onlinegrandpa's Blog

I was watching MSNBC last night and one of the infinite number of pundits said something about how we're going to have to do something about entitlement programs, meaning Social Security and Medicare, and hearing that made me wince.

Social Security and Medicare are not entitlement programs. They're insurance programs administered by the government, but we pay the premiums. They're deducted from our paychecks. Social Security and Medicare are  not paid for out of the general tax fund.

I seem to remember there was something like a trillion dollar reserve  for Social Security when President Bush took office, but that somehow disappeared after we invaded Iraq, pretty much the same way all those private pensions and state government worker's pensions disappeared because the companies and states who managed them wanted to spend the money on something other than what those pensions were for.

However, my point is, stop calling Social Security and Medicare "entitlement programs." It makes it sound like we're asking for something we don't deserve and we're asking someone else to pay for it. That's not the case at all. They're both insurance programs that we pay for ourselves.

And like any insurance program, premiums will change to reflect changes in cost. That's the way it works. So, when you hear someone say that Social Security or Medicare is running out of money, please understand that that's not true at all. If costs go up, it is the responsibility of the program administrators to raise premiums. That's what they're supposed to do. There is no way these programs will ever run out of money, as long as we can afford to pay the premiums.

The Martin Luther King You Don't See on TV

 

by Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon

 

It's become a TV ritual: Every year in mid-January, around the time of Martin Luther King's birthday, we get perfunctory network news reports about "the slain civil rights leader."

 

The remarkable thing about this annual review of King's life is that several years--his last years--are totally missing, as if flushed down a memory hole.

 

What TV viewers see is a closed loop of familiar file footage: King battling desegregation in Birmingham (1963); reciting his dream of racial harmony at the rally in Washington (1963); marching for voting rights in Selma, Alabama (1965); and finally, lying dead on the motel balcony in Memphis (1968).

 

An alert viewer might notice that the chronology jumps from 1965 to 1968. Yet King didn't take a sabbatical near the end of his life. In fact, he was speaking and organizing as diligently as ever.

 

Almost all of those speeches were filmed or taped. But they're not shown today on TV.

 

Why?

 

It's because national news media have never come to terms with what Martin Luther King, Jr., stood for during his final years.

 

In the early 1960s, when King focused his challenge on legalized racial discrimination in the South, most major media were his allies. Network TV and national publications graphically showed the police dogs and bullwhips and cattle prods used against Southern blacks who sought the right to vote or to eat at a public lunch counter.

 

But after passage of civil rights acts in 1964 and 1965, King began challenging the nation's fundamental priorities. He maintained that civil rights laws were empty without "human rights"--including economic rights. For people too poor to eat at a restaurant or afford a decent home, King said, anti-discrimination laws were hollow.

 

Noting that a majority of Americans below the poverty line were white, King developed a class perspective. He decried the huge income gaps between rich and poor, and called for "radical changes in the structure of our society" to redistribute wealth and power.

 

"True compassion," King declared, "is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring."

 

By 1967, King had also become the country's most prominent opponent of the Vietnam War, and a staunch critic of overall U.S. foreign policy, which he deemed militaristic. In his "Beyond Vietnam" speech delivered at New York's Riverside Church on April 4, 1967--a year to the day before he was murdered--King called the United States "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today."

 

From Vietnam to South Africa to Latin America, King said, the U.S. was "on the wrong side of a world revolution." King questioned "our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America," and asked why the U.S. was suppressing revolutions "of the shirtless and barefoot people" in the Third World, instead of supporting them.

 

In foreign policy, King also offered an economic critique, complaining about "capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries."

 

You haven't heard the "Beyond Vietnam" speech on network news retrospectives, but national media heard it loud and clear back in 1967--and loudly denounced it. Life magazine called it "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi." The Washington Post patronized that "King has diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people."

 

In his last months, King was organizing the most militant project of his life: the Poor People's Campaign. He crisscrossed the country to assemble "a multiracial army of the poor" that would descend on Washington--engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience at the Capitol, if need be--until Congress enacted a poor people's bill of rights. Reader's Digest warned of an "insurrection."

 

King's economic bill of rights called for massive government jobs programs to rebuild America's cities. He saw a crying need to confront a Congress that had demonstrated its "hostility to the poor"--appropriating "military funds with alacrity and generosity," but providing "poverty funds with miserliness."

 

How familiar that sounds today, more than a quarter-century after King's efforts on behalf of the poor people's mobilization were cut short by an assassin's bullet.

 

As 1995 gets underway, in this nation of immense wealth, the White House and Congress continue to accept the perpetuation of poverty. And so do most mass media. Perhaps it's no surprise that they tell us little about the last years of Martin Luther King's life.

Globalization appeals to three groups of people. Economists, who have a world view that's at least a thousand years too soon, Third World countries, who gladly welcome manufacturing jobs and the wealth they bring with them, and the Rich, who happily lower their labor costs while tremendously increasing their profits by shipping jobs and factories overseas.

