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If the election were held today, and if wishes were horses

Tuesday, October 8, 2013

It occurs to me that it's been a while since I posted some good news, which I obligated myself to do weekly awhile back. It seems I just can't stop slipping into my pessimistic mode. So here's some good news, though it has to be taken with a pillar of salt.

If the election were held today, the Democrats would take back the House.

Now, mind you, given the attention span and memories of American voters, the shutdown will have to last until October 31 of next year and/or we will have to be plunged into a major depression and/or the media will have to assign blame where it belongs (least likely possibility) in order for these numbers to hold or get better, but still, in this day and age this is good news.

In the linked article, Sam Wang opines that the Democrats may avoid the usual mid-term losses (something, by the way, that the Dems also avoided in Clinton's second term). I would argue that this is quite likely precisely because of the gerrymandering that handed the House to the party that got beaten in the aggregate by 1.5 million votes. In order to get a majority for a minority party, it is necessary, especially in the bigger states, to create massively Democratic districts to assure that the Republicans win the rest. The process practically guarantees a floor for the Democrats below which they can't go. The Republicans, on the other hand, have to make do with districts in which they are in the majority, but not as much in the majority as are the safe Democrats in their massively gerrymandered districts. Mathematically, they are more at risk, even if they are in districts designed for them to win, because in order to get enough of them to win you have to accept a number of districts in which your advantage is good, but not great. If you then proceed to destroy the economy and the republican form of government, you run the risk of some blowback-big enough, perhaps, to destroy your majority.

That's my opinion, anyway, and it's the good news for today.

Filed in Good News, Politics | | Comments (1)

Some help for Fat Tony

Monday, October 7, 2013

Antonin Scalia is, though it is hard to believe, a Supreme Court Justice. Supreme Court justices are quite knowledgable, as any one of them would be the first to tell you, but they can't know everything, and it seems that Fat Tony is puzzled. You see, he believes in the devil, but he can't quite figure out why the guy with the tail is so quiet these days:

Have you seen evidence of the Devil lately?

You know, it is curious. In the Gospels, the Devil is doing all sorts of things. He’s making pigs run off cliffs, he’s possessing people and whatnot. And that doesn’t happen very much anymore.

via New York Magazine, and I mean it-NOT THE ONION

Well, it does my heart good to tell Tony that, while I'm not quite sure about the pigs, I can tell you why all that “possessing people and whatnot” doesn't happen these days. It's because of clozapine, Risperdal, Abilify, Seroquel and Zyprexa. For all that, you can probably put the stuff in pig food and it will prevent those cliff runs.

I hope Tony finds this helpful. It's the least I can do for a Man for All Seasons, or should I say a Man for All Ages; for he'd be just as comfortable-actually far more comfortable- in the Middle Ages as in his own time.

Filed in Crazies, Religion | | Comments (0)

Two cheers for Dave Collins

Friday, October 4, 2013

For those of you who do not read the New London Day, Dave is a columnist who ordinarily makes a great deal of sense. A person near and dear to me thought he made a great deal of sense today, and urged me to point this out in my blog. I make a point of always doing what this particular person says, so here goes.

Dave has declared pretty much every Connecticut Republican gubernatorial candidate dead to him for either refusing to take a coherent position on, or for professing support for, the GOP's government shutdown. I'm not clear why Dave is surprised; the more fractured the field, the less likely is it that any of the hopefuls will deviate from insanity. That's the nature of the GOP these days. But still, it's important that these folks be exposed for the sake of the sane majority.

So, good for Dave for getting these guys on record (or ducking his questions).

Why only two cheers?

Well, Dave is a journalist. He must have gone to Washington recently, associated with his beltway brethren, and contracted a case of Beltway Balance, a condition endemic among journalists there, who insist that both sides are at fault in every situation, no matter the facts. Some of Dave's targets try that meme on him, and he was quite receptive to it; it was only when they endorsed the blackmail tactic that he got turned off. For instance:

I came away from a long and spirited chat with declared gubernatorial candidate John McKinney of Fairfield, state Senate minority leader, impressed that he is a thoughtful candidate who was also willing to lay blame for the shutdown on both parties.

