Interesting quote of the day:

From the FAIR blog:

Where media define the “center” or the “middle” tells you a lot about the worldview they are promoting. The “center” doesn’t usually indicate where most of the public is, but rather where elites have determined an appropriate middle between opposing arguments. Confusing the two concepts is common (and not an accident).

The Article in question is about the economic advice from two of the most prominent economists who have worked at the highest levels of government and academia.  On the other hand, this is a fairly telling comment as I have been seeing a lot of political terms being misused, such as “socialism” and “conservative”.  The last term being the most thoroughly brutalised of all of them.

“Conservatism”, from the Latin: conservare–”to retain”, is defined as a political and social philosophy that promotes retaining traditional social institutions. A person who follows the philosophies of conservatism is referred to as a traditionalist or conservative. Conservatives seek to preserve things as they are, emphasizing stability and continuity. According to the 2nd Viscount Hailsham, a former chairman of the British Conservative Party, “Conservatism is not so much a philosophy as an attitude, a constant force, performing a timeless function in the development of a free society, and corresponding to a deep and permanent requirement of human nature itself.”

To me to be a “Conservative” one must be strongly for social order and institutions while not accepting change to that order without good reason.

Of course, the definition is used about has this caveat:

There is no single set of policies that are universally regarded as conservative, because the meaning of conservatism depends on what is considered traditional in a given place and time. Thus, conservatives from different parts of the world – each upholding their respective traditions – may disagree on a wide range of issues.

I am of the opinion that the precedent set in the US by its use of force to obtain independence from Britain (a decidedly non-conservative act) has left its mark on US politics to bring about what I call the “reality challenged right”.  Although, one could also add that other factors are also afoot to create the “reality challenged right”.

The main characteristic of this is the belief in the use of force in politics, which is not found in most civilised nations.  In fact, that is probably the most obvious characteristic of this movement.

Another characteristic is being fact adverse, with the most frightening aspect being the failure to address climate change as news comes that the atmospheric level of a carbon dioxide has reached a concentration not seen on the earth for millions of years.  Scientists believe the rise in atmospheric Carbon Dioxide portends large changes in the climate and the level of the sea.

“It symbolizes that so far we have failed miserably in tackling this problem,” said Pieter P. Tans, who runs the monitoring program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

I have to admit that I find this movement quite frightening and am not sure how it could have been allowed to arise, but the fact that such a disastrous political faction could be given any level of credibility, let alone called “Conservative”, boggles my mind.

The Austerity Delusion

You would think that a crappy idea which has failed before wouldn’t get much attention, but somehow economic austerity tends to get more attention from politicians than it should.

Austerity is a seductive idea because of the simplicity of its core claim — that you can’t cure debt with more debt. This is true as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough. Three less obvious factors undermine the simple argument that countries in the red need to stop spending.

The first factor is distributional, since the effects of austerity are felt differently across different levels of society. Those at the bottom of the income distribution lose proportionately more than those at the top, because they rely far more on government services and have little wealth with which to cushion the blows. The 400 richest Americans own more assets than the poorest 150 million; the bottom 15 percent, some 46 million people, live in households earning less than $22,050 per year. Trying to get the lower end of the income distribution to pay the price of austerity through cuts in public spending is both cruel and mathematically difficult. Those who can pay won’t, while those who can’t pay are being asked to do so.

The second factor is compositional; everybody cannot cut their way to growth at the same time. To put this in the European context, although it makes sense for any one state to reduce its debt, if all states in the currency union, which are one another’s major trading partners, cut their spending simultaneously, the result can only be a contraction of the regional economy as a whole. Proponents of austerity are blind to this danger because they get the relationship between saving and spending backward. They think that public frugality will eventually promote private spending. But someone has to spend for someone else to save, or else the saver will have no income to hold on to. Similarly, for a country to benefit from a reduction in its domestic wages, thus becoming more competitive on costs, there must be another country willing to spend its money on what the first country produces. If all states try to cut or save at once, as is the case in the eurozone today, then no one is left to do the necessary spending to drive growth.

The third factor is logical; the notion that slashing government spending boosts investor confidence does not stand up to scrutiny. As the economist Paul Krugman and others have argued, this claim assumes that consumers anticipate and incorporate all government policy changes into their lifetime budget calculations. When the government signals that it plans to cut its expenditures dramatically, the argument goes, consumers realize that their future tax burdens will decrease. This leads them to spend more today than they would have done without the cuts, thereby ending the recession despite the collapse of the economy going on all around them. The assumption that this behaviour will actually be exhibited by financially illiterate, real-world consumers who are terrified of losing their jobs in the midst of a policy-induced recession is heroic at best and foolish at worst.

