Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves by Stealing from Us

Tags: Obama No Debt Deal Stop Rich Free Lunch Make Rich Pay Selective Payout

Without a Debt Deal, Obama Can Make the Rich Pay

Polls show that Obama is now down to 40 percent approval. Americans are now understanding that both the Republicans and plutocratic Democrats are at fault for their joblessness and drastically lowered income. Bloomberg Business News reported that American Median Income, or half more and half of families less, is no at the hard to survive level of $43,000. In Oregon, a poor state, $48,000 median income is necessary for necessities only for a family of four. Reagan and Greenspan got the idea of easy debt through credit cards and easily obtained Equity Loans and family and finally coup was the no or very low down payment "loan" to suck Americans in and take away their homes when they could not pay. The way they did this is break up each mortgage in many pieces so they could be combined with others and sold. The bank that owns your home is not your local bank, but mostly Wall Street Banks. They make huge profits on foreclosures because they lose nothing, and just get the enormous fees they charge to bankrupt you.

Jim Kawakami, July 30, 2011, http://jimboguy.blogspot.com

Posted on Jul 29, 2011 By Moshe Adler

What we should be talking about when we talk about the debt ceiling is the proper role and size of government. Instead, we are asking whether the government spends too much on programs that alleviate the pain that is the result of government policies in the first place.

Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance and food stamps are all good programs, but all are meant to deal with the consequences of the income inequality that the government makes possible by the laws it passes.

Income security programs make up 65 percent of all government expenses, and from this we are asked to conclude that the government is mainly in the business of serving and taking care of common people. But the most profound actions that the government takes, passing laws that make the rich rich, ostensibly cost no money and, because we play along, enforcing them supposedly has no cost. ... (Pulitzer Prize winning NY Times Economics columnist David Cay Johnston describes this clearly in Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense [ and Stick You with the Bill]

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/without_a_debt_deal_obama_can_make_the_rich_pay_20110729/

Voters Use Common Sense Experience Based on Their Culture and Not Logic

Tags: Voters Common Sense Experience Conservative Without Conscience The Social Animal Everything Is Obvious Brain Books

Voters Use Common Sense Experience Based on Their Culture and Not Logic Books Conservatives Without Conscience and Everything Is Obvious Campaign Strategy

Even though common sense has worked well in our interpersonal lives very well, this experience does not translate into thinking about complicated policy questions often foisted on us by politicians.

Being too simplistic without knowledge and judge politicians by how handsome or beautiful they are not what they are planning to do to make our life more miserable by trashing Medicare and Social Security. I think the best way to improve government is to keep out the Ivy League politicians and choose people who have more real life experience, not corporate experience at the unacknowledged at the corporate university training centers.

Two books I have been reading in tandem, The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement by David Brooks and Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer, by Duncan J. Watts, and reviewing the previously read book Conservatives Without Conscious by John W. Dean, have helped me more clearly understand how I and others think and behave, and especially how conservatives think and behave badly. I am hopeful that State Democrats have started attacking the Republicans hard on visceral topics instead of campaigning on high ideals, which may have worked once for Obama, but voters saw that he did not act on them. It won’t work the second time.

Everyone knows and believes that Republicans are much better at winning elections and atrocious in running our government. Reagan and Bush, Jr. Are typical examples. They run it like CEOs from the top for the top income corporations and families and help themselves to the free floating cash as we had seen in the many financial scandals during their terms, and how fast the Middle-class is shrinking dramatically.

About half of the working families make less than $50,000 a year which makes survival difficult without borrowing too much money at high interest rates. The wealth of the top one percent equals that of 150 million Americans!

In our society seniors feel entitled and are largely conservative and provide 30 percent of the Presidential votes because they vote in high numbers. Republicans can always count on 40 percent of the vote for this reason. The same for Democrats except not as many vote so Independents normally decide elections. These votes are normally in the Midwest and Florida which has many seniors, Cubans, and many midwesterners. The New Yorkers also are abundant who tend to vote Democratic, but it is still a swing state. For this reason we get a Tea Party senator and a crook for governor in Florida.

Why? Independents are the most ignorant voters in America. They like tall and handsome rather than a black Democrat. Even with more than enough evidence, voters who vote Republican still vote Republican even if they are crooks. Bush tried to pack the Federal prosecutors by ousting those who did not obey orders from the top to investigate Democratic politicians with no evidence at all. Our brain is wonderful in that we can justify crimes in politics, but strict honesty with our neighbors. The records clearly that crooks seem to occupy the Republican Party to a much larger extent than the Democratic one.

Why? We all our products of our culture which influences our beliefs and the way we think.

Common Sense does not work well when we apply it to areas where we have very little knowledge. That is why such huge mistakes are made at corporations and governments.

The right wing Democratic Leadership Council established by Republican Bill Clinton, yes moderate Republican, which President Obama behavior seems to indicate similar defects. Obama is too inexperienced to have developed principles to rule by. He just comprises with power and wealth. The idea is to win elections instead of doing the right thing. I did not initially support Obama because he had no experience. I was right. Hillary Clinton is a more natural leader and would have been a much better President. Obama seems not to have any deep principles that can guide his leadership.