In the end, though, he seems to side with Boughton on the sausage-making theory. I could not get him to condemn the strategy of linking a government shutdown with demands to change the health care law.

via New London Day

But Dave, there is no rational basis for blaming both parties. The Democrats have actually offered to negotiate to give away more than they already have (they have already accepted continuation of the sequester, and they have no qualms about allowing the Republicans to do more damage to the economy), but the Republicans refuse to negotiate without keeping a gun to the head of their opponent. So, if you pretend to be unbiased, you cannot let the “both sides are to blame” argument pass, anymore than you should let a politician take the position that it is alright for the minority to take the country hostage. It may be a Republican meme, and it may be a symptom of a beltway disease, but it's a lie, and it should be treated as such.

Filed in Media, Republicans | | Comments (0)

Storm is threatening

Thursday, October 3, 2013

Okay, I'm coming around. A few months ago (too lazy to link) I mockingly reported on a study that proved something that was totally obvious to any thinking person. I was subsequently contacted by the author of the report, and I am more and more persuaded that he was right. It's important to prove the obvious. The depressing thing is that it does no good when you do it. Krugman has often bemoaned the fact that while austerity has been proven wrong both theoretically and in practice, its advocates have not been humbled, and governments have not backed away from their obsession. In the case of austerity it's understandable, since the real agency of the austerians is to get rid of the welfare state.

This is by way of a long introduction to a reference at Wall Street on Parade to a couple of economists who have apparently proven another obvious fact: that in a consumer based economy (which, when you think of it, means all economies), there is inevitably a tipping point at which growing inequality brings the whole thing crashing down. This is embedded in a review of Robert Reich's new film, Inequality for All.

The first stunner comes with the chart we have posted below showing that in 1928 and 2007 – the year before the two greatest financial crashes in U.S. history, income inequality peaked. In the film, Reich says about the graph: “The parallels are breathtaking if you look at them carefully.” Indeed they are.

Reich brilliantly animates this graph into a suspension bridge, demonstrating that there is a finite equilibrium of income distribution at which the U.S. economy can function. Since 70 percent of U.S. Gross Domestic Product is consumption, when workers are stripped of an adequate share of the nation’s income, they are not able to function as consumers. Less consumption means lower corporate earnings resulting in layoffs and then even lower corporate earnings and more layoffs. The vicious cycle feeds on itself.

Going forward at Wall Street On Parade, I will be calling this the Suspension Bridge Theory of Income Inequality: when the delicate balance of the structure shifts to extremes, it collapses under its own lopsided weight.

The data for the graph comes from the brilliant French duo whispered about in those secret Koch brother confabs as Piketty-Saez. They are indeed the nemesis of the Ayn Randians, proving with data going back to 1917 that dramatic income concentration at the top is a killer to the economy. Thomas Piketty teaches at the Paris School of Economics; Emmanuel Saez is the Director of the Center for Equitable Growth at UC Berkeley. Both wear the badge of honor of being denounced on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal.

via Wall Street on Parade

I've actually made this point before, but damned if I can find the post. It seems fairly obvious that if Apple wants to make an obscene amount of money selling Ipads, an obscene number of people have to be able to afford them. Same goes for cars, houses, etc.

Your average billionaire might actually have one or two of these devices, and buy them more frequently than us riff-raff, but he really can't realistically pick up the slack that results from the inequality he insists on increasing. It's hard to justify buying an Ipad (though I admit, I could try) when you're having trouble putting food on the table and keeping a roof over your head.

The sad thing is, or at least I suspect this is the case, that the first corporations to feel the inevitable pain will be those least responsible for causing the inequality in the first place. The bankers, who bear primary responsibility, are basically on government welfare; they'll survive any crash they can cause.

Filed in Corporate Crime | | Comments (0)

No surprise here, either

Tuesday, October 1, 2013

This may have to be a regular feature here, passing on yet another story that confirms something we all knew already. This time it has to do with investment consultants, who gather millions of dollars in fees from pension funds and the like for steering their money this way or that. If I suggested that they earn those fees, would you believe me? No? Well, good for you.

Andrew Ross Sorkin, who sometimes does good work at the Times, reports on a study from the University of Oxford:

The study demonstrates, perhaps for the first time, that the investment consultants that pension funds rely on to advise them about what funds and investments they should make — resulting in tens of millions of dollars in fees each year — are, as one of the authors of the survey says, “worthless.”

via New York Times

I was in shock when I read this article. Was this truly the first time this obvious proposition had been proven?

