There are two parts to The Real News posting Eurocrisis: “Democracy is Not a Given”.

One part is Eurocrisis: “Democracy is Not a Given” – German policy of low wages and beggar thy neighbor is root of euro crisis. German policy of low wages? Certainly not. I have never heard about this in the progressive press, let alone the lame stream press. Well, watch the videos, you may be shocked.

The other part is Class War: Low Wages and Beggar Thy Neighbor – The words “class war” maybe unfashionable, but it is still a battle between labor and capital.

The specter of economic imperialism rising again in Germany gives one pause, to say the least.

Maybe the previous post Paul Krugman: What Germany’s Jobs Miracle Can Teach Us didn’t have the whole story.

There is a simple economic lesson here about how economics is not so simple. The German attempt to increase employment by lowering wages based on the economic theory of supply and demand, should not have worked because of the Keynesian economic theory of demand destruction, but did work because of an entirely different economic principle of beggar thy neighbor.

I’ll rephrase Dr. Heiner Flassbeck’s conclusions for the United states.

The wage suppression that the Republicans have been trying since 1980 based on the theory of supply and demand, has not worked because of Keynes’ ideas of demand destruction. Beggar thy neighbor won’t come to our rescue because we don’t have neighbors big enough and rich enough onto whom we can shift our own problems. What little shifting we could do has already been done. The end of this road is similar to the end of the road that Germany’s policy of beggar thy neighbor is fast approaching for Germany.

See the subsequent post The Euro Crisis in 7 Simple Charts: They’re telling you a real pack of lies for the charts that support the videos in this article.

The Raw Story article House passes Republican payroll tax cut plan gives some detail on the plan.

Defying a White House veto threat, the US House of Representatives voted Tuesday to tie a payroll tax cut extension to the swift approval of the controversial “Keystone XL” US-Canada oil pipeline.

You had to know they would do this. Now, does the President have the guts to veto it if it should somehow make it past the Senate/House conference committee?

Here is Ron Paul’s ad about Newt Gingrich.

The obvious thing to do is to compare this ad with the one Karl Rove made against Elizabeth Warren. The main difference, I think, is that this one is not using lies to make its point. This ad is not telling you that Newt Gingrich is a completely different person from the one you have come to know over the years if you follow the news at all.

Government and Business play two different but essential roles in our society.

Think of the government as the citizens banding together to do things in a cooperative, wholesale way what they couldn’t do at all or as efficiently as individuals. Some of these things cannot be done by individual companies either. Companies banding together as monopolies or oligarchies have extremely unfortunate consequences, so we frown on allowing that to happen without strict controls by the government (the people).

I’ll provide some examples, but do not intend to write a book in an attempt to cover everything.

Government provides infrastructure such as roads, sewers and sewage treatment, and flood control. These are large projects that consist of many pieces that must work together, but we don’t need multiple copies in competition with each other.

Government also provides services that have no short term payback, but have important long-term consequences. Education of the citizens and work force are important. Some of what citizens need to learn is related to making society work as a whole and have little to do with satisfying the needs of a company or business.

Companies have primary responsibilities to their owners/share holders. There are no national boundaries to where the owners live or where the company does business. We should not expect large, multinational companies to have an allegiance to only one country.

Government, on the other hand, has its primary responsibilities to its citizens and residents. We should expect the government to have a keen interest in the welfare of its residents.

One of the advantages of our economic system is diversification. It is very hard to predict which inventions will lead to new industries that change the world. With diversification of companies we get many different attempts to make a business out of an invention. Most fail, some succeed on a grand scale. Companies come into existence and go out of existence as the needs of people change over time. This is what makes our economy vibrant.

What the government provides should not come and go with quite the same rapidity. Health care, retirement, education, infrastructure, defense, currency, and many other things need to be dependable for the long run. Certainly they need to adapt to changing conditions, but they probably shouldn’t disappear altogether in one form to suddenly reappear somewhere else in another form.

I won’t go into any details, technical or otherwise, but the interaction between the federal government and the economy is hugely different from the interaction between even the largest companies and the economy.  Any national politician, who does not recognize and understand that difference, can only lead us to wrack and ruin.  We have plenty of evidence of that in the present let alone our most recent history.

When we realize these vastly different roles, we can see that being a great success in business does not necessarily make for great success as a politician – be that mayor, governor, senator, representative, or president. When we elect people to these roles, we don’t want them thinking just like business people. We want them to understand that they are taking on a different role and different responsibilities from what they did when they succeeded in private life. We should always ask candidates to explain their understanding of how the role of government is different from the role of business.

Business experience isn’t a bad thing for a politician. However, when running for office, we ought to demand that politician show us an understanding of how the new role will be different from the old one. If the politician does not recognize the difference, there is little hope that this politician will have a highly beneficial impact on the lives of the citizens/residents with respect to the large matters given to the care of the government.

The post Rescued from Real People, Boston’s De-Occupied Dewey Park Now Re-Landscaped for Passing Motorists has some very thought provoking ideas in it.

I’ll quote just three paragraphs.  You’ll have to read the article itself to fill in what came before and what came after.

