Adbusters magazine's new book "Meme Wars: the Creative Destruction of Neoclassical Economies" uses hard-hitting images to make its points.
Where's RICO when you need it?
Adbusters magazine's new book "Meme Wars: the Creative Destruction of Neoclassical Economies" uses hard-hitting images to make its points.
Download: Reframing the debate
[This is from the website of the Center for Economic and Policy Research]
By Dean Baker (2011)
Progressives need a fundamentally new approach to politics. They have been losing not just because conservatives have so much more money and power, but also because they have accepted the conservatives’ framing of political debates. They have accepted a framing where conservatives want market outcomes whereas liberals want the government to intervene to bring about outcomes that they consider fair.
This is not true. Conservatives rely on the government all the time, most importantly in structuring the market in ways that ensure that income flows upwards. The framing that conservatives like the market while liberals like the government puts liberals in the position of seeming to want to tax the winners to help the losers.
This "loser liberalism" is bad policy and horrible politics. Progressives would be better off fighting battles over the structure of markets so that they don't redistribute income upward. This book describes some of the key areas where progressives can focus their efforts in restructuring market so that more income flows to the bulk of the working population rather than just a small elite.
By releasing The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive under a Creative Commons license and as a free download, Baker walks the walk of one of his key arguments -- that copyrights are a form of government intervention in markets that leads to enormous inefficiency, in addition to redistributing income upward. (Hard copies are available for purchase, at cost.) Distributing the book for free not only enables it to reach a wider audience, but Baker hopes to drive home one of the book's main points via his own example. While the e-book is free, donations to the Center for Economic and Policy Research are welcomed.
Read the book (other formats coming soon)
PDF | Kindle (.AZW) | NOOK (.EPUB) | .MOBI
Paperback
The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive
By Dean Baker (2011)
Progressives need a fundamentally new approach to politics. They have been losing not just because conservatives have so much more money and power, but also because they have accepted the conservatives’ framing of political debates. They have accepted a framing where conservatives want market outcomes whereas liberals want the government to intervene to bring about outcomes that they consider fair.
This is not true. Conservatives rely on the government all the time, most importantly in structuring the market in ways that ensure that income flows upwards. The framing that conservatives like the market while liberals like the government puts liberals in the position of seeming to want to tax the winners to help the losers.
This "loser liberalism" is bad policy and horrible politics. Progressives would be better off fighting battles over the structure of markets so that they don't redistribute income upward. This book describes some of the key areas where progressives can focus their efforts in restructuring market so that more income flows to the bulk of the working population rather than just a small elite.
By releasing The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive under a Creative Commons license and as a free download, Baker walks the walk of one of his key arguments -- that copyrights are a form of government intervention in markets that leads to enormous inefficiency, in addition to redistributing income upward. (Hard copies are available for purchase, at cost.) Distributing the book for free not only enables it to reach a wider audience, but Baker hopes to drive home one of the book's main points via his own example. While the e-book is free, donations to the Center for Economic and Policy Research are welcomed.
Read the book (other formats coming soon)
PDF | Kindle (.AZW) | NOOK (.EPUB) | .MOBI
Paperback
"Benghazi, Alex, for 10 points."
Usually, the Right throws some crap against the wall and if it sticks they throw some more; if it doesn't, they throw something else. But this Benghazi crap isn't sticking and still they don't stop. Are they so out of ideas the can't even come up with a good lie anymore?
Head count
Democrats got a boost of one in the
Senate today.
The newly elected independent from the State of Maine, Angus King, said he will join the Democratic caucus: "Affiliating with the majority makes sense." That gives Democrats 55 seats in the upper house, with 45 seats for the Republicans.
Time was when that would have been perceived as a majority.
We'll see.
The newly elected independent from the State of Maine, Angus King, said he will join the Democratic caucus: "Affiliating with the majority makes sense." That gives Democrats 55 seats in the upper house, with 45 seats for the Republicans.
