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A short hiatus

Tuesday, October 2, 2012

It could be a while before I further pollute the Internet. Civic duty tonight, debate tomorrow, and Drinking Liberally on Thursday. Speaking of Drinking Liberally, we’ve been trying to get the word out to all that we’re moving back to the Bulkeley House, 111 Bank Street in New London at 6:30 PM. If you like to drink, even a bit, or even if you don’t, come join us (the liberal part is not optional, however). Rumor has it we may have a special guest, but that’s not confirmed yet. 

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Hedge funds have a problem

Tuesday, October 2, 2012

According to Andrew Ross Sorkin at the New York Times, hedge funds are sitting on about a trillion dollars in cash that they need to invest:

Some private equity firms have put the word out to Wall Street banks that they want to go “elephant hunting” — seeking big deals worth as much as $10 billion — and are willing to pay a special bounty for bringing them acquisition targets.

So, look, it’s nice to see that the .01% have more money than they know what to do with it, so I come not to decry that, but to decry what they intend to do with it if they can ever get it together to do something at all.

There was a time, wasn’t there, when people with money got together and did constructive things with it. They built railroads, for example, or factories. They invested in other people who had ideas for building other things. Sure, they were heartless Robber Barons, but at least when they were done we had railroads. Now, apparently, the thing to do is to buy already existing companies to get as much value out of them as you can. Whether that value is achieved by raping the company or making it grow is completely irrelevant. The last think they are looking to do is build or make things. After all, we have Kickstarter for that.

There is a solution, brothers and sisters. Let them be taxed, and let us spend that $1 trillion dollars on things people need, and, as Bob Dylan said in an entirely different context, “country’ll grow”.

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Joshua Green succumbs to beltway dogma

Sunday, September 30, 2012

I have usually enjoyed reading articles by New London’s own Joshua Green, but his column in this morning’s Globe made me wonder if he’s drunk that old inside the beltway Kool-Aid. I’m not taking issue with his main thesis that neither presidential campaign is being terribly specific about their prescriptions to cure the nation’s ills. Rather, it’s with Green’s formulation of those ills.

They would also agree that the election is not a referendum on President Obama but a choice — a “very dramatic choice,” as Mitt Romney told a crowd in Westerville, Ohio, on Wednesday — between two very different governing visions. That choice is all the more important because so many formidable problems await the next president: how to reduce the deficit, reform the tax code, and curb the growth of entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security, to name just a few. With so much on the line, you might naturally want to know more about these competing visions. Here again the candidates would agree. They’d say, “We’ll get back to you.”

For the most part, this is a list of non-problems. If you heard a bank was offering to loan money to a business at a negative interest rate, would you conclude that the business has a debt problem? Right now people are basically paying the U.S. to hold their money, as it is paying, long term, lower interest than the rate of inflation. Long term we may have a deficit problem, but it’s caused by exploding health care costs, which themselves are caused by massive inefficiencies in our private health care system. Green doesn’t mention that fact; a fact commonly ignored by Beltway insiders. And where, other than in the Beltway, have there been demands for cutting either Social Security or Medicare? As to the former, it has no funding problem that raising the payroll tax cap wouldn’t fix. As to the latter, get health care costs under control, and the problem goes away. There really is no need to make people work until they die or have no health care until they’re 70.

Elsewhere Green speaks approvingly of the Simpson-Bowles commission recommendations. The Beltway refuses to recognize that the commission made no recommendation. What he refers to are the recommendations of Alan Simpson (the federal pension receiving ex-Senator who said Social Security recipients we’re all sucking at the public teat) and Morgan Stanley Director Erskine Bowles; recommendations that never earned the votes to become a commission report. Those recommendations are just what you’d expect from Simpson and Bowles: comfort for the comfortable and more affliction for the afflicted, but with a slightly more human face than the Ryan plan.

And note what’s missing from Green’s list of problems bedeviling the nation: any mention of unemployment or the bleak long term job prospects for so many members of the generation to which Green himself belongs. The list of more fundamental problems is a long one: global warming, hollowing out of our educational system; deterioration of our infrastructure, collapse of the manufacturing sector, “to name just a few”. You know, the problems that affect real Americans, both short term and long term, not the obsessions of the privileged and the Washington insiders. Here’s a quote from Robert Caro’s recent book on LBJ, in which he relates the advice Johnson was given by Eisenhower’s treasury secretary the day after Kennedy was shot:

Anderson told him that the surest way to restore confidence was to cut the budget and reduce the deficit.

My lord, same as it ever was. Why, that could be torn from today’s headlines, and, lamentably, from Green’s column. The advice was not followed, and the nation thrived, at least economically. These issues are, for the most part, used to distract from the real issues-those that truly affect the mass of people, and are used, as they currently are being used with a vengeance in Europe, to make the masses pay for the depredations visited upon them by the elites. They are formulations of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%. Remember also, that deficits don’t matter, and haven’t mattered, when Republicans are in office.

