I received this email from one of the candidates for Tantasqua School Committee.  Since he does such a great job of speaking for himself, I am not going to add anything more.

 

——– Original Message ——–

Subject:	It’s A Race!
Date:	Mon, 24 Feb 2014 11:04:56 -0500
From:	Jacob Ryan <jacobjamesryan@gmail.com>
To:	Steve Greenberg

Hello Everyone!

I wanted to take a moment to message you all and talk about why I got so involved in Politics and why I am running for the Tantasqua School Committee.

I first got involved in politics at the age of 13. I had grown up until that time with a conservative point of view due to the church I attended, and it wasn’t till Hillary Clinton ran for president that I started to identify as a Democrat. After that loss and Barack Obama’s win in 2008, I began to get deeply involved in races. My first internship at a campaign was back in 2010 in Congressman Neal’s campaign office. I learned at that time how important it is to organize locally to help your candidates win elections and make sure the beliefs you hold deep in your core win as well.

With his re-election complete, I was eager to get involved in more campaigns. In 2011, I got involved with and interned for Elizabeth Warren. Never had there been a time that I had been more devoted to a candidate then when I interned for her. And the night that she won her election to represent the Commonwealth in the Senate, I bawled my eyes out. I continued to cry with Barack Obama’s re-election as well. By this time I knew how to campaign, but I still had much to learn.

I got more involved in town politics in June of 2013. I went to my first town meeting and was very attentive to the issues at hand. One issue in particular caught my attention, Stipends. The BOS had tried to pass stipends for certain elected and appointed officials in the town at the last minute during the budgetary season and the folks at town meeting were deeply opposed. I at the time wasn’t sure about the issue and wanted to have more time to learn about it. So I voted no to the proposal. Then when the town moderator had brought up the idea of a study committee being formed to study the issue of stipends, I was proud to make the motion to create this committee.

With the creation of this committee, I had asked the town moderator to appoint me to be one of the two citizen appointees. When I got the letter from him stating that he was going to appoint me, I was very humbled that he was giving me the opportunity to serve my community. I had the honor of working with some great folks on that committee who really did have the community’s best interest at heart. I was chosen by the committee to be the chair, again a very humbling experience for me. As time had gone on I had grown more opposed to stipends but was able to put those beliefs aside to work with those who I may not agree with to come up with a plan for the voters at town meeting to decide. I found it easier to work with those I may not agree with when I really looked at them as fellow members of the community who cared about the town as well.

With the success of compromise and non-partisanship that this committee showed could happen I was saddened to see how much town politics had devolved to spiteful, hateful speech. And I couldn’t stand by and watch it happen anymore. With the Stipend Study Committee coming to a close and my belief that we needed someone in the community that could work with everyone (no matter their political stripes) I decided to run for local office.

I decided that I wanted to give back to the part of the community that had given so much to me, Tantasqua. I graduated in 2013 with my diploma and CNA certification in hand and was able to do something a lot of students coming out of high school have a had a hard time doing, get a job.

Thanks to Tantasqua’s wonderful vocational program I was able to get a job with good job security during a time of economic hardship. When I was in high school I had the opportunity to serve as the Technical Student Representative on the School committee and really loved praising our vocational program to the committee. My brother is currently enrolled in the computer tech program at the high school and is ahead of his class in getting his certifications. I couldn’t be more proud of him. I want to work with those on the committee and in town to help preserve this great asset to our children. These programs give such a valuable opportunity to our students and should be protected.

I also want to serve as a bridge-builder on the committee. As proved by my time on the stipend study committee, compromise and non-partisanship can be reached but it requires patience and the understanding that those you agree and disagree with are only doing what they think is best for the school and community. With that in mind, I promise to work with my fellow committee members to do what is best for our community and to build bridges not only for us to work with each other on but to allow our next generation to cross those bridges into the next part of their lives.

I am proud to welcome Patricia Barnicle and Ms. Tichy to the race and wish them the best of luck.

I ask for your support because I care deeply about our community and school system and want to make sure the same opportunities that were presented to me are still there for upcoming generation.

Thank You!