Time was when that would have been perceived as a majority.
We'll see.
"Takin' Care Of Business":
What it means depends a whole lot on who says it.
A new organization is needed that will do two things:
1. provide training to ordinary citizens on the ins-and-outs of running for and serving in public office (this would not only identify potential candidates but help to train staff members for campaigns and officeholders); * and,
2. more crucially, grant subsidies to working people so that they can afford to seek office (an income cutoff of $250K would make 98% of the population eligible for some degree of help, depending on circumstances).
It is nearly impossible for a salaried person -- or a person bearing the burden of responsibilities (for children or elderly parents, for example) -- to expend without assistance the time and resources demanded by public service. The result is that we have a system of governance in which most elected officials are remote by reason of economic advantage from the people they purport to represent.
Take Congress. (Please.)
According to Capital Hill's Roll Call, Members of Congress had a collective net worth of more than $2 billion in 2010, quite a different sum than you could put together from 535 Americans chosen at random.
Not to pick on Democrats, but with a median net value of $878,500 in 2010 the self-described defenders of the middle class were worth more than nine times the typical American household (most of these figures are drawn from reporting on CNN). Twenty-one congressional Democrats have average assets of more than $10 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics (Barack Obama's average net worth of $7.3 million is nothing to sneeze at either, especially when compared to the median household net worth in America, which in 2009 was $96,000).
Republicans are a little richer, but not by much. Their median net is $957,500 on average and 35 of them have assets totaling more than $10 million. **
That's net worth: congresspersons' $174,000 salary also blows away the median household income of $49,445 for 2010 -- for most people, being elected to Congress would result in a healthy jump in income. And members' net worth has been on the rise since 2004, unlike ordinary Americans, who have seen their wealth decline (the center's figures don't even include a primary home when calculating net worth for politicians, but the Census, in calculating net worth for average Americans, includes all real estate assets, meaning the divide between the people and their representatives is even more pronounced than it appears).
Dishearteningly though not surprisingly, less than 2% of the Congress comes from the working class, a figure that's stayed constant for the last century.
There's no reason not to think that similar disparities exist at every level of government.
This is not to say that it might not be easier for a wealthy person to be an effective advocate for the interests of poor, working and middle class Americans than for a camel, say, to pass through the eye of a needle. But it's pretty clear that in the aggregate, elected officials inhabit a rarified economic environment that at the least makes it more difficult to keep the struggles of ordinary folks in perspective. It seems obvious that politicians from the working and middle classes will be more likely to concentrate on bread-and-butter domestic economic issues than will people whose principal domestic issue is whether the help all have their green cards.
It will take more than training and funding average Americans to make representative government more democratic. We need publicly financed elections, controls on media access, weekend voting, and so on. In the meantime, the suggestion I made many years ago that that the only political reform we really need is to limit the income of every elected official to the level of the average person he or she represents is still a pretty good one.
* Organizations Right and Left already exist that offer assistance and training to people who have decided to run for office. But what's needed is a national network of training centers, possibly operated through existing organizations like churches and labor unions, that broadens its appeal to include people who are just beginning to entertain the idea of service in government.
** You are permitted a moment to savor the irony that the $448 million fortune of the richest rep, Darrell Issa, is built on vehicle anti-theft devices.
A new organization is needed that will do two things:
1. provide training to ordinary citizens on the ins-and-outs of running for and serving in public office (this would not only identify potential candidates but help to train staff members for campaigns and officeholders); * and,
2. more crucially, grant subsidies to working people so that they can afford to seek office (an income cutoff of $250K would make 98% of the population eligible for some degree of help, depending on circumstances).
It is nearly impossible for a salaried person -- or a person bearing the burden of responsibilities (for children or elderly parents, for example) -- to expend without assistance the time and resources demanded by public service. The result is that we have a system of governance in which most elected officials are remote by reason of economic advantage from the people they purport to represent.
Take Congress. (Please.)
