It's A Wonderment

From a bit in Forbes, by the leftie-ish Rick Ungar:

With Medicaid eligibility about to be expanded in some 30 states, as a result of the Affordable Care Act, Wal-Mart has responded by cutting employee hours—and thereby wages—even further in order to push more of their workers into state Medicaid programs and increase Wal-Mart profits. Good news for Wal-Mart shareholders and senior management earning the big bucks—not so good for the taxpayers who will now be expected to contribute even larger amounts of money to subsidize Wal-Mart’s burgeoning profits.

But, at long last and in a move gaining popularity around the nation, the State of California is attempting to say ‘enough’ to Wal-Mart and the other large retailers who are looking to the taxpayers to take on the responsibility for the company’s employees—a responsibility Wal-Mart has long refused to accept.

It’s about time.

--and--

Of course, the California Retailers Association, where Wal-Mart Stores WMT +1.14%, Inc. is listed as a board member company, is not quite so pleased with the legislation. According to Bill Dombrowski, chief executive of the Association, ”It’s one of the worst job-killer bills I’ve seen in my 20 years in Sacramento, and that says a lot. The unions are fixated on Wal-Mart, but that’s not the issue here. It’s a monster project to implement the Affordable Care Act, and having this thrown on top is not helpful.”

One wonders if we will ever see the day when Americans will stop falling for the hostage-taking narrative consistently put forward by those whose job it is to defend the indefensible. At the first suggestion of finally putting a chink in Wal-Mart’s policy of profiting at the taxpayers’ expense—a practice that should have every American thinking about what passes for free-enterprise in the United States today—the response is to always threaten to take away jobs if we dare to challenge their business practices, even if those practices cost us billions.

I'm not a regular visitor to their site, so I don't know how often they do this kinda thing, but seeing this under the flagship Forbes brand seems odd to me.  It feels encouraging tho', especially considering that Ungar is staking out what has traditionally been the conservative position when we approach the issue of government involvement in private business.

When Wal-Mart practically owns local and state politicians; when they dominate the retail sector of any portion of any economy; and as a result they get to use the power of government to enforce their business plan - isn't that almost exactly the kind of overly-powerful relationship we're all supposed to be against?

Be sure to browse the comments too - Ungar goes toe-to-toe with some of the more rabid knee-jerkers. 

Celebrating Life's Little Victories

How come it seems like when you see one of these guys, it's just always at Wal-Mart?

Today's Quote

The best line I've seen today is this one from Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs, translating into English a comment Marsha Blackburn made in her native ShitSpeak:

Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee) says women don’t want laws guaranteeing them equal pay, because they want to have the “power and the control” to let men make those decisions for them: Marsha Blackburn: Women ‘Don’t Want’ Equal Pay Laws.

Just Another KrugMan Post

This one's by way of Balloon Juice, excerpting from NYT:

Last month the Congressional Budget Office released its much-anticipated projections for debt and deficits, and there were cries of lamentation from the deficit scolds who have had so much influence on our policy discourse. The problem, you see, was that the budget office numbers looked, well, O.K.: deficits are falling fast, and the ratio of debt to gross domestic product is projected to remain roughly stable over the next decade. Obviously it would be nice, eventually, to actually reduce debt. But if you’ve built your career around proclamations of imminent fiscal doom, this definitely wasn’t the report you wanted to see.

--and--

Start with Social Security. The retirement program’s trustees do foresee rising spending as the population ages, with total payments rising from 5.1 percent of G.D.P. now to 6.2 percent in 2035, at which point they stabilize. This means, by the way, that all the talk of Social Security going “bankrupt” is nonsense; even if nothing at all is done, the system will be able to pay most of its scheduled benefits as far as the eye can see.

 --and--

What about Medicare? For years, many people — myself included — have warned that Medicare is a much bigger problem than Social Security, and the latest report from the program’s trustees still shows spending rising from 3.6 percent of G.D.P. now to 5.6 percent in 2035. But that’s a smaller rise than in previous projections. Why?

The answer is that the long-term upward trend in health care costs — a trend that has affected private insurance as well as Medicare — seems to have flattened out significantly over the past few years. Nobody is quite sure why, but there are indications that some of the cost-reducing measures contained in the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, are actually starting to “bend the curve,” just as they were supposed to. And because there are a number of cost-reducing measures in the law that have not yet kicked in, there’s every reason to believe that this favorable trend will continue.