Jacob J. Ryan

 

 

Progressive Massachusetts has created an endorsement questionnaire for candidates running fo the offices of Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Treasurer, and Attorney General.

We asked all democratic and independent candidates for contested statewide offices to submit questionnaires to be considered for our endorsement. As you vet the candidates and study their platforms, use our questionnaires to find out where candidates stand on specific policies that will move our state toward greater economic justice and a renewed, shared prosperity.

On the Progreesive Massachusetts‘ web page there are links to the responses of candidates for all four of the offices.  Here is the link to 2014 Governor’s Race OMNIBUS PROGRESSIVE MASSACHUSETTS ENDORSEMENT QUESTIONNAIRE RESPONSES.

It is going to be tough to decide on who to choose from this excellent field of candidates.  We should always be lucky enough to face this “problem”.  I hope they don’t get into a mudslinging contest. Such a contest might spoil the chances of enlisting the expertise of the non-winners in the next Governor’s administration.

The Maddow Blog has the post Why actual ACA ‘victims’ are so elusive.

Michael Hiltzik speculated last week that there may not be any genuine anecdotes to bolster the right’s claims.
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To a very real degree, it’s tragic to watch the developments unfold in real time. For much of 2013, especially in the months leading up to the open-enrollment period, assorted far-right groups launched an organized campaign to encourage the uninsured to stay that way – on purpose – in order to help conservative organizations advance their ideological agenda. It was a truly offensive display in which wealthy activists on the right urged struggling Americans to deliberately put their wellbeing in jeopardy.

Months later, we’re at a similarly painful moment in the debate, in which many of the same groups and activists are now exploiting people to create misleading attack ads, all in the hopes of keeping people from having access to affordable health care.

Quoting Paul Krugman, the post has the following:

Surely there must be some people somewhere actually being hurt by a reform that affects millions of Americans. Why can’t the right find these people and exploit them?

If and when someone actually does find someone hurt by the ACA, nobody is going to believe it because of all the phony stories that preceded it.

New Economic Perspectives has the Joe Firestone article How to Restore the Good Name of Government.

Nor will they legislate anything useful after it unless 1) Democrats get a majority in both Houses and 2) Democrats who constitute those majorities are willing to move away from corporatism and legislate in the interests of people. So, if something can be done in this area, it must be done by the President. There are four very important things he can do before the elections of 2014 that would help to restore some faith in Government and, as a by-product, at least tentative trust in the possibility that renewed Government deficit spending may help people.

1. The President can re-institute the rule of law in the area of national security and secrecy by ending mass surveillance of the US population immediately, ceasing all investigations and attempts at prosecutions of journalists who have been trying to tell the public about the overreach of our intelligence agencies, beginning investigations and prosecutions of intelligence operatives who have broken existing laws in gathering intelligence, ending current prosecutions of whistle blowers, and issuing pardons for those who already have been tried, convicted, and jailed.

2. The President can re-institute the rule of law in the area of FIRE sector control and mortgage frauds by beginning investigations and prosecutions of high level executives at too big to fail FIRE sector organizations who have committed fraud including those that caused the financial collapse of 2008, which, in turn, led to the Great Recession and the destruction of so much middle class wealth.

These first two initiatives are supremely important because they will deliver a very visible presidential message that the Government is re-instituting honest government and a single system of law, which, in turn, will give people some reason to believe that renewed spending by the Government will be carried out honestly for the benefit of people, and not for the benefit of FIRE, health care, energy and other elite corporations.

I leave it to you to read the other two things that can be done.

I chose to respond to the following statement from the article:

Finally, these Democratic promises will surely be met with a campaign emphasizing the bogeyman of hyperinflation. Democratic promises will be estimated in a primitive way totaling up what will they cost over the two year period. The assumption will be made that they won’t be countered by automatic stabilizers producing increasing fiscal drag as the US approaches full recovery.

The trouble with the cut in tax rates during the Reagan/Bush/Bush era is that it severely weakened the automatic stabilizers that prevent inflation from happening when the economy is in full recovery.  A marginal tax rate of 80% to 90% then in effect is a far cry from top rate in the 30’s that is now prevailing.  If we cannot get these tax rates restored now, then when inflation comes along, the stabilizers won’t be automatic.  They will require legislation that takes a long time to get approved at just the time when they need to immediately and gradually start kicking in before inflation can take hold.