Well, this may be explained by something else Sorkin relates: the fact that these consultants (fear anyone with that title, by the way) refuse to reveal how well they perform. Sort of like a baseball player keeping his batting average a secret. See if you can even understand this explanation from one of the consulting companies about why it's best if its clients don't know if it knows what it's doing:

“It’s in our clients’ interest to have the level of transparency that we have. We’re not forced by marketing purposes to give advice we think isn’t the best due to polishing numbers that makes us look better in a survey,” Mr. Kirton said. “You can make yourself potentially a hostage to data.”

I've read it a bunch of times, and I've finally concluded that he's saying that if they pretended to be transparent they'd have to lie to their clients (“polishing numbers”), but if they simply hide their incompetence behind a veil of secrecy they don't have to learn the art of mendacity. I suppose there's some virtue in that.

Filed in Corporate Crime | | Comments (0)

Won’t give in to blackmail

Monday, September 30, 2013

As regular readers know, I'm a Monty Python fan, particularly The Life of Brian, which I consider to be one of the best movies ever made.

Well, the Republican shenanigans of the past few days put me in mind of the following scene from that best of all movies. Unfortunately, this clip continues on past the most salient point, that the blackmailers won't give in to blackmail, but the “What have the Romans ever done for us” colloquy has a certain salience in this debate as well. Try replacing the word “Romans” with “liberals” or “Democrats” .

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Crime Definitely Pays

Friday, September 27, 2013

You couldn't make this up. Matt Taibbi gives a summary history of the most successful organized crime gang in the country, the Bank of America. Of course, the Mafia has a handicap in this competition. It helps if the government enables your criminality, something it has done for the banker class in spades.

Filed in Corporate Crime | | Comments (0)

Surprising finding…not

Thursday, September 26, 2013

Some news from the Department of Why am I not surprised by this. It seems that politicians of both the the right and the “left” believe their constituents are far more out of touch with their own self interest than is actually the case:

When we compare what legislators believe their constituents want to their constituents’ actual views, we discover that politicians hold remarkably inaccurate perceptions. Pick an American state legislator at random, and chances are that he or she will have massive misperceptions about district views on big-ticket issues, typically missing the mark by 15 percentage points.
What is more, the mistakes legislators make tend to fall in one direction, giving U.S. politics a rightward tilt compared to what most voters say they want.

Not surprising, in a way. But startling. The typical conservative candidate in their survey overestimated the district's conservatism by 20 points. The typical liberal candidate overestimated the conservatism by around 5 percentage points.

via Daily Kos

Now, there are probably a lot of reasons for this, including some mentioned in the Daily Kos article, but surely one of them is the gravitational influence of money. Politicians of both the “left” and right, intentionally or unintentionally, conflate their contributors with their constituents. Republicans owe fealty to the most extreme of the rich, the Koch brothers and others of their ilk, while the Democrats take their marching orders from the Wall Street types who don't mind if people get health care (so long as the profits go to them) and are generally supportive of the liberal position on social issues. In both cases, the interests of the large contributors are significantly to the right of the base in both parties, not to mention the public at large. The so called “liberal media” helps, of course, by perpetuating the meme that this is a “center-right” country, despite what the polls may say.

I suppose we can take some comfort from the fact that the Democrats are far less deluded than the Republicans. On the other hand, the Republicans are far more aggressive at demanding and delivering what their fantasy constituents want than are the Democrats.

Filed in American Life, Politics | | Comments (0)

Our nobility

Tuesday, September 24, 2013

I think it can legitimately be argued that democracy is definitely dead when the nobles no longer even pretend to believe that this is a “classless” society. Put another way, we can kiss democracy good-bye when the nobles insist on being treated like nobles, or, alternatively, when they insist on their right to treat us peasants like dirt.

If I’m right, then it looks like we might as well accept that our Republic is on its last legs. Case in point, this truly amazing, and one would think unbelievable factoid. The president of the University of Chicago has declared that the uninformed proles (maintenance, security officers, etc.) at the University may not ride the elevators in the Administration building, but must, instead, trudge up six flights of stairs. In a sign of hope, the union is not taking this lightly, and seems to understand the issue and its implications well enough.