Joshua. Come home. Live in New London for a couple of years and regain your perspective.

UPDATE: Josh, if you won’t listen to me, listen to Paul. 

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Heal yourselves

Saturday, September 29, 2012

We’ve been hearing a lot about voter fraud from the Republicans, but it is little noted nor long remembered that what few examples we have of the practice have been committed by Republican operatives. In person voter fraud is almost unknown, except when committed by little Republican criminals trying to prove it could be done. Now we learn that the Florida Republican Party, which has been intent on suppressing the vote in the name of suppressing non-existent fraud, has been engaged in fraud of its own. Who would have thunk?

TALLAHASSEE — A vendor fired by the Republican Party of Florida for submitting questionable voter registrations forms in Palm Beach County is also responsible for filing potentially hundreds of flawed applications in at least eight other counties, including Miami-Dade, election officials confirmed Friday.

Virginia-based Strategic Allied Consulting fell out of favor with Florida Republicans after Palm Beach County flagged 106 registration forms that had signature irregularities or incorrect information for voters already on file, such as new dates of birth and faulty Social Security numbers. Some of the forms in question attempted to change a voter’s address but violated state law by using business locations, such as the Port Everglades administration office, a gas station and a Land Rover dealership.

After problems in Palm Beach County emerged, Florida counties from Miami to the Panhandle reported similar irregularities with voter registration forms that all tracked back to the Republican Party of Florida.

(via Miami Herald)

Don’t for a moment think this firm did anything it was not supposed to do, except for one thing. It was not supposed to get caught.

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Friday Night Music

Friday, September 28, 2012

This is one of those stream of consciousness sort of things, starting with my ride home from work. My iPod is attached to my car stereo, and lately I’ve been playing things at random by spinning the selector wheel on the stereo and seeing what it lands on. It’s safer that way; less need to take your eyes off the road. Anyway, I stumbled upon Maria Muldaur, and it occurred to me that I’d never used her on one of these videos, or, if I did, I can’t remember doing so, and if I can’t remember, it’s not likely anyone else will.

The pickings on youtube from her early days are somewhat sparse. This one seemed best:

Which led me to this, with Maria (who, begging her pardon, always struck me as a not quite Linda Ronstadt) and Linda herself, along with the McGarrigle sisters:

Which led me here, the McGarrigle’s and a host of friends ((Rufus Wainwright – son of Kate -, Emmylou Harris, Mary Black, Karen Matheson, Rod Paterson) singing one of my favorite songs, and one, unfortunately, still quite topical today.

Funny that Stephen Foster songs we learned as kids are, to some extent, now politically incorrect, but this song, which I never heard until I heard Thomas Hampson, of all people, sing it, seems to have been reborn. The Hampson CD, by the way (American Dreamer) should make anyone appreciate Foster’s music.

And, speak of the devil, I found it, so why not stick it up. The violinist (or should I say fiddler) is a guy named Jay Ungar, who may be playing in the McGarrigle version above, which was performed at the Transatlantic Sessions, which he must have had a hand in organizing. I know this because as a result of all this meandering I went to iTunes and bought the CD.

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Am I missing something here?

Friday, September 28, 2012

The rich have justified their lower rates on capital gains for years using some variant of the argument Willard trotted out on 60 minutes:

Answering a direct question on “60 Minutes” last Sunday, Mitt Romney said it was fair for him to pay a lower tax on $20 million in capital gains than a worker pays on $50,000 in wages “because capital has already been taxed once at the corporate level, as high as 35 percent.”

Romney was echoing a claim contained in an Ernst & Young study purporting to calculate “integrated” tax rates on capital gains and dividends by (listen up, now) combining taxes paid at the corporate and individual levels. The study mixes apples, oranges and tomatoes too, in a crazy right-wing stew.

He delivered his answer with a straight face, to a national television audience, as if it were the gosh-honest truth. In the real world it’s gosh-awful garbage.

The same study was used by the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Rep. Dave Camp (R-MI), in his opening statement to a hearing last week on tax reform and the tax treatment of capital gains. Here’s an eye-opening sample:

“As we consider the economic impact of the tax burden associated with capital gains, it is critical that we focus on the total integrated rate, which is nearly 45 percent, not just the statutory rate of 15 percent. The capital gains tax is often, though not always, a double layer of taxation. For example, in the case of shares of stock, a company’s income is first taxed at the corporate rate. Then, when shareholders of the company later decide to sell their stock, they are subject to capital gains tax on the sale. But the value of the stock they sell has already been reduced by the fact that the corporation previously paid out a portions of its earnings as taxes. So, even if we make current low-tax policies permanent, the top integrated rate on capital gains is actually 44.75 percent – a 35 percent first layer of tax and a 15 percent capital gains tax. If we allow current low-tax policies to expire, the top integrated rate on capital gains will exceed 50 percent.”

