Steve's Politics Blog

New Economic Perspectives has the article The Kansas Regents (Casually) End Academic Freedom.

The chief executive officer of a state university has the authority to suspend, dismiss or terminate from employment any faculty or staff member who makes improper use of social media. “Social media” means any facility for online publication and commentary, including but not limited to blogs, wikis, and social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube. “Improper use of social media” means making a communication through social media that:
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Kansas is trashing the only remaining jewel in the state, its superb university system.  The ideological purge that removed virtually all of the “moderate” Republican conservatives from the Kansas legislature has now set its assault rifle sights on the universities.  Their view of the glorious “harmony” made possible only through ideological purity perverts a “right” of free speech or “academic freedom” into an act of disloyalty.  The new “efficiency” regime founded on “truth” as it was revealed to the Koch brothers and the NRA will gradually sweep discordant views from Kansas’ universities.  The purge leaders will eventually celebrate the date, December 18, 2013, on which the Kansas university system was officially Koched and NRAed

Now, maybe people can understand why I am so dead set against MIT’s accepting money to build a building and name it after David Koch.

The follow on article to the one above is headlined The Kansas Regents’ (Unintentional) Honesty about Academic Freedom.

In thinking about the rule I realized that I had failed to make in blunt terms five points about how radical it rule it was.  I circulated these five points about an hour ago to a number of my contacts.

1. The Regents’ rule allows the CEO to terminate tenured faculty upon their arrest for a felony.  There is no requirement for a conviction and no provision for reinstatement if not convicted.
2. Truth is no defense.  The comment that tenured faculty makes can be accurate and the faculty member can still be fired by the university’s CEO.
3. Lack of ill intent is no defense.  The faculty member can make an accurate statement of fact or well-founded statement of opinion for exemplary purposes and can still be fired.
4. There are no meaningful “standards” so the statement by the faculty member could unknowingly subject him/her to dismissal because the faculty member did not know that the CEO was a global climate change denier (or partisan) and believes that those with the opposite view pose a grave threat.  The concepts are so vague and subjective (“harmony” and “efficiency”) that a faculty member’s only sure means of safety is to say nothing.
5. The rule creates different levels of (not very) protected speech.  The same statement by a professor in a traditional physically published journal – if not posted online (recall that most print publishers also make one’s article available on line) — enjoys greater protection that any comment published “online.”

You can tell that the Oligarchs really feel threatened and will go to any length they need to suppress dissent. I’d say that they will come after the internet next, if it weren’t for the fact that Congress has already passed laws attacking freedom of speech on the internet.

Boston Magazine has the article Criminal Justice Reform Just Might Have a New Champion.

Democrat hopeful for Governor Juliette Kayyem does not have all the solutions to overhauling the ailing criminal justice system in Massachusetts, but at least she’s put her ideas into a campaign platform. And right now, her ideas for potential reforms seem to be the only ones out there in the gubernatorial race.

The Kayyem web site has the page Reforming the Criminal Justice System which is what this article is talking about.  Below I quote just one of the bullet points from her web page.

Decrease overly lengthy incarceration for non-violent technical violations.

This is not a “soft on crime” plan, as I read it.

We are well beyond believing that criminal justice reform is “soft on crime.” Juliette, who has confronted criminal conduct throughout her career in homeland and national security, knows that those words are just fear tactics. Criminal justice reform is about preparing prisoners who have served their time for re-entry into our state. It is about preparing our communities and our state for a different approach to crime and crime prevention. It is about our progressive politics and our humane treatment. Juliette will push for the more comprehensive overhaul that Massachusetts deserves.

The web page mentions some ideas that I have since found on the web The Justice Reinvestment Initiative: Experiences from the States and Justice Reinvestment State Brief : Texas.  I don’t usually associate Texas with progressive ideas on criminal justice, so I am going to have to read this.  Below is a brief excerpt from the Brief on Texas.

On Naked Capitalism Yves Smith has the article Steve Keen: Oh My, Paul Krugman Edition.

Yves here. In some ways, I hate to be having such a run of Paul Krugman posts, but his stand on the TransPacific Partnership and his continued defense of dubious economic ideas that were long ago disproven, like loanable funds, in combination with his prominence, means the attention is well warranted.
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Have you heard the old joke that an economist is someone who, seeing that something works in practice, then says “Ah! But does it work in theory?”. I’m not going to pull that swifty here: as I noted last week, I see the role of debt adding to aggregate demand as an empirical reality that economists have to explain – not something that can’t exist unless economists have a model that explains it.

