Category: economics

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Is There Anything Good About Men?

This is a response to an article called “Is There Anything Good About Men”.

I’m sure the author feels assured that most people will regard his title as amusing or intentionally provocative, and not ridiculous, or offensive, as it would be if it were “Is There Anything Good About Negroes?” or “Is There Anything Good About Women?”. It’s the kind of bullying, self-amused irony only allowed because men are positioned so comfortably in a privileged position, that no one could possibly regard it as threatening or really pejorative.

The article is linked in an article in the New York Times entitled “Why Men Need Women”. which does more to convince me that the persistent lack of women geniuses is causing some desperation out there.

This is the kind of bullshit that nowadays passes for serious social theory:

We recognize the direct advantages that women as leaders bring to the table, which often include diverse perspectives, collaborative styles, dedication to mentoring and keen understanding of female employees and customers. But we’ve largely overlooked the beneficial effects that women have on the men around them. [NY Times, July 21, 2013]

Gosh, I’d like to meet those women!

Now, I know that any generalized knowledge, especially from the social “science” sector, includes a hell of a lot of selectivity and redundancy, therefore providing a barn door’s worth of anomalies, but even so, the idea that there are a lot of women managers out there selflessly promoting their colleagues and underlings and bringing “diverse perspectives” to management meetings is a bit of a stretch.

The one area where women are more than the equal of men is self-interest, even if the the social sciences as a block generally refuse to recognize just how self-interested a lot of overtly “selfless” behavior is. Anyone who has ever forgotten to thank his mother or wife knows this. Any girl in school who hasn’t made the correct gestures of gratitude and loyalty knows this.

 

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Lanny Breuer’s New Old Job

There’s are things that so obvious the wonder is not that anyone missed it, but that that no one did anything useful about it.

And so we have Lanny Breuer, the man who saved the banking industry from even a single successful prosecution for the 2008 collapse, finally relieved of his position at the Department of Justice, taking a position with the law firm of Covington and Burling. What does Covington and Burling do? They represent large, multinational corporations, like– wait for it– Bank of America, Eli Lilly, General Electric, IBM, Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, NASCAR, and Verizon. And Halliburton. And Phillip Morris.

So Lanny Breuer is now working for the banks. But wait– that’s not true.

Lanny Breuer was always working for the banks.

As the Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, Breuer’s main purpose in life, as he appeared to see it, was to see to it that not a single banker went to jail for the massive frauds that caused the incredible financial collapse of 2008. At the height of his “investigations”, Breuer confided to a banquet hall of lawyers that what kept him awake at night was the fear of what would happen to the banking industry if some bankers were prosecuted.

After a Frontline documentary, “The Untouchables”, revealed the depths and breadth of his indifference to the millions and millions of workers and pension holders whose savings and jobs were ravaged by the intentional frauds committed by the banks, he resigned his position to go back to work for the industry for which he was always working.

The question that must occur to any intelligent American: why should I obey the law?

And Did You Know

Others in my personal hall of infamy of people you never heard of who have caused immense suffering and loss to others:

Janet Reno

Paul Wolfowitz

General Curtis LeMay

People you never heard of who caused a lot of good things to happen (or bad things not to happen)

Paul Martin

Bethany Maclean

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The Subcommittee on Authentication of Authenticity

An original painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat from 1981-1983, regarded as his “peak” period, can sell for up to $16 million. No– wait: $29 million.

Basquiat made some money from his own work but artists almost never make the really big money, for two reasons. Firstly, works of art don’t sell for all that much until the artist is dead. Secondly, art is a racket. By “racket”, I mean that nobody really knows what the value of a work of art is until the institutional forces that manage, manipulate, and arrange the art world take hold of it. Basquiat is definitely safely dead, and his works are distinctive, so the art world can now play it’s role. He must be desired to be desired, wanted to be begged, and rare enough to be valuable. But Basquiat’s works will never be as rare as collectors think because it is in no one’s interest to promote the idea that there are a lot of Basquiats out there. [I just heard that someone living in a flooded area of Calgary had an original Van Gogh painting in his house.]

Basquiat

There was, for a time, something called the “Authentication Committee”. You see, a Basquiat is not valuable to anyone because of what it looks like, in spite of utter drivel you will hear:

“he painted a calculated incoherence, calibrating the mystery of what such apparently meaning-laden pictures might ultimately mean” (Marc Mayer, Basquiat in History).