He seems to do what he thinks is politically best rather than do what is right in his opposition to the 9^th Circuit Appeals Court ruling to implement the Gay Rights in the military. Every other modern nations has done this decades ago. What is wrong with us!

Jim Kawakami, July 19, 2011, http://jimboguy.blogspot.com (Note I am strongly considering joining FACEBOOK because of Peter Singer’s (Princeton Ethicist) essay in the August Harper’s Magazine Visible Man: Ethics in a World Without Secrets. He points out that we no longer have secrets due to the efforts of government and corporations such as FACEBOOK and Google where both extract our behavior and thoughts so they can sell us something and there may be some good to laying it all out. WikiLeaks is one good example. It helps Americans know that our motives are not always so pure. )

Debt Ceiling Holy War: Why Do Conservatives Have Unshakable Faith in Ideas That Are Totally, Demonstrably False?

Facts come second to faith in the GOP's populist brand of conservatism.

AlterNet, Chauncey DeVega, July 18, 2011 |

The Republican Party is holding the U.S. economy hostage. While the American people overwhelmingly support a solution to the debt ceiling impasse that includes a mix of tax hikes on the rich and cuts to the federal budget, the Tea Party GOP is deaf to their concerns. Moreover, even though President Barack Obama is willing to make painful concessions on entitlement spending—a move that hands the Republican Party a practical win—the Tea Party GOP remains intractable in its refusal to support even the most minimum of tax increases on the wealthiest Americans.

The American people, the world’s financial markets and the pundit classes remain perplexed by the Republican Party’s dangerous brinkmanship. Why would they risk financial armageddon? What is the practical gain to be had from such irresponsible behavior? Is this a ploy to undermine the Democrats before the 2012 election?

Observers remain befuddled because they have failed to connect the dots between the Republican Party’s intransigent stubbornness and a populist brand of conservatism where the world of facts has been made secondary to the intoxication of faith.

Consider the following: faith is based upon a belief in that which cannot be proved or demonstrated by normal means. Faith is also immune and separate from tests of empirical proof. Not to be overlooked, the contemporary Republican Party is home to the Religious Right. Consequently, the primacy of “faith” as the decision rule in political decision-making is both a perfect and logical fit for conservative populism.

When coupled with conservatives’ penchant for authoritarianism, http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/ , (John W. Dean’s book Conservatives Without Conscience was largely based on Canadian Bob Altemeyer’s book Authoritarianism) their adherence to simple moral scripts, and a either/or binary world view, the allures of faith mated with fiction are irresistible to the Republican Party. Thus, the idea that politics should serve the common good for all is truncated and superseded by the pursuit of a common good that is only for the faithful, the few and the ideologically pure.

This cognitive framework colors a wide range of the Republican Party’s policies. For example, in the face of overwhelming evidence the Tea Party GOP continues to deny the existence of global warming. Doubling down, history is made into a plaything; the U.S. Constitution is transformed into a fetish object where the intent of the framers is almost magically divined by “strict constructionists” who pray at conservatism’s altar. School boards in Arizona and Texas rewrite the historical record at a whim in order to indoctrinate students into right-wing ideology. And conservative darlings such as Mike Huckabee and “scholar” David Barton pander ideologically correct, snake oil, flimflam versions of U.S. history to the Tea Party GOP faithful who are suckered into buying their books and videos.

In all, the Republican Party is possessed by a spirit of willful denial: aided and abetted by the right-wing media, Conservatives can bend the world to their wishes; reality is subject to their fantasies; any belief, however specious, is made true because they want it to be so. This is a pathology that extends both to the debt ceiling debate and the broader assault by conservatives on the country’s social safety net. Both are examples of a frightening pseudo religion called Free Market Fundamentalism—a faith based on a set of assumptions that are immune to interrogation, challenge or the collective weight of reality.

Myth Number One: The crisis over the debt ceiling is an artificial panic. There will be no serious consequences if the United States does not resolve this issue by August 2, 2011. In fact, President Obama and the Democrats are trying to scare the American people into thinking that a calamity will occur if the United States chooses to selectively pay its bills. Alternatively, the United States Treasury has more than enough revenue to push the debt ceiling issue down the road to a future date.

While Tea Party darlings such as Congressman Allen West are saying this is "much ado about nothing,"a failure to resolve the debt ceiling crisis would be an unprecedented event in American history. A range of non-partisan organizations, financial giants such as Standard & Poor's, Moody's and even the Chinese government are warning the Obama administration that if the United States were to default on its debts a global financial crisis would ensue. Moreover, a myriad of government agencies would be closed and a shock wave would ripple out to all corners of the U.S. economy. … http://www.alternet.org/story/151673/debt_ceiling_holy_war%3A_why_do_conservatives_have_unshakable_faith_in_ideas_that_are_totally%2C_demonstrably_false?page=entire

Republican Economic Rule Has Made Our Country More Violent and Immoral

Tags: Legacy Inability to Identify with Others, Less Civilized Society, Violence, Extremism, Mental Illness Up, Extreme Individualism, Lack Justice, Equality, Social Good and Protection, Responsibility to Others

RE: You are right. The stress is going out the roof. How to reduce crime sharply? Reduce poverty! In nearby Corvallis, property crime has doubled in the last year. Gang violence has increased in Portland, Oregon in the Black community in Southeast Portland. Even Eugene has seen gang violence.