Globalization is an area where both Republicans and Democrats have gotten it wrong, all wrong. They bought into this concept and they ran with it. They've decimated the Working Class in the process. Our manufacturing jobs are almost all gone. We make almost nothing in America now.

True, Globalization has been a tremendous help to China. They now have a rapidly growing Middle Class and their economy can't expand fast enough. Globalization has been so successful for China that they now lend us money to run our government. We can't run our own government any longer because we sent all the jobs that had been paying the lion's share of the cost of our government, our tax base, overseas. Also true, the Rich got richer, they always do, but instead of shifting the tax burden to the Rich so we could continue running our country, we cut their taxes.

To be honest, I support a move towards Globalization because I believe that somewhere down the road we need to have a single planet wide government that will manage our planet wide economy, but that's way, way down the road. We are nowhere near being ready to do that now. Way off in the future, we'll achieve financial equality and everyone who lives on this planet will have an equal share of our resources, but if you try to achieve that now, all you'll do is destroy the economies of all the Industrialized Countries as you transfer wealth to all the Third World Countries.

Just like what's happening to America right now.

Go ahead. Call me a Protectionist. I am. It's a necessary, albeit temporary, evil. We have to take care of our citizens, our economy, first. Otherwise we'll end up as a Third World Country, which is what is happening to us now.

There's an easy way to fix this. All that is required is the political will to do it. The government needs to dust off old fashioned Trade Policy and Tariffs. We need to tell Business that, yes, they are free to manufacture products anywhere in the world they wish to. However, we will be adding a tariff to every single product that is sent here, to raise the cost of that product to what it would cost if it were actually made here. Take the money from those Tariffs and subsidize our workers so we begin building our Middle Class again. Then provide Business with a tax credit if they manufacture products here instead of overseas. Do that, and that's the only incentive you'll need to bring all those factories, all those jobs, home again. Tariffs will level the playing field and Tax Credits are what provides the incentive for Business to come home.

Bingo. There's the factories, there's the jobs, and there's the tax base to pay for the cost of running our government.

Or, we continue down the Globalization path and see how we like an economy based on delivering pizzas to each other.

Or, we don' t increase the Federal Debt Ceiling, that causes us to default on our loans, no one will lend us any money, our government shuts down, our economy collapses into a major full blown Depression, and that takes out the entire world economy.

Personally, I think it's a far, far better idea to "protect" our economy and go back to manufacturing here the goods we consume here.

What say you, Homer?

America, the most heavily armed country on the planet always seems so surprised when yet another crazy gets hold of an assault weapon and tries to rectify where his twisted conspiracy theories have taken him. Then we'll drone on and on about how someone should have picked up on the fact that this guy is nuts, the NRA begins their canned knee jerk media push back, just in case anyone dares to suggest we have way too many guns in America, the pundits get plenty of air time, and then it all is forgotten.

Until the next Gun Massacre.

Will we ever have a grown up conversation about what we're doing with all these guns? I wonder, but I'm not going to hold my breath. There's something odd about our psyche. Part cowboy/old west. Part something else I don't understand. I'm just not sure what it is. 

There is no doubt in my mind that we don't need guns, hunters excepted. We need more cops, we need more firefighters and first responders, but we don't need guns. I'm certain of it. We don't need 30,000 gun deaths every year, either.

Maybe we should take the gun discussion in another direction. Maybe we should go down the "right to bear arms" path and follow it to its predictable conclusion. Maybe we should accept the fact that citizens have the right to own weapons, any kind of weapons. Just go with it for a moment. Want an RPG, a Bazooka? Go buy one. You want to make the skies safe over your house? Go buy an F16, if you can afford one. Want your own "panic button?" Build a tactical nuclear weapon in your garage. It's your right. You go right ahead.

Do you think if it were ok to own tactical nuclear weapons that anyone would own them? I do. It's not even too big of a stretch. And I'm not just talking about those individuals who wear aluminum foil on their heads to protect themselves from the mind controlling government. I'm talking about regular people, people you walk right by on the streets every single day. There are folks out there who would own nuclear weapons if they could.

Would we have a "who needs nuclear weapons" discussion then? Or would we wait until someone set one off? One million people reach 10,000 degrees in less than a second. Poof!!! But the government mind control survives.

Yeah, I know. I'm being silly, but that's how I react to silliness. I think you gun nuts are odd, your arguments in favor of gun ownership smack of aluminum foil, and what your beliefs say about how you really feel about humanity in general are seriously funny, in a frightening kind of way.

So, go ahead and keep your guns, your assault weapons, and whatever the hell kind of WMD you want to own. The Right is going down a path that will do nothing but cause the Left to arm and that could very well be Civil War time, Folks.

Maybe you guys should just go ahead and leave the Union, like you wanted to do the last time we had a Civil War. You guys take the southern states and we'll take the northern ones. We'll even let you guys have the name. We'll call ourselves Southern Canada.