Basquiat’s paintings are very, very valuable because they, like all other collected art, have become a form of currency. They might as well be currency. Above is a $7 million bill.  If you really think you could paint it, you ought to give it a try.  I can guarantee you can’t.

I was going to write something snarky about rich people who don’t appreciate real art and only collect it as an investment, and for it’s snob value. That’s probably all true, but there’s not much new to say about it. I was just struck by the idea of an “Authentication Committee”. We all need an Authentication Committee: this is real, this is not real. This is a hoax. This is phony. All of this is phony. Everything is phony. If everything is phony, then everything is real. You need to sort it out for yourself. You need to stand in front of the painting and decide whether or not you find it entertaining in some way. Then you need to decide if it is entertaining to you because it is shocking that people pay a lot of money for it, or because the colors and shapes and design tickle your eye. Or because other people think that it is only entertaining because it cost a lot of money but you are smarter than that. Or because you can see why people pay a lot of money for it but you have no idea why this particular work, and not some other work by a completely unknown artist, is any good. All of our perceptions can be corrupted. All of them matter. None of them do. But then all of them do.

I like the painting. I think it’s original and interesting and expresses something about Basquiat’s desire to express something. I would be willing to pay more than $100 for that painting, if I ever get a chance to buy it.

 

I love this:

“It hung above a desk in a hotel suite where Coco Chanel lived for more than 30 years and was only discovered to be important last summer, when the hotel shut for a 27-month renovation in the face of stiff competition from newer hotels. ‘It is a magical discovery,’ said Cecile Bernard, a Christie’s expert…'”

The magic, of course, is the fact that this painting was not “important” until an expert from Christie’s got onto her solemn podium of high art and pronounced it so.

The painting is “Le Sacrafice de Polyxene” by Charles Le Brun from the 17th century. It is worth about $650,000.00 (U.S.).

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Chinese Hackers

“I don’t need to kill you to get what I want.”

We read that Chinese hackers, once again, are poking around on U.S. government and corporate servers and stealing important data files related to national defense and patented inventions.

I am perplexed. As a computer professional, and a database specialist, I always immediately ask myself how they got in? And then I ask myself, how would I manage a data set that required a very, very high degree of security?

The answer is pretty simple. You don’t expose data like that to an external network.

In the simplest form, this kind of security can be implemented very easily. You locate the files, the applications, the data bases, configurations, libraries, code, whatever, on a local network. You don’t connect it to the internet. All the people working on your project have to be located within your physical network, that is, one or more buildings physically connected by network cable, and not connected to any external modem or line, and certainly without a wireless connection.

I would guess that, from the point of view of industry or government, this might be unacceptable in some way. Anyone working on almost any information technology would need to access the internet often. But what is “unacceptable”? Is opening your information systems to Chinese hackers “acceptable”?

How quickly could we get used to a new acceptable: when you work on a very important project that requires a high level of security, you get off the grid. That’s the way it is. The same way that scientists working in micro bacterial research now have to wear white suits, visors, and gloves and work in sealed rooms, in secure buildings.

I think it can be done. Inevitably, some scientists or engineers will need some information only available on the internet but that can easily be handled by having a physically isolated internet connection to a separate, non-networked computer in the same building. It’s not technically difficult to keep it separate from a LAN. If the information is copied or downloaded, it can be copied onto a flash drive and then transferred to the LAN. Then, even if an employee inadvertently downloaded a virus from the internet, it would have no effect. It won’t be able to connect to a mother ship. The flash drive could be reformatted before ever being used again for extra security. What’s so hard about that?

[It might be argued that all computers nowadays come with built-in wireless connectivity.  But it is possible to build computers without it if there was a demand for it.]

I know: the engineers and scientists will insist they need immediate, continuous access to the internet. If you insist, and the government or industry accedes to this demand, they should quit whining about hackers stealing the data: you have made it available to them.

If you want to rent a car and drive to Italy and park it on the street, please don’t come to me with your crisis about someone stealing your GPS out of your glove compartment– I can tell you right now, that is what will happen. If you don’t like it, go somewhere else.

We have bigger problems with China. Today, the “Inside Washington” program with Gordon Peterson and gang decried the fact that the U.S. is not preparing for war with China. Even Mark Shields seemed to believe we should not be conducting war exercises with China while they are trying to steal our data.