Eugene, Oregon had essentially no violent crime last year. Now it is occurring once or twice a week. Recently there was a workplace killing. This is occurring throughout the USA even though it has not been publicized much in the news media which thrives on violent crimes.

More and more data now shows that the sharp increase in mental illness.

People with similar views tend to congregate in communities, churches, the internet, and political parties. One article I saw today is that extremism becomes more extreme when people congregate in person or on the Internet. The Republican Party is a very visible example where extremism is going through the roof!

The Republicans have prevent one starting cure for jobs. Massive government spending for infrastructure rebuilding which is sorely needed and needs to be done now.

Even Walmart is suffering here! Only the grocery portion is thriving. Food Banks in Oregon have been overwhelmed.

I think what we need to do is get the Republicans out as soon as possible in spite of the huge unlimited money available for Republican candidates. Perhaps Americans will realize too late that ignoring political issues can be fatal.

Business men and Republicans helped Hitler thrive by providing funds and arms to Germany in the 1930s. They envied the control that dictatorships helped improve the bottom line of established large companies. The Bush family became rich by providing loans for armaments until November 1942! Corporations such as GM located in Germany were building arms for Hitler's army.

Yes, big government is a great help to corporations when their people are in power such as our Opus Dei Supreme Court and they fight hard to maintain their subsidies, pay no taxes by putting their headquarters in tax free buildings with mailboxes outside the USA, take their profits in a state with low taxes such as Delaware and their expenses in more extensive tax states so they 50% large corporations pay no taxes at all.

That is why when the Republicans really screw up with blatant corruption and crimes to such a great extent that even the mindless Americans notice, they try to put in a conservative President as they did with Jimmy Carter who turned on them. They did not like Hillary because she is Independent and convinced Bill to veto the Bank Bill which led to the scandals to punish Bill for not following their orders. That is why the Media from the New York Times to CNN really pushed hard to keep Hillary out of the Presidency.

The powers like to put someone in on the Democratic side without any experience so they will make lots of mistakes so they will become one term Presidents which is normally the case. That is what Obama is doing. Healthcare Bill? Healthcare Insurance Stocks have gone up 50% after it passed!

Jim Kawakami, June 26, 2011, http://jimboguy.blogspot.com

Reveling in the Pain of Others: Moral Degeneracy and Violence in the "Kill Team" Photos

Monday 20 June 2011

by: Henry A. Giroux, Truthout | News Analysis

The inability to identify with others was unquestionably the most important psychological condition for the fact that something like Auschwitz could have occurred in the midst of more or less civilized and innocent people.... The coldness of the societal monad, the isolated competitor, was the precondition, as indifference to the fate of others.... Regressive tendencies, that is, people with repressed sadistic traits, are produced everywhere today by the global evolution of society.... Everywhere where it is mutilated, consciousness is reflected back upon the body and the sphere of the corporeal in an unfree form that tends toward violence. -Theodor Adorno

War, violence and death have become the organizing principle of governance and culture in the United States as we move into the second decade of the 21st century. Lacking a language for the social good, the very concept of the social as a space in which justice, equality, social protections and a responsibility to the other mediate everyday life is being refigured through a spectacle of violence and cruelty.

Under such circumstances, ethical considerations and social costs are removed from market-driven policies and values just as images of human suffering are increasingly abstracted from not only their social and political contexts, but also the conditions that make such suffering possible.

Moreover, as public issues collapse into privatized considerations, matters of agency, responsibility and ethics are now framed within the discourse of extreme individualism.

Unexpected violence, aggression and the "'masculine' virtues of toughness, strength, decisiveness and determination ... are accentuated," along with the claims of vengeance, militarization and violence.(1) The collapse of the social and the formative culture that make human bonds possible is now outmatched by the rise of a Darwinian ethic of greed and self-interest in which violence, aggressiveness and sadism have become the primary metric for living and dying. As the social contract is replaced by social collapse, a culture of depravity has emerged in American society. The spectacle of violence permeates every aspect of the machinery of cultural production and screen culture - extending from television news and reality TV to the latest Hollywood fare. Of course, this is not new. What is new is that more and more people desire spectacles of high-intensity violence and images of death, mutilation and suffering and their desires should no longer be attributed to an individual aberration, but instead suggest an increasingly widespread social pathology.

