Month: April 2010

Zero Out Zero Water

by tristero

Zero Water, which makes water filters, advertises on Glenn Beck, according to Media Matters. That is their right. It is also your right to tell them what you think about that. Go here.

Pass it on.

Guest Post

Fiscal Sustainability Teach-In Counter Conference

-by Selise

“The Fiscal Sustainability Teach-In Counter Conference will be the important event in Washington on April 28. Unlike the other meeting, this one will feature important work by honest scholars. It deserves at least equal attention, and very much more respect.“

— James K. Galbraith, The University of Texas at Austin. [April 19, 2010 via email]

* * *The deficit hawks at the Peterson Foundation are at it again: attacking Social Security and Medicare with their false economic notions, this time with a “Fiscal Summit” to “Discuss Nation’s Rising Deficits and Debt.”

We have a massive need for a counter-narrative to the false but conventional notion that Federal deficit spending is bad, that it is a burden to the next generation, that deficit spending risks insolvency — basically that the Federal Government Budget is some how analogous to a household budget when, in fact, it is no such thing.

The Teach-In Counter-Conference on Fiscal Sustainability on April 28th, 2010 in Washington, DC aims to do just that with some real world, honest economics. The date was chosen as an alternative and counter to the deficit hawks at Peterson Foundation’s “Fiscal Summit.”

We can move beyond the false economic orthodoxy that got us into the current economic mess and that are now being promoted to attack Social Security and Medicare — and harming our Nation and it’s People in so many ways. You can help.

The tentative program schedule, topics and presenters as of 04/16/10:

Time Period	Topic	Team Leaders
8:30–8:45 AM	Welcoming Remarks
8:45–10:15 AM	What Is Fiscal Sustainability?	Team Leader: Professor Bill Mitchell, Research Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at the University of Newcastle, NSW Australia, and blogger at billy blog
10:15–10:30 AM	BREAK
10:30 AM–12:00 PM	Are There Spending Constraints on Governments Sovereign in their Currency?	Team Leader: Stephanie Kelton, Associate Professor of Macroeconomics, Finance, and Money and Banking, Research Scloar at The Center for Full Employment and Price Stability (CFEPS), University of Missouri – Kansas City, Research Associate at The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, and blogger at New Economics Perspectives
12:00–12:15 PM	BREAK
12:15–1:45 PM	The Deficit, the Debt, the Debt-To-GDP ratio, the Grandchildren and Government Economic Policy	Team Leader: Warren Mosler, International Consulting Economist, Independent Candidate for the US Senate in Connecticut, and blogger at moslereconomics.com
1:45–2:00 PM	BREAK
2:00–3:15 PM	Inflation and Hyper-inflation	Co-Team Leaders: Marshall Auerback, International Consulting Economist, blogger at New Deal 2.0 and New Economic Perspectives, and Mat Forstater, Professor of Economics, Director of CFEPS, Department of Economics, University of Missouri — Kansas City, Research Associate at The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, and blogger at New Economic Perspectives
3:15–3:30 PM	BREAK
3:30–5:00 PM	Policy Proposals for Fiscal Sustainability	Co-Team Leaders: L. Randall Wray, Professor of Economics, Director of CFEPSThe Levy Economics Institute of Bard College; and Pavlina Tcherneva, Assistant Professor of Economics at Franklin and Marshall College, Senior Research Associate at CFEPS and Research Associate at The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College and bloggers at New Economic Perspectives at the University of Missouri – Kansas City, and Senior Scholar at

What you can do to help:

1. Contribute to the cost of the Conference — Here




2. Attend the Teach-In — watch these pages for location and other logistical information




3. Spread the word — write a blog post, talk with your friends.




4. Educate yourself — some great introductory resources are:
   
   
   
   • Teaching the Fallacy of Composition: The Federal Budget Deficit, by L. Randall Wray

   
   

   • Fiscal sustainability 101, by William Mitchell

   
   

   • 7 Deadly Innocent Frauds, by Warren Mosler

   
   

   • In Defense of Deficits, by James K. Galbraith

Oh, Bernie

by digby

…you are such a fool:

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Freefall

by digby

Lucky us:

Forbes has released its list of ‘Top 10 U.S. Cities In Freefall’, and California has the dubious distinction of appearing thrice. The greater Los Angeles, Riverside and Sacramento areas all made the list, only Florida had more cities represented. In compiling the list, Forbes used six metrics, including the percent the median home price has fallen since its individual peak, how many people were moving in and out of these metros, and percent change in unemployment. Of California’s woes, Forbes writes:

