It's official. Mitt Romney does not like you if you:
are Latino (immigrant);
are Black;
like Medicare;
believe in Social Security;
have a government job;
don't have a job;
feel responsible for others;
would like help from others when life is hard;
believe that a woman is in charge of her own body and life;
believe you are "entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it."
The man has no concept of community, no concept of charity beyond his Mormon Church, no concept that life can hit you with a random blow, no compassion for others hit with a random blow.
Sometimes, Mr. Romoney, shit happens to someone that ain't their fault. Americans believe that we are stronger when we pull together, extend a hand, provide opportunity for "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Too bad you believe "he who grabs, gets."
Romoney is so insulated by his wealth, inherited and accumulated by gaming the system (then shipped to Swiss Bank accounts and hidden– can you spell "tax cheat?"), that he feels anyone who is not rich doesn't have the same guarantee of opportunity that he does.
He scorns 47% of the country, saying they believe themselves to be "victims."
After his buddies at Goldman Sachs crashed the economy with dubious deals by playing "casino" with our mortgage payments, after millions of Americans were thrown out of work because of economic forces OVER WHICH THEY HAD NO CONTOL and lost their homes and their insurance and their future, Ri¢hie Ri¢h Romoney says they consider themselves "victims" and expect handouts.
And yesterday, he and that tight-assed VP candidate, the cold, calculating narcissistic liar Paul Ryan, said the Federal Reserve shouldn't try to jump start the economy because we hadn't been hit hard enough, hadn't suffered enough over the last five years.
America! Wake up! It IS class warfare and they started it! Working men and women are losing! The 1% have contempt for the 47%! They have all the money and they own our Congressmen (that's you, Rep. Greg Walden of Oregon) and are buying our legal system.
Romney is owned by gamblers (real ones – not just Goldman Sachs) and polluters and New York bankers and drug companies and insurance companies. They want to make economic serfs out of us!
Romney has admitted it. Finally, something comes out the man's mouth we can actually believe.
Showing posts with label economics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label economics. Show all posts
Monday, September 17, 2012
Monday, September 3, 2012
How did Romney-Ryan DO that?
How did it come to pass that rich white men born into immense privilege are telling the rest of us we should just work a little harder, expect a little less, do a little more without?
Where do they get off telling the rest of the country what life should be for poor white men and women, poor Blacks, Hispanics, single mothers etc.(some of whom actually had those kids that Romney-Ryan say all women who have sex should be obliged to have )?
Oookay, I got all the "coal miner" symbolism paraded out by the righties at the GOP convention. Too bad nobody had a great uncle who was a logger up here in Oregon (whew!) or worked in the mills around here. Rather, the mills that used to be around here. I bet there would be some great family history of the Wobblies.
Speaking of which, all those descendants of miners at the GOP convention and not a word about horrendous conditions? About mines collapsing because adequate shoring took too much out of profits? About black lung disease so long hidden by the great coal companies? The United Mine Workers didn't send one kid to college? Ever seen a face macerated by a broken saw chain?
But, back to the rant.
I don't get it. Romney-Ryan don't know and can never know what it's like at the bottom of the pile, and now they want to lower their taxes (when they already pay less of their income in taxes than their drivers, their maids, their cooks, etc.) and they want to raise our insurance deductible, they want to decimate our schools, they want to take away our retirement? While they hide their tax returns and their money in offshore accounts? While telling us we should trust them?!?!
What they really want is to destroy opportunity for the rest of us to get where they are, because we need schools, hospitals and homes we can afford. And clean water to drink. And clean air to breathe. And jobs that protect us instead of kill us. And we want our kids to have some opportunity to get what Romney-Ryan got.
Monday, May 23, 2011
Republicans are anti-business
The right wing is still pushing the message, "government is bad, people are good." Less government, lower taxes, more freedom, let free markets work.