Regardless of what else happens, all these damned gun massacres are getting a little old.

 

Christ wanted us to love one another and take care of one another. He wanted us to minister to one another and not rely on priests or preachers. He wanted us to share what we have with those who have not. He definitely had a problem with money lenders and those who accumulate wealth, and I'm fairly certain Christ didn't want us to kill one another, steal from one another, take advantage of one another, or persecute one another.

Christ would have been a great Socialist because His teachings are the cornerstone of Socialist thinking. Christ would have been a great Capitalist, too. If you apply His teaching to Business,  Business would never do anything to the detriment of the general public welfare, just the same as Government.

So, I think this argument about the rightness or wrongness of Socialism and Capitalism is a false argument. The argument should be about our lack of ethics. There's nothing complicated about the teachings of Christ, nothing incomprehensible. His teachings are about as simple as you can get. If you apply those lessons to every endeavor, even a Dictatorship works. If you don't apply those lessons, nothing works.

As proof, I present you with the world around us, a world filled with hate, greed, corruption, fear, and gut wrenching poverty, a world where the very few hoard most of the wealth while the majority struggle to get even the most basic of necessities.

The Seven Deadly Sins.

Pride is excessive belief in one's own abilities, that interferes with the individual's recognition of the grace of God. It has been called the sin from which all others arise. Pride is also known as Vanity.

 

Envy is the desire for others' traits, status, abilities, or situation.

 

Gluttony is an inordinate desire to consume more than that which one requires.

 

Lust is an inordinate craving for the pleasures of the body.

 

Anger is manifested in the individual who spurns love and opts instead for fury. It is also known as Wrath.

 

Greed is the desire for material wealth or gain, ignoring the realm of the spiritual. It is also called Avarice or Covetousness.

 

Sloth is the avoidance of physical or spiritual work.


I may be an Atheist, but I'm a Christian Atheist. As such, this isn't a moral code to me. It's a code of ethics. So, when we discuss how destructive Capitalism can be, or the evils of the Welfare State, it's six of one or half dozen of another. Without ethics, or a moral code for those of faith, nothing you do will work, our country will falter and fail, and we will all sink into the Abyss.

So, when we have these little discussions about how government should or should not perform, or how business should or should not perform, I may be hearing something a little different in your meaning than you intended.

 

Ok, the problem is people are sometimes trying to use themselves as bombs to knock planes out of the sky. I mean, it's bad enough that planes fall out of the sky all by themselves occasionally. It's seriously bad news when they get help.

Having said that, is the TSA not overkill? We're spending billions of dollars scanning people and patting them down, all because they want to fly somewhere. I'm also pretty sure if you stop someone and pat them down, you just detained them and you need probable cause to do that.

I think we'd do better to simply acknowledge we live in a dangerous world, use standard airport surveillance to look for people who act suspicious, use standard intelligence gathering to uncover plots, and accept the fact that, from time to time, someone is going to blow up a plane. I think,no matter what we do, that's going to happen anyway.

We can just go back to asking people to show up fifteen minutes before their plane is scheduled to depart, you can accompany your loved ones to the gate and watch their plane fly off, and you won't have to deal with being scanned, groped, and terribly inconvenienced any longer. Just keep in mind that every so often some zealot is going to blow up a plane. 

However, even if we all just quit flying, zealots would simply start blowing up trains and busses. It's what zealots do.

Personally, I don't fly. I don't care for air travel. Never have. I'm also never in that much of a hurry to get anywhere. I also have another problem. If you insist on touching me, I'm probably going to insist on touching you back.

I've heard some of the stories about rape and child abuse survivors who have a problem being groped, I can definitely understand that, but I can also understand those who simply don't want anyone touching them.

And how many terrorist bombings have the TSA prevented so far? Just how many zealots have the TSA prevented from getting on planes with all their gropes and scans? I'm thinking the answer is zero. All we're doing is providing fuel to the fire for those folks who think that government is just another word for tyranny and I doubt seriously if we're preventing anyone from blowing up an airplane.

I would expect that the federal, state, and municipal workers "We The People" hire would be the best and the brightest from among us, the most honorable, the most compassionate, and the most competent people we could find. Consequently, I want to compensate them to the point where there would never be any question that they could  make that kind of money in the private sector, whatever job we hire them to do. I would want it to be common knowledge that working for "We the People" is the most rewarding job in the world, and the highest paid. I want to know that the best interests of the people of the United States are always being looked after by the best and the brightest from among us.

I want political campaigns to be publicly financed, no more private or corporate donations, no more political fundraising, no more favors owed. Let those running for public office focus on the issues, in print, and make them stay off my damn TV set with all those ridiculous "attack" ads.

I think setting single term limits for every elected office would get us back to the idea of a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, elected representatives who are regular citizens and not career politicians.

Congress should go back to "majority rule," and do away with filibusters and super majorities. I can live with that when the Republicans are in office if they can live with that when the Democrats are. I want Congress to legislate. That's what we pay them for.