I think he’s wrong. I think that is precisely what we should be doing: engaging China, developing relationships, sharing knowledge with them. If you prepare for war, you will have war. If you prepare for peace, you might not.

The great problem with China is caused by us. Walmart, especially, uses China as a vast pool of cheap labour to produce millions of trinkets to be sold cheaply at the mall outside of your town, thereby driving local businesses out of business and driving more and more American workers into minimum wage jobs supporting the dispersal of the products of Chinese productivity and providing the capital China needs to build a navy that can challenge the navy of the country they expect some day to go to war with, the United States. Apple has found a congenial home in China. All the big American corporations are drooling at the possibilities of a billion new customers. That is what drives U.S. foreign policy and anyone who pretends otherwise is running for president.

If you don’t want China to become big and powerful and rich, you will cut Walmart off at the knees. Walmart will then shift their production to Bangladesh or India or Mexico. Maybe a few jobs will come back to America.

Because both sides know two things. Firstly, there is not enough oil in the world for both the U.S. and a future China when it begins to catch up to American industrial might. Secondly, neither country has the moral or rational ability to say: let’s share.

And Furthermore…

If you don’t like the Internet, get off. I mean it. Who asked you on? Who the hell insisted that corporations should be able to store their data on public networks, advertise their products, and sell their services, online? Get off. Lock your LAN up. Disconnect. Use the telephone instead. Use the courier. Fax your information. Send it by carrier pigeon.

There is no divine ordinance that says that governments and corporations must be allowed to store their data on the internet and should expect that information to be secure.

Get off, get off, get off.

One More Thing

I just think I need to take a moment and remind everyone that Wolf Bitzer at CNN said this about Sarah Palin’s acceptance speech: “She hit one out of the park.”

Let’s not forget.

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The Cost of Warfulness

The New York Times has published an update on comments made by President Eisenhower in 1953, in what was known as the “Chance for Peace” speech, an appeal to the Soviet Union to not indulge in an arms race.   He compared the costs of some major pieces of military equipment with the cost of items with peaceful purposes, like roads and schools and asserted that every dollar spent on  weapons robbed the citizens of tangible peacetime benefits.  Yes, this was a Republican ex-General speaking.  Quite a contrast to the current crop of Republicans who have repeatedly insisted on giving the military more money than it asks for.

The U.S. was spending about 14% of GDP on defense in 1953, the height of the Korean War.  Today, that number is 4.3%.   1953 was a mere eight years removed from World War II, and the U.S. was still at war with Korea, so perhaps the numbers are skewed.  Perhaps we literally get better bang for out buck today.

 

Product Cost Equivalence
F84F Thunderstreak Fighter Jet (1953) $769K 170,000 bushels of wheat
F-22 Raptor (2012) $250 million 29,500,000 bushels of wheat
B54 Stratojet Bomber (1953) $1,500K 30 schools, 2 hospitals, 2 power plants, 50 miles of roads,
B2 Stealth Bomber (2012) $1.5 billion 99 schools, 19 Power Plants
6 hospitals
328 miles of roads
destroyer (1953) 8,000 homes
destroyer (2012) $1.5 billion 34,000 homes

It’s interesting to me how much the price of these objects of destruction have gone up.  A car cost about $800 – 1000 in the 1950’s and today it cost about 20 times as much.  But 20 times $1.5 million (Stratojet Bomber) is a hell of a lot less than $15 billion, which is about 1,000 times the 1953 cost.  That car should cost $1,000,000.

I firmly believe that cost escalation is a result of what Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex”, that incestuous relationship between the government and business, between congressmen and lobbyists, and industries in the home district, that leads to vastly increased costs, including, famously, the defective F-35, which, it appears, will cost an infinite amount of money, and is necessary to defend us against no one.

University costs have climbed in a similar fashion.  I attended Trinity Christian College in 1974-75 to 1978-79 (I took a year off to work and travel Europe).  My cost the first year for tuition, room and board (on campus housing) was about $3100.  My parents were not wealthy so I received grants totaling about $1400 and loans from the Canadian government for about $1500.   My brother, who was a full-time mechanic, earned about $20,000 that year.  A new car cost about $3600, a gallon of gas was .42.

