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Woody Guthrie was right-the fountain pens strike again

Wednesday, January 11, 2012

One of the great mysteries of American politics, at least to me, is why the typical American small businessman is a Republican. For reasons that are unfathomable, they appear to believe that their interests are aligned with the corporations that own the Republican party, despite massive evidence that they are perceived by those corporations and by the Republican party as just another set of people to be sucked dry and left for dead. It is a tribute to the power of propaganda that these folks, who should be more perceptive than the mass of folks who don’t have the time, education or information to see through the scam, are in fact no better than the millions in seeing where their interests lie.

 

What brings this to mind? 

Via Matt Taibbi’s blog on Rolling Stone I was directed to this article in Bloomberg’s, which describes one method employed by banks to steal from the merchants who accept their credit cards. If this type of activity is widespread, and you just know it is, the scale of the theft probably makes the mortgage fraud scam small potatoes:

 Stephen and Cissy McComb say they managed their Italian eatery in Park City, Utah, for more than two decades without running afoul of security rules of Visa Inc. (V) and MasterCard Inc. (MA) — until they were accused of mishandling data and opening the door to $1.26 million in fraud.

The McCombs, who opened Cisero’s in 1985, are now in a legal fight with the bank that processed their credit charges and, indirectly, with what they say are card networks that change rules without notice, impose unfair one-sided contracts and allow the taking of money from merchants’ accounts with no proof of fault.

The couple sued, saying they didn’t break MasterCard and Visa rules, that there was no security lapse and that no acts of fraud were specifically claimed. The fraud was conjured from unexplained and unsupported data, they said in court papers filed in state court in Park City. Their suit may be the first court challenge to penalties under the card networks’ security procedures, said one of their lawyers, W. Stephen Cannon.

The card issuer and banks, acting through subsidiaries, impose fines on merchants for failing to adhere to rules purportedly designed to prevent fraud. Naturally, the merchants are not permitted to know the actual rules, nor are they allowed to contest the fines:

When the restaurant and US Bancorp entered their first contract, “arcane operating rules — over 1,000 pages in length — were not publicly available to merchants and did not contain provisions on data security,” the McCombs said in their complaint.

The fines are initially assessed against US Bancorp by Visa. US Bancorp simply passes them on to the merchant, never bothering to determine whether there is any factual or legal basis for them. 

 

Merchants already pay exorbitant fees to the banks for the privilege of enabling the banks to make even more exorbitant profits off of the customers of those merchants. The card issuers are in a position, and make no mistake, it might as well be a monopoly position, to impose an exorbitant sales tax on almost every transaction that takes place in this almost cashless society. But what fun is making obscene profits if you can’t add that little frisson that comes with a bit of mega thievery.

This story should lead to a massive government investigation, because only the government is in a position to determine the scale of this particular criminal enterprise.

Don’t hold your breath.

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Buchanan exits, stage right

Monday, January 9, 2012

John Aravosis at Americablog notes that Pat Buchanan appears to have been (silently) dropped by MSNBC. All to the good. Aravosis gives this example of Buchanan’s only slightly coded racism. 
 

For what is a nation?

Is it not a people of a common ancestry, culture, and language who worship the same God, revere the same heroes, cherish the same history, celebrate the same holidays, share the same music, poetry, art, literature, held together, in Lincoln’s words, by “bonds of affection. . . . mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-?eld, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone”?

If that is what a nation is, can we truly say America is still a nation? The European and Christian core of our country is shrinking. The birth rate of our native born has been below replacement level for decades. By 2020, deaths among white Americans will exceed births, while mass immigration is altering forever the face of America.

You have to wonder if it ever occurs to Pat that stuff like that, with the words slightly changed, was what the European Christians who ran this country were once saying about the Irish Catholics that were altering the face of America forever.  
While I am personally against the death penalty, I might reconsider if they imposed it on any racist that uses quotes from Lincoln to make his case. Almost as bad as Ron Paul trying to claim Martin Luther King as a personal hero. 

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Krugman has it wrong this time

Monday, January 9, 2012

He asks what Romney has ever done, or proposed to do, to create the level playing field he advocates in his speeches. No need to do anything, this blissful state of affairs already exists, for Romney would surely agree with Anatole France that “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and the poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread”. How much more level a field could you want?