And I'm tired of shadow governments, secrets, and back room politics. I want 100% openness and transparency from our government, even when it comes to foreign policy. I want the entire world to know we walk our talk in this country, and I want every citizen to know that our government plays out right in front of every single person who lives here.

I want to see that one of the most serious crimes one can commit in this country is political corruption by public officials, and I want vigorous prosecution and long prison sentences whenever we catch someone.

Whenever someone says, "I'm from the government and I'm here to help," I want everyone to breathe a sigh of relief, knowing that the full backing and support of the people of the United States is at hand.

If someone walks into a government office and asks for help, I expect them to get help and I expect them to be treated with respect and compassion.

I also demand an efficient and cost effective government, a responsive and responsible government, and a government that is compassionate yet constantly vigilant about not wasting taxpayer's money.

We need a government like this regardless of who's in power. The idea of self governance is one of the greatest ideas in the history of mankind and we should always remember that and never give up on this wonderful work in progress.

Government is how we work together as a nation and what we do as citizens. Government should be an expression of who we are as a people and where we are going in the future.

Our government has problems. If we don' fix those problems, we will fail. I promise you that.

I posted this elsewhere but I thought I'd add it here.


Democracy is messy. Where you want to end up is with a government program that has a clear mission statement, operates efficiently, and has adequate funding to do the job.

For example, if you asked the Congressional Budget Office how we could deliver health care so that we spent half as much per capita but got twice the outcomes, the CBO would be able to tell you exactly how to do that.

It's a simple management problem and management is not rocket science. Even if it were, we have rocket scientists.

If you produced a clear mission statement that said you wanted to flood proof New Orleans once and for all, there are folks out there who could tell you exactly how to accomplish that and the CBO would tell you exactly how much that's going to cost.

There are management experts who can tell you precisely how to create manufacturing jobs here in America, in the same sense as there are professionals who know how to get us off fossil fuels.

These are all management problems.

What I'm suggesting is that we should have a managed economy. Government is management, in the same way that business is management. However, the democracy part, the political part of this equation is where the problem arises. Everything falls apart as soon as you introduce the politics.

I don't know what the answer is. I wish I did. 

What I do know is if you empowered the CBO to come up with a health care delivery system that costs half as much but delivers better outcomes, they would do exactly that.

The question becomes, how can "We the People" hire a management team to do a job for us? Without all the politics? If we could get better health care, for everyone, at half what we're spending now, why would anyone care about the politics?

 

I’m still reeling from the mid-term election results, even though I completely anticipated the blood bath that we on the Left received. I’m feeling better, though. I figure, go ahead, let the Republicans drive us right back into that ditch again, borrow a couple of trillion dollars from the Chinese to run our country and shore up those ever increasing holdings the rich have, keep sending all those manufacturing jobs overseas so that our middle class becomes those who deliver pizzas to one another, and get that black guy the hell out of here. You know that’s what this is really all about, getting rid of the black guy. I know it. You know it. Everyone knows it, whether they admit it or not.

 

It’s true. I am feeling better, in an odd way. Maybe if the country sinks low enough, we’ll finally wise up and realize we’ve been had. Maybe when we’re broke and hungry enough, we’ll all stroll over to the high rent district and get our money back, or we’ll vote in enough truly progressive representatives and let them do that for us, or we’ll finally grasp the concept that a public utility model can be applied to most anything, and banking and the stock market are no exceptions.

 

I’m prepared to let all those White Christian Nationalists……where have I heard that before?……sink our ship of state. Then the revolution will come and we’ll dust off the guillotines and rebuild our country from the bottom up.

 

Had we only figured out sooner that government is not our enemy. Our enemy is greed and stupidity, and incompetence, plus our inability to see that the Left is much more fiscally conservative than the Right, is much more Family Values oriented, and is much more emphatic about protecting our Rights and Liberties. The Right serves the rich. The Left serves everybody else.

 

It’s going to get ugly out there and I’m sorry you guys are going to suffer, especially since it’s so unnecessary, but I have high hopes you will eventually think your way out of this mess you got us into.

 

Just remember, you need to elect Progressives if you want things fixed. Just a thought.

In a "We the People" type democracy, government is nothing more than our very own DIY set of tools, which is not the same as the government we have now, and definitely not the same as no government at all. It's the government we should have, though. Our very own public utility, for whatever task we want done.

If we want our public schools to be palaces and our teachers to be the best and brightest among us, we can provide a clear mission statement and we can get the job done. If we want high speed bullet trains to crisscross our country and connect all our cities and towns, we can definitely do that. If we choose to manufacture most of the goods we consume right here in America, we can accomplish that, and if we want to see wind and solar farms powering our country, there's a "can do" there, too. No job is too big or too small for a public utility.

It's not a question about which is better, public or private. That's the wrong question anyway. The right question is, for anything with national implications, what is the most cost effective way to accomplish that. We're talking about our money. We should get the biggest bang for our bucks.