In some  ways, I see this article as economists on both side misunderstanding each other and trying to argue over who is right about what happens in the real world, when a plain look at recent history seems to me to provide irrefutable evidence that debt does have an impact on demand under some (but not all) circumstances.

I don’t understand this wondering if debt creates demand.

I thought the whole housing bubble was about middle-class people artificially maintaining their customary buying power in the face of declining income by borrowing on the rising equity in their homes.

As soon as the rising value of the homes had a hesitation, the whole house of cards collapsed.

Isn’t this proof enough of the impact of debt on consumption?  Let’s move onto the next question already.

I also take the position as does Yves Smith that lowering the cost of borrowing is not going to make companies invest in new capacity if there is no demand for the products of that capacity.  This is a different circumstance from borrowing on home equity during the housing bubble.  Also one situation is talking about the difficulty in getting people to borrow (invest) as opposed to the impact that the borrowing has once the borrowing has been done.

I found the “PowerPoint” presentation Fiscal Space and Financial Stability: A Differential Analysis The U.S. vs. The Eurozone, Stephanie Kelton, Ph.D. FIELDS-INET November 1, 2013 on Scribd.  I call it a “PowerPoint” presentation because it is not an article that fully explains every “slide”.  I also must admit that I did not spend the time to understand all the equations and graphs.  I did get the gist of the story, and I selected two interesting quotes.

Fiscal Space with EMU

“[T]he power to issue its own money, to make drafts on its own central bank, is the main thing which defines national independence. If a country gives up or loses this power, it acquires the status of a local authority or colony.”

~Wynne Godley, 1992

and

There are No “Market” Constraints

“The treasury can always raise money by issuing securities. The bond vigilantes really have it backwards. There is always more demand for treasuries than can be allocated from a limited supply of new issues in each auction; the winners in the auctions get to place their funds in the safest most liquid form of instrument there is for US dollars; the losers are stuck keeping some of their funds in banks, with bank risk.”

~Frank N. Newman, 2013

McClatchy DC has the story ‘Junk insurance’ comes back to haunt its policyholders.

“These junk policies have been crafted pretty carefully,” he said. “When I talked to people and they shared their contracts with me, the language can be very confusing, even for somebody like me.”

The complaints are a familiar refrain for HealthMarkets, which is owned by three prominent Wall Street private equity firms: Goldman Sachs Capital Partners, The Blackstone Group and Credit-Suisse-DLJ Merchant Banking Partners.

Consumer lawsuits and state insurance regulators across the country have targeted the company for years over its market conduct and sales and marketing practices.
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Last year, state insurance regulators slapped the company with a $325,000 penalty for not meeting five of 95 performance measures that were part of the $20 million 2008 settlement agreement. The unmet measures dealt with training and oversight of agents.

Were you as surprised as I was to find out that Wall Street private equity firms: Goldman Sachs Capital Partners, The Blackstone Group and Credit-Suisse-DLJ Merchant Banking Partners are involved in this story?  (That was sarcasm, in case you didn’t recognize it.)

It wouldn’t surprise me if most of the people who claim that they have cheaper, catastrophic only health insurance policies, actually have policies like the ones described in this article.  They believe the fallacy that they don’t need no stinkin government help to make these complex decisions on buying health insurance.  After all, they have had a wonderful experience with their insurance companies and have saved a lot of unnecessary expense. (As long as they don’t get sick.)  If you have health insurance that is only good if you don’t get sick, you aren’t saving money; you are wasting money.  Why pay a cent for an insurance policy that is actually worthless?  If you are going to spend any money at all on insurance, at least buy a policy that insures you for something.

McClatchy DC has the story Syrian rebel group rejects talks with U.S..

Last week, Islamic Front units stormed the remaining military council bases, seizing equipment donated by the U.S. and forcing its leadership to flee to Turkey. Kerry had suggested that the equipment could be returned in exchange for direct talks with the U.S., an overture that Ford said was rebuked.

I am not sure that I was aware, before this article, of who exactly seized the U.S. equipment nor what that equipment was.

Two comments on the story were very critical of the Obama administration’s handling of events in Syria.

I withhold judgment on whether or not the criticism is completely warranted, until I hear a reasonable alternative to what the Obama administration did or didn’t do.  Don’t read my remarks as an endorsement of Obama.  I, for one, do not know that the right reaction on our part  to the rebellion would have been.