Austerity, then, is a dangerous idea, because it ignores the externalities it generates, the impact of one person’s choices on another’s, and the low probability that people will actually behave in the way that the theory requires.

Austerity’s origins lie in a tension within liberal economic thinking about the state. In the second of his Two Treatises on Government, the seventeenth-century English political theorist John Locke accepted the inevitability of inequality stemming from the invention of money and private property. But having done so, he also had to acknowledge the need for a state to police the inequities that the market produces. Any state that could do this effectively, however, would also be strong enough to threaten the property holders it was meant to protect. And so a tension was born in the heart of liberalism: you can’t live with the state, since it might rob you, but you also can’t live without it, since the mob might kill you.

Anyway, the bottom line is that the results of the experiment are now in, and they are consistent: austerity doesn’t work.

More here

Question Authority.

One needs to start fact checking given the amount of rubbish coming from the right wing (left field? twilight zone?) in the US.  Case in point, this fourth grade science test:

This has been verified by Snopes

You Hate “Right To Work” Laws More Than You Know. Here’s Why.

My dislike for Sepp was based on a visceral feeling that he was full of it.  But I found an article I want to share about the Right to Work Movement.  Here’s a wonderful quote

“The transition to our time has been seamless. Charles Koch’s father, Fred Koch, made his name in right-wing politics as one of the leaders of the Kansas Right-to-Work movement. The fight in Kansas was more bitter and protracted than in Texas — Kansas had a strong tradition of populism and farmer socialism — but in 1958, they succeeded and the law passed. That same year, Fred Koch co-founded the crypto-fascist John Birch Society with eleven other industrialists, the most powerful grassroots libertarian outfit of the postwar era until his son Charles raised libertarianism to an entirely new level.”

Libertarianism–Fascism wearing a smiley face.

Anyway, this is an interesting read:
www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/right-to-work

I strongly hope this is passed around the internet and read far more widely than it already has been.

Slavery, Segregation, and Romney Voters

Still want to say it had nothing to do with race?  This is an interesting graphic to ponder

House Speaker John Boehner shout to Tea Party, “GET YOUR ASS IN LINE!”

by Engineer Of Knowledge

This past couple of weeks we are seeing the results and payback rewards to the now dysfunctional Republican held House of Representatives when they embraced and gave validity to the extreme elements by welcoming in the Tea Party into their ranks.  This was never more evident when out of frustration the House Speaker and Majority Leader, John Boehner, shouted out in the House session, “Get your ass in line.”  This comment was directed to the fanatic element calling themselves “Tea Party.”  Even former Republican Presidential Candidate John McCain railed against the Tea Party calling them, “Worse than Foolish. Bizarros!!”

I guess the thinking was any vote, even mentally incompetent, was a vote needed to push the agenda of the wealthy backers that has bought the influence of my Republican Party.

Now I am not saying that we are doomed and all is lost for this country because I do take refuge of optimism from Churchill’s reputed line:

“In the long run, Americans will always do the right thing….after exploring all other alternatives first.”

I do take refuge in the comfort in the reason to believe that history is going to repeat itself.  I do have faith that the American People will see these extreme elements today currently identifying themselves as Tea Party, Conservative Religious Right, etc. are just too much of a lunatic fringe to renew their political power by the next election.

I have always taken the belief in the formula for past American success was built on five basic pillars:

1. Educating the work force up to and beyond whatever technology demands.

2. Building the world’s best infrastructure of ports, roads and telecommunications.

3. Attracting the world’s most dynamic and high-I.Q. immigrants to enrich our universities and start new businesses.

4. Putting together the best regulations to promote risk-taking incentives.

5. Funding research.

This country does not need a Tea Party extremist plan for regaining American solvency.  We all ready have the plan for maintaining American greatness and sustaining the American dream for another generation.

Some of the world’s most talented people, students, and would-be entrepreneurs who would like nothing more than to remain in this country are told they are not welcome.

Anyone who says that tax increases are off the table does not have a plan for sustaining American greatness and passing on the American dream to the next generation.

To employ artistic license and put this in a Shakespearian form, “Alas Destruction, thy name is Tea Party.”  The extreme elements of the Tea Party is so lacking in any aspiration for American greatness, so dominated by the narrowest visions for our country and so ignorant of the fact that it was not tax cuts that made America great but our unique (public / private) partnerships across the generations.

If everyone, more importantly the sane and moderate Republicans in this country, do not stand up to this extreme, fanatical, mentally ill, faction in their midst, the Tea Party will take the G.O.P. and this country on a suicide mission.

I will reiterate and stress the obvious point that it’s not just the Republican Party that the Teabaggers are destroying.  It Is Our Country that is at risk!