--and (the big payoff)--

So what are we looking at here? The latest projections show the combined cost of Social Security and Medicare rising by a bit more than 3 percent of G.D.P. between now and 2035, and that number could easily come down with more effort on the health care front. Now, 3 percent of G.D.P. is a big number, but it’s not an economy-crushing number. The United States could, for example, close that gap entirely through tax increases, with no reduction in benefits at all, and still have one of the lowest overall tax rates in the advanced world.

How The KrugMan Speaks

If you're in a running rhetorical battle with almost anybody about almost anything - and the other side starts to slam you for being rude or personal or shrill or whatever - when they start to complain about your tone, you can take it as a pretty good sign that you're winning.



BTW: I always tho't of Zakaria as a pretty straight shooter.  Not always right and certainly not always in agreement with me.  But then he kinda started drifting into The Zone of False Equivalencies.  It's like the Suits took him aside and had "the talk" with him.  The talk that points out that The News has to pay its way too, and if you piss off 20-30% of the viewers, they won't watch the show, which means they won't see the commercials, which means the sponsors won't buy the airtime, which means we won't make our numbers, which means you won't get paid, which means we'll just pick any of the 5,000 Makeup-and-Hair-Gel Models working in local markets to plug into your time slot, which means you need to concentrate on "balancing this thing out", which means you will not focus in on the facts, which means you will spend interview time hyping the cat-fight du jour - cuz that's what sells the Trinkets and Trash, which is what keeps the rubes bent over and greased up.

Ah Yes, I See It Now

Wes Clark's a pretty smart guy.  I haven't checked on any of this, but I'll bet it's at least as close to The Truth as anything you're gonna get talking to anybody else.

We spend about 1/2 a TRILLION dollars every year trying to secure the flow of oil into the US.

You're a pretty smart cookie too, so I'm sure you're wondering, why is it OK for us to spend all that money every year?  Two basic reasons:
1) The US economy is designed, engineered and marketed as Petroleum-Based.
$15 Trillion dollars per year in GDP, and prob'ly 80-90% of it depends on relatively inexpensive oil products in one way or another.  $500 Billion (aka 1/30th of your "gross revenue") sounds like cheap insurance to some of these pricks.

2) Clark says there's something like $170 Trillion worth of oil still in the ground.



And, oh yeah - 3) Most of the various layers of Government in the US reflect the "realities" of our Petro-Based economy, and the political community has again been corporatized to the point where it's not much more than just another Business Unit.

Knowledge is Power?  Not here.  Not anymore.

from WhoWhatWhy ( a new one for me) with a hat tip to Democratic Underground

Just A Tho't

(sparked by a bit in the Adam Curtis piece I posted yesterday)

"The Invisible Hand" has become the catch-all shield for anybody arguing for austerity and privatization, etc; or against Gubmint and social welfare or whatever evil rotten thing they find moldering in their fevered skulls.

The Invisible Hand (per Wikipedia):

In economics, the invisible hand of the market is a metaphor conceived by Adam Smith to describe the self-regulating behavior of the marketplace.[1] The exact phrase is used just three times in Smith's writings, but has come to capture his important claim that individuals' efforts to maximize their own gains in a free market benefits society, even if the ambitious have no benevolent intentions. Smith came up with the two meanings of the phrase from Richard Cantillon who developed both economic applications in his model of the isolated estate.[2]

From just a quick look at our own relatively brief history, I'm sure we could all come up with some good examples of bad results whenever The Invisible Hand was allowed to rule - the Slave Trade in America comes to my mind.  But maybe what we really need to consider is something a bit more ethereal, even tho' in a weird way it's right there in front of us.

Maybe "The Invisible Hand" is invisible because it isn't fucking there.  Not as a prospectively guiding force anyway.  My main problem with "market-based self-regulation" is that the regulatory function is always retroactive; it's remedial instead of preventative; and so any solutions or corrections always come after the fact, which means the whole mess is way more costly than it'd be if we'd had good regulations in place that were aimed at heading off problems before they become problems.

Looking at it thru the "Fuck Your Buddy" filter, the picture clears up a bit more.