I have been a firm supporter of the idea that we did not need to go to war with Syria over the chemical weapons incident.  Beyond that, I have no idea as to what we should do in Syria.

The Real News Network has started a series of interviews with Ralph Nader with the video McCarthyism Made Us Veer Away From a Systemic Doctrine for Change – Ralph Nader on RAI (1/3) .

NADER: Well, it’s really amazing that one senator, Senator Joseph McCarthy, who defeated La Follette in Wisconsin on the grounds that he wasn’t liberal enough, rather, that La Follette was not liberal enough. Joe McCarthy, it was like a reign of terror. He’s scared people. He intimidated people. He ruined people’s careers through his highly publicized congressional hearings, his wild accusations anonymously against people in the federal government.

But, you know, it spilled over. I mean, there were students at university, college, they didn’t want to show up at what they thought were activist symposiums. They didn’t want to do any marching. They just–they figured, you know, they’d be stigmatized as soft on communism or, you know, reds.

And the overall impact was–on the progressives and liberals was it made them veer away from any kind of systemic public philosophy to change things for the better. So they just became very empirical. They’ll try to get a labor union organized or try to get better working conditions or something like that because they didn’t want to be accused of isms, you know, like socialism or communism. And the other side was, of course, they were all about capitalism.

So just amazing effect, Joe McCarthy and his acolytes, not just on civil liberties, but on the whole mindset of people.

JAY: And how did it affect your mindset?

NADER: Well, it affected it in the sense that you didn’t come forth with any doctrine of social change, because if you had any kind of coherent doctrine or platform, they would label it as a ism. You know, it would be socialism or any kind–syndicalism. You know? So we became very empirical. You know, we went after the auto companies’ unsafe cars. No ism there. People are being killed every day, injured because of unsafe cars, lack of seatbelts and padded dash panels.

And that has affected the left all the way to the present day, whereas the right wing, they’ve got this capitalism–although, you know, it’s–corporate capitalism is the antithesis of capitalism. I mean, owners of corporations, they have no control, the shareholders have no control over General Electric or IBM or General Motors.

So it really had an amazing impact. As a result, there were no big thinkers on the left the way the right wing had Friedrich Hayek, even though they distorted what a lot of–Ludwig von Mises and so forth.

And I thought that the lack of big thinkers on the left was a recent phenomenon.  Maybe it is just that after the left stopped thinking big, it took the Republicans a lot of time to catch up and surpass the left in big ideas.

I am beginning to appreciate Ralph Nader more and more.  I just didn’t believe him in what he said about Al Gore in 2000, but I am finally coming around to seeing what I didn’t see then.  After reading Chris Hedges’ complaint that Nader is being shut out by the press these days, I am glad to see The Real News Network have him on.

My apologies to ChuckS for my defense of Al Gore when Chuck tried to explain Ralph Nader’s value to me.

See the other parts of this interview at my blog posts –

Are Nader-Like Reforms Still Possible? – Ralph Nader on Reality Asserts Itself (2/3).

and

On Florida in 2000 and What to Do Next – Ralph Nader on Reality Asserts Itself (3/3)

Tanya and Joe Lucas held a house party to introduce gubernatorial candidate Juliette Kayyem to Sturbridge voters.  The turnout was very good.  It would be great if other candidates would follow her example in coming to talk to the people of Sturbridge.

The above picture is from her campaign web site. It is not a picture of her in Sturbridge. There was significant snow on the ground today.  The venue being close to Wells State Park presented some challenges to many of the attendees including local ones who had no idea that the road to the park is not plowed in winter.  We didn’t have to go to the park, but the park road does give access to several residential streets in Sturbridge, at least when the roads are clear.  Today we had to backtrack to another access to these streets.

Hearing her in person make the case, it really dawned on me how applicable her experience is to being a governor.

An appointee to both Governor Deval Patrick and President Barack Obama’s Administrations, she has made government work for citizens when it matters the most. As a homeland security expert, Juliette knows what it means to bring together every facet of society and work towards common solutions with a clear path forward. Her career is proof that progressive politics and safety and security policy strengthen one another.

Her description of how she has worked with Governors and Mayors in times of crisis and stress as a key figure in homeland security was what made me realize what executive talent she has.  She also had a convincing explanation of how she would be able to deal with a Massachusetts legislature that is famous for jealously guarding its own centers of power in the state.