The message "government is bad" resonates because, since WWII, our government and wealth have often been directed toward doing things government does not do well. There has also been a successful effort on the part of unions to protect government jobs and paychecks while reducing accountability, which has not been good PR.
But the pointed message "government is bad" has been co-opted as propaganda by radical right wing think tanks that have an entirely different agenda which is being fed to the American people by political puppets. Simply stated, their goal is to reintroduce hardship as a means to improve productivity, and encourage corporate culture to become America's culture.
Which is not bad in and of itself, as long as we are able to have a discussion about what is involved. But we are lazy and we are easily misled and the issues take work and they are hard.
Before we throw out rules and regulations and limit government, we need a real conversation about what will take its place. What will limit the power of those who can and will take advantage of other people's weakness?
"Free markets" without rules that keep as many players as possible in the game aren't free at all. Markets are not "moral." They can't be nor should they be. At best, we hope they are efficient at providing the products and services we want at the lowest possible cost through the mechanism of competition.
Without enough players, and that number varies by industry, markets become captive to the most powerful. Then the powerful take advantage of the rest of us.
In some "markets," such as health care, even the lowest possible cost is probably still more than we can afford when we attempt to postpone death as long as possible. Everyone is being false when we debate only cost and affordability without acknowledging the spiritual issue that Death is inevitable and hard. Horrific manipulation from the right (death panels!) only served to hide the fact that the Republican agenda is a fast track to the same destination. Again, not to disagree with the direction, but the dishonestly is breathtaking.
Or the "markets" in communication. There has been more than one revolution in the telecommunications industry since AT&T, then called "Ma Bell," was broken up (by government regulation). These revolutions would have been far different, and less likely, had Ma Bell's monopoly continued.
Now we have different technologies, and different requirements. But monopolies, or duopolies, or oligopolies still seek power and profit and the power that profit provides. As they should. The corporation has a duty only to itself.
The entity that stands between abuse of corporate power is government. Our system of laws is the "playing field" on which we play the economic game. It doesn't work if one player is able to walk up to any other player at any time and say, "give me all your money."
Which is what AT&T and Exxon and UnitedHealth Group Inc. and Goldman Sachs and Pfeizer and Monsanto are trying to achieve.
They don't want "free" markets, they want your money. Truly efficient markets would mean competition, which would keep costs down and limit how much they could take. So they attempt to reduce the government that could keep markets healthy.
So the Republicans who do their bidding (Bohner, Bachmann, etc.) don't like "free markets" either. They undermine government's role, or work to prohibit government from regulating industries that seek to monopolize our life blood services such as fuel, communication, health care, money and food.
Yes, price controls and direct government interference can do more harm than good. And government screws it up often enough. But let's not forget that government is not the only power, and that many laws are designed first and foremost to protect the public from robbery, either by a thug in a hoody or a Harvard grad in an expensive suit.
Successful efforts (by conservatives and liberals) to repeal banking laws that were enacted after the Great Depression, along with a failure to regulate new financial instruments, and a cultural change ("Borrow money against your house to buy ... toys! You deserve it!") promoted by banks led to the deep recession we have not yet survived.
Look at how much is spent on lobbying, by whom, and how the supreme court (why hasn't Clarence Thomas been impeached?) allowed corporations to hide their influence and spend as much as they like to upend "democracy."
There is an incoherence among a population that wants less government but more services. That incoherence is being manipulated by some very smart and greedy people who know that government is the last warden protecting the average American from a corporatist culture that views our nest egg as food.
And they are being aided unintentionally by a Left Wing that hates other people's money and thinks that good intentions are more powerful than the laws of economics.
The message "government is bad" resonates because, since WWII, our government and wealth have often been directed toward doing things government does not do well. There has also been a successful effort on the part of unions to protect government jobs and paychecks while reducing accountability, which has not been good PR.
But the pointed message "government is bad" has been co-opted as propaganda by radical right wing think tanks that have an entirely different agenda which is being fed to the American people by political puppets. Simply stated, their goal is to reintroduce hardship as a means to improve productivity, and encourage corporate culture to become America's culture.