According to Capital Hill's Roll Call, Members of Congress had a collective net worth of more than $2 billion in 2010, quite a different sum than you could put together from 535 Americans chosen at random.
Not to pick on Democrats, but with a median net value of $878,500 in 2010 the self-described defenders of the middle class were worth more than nine times the typical American household (most of these figures are drawn from reporting on CNN). Twenty-one congressional Democrats have average assets of more than $10 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics (Barack Obama's average net worth of $7.3 million is nothing to sneeze at either, especially when compared to the median household net worth in America, which in 2009 was $96,000).
Republicans are a little richer, but not by much. Their median net is $957,500 on average and 35 of them have assets totaling more than $10 million. **
That's net worth: congresspersons' $174,000 salary also blows away the median household income of $49,445 for 2010 -- for most people, being elected to Congress would result in a healthy jump in income. And members' net worth has been on the rise since 2004, unlike ordinary Americans, who have seen their wealth decline (the center's figures don't even include a primary home when calculating net worth for politicians, but the Census, in calculating net worth for average Americans, includes all real estate assets, meaning the divide between the people and their representatives is even more pronounced than it appears).
Dishearteningly though not surprisingly, less than 2% of the Congress comes from the working class, a figure that's stayed constant for the last century.
There's no reason not to think that similar disparities exist at every level of government.
This is not to say that it might not be easier for a wealthy person to be an effective advocate for the interests of poor, working and middle class Americans than for a camel, say, to pass through the eye of a needle. But it's pretty clear that in the aggregate, elected officials inhabit a rarified economic environment that at the least makes it more difficult to keep the struggles of ordinary folks in perspective. It seems obvious that politicians from the working and middle classes will be more likely to concentrate on bread-and-butter domestic economic issues than will people whose principal domestic issue is whether the help all have their green cards.
It will take more than training and funding average Americans to make representative government more democratic. We need publicly financed elections, controls on media access, weekend voting, and so on. In the meantime, the suggestion I made many years ago that that the only political reform we really need is to limit the income of every elected official to the level of the average person he or she represents is still a pretty good one.
* Organizations Right and Left already exist that offer assistance and training to people who have decided to run for office. But what's needed is a national network of training centers, possibly operated through existing organizations like churches and labor unions, that broadens its appeal to include people who are just beginning to entertain the idea of service in government.
** You are permitted a moment to savor the irony that the $448 million fortune of the richest rep, Darrell Issa, is built on vehicle anti-theft devices.
Maybe you can still buy love, though
As we predicted, Richard Bloom is the legatee of Torie Osborn's inane and opportunistic run against Betsy Butler.
Turns out you can't buy an assembly seat after all.
Turns out you can't buy an assembly seat after all.
Class Unconsciousness
President Obama has gotten a lot of free advice since Nov 6 from progressives who think he should refocus his attentions on their priorities. But why should he? Since, when it appeared he needed them, they volunteered their support for his reelection without demanding anything in return, why should he now feel obligated to take their wishes seriously?
When he was first running for president, then Sen. Obama repeated the famous story about a delegation of progressives, led by the great labor organizer A. Philip Randolph of the railroad porters' union, meeting with another newly elected president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The delegation described the things they believed FDR needed to do to help fix the economy and improve the situation of ordinary citizens. As the story is told, FDR listened intently, then replied: 'I agree with everything you have said. Now, make me do it.'
Making Obama "do it" is going to take a lot more than op-ed pieces, open letters and online petitions. To move this administration in a more progressive direction, to overcome its leader's native caution and to beat back the relentless pressure it is under from the corporate class and the military-security state apparatus will require an equal or greater pressure from a national movement demanding economic justice and a restoration of the middle class. Such a movement can only be built if the identification that currently exists between the 99% and their oppressors can be broken. In other words, until Americans become class conscious there will never be a reason for Obama, or any politician, to do anything other than carry on with business as usual.