Here’s my table:

tuition/room & board 3100 35000 11 x
car 3500 19000 5.5 x
salary 17000 43000 3 x
gas 42 2.75 6 x
record (single) .99 .99 !
record (album) 4.99 22.00 4.5 x

It’s interesting that we are actually spending less of GDP on defense than we did in the 1950’s.  I believe that it’s not because our values or strategies have changed, though they have, but due to the fact that our society now produces an overwhelming volume of stuff, so that our defense spending is a smaller proportion of overall productivity.    But it leads me to wonder if the aspiration of peaceniks to reduce defense spending is not somewhat misplaced.  I don’t think cutting our military spending will reduce poverty: it will further enrich people who already manage to pay as little tax as possible.

 

Afterthought

The most effective weapon of World War II–on the ground, at least– was the German Tiger I and Tiger II tanks. A Tiger I cost about 800,000 Reichsmarks, and required the labour of 6,000 people working for one week, or the wages of 30,000 people for one week. Which leads one to wonder just how sustainable the 3rd Reich ever was. The V-2 rocket was also extraordinarily expensive. It killed thousands, but at a cost of millions of Reichsmarks per death.

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The Expensive Iranian Hostage

The former U.S. hostages in Iran believe they should be able to sue the government of Iran for compensation for the horrible suffering they experienced during their 444 days of captivity. I don’t know what kind of scale can be applied here but I know that everyone thinks that their specific suffering is more entitled to sympathy and compensation than anyone else’s suffering, and that while it is never, ever about the money, it is always, always about the money.

And advertisers.

ABC Television decided to run a nightly news program called “Nightline” which was primarily a big fat wet kiss to Ronald Reagan: “The Hostage Crisis! Day blah-blah-blah” making it sound like the entire world had come to a stop to wait to see if the American hostages were going to make it home all right. There were ribbon campaigns, lots of speeches, and miserable old Jimmy Carter stewing in the White House incapable of doing anything about it. Other than, of course, the ill-advised rescue attempt.

The hostages were released after the Iranians were sure that Carter had lost re-election (after he stupidly launched a military rescue attempt) and a deal was concluded which, among other things, specified that the hostages could not sue the Government of Iran for damages.

The State Department had no objection to this clause because you can’t sue a sovereign government for damages anyway.

This outraged the hostages. “How dare the U.S. government sign an agreement that keeps us from untold wealth?!”  Did I say it’s not about the money?

They were hoping to go after seized Iranian assets. But you can see the problem, can’t you? The Iranians could turn around, of course, and sue the U.S. and Great Britain for sponsoring the coup that brought the Shah to power in the first place, and allowed him to repress and torture his own citizens for 35 years while looting the country of billions in oil wealth, and hold massive coronation parades for himself, and buying lots and lots of U.S. military equipment to defend Iran against– get this– the communists! Yes, it was a quaint period in our history..

Could native peoples sue our governments for forcing treaties on them and then violating those same treaties anyway? How about the Vietnamese, whose elected government was overthrown by the French, and then the Americans? Or Guatemala or Nicaragua? Why there is no end of tearful stories.

Among all the tearful stories in the world, the Iranian Hostages don’t rank among the teariest. For one thing, they were willing participants in a corrupt government relationship with a dictatorial regime. For another, it was Carter’s stupidity in allowing the Shah to enter the U.S. for medical treatment that precipitated the crisis. How kind, to our old friend, the dictator! Just as Thatcher was kind to Pinochet! Our selective kindnesses sometimes do us in.

And finally, the biggest complaint the hostages have about their treatment is that they were held against their wishes and they often feared that something awful was going to happen to them. In general, however, they were not treated too badly. Not nearly as badly as the dissidents the Shah imprisoned and tortured.

So, I’m not against compensation. Let’s add them to the list and indulge in no end of suit and counter-suit and counter-counter-suit.

Afterthought

Part of the story you won’t hear anything about: the families of the victims of the Newtown Connecticut attack are all going to receive big checks from the government.

So, you think, that’s nice. The government stepped in and compensated people who were victims of serious crimes. This required legislation because there is no existing government policy of compensating victims of violent crime.

So when can the mother of Trayvon Martin expect her check?

Oh wait…

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Corporations are People: Yes they are — psychos.

Corporations are people, my friend.  Mitt Romney

As Michael Kinsley observed,” a gaffe is when a politician tells the truth”. And so Mitt Romney inadvertently– and unapologetically– spoke the truth. The truth about what he believes, that is. This election is about dumping the 47% out onto the streets. It’s about getting rid of the old ball and chain. It’s about traveling light, free and easy, without being dragged down by losers and weaklings. And that’s why Ann Romney can’t understand why people don’t think her husband is the nicest guy there is.