On the other hand, though it is true that the rich are not allowed under the bridges, unlike the poor, they are allowed to rob banks.

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New App

Sunday, January 8, 2012

Ever since I got my iPad I have been on a quest to get a satisfactory RSS reader app. I have abouty six of them, all with their strengths and weaknesses. Lately I’ve been using Flipboard, which has a great interface, but is not terribly efficient. I subscribe to lots of feeds, and I like to scan them quickly, something that’s not really that easy on Flipboard. 
Should there be anyone else out there who still reads blogs in lieu of tweets, I highly recommend my latest find, an app called Mr. Reader. I realize it’s a silly name, but it’s really quite a good app, which, among other things, plays well with Terminology, another app that I just downloaded, as well as Instapaper, Read it Later, Evernote, Facebook, Twitter, and a host of other internet services. 

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No need to count the votes

Saturday, January 7, 2012

A little comfort food for Democrats sent to me by a friend today. The election is in the bag for Obama.
 

American University professor Allan Lichtman has issued his “sure fire” prediction for the outcome of the November 2012 election.
 
Lichtman is no crystal ball gazer. His predictions are based on a formula he developed in 1981 in collaboration with a Russian geophysicist, who had previously specialized in creating models used to forecast earthquakes. Their approach was based on a thorough analysis of the forces at work in shaping the political landscape in every U.S. presidential elections from 1860 to 1980. From this examination they developed their predictive model. And since then, Lichtman has used it to correctly forecast the outcome of every election from 1984 through 2008.

 
Lichtman has identified 13 “keys” to electoral success, and right now Obama is on the downside of no more than 5 of them.
 

Nevertheless, this still leaves a maximum of 10 “Keys” and a minimum of eight “Keys” in the president’s favor, enough for Lichtman, who has never been wrong, to confidently predict Obama’s reelection in November.

 
One of the 13 keys has to do with charisma, a key Obama certainly had in 2008. The bloom is off the rose right now, but it looks like that will not be a  factor in 2012. You can apply lots of adjectives to Romney, most of them pejorative, but “charismatic” is not among them. Even on that score, Obama wins.
 
Not to denigrate Lichtman’s record of success, but when I read this the first thing I thought about was Karl Rove, who was a political genius until, all of a sudden, he wasn’t anymore. Lichtman is probably smarter than Rove, but I take this with a giant grain of salt. He’s never been wrong, but that doesn’t mean he’ll always be right. None of his keys, for example, take into account the combined effects of voter suppression and Citizens United and the extent to which the American people have been propagandized against Obama is unprecedented.  Still, I’d rather he was predicting an Obama victory than one for Willard, and, as I’ve been saying all along, if I had to bet, I’d bet on Lichtman maintaining his winning streak.

 

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Friday Night Music, in which Randy Newman channels John McCain

Friday, January 6, 2012

I know I’ve put up a lot of Randy Newman, but hey, it’s my blog and the guy is great. I came up with this particular choice after watching this video on the TPM youtube channel:

I wracked my own senescent brain for a song about someone who bemoans the fact that he or she said the wrong thing, but though I’m sure such songs are out there, I couldn’t think of any. But in wandering through my vast iTunes library, I came across this song and I thought, it may not be about a slip of the tongue, but it still might as well be John McCain’s signature song.

You can listen to the overlong intro, or let it load awhile and start at about 2:15.

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Tax the Rich-it’s our moral obligation

Friday, January 6, 2012

I missed this post by Brad DeLong when it was first written, but came across it recently and just had to pass it along. He cites to the work of two economists, Emmanuel Saez, and Nobel laureate economist Peter Diamond, who prove that we should be taxing the rich at a 70% rate:

It is an arresting assertion, given the tax-cut mania that has prevailed in these societies for the past 30 years, but Diamond and Saez’s logic is clear. The superrich command and control so many resources that they are effectively satiated: increasing or decreasing how much wealth they have has no effect on their happiness. So, no matter how large a weight we place on their happiness relative to the happiness of others – whether we regard them as praiseworthy captains of industry who merit their high positions, or as parasitic thieves – we simply cannot do anything to affect it by raising or lowering their tax rates.