Death and violence have become the mediating link between US domestic policy - the state's treatment of its own citizens - and foreign policy, between the tedium of ever expanding workdays and the thrill of sadistic release. Disposable bodies now waste away in American prisons, schools and shelters just as they litter the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. America has become a permanent warfare state, with a deep investment in a cultural politics and the corollary cultural apparatuses that legitimate and sanctify its machinery of death. The American public's fascination with violence and death is evident in the recent popular obsession with high-octane action films, along with the ever-expanding volume of vampire and zombie films, TV shows and books. We also see death-dealing and violent acts accrue popularity with Hollywood films such as the 2010 academy-award winning "The Hurt Locker," in which the American bomb disposal expert, William James (Jeremy Renner), repeatedly puts himself at risk in the face of defusing various bomb threats - thus to highlight the filmmaker's concern with a growing "addiction" to war. As Mark Featherstone points out, there is more represented here than the reckless behavior of immature and hyper-masculine soldiers. He writes, "James takes unnecessary risks and lives for the limit experience.... [H]e feels most alive when he is closest to death ... When James ... throws the bomb suit away and stands before the bomb with no protection, he puts himself at the mercy of the bomb, the embodiment of the death drive."(2)

"The Hurt Locker" is only one of a number of serious films that address, if not mirror, a psychological state in which the production of a virulent masculinity now augurs both a pathological relationship with the body, pain and violence and a disdain for compassion, human rights and social justice. The death drive in American society has become one of its fundamental characteristics and, undoubtedly, its most disabling pathology. More than a trace of this mode of aggression and moral indifference now dominates contemporary American life. Marked by a virulent notion of hardness and aggressive masculinity, a culture of depravity has become commonplace in a society in which pain, humiliation and abuse are condensed into digestible spectacles of violence endlessly circulated through extreme sports, reality TV, video games, YouTube postings and proliferating forms of the new and old media. But the ideology of hardness and the economy of pleasure it justifies are also present in the material relations of power that have intensified since the Reagan presidency, when a shift in government policies first took place and set the stage for the emergence of an unchecked regime of torture and state violence under the Bush-Cheney regime. Conservative and liberal politicians alike now spend millions waging wars around the globe, funding the largest military state in the world, providing huge tax benefits to the ultra-rich and major corporations, and all the while draining public coffers, increasing the scale of human poverty and misery and eliminating all viable public spheres - whether they be the social state, public schools, public transportation, or any other aspect of a formative culture that addresses the needs of the common good.

Mainstream politicians now call for cutbacks in public funding in order to address the pressing problems of the very deficit they not only created, but gladly embrace, since it provides an excuse either to drastically reduce funding for vital entitlements such as Medicare and early childhood education or to privatize public education, transportation, and other public services, while putting more money into the hands of the rich and powerful. The real deficit here is one of truth and morality. The politics of austerity has now become a discourse for eviscerating the social state and forcing upon cities, families and individuals previously unimaginable levels of precarity, suffering and insecurity. As Rania Khalek points out, conservatives want to "exploit the budget crisis in order to starve government…. The truth is that the economic crisis, sparked by decades of deregulation and greedy financial forms, caused high levels of unemployment that dramatically reduced state and local tax revenues. Add to that years of tax cuts for the wealthy and decades of corporate tax-dodging and you've got yourself a budget crisis."(3) The discourse of "deficit porn" now justifies the shift in public policy and state funding further away from providing social protections and safeguarding civil liberties toward the establishment of legislative programs intent on promoting shared fears and increasing disciplinary modes of governance that rely on the criminalization of social problems.(4)

The broader cultural turn toward the death drive and the strange economy of desire it produces is also evident in the emergence of a culture of depravity in which the American public appears more and more amenable to deriving pleasure from images that portray gratuitous violence and calamity. As mentioned above, exaggerated violence now rules screen culture. The public pedagogy of entertainment includes extreme images of violence, human suffering and torture splashed across giant movie screens, some in 3D, offering viewers every imaginable portrayal of violent acts, each more shocking and brutal than the last. The growing taste for sadism can be seen in the recent fascination on the part of the media with Peter Moskos' book "In Defense of Flogging," in which the author seriously proposes that prisoners be given a choice between a standard sentence and a number of lashes administered in public.(5) In the name of reform, Moskos argues, without any irony, that public flogging is more honest and a sure-fire way of reducing the prison population. Not only is this book being given massive air time in the mainstream media, but its advocacy of corporal punishment and flogging is treated as if it is a legitimate proposal for reform. Mind-crushing punishment is presented as the only choice left for prisoners outside of serving their sentences. Moreover, this medieval type of punishment inflicts pain on the body as part of a public spectacle. Moskos seems to miss how the legacy of slavery informs his proposal, given that flogging was one of the preferred punishments handed out to slaves and that 70 percent of all current prisoners in the United States are people of color. Surely, the next step will be a reality TV franchise in which millions tune in to watch public floggings. This is not merely barbarism parading as reform - it is also a blatant indicator of the degree to which sadism and the infatuation with violence have become normalized in a society that seems to take delight in dehumanizing itself. ... http://www.truth-out.org/reveling-pain-others-moral-degeneracy-and-violence-kill-team-photos/1308333080

Public Worker's Pension News Stories Slant the Real Truth about Costs

Tags: Public Workers Pension Corporate News Slants Real Truth Costs Responsibility

Public Worker's Pension News Stories Slant the Real Truth about Costs

Many of the problems with both government and corporate pension plans is due to not paying into the plan as logically required. Corporations have used pension as a cash source just like the government since Reagan have used Social Security pension money from a plan by Greenspan and Reagan to make up for shortfalls in money by stealing from the Social Security fund and leaving an IOU of bonds paying half the going interest rates! The same happened in Costa Mesa, California, a city in the hot belt of conservatism and/or wealth.