There is a real reason to have high nominal tax rates with loopholes that kick in in times of recession.  Nobody is explaining this to people.  When the Republicans emphasize the high nominal corporate tax rates compared to other countries, the Democrats only explain that the effective tax rate is actually very low.  They never explain why this method is advantageous.  So you get all these calls to simplify the tax system with no explanation of what would be lost if we enact some of the simplifications.

There are probably very few politicians that even think about this and would be in a situation to provide an explanation.

New Economics Perspectives has the William Black post If New York Times Reporters Won’t Read Krugman about Austerity Will they Read Brooks?

I have written repeatedly about the New York Times’ needs to create a prize in incompetence in macroeconomic reporting (IMR) and suggested that the paper award the IMR prize to its reporters.  I suggested that the prize consist of a two hour lunch with Paul Krugman in which he will provide them with a remedial lecture on why austerity is an economically illiterate response to a recession.

I dedicate the above link to all who hold The New York Times in such high regard for their honesty in reporting all the news that fits in print.

To bolster my confirmation bias in what stories I choose to emphasize, Black goes on to say,

Notice that Shear treats the “looming debt crisis” and desirability of deficit reduction as facts so obviously true that they require no analysis.  There is no “looming debt crisis” for the U.S. government and the deficit has been reduced too quickly.  Notice that Shear implicitly treats federal budget deficits as harmful.  There are circumstances where that could be true due to inflation and very high capacity utilization.  We are not remotely in those circumstances.

I have emphasized the last two sentences, so that people won’t try to raise the false argument about inflation and crowding out private investment.  To get what Bill Black and I are saying, refer to the video below.

For everything there is a season, and this is not the season for austerity. Could it be more plain?

The Daily Kos has the story Exxon CEO Joins Lawsuit to Stop Fracking Near His Home.

Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson may be the world’s biggest fracker (Exxon is the biggest natural gas producer in the U.S.) but he isn’t stupid. He’ll frack my backyard and tell me it’s good for me and he’ll frack your place too, but don’t let any frackers near his home. He knows damn well that fracking lowers property values, but he wouldn’t admit it until the frackers came to his place. He just joined a lawsuit to stop the fracking because it would lower the value of his property.

Well, if you read the story on which The Daily Kos article is commenting, the path from the lawsuit to fracking is not quite as direct as the comment would imply.  However, “it is close enough for government work” as we used to say in the Army.

The step between the lawsuit and the fracking is really a pretty thin veil, in my opinion as well as the opinion of the article.

I don’t know who is being quoted here, but this shows you the indirection used.

Tillerson has joined a lawsuit that cites fracking’s consequences in order to block the construction of a 160-foot water tower next to his and his wife’s Texas home.

The Wall Street Journal reports the tower would supply water to a nearby fracking site, and the plaintiffs argue the project would cause too much noise and traffic from hauling the water from the tower to the drilling site.

If noise and traffic is a legitimate cause for legal action, you would think that poisoning wells and causing earthquakes would be legitimate causes for action, too.  Poisoned wells and earthquakes are the more typical reasons for objecting to fracking.

Motherboard has the article The Math That Predicted the Revolutions Sweeping the Globe Right Now.

Just over a year ago, complex systems theorists at the New England Complex Systems Institute warned us that if food prices continued to climb, so too would the likelihood that there would be riots across the globe. Sure enough, we’re seeing them now. The paper’s author, Yaneer Bar-Yam, charted the rise in the FAO food price index—a measure the UN uses to map the cost of food over time—and found that whenever it rose above 210, riots broke out worldwide. It happened in 2008 after the economic collapse, and again in 2011, when a Tunisian street vendor who could no longer feed his family set himself on fire in protest.

To judge this article, it helps to know the definition of the Food Price Index.

The FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) Food Price Index is a measure of the monthly change in international prices of a basket of food commodities. It is not a measure of the height of food prices, but it is a measure of how quickly the prices change.