So it was no surprise that the mostly young, idealistic and courageous occupiers were forced from day 1 to recreate government, to develop mechanisms to deal, face to face with drug abuse, violent/uncontrolled behavior, unemployment, homelessness, hunger and poor health.  It wasn’t all just marches and demonstrations and rallies and teach ins; it was also a daily struggle for human and humane survival.  And the fact this was happening was also a daily embarrassment to the city and a reminder of how badly our cities fail for so many of their citizens.

The occupation movement did not create these people or their problems — those who received the trillions in bailouts were far more responsible — nor did they  exacerbate any of their conditions.  Homeless, suffering people and conditions came to the occupation, and the movement did its best to deal with them.

None of those conditions are gone merely because tents will now be replaced with freshly mowed grass that almost no one will see or walk on.   The problems and the people who struggle with them are still there, dispersed to who knows where, mostly out of sight and hence mostly out of mind.  And that was probably the unacknowledged plan that compelled the good Mayor to lie.

I think the Occupy Boston movement was about far more than we imagined.

You hear about big losses that major companies suffer from patent and copyright violators  and the cost of theft of intellectual property.  Makes you wonder how much money they make because they have these patents and copyrights which most people do not violate.

The thought of posting this article, led me to do a little Google searching for support.  I found Patent Losses Trump ObamaCare Benefits which gives a slightly different aspect of the value of patents.  Just do your own Google search on “patent losses” for a whole raft of other articles.

If you Google search “intellectual property loss” you find articles such as Losses from intellectual property espionage: a trillion dollars a year.  Again, one has to ask about the money made from protection of intellectual property that the non-violators fork over.

I am not in any way trying to promote the idea of patents and copyrights, but what I am trying to show is the tremendous financial gain that major corporations and the “job creators” get from the government programs and laws of patent and copyright protection.  You’d think these entities would have some appreciation for the great benefit they are receiving and might want to pay some taxes to keep this benefit flowing to them.  What about the cost to the government of the courts and law enforcement that does help recoup some of the losses from patent and copyright violations?  Is there any appreciation for that. Apparently, according to what the Republicans say about taxing “job creators”, you would be wrong to think there is any appreciation commensurate with the size of the benefit.

Of course, any benefit to corporations and wealthy “job creators” they get from these protections is a loss to the people who pay the higher prices for these protected products.  This makes this all a double example of how the wealthy benefit from government, do not want to pay for it, and foist the costs on the other 99% of us.

If I were a wealthy person, I would be more careful about bringing up this whole topic of “class warfare”.  What if the 99% woke up to what the wealthy were getting for free and how much it was costing them to provide it to the wealthy?  They might decide the wealthy ought to pay for what they get or lose the benefit of the government sponsored protection.  If I were wealthy, I would shut up about this and be happy to take the free ride I was getting.

I guess the wealthy never heard the maxim, “Let sleeping dogs lie.“

I got a kick out of this political ad for Rabbi Jason.

As a bonus I’ll throw in a video about Jon Stewart’s War on Christmas. If the video doesn’t play for you, try this link.

Here is a story about Newt the historian. The article Palestinians tell Gingrich to learn history after ‘invented people’ claim is my excuse to comment on this issue.

In the article, Newt Gingrich is quoted as saying, “I think we have an invented Palestinian people who are in fact Arabs and historically part of the Arab community and they had the chance to go many places.”

I have had this discussion with my Jewish relatives and friends a number of times.

I try to put them in a different frame of mind by trying to reduce this argument to something more personal.

Suppose a refugee, who had suffered great calamities in their life and had been dispossessed of their home, came to you and said, “I need to live in your house.  I don’t want to hear any complaints because you have the choice to live in many other places.  I’ll even offer you some money to sell the place to me.  On top of that, I will remodel and make this place a nicer place to live than you have. Now get out and shut up.”

There is no right answer for playing this suppose game. If you carry out this exercise truthfully, you might find yourself having a conversation with yourself about the merits of both sides of the argument.

We can lose our moral compass when we only talk about this group of people versus that group of people.  I hope that we can regain our sense of direction when we can remember that groups are made up of individual people.

Does the article Barack Obama Plays the Teddy Roosevelt Card a Little Late prove that I was wrong in my assessment of Ideal President Obama Replacement?

Here are a couple of paragraphs from the Teddy Roosevelt article.

When in doubt, wheel on Teddy Roosevelt. It’s article one in every Democratic president’s playbook. Roosevelt was president from 1901 to 1909. He was manly; he ranched in North Dakota and explored the Amazon. He was a rabid imperialist, charging up San Juan Hill and sending the Great White Fleet round the world. And he loved the wilderness — so long as it was suitably cleansed of Indians. “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians,” he wrote in “The Winning of the West,” “but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.”
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Obama and his campaign advisers are obviously betting that there won’t be any excessive snickering at the sight of a president who is blithely denying that, during the worst economic crisis in 70 years, his economic team — Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Chief Economic Adviser Lawrence Summers — wasn’t determined to “return to the same practices that got us into this mess” and impede any serious economic reform of the institutions and practices that prompted the great crash of 2008.

You probably know what that last paragraph is trying to say. I have counted the number of negatives in that paragraph and I think the number comes out right to express what they wanted to express.

After reading what I wrote, I counted them again – snickering at – denying – wasn’t determined. Yep, I think that is right. See what you get when you count them.

I received some talking point to help rebut the phony ad against Elizabeth Warren.