Which is not bad in and of itself, as long as we are able to have a discussion about what is involved. But we are lazy and we are easily misled and the issues take work and they are hard.
Before we throw out rules and regulations and limit government, we need a real conversation about what will take its place. What will limit the power of those who can and will take advantage of other people's weakness?
"Free markets" without rules that keep as many players as possible in the game aren't free at all. Markets are not "moral." They can't be nor should they be. At best, we hope they are efficient at providing the products and services we want at the lowest possible cost through the mechanism of competition.
Without enough players, and that number varies by industry, markets become captive to the most powerful. Then the powerful take advantage of the rest of us.
In some "markets," such as health care, even the lowest possible cost is probably still more than we can afford when we attempt to postpone death as long as possible. Everyone is being false when we debate only cost and affordability without acknowledging the spiritual issue that Death is inevitable and hard. Horrific manipulation from the right (death panels!) only served to hide the fact that the Republican agenda is a fast track to the same destination. Again, not to disagree with the direction, but the dishonestly is breathtaking.
Or the "markets" in communication. There has been more than one revolution in the telecommunications industry since AT&T, then called "Ma Bell," was broken up (by government regulation). These revolutions would have been far different, and less likely, had Ma Bell's monopoly continued.
Now we have different technologies, and different requirements. But monopolies, or duopolies, or oligopolies still seek power and profit and the power that profit provides. As they should. The corporation has a duty only to itself.
The entity that stands between abuse of corporate power is government. Our system of laws is the "playing field" on which we play the economic game. It doesn't work if one player is able to walk up to any other player at any time and say, "give me all your money."
Which is what AT&T and Exxon and UnitedHealth Group Inc. and Goldman Sachs and Pfeizer and Monsanto are trying to achieve.
They don't want "free" markets, they want your money. Truly efficient markets would mean competition, which would keep costs down and limit how much they could take. So they attempt to reduce the government that could keep markets healthy.
So the Republicans who do their bidding (Bohner, Bachmann, etc.) don't like "free markets" either. They undermine government's role, or work to prohibit government from regulating industries that seek to monopolize our life blood services such as fuel, communication, health care, money and food.
Yes, price controls and direct government interference can do more harm than good. And government screws it up often enough. But let's not forget that government is not the only power, and that many laws are designed first and foremost to protect the public from robbery, either by a thug in a hoody or a Harvard grad in an expensive suit.
Successful efforts (by conservatives and liberals) to repeal banking laws that were enacted after the Great Depression, along with a failure to regulate new financial instruments, and a cultural change ("Borrow money against your house to buy ... toys! You deserve it!") promoted by banks led to the deep recession we have not yet survived.
Look at how much is spent on lobbying, by whom, and how the supreme court (why hasn't Clarence Thomas been impeached?) allowed corporations to hide their influence and spend as much as they like to upend "democracy."
There is an incoherence among a population that wants less government but more services. That incoherence is being manipulated by some very smart and greedy people who know that government is the last warden protecting the average American from a corporatist culture that views our nest egg as food.
And they are being aided unintentionally by a Left Wing that hates other people's money and thinks that good intentions are more powerful than the laws of economics.
Sunday, October 21, 2007
Greenspan's warning
“If the pernicious drift toward fiscal instability is not arrested and is compounded by a protectionist reversal of globalization, the current account adjustment process could be quite painful for the United States and our trading partners," warned Alan Greenspan on Sunday, October 20 in a speech on the sidelines of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank meetings (read it here).
There is cause for great alarm in that sentence. Partly because of the incompetence of Bush/Cheney. Partly because of the tendency of both Democrats and Republicans to pander.
The “drift toward fiscal instability” is the deficit that Cheney/Bush has run up during its term of office. They are not conservatives. They are statists drawing power from the moral right. They favor a big government profiting special interests, they have run up huge deficits with tax breaks to large corporations and the wealthy while not paying for their war in progress.