I have been wondering what it takes to drive people to start the kind of uprising that can overthrow a government.  This article provides an answer that I had not thought about.  I doubt the Republicans know what fire they are playing with when they cut back on food stamps in this country.  Should we tell them, or should we let them dig themselves a hole they will never get out of?  If it weren’t for the suffering of the people who cannot afford to buy food for their families, the answer to the previous question would be more obvious.

The Real News Network has the interview Why Is The 2008 Crisis Taking So Long To Resolve?

Economist Yilmaz Akyüz on how excessive reliance on the US Federal Reserve created more problems than it has solved

Here is an excerpt to get you started.

AKYÜZ: The top 1 percent actually got the entire increase in income in the United States since 2009. And, in fact, the share of the rest of the population has been falling. So inequality is increasing in Europe too because of the austerity policies. So we have actually [incompr.] a bigger deflationary gap, because the workers are unable to afford the goods and services they are producing.

Now, how are we going to grow again brings you to the fundamental problem. Are we going back to business as usual? That means we’re going to have debt-driven bubbles in the United States or in Europe, or we’re going to be stuck in a long stagnation

FRIES: And what other policy shortcomings do you see in the U.S. and Europe post-crisis?

AKYÜZ: Well, one problem I mentioned in the crisis intervention was fiscal austerity after the initial expansion. A second shock coming in the policy response was actually the inability, and, in fact, unwillingness, of the governments to remove debt overhang by timely, orderly, and comprehensive debt restructuring.

Some people have had trouble understanding the interviewee. If you have such trouble, you might want to read the transcript at The Real News Network web site.

The paper that the interviewee discusses in this video is The Uncertain Future of the World Economy.

The world economy suffers from an under-consumption bias because of low and declining share of wages in the gross domestic product (GDP) in all major advanced economies including the U.S., Germany and Japan, as well as China.

Still, until 2008-2009 the threat of global deflation was avoided thanks to consumption binges and property booms driven by credit and asset bubbles, particularly in the U.S. and the European periphery.

The crisis has not removed but reallocated global trade imbalances.

Longer-term global prospects depend a lot on the U.S. due to its central position in the world economy and the international reserves system. It is highly unlikely that the U.S. can move to wage-led growth in the near future.

The end of this short paper speaks about an issue for the emerging economies.

The normalisation of monetary policy in the U.S. will also cause problems for emerging economies. Despite occasional complaints about the “currency war” entailed by liquidity expansion in several major advanced economies simultaneously, the policy of ultra-easy money has generally been benign for emerging economies.

It has been a major factor in the sharp recovery of capital inflows after the sudden stop caused by the Lehman Bank collapse in September 2008.

Many major emerging economies such as India, Brazil, South Africa and Turkey have come to depend on such inflows as their current accounts started to deteriorate. They have invariably welcomed the asset bubbles that such inflows have helped generate and often ignored the financial fragilities caused by increased exposure to interest rate and exchange rate risks by private borrowers abroad.

Such exposures are on the rise since the beginning of 2012. As funds have started to be withdrawn from domestic securities markets, emerging economies have increasingly relied on international debt contracted in reserve currencies, which reached, in net amounts, 600 billion dollars between the beginning of 2012 and mid-2013.

As the Fed has got closer to ending the QE3 and the long-term U.S. rates have edged up, strong downward pressures have started to build up on the currencies, stocks and bonds of several emerging economies such as Brazil, India, South Africa and Turkey, which were widely seen as rising stars only a couple of years ago.

And the longer-term prospects of the eurozone are even less encouraging than the situation in the U.S. Deleveraging and recovery are likely to remain extremely slow in the periphery and many countries cannot expect to recuperate the output losses incurred after 2008 for several years to come.

This explanation answers some of the questions I had about an interview featured in a previous post Tapering of Quantitative Easing Is Throwing Emerging Markets into Chaos.

February 23, 2014

Part 2 has been published – Wage Shares Fall in the US, Germany and Many Other Countries While Financial Shocks Hit Emerging Economies

I received an email about this news, so I went searching for an article with the details.  I found that ABC News had the article Obama Budget to Drop Benefit Cost-of-Living Trims.  I place ABC News only a fraction of a step above Faux Noise, but I’ll give you a few quotes from the story so you get the gist.