Riverside, Los Angeles and Sacramento are suffering because of the knocks they took after their inflated housing markets began to plummet. Unemployment in the City of Angels has nearly tripled in three years, to 12%. Riverside’s unemployment has also ballooned, to 15%. Meanwhile Sacramento saw a 75% drop in new building permits. These are troubling signs for Cali metros, but not surprising. The end of the state’s home-price climb triggered more than just a housing slump. “In California, so many jobs were concentrated in construction,” says Michael Fratantoni, vice president of research at the Mortgage Bankers Association, the professional association for real estate financiers. “Jobs building single family homes wound up not being sustainable, and there were a lot of job losses.”

Hence:

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said Tuesday that Los Angeles will lay off more than 700 workers in the coming months and eliminate thousands of jobs as the nation’s second-largest city struggles to close a $500 million budget gap. In addition to reducing the public work force, the Democratic mayor warned the recession-battered city to prepare for cuts in road repairs, tree trimming and library hours. “This is not a budget that reflects why I ran for office,” the mayor said in his annual address to the City Council. The speech began what is shaping up as a tense budget season at City Hall. The mayor’s spending plan for the fiscal year that begins July 1 must be approved by the council, which has chafed at some of his proposals. “We’ll have to make some difficult choices and it won’t be easy,” City Council President Eric Garcetti said in a statement. Working with the council, the mayor wants to slash roughly 3,500 positions through job cuts, early retirements and the elimination of vacant posts.

It’s not over here — by a long shot.

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Meh

by tristero

The foodie blogs I read are all abuzz over this debate from Intelligence Squared about the proposition: Resolved: Organic is Marketing Hype. Skip it. Well, maybe not if your interest is seeing incontrovertible evidence of how thoroughly debased our public discourse is. But aside from that, skip it. Only two debaters, John Krebs and Urvashi Rangan, seemed remotely prepared or capable of staying focused on the topic – and they barely met those low bars. Both made numerous unsupported assertions and argued in obviously fallacious ways. Among the others, at least one participant was so incoherent as to create questions about mental competence, another’s absurd assertions were so poorly sourced he should have been thrown out of the debate, the token farmer made it clear he knew it all and wanted to be anywhere else (he also didn’t know it all, and wasn’t half as Real-American trenchant or as avuncular as he thought he was). The moderator was pretty good, but he had little to work with. Oh, and the topic was so nebulous as to be meaningless.

It’s too depressing to go into all the ways this video is awful – or any more than I’ve summarized above – so let me cut to the chase. If you want to understand the basics of the issues surrounding organic, start by reading Michael Pollan and Marion Nestle. However, I don’t think even that is too necessary if all you’re interested in is eating well – meaning lustily, healthfully, and responsibly. It boils down to this:

If you can afford it, and you can find it, prepare and eat unprocessed fresh organic foods.

Otherwise, prepare and eat unprocessed fresh conventional foods.

If you possibly can, don’t buy or eat industrial meat.

The End. The rest is detail. Here’s a little of that:

Why are organics preferred? Mainly, it’s way easier on the environment and far less cruel to animals. Since there are fewer human-made chemicals used in the growing, cleaning, storing, and distribution it’s probably healthier (assuming it’s fresh and meets the appropriate standards). There are other reasons, but those are the main ones.

Why are conventionally grown foods acceptable? They’re much cheaper. If you can’t afford organics, there is no reason under the sun to worry that you are somehow harming your family (assuming it’s fresh and meets the appropriate standards). Far worse than eating unprocessed conventional is eating processed organic food, which is usually junk food. The less of that stuff, the better (ditto junk food that isn’t organic, duh).

Why avoid industrial meat if you possibly can? The more you understand how the animals are treated, how they are killed, and how the meat is made, the more you understand how environmentally destructive industrial meat practices are, the more you realize how thoroughly disgusting it is, by any standards. Get your meat from a high quality butcher and only eat ground meat prepared by people you trust. Since this is more expensive, chances are you’ll eat less meat. That is an extra benefit, for many reasons. Pollan, Nestle, and Bittman – none of whom are vegetarians, btw – will be happy to tell you about them.

Hyvää ruokahalua!

The Great Shark Hunt

Bby digby

This may be the funniest article I’ve read all year. It’s a scathing indictment of the cozy relationship between wall street and government, the revolving door, regulatory capture, the whole schmear. It’s very convincing.