20130924-191222.jpg

Speaking of the nobility, it’s definitely good to be the king, or, failing that, the head guys at Google. You’ve probably asked yourself: Why can’t I get below market rates on fuel for my private jet? Well, maybe you haven’t. If you could afford to ask the question, you probably wouldn’t need to. Remember when Leona Helmsley said that only the “little people” pay taxes? Well, she was only half right. Not only do the nobles not pay taxes, they drink most deeply from the government teat:

A year-long examination of federal government documents shows that a company owned by the founders of Google has purchased millions of dollars’ worth of jet fuel at below-market prices from NASA and the Department of Defense. The records show the company, H211, whose principals are also the principals of Google, used the fuel to fly their private airplanes around the world.

Local officials in Santa Clara County confirm that the company owned by the Google founders, H211, pays no property taxes on the airplanes that are housed at Moffett—a potential loss to local tax rolls of up to $500,000 per airplane per year.

Nearly $8 million worth of jet fuel that sold for as little as $1.68 a gallon was put into a fleet of seven different airplanes and two helicopters that are kept on taxpayer-owned land at NASA’s Ames Research Center at Moffett Field. The same jet fuel sells for two to four-and-a-half times that amount, up to $8.05 a gallon, at fixed-base operators at nearby airports in the Bay Area.

This was made possible under a NASA Space Agreement which has allowed these planes to be housed at Moffett Field since 2007. In exchange, H211 agreed to pay NASA first $113,365.74 a month in rent. That figure later dropped to $108,938.62 a month in rent and NASA was allowed to use the planes for science.

But an examination of records by NBC Bay Area in May 2012 showed that only 155 out of more than 1,039 flights were actually used for science. And these newly released fuel records show the planes used the below-market-rate fuel to fly to exotic places around the world, such as Paris, London, Cancun, Scotland, Puerto Vallarta, St. John, Hawaii, Liberia and Tahiti.

(via Google Executives Globetrotting on Taxpayers’ Dime | NBC Bay Area)

Well, really, we can’t expect these Google guys to pay for their own fuel, can we? Nor can we expect them to pay local property taxes, which they also evaded through this scam. Thank god we can cut the food stamp budget to find the cash to make sure that Larry, Serge and Eric can fly on our dime. But wait, I’ve spoken too soon. This Bush era deal having seen the light of day, has been terminated.

But am I being fair? After all, the government got good value for the nearly free fuel it gave to the Google guys and the money it literally stole from the local municipality.

In explaining the unusual arrangement, NASA officials have pointed to a related agreement by the Google executives to perform scientific flights and other NASA-related transport. That mostly has involved flights by an Alpha jet, a small trainer bought by the Google executives and used by NASA to measure atmospheric greenhouse gases and ozone.

(via Google Founders’ Jet Fleet Loses a Pentagon Fuel Perk – WSJ.com)

In other words, in exchange for fueling the Google RV, the government got to take the Google scooter out for a spin now and then. Well, that’s alright then.

Filed in Corporate Crime, Decline | | Comments (0)

Let them live amongst the rabble

Sunday, September 22, 2013

Digby rebuts the argument (made here) that members of Congress should be paid more, so that they can keep up with their “peers” and won't feel tempted to cash out for even more than their enhanced (above the present $172,000 per year) salaries by turning to a career in crime lobbying:

But they're not supposed to be “elites.” They're supposed to be representatives of the people who voted for them, which means they should not think of their “peers” as bankers, entertainers, executives etc. (at least not most of them.) Perhaps if they spent more time among the former instead of the latter they wouldn't feel so cheated and would have a better idea of who it is they should be identifying with. In fact, the problem may be that they actually make too much money which explains why they no longer understand the needs and wants of 95% of America.

via Hullabaloo

This leads me once again to a modest proposal that I have made in the past. There was once a need for a national capital, but that time has long since passed. Washington is now an artificial world, a bubble nation insulated from the effects of the policies it inflicts on the rest of us, and our “representatives” increasingly have no idea how we live. Even many who start with the best intentions are eventually infected with Inside-the-Beltway syndrome.

The Capitol should be used for ceremonial purposes only; a place the average Congressman or Senator visits only rarely. The rest of their time should be spent in their offices in their districts or states. They can participate in committees via the internet, and can cast their votes the same way. Not only would they be spending more time with their constituents, it would become about 435 times harder for lobbyists to effectively run the country. It would be easy to list disadvantages to this system, but they are trivial in comparison to the advantages.

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