection to Charlie Baker.

To give a very short summary of Sirota’s biggest current story, the IBT journalist has uncovered questionable connections with two prominent figures, Charlie Baker, who is a Republican gubernatorial candidate in Massachusetts, and former New Jersey pension fund chief Robert Grady.

First, a short background on the Baker story: Sirota showed how that Baker made a $10,000 donation to the New Jersey Republican Party shortly before Christie officials gave Baker’s firm a pension management contract. That donation ran afoul of the Garden State’s pay-to-play rules that bar contributions from executives and partners of entities that manage state pension funds.

New Jersey launched an investigation into Sirota’s charges and announced that as a result, it was exiting the contract with Baker’s firm.

The article does provide a link to The Boston Globe article Baker denies connection between donation, investment.  I leave it up to you to decide if The Boston Globe article gives this story all the coverage you need to know as you decide whether or not to vote for Charlie Baker as our next governor.

Nate Silver’s Five Thirty Eight web site has the article The American Middle Class Hasn’t Gotten A Raise In 15 Years.

Take the generation born in 1970. In early adulthood, these Americans outearned their parents, those born in 1950. But their gains stalled in the 2000s, when they were in their 30s. Now in their 40s, their earnings have fallen behind those of their parents at the same stage in their lives.

If you are in your 40s and you haven’t reached your economic expectations for this stage of your life, it’s probably not your fault. The world economy has turned against you because all the economic gains are being gobbled up by the top 1%.  The beauty of this for the top 1% is that you are struggling so hard, you don’t have time to do anything about this.

I have the solution for you though.  Stay away from the election on November 4th and turn the Senate over to the Republicans.  You’ll soon be unemployed and have plenty of  time to riot in the streets.

The Republicans may have stopped the Obama administration in its tracks, but at least we can be thankful that the Senate has the Republicans stopped in their tracks too.  Imagine if these people were to get their way.