This is also the problem in New Jersey with huge tax cuts and tax breaks for the wealthy families made up by increasing property taxes for the middleclass to fund schools and running local governments. That is why I was very apprehensive when New Jersey went for a right wing Republican Governor. As in New Jersey and other states, generous amounts of money for political ads on television for ignorant Americans does more to elect politicians than a true knowledge of what is in their interests.

Unfortunately in the 2010 elections governors in Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and Florida among others are imposing their draconian agenda that hurts the Middle Class families who have already gone through a depletion of income taking into account inflation and forced families to take out second mortgages to supplement their income which is still at 1973 levels. http://ed.msnbc.msn.com/

Ed has a graph (See Video at Ed link) from the 1970s to 2010 showing the flat line of Middle Class Income. Then above that Productivity of each worker who work lots of unpaid overtime at Wal Mart and White collar jobs improved ten times. However, the top 1.0% income went up at a forty-five degree angle like the diagonal of your monitor in inches goes.

Jim Kawakami, June 24, 2011, http://jimboguy.blogspot.com

Select a show date: Go to http://ed.msnbc.com to see the video of talk.

Poll: Should unions punish New Jersey Democrats who are siding with Governor Chris Christie?

• Thu Jun 23, 2011 10:01 PM EDT http://ed.msnbc.msn.com/

  NYT and the Pampered Public Worker's Pension

06/22/2011 by Peter Hart FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting) Watches the newspapers of record that the elites rely on for information including the New York Times. As I noted previously, the Wall Street Journal is actually starting to lie than simply distort the truth. The NY Times slants stories by putting "contrary" information much later in the article and headlines that support propaganda story. Unfortunately most Americans get much of the information from television news if at all and due to "time" constraints go with

Http://www.fair.org/blog/2011/06/22/nyt-and-the-pampered-public-workers-pension/ When you see a headline like "Public Unions Take On Boss to Win Big Pensions," you know what you're going to get -- more scaremongering about runaway public employee pensions. The New York Times delivers, with a lengthy front-page piece by Charles Duhigg that mostly takes the side of the Republican lawmakers trying to cut benefits in the name of fiscal discipline.

The article is largely based around Jim Righeimer, a conservative activist turned city council member in Costa Mesa, California, whose become something of a national star on the right. He can rattle off the anecdotes about sky-high pensions:

The city was on the road to insolvency, he warned, because public employee unions had pressured politicians into handing over generous salaries and pensions. The police chief received $298,000 a year in total compensation, Mr. Righeimer noted. The deputy fire chief had retired with a pension of more than $182,000 a year.

How typical is a $182K pension? The Times doesn't really explain, but they do suggest that this particular town's situation is typical for the state -- which is in terrible shape:

Costa Mesa, population 110,000, is California in miniature. For years, public employee unions across the state have often used their influence — sometimes behind the scenes but occasionally with public, hardball campaigns — to push for improved worker pay and benefits.

The Times could have mentioned that not everyone agrees with Righeimer's alarmist view. According to one report (Bloomberg,4/8/11) the city's budget officer says the pension estimates being used do not include union givebacks or changes in the state pension contribution rates. And it's worth pointing out that at one point the city stopped making pension fund contributions ten years ago, when the system was overfunded.

You have to go a ways in the Times before getting a dissenting view:

Public employee unions, in their defense, say politicians have unfairly made them into simplistic bogeymen, responsible for problems that have myriad causes. Not all government workers receive generous pensions, they note. A public worker enrolled in the state’s largest pension fund who retired in 2008 with more than 30 years of service received a pension of $66,828 a year, on average, and a retiree with 20 to 25 years of service received around $34,872. Public workers who retire with fewer years on the job receive even less.

So you lead with anecdotes about six-figure pensions -- and then give readers some sense of a more typical retirement later on.

As we've pointed out before, there are serious debates about the scale of the pension problems across the country; many see the shortfall estimates as overly pessimistic. But The Times seems to have picked its side:

But no matter what steps are taken, the cost of public pensions will most likely preoccupy many states for years. In California, New Jersey and Illinois, lawmakers may eventually need to increase taxes more than 17 percent or cut government services to pay public retirees’ benefits, according to a nonpartisan study. In some states, no matter how much the economy rebounds, pension funds may not be able to meet their obligations without significant government support.

And later:

In some states, including California, a study found that pension fund managers needed to earn a 12 percent return each year for the next three decades to meet obligations. Such prolonged returns are far higher than historical norms. (Calpers, in a statement, said it expected to earn double-digit returns this year, and disagreed with the 12 percent estimate.)

It's not clear what studies they're referring to, but it should be pointed out that not every analyst takes such a pessimistic view. TheTimes does report--deep into the piece--that the main California pension plan reports that they're doing fairly well:

Calpers says its retirement fund is healthy, having earned back more than $70 billion of the value lost since 2007.... “The costs of Calpers pensions for the state represents 2.2 percent of total general fund expenditures,” the agency wrote. “To suggest that pension costs are the cause of layoffs, degradation of our schools or the California economy would be irresponsible.”

So in the Times' voice, pension shortfalls are going to "preoccupy" states, and might require massive tax increases. Dissenters may exist -- but they're not likely to convince the New York Times.

