Steve's Politics Blog

It is time for the public to start yelling bloody murder.

I have just watched President Obama give up on taxing the wealthy without a fight.

I was looking for a news story to use as a reference to show you what I mean.  I found it in The Los Angeles Times news story Obama says budget deal must include higher taxes on the wealthy.

Allowing the tax rates on higher income levels to go up in the new year would hurt small-business owners, Boehner argued, which “would slow down our economy.”

The president said he “was encouraged to hear Speaker Boehner agree that tax revenue has to be part of this equation,” and would look forward to discussing plans in detail next week.

Here is a perfect example of the President continuing his failure to communicate that has been his downfall over the last 4 years.  The Boner of The House is addressing the electorate with propaganda that has sunk in with his and other Republican’s repetition.  The President is addressing Speaker Boner without even offering a story to the public to counter the propaganda wallop that Boner delivered.  Boner knows where the power is.  Despite going to Harvard to learn where the power is, the President apparently did not learn much.  You could dismiss my griping as coming from a country hick who knows nothing about power if you hadn’t already observed this kind of travesty many times yourself.

The wealthy and the big corporations are drowning in so much excess money that they don’t know where to invest it.  They are not investing it in making jobs to produce more goods since the middle-class does not have enough money to buy the goods that the currently employed and currently open factories can produce.  What foolish capitalist would invest money to produce goods for which there are no customers and there are not going to be customers?  Instead the wealthy are putting their money into financial finagling trying to see which one can gain an advantage over the other.  As a side line, they are buying up troubled companies, selling off the assets that could have been used to create future jobs, and increasing their share of the country’s wealth.  They are stealing the workers’ pension funds and health care accounts to add a little more to their wealth.

Look at the above comparisons, if you think I am kidding.

• For poor and median households, Great Recession wipes out 20 years of net worth accumulation
• For the rich, only small decline

The net worth of the rich and the poor are in terms of today’s depressed values. If and when the values come back, the wealthy will have gotten even farther ahead of the middle-class and poor.  Even without the recovery of values, the share of the shrinking pie that is owned by the wealthy is skyrocketing.

Taxing the wealthy and using that extra government revenue to buy infrastructure, education, health care, retirement benefits, basic science, and a myriad of other things the society needs will increase jobs and make further deficit spending unnecessary.  In other words increasing the taxes on the wealthy and not cutting spending is what we need, while Boner tries to justify the exact opposite policy.  Where is the public outrage going to come from if the President won’t explain this?

Whatever liquidity that the Fed has been pumping into the economy to boost its performance has been sucked right back out of the economy by the hoarding of wealth by the rich.  The only way to break this cycle is to tax this wealth out of the hoarders’ hands and put it back into the economy as the Fed intended.

Do you think the President could get the public to put pressure on Boner and the other Republicans if he explained all of this to the public and asked for their help?  Instead, the President is treading lightly so as not to offend Boner who has on his Army boots and is stomping all over the President.

What can we do, when the President we just re-elected is too weak to stand up for us?  If we don’t rise up in a second Occupy movement, then we will get what we deserve for our inaction.

I am issuing this call from this blog.  How many of you can help me spread the word?  The longer you wait, the less chance we have of overcoming the forces of the wealthy.

Lest you think I am only complaining about what the wealthy are doing to me, I need to say that my personal net worth history looks more like the right hand graph than it does the other two. I have learned a little about how to play the game with the rules cast as they are. However, for the good of the country, I am hoping that things can be made more even. There is every likelihood that I will do OK unless the greed of the wealthy takes us all into a depression. Then even my skills may not be enough to protect me. That is my real worry.

Of course, how my descendants might fare is another worry. I may have enough cushion to protect Sharon and me (I hope), but I doubt it is enough to protect anybody else.

The Nation Of Change has published Robert Reich’s article Obama’s Next Economy: Why He Must Take This Opportunity to Reframe the Economic Debate.