The left is not much better. Their hatred of other people’s money makes them economically illiterate. If they get control of government on an agenda that includes opposition to liberal trade, Greenspan’s “protectionist reversal of globalization” could launch another worldwide recession.
At the end of which, China will be even more clearly the most significant economy in the world. If we start banning their T-Shirts, they may stop buying our debt. We need them more than they need us, and some of the recent market chaos may be related to China’s displeasure with our politics. We did not need to fete the Dali Lama.
The Law of Comparative Advantage proves that trade makes all nations wealthier. Protectionism extended the depression and made it worse. Democrats need to recognize that by trying to save in California jobs more cheaply done in Mexico, we hurt U.S. consumers, Mexican workers, and U.S. workers who can not make things for sale to a Mexico that can not pay for them.
Greenspan is giving us another warning. We are walking an edge. Only by more wisdom than we seem to possess, and a great amount of luck, shall we avoid a fall.
There is cause for great alarm in that sentence. Partly because of the incompetence of Bush/Cheney. Partly because of the tendency of both Democrats and Republicans to pander.
The “drift toward fiscal instability” is the deficit that Cheney/Bush has run up during its term of office. They are not conservatives. They are statists drawing power from the moral right. They favor a big government profiting special interests, they have run up huge deficits with tax breaks to large corporations and the wealthy while not paying for their war in progress.
The left is not much better. Their hatred of other people’s money makes them economically illiterate. If they get control of government on an agenda that includes opposition to liberal trade, Greenspan’s “protectionist reversal of globalization” could launch another worldwide recession.
At the end of which, China will be even more clearly the most significant economy in the world. If we start banning their T-Shirts, they may stop buying our debt. We need them more than they need us, and some of the recent market chaos may be related to China’s displeasure with our politics. We did not need to fete the Dali Lama.
The Law of Comparative Advantage proves that trade makes all nations wealthier. Protectionism extended the depression and made it worse. Democrats need to recognize that by trying to save in California jobs more cheaply done in Mexico, we hurt U.S. consumers, Mexican workers, and U.S. workers who can not make things for sale to a Mexico that can not pay for them.
Greenspan is giving us another warning. We are walking an edge. Only by more wisdom than we seem to possess, and a great amount of luck, shall we avoid a fall.
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
Liberty and Liberals
"Single" seems to thrive on feelings he denies. In this case, feelings about "liberals." He sets up a "straw man" and then crows about knocking him down. (http://eyeonoregon.blogspot.com/2007/01/protect-and-serve.html)
Let's try this in language more plain: We did NOT say cops should not do anything when they feel threatened.
What we did say was that there needs to be greater scrutiny of the "I felt threatened!" defense, better training, possibly a change of culture in the union hall and squad room. Because there seems to be a pattern of behavior.
The other difference between bad cops and good liberals, “Single,” is that a bad cop carries a gun and a badge that allows him/her to victimize others with impunity. And those that do so damage all those good cops, the vast majority, we agree, as well as the rest of our social fabric.
That’s what we said.
The idea that "Single" may favor a society that, without much concern, allows police to batter a man because he didn't do "what the cops ask," even though the man was autistic and barely able to speak and follow directions, is a repugnant but possibly accurate representation of his whole philosophy.
There, a straw man of my very own.
We LIKE it when "Single" takes the opportunity to prove his "conservative manliness" over the "weak liberal" writer by saying there are only a few bad cops and a few good liberals.
It tugs at our “Wobblie” heart strings when “conservatives” do that sort of thing. Gives us a glow right from the 1940s and 1950s, not only a time of “Leave It to Beaver and “Father Knows Best,” but of Eric Hoffer and Alan Ginsberg and Jack Keouac and a vibrant left that was made up of working men and women who fought for these liberties on the battlefield and in the steel yard and ship yard and in the forests. Who bought bonds and made guns and sent their own children off to war.