The piece closes at the Costa Mesa City council, with an ominous sounding show of force:

In the audience sat three local firemen wearing Costa Mesa Fire Department T-shirts, all of whom declined to give their names.

“I’m not here on anything official,” one said. “We just like the council to know that we’re watching them.”

Tags: Charles Duhigg, pensions, public workers

Climate Change Storm Records Smashed Tornadoes Floods Rain Snow Drought Patterns Have Changed

Tags: Climate Change Politics Distorts Facts Special Interests Prevent Solutions Record Tornadoes Floods Droughts All Affecting USA

Are Sharp Increases in Violent Storms Normal or Has Something Changed?

NY Times, John M. Broder, June 15, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/16/science/earth/16climate.html?src=recg

So far this year, there have been nearly 1,400 preliminary tornado reports nationwide; those reports will most likely be whittled down to about 900 confirmed tornadoes, the second-highest annual total recorded in modern times. The record is 1,011 confirmed tornadoes in 2008.

“Global warming is contributing to an increased incidence of extreme weather because the environment in which all storms form has changed from human activities,” Dr. Trenberth said in a telephone interview Wednesday. “Records are not just broken, they are smashed. It is as clear a warning as we are going to get about prospects for the future.” …

When politics or funding is involved, the public discussion of climate change becomes muddled. A review of some basics of weather and climate might help the layperson understand this more than the brief and distorted discussion often seen on television interviews.

First congress, the political dimension, often funds the money to do the research to understand our climate system so we can predict weather patterns for economic reasons such as growing food crops. Second, we need some advance knowledge of weather patterns to predict violent tornadoes, hurricanes, droughts, for survival reasons, and when we can have outdoor picnics.

Then we have special interests who do not want any law or regulation that will cut their profits in oil, gas, coal, and nuclear plants in a similar manner to that the tobacco corporations had a sophisticated campaign of creating doubt about whether smoking caused the deaths from cancer and emphysema. It worked marvelously in keeping the profits up.

The same group of former Nuclear Scientists have also done the same in creating doubt about climate change from carbon dioxide and methane which had a scientific consensus back in 1969 and taught in universities such as Gore’s Harvard from our unregulated use of petroleum. The dilemma we Americans have is that we like the “good” life petroleum has played in our lives. Without it we would have almost no plastic products and containers, lighter cars, cheaper furniture, and countless items in our homes and workplace.

Because improving our energy efficiency will cut their profits, the Republican House refuses to fund this common sense solution. How much can we save. Largely corporate Think Tank, McKinsey&Company has made an estimate.

Energy Efficiency Study by Mckinsey&Company http://www.mckinsey.com/en/Client_Service/Electric_Power_and_Natural_Gas/Latest_thinking/Unlocking_energy_efficiency_in_the_US_economy.aspx Cor… The research shows that the US economy has the potential to reduce annual non-transportation energy consumption by roughly 23 percent by 2020, eliminating more than $1.2 trillion in waste—well beyond the $520 billion upfront investment (not including program costs) that would be required. The reduction in energy use would also result in the abatement of 1.1 gigatons of greenhouse-gas emissions annually—the equivalent of taking the entire US fleet of passenger vehicles and light trucks off the roads.

Such energy savings will be possible, however, only if the United States can overcome significant sets of barriers. These barriers are widespread and persistent, and will require an integrated set of solutions to overcome them—including information and education, incentives and financing, codes and standards, and deployment resources well beyond current levels.

In addition to the above central conclusion, five observations will be relevant to a national debate about how best to pursue energy efficiency opportunities of the magnitude identified and within the timeframe considered in this report. Specifically, an overarching strategy would need to:

• Recognize energy efficiency as an important energy resource that can help meet future energy needs while the nation concurrently develops new no- and low-carbon energy sources
• Formulate and launch at both national and regional levels an integrated portfolio of proven, piloted, and emerging approaches to unlock the full potential of energy efficiency
• Identify methods to provide the significant upfront funding required by any plan to capture energy efficiency
• Forge greater alignment between utilities, regulators, government agencies, manufacturers, and energy consumers
• Foster innovation in the development and deployment of next-generation energy-efficiency technologies to ensure ongoing productivity gains

»
Read executive summary (PDF–1.52 MB)

»
Read full report (PDF–6.37 MB)

Jim Kawakami, June 16, 2011, http://jimboguy.blogspot.com

Blood Pressure Best Indicator for Disease Uric Acid from Fructose High BP

Tags: BP Increases Fructose Metabolism, Uric Acid Causes Inflammation Blood Vessel, High Blood Pressure, Heart Disease, Strokes, Cancer Spread

The latest recent American Society of Hypertension (ASH) was for the first time attended by more people from diverse areas and countries showing how important Hypertension regulation is for our healthy lives. The 14 minutes video and transcript of the video talked about for essentially the first time about the role of High Fructose Corn Syrup in the production of Uric Acid which causes inflammation of our blood vessels which increases the chance for plaque deposition, heart attacks, and strokes and not mentioned, but know is that cancer spreads with blood vessels are inflamed.

I have urged all of you to really drastically cut fructose in your diet, especially HFCS which is much worse than sucrose for not completely understood by doctors but readily explained by scientists, especially doctor-scientists who study metabolism.