His victory and the pending “fiscal cliff” give him an opportunity to recast the economic debate. Our central challenge, he should say, is not to reduce the budget deficit. It’s to create more good jobs, grow the economy, and widen the circle of prosperity.
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Any “grand bargain” on deficit reduction should contain a starting trigger — and that trigger should be when the economy can safely be assumed to be back on track. I’d make that trigger 6 percent unemployment and 3 percent economic growth for two consecutive quarters, and make sure that trigger was in the legislation.

The first part of the quote describes how the debate must be reframed.

The second part of the quote is a way to agree to deficit reduction, but makes it clear when is the time to do it and when is not the time to do it.  If this wording makes it comfortable for the opposition to realize that the President is not saying that the deficit should not ever be cut, then we should put in those words.  These words are only an explicit statement of what President Obama’s policy has always been.  The words are also an answer to the claim by the opposition that if we do not cut the deficit now, there are no plans to ever cut the deficit.

Mitt Romney, even before his unexpected  switch to being a pseudo-moderate Democrat in the campaign, agreed that cutting the deficit too soon would be bad for the economy.

I might add that another part of the Grand Bargain is the statement that changes to Social Security and Medicare will not be planned in detail until after we see how the increase in taxes on the wealthy and the recovery of the economy effects the long term outlook for these insurance programs.

When you pay for an insurance policy, you are entitled to the benefits you paid for.  Nobody calls the monthly payments of a private annuity  an entitlement.  Why should they call the monthly payments of a public insurance policy, the Social Security Annuity, an entitlement?

The Real News Network has the interview Nader on What To do Now.

No matter what you may think of Nader’s past actions, I think he raises some excellent points and ideas here.

Now is the time to think about how we turn our campaign enthusiasm into something more permanent.

The New York Times published the opinion piece The Oscar Wilde Strategy by Lee Siegel.

Someone once said that upon reaching 60, you have two thoughts. The first is, “This is going to work out.” The second is, “This is not going to work out.”

Many of those who voted, as I did, for Barack Obama must have experienced a similar simultaneous sense of relief and despair last night, as jubilation gave way to the grim realization that the political paralysis of the past four years will become, if anything, worse and more bitter.

It was startling to hear, on CNN, the assembled pundits almost unanimously agree that President Obama had to find the “middle ground,” move to “the center” and “build relationships” with Republicans. Where have they been for four years? Mr. Obama had been trying desperately to find the political center for his entire first term, only to be stymied by Republicans trying to recapture the White House by rejecting his every attempt at compromise and then blaming him for being unwilling to compromise.

What to do in such a situation, with the country split right down the middle, and a Republican opposition driven by a hardcore faction that believes the country has been stolen from them by treacherous and unpatriotic forces? There is only one thing to do: one half of the country must leave the other half behind.

You really need to read the rest of the piece by following the link above.

I thank JamesG for sending an email containing an extensive quote from the article.  I wish I could post the whole thing here, but what is appropriate for a personal email is too long to be published on this blog without written permission from the author.

I don’t know how the target audience reacts to these videos from Bravenew Films.

I don’t have trouble imagining my ethnic group being scapegoated like this, so perhaps that is why I empathize.

MoveOn.org is promoting this video.

On job creation I expected the part where Mitt Romney says that government does not create jobs.  Then I was expecting a comment how cutting defense spending will costs hundreds of thousands of jobs.  The one they used is almost as good.

It is one thing to be confused about who is lying and who is telling the truth when it is merely an argument about which set of statements are true.  However, when the words of the candidate himself are contradictory, then it is not hard at all to figure out what’s what.

Voting by electronic methods does not have to lead to the abuses that are going on right now.  I have a relatively simple idea for making electronic voting verifiable and more transparent than the traditional paper ballot or any other voting machine method.

In my proposal, every electronic voting machine will print a receipt for the voter to take home. The receipt will have a ballot number and the vote for that ballot. In the voting booth the voter can verify that the receipt matches how the voter intended to vote.

The results of all ballots will be put online in a way that matches the receipts. What is online is what will be counted. Each person with a receipt will be able to go online to verify that his or her ballot was recorded correctly.  There should be no way for anybody other than the receipt holder to know which ballot number corresponds to which voter.

