Steve's Politics Blog

New Economic Perspectives has the cross-post Senator Bernie Sanders presents Tcherneva’s research to Show How Reagan Helped Destroy the Middle Class.

But when Sanders took to the Senate floor Thursday evening to offer a broad vision for how to do something to help the declining middle class, he offered a stunning chart that showed just how poorly most Americans have fared during economic recoveries since the advent of Reaganomics.

Here is a good look at Pavlina R. Tcherneva’s chart.

Notice that the top 10% got more than 100% of the income growth in this latest recovery. If you are in the bottom 90%. not only did the top 10% take all of you share of the income growth from the economic recovery, but they also took a good chunk of the income you were getting before the recovery. And Obama wonders why the voters didn’t turn out in droves to elect his party to majority control of the Congress.

Here is the presentation by Senator Sanders.

The article mentions:

The socialist Democrat is certainly aware that other factors such as technology, the waning of the union movement and globalization all played their roles, but his data makes for an awfully stark portrait.

Well, I object to that.  It is not that the other factors aren’t part and parcel of the concerted effort by the oligarchs of this country to redistribute the wealth upward.  So, being aware of these other factors does not change in any way the story Sanders is presenting.

Comments on the New Economic Perspectives post identify the woman in the video as Stephanie Kelton. For the uninitiated, Stephanie Kelton is the chief economist for the minority on the Senate Budget Committee that Bernie Sanders recently appointed. She is in the vanguard of promoting and explaining the precepts of Modern Money Theory. With her being in this position and Bernie Sanders’ using her advice so prominently, I predict that the American (and world) conversation about government debts and deficits will be turned up-side-down. This may have been an historic moment that you just watched.

The Daily Kos has the article Obama Tells House Dems to “Get Informed” on the TPP, But He’s the One Restricting Access to the Text.  The Daily Kos is commenting on  The Hill article Obama to Dems: ‘Get informed, not by reading the Huffington Post’.

PHILADELPHIA – President Obama on Thursday asked wary House Democrats to hold their fire, while the administration negotiates several trade deals opposed by scores of liberal lawmakers.

“Keep your powder a little dry,” he told the Democrats assembled here for an annual retreat, according to a source in the closed-door session.
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Top House Democrats, including Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), have drawn an additional line in the sand, saying they won’t support any new trade deal before the administration can demonstrate that the result will be higher wages for American workers.

“The impact on the paychecks of America’s workers is the standard that we will use,” Pelosi told reporters Wednesday.

Fielding private questions from the Democrats after a fiery speech before the caucus Thursday, Obama tried to defuse those concerns, saying his administration will make a “substantive case” for the new pacts.

Congress Needs to get Obama to listen. They just need to tell Obama that they can’t both be right about TPP, and Congress is pretty darn sure that Obama is the one that is wrong.

If corporations are allowed to write the trade pact and Congress isn’t allowed to know what is in it even for years after it is passed, then it is entirely obvious that the President has something to hide.

Maybe the Democrats need to tell Obama that if he refuses to listen, then they will join the Republicans in the efforts to impeach him.  If this does not get his attention, then he does need to be impeached and convicted and run out of office.

Senator Elizabeth Warren has made a post on her Facebook page where you can read the comments, add your own comment, and vote in favor of her idea. She has the following video in her post.

Senator Elizabeth Warren introduced the Medical Innovation Act on the Senate floor on January 29, 2015. The legislation would require large pharmaceutical companies that break the law and settle with the federal government to reinvest a small percentage of their profits into the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

To be against this bill you have to be for illegal behavior on the part of drug companies. How many Senators want to come out publicly for more waste, fraud, and abuse?

Even if these bills of Warren’s haven’t got much chance in the Republican Congress, it is about time we learned how to frame issues so that the Republicans are at least embarrassed when they refuse to act on them. Even better, Facebook gives you a way to register your approval of the proposal. If you can’t even bother to vote on Facebook, let alone at election time, when are you ever going to face your civic responsibilities?

New Economic Perspectives has the article Bill Black appears on The Real News Network discussing Greece which features The Real News Network video. On YouTube, the video has the explanation:

Professor William Black says the people of Greece won in spite of mainstream medias’ efforts to bury their plight and force them into a Great Depression

From the YouTube post, it is not clear if The Real News Network wants to discourage me from making these posts.  I have been avoiding posting such items recently because of these admonitions.  However, I think this one is too important to pass up.

I feel that this video is important because it is a good antidote to the fiction that has been printed as news in so-called reliable media such as The New York Times. The so-called experts that The New York Times uses to write its stories are just not qualified to offer their opinions on the subject as if it were expert testimony.

The Daily Kos has the article Justice Stevens Pens Six Amendments to Tune-Up Constitution. The author presents and comments on the amendments that Justice Stevens wrote in his book.  All the amendments are good, but I’ll quote just one.

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms when serving in the Militia, shall not be infringed.

In modern parlance that may be called the “What part of well regulated militia did you dummies not get, or did the comma confuse you?” amendment.

I have created an image for use as a bumper sticker or as a Facebook cover photo. Click on the thumbnail to get to the full size image. I describe the restrictions on its usage below. (There are none as far as I am concerned.)

The headshot comes from Bernie Sanders’ About Page on his Senate web site. I presume he wouldn’t mind my using this picture for this purpose. All the rest, I created with various tools such as Inkscape, MS Paint, and Adobe Photoshop. In other words, I have placed no copyright, nor creative commons restrictions on this image. Feel free to use it, hopefully to promote Bernie Sanders’ run for President. He hasn’t decided yet whether or not he will attempt the run, but if he sees enough of these, perhaps it will help him make the decision.