I liked her explanation of the importance of pushing Massachusetts forward on the the road already begun by Governor Patrick to become and remain competitive in the economy.  She understands the investments we need to make to compete nationally and globally.  As I said above, she has a good plan for working cooperatively with the state legislature to accomplish what needs to be done in a way that is fair to the voters of the state in all parts of the state.

To call her energetic just doesn’t begin to do justice to how she is going to campaign, and if elected, govern.

Here is an article recommended by RichardH.  The Fiscal Times story Of Course the Safety Net Redistributes Income…That’s Why It Works is by Mark Thoma.

This is what insurance does. It pools risk and distributes the losses across the participants in the program. Fire insurance, for example, pools the contributions of participants, and when somebody experiences a loss from fire the money is redistributed from those who did not have a fire to those who did. Everyone understands that the fees they pay provide this protection, and they don’t object when the pooled contributions are redistributed to cover losses.

It would be hard to believe that anyone who has insurance of any kind wouldn’t know what the above excerpt states.  Of course there is much more in the article itself.

The problem seems to be that so many people act like they don’t know the above when it comes to the Federal Insurance Contributions Act tax.  The money that gets deducted from your paycheck under the acronym FICA is what pays for your Social Security and Medicare INSURANCE.

If your fire insurance company came to you and said we are going to have to reduce your entitlement to a payoff if your house burned down because we have given too much of your insurance payments to the stock holders, would you just simply agree because you are worried about the financial stability of the insurance company?

So when the Congress comes to you and says we have to cut benefits you are entitled to from your insurance policy because we gave too much money to the stock holders of the Congress, why do you all nod your head in agreement?  It is the only fiscally sound thing to do, you repeat.  Do you ever say, your stock holders are making plenty of money so give me what I paid for and you contracted with me to pay me?

By the way, the stock holders of Congress are not we the people as you may so naively believe.  The stock holders are the corporations who spend billions of dollars lobbying Congress to give them benefits that are far larger than the money spent to lobby Congress.  That’s why is so important to realize that Corporations are people too.  Have some sympathy for them, please.

CBS News had the story FDA gets tough on antibacterial soaps.  For a long time we have been fans of liquid soap, but have been worried that all of them seem to be antibacterial.  We had worried that the use of these soaps would promote the growth of resistant bacteria.  There was no mention of this in the CBS report.  In comments from a soap industry representative the CBS interviewer never raised the issue and the spokesman never addressed it.

I began to wonder if I had been confusing antibacterial with antibiotic.  I found an article that settled it for me.

Wired has the article FDA Scrutinizes Antibacterial Products for Hormonal Disruption, Bacterial Resistance.  In the discussion, the aricle quoted the FDA report.

    Since publication of the 1994 TFM, there is new information raising concerns about the impact of widespread antiseptic use on the development of antimicrobial resistance. Bacteria use some of the same resistance mechanisms against both antiseptics and antibiotics. Thus, the use of antiseptic active ingredients with resistance mechanisms in common with antibiotics may have the potential to select for bacterial strains that are also resistant to clinically important antibiotics, adding to the problem of antibiotic resistance. Laboratory studies of some of the antiseptic active ingredients evaluated in this proposed rule demonstrate the development of reduced susceptibility to antiseptic active ingredients and some antibiotics after growth in nonlethal amounts of the antiseptic (i.e., low-to-moderate concentrations of antiseptic). These studies provide ample evidence of bacterial resistance mechanisms that could select for antiseptic or antibiotic resistance in the natural setting.

The impact on bacterial resistance in the natural setting (rather than in the laboratory) has not been extensively evaluated. The existing data are very limited in scope. (pp. 37-38)

So who at CBS was assigned to their coverage of the story?  They have a medical doctor on staff to cover health issues.  Perhaps Scott Pelley isn’t aware enough about the ramifications of this issue to even know which reporter to assign it to.  Apparently the reporter didn’t know either.

I left the comment at CBS News:

What about the promotion of antibacterial resistant bacteria?  How could you leave out that concern from your report?  How could you let the industry spokesman off without his addressing this issue?  Without addressing this issue, the FDA concern almost seems minor.

Maybe there is an object lesson for advertisers here.  The same CBS show did attack vitamins with a story that says that they are mostly useless.  Perhaps the vitamin manufacturers have been cutting back on their advertising spending on CBS, and this is a shot across their bow as to what can happen to them compared to the people who do spend a lot on advertising.