This characterization of Teabaggers is exactly, spot on, correct.  Since they’ll never see it themselves, because introspection clarity is hardly a defining characteristic of this group, the only hope is that enough voters will figure it out before the next election and it becomes too late.

But, as we have coined the phrase, “Low Information Voters,” we have seen too many times the critical mass of the electorate that has been carefully molded by the Karl Rovian cynicism into a bunch of credulous, gullible true believers, unable to see where their and their country’s real interests lie.  There are those who are happy to buy into the hatreds and falsehoods that extreme, self massaging, and financial grabbing, elements have so deliberately and effectively nurtured.

When it comes to economics, we have proven and know well that a market economy with a significant government role is the only proven model of success.

From time to time through history, we have seen the ebb and flow of the unencumbered market forces gaining too much control in our legislators that will inevitably lead to disasters, such as in 1929 and 2008.  These historical examples have made it clear where the abused have been laid victim by those unmonitored by legal rules complemented with regulations, the economic devastation is incurred by the middle class of this country.  This is no different than any other example of a “Pyramid Scheme.”

Fact is today the bottom 50 percent of households, based on pretax income, make less combined than the top 1 percent who have benefited from the current laws and tax codes that were enacted at the turn of the century.  Only three decades ago, the bottom half made more than twice as much. The middle class has also received a much smaller tax cut in recent decades than the affluent.

The real problem with so many of these issues is that the “Tea Party Political System” is not even trying to find SANE solutions.

Amazingly, Congress may be about to create a whole new economic problem by voluntarily defaulting on the national debt for the first time in our 250 year history.

Bottom line you can count me as one who doesn’t think this will happen, or if they do, it will be too late, because it already was too late for us all.

Lessons for Anarcho-Capitalists

Paul Ryan’s Budget Proposal Analyzed

They cry, “Socialism!”

Demographics always gets in the way of those brilliant political pundits out there.  Demographics on the electorate ain’t what they used to be and that pretty well puts the lid back on that stewing batch of stale tea drinkers.

Palin, Bachman and those other privileged white folks who have been screaming and ranting of late are mistresses of demagoguery and appeal well to those Eighteen-Percenters who sip the amber fluid. American humorist H. L. Mencken said of  a demagogue: “it is one who will preach doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.” Who could argue with Mencken?

Take ‘socialism’ for example.  Lots of fear-mongering going on with that word these days. Its a favorite word of the GOP leadership and was often used in association with the Health Care Bill. How many American citizens ‘believed’ that the proposed health care reform that wound its way through the House and Senate was a form of ‘socialism’ as it was painted by the GOP leadership?

How many? Probably only by people older than 50. Those younger than that don’t even know what ‘socialism’ is unless they paid close attention to their world history classes in high school. The ‘red-dread,’ communism and socialism are just another set of words in the glossary of those dull history books.

Back to demographics.  As the results of the 2010 census will affirm, the United States is becoming younger and browner in skin tone and that set of Americans could give a crap about  ’socialism’ or the other references to Cold War history. That demagoguery excites the old farts, not the 20-30 something crowd.

One more thing.  I wonder what this under-40 demographic thinks when they see Palin or Bachman in their shrill voices condemning Barack Obama and his middle-of-the-road policies that are directed towards lifting up the citizens of this nation?  What image comes to their mind upon watching the antics of these two screeching women? Does ‘bitch’ ring a bell?

Crying Over Obama’s Nuclear Summit

The right-wing dimwit contributor to The Blade, Jack Kelly, boo-hooed Obama’s nuclear summit opening his usual diatribe against the President, “PRESIDENT Obama has reminded that before he drives us into bankruptcy, he might get us all killed.”  Are there any English teachers in the audience who may want to comment on that sentence?  Are there any wise citizens who may want to comment on that idiocy?

Kelly, like all far right-wing nuts, detests President Obama and would criticize him for blowing his nose incorrectly if that would satiate his bobble-head audience.

All across America the Tea Partiers, war hawks, right-wingers and the vast vat of dumbed-down citizens are condemning Obama for ‘making us less safe!’

I am so tired of these morons. It is as if they have sold their brains to the talking heads on the far right.  I have little hope for their recovery.

Yet I am outraged that the vast majority of citizens who sit in the ideological center of political thought are mute. What the hell is wrong with them? Why do they remain silent when this travelling troupe of miscreants seemingly sets the agenda for the citizenry of this nation?

Sure Obama displays mastery as president; which other U.S. President was able to assemble 42 heads of state in one place to discuss such an important topic? There is no doubt of his skills and talent as leader of this nation.

Yet, the media focus their reporters and cameras on the jackasses dumping dung onto the streets.  Apparently a circus always trumps reality.