But I didn’t see the punchline coming. No one would, since it’s completely absurd. And I’m talking Alice In Wonderland , Raoul Duke and Doctor Gonzo absurd.

But then, the writer is a libertarian.

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Oh No

by digby

Brian Beutler at TPM reports on the possibility of GOP filibusters of the financial reform bill and the Democratic plans to thwart them:

[S]urely Democrats and their allies in key pressure groups have rehearsed a bold, unified response, in the event that the GOP follows through on their threat to block debate. Ads are in the can, talking points are drafted, and everyone’s been prepped to argue before the world that the Republicans have allied themselves with the firms that wrecked the economy. Right?The answer to the question is: yes and no. Democrats and outside groups have some contingency plans in place, if the GOP carries out a filibuster. But those efforts aren’t being tightly coordinated, and with a key test vote coming as early as Monday, there’s precious little time left for Dems and their allies to get their ducks in a row. Given how politically explosive a GOP filibuster could be, the ad hoc nature of the Democrats’ plans that suggests they won’t take as full advantage of it as perhaps they could. “When Republicans pulled their obstructionist tricks during healthcare, there was an immediate response from every pro-reform group,” says a concerned source working in messaging at one of the largest Dem-aligned financial reform pressure groups in the country. “Now that the GOP is using the same stalling and backroom meetings for Wall Street, that response just doesn’t exist.” “If similar things had happened in healthcare that have happened during past week, we would have all blown the lid off of it,” the source added.

I keep wondering about this too. There seems to be some strange zenlike confidence that this thing is going to sail through and I honestly don’t know where it’s coming from. Sure, it’s possible that Republicans are all quivering in their boots at the prospect of failing to vote for Financial Reform but I don’t know why the Dems would be so sanguine that there’s no chance of a serious fight.

Krugman evokes the Lucy law:

My own conversations with administration officials over the past few weeks have given me the sense that they were quite sure that FinReg wouldn’t be like health care — and that they didn’t seem to take seriously those (including me) who thought they were taking too much for granted. I have a theory about the problem here. My understanding is that Obama officials have looked at the polls, which show that the public overwhelmingly favors cracking down on Wall Street; so they assumed that the GOP wouldn’t dare stand in the way. But they seem not to have learned, even now, that the right has an awesome ability to create its own reality: that Mitch McConnell et al would stand in the way of reform while claiming to be taking a stand against Wall Street. Nor can you count on the truth to sink in with the public. The conventions of he-said-she-said reporting, among other things, make it surprisingly easy to get away with even the most obvious hypocrisy.

I wrote about this yesterday too. The right isn’t constrained by this thing we all call “reality.” They can easily persuade their followers that black is white and up is down. For instance, listen to the head of the Republican Party talk about this yesterday:

• Rush says financial reform is “health care bill redux,” gives Obama “total unchecked oversight over American businesses”
  April 20, 2010 4:00 pm ET
• Limbaugh says financial reform regulation would have prevented adoption of “new innovations like debit cards and PayPal”
  April 20, 2010 3:30 pm ET
• Rush says Goldman case “shaky on purpose” and “not meant to win anything in court but to win in Congress”
  April 20, 2010 3:24 pm ET

They have plenty of stupid arguments.

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OMG

by digby

UGTBK:

During oral arguments today in the case City of Ontario v. Quon, which considers whether police officers had an expectation of privacy in personal (and sexually explicit) text messages sent on pagers issued to them by the city, the justices of the Supreme Court at times seemed to struggle with the technology involved.

The first sign was about midway through the argument, when Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. – who is known to write out his opinions in long hand with pen and paper instead of a computer – asked what the difference was “between email and a pager?”

Other justices’ questions showed that they probably don’t spend a lot of time texting and tweeting away from their iPhones either.

At one point, Justice Anthony Kennedy asked what would happen if a text message was sent to an officer at the same time he was sending one to someone else.

“Does it say: ‘Your call is important to us, and we will get back to you?’” Kennedy asked.

Justice Antonin Scalia wrangled a bit with the idea of a service provider.

“You mean (the text) doesn’t go right to me?” he asked.

Then he asked whether they can be printed out in hard copy.

“Could Quon print these spicy little conversations and send them to his buddies?” Scalia asked.

WTF?

TTLY

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Threats

by digby

In light of the teabaggers’ crude outing of Lindsay Graham, I took a little trip down memory lane and revisited the history of the right wing attacks on gays as threats to national security. I guess that Mad Men craze has unfortunately put McCarthyism back in vogue.