Ann Romney thinks people would change their opinion of Mitt Romney if they only knew about the very nice things he has done for families and friends within his social and professional class. And indeed, by most accounts, Romney has been an exceptionally nice guy. But he reminds me of Ronald Reagan, of whom it was said, he would give you the shirt off your back, and then sit down at his desk in the Oval Office and sign a law that took away school lunches for two million poor children.

Nice guy.

What Romney and Ryan probably are not going to tell you is that they don’t even believe in Medicare or Social Security, or Medicaid. When you hear so-called moderate Republicans like David Brooks declare that the U.S.– unlike every other developed country– can’t afford Medicare, can’t afford Medicaid, and can’t afford Social Security, you realize that there may not be any thing as a “moderate” Republican any more.

What Brooks really means, of course, is that the rich don’t want pay taxes for anything other than ensuring our ability to kill other people, presumably to take their oil, if necessary.

If Romney wins, I suspect he will actually turn out to be a bit of a pragmatist. Confronted with a budget crisis in Massachusetts in 2003, due largely to unfunded medical costs for people who did not carry insurance, Romney hired some smart people from MIT and analyzed the problem and came to a rational conclusion. And thus Obamacare was born. If this is a model for what he would do as president it would be interesting. But even more interesting is the fact that the Tea Party wing of the party will be expecting marvelous things from Mr. Romney and he will, I’m sure, consider long and hard the costs of gratifying them balanced against the possibility of a second term.

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Ayn Ryan

“Even as House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s budget would impose trillions of dollars in spending cuts, at least 62 percent of which would come from low-income programs, it would enact new tax cuts that would provide huge windfalls to households at the top of the income scale. New analysis by the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center finds that people earning more than $1 million a year would receive $265,000 apiece in new tax cuts, on average, on top of the $129,000 they would receive from the Ryan budget’s extension of President Bush’s tax cuts. The new tax cuts at the top would dwarf those for middle-income families. After-tax incomes would rise by 12.5 percent among millionaires, but just 1.8 percent for middle-income households. Low-income working families would actually be hit with tax increases.” The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

We should always be disturbed when liberals and conservatives rejoice at the same the news. Or at least wary.

Do conservatives believe that most people would support a far right conservative fiscal policy if it was honestly and openly presented to them? I think they do. I think they are very mistaken. I think it was no accident that George W. Bush did not campaign on a policy of cutting taxes on the rich and making war on Iraq. That was his agenda, but he campaigned on tax cuts for everyone, improving education, and drilling for more oil. The only thing he actually achieved, aside from destroying the entire world economy, was the tax cuts for the rich, which he didn’t advertise. Republicans never announce those tax cuts as tax cuts for the rich. They announce “tax cuts for all Americans” and then only cut taxes for the rich and then, having created a massive deficit, they announce program cuts for the poor. Now, with Ryan, the target is Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

Social Security, by the way, is perfectly solvent. Social Security is this incredibly rational little plan to have employees and employers each put a certain amount of money into a fund every pay period for a person’s entire working life. When this person gets old, he is able to draw from this fund to live off of. Can you imagine a more rational social policy? It’s positively ingenius. Does it work? Hell yeah! No government or private policy in the history of the world has reduced poverty more than social security.

And no conservative policy is more sinister than the one to destroy it. Conservatives say, we can’t have it. We can’t allow people to benefit from rational policies. We must destroy them! Because, you see, we all pay in to Social Security. Even if you are rich. Even if, like Mitt Romney, you are so rich, you will never need Social Security.

The massive current government deficit– Bush inherited a surplus from Bill Clinton and immediately converted it into a deficit with his tax cuts for the rich and wars on Afghanistan and Iraq– is seen by the Republicans as the best opportunity in years to try to convince Americans that we can’t afford Social Security or Medicare.

I think about that a lot. If the Republicans are right, we live in a world in which millions of people must live in poverty without medical care of any kind. That is the only possible outcome of Republican policy in this area.

The real “death panel” is Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan planning to gut the only health insurance plan for poor Americans.

I don’t really see the logic of Paul Ryan as Romney’s running mate. Obama and Romney are running neck-in-neck among decided voters and the only way either of them can win is by winning a majority of the independent voters. Who these independent voters are is a bit of a mystery: who, in his or her right mind, in this election, could possibly still not know how he or she is going to vote for yet? What are they waiting for?