Most things can be done less expensively by non profit public utilities because, obviously, there's no profit involved. Nobody is skimming anything off the top. Public education is the same thing as health care, banking, transportation, or the delivery of mail and parcels. They are just jobs to be done, with efficiency and cost effectiveness, because we're always talking about our own money.

However, bloated unresponsive corporations are no different than bloated unresponsive government, so nothing will change until we all demand that the public welfare is everyone's number one priority. It has to be what is good for the country. Business or government. We the people come fist. If we demand that, then government will operate efficiently and corporations will do the right thing, but I promise you this, an efficient government can always kick the ass of any corporation when it comes to cost effectiveness.

It's my hope of hopes that one day we'll pull out all the stops and take this idea of self governance into the 21st century. Then we'll have a modern progressive industrialized nation with full employment and no poverty.

And I look forward to riding on that bullet train, too.

This is a day to appreciate what you've got and to celebrate with a major feast, which should include at least a half gallon of gravy.

As a Democratic Neo-Socialist, I wish all of you the very best. I support the very highest of family values, fiscal responsibility, fair taxes for those who work for a living, using our military only in extreme circumstances and only to defend the United States, and an efficient government that treats its citizens with the utmost respect while it protects our rights and freedoms.

In a Democracy, government is whatever citizens want it to be and its a tool we can use to accomplish things as a nation. I personally believe government is one of mankind's greatest achievements, even though it's still a work in progress.

Again, Happy Thanksgiving to everyone.

It's almost like if it's not happening here we don't care about it, and our media responds accordingly. Consequently, we don't hear about how other countries are solving their health care problems, we don't get to hear about how Denmark's citizens pay the highest taxes on the planet and are as happy as clams at high tide, and we don't get to hear how Portugal decriminalized drug use, saved a ton of money by not fighting a losing drug war, and then watched as drug use actually declined.

We'd be so much better off if we looked at other countries to see who is doing what successfully and then made changes accordingly. Sweden seems to shun long prison sentences and I would guess they save a ton of money by not having to build more and more prisons at an ever increasing cost to taxpayers. That makes sense. If you're an inmate, five years is a long time, but twenty to life is outrageously expensive.

Americans like to think we lead the world when it comes to personal freedom but Sweden's entire government is based on freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Those aren't amendments to their constitution. They are their constitution.

I think it was Singapore who put together a commission to study successful health care delivery systems around the world, they picked what works, discarded what didn't, and went about overhauling their entire national health care delivery system so they can provide excellent health care at the lowest possible cost.

Do other democracies function better than ours? You won't get to hear about it if they do. What about the rights of workers? I discovered, quite by accident, that French workers are rioting in the streets of Paris because their conservative government wants to raise the retirement age to 62 from 60. That's important news, but the nightly news skipped that story.

Don't get me wrong, I love my country, but I'm not an apologist. If we're wrong, I don't mind admitting it. I also shun the idea that America is number one and therefore we can safely bury our heads in the sand like an ostrich. It's important to know about what other countries are up to. What kind of energy policies work? How are those 300MPH bullet trains working out? How are other countries protecting their manufacturing base? How do other developed countries improve their infrastructure while ours is falling apart. How were the Dutch so successful at flood proofing their country while we hold our breaths every time a hurricane comes near New Orleans?

I think it's critical that we try to save America, but we don't have to reinvent the wheel to do it. We could simply look around and borrow what works elsewhere. We should, at the very least, be doing that. Our two party system is barely functional. Would a parliamentary system work better? How are other countries able to legislate and govern effectively? We should be asking those questions. We should be looking for answers, and we should be looking for answers elsewhere. We can't find those answers if we bury our heads in the sand.

It means we go through life as brothers and we all go together. No one gets left behind. No one is ever abandoned. No one ever needs to feel alone because we are all in this together. If you stumble and fall, your brothers and sisters will help you to your feet.

We use government, one of the many tools we have available in our society, to get the job done and to protect those rights and liberties that apply to all men and women.

That's what being a Liberal means to me.

I read this and it had me in stitches so I thought I'd repost it here. I apologize to the original author for not remembering his or her name.