That will prevent the machines from incorrectly recording what the voter intended.  It will also prevent the machine from dropping votes. It will also maintain the secrecy of the ballot.

We still need a mechanism for preventing the machines from inventing votes that were not there. The number of votes cast can be compared to the records of voter sign-in and sign-out counts.

What’s left are issues of challenged voters and mail-in votes.

However, at this point the electronic vote is already better than the pure paper ballot vote.

With the principles of quality control applied to the checking of votes, it is not necessary for all voters to check that their vote is properly recorded. If enough voters do check, and the failures are below the AQL (acceptable quality limits), then the vote can be considered “correct”. If the errors are above AQL, steps can be taken to remedy the “few” precincts where the error rate is above acceptable limits.

If making electronic voting this verifiable is not so difficult, then why are there voting machine companies out there making electronic voting machines that use secret software and that can be easily hacked?  Why are there election commissioners buying such machines? Instead election boards and commissioners should be specifying what kind of machine they want to buy in requests for proposals (RFP).  The usual way government purchasing is done is with an RFP with all the specifications of the product to be purchased and an open bidding process among suppliers to provide the requested product or service.

Certainly a retired software engineer such as me cannot be the only person who has figured this out.

June 8, 2016

See subsequent post Uncounted: The New Math of American Elections (Full Length). In the video, there is a demonstration of some electronic voting hardware that is exactly what is needed for my idea to be implemented.

November 27, 2020

See subsequent post How To Cheat On My Electronic Voting Proposal.

This describes a system to defraud my idea, but mentions that experts looking at the open source for the electronic voting system could be looking for such schemes in the software. If there are any fraudulent schemes in the software, they would be detected and the software would be banned from use in government elections.

William Black has written the article The Great Betrayal – and the Cynicism of Calling it a Grand Bargain .

Kuttner wrote to warn that Obama intends to seek a “grand bargain” causing the U.S. to adopt the type of austerity program that threw the Eurozone back into a gratuitous recession.

Worse, Obama intends to begin to unravel the safety net (Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid) to convince the Republicans to enter into this Faustian bargain.  Just as only a conservative Republican could visit “Red” China, only a Democrat can begin the destruction of the safety net.  The difference, of course, is that normalizing relations with China was a good thing while unraveling the safety net is a terrible thing.

I had been hoping to keep this controversy among Progressives under wraps until after the election, but I can see that it is difficult to keep this hidden.

Electing Mitt Romney is not the solution to preventing the Great Plague (aka Grand Bargain). What is the solution is for the Progressive Community to be able to turn on the proverbial dime after the election. As soon as we know that Obama has been re-elected and that the Democrats are in firm control of Congress, we must start applying immediate pressure to prevent the Great Plague from coming to fruition.

November 7 cannot be the time to take it easy and think our problems have been solved.

Another gem posted on The Real News Network.

It is so sad when the Republicans want to focus on spending cuts now and the Democrats concentrate on spending cuts later, but none of the mainstream politicians are focusing on what to do now.

When are we going to, as a nation, focus on the trillions of dollars of infrastructure work that we know must be done in the next decade? Do we do it now when there are lots of people unemployed, resources going unused, and interest rates at historic lows? Or do we do it later if and when we get full employment, the economy is running at full capacity, the interest rates are high, and any extra government spending will only fuel inflation?

Where is the sanity in refusing to do now what is the most appropriate thing to do now, and formulating a policy where we will do necessary work at exactly the wrong time in the economic cycle?

Many of the posts on this blog are inspired by what I read and and see on The Real News Network.  Because this source is so important, I am posting this explanation of what The Real News Network is, what it can become, and the support that it needs.

“The Promise” represents The Real News Network as we hope it will be when fully funded. What you have been seeing so far on our web site is just a taste of what’s to come.  We need your support to make this vision a reality.

The following video was re-emphasized in today’s email from The Real News Network, but it was originally posted in 2009.