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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

Today's T-Shirt

Word O' The Day

stealth abs

When your ripped six pack is covered by a thick layer of fat.

"This isn't a beer belly, it's my stealth abs. I just needed to avoid attracting too many ladies with my well defined stomach."

Sense Of Direction

Finding your way around a new place can be confusing and difficult. Here's some helpful advice offered recently in Vancouver by a local who was trying to help an American visitor.

"If you're seeing mountains, you're facing North. If your feet are wet, you're in the ocean and that`s West. If you've just had your car stolen, you're in Surrey, to the East. But if you see people without healthcare, waving handguns... you're back in the States."

Low Grade Corruption

Marco Rubio is among the new crop of Repub darlings, and he's pretty much all set to stomp Charlie Crist in the primary for Florida's senate race.  But now it's come out that Rubio used his GOP-issued credit card to pay for groceries and car repairs and a bunch of other personal expenses when he was Speaker of the  House in Florida's legislature.

Here's a quickie at TPM.com.

Of course, Rubio denounced the revelation as a desperate act of his political opponent, in that tried-n-true tactic of attacking the attacker - if you make a bold enough statement about what a dirty trick it was to reveal your corruption, then people will be likely to remember that part of the episode more than the feeble bullshit you sling trying to explain your actions.

Now really, we're talking about less than $14,000 over 4 years time.  Not a huge thing, but there're a couple of things about it that bug the crap outa me.

1) It's just too typical for a politician to feel entitled to spend other people's money on perks for himself.

2) $14,000 divided by 4 years = $3500 per year.  Did Rubio declare that money as income on his tax returns?

Grayson Stands His Ground

I haven't decided yet if Alan Grayson is really onto something, or if he's just another doofus with too much money.  Anyway, at least he seems to be saying what's on his mind and letting the chips fall.

It's interesting to hear about his brush with Blackwater, and then hear that he still thinks they're a bunch of dangerous buttheads.

Here's the story at TPM.com.

But I was thinkin' - remember back when the only people who had private armies were the bad guys in the Bond movies?  Just sayin'.

We Are So Fucked

And here's some graphical representation of the concept (hat tip to Brother John).

Bring The Stupid

Here's a great little story via the Salt Lake Tribune.

Seems the Utah legislature decided they needed to make illegal abortions more illegal(?)

And here's the rub: if I suspect a woman intends to induce a spontaneous abortion (aka: miscarriage) to end her own pregnancy, and I report her to the cops; and the cops show up at her house to investigate, but she refuses to cooperate; don't the police have at least the implied authority to use deadly force in their attempt to compel her compliance with the law?

This is madness.

We Are So Fucked

Our "representatives" aren't elected by voters - they're elected by contributors.

Now that Obama is talking about trying to push a little harder to get Wall Street and The Big Banks to play by the rules, they're aligning against him; and against anybody who speaks out in favor of re-regulating.

In a previous post, I wondered why Repubs were sounding so confident of a resurgence, and I said then that it all sounded hollow.  It isn't.  The big money contributions are running 2-1 in favor of the Repubs.

Here's the story at WaPo today.  Oh well; it was nice to dream of things getting better.

Bring The Stupid

Politicians say and do some pretty dumb things.  I think it's usually just a function of having to walk a really thin line in an attempt to keep some voting faction or another happy while at the same time trying not to cause some other faction to back away.  Maybe it's always been that way, and maybe we're just becoming more aware of it.  Anyway, Virginia Delegate Bob Marshall (R-Dumbass) is in a lot of trouble (petition demanding his resignation) for saying what was on his mind - (see story in Gainseville Times). He claims his comments were  "misconstrued", but reading the direct quotes, I'm thinkin' he really just let the truth about what he believes slip out.

And the truly unfortunate aspect is that the study he was citing may have had new info we should know about - but now it's all lost in the firestorm of protest.*  Don't get me wrong; I think the guy is at best borderline Taliban, and he oughta be thrown out on his ass.

I left a meesage for my delegate (Rob Bell) asking for comment - no reply as yet.
I tried to get somebody at VCU to comment and couldn't find anybody who's even heard about it.

*It doesn't appear to my highly untrained eye to make any real link to the kind of "Elective Abortion" the wingnuts love to rage about.  Here's the abstract for the VCU study.