Building class consciousness won't happen -- can't happen -- by recruiting people to join the Peace and Freedom Party or the Greens (although third party mechanisms will be necessary in the future as the country continues its decline under the Democratic-Republican duopoly, so it's to be hoped that Jill Stein's paltry 396,684 tally is enough to keep the Green Party on state ballots). But class consciousness can be built by engaging in practical political work in our communities.
There are a number of local issues that are looming (or that are chronic, is more like it) -- repairing the public schools; providing universal access to public institutions of higher learning; keeping hospital emergency rooms and clinics open and accessible; raising local minimum wages to livable levels; restraining public transportation costs and assuring availability; resisting hand-outs to developers; opposing the crushing of local businesses by big-box stores and malls; increasing infrastructure spending; making state and local taxes more progressive; supporting labor actions by janitors, hotel workers, grocery clerks, teachers, factory workers -- that offer opportunities for common-sense, real-world discussions about capitalism and economic and social justice.
Also, reforms that would make our political system more democratic and thus more responsive to the majority -- weekend voting; instant run-offs; proportional representation; public financing of elections -- will only gain traction if they are tested and proven effective on the local level. And that won't happen, either, unless that majority begins to understand whose interests are served by the creaky, calcified, undemocratic political mechanism we use now.
This is not to say that we should give up attempting to affect national issues -- the security state; the war machine; our murderous and counter-productive foreign policy; the immoral drone campaign; climate change; free trade; protecting and expanding Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security; the private health care insurance gravy train; control of the government by oligarchs; the kleptocracy -- but these are matters for discussion and op-ed pages; organizing around them will only make sense when people active locally begin to connect the dots between community concerns and macro issues, and local organizations join together to demand change on these national issues.
The Democratic Party as a whole has moved steadily to the right for four decades. But many people within the party who share our goals are potential allies in local fights; these engaged people also need and deserve support when they resist the pro-business, anti-labor forces that dominate the party. After the "change" election in 2008, many on the left suffered buyer's remorse when Obama adopted a business-as-usual attitude toward governing (and doubled-down on many of Bush's worst security-state policies); yet four-years later they found themselves with seemingly no choice but to push once again for the lesser-of-two-evils option. If we're going to use our limited personal energies in electoral politics going forward, it should be in local races and political institutions where we can build trust with our communities and demonstrate concrete results. If this country is going to begin down a new road, the journey will start at Neighborhood Watch and the PTA, in community organizations, planning commissions and city councils. Not only is it possible to make concrete changes in our lives at the micro-political level, but local successes will demonstrate the practical worth of our ideas.
When he was first running for president, then Sen. Obama repeated the famous story about a delegation of progressives, led by the great labor organizer A. Philip Randolph of the railroad porters' union, meeting with another newly elected president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The delegation described the things they believed FDR needed to do to help fix the economy and improve the situation of ordinary citizens. As the story is told, FDR listened intently, then replied: 'I agree with everything you have said. Now, make me do it.'
Making Obama "do it" is going to take a lot more than op-ed pieces, open letters and online petitions. To move this administration in a more progressive direction, to overcome its leader's native caution and to beat back the relentless pressure it is under from the corporate class and the military-security state apparatus will require an equal or greater pressure from a national movement demanding economic justice and a restoration of the middle class. Such a movement can only be built if the identification that currently exists between the 99% and their oppressors can be broken. In other words, until Americans become class conscious there will never be a reason for Obama, or any politician, to do anything other than carry on with business as usual.
Building class consciousness won't happen -- can't happen -- by recruiting people to join the Peace and Freedom Party or the Greens (although third party mechanisms will be necessary in the future as the country continues its decline under the Democratic-Republican duopoly, so it's to be hoped that Jill Stein's paltry 396,684 tally is enough to keep the Green Party on state ballots). But class consciousness can be built by engaging in practical political work in our communities.