The unavoidable implication of this argument is that when we calculate what the tax rate for the superrich will be, we should not consider the effect of changing their tax rate on their happiness, for we know that it is zero. Rather, the key question must be the effect of changing their tax rate on the well-being of the rest of us.

From this simple chain of logic follows the conclusion that we have a moral obligation to tax our superrich at the peak of the Laffer Curve: to tax them so heavily that we raise the most possible money from them – to the point beyond which their diversion of energy and enterprise into tax avoidance and sheltering would mean that any extra taxes would not raise but reduce revenue.

I’ve been advocating such taxes as a quick and easy solution to a lot of our problems, including the central problem of income inequality and, now, the allied problem of a rising oligarchy, so I just had to pass this along, if only to prove that I have respectable company. DeLong’s full post is worth reading, as it provides some insight into why we don’t do the obvious and tax the bastards. Something to do with the fact that in our fantasies, we’d like to be one of the bastards.

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New Hampshire Goes Full Crazy

Friday, January 6, 2012

New Hampshire has always been the Dixie of New England, and they’ve proved it in spades recently.

The Tea Party dominated New Hampshire Legislature on Wednesday overrode the governor’s veto to enact a new law allowing parents to object to any part of the school curriculum.

The state House voted 255-112 and Senate 17-5 to enact H.B. 542, which will allow parents to request an alternative school curriculum for any subject to which they register an objection. Gov. John Lynch (D) vetoed the measure in July, saying the bill would harm education quality and give parents control over lesson plans.

“For example, under this bill, parents could object to a teacher’s plan to: teach the history of France or the history of the civil or women’s rights movements,” Lynch wrote in his veto message. “Under this bill, a parent could find ‘objectionable’ how a teacher instructs on the basics of algebra. In each of those cases, the school district would have to develop an alternative educational plan for the student. Even though the law requires the parents to pay the cost of alternative, the school district will still have to bear the burden of helping develop and approve the alternative. Classrooms will be disrupted by students coming and going, and lacking shared knowledge.”

The bill basically makes it impossible to teach, unless you happen to teach in a school district in New Hampshire in which there are no crazy people. There is a redeeming feature, sort of, in that only parents with the money to develop the alternative curriculum can make the demand. On the other hand, that means that only parents with money have this new “right”. But the demands on the school system could still be enormous. How does a teacher teach using multiple curricula? What happens when a parent insists that you teach a lie? And make no mistake, that’s the point of this: forcing schools to teach religion in the guise of science.

The way out, and probably the path that will be taken, is for the schools to decide that the curricula demanded requires hiring a new teacher, and telling the parent that they have to pay for that new teacher. At worst, that converts the bill into a mini-stimulus package. Still, this is yet another example of the states that swerved to the right in the last election getting what they voted for, if not what they expected.

UPDATE: A fellow from newsy.com asked me to add this clip to this post, and as it does seem to cover the salient points, I decided I would.

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Thank Obama

Wednesday, January 4, 2012

I’ve been critical of Obama on many occasions, but when he does good, he deserves credit and our thanks. Today he made some recess appointments that have given the Republicans the vapors. Go to Kos and thank him here.

Somewhere I saw that this might lead to a Republican push for impeachment. Wouldn’t that be nice? That might be the only way the Democrats could take back the House and keep the Senate.

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Newt disobeys Reagan

Wednesday, January 4, 2012

There is one and only one unbreakable commandment in the Republican party: Thou shalt love Ronald Reagan as thou lovest Jesus. Indeed, thou shalt love him so much that thou shall refuse to believe that he did anything with which you purport to disagree, such as raising taxes, no matter that the facts are indisputable in the reality based world.

But like Jesus, Reagan laid down commandments of his own, and again as with Jesus, his most rabid followers tend to disobey them more often than the non-believers. Latest apostate, Newt Gingrich has announced he is about to break Reagan’s 11th Commandment, (Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican). Newt is only the latest self proclaimed Reagan worshipper (as in all other things, Willard’s avowals are a bit suspect, but he does make the claim) to disobey Ronnie’s imprecation. Is there a Republican hell to which they’ll be consigned? We can only hope.

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