Ahh - Now I Get It

I've had a nagging suspicion for a while now that we weren't seeing quite the whole picture of how our economy was changing over the last 15-20 years.  Turns out it's mostly because we haven't been measuring (or reporting) things like Productivity very well.  And actually, you could make a decent case that while our fearless leaders have known about this all along, they've steadfastly refused to explain it to us clearly - instead, we just get the usual happy-talk about how great everything is and if you're not able to participate, then you must be doing something wrong.

Above all, if offshoring has been driving much of our supposed productivity gains, then the case for complete free trade begins to erode. If often such policies simply increase corporate profits at the expense of American workers, with no gains in true productivity, then they don’t necessarily strengthen the national economy.

The Op-Ed piece homes in on the disconnect between stagnating wages and the big increase in productivity that we keep hearing is supposed to drive up a worker's earnings.

Read it here.

Hold The Testosterone Please

Mike Mullen continues to say things that could prove dangerous to his career and reputation.

First, he criticized DADT a while back - right there in front of a Senate committee and everything - and now this.

Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Wednesday evening that there are limits to American military power and diplomatic efforts must be just as important if not more so. But despite recognition of this, the military has become the default for American foreign policy.

Limits to our power!?!  Diplomacy!?!  How long before the wingnuts start to go after Mullen and his boss, Bob Gates for being appeasers, and soft on terrorism?  Also, I'm guessing that once the campaign against them starts, whenever Limbaugh or Cluster Fox refers to either of them, they'll be identified as "Obama's".  ie: Obama's Sec'y of Defense Bob Gates...or Obama's top military adviser Adm Mullen.  That way, the rubes can conveniently ignore the facts and concentrate on misspelling their protest signs. 

Taibbi On Healthcare Reform

As much as Obamacare sucks, though, the alternative is even worse. For one thing, the defeat of Obama's health care initiative would set a decisive precedent: that even a transcendently popular new president armed with a congressional supermonopoly is forbidden to so much as put a regulatory finger on an organized, politically connected industry. For another thing, Obama's pukish bungling of health care may achieve what previously seemed impossible: exhuming the syphilitic corpse of George W. Bush's Republican Party, and, shit, who knows, maybe eight years of President Sarah Palin.

Read it all here.

Bring The Stupid

Yeah, it's a cheap shot.  Guess what?  Don't care.

Crock Of The Week

"Science is what we do to keep from lying to ourselves" -Richard Feynman

A Free Market Economy

One of the problems with any "system" is that when we see something that works for some things, we assume (even insist) that it'll work for everything.

High Country News has a good piece on the unintended consequences of our reliance on Private Sector solutions to certain Law Enforcement and Public Health problems.

The drug industry is the second-largest source of foreign currency in Mexico, just behind oil. It earns somewhere between $30 billion and $50 billion a year -- no one really knows, including the people in the industry. It also creates enormous numbers of jobs in the U.S.: We spend billions a year on narcs, maintain the world's largest prison industry, which is absolutely dependent on the intake of drug felons, and we have about 20,000 agents on the border who feed off drug importation. The rehab industry is also a source of a large number of jobs since many well-heeled defendants pick mandatory treatment over prison. Many county and local police departments now get fat off of RICO suits based on drug offenses.

Once we made it profitable for some people to fight "The War On Drugs", it didn't take long for them to figure out that it's not in their best interests to win it.

Ten Years Of Hell

Read this from Nieman Watchdog.

Despite catastrophic events, it is folly to expect the suffering of millions and an onslaught of inconsistent facts to wipe out an economic theory whose tenets were and still are so convenient for so many powerful economic interests. At present the defenders of the efficient market hypothesis are engaged in trying to pin the cause of the financial crisis on the government. (If the financial crisis was the result of government policies, then one could still plausibly claim the market to be rational, efficient, etc.) Their targets include the mortgage practices of the quasi-government lenders, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, the low interest rates of the Federal Reserve, and a pessimistic speech by President George W. Bush. The problem with this “blame-the-government” approach is the disproportion between these purported causes and economic effects. As Paul Krugman noted,

“[N]one of the proposed evil deeds of policy makers were remotely large enough to cause problems of this magnitude unless markets vastly overreacted. That is, you have to start by assuming wildly dysfunctional markets before you can blame the government for the crisis; and if markets are that dysfunctional, who needs the government to create a mess?”

The Wisdom Of Ron Paul(?)

The guy's mostly a nutball, but hey - even a blind hog roots up an acorn once in a while.

Healthcare Reform Summit

I didn't watch it on C-SPAN because I'm trying to be a little less obsessed with this shit, but of course, I caught a couple of reports on NPR and MSNBC in which (again, of course) the reporters drew false equivalencies, saying both Obama and Alexander "essentially had their facts right" when they made claims about what the CBO predicts concerning insurance premiums.  Claims that can't be more opposite from one another.

What the fuck?  Oh yeah - it's in the best interests of our Media Poodles to keep the fires stoked.  Controversy is important when the real point of the exercise is to sell ad time.

Bend Over And Grease Up

Blackwater and Cartman-gate.

There's a National Security Consortium hard at work, trying to make sure the spigot of tax dollars is never closed.  The DoD and Contractors and Congress Critters are the main players, but even in the kind of corrupt system that's evolved in the USA over the last 50 years - under which actual people are the last to be considered - we The People still have to take some responsibility for the corruption itself.  We can also stand up and call these assholes out.

Dems:

Norman D. Dicks (WA)
Peter J. Visclosky (IN)
James P. Moran (VA)
Marcy Kaptur (OH)
Allen Boyd (FL)
Steven R. Rothman (NJ)
Sanford D. Bishop, Jr. (GA)
Maurice D. Hinchey (NY)
Carolyn C. Kilpratrick (MI)
David R. Obey (WI), Ex Officio

Repubs:

C.W. Bill Young (FL)
Rodney P. Frelinghuysen (NJ)
Todd Tiahrt (KS)
Jack Kingston (GA)
Kay Granger (TX)
Harold Rogers (KY)
Jerry Lewis (CA), Ex Officio

Paul Juola, Subcommittee Clerk
Room H-149 The Capitol
Washington, DC 20515
Phone: (202) 225-2847