There are a number of local issues that are looming (or that are chronic, is more like it) -- repairing the public schools; providing universal access to public institutions of higher learning; keeping hospital emergency rooms and clinics open and accessible; raising local minimum wages to livable levels; restraining public transportation costs and assuring availability; resisting hand-outs to developers; opposing the crushing of local businesses by big-box stores and malls; increasing infrastructure spending; making state and local taxes more progressive; supporting labor actions by janitors, hotel workers, grocery clerks, teachers, factory workers -- that offer opportunities for common-sense, real-world discussions about capitalism and economic and social justice.
Also, reforms that would make our political system more democratic and thus more responsive to the majority -- weekend voting; instant run-offs; proportional representation; public financing of elections -- will only gain traction if they are tested and proven effective on the local level. And that won't happen, either, unless that majority begins to understand whose interests are served by the creaky, calcified, undemocratic political mechanism we use now.
This is not to say that we should give up attempting to affect national issues -- the security state; the war machine; our murderous and counter-productive foreign policy; the immoral drone campaign; climate change; free trade; protecting and expanding Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security; the private health care insurance gravy train; control of the government by oligarchs; the kleptocracy -- but these are matters for discussion and op-ed pages; organizing around them will only make sense when people active locally begin to connect the dots between community concerns and macro issues, and local organizations join together to demand change on these national issues.
The Democratic Party as a whole has moved steadily to the right for four decades. But many people within the party who share our goals are potential allies in local fights; these engaged people also need and deserve support when they resist the pro-business, anti-labor forces that dominate the party. After the "change" election in 2008, many on the left suffered buyer's remorse when Obama adopted a business-as-usual attitude toward governing (and doubled-down on many of Bush's worst security-state policies); yet four-years later they found themselves with seemingly no choice but to push once again for the lesser-of-two-evils option. If we're going to use our limited personal energies in electoral politics going forward, it should be in local races and political institutions where we can build trust with our communities and demonstrate concrete results. If this country is going to begin down a new road, the journey will start at Neighborhood Watch and the PTA, in community organizations, planning commissions and city councils. Not only is it possible to make concrete changes in our lives at the micro-political level, but local successes will demonstrate the practical worth of our ideas.
So...
Yes on Prop 30, temporary taxes to fund education.
And yes on Prop 34: Death Penalty Repeal and Prop 36: Three Strikes Law, because the politicians will never dare to get these done in the legislature where they should get done.
As for the rest, No. Not because they don't have worthy goals (Prop 31: State Budget Process; Prop 33: Auto Insurance Rates; Prop 39: Multistate Business Tax), are badly drawn (Prop 32: Political Contributions; Prop 37: Genetically Modified Foods) or misdirected (Prop 35: Human Trafficking/Sex Offender), but because they're not the business of referendums; all would be better decided in the give-and-take of the legislative process.
The only prop we really need is the Prop to End All Props.
quote unquote: David Friedman
The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations. -- David Friedman
Agenda items
Now that consumer confidence, Hurricane Sandy and Mayor Bloomberg have settled the election, can we have a discussion about what to do about military spending;
drones; the assassination of American citizens; illegal military incursions into Pakistan; military adventures in Yemen, Bahrain, Somalia and now, it appears, Mali; Africom; the pumped up Drug War; militarization of US drug war interventions in Honduras, Guatemala, Columbia, et al; the brutal program of sanctions against Iran; the military "pivot" toward China; habeas corpus; Bradley Manning; expanded government secrecy and unprecedented actions against whistle-blowers; domestic government spying; continued the transfer of vast amounts of wealth into the hands of the financial giants without significant oversight or accountability; truly universal, truly affordable health care (Medicare for All); neoliberal judicial appointments and the general failure to make appointments at all; austerity as a budgetary priority; the need for a massive New Deal-style jobs program; the ambition to strike a "grand bargain" with McConnell, Cantor and Boehner that will put Social Security and Medicare "on the table;" and the ongoing control of the country by the corporations, the militarists and the industrial-security state?
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