I have urged all of you to routinely or at least once a year, get a uric acid reading, especially if you have high blood pressure which needs to be regulated with medication. All drugs have unintended side effects. When Americans consume high levels of fructose and up to 150 lbs per year by some estimates, mainly from drinks such as colas or special gatorade, all our cells develop enzymes to metabolize the fructose which through a number of steps including destroying our cells produce uric acid as an endpoint.

When I reduced my uric acid level from 8 which is "normal" by current standards down to more recent scientific standards of less than 4.5 by stopping my habit of drinking orange and apple juice at breakfast and sometimes during the day, my uric acid level dropped to less than 4.5.

My blood pressure dropped from 130 plus systolic to routinely to 115 or lower without medication. My kidney transplant drugs increases blood pressure and can cause diabetes unless I keep my fasting glucose down to below 90. It is routinely below 90 now. Also eating too much of any foods such as sardines which I limit to once a month produces purines which convert to uric acid. The destruction of cells with metabolizing fructose results in purines. In the liver, fructose is metabolized to a number of products but the major one is low density lipoproteins, a source of heart disease, strokes, and Alzheimer's Disease.

When we evolved, sweet fruits was not readily available so our system was not well designed to make non-toxic products from it. Fructose HFCS does not satiate our appetite as sucrose does so we keep eating more and more. Extra calories can pack on weight where two-third of Americans are now obese or overweight with obese Americans now passing those merely overweight. The epidemic started mostly after Reagan subsidized corn so much that High Fructose Corn Sugar because as cheap as dirt so it replaced sucrose in our diet. It also had the advantage of being so soluble in foods and liquids that enormous amounts could be added that could not be added with crystalline sucrose.

In men with waist size over 40 inches and women over 35, are obese. Belly fat is extremely dangerous and can weight more than 15 pounds. It is not the external fat you can see, but resides next to organs near your belly. The organs develop layers of fat which decreases the efficiency of the organs to do their job and in woman it can even deposit layers of fat on the outside of blood vessels.

http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/744233?src=mp&spon=44

Jim Kawakami, June 15, 2011, http://jimboguy.blogspot.com

Government's Place in the Market, Republicans Destabilizing Dems Like CIA Does to Countries

Tags: Government's Place in the Market, Eliot Spitzer Talk at MIT, Externality, Corporations Ignore Costs to Others, GOP's CIA Playbook: Destabilize Country to Sweep Back Into Power

Government's Place in the Market, Eliot Spitzer Talk at MIT

He gave the talk to MIT business school students who looked quite grim during Spitzer's talk about Wall Street. Just one student admitted that he will try to get into Goldman Sachs.

As New York attorney general he became aware that Banks were issuing subprime mortgages in 1999 and started looking into it. In 2005 he won a law suit that stopped its worse abuses in New York and he thought the banks would behave. They did not.

Goldman Sachs knew that the mortgage market is going to collapse and bought a huge amount SWAPS insurance from AIG and others, but kept selling the bad stuff to other banks and institutions in December 2006. Yes, 2006 when Secretary Paulson was probably in charge. He was the one that introduced it to Goldman during his tenure.

Spitzer talked about why Obama is so ineffective putting forward progressive programs. He believes that compromise is the only way. He seems to have no principles that he is willing to push. The other huge mistake Obama made is not to go full force in changing the Financial system and improve rules instead of spending so much time on Healthcare. Yes, he could have done both.

Yes, our Media and Press do have experts from the CIA helping them put forth propaganda with a good face. CNN was caught once and there has been rumors that CIA is operating in the basement of major newspapers, but so far as I know, no one has proven this.

In any case the Heritage Foundation, Free Enterprise Institute, Koch Brothers, Chamber of Commerce, and other Think Tanks are experts at providing soundbite propaganda where reporters and news hosts do not have time to really research the facts news so appreciate getting their blurb. Rachel Maddow's team and others have to do their own research at MSNBC for the evening ET broadcasts.

In our current environment which may take decades to change, making more profits by corporations without taking into account the public costs their activity engenders. For example Ohio used high sulfur coal because it was cheaper and controlled their coal emission pollution in Ohio by just extending the exit pipe to 1000 feet so the pollution does not settle in Ohio but in New York where the acid rains have destroyed trees and killed fish in lakes. Another example is fracking to give us lots of natural gas without considering more carefully the side effects such as aquifer pollution, especially in places like Texas and Montana where rain can be scarce, and even earthquakes happened in Missouri. When they stopped their operations, the earthquakes stopped.

One of the books Spitzer recommended is on Google Books. It is short book by Albert Hirshman at Princeton in 1982. I have started reading it. It is quite good and called Shifting Involvements: Private Interest and Public Action. http://books.google.com/books?id=ptdnoonnzuwC&printsec=frontcover&dq=albert+hirschman&hl=en&ei=bw30TeiXBIussAOx29jHCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CFQQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q&f=false It basically says that both private and public actions which look very good in itself as maximizing profits without considering externality. Noun: A side effect or consequence of an industrial or commercial activity that affects other parties without this being reflected in the cost of the goods or services involved, such as the pollination of surrounding crops by bees kept for honey. More »

Wikipedia - Dictionary.com - Answers.com - Merriam-Webster

Eliot Spitzer http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/Placeint 1 hr 4 minutes You have to go to the particular link that C-Span has for this video or your searches turn up nothing. Normally I gave up early, but this time I persisted and found the Spitzer video.