BTW: "Conservatives" adhering to the (increasingly debunked) theories of Milton Friedman and John Nash and Friedrich von Hayek seem to be insisting that all the bad shit that seems always to happen with unregulated capitalism hasn't actually happened.  And that's all part of the revisionist bullshit theme that runs very strong in "Conservative" politics - start with your desired outcome, and then do whatever is necessary to fix the facts around that outcome.  (see Downing Street Memo for an excellent example)

Friedman's shock therapy gets applied in Chile and Argentina and Iraq and Greece and and and - and it's mostly pretty much all fucked up.

Nash's Game Theory gets played out with the secretaries at Rand Corp, and what happens?  The subjects insisted on cooperating with each other instead of fucking each other over all the time, so the experiment was a complete flop.  And of course, it wasn't because there were serious problems with the theory - it had to be because those stupid secretaries weren't behaving in the "appropriately rational manner".  So the theory didn't fail, those idiot biddies failed the theory.  Sound familiar?

Here's a little experiment we can try: whenever you hear somebody use the phrase "The Invisible Hand", substitute "the will of god", or "god's mysterious plan".  Now tell me if anything else that person says makes any real sense from the standpoint of what a "fully rational, pragmatic adult" might say - about economics or politics or actual human-type people.

If it's bullshit, then you're not being rude when you call it bullshit.

Using The Language Of Freedom

Adam Curtis.  Yeah, he can be formulaic, and more than a little heavy on the Makes-Ya-Clench-Yer-Asshole thing when he lays the spooky music over the gritty visuals.

Well, maybe we need a little asshole clenching now and then.

And not to get too Centrist here, but I do know this seems to dance perilously close to the kinda shit being peddled by Alex Jones and Glenn Beck, et al, but comparing black helicopters and FEMA camps and Ammo-gate to what Mr Curtis has to say makes my decision on what's closer to reality much easier.

Mathematicians such as John Nash developed paranoid game theories whose equations required people to be seen as selfish and isolated creatures, constantly monitoring each other suspiciously – always intent on their own advantage.

… politicians and scientists came to believe that this idea of human nature could be the basis of a new type of free society. But what none of them would realize was that within this dark and distrustful vision, lay the seeds of a new and revolutionary system of social control. It would use the language of freedom, but in reality, it would come to entrap us and our leaders in a narrow and empty world.

The Trap, part 1: "F**k You, Buddy"


The silly thing from days long past that comes to mind:  "Only yo mama loves ya, and she might be jivin' too."

The Trap, part 2: "The Lonely Robot"


The Trap, part 3: "We Will Force You To Be Free"

Go, Charley

The staffers working for Charley Pierce must be truly awesome (or maybe it's just Charley).  I dunno, but dang, somebody has some real chops when it comes to diggin' up nuts.

I first saw President Reagan as a foot, highly polished brown cordovan wagging merrily on a hassock. I spied it through the door. It was a beautiful foot, sleek. Such casual elegance and clean lines! But not a big foot, not formidable, maybe a little ...frail. I imagined cradling it in my arms, protecting it from unsmooth roads. --Peggy Noonan, speechwriter for the Reagan administration

If you wanna good breakdown of the monuments to mendacious mediocrity that David Brooks puts up every week, read driftglass (he does pretty well with Sully and Friedman too).

But nobody (imo) gets at Nooners With Ronnie better than Charley Pierce:

Anyway, she's on again about the IRS dumbassery. A while back, she pronounced it the worst scandal in the history of scandalosity. Everybody laughed, even the ghosts of the Nicaraguan peasants killed by the contras with the weapons we bought for them by selling missiles to the mullahs in Iran, which happened while Peggums herself was contemplating hot monkey bunion-sex with Reagan's metatarsals. So, she has now moved along. The IRS dumbassery is now a clash of American civilization itself.

The Benghazi scandal was and is shocking, and the Justice Department assault on the free press, in which dogged reporters are tailed like enemy spies, is shocking. Benghazi is still under investigation and someday someone will write a great book about it. As for the press, Attorney General Eric Holder is on the run, and rightly so. They called it the First Amendment for a reason.

Uh, because it was the first one?
(This is really too easy.)

God Love The Onion

Popular Children's Book Author Reveals The 'Spooky Truth' About Creepy Conspiracy Theories