The Young Turks has posted YouTube video EXCLUSIVE VIDEO: Citizens United Activists Disrupt Supreme Court.

“Seven protesters accused of disrupting U.S. Supreme Court proceedings and another man who allegedly filmed the disruption are facing misdemeanor charges.

This could be a growing trend. If the Supreme Court is where our democracy goes to die, we ought to be able to protest its execution.

I finally found the source for the story about the 11 out of 12 footballs being under-inflated. The Bleacher Report has the story NFL Reportedly Finds 11 of 12 Balls Used in AFC Championship Were Under-Inflated.  Oops, I just noted the word “reportedly” in the headline.

NFL Communications (full version here) released the league’s statement on the situation:

Well the full statement is actually here. The report is what The Bleacher Report posted, but it says nothing about how many balls were measured as under-inflated.

While the evidence thus far supports the conclusion that footballs that were under-inflated were used by the Patriots in the first half, the footballs were properly inflated for the second half and confirmed at the conclusion of the game to have remained properly inflated.

So the operative, definitive statement is still

The NFL has launched an investigation into the amount of air in the balls provided by the New England Patriots in the AFC Championship Game against the Indianapolis Colts. On Jan. 20, ESPN’s Chris Mortensen reported that 11 of the 12 balls used by the Patriots were under-inflated by two-to-three pounds each.

If you follow the above link to Moretenen’s Twitter page, you will find the statement:

NFL has found that 11 of the Patriots footballs used in Sunday’s AFC title game were under-inflated by 2 lbs each, per league sources.

All roads lead back to Chris Mortensen. What if his balls get deflated?

I wish someone would publish a photocopy of the supposed letter that The Boston Globe said that it was shown. What could they possibly be hiding?

I am not a die-hard sports fan.  I only occasionally watch a Patriot’s football game.  So it is highly unusual for me to decide to even comment on this affair that is all the rage in the news.  I don’t claim to know who is and who isn’t telling the truth.  I could easily be convinced of either side being untruthful if any news medium decided to report all the facts.

What strikes me as particularly galling about the reports is an example of the problem in The Boston Globe article Bill Belichick and Tom Brady provide no insight on Deflategate by Christopher L. Gasper on January 23, 2015 – today’s newspaper.  On the front page of the sports section of the printed version of the paper, the headline was Belicheck to Brady: Incomplete Pass.

The Patriots were informed by the National Football League on Monday that their game balls were not properly inflated at halftime of the AFC title game. League office personnel and an alternate official inspected each ball twice, using different pressure gauges. ESPN has reported 11 of the 12 tested balls were two PSI below the specified limit.

Every story about the 11 footballs that I read refers to reports by ESPN.  I have yet to see the name or names of the people who actually did the measuring and reporting.  I don’t take ESPN’s word for anything any more than I would take Tom Brady’s or Bill Beklichick’s word.  You’d think that people giving these details would have actual names, and other media could speak directly to them to verify ESPN’s report of what they supposedly said.

Ironically, as I searched the Globe’s web site for the article that I had read in the paper as Belicheck to Brady: Incomplete Pass, I stumbled across a different article before I found the original article that was renamed on the web site as Bill Belichick and Tom Brady provide no insight on Deflategate.

This other article was named Patriots’ spying opened the gate, also by Christopher L. Gasper, and written on January 21, 2015,  two days before the article that started my investigation.

According to an NFL letter about the investigation that was shared with the Globe, the Patriots were informed that initial findings indicated the game balls New England used did not meet specifications (inflation to 12½ to 13½ pounds per square inch). The league inspected the Patriots’ game balls at halftime. It studied each ball twice using different pressure gauges. It found footballs that were not properly inflated.

Does the person sharing the letter with The Boston Globe have a name? So if the author Christopher L. Gasper had knowledge of an NFL letter when he wrote on January 21, why did he not mention this letter instead of an ESPN report when he wrote about the subject on January 23?  Did he actually see an official letter from the NFL, or did he see a report of the letter on ESPN or a copy supplied by ESPN?

Casper may think that Patriot’s spying incident opened the gate for questioning the veracity of the Patriots, but for me the past history of lazy journalism opened the gate for questioning the veracity of the press,  One example of what I call lazy journalism is for one journalist to quote as fact what was reported by another journalist without doing any investigation of her or his own. That investigation would include finding out who are the original sources, and conducting your own interview with those original sources.  Then the enterprising journalist could use names in the article written to explain who said what.

I am still open to the possibility that this story could go either way when the facts come out, if the facts ever do come out.  I am not sure that my source for reading about the facts will ever be The Boston Globe or any other corporate source for so-called news.

I understand why some news stories quote anonymous sources. Often a source is afraid of someone finding out who spilled the beans. Many important stories would never get told if a reporter could not guarantee the confidentiality of a source. However, anonymous sources open the reporter to the risk of publishing a lie.

The solution to the problem of anonymous sources is simple. Any promise of confidentiality must be predicated on the source telling the truth. The reporter should advise the source that if it turns out that source knew that the information was untrue, the sources’ name will be published as the teller of the false information. If the source cannot agree to this, then the reporter should not report anything the source has said based solely on what the source said. Anything of what the uncooperative source said should only be reported if another, more cooperative source can be found for that information.