What is clear is that they are not ideologically committed, so they are not going to warm up to Romney because he chose an extremist as running mate. Ryan plays well to a constituency Romney already owns: the hard right. He is not going to play well to seniors in Florida, women in Pennsylvania, blacks in Michigan, or Hispanics in Colorado. He has nothing for any of them. He doesn’t really have any thing for white working-class Americans either but they don’t seem to understand that. “If you vote for me, I’ll wack you in the face with a spiked two-by-four.” “I’m in.” “Plus, you get a chance to go overseas and get paralyzed by an ungrateful Arab.” “Woo hoo! Can’t wait.”

By the way, don’t buy all this horseshit about Ryan being the “intellectual” heart of the Republican Party. He is a hack: someone who has absorbed something of the language and style of policy but, in the end, draws absurd conclusions that are completely rooted in his fervent emotional beliefs– not in science or rationality. I believe Romney will soon find himself backing away from Ryan’s budget and his other positions. [Aug 28, yes he is.]

That’s why it’s a bit hard to stomach Romney/Ryan claiming that they are the ones who want to have a serious discussion of the issues in this election. It’s always good strategy to accuse your opponent of your own cardinal vice, especially if you can do it before you become identified with it.

There could be a good debate. There is a fundamental issue at stake in this election. Is America a nation in which citizens pull together for the common good, or in which every person looks out for his or her own interests. The only flaw in this debate is that the Republicans don’t mean it, and they never did. They talk about self-reliance and individual responsibility but that’s for you and me. Once they get into power they fall over themselves cutting lavish tax breaks– which are subsidies in everything but name– for their corporate puppet masters, buying up bushels of new, hi-tech weapons systems from other corporate puppet masters, and shifting more and more of the tax burden on the working classes. This is not personal responsibility: it’s a plutocracy.

And of course, neither Romney nor Ryan served in the military: that is a personal responsibility conservatives invariably offload onto the shoulders of credulous patriots, while they hire the brass bands and salute the flag with contrived expressions of piety.

 

2012-08-10

Index

“Even as House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s budget would impose trillions of dollars in spending cuts, at least 62 percent of which would come from low-income programs, it would enact new tax cuts that would provide huge windfalls to households at the top of the income scale. New analysis by the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center finds that people earning more than $1 million a year would receive $265,000 apiece in new tax cuts, on average, on top of the $129,000 they would receive from the Ryan budget’s extension of President Bush’s tax cuts. The new tax cuts at the top would dwarf those for middle-income families. After-tax incomes would rise by 12.5 percent among millionaires, but just 1.8 percent for middle-income households. Low-income working families would actually be hit with tax increases.” The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

We should always be disturbed when liberals and conservatives rejoice at the same the news. Or at least wary.

Do conservatives believe that most people would support a far right conservative fiscal policy if it was honestly and openly presented to them? I think they do. I think they are very mistaken. I think it was no accident that George Bush did not campaign on a policy of cutting taxes on the rich and making war on Iraq. That was his agenda, but he campaigned on tax cuts for everyone, improving education, and drilling for more oil. The only thing he actually achieved, aside from destroying the entire world economy, was the tax cuts for the rich, which he didn’t advertise. Republicans never announce those tax cuts as tax cuts for the rich. They announce “tax cuts for all Americans” and then only cut taxes for the rich and then, having created a massive deficit, they announce program cuts for the poor. Now, with Ryan, the target is Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

Social Security, by the way, is perfectly solvent. Social Security is this incredibly rational little plan to have employees and employers each put a certain amount of money into a fund every pay period for a person’s entire working life. When this person gets old, he is able to draw from this fund to live off of. Can you imagine a more rational social policy? It’s positively ingenius. Does it work? Hell yeah! No government or private policy in the history of the world has reduced poverty more than social security.

And no conservative policy is more sinister than the one to destroy it. Conservatives say, we can’t have it. We can’t allow people to benefit from rational policies. We must destroy them! Because, you see, we all pay in to Social Security. Even if you are rich. Even if, like Mitt Romney, you are so rich, you will never need Social Security.

The massive current government deficit– Bush inherited a surplus from Bill Clinton and immediately converted it into a deficit with his tax cuts for the rich and wars on Afghanistan and Iraq– is seen by the Republicans as the best opportunity in years to try to convince Americans that we can’t afford Social Security or Medicare.