Jim Kawakami, June 12, 2011, http://jimboguy.blogspot.com

Government's Place in the Market

Eliot Spitzer

About the Program

Eliot Spitzer, former Governor of New York and New York State Attorney General, presents his thoughts on when the government should intervene in the financial market. Mr. Spitzer argues that government assistance given to the banking industry in 2009 was a poor decision, as it forced the American public to share in bank's risks without benefit. The author posits when intervention is appropriate and details how the government can reestablish the public's trust. Eliot Spitzer is in conversation with Simon Johnson, co-author of 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

About the Authors

Eliot Spitzer

Eliot Spitzer is a former Governor of New York and New York State Attorney General. He is currently the host of CNN's In the Arena.

Republicans Destabilizing Dems Like CIA Does to Countries

Representative Wiener is an example of what Breitbart and the Republicans do. They use CIA tactics to destroy the Democrats regardless of what it is doing to our country. They lie without even being guilty about lying and make salacious video that completely lies about what really went on. I am not sure what we can do about the propaganda in the corporate media. It is so pervasive and subtle that viewers have very little chance of detecting it unless they have some prior knowledge.

The Republicans are very good at doing this with huge support from the wealthy and corporations. The connotation is similar to the Vietnam book "The Best and the Brightest" has changed horses to do what pays more such as advising on torture and selling Americans a bunch of product and ideas crap.

If the Democrats had the money and control of the media as the Republicans do, the same would not happen and did not happen whenever the many sex and criminal activities committed en masse occurred in the 1980s and 2000s. Yes, our military and CIA is filled with Right Wingers. See article excerpt below.

The GOP's CIA Playbook: Destabilize Country to Sweep Back Into Power

Modern Republicans have a simple approach to politics when they are not in the White House: Make America as ungovernable as possible by using almost any means available.

Consortium News Robert Parry, www.AlterNet.org June 9, 2011, http://www.alternet.org/teaparty/151209/the_gop%27s_cia_playbook%3A_destabilize_country_to_sweep_back_into_power/?page=entire ... Under the direction of President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the CIA was dispatched to engage in psychological warfare against Allende’s government and to make the Chilean economy “scream.”

U.S. intelligence agencies secretly sponsored Chilean news outlets, like the influential newspaper El Mercurio, and supported “populist” uprisings of truckers and housewives. On the economic front, the CIA coordinated efforts to starve the Chilean government of funds and to drive unemployment higher. ...

Obviously, given the wealth of the American elites, the relative proportion of the propaganda funding is derived more domestically in the United States than it would be in a place like Chile (or some other unfortunate Third World country that has gotten on Washington’s bad side).

But the concept remains the same: Control as much as possible what the population gets to see and hear; create chaos for your opponent’s government, economically and politically; blame if for the mess; and establish in the minds of the voters that their only way out is to submit, that the pain will stop once your side is back in power.

Today’s Republicans have fully embraced this concept of political warfare, whereas the Democrats generally have tried to play by the old rules, acquiescing when Republicans are in office with the goal of “making government work,” even if the Republicans are setting the agenda.

Unlike the Democrats and the Left, the Republicans and the Right have prepared themselves for this battle, almost as if they are following a CIA training manual. They have invested tens of billions of dollars in a propaganda infrastructure that operates 24/7, year-round, to spot and exploit missteps by political enemies.

This vertically integrated media machine allows useful information to move quickly from a right-wing blog to talk radio to Fox News to the Wall Street Journal to conservative magazines and book publishing. Right-wing propagandists are well-trained and well-funded so they can be deployed to all manner of public outlets to hammer home the talking points.

When a Democrat somehow does manage to get into the White House, Republicans in Congress (and even in the Courts) are ready to do their part in the destabilization campaign. Rather than grant traditional “honeymoon” periods of cooperation with the president’s early policies, the battle lines are drawn immediately.

In late 1992, for instance, Bill Clinton complained that his “honeymoon” didn’t even last through the transition, the two-plus months before a new president takes office. He found himself facing especially harsh hazing from the Washington press corps, as the mainstream media – seeking to shed its “liberal” label and goaded by the right-wing media – tried to demonstrate that it would be tougher on a Democrat than any Republican.

The mainstream press hyped minor “scandals” about Clinton’s Whitewater real estate investment and Travel-gate, a flap about some routine firings at the White House travel office. Meanwhile, the Right’s rapidly growing media was spreading false stories implicating Clinton in the death of White House aide Vince Foster and other “mysterious deaths.”

Republicans in Congress did all they could to feed the press hysteria, holding hearings and demanding that special prosecutors be appointed. When the Clinton administration relented, the choice of prosecutors was handed over to right-wing Republican Appeals Court Judge David Sentelle, who consciously picked political enemies of Clinton to oversee zealous investigations. ...

http://www.alternet.org/teaparty/151209/the_gop%27s_cia_playbook%3A_destabilize_country_to_sweep_back_into_power/?page=entire