The teabagger who outed Graham put it in classic terms:

“Sometimes I wonder what it would take to make a person sell their country out like that. There’s one thing that it could be, that I’m going to put out in the open here today. It’s a secret Lindsey Graham has… I hope this secret it isn’t being used as leverage over Senator Graham, so today I think Senator Graham, you need to come forward and tell people about your alternative lifestyle and your homosexuality.”

The logic there is that people are blackmailing Graham into selling out his country because he’s in the closet. (In this case, they are talking about immigration reform, but it’s always something.)

I’m frankly surprised they haven’t used this argument to agitate against Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. But then, they know that the answer to this alleged blackmail threat is to allow people to openly serve, which wouldn’t be the thing at all. How can anyone be blackmailed into selling out their country if they aren’t hiding anything?

Well, now they’re left with simply asserting that gays are “anti-national security” and leaving it at that. I guess it’s supposed to be self-evident:

ThinkProgress obtained a letter the group sent to senators last week, which says that [Judge Marissa] Demeo is an “open, radical lesbian” who supports marriage equality:

As an open, radical lesbian, Demeo has openly condemned the effort to amend our Constitution to protect marriage as a one-man, one-woman union. Demeo supports gay marriage, claiming it is a constitutional right. She also claims that LGBT individuals are equal to racial minorities and can claim protection as minorities under our civil rights laws.

As a DC Superior Court Judge, Demeo would be in a key position to undermine our national security and destroy traditional marriage through her edicts. The DC Superior Court is known to be a steppingstone to the Supreme Court.

Demeo’s radical lesbianism, anti-marriage, anti-national security views are dangerous to our nation. She should not be confirmed to the DC Superior Court.

I don’t know if there’s something unrelated to her “radical lesbianism” that affects her “anti-national security views,” but just stringing all that together in a sentence certainly implies it. It can’t be that she’s subject to blackmail since she’s out, so they’re just coming right out and saying that simply being a lesbian is a threat to national security. And that’s actually what they’ve always thought.

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The Right CW

by digby

Mark Halperin said something on Hardball he seems to think is a truism. Speaking about GOP obstructionism on financial reform, he said “you can’t sustain something if you don’t believe it and it isn’t true. You can have one or the other, but not both.” Is that true? It sounds like it could be, but my observation is that politicians routinely believe things that aren’t true and don’t believe things that are true and also don’t believe things that aren’t true. What’s he talking about?

The upshot of the interview is that the GOP is falling into line and will vote for the bill. Halperin even thinks McConnell will join in. This because they believe that people are really really angry about the banks, which seems logical, but I’m not sure it’s true (at least as compared to other reasons they’re angry.) The NY Times poll from last week said that only 2% named it as the primary thing they’re angry about, far behind things like “partisanship’ and health care reform. 52% of the country thinks Obama is moving the country toward socialism. According to the Pew poll the country is bi-polar on the issue: 58% say that “the government has gone too far in regulating business and interfering with the free enterprise system” but 61% of those polled also say they want stricter regulation of financial companies.” I’m guessing that there are some messaging opportunities for all sides in that.

That’s not to say this isn’t a fertile issue for Democrats. In fact, it’s the most fertile issue, in my opinion, long overdue, and their single best hope for gaining traction on economic issues for 2010. But it isn’t obvious to me that Republicans must see this as something they need to jump on. They already have an argument and it has some resonance, no matter how illogical and stupid it might be: government is the problem, not the solution and if you just let the market work — let the banks fail as the Invisible Hand ordains — everything will be fine. Anything else is a bailout — even regulation. After decades of indoctrination, to an awful lot of people that argument makes more sense than complicated legislation about derivatives and bailout funds.

I’m hopeful that the Village CW is having a beneficial effect for a change and actually leading the Republicans to be fearful that their arguments aren’t working. It’s got to go our way once in a while. But I’m not convinced the GOP follows the Villager CW. Usually, they create it and they may not know what to make of all this.

And anyway, at the end of the day they are going to do mot of what the banks want them to do. So will most of the Democrats. They may not know they are doing what the banks want them to do, but they will be doing it nonetheless. The amount of money being applied to all this isn’t for nothing. However, after watching the bankers’ hubristic behavior lately, I’m slightly optimistic. The Masters of the Universe haven’t been as deft at handling this as one might have expected.

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