I think about that a lot. If the Republicans are right, we live in a world in which millions of people must live in poverty without medical care of any kind. That is the only possible outcome of Republican policy in this area.

The real “death panel” is Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan planning to gut the only health insurance plan for poor Americans.

 

All Contents Copyright © Bill Van Dyk 2012 All Rights Reserved

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Free Stuff

When I mentioned I am going to get rid of Obamacare they weren’t happy, I didn’t get the same response. That’s O.K, I want people to know what I stand for and if I don’t stand for what they want, go vote for someone else, that’s just fine… But I hope people understand this, your friends who like Obamacare, you remind them of this, if they want more stuff from government tell them to go vote for the other guy — more free stuff. Mitt Romney, July 14, 2012

As Rolling Stone Magazine pointed out, the day after giving his speech to the NAACP in which he was booed for declaring that he would rescind Obama’s health care legislation, Romney gave a speech to a more congenial crowd in Montana in which he made the comment about “free stuff”. Read it carefully.

Fox News rhapsodized about Romney’s “courage” in going to an audience known to be hostile to Republicans and laying it on the line.   Fox News can’t be serious– they don’t really like Romney.   He is way too moderate.  He practically invented Obamacare (check it out).

He allegedly gave them the same speech he gives to white audiences. That’s manly of him.

Except he did and he didn’t. That is, it would have been courageous if Romney had made a bold statement of his personal principles and then made a specific promise about things he was going to do as President which are necessary and right but which are politically unpopular, like increase taxes in order to pay down the deficit.

That is exactly what he did not do.

He basically told them that he would cut taxes to the richest people in the country, increase military spending to deal with the communist menace, and then magically make the deficit go away without having to cut any entitlements like Social Security and Medicare.

His speech was nothing more than the usual clichés and conservative stock phrases and platitudes. And he clearly didn’t care what they thought about it: the speech was not meant for them. It was meant for those folks up in Montana waiting for the line about “free stuff”. They got it.

He wasn’t booed because he advocated unpopular political positions but because he acted as if he was completely oblivious to where he was. It was as if your smelly old aunt with bad breath suddenly leaned in on you one day and urged you to get a haircut and go to church and get a job and find some girl and get married.

And you already have a job.

But here’s the most important thing: Republicans love giving away free stuff.  The earned income deduction.  The oil depletion allowance.  The military industrial complex.  Sports stadiums.  9/11 Victims Compensation (compare to Hurricane Katrina victims compensation), military bases in Congressional Districts that are no longer needed, tax incentives, and so on, and so on.

Yes, loads and loads of Free Stuff.

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Foxconn

“We shouldn’t be criticized for using Chinese workers,” a current Apple executive said. “The U.S. has stopped producing people with the skills we need.” Ny Times, 2012-01-21

I couldn’t get over that quote: The U.S. has stopped producing people with the skills we need. Oh woeful day– America doesn’t even educate it’s own people properly and they can’t keep up with those backward Chinese.

Apple computer, selling itself to us as the totemic object of enlightened consumerist fantasy… but we aren’t the kind of people who can produce these objects. The Chinese are out there feeding us, suckling America, clasping the American consumer to it’s massive breast…. and guzzling American dollars and jobs in the process.

Is your iPhone made by slave labour? And if it was, would it actually be possible for you to own a other electronic communications device– say, an Android phone– that was not manufactured under somewhat odious conditions somewhere in China?

It has been estimated that an iPhone would cost about $65 more if it were assembled in the U.S. Would American consumers be willing to pay about 10% more for a product if it produced thousands of good-paying jobs in America instead of China? I think they probably would, right now. But nobody is campaigning on that strategy. And probably rightfully so– a trade war would not be helpful to anyone.

Foxconn is a very, very large company. It is actually owned by the Hon Hai Precision Industry Company based in Taiwan. I’ll bet you’ve never heard of it. It is the world’s largest producer of electronic devices.

All those U.S. dollars flowing to China to pay for the iPhones and iPads and Acer laptops, etc., etc. ,etc… what will they do with all those American dollars? Nobody really seems to know. Whenever I see an article on the subject, I read it, but I still can’t figure out what people think is likely to happen eventually. Keep in mind, that China is now increasingly competitive with the U.S. in one other area: guzzling oil.

Wiki on Foxconn.