President Barack Obama will propose an election-year budget that would drop reductions he had previously embraced in federal benefits, officials disclosed Thursday. He also will ask Congress to approve about $56 billion in new or expanded programs, stepping back from aggressive efforts to tackle long-term government deficits and debt.
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Republicans promptly portrayed the White House move as abandoning any commitment to fiscal discipline.

“The one and only idea the president has to offer is even more job-destroying tax hikes, and that non-starter won’t do anything to save the entitlement programs that are critical to so many Americans,” said Brendan Buck, a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner.

I suppose you can’t blame ABC News for repeating what Speaker Boner had to say.  So I wish that the Obama administration would come out first about how these tax cuts are destroying jobs and need to be stopped.  The reason why the tax cuts are job destroying is that they take money away from government that would spend it on buying stuff that creates jobs, but instead the money is retained by the wealthy who can’t possibly spend all the money they already have.  So the wealthy put the money from the tax cuts into bogus Wall Street gambling schemes that don’t put anybody to work.

Now here is one that you can blame ABC News for.

The proposed cost-of-living trims, supported by many Republicans and now put aside by Obama, would use a different inflation index to adjust annual benefit payments. Many economists believe the alternative formula, called a “chained consumer price index,” better reflects consumer spending behavior.

What ABC News doesn’t tell you is that there may be more economists that believe the current inflation index underestimates the impact of inflation on the elderly.  If there needs to be an inflation index to determine cost of living adjustments, there should be a special one for how seniors spend their money.  (Well, there actually already is one.)  Using this index would give seniors even higher cost of living adjustments than they currently get.

See the Bureau of Labor Statistics web page Consumer Price Index for the elderly.

BLS also calculates an experimental CPI for the elderly, or CPI-E, by using households whose reference person or spouse is 62 years of age or older.

Could ABC News be so ignorant that they are unaware of this index and the economists who promote it?  For that matter, one has to wonder if President Obama is also ignorant of this index.  What about the Republicans in Congress?  Anyone who is unaware of the this BLS index ought not be making budget decisions for our government.

I found a more reliable source to misrepresent the story. The Los Angeles Times story is Obama backs away from a Republican budget priority.

The president’s now-abandoned proposal to replace the consumer price index with a new formula for cost-of-living increases called “chained CPI” would probably have resulted in savings in programs such as Social Security and Medicare. Obama had indicated his support for chained CPI in battles with Republicans over the debt ceiling and government funding, starting in 2011.

Why no mention of the CPI-E, the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer price Index For the Elderly?  Not only is chained CPI not a better measure of elderly spending compared to what is used now, it is actually a worse measure than what we use now – see CPI-E above.

Does the media have any responsibility to educate its readers?  Or does it only have to report what a few sides of the argument are?  Is this what is called balanced reporting?

When the President is wrong and the Republicans are wrong and this newspaper knows it, is it really being a newspaper to keep this a secret?

Do you ever ask yourself, how come I know more about these matters than the professional reporters seem to know? What am I paying them for anyway? Well, of course, I am reading this on the web so I am not paying them anything for the shoddy reporting. And they are getting everything from me that their reporting is worth.

The Real News Network has the 4 part series starting with I Was Born a Rebel – Code Pink Co-Founder Medea Benjamin on Reality Asserts Itself (1/4).

You may know Code Punk only from some of their visible protests at various congressional hearings or appearances of politicians. If so, you may or may not have an entirely favorable opinion of Code Pink. However, when you hear the story of how Medea Benjamin came by her opinions, you may change your mind somewhat. When I found out the things she has experienced first-hand about U.S. and multi-national corporate power, and even her experiences in Cuba, I couldn’t imagine her taking any different stands from the ones I have seen on TV (and the ones shown in the interviews).

An Apology From Fidel – Medea Benjamin on Reality Asserts Itself (2/4).

Obama Sucked the Steam Out of the Anti-War Movement – Medea Benjamin on Reality Asserts Itself (3/4).

As of this writing, part 4 has not been published.

February 23, 2014

Part 4 has been published.
The Movement is in Silos – Medea Benjamin on Reality Asserts Itself (4/4)