"Last week I spent some time with a group of people I don't usually spend much time talking to. They were not rich--by which I don't mean that they had overstretched themselves by buying a seven-figure principal residence but rather that they weren't rich: their household income was in the five or, for some of them, perhaps the very low six figures. And (which is unusual for Berkeley) they were not lefties, neither cultural nor sociological. They were deeply concerned with the future of our country. And they were desperate to figure out how to engage in effective political action--but had few illusions that the politicians they would vote for in November were their kind of people with their interests at heart.   I suppose that in a previous era, back when there were private-sector unions, they might have been union stewards. But now we have no private-sector unions.   And so they are activists from the California Tea Party.   So I went through my standard spiel. Housing bubble. 5 million excess houses built in the desert between Los Angeles and Albuquerque, and on all of them the least $100K of mortgage debt will not be repaid. A $500B loss in an $80T world economy. Shouldn't have been a problem—securitization exists to spread risks. But the banks pretended that the AAA MBS issued by other banks were high-quality basel capital even though they knew full well the dreck that they were issuing. A financial multiplier of 40. A flight to safety. A big shift away from spending on currently-produced goods and services and on currently-employed labor as people tried to build up their stocks of safe assets. A multiplier as people who lost their jobs stopped spending, and the situation snowballed.   It could have been worse, I said. Without all of the rescue policies we would probably now have an unemployment rate of 16 percent rather than 10 percent.   But they question is what to do now with the economy. The idea is not to go to socialism—not to nationalize large chunks of the economy and have everybody work for the government—but to conduct strategic interventions in financial markets. Relieve the excess demand for safe high-quality assets and you remove the pressure on people to spend less than they earn as they try to build up their stocks of safe assets, and you get a virtuous circle of strong recovery.   So, I said, the right thing to do is the Bagehot rule: lend freely at a penalty rate. The government should throw huge amounts of money at the financial markets and in the process take a large chunk of the upside in equities and options.   SOCIALISM, they said. We don't want SOCIALISM.   But it's not socialism, I said. It's an attempt to avoid socialism—it's an attempt to conduct a strategic intervention into the market economy so that it can rebalance itself.   SOCIALISM, they said.   Well, I said, how about lending freely to the financial sector but forget Bagehot's "penalty rate" stuff?   BAILOUT, they said. BAILOUT OF CORRUPT FINANCIERS WITH WASHINGTON CONNECTIONS, they said. WE LIKE THAT EVEN LESS.   Well, I said, how about pushing off taxes into the future, bringing forward infrastructure spending we know that we will want to do, and financing it by issuing more government debt? The spending should put some people to work, and the extra government bonds we print up will increase the supply of safe assets, decrease the excess demand, and so remove some of the downward pressure that is inducing people to spend less than they earn/   DEFICIT, they said. DEFICIT BAD. MUST REDUCE THE DEFICIT. GOVERNMENT MUST LIVE WITHIN ITS MEANS.   But, I said, the U.S. government now can borrow at unbelievable terms. If you could borrow at such terms, you would bust out the top of your house and add a second story immediately.   GOVERNMENT MUST LIVE WITHIN ITS MEANS.   OK, I said. How about having the federal government aid the states. We want to keep our police and our fire and our road maintenance and our schools running at their efficient levels, don't we? It's stupid to cut back on the long-term foundations of our economy and its growth because of recession, isn't it. How about a large program of federal aid to the states so that teachers, sewer workers, police officers, and firefighters can keep their jobs, keep protecting us—and keep spending and so provide employment for the rest of us?   ARE YOU KIDDING? THEY HAVE KEPT THEIR UNIONS. WE HAVE LOST OUR UNIONS. WE HAVE LOST OUR JOBS. THEY HAVE GONE TO CHINA. THEY HAVE VANISHED. WE ARE UNEMPLOYED. IF WE ARE EMPLOYED WE HAVE NO BARGAINING POWER WITH OUR BOSSES. IT IS NOT FAIR FOR STATE WORKERS TO NOT ONLY HAVE UNIONS, BARGAINING POWER, AND PENSIONS, BUT FOR THEM TO HAVE THEIR JOBS TOO. SINCE WE ARE LOSING OUR JOBS THEY SHOULD LOSE THEIR JOBS TOO. IT IS NOT FAIR.   Oh.   EVERYTHING YOU PROPOSE TAKES OUR HARD-EARNED MONEY, TAXES IT AWAY FROM US, AND GIVES IT TO SOMEBODY ELSE.   Oh.   BERKELEY SOCIALIST.   So what do you think we should do?   GET US JOBS!   But you have just rejected every idea I have for boosting employment—short of nationalizing the means of production and employing everybody by the government, that is. What are your ideas?   CUT TAXES. ABOLISH THE EPA. REPEAL HEALTH CARE REFORM. KEEP GOVERNMENT'S HANDS OFF OF MEDICARE. RAISE SOCIAL SECURITY PAYMENTS. CUT THE DEFICIT."

I strongly suggest the Left start using the same strategy the Right is using to attract Low Information Voters. Tap into all that anger and start screaming slogans and catch phrases that appeal to that group. All you need is "Freedom," Liberty," The Constitution," and toss in "Power to the People" and "Death to Wall Street," and just keep talking about how Big Business and Bankers are stealing all our hard earned money.

Don't think that'll work? Remember the Union Movement? Remember the Anti-War Protests that finally ended the Vietnam War? The Left can use slogans just as well as the Right can, and maybe it's high time to start doing that again.

There's nothing wrong with appealing to Low Information Voters. Just give them enough information so they see which side of their toast gets the butter and most of them will come down solidly on the Left. It's the policies of the Left that serve the interest and well being of people who work for a living, not the Right, so let's start redirecting some of that anger against Big Business and those political mouth pieces who serve them.