(via Truthout)

Now, this argument is bullshit for a lot of the reasons set forth in the article from which I took the quote. But I think there’s one more. The argument is that at the time a stock is sold, its price is depressed by the fact that the corporation issuing the stock has been taxed. If the corporation had never been taxed, each of its shares would be worth more. Doesn’t that mean the price was similarly depressed at the time of purchase? All things being equal, wouldn’t the impact of the tax be the same at both points in time and wouldn’t that imply that the effect of the tax is cancelled out, and the gain to the shareholder is more or less the same whether the corporation pays taxes or not?

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Something completely different

Thursday, September 27, 2012

A local story in Smithsonian Magazine. Vampires in Jewett City. (For those not from the area, Jewett City is part of Griswold, and is not now, nor was it ever, actually a city)

 Hat Tip to Matt Berger

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It’s funny because…

Thursday, September 27, 2012

It’s funny, because it’s true that it’s implausible but it’s still true.

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Where do they find these people?

Thursday, September 27, 2012

No comment needed:

Mia Love has made her Haitian immigrant family’s bootstraps story the centerpiece of her campaign to become the first black Republican woman elected to Congress. But on Monday, Mother Jones raised some serious questions about the Utah congressional candidate’s public statements about her family’s immigration story, which she’s used to justify a host of draconian budget proposals that range from eliminating the school lunch program to axing student loans.

In 2011, Love described herself to a Deseret News reporter as what some in her party like to derisively call an “anchor baby”—that is, someone who was born in the United States to immigrants hoping to gain legal citizenship. “My parents have always told me I was a miracle and our family’s ticket to America,” she told the paper.

The story has created a bit of a stir in Utah, where Love is trying to knock off six-term incumbent Rep. Jim Matheson, the state’s only Democratic member of the House. Love has fired back and done a number of interviews criticizing our story. Yet she still has refused to answer the fairly basic questions Mother Jones has been putting to her campaign for more than a month, namely: How did her parents get to the United States, and how did they survive here on only $10 if they didn’t get any government “handouts”?

Instead of offering a straightforward answer, Love has blamed the Matheson campaign for somehow planting the Mother Jones story. She told a local radio station, “It is so sad that Jim Matheson and his friends would go as far as attacking my family, attacking the American Dream.” For the record, the Matheson campaign had nothing to do with the Mother Jones story.

Love has closely aligned herself with members of her party who have pushed to end birthright citizenship (as outlined in the 14th Amendment) for children they believe were born here in an attempt by their parents to win permanent residency. (In reality, having a baby on American soil is not a sure-fire hedge against deportation.) Her campaign is managed by people who used to work for Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), one of the leading proponents of legislation that would deny citizenship to US-born children of non-citizens—people just like Love herself. (The issue was so central to Lee’s own 2010 campaign that HBO’s Newsroom parodied it this summer.)

Despite all of the interviews Love has done in the past 24 hours, she has done little to clear up the inconsistencies in her story. She has claimed amnesia about the 2011 Deseret News interview, saying she just can’t recall saying those things. She continues to claim that her parents came here legally, telling one local TV reporter that her parents had come on a “tourist visa.” When asked by Fox News whether her birth in the United States allowed her parents to become citizens, she replied, “I’m not sure, maybe. What if someone got married? Maybe. Again, what we need to focus on is that legal immigration is a good thing when you’re contributing to society. I’m the product of legal immigration.”

In another interview with the Salt Lake ABC affiliate, a reporter pressed her on her comments to the Deseret News, asking, “Just one last time, for the record…your parents didn’t get to stay in this country because you were born here?” Love responded, “Chris, what if they did? So what? What if they did? I mean they are legal. They are legal US citizens. I was born in this country.”

(via Mother Jones)

Okay, one comment. This sort of reminds me of our own Linda, who has been bragging about her elective bankruptcy for years, then attacks Chris Murphy for falling behind in his bills. Could it be that their contempt for the public is so deep that they feel that there is no need to even pretend to be intellectually honest or consistent?

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I should have gotten a copyright

Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Okay, so I went here today, and find to my surprise, that Jon Stewart has introduced a new segment entitled “Barack Obama is the luckiest dude on the planet” or something to that effect. Here’s the video:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
Democalypse 2012 – Every Which Way But Lucid
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on Facebook

Of course, he’s entirely right, but I must register my objections to this blatant appropriation without accreditation. This is a point that some (meaning me) have made before (like here, here, here, here, and here) and for pretty much the same reasons. Obama is the fortunate beneficiary of an unprecedented plague of stupid. So some of us (meaning me) saw this coming. (Though I was wrong about Sarah)

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