Liberals are not “weak” by definition. They just misplaced their vitality, a few vital organs, too. Many of them from the past would not even be considered "liberal" today, but great confusion occurred after the 60s, with the boomers ascendant. It was the mushrooms, I just know it.
The left is ignorant about many things, like the effects of global free trade, and that all teachers are of value and should have equal access to the minds of our children, that good intentions are the equivalent of good action. The left can be quite confused about the difference between “equal opportunity” and “equal quality (equality) of life.”
But the left is not inherently weak, unless they choose not to fight.
And the best thing to fight for is liberty, and against those who think that a “police state” is a liberty-enhancing, safer place to live.
Democracy is a funny thing. It is not the bed of liberty, as many suppose. In fact, one of the most important warnings we’ve been given about democracy are the dangers inherent in “Tyranny of the Majority.” And if the last two presidential elections didn't convince you, nothing will.
Which is why we have a Bill of Rights, which is why our founding fathers designed a government that was INTENDED to be slow and awkward and noisy and inefficient.
"Single" my friend, "warm and fuzzy?" The only thing fuzzy here is your thinking. Like you, many of those today who believe they are "conservative" are not, they are actually statists, corporatists, Fascists or theocrats, or some foul amalgam of all of those. Like Cheney’s puppet in the “W”hite House.
Let's try this in language more plain: We did NOT say cops should not do anything when they feel threatened.
What we did say was that there needs to be greater scrutiny of the "I felt threatened!" defense, better training, possibly a change of culture in the union hall and squad room. Because there seems to be a pattern of behavior.
The other difference between bad cops and good liberals, “Single,” is that a bad cop carries a gun and a badge that allows him/her to victimize others with impunity. And those that do so damage all those good cops, the vast majority, we agree, as well as the rest of our social fabric.
That’s what we said.
The idea that "Single" may favor a society that, without much concern, allows police to batter a man because he didn't do "what the cops ask," even though the man was autistic and barely able to speak and follow directions, is a repugnant but possibly accurate representation of his whole philosophy.
There, a straw man of my very own.
We LIKE it when "Single" takes the opportunity to prove his "conservative manliness" over the "weak liberal" writer by saying there are only a few bad cops and a few good liberals.
It tugs at our “Wobblie” heart strings when “conservatives” do that sort of thing. Gives us a glow right from the 1940s and 1950s, not only a time of “Leave It to Beaver and “Father Knows Best,” but of Eric Hoffer and Alan Ginsberg and Jack Keouac and a vibrant left that was made up of working men and women who fought for these liberties on the battlefield and in the steel yard and ship yard and in the forests. Who bought bonds and made guns and sent their own children off to war.
Liberals are not “weak” by definition. They just misplaced their vitality, a few vital organs, too. Many of them from the past would not even be considered "liberal" today, but great confusion occurred after the 60s, with the boomers ascendant. It was the mushrooms, I just know it.
The left is ignorant about many things, like the effects of global free trade, and that all teachers are of value and should have equal access to the minds of our children, that good intentions are the equivalent of good action. The left can be quite confused about the difference between “equal opportunity” and “equal quality (equality) of life.”
But the left is not inherently weak, unless they choose not to fight.
And the best thing to fight for is liberty, and against those who think that a “police state” is a liberty-enhancing, safer place to live.
Democracy is a funny thing. It is not the bed of liberty, as many suppose. In fact, one of the most important warnings we’ve been given about democracy are the dangers inherent in “Tyranny of the Majority.” And if the last two presidential elections didn't convince you, nothing will.
Which is why we have a Bill of Rights, which is why our founding fathers designed a government that was INTENDED to be slow and awkward and noisy and inefficient.
"Single" my friend, "warm and fuzzy?" The only thing fuzzy here is your thinking. Like you, many of those today who believe they are "conservative" are not, they are actually statists, corporatists, Fascists or theocrats, or some foul amalgam of all of those. Like Cheney’s puppet in the “W”hite House.
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