It might just get interesting.

What good is government?

Well, as a nation, nothing can protect our rights and freedoms better than government. That's the main reason our government and our Constitution exist, to protect those rights and freedoms and to guarantee equal protection under the law.

Another reason to use government as a tool is we have limited resources and those limited resources need to be managed. Government is the best tool we have for accomplishing that so that we can all benefit from the wealth we have and the wealth we can share with one another.

Defending our citizens from threats, both domestic and foreign is another tool we use government for, and we all join together to hire the best first responders in the world.....our military, police, fire fighters, and emergency rescue personnel.

We also need government to maintain our courts, to guarantee that contracts are followed, and to maintain a system of justice that we all have equal access to.

Maintaining our nation's infrastructure is an important function of government and it requires a massive amount of planning and resource management to accomplish that. Government is the least costly method of achieving that goal.

And it all depends on how you define "infrastructure." I define it as any goods or services that are absolutely critical for our well being. Government is the most effective tool for maintaining that infrastructure, whether it's making sure we have enough energy or making sure the food we eat is of good quality, whether it's building a nationwide network of high speed bullet trains or simply making sure every community has a decent public library.

We can also join together and use government to provide a safety net to reduce human suffering. Access to affordable health care, providing the elderly with a livable and guaranteed retirement income, maintaining a system of unemployment insurance, access to decent housing, and sufficient food are all things we can use government to achieve.

Beyond those things, since we have a democracy, we can use government as a tool to do anything we decide we want to do as a nation.

Government is nothing more than a toolbox filled with tools, tools we use to build and maintain our society and to make sure we all move forward together.

So, asking, what good is government ,is the same as asking, what good are tools.

Here's a link to an important piece of writing about randomness and how we humans insist on finding meaning, often when no meaning exists.

http://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/09/11/the-texas-sharpshooter-fallacy/


I'd be interested in hearing your comments.................

As the GOP (Greed, Oil, and Power) seems to be poised to seize control of our government this November, I'd like to point out to those on the Left, and those who simply give a damn, all will not be lost. A revolution is coming. A revolution of "We the People." It's not a matter of "If." It's only a matter of "When." The Right will lose. "We the People" will win.

 

Latinos will one day stand with Blacks, with Asian Americans, Native Americans, Women, Gays and Lesbians, and all progressive thinking Americans, and they will sweep away all those corrupt politicians on the Right and all of their Fat Cat, Robber Baron friends in "Big Business." "We the People" will take our country back and we will take control of our government, our wealth, and our future.

 

We will one day stand together and use the tools of our government to eliminate poverty and suffering, to provide our children with a world class education, to make sure everyone has equal access to quality health care, and to make certain that "Big Business" can never again ransack our Economy.

 

And we will take control of our own money supply and our own national resources. Those things belong to all of us, not just the rich.

 

The revolution of "We the People" is coming. But, like any addict, we'll have to reach rock bottom first, that place where we realize there is nowhere to go but up. The Republicans will give us that, they will give us rock bottom, as they give huge tax cuts to the rich, as they begin to dismantle Social Security and Medicare, and as they dismantle our federal government and eliminate the ability of our government to regulate anything. Our citizens will arrive at rock bottom, We'll get really, really angry, and then we will act. You think the Tea Party folks are angry. You ain't seen nothing yet.

 

It's only a matter of time, so don't become too discouraged. If the Republicans win in November, it will only be a short term victory. We've already won the war. They just don't know it yet.

I thought you guys might appreciate hearing the truth about Social Security. There's not a damn thing wrong with it. It's a simple retirement insurance program that pays its own way and adds not one red cent to the deficit.



Top 5 Social Security Myths

Myth: Social Security is going broke.

Reality: There is no Social Security crisis. By 2023, Social Security will have a $4.3 trillion surplus (yes, trillion with a 'T'). It can pay out all scheduled benefits for the

next quarter-century with no changes whatsoever.1 After 2037, it'll still be able to pay out 75% of scheduled benefits--and again, that's without any changes. The program

started preparing for the Baby Boomers retirement decades ago.2 Anyone who insists Social Security is broke probably wants to break it themselves.

Myth: We have to raise the retirement age because people are living longer.

Reality: This is a red-herring to trick you into agreeing to benefit cuts. Retirees are living about the same amount of time as they were in the 1930s. The reason average life expectancy is higher is mostly because many fewer people die as children than did

70 years ago.3 What's more, what gains there have been are distributed very unevenly- -since 1972, life expectancy increased by 6.5 years for workers in the top half of the

income brackets, but by less than 2 years for those in the bottom half.4 But those intent on cutting Social Security love this argument because raising the retirement age is the same as an across-the-board benefit cut.

Myth: Benefit cuts are the only way to fix Social Security.

Reality: Social Security doesn't need to be fixed. But if we want to strengthen it,

here's a better way: Make the rich pay their fair share. If the very rich paid taxes on all of their income, Social Security would be sustainable for decades to come.5 Right now,

high earners only pay Social Security taxes on the first $106,000 of their income.6 But conservatives insist benefit cuts are the only way because they want to protect the super-rich from paying their fair share.

Myth: The Social Security Trust Fund has been raided and is full of IOUs

Reality: Not even close to true. The Social Security Trust Fund isn't full of IOUs, it's full of U.S. Treasury Bonds. And those bonds are backed by the full faith and credit ofthe United States.7 The reason Social Security holds only treasury bonds is the same reason many Americans do: The federal government has never missed a single interest payment on its debts. President Bush wanted to put Social Security funds in the stock market--which would have been disastrous--but luckily, he failed. So the trillions of dollars in the Social Security Trust Fund, which are separate from the regular budget, are as safe as can be.

Myth: Social Security adds to the deficit

Reality: It's not just wrong -- it's impossible! By law, Social Security funds are

separate from the budget, and it must pay its own way. That means that Social Security can't add one penny to the deficit.1

Sources:

1."To Deficit Hawks: We the People Know Best on Social Security" New Deal 2.0, June 14, 2010 http://www.newdeal20.org/2010/06/14/to-defict-hawks-we-the-people-know-best- on-social-security-12290/

2. "The Straight Facts on Social Security" Economic Opportunity Institute, September 2009 http://www.eoionline.org/retirement_security/fact_sheets/StraightFactsSocialSecurity- Sep09.pdf

3. "Social Security and the Age of Retirement"Center for Economic and Policy Research, June 2010 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/publications/reports/social-security-and-the-age-of- retirement/

4. "More on raising the retirement age" Ezra Klein, Washington Post, July 8, 2010

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra- klein/2010/07/more_on_raising_the_retirement.html

5. "Social Security is sustainable" Economic and Policy Institute, May 27, 2010

http://www.epi.org/analysis_and_opinion/entry/social_security_is_sustainable/

6. "Maximum wage contribution and the amount for a credit in 2010." Social Security Administration, April 23, 2010 http://ssa-custhelp.ssa.gov/app/answers/detail/a_id/240

7. "Trust Fund FAQs" Social Security Administration, February 18, 2010

http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/ProgData/fundFAQ.html

8. "To Deficit Hawks: We the People Know Best on Social Security" New Deal 2.0, June 14, 2010 http://www.newdeal20.org/2010/06/14/to-defict-hawks-we-the-people-know-best- on-social-security-12290/

Maybe I'm daft. Maybe I'm way too slow, but I'm tired of trying to respond to death panels, pulling the plug on Granny, birth certificates, Democratic tax hikes, and how the government wants to take over our health care.These may be big issues to those on the idiot right wing fringe but I guarantee no one else takes these issues seriously. They're all lies, and it's as simple as that. As a tactic, though, all these Republican lies seem to be working and we're getting ready to vote a lot of Democrats out of office. It doesn't seem to matter that our taxes are lower now than when President Bush was in office, or that it wasn't President Obama who asked for that big bail out, or that we finally got a little health care and financial reform. That things are much better now than when President Obama took office doesn't matter either. The only thing that does matter, though, is President Obama is not a Republican an, let's face it, he's black. and I've never met a Republican who wasn't at least a little bit prejudiced about Blacks down deep in their cold, cold hearts. Republicans are white Christian nationalists. I understand what that means, what that really means, and from now on I'm not going to spend any time at all trying to figure out what the hell Republicans are talking about beyond the fact that they are white Christian nationalists. They'll say and do anything to win and they'll say and do anything to seize power again so that they can get back to the task of dismantling the federal government so their rich friends can get richer. These white Christian nationalists are corporatists too so anything that business wants, business gets.

Gun loving NASCAR people are never going to like macrobiotic eating, sandal wearing Liberals who believe the main function of government is to protect and serve. No. Gun Loving NASCAR people aren't going to allow anyone to get in the way of big business so they're going to absolutely hate anyone who proposes that government is actually supposed to keep an eye on things for the rest of us and prevent business from robbing us blind. 

And it probably gets even more simple. People who like guns don't like people who don't like guns and people who hate gays and lesbians will hate anyone else who doesn't hate gays and lesbians. 

I think that's about it. Republicans are all about letting business do whatever they want, all about letting rich people get even richer, all about getting rid of all forms of government oversight, except the oversight necessary to make sure a woman is doing the "right" thing with her uterus, or to make sure that everyone understands that being openly gay or lesbian is both a sin and a crime. Sink or swim, Bub. You're on your own. It's a dog eat dog Republican world out there so don't expect any help, unless a 30% interest loan would work for you.

So I'm not going to worry about trying to figure out what Republicans are talking about when they go off about death panels and birth certificates. I'm just going to go with understanding what Republicans actually are, which is white Christian nationalists, corporatists, who are always, at the very least, a little bit racist and homophobic. It doesn't make any difference what else they seem to be talking about because I know what they're really saying, which is basically "Screw You."