The problem with monopolies

Read this. The headline is "Our Problem with Monopolies and Why Everything Sucks." I'm not going to excerpt any part of it here. But it's worth a read.

It's just a couple of anecdotes, nothing more than that. And it's funny, though it wasn't funny for them. But this is at least one of the problems with monopolies.

Remember, we witnessed this same stuff in the Soviet Union. Communism failed because of the inherent problem of monopolies, at least in part. Monopolies in a capitalist system aren't much better.

Of course, some things are inherently monopolistic. We call those things "utilities." They require effective government regulation and political consequences when they screw up too badly.

It doesn't matter much to me if monopolistic businesses want to join the ranks of utilities, with all of the regulation and restrictions that entails, or if they want to get out of the business of being monopolies (one way or another).

My argument is just that we should be actively seeking to eliminate monopolies which aren't considered to be utilities (and regulated that way).

Of course, the devil is in the details. Monopoly power is a problem even when one single company isn't the only option. The question should be more about the degree of market control, and we won't all agree about that.

Extremely large companies have many advantages, from economies of scale to political and economic power, so large companies tend to get larger. That's natural. And that's why we need an active effort to avoid monopolies.

I'm not claiming to have the solutions. It's not likely to be simple, and it's almost certainly not going to be just one solution. But it's something we need to work on. And it's one big reason why money is such a problem in our political system.

These companies have the money to get what they want - and prevent what they don't want - in our political system, especially after such destructive Supreme Court decisions as Citizens United. Well, that's the law of the land now. We're going to have to live with it while we seek to change it.

None of this is going to be easy, and it's all going to require compromises. But we've seen what being stupid, simplistic, and unyielding did to us in November, didn't we?

If we didn't learn from that, this is just going to get worse and worse as the Republican Party continues to dominate the American political landscape.

Gary Johnson

I've actually been hearing people talk up Gary Johnson as an alternative to Hillary Clinton. Yeah, it's crazy on the face of it. He's a Libertarian, for one thing. And he's not going to win, so the only thing voting for him would do is help elect Donald Trump. Republicans want to split the anti-Trump vote.

For both of those reasons, it's an insane idea. But if you really look into his positions, it's even crazier. This article explains how Johnson is even worse than Trump:

If all you’ve done is watched a few clips of Gary Johnson on the internet, it’s easy to be taken in. He knows how to talk like he wants to stand with ordinary folks against those big corporate interests. But Donald Trump does that too, and he doesn’t mean it either. Gary Johnson is a deceitful person who sells himself as Bernie Sanders lite while in reality he has consistently supported a far right agenda that would devastate the country. He hawks his liberal positions on social issues while concealing a deeply disturbing and malicious economic agenda. More than anyone else running, he knows how to put lipstick on the pig that is the Libertarian Party

I'm not going to go into the details. You can read them here, if you want, although the fact that he's a Libertarian should tell you all you really need to know. No one is more faith-based than Libertarians. They tend to follow their beloved philosophy to its most absurd conclusions.

And I certainly don't have a big problem with Hillary Clinton. She's more conservative than I'd like, but most people are. And she's certainly capable and knowledgeable, well-prepared to be our next President of the United States.

It should be a slam-dunk. But there are crazy people on both sides of the political spectrum (most on the right, but not all). Even worse, there are stupid people, ignorant people, gullible people. A democracy is only as good as its citizens. Are we Americans capable of sustaining our democracy? I guess we'll see in a few months, huh?

Seth Meyers: Kansas tax cuts

It's really a shame that Republicans don't care about reality, isn't it? This isn't the first time trickle-down economics has failed - far from it. For one thing, nothing the Bush administration promised us has come true.

But evidence means nothing to right-wing Republicans. They have faith in their dogma, and that's it. Even in Kansas, they wouldn't throw out the governor for getting them in a mess like this. Reality means nothing to people whose ideology isn't based in the real world in the first place.

Republican economics

(Tim Eagan)

What's wrong with America?

Maybe I should have called this "What's right about TYT?" Of course, I don't always agree with them - heck, they don't always agree with each other (and why should they?) - but these kinds of videos are why I keep watching.

CEO pay - a massive scam?

There might be several reasons for this. We've long known, for example, that people tasked with interviewing and hiring applicants for a job - any job, not just a CEO position - generally have a greatly inflated sense of their ability to choose good people.

Research shows that they don't add much, if anything, to a company's chances of getting a good employee, but they think they do. I suppose this applies as much to the CEO as any other position. (And if the CEO is expensive, he must be good, huh?)

But mostly, it's because everyone involved has an incentive to keep CEO pay as high as possible. The directors of corporations are often paid very, very well for doing almost nothing at all. (Indeed, they frequently just rubber-stamp what the CEO is doing.)

They have no incentive to rock the boat and risk their lucrative position. Many are CEOs themselves, or at least want to be, someday. But they're all in that class of people who think that executives are important and lesser employees just interchangeable parts.

I suppose it's prestigious, too, when you have the most expensive CEO. You must be doing something right if you've paid that much for someone to lead the company, right? And that expectation of high pay tends to translate into higher pay for other top executives and for the board of directors, too (but certainly not for the rank-and-file employee).

So the people making these decisions are the people who benefit themselves, in one way or another, from the culture of exorbitantly high CEO pay. Is it any wonder that CEO compensation has skyrocketed (for no benefit to the company, as that devastating graph shows so clearly)?

But CEO pay is even a bigger scam than that. Often, there are "golden parachutes" - or other severance packages - in a CEO contract, which mean that the CEO makes out like a bandit even if he does so poorly he gets fired by the corporation.

Obviously, a CEO would prefer to do well, if only for the prestige. And no one wants to lose his job. But that's the whole point. This makes it less likely that the CEO will be fired, just because the corporation will have to pay him millions of dollars anyway. (Not that the directors necessarily care about that, but this would make them look bad, too.)

Frequently, these are set up to protect a CEO from losing his job in the event of a merger. (Of course, no one would even think of such protections for other employees. In fact, part of the expected benefit of mergers is that they'll be able to fire so many employees afterward.)

But then, kickbacks - excuse me, "retention bonuses" - are also common in mergers. You either bribe a CEO so he doesn't kick up a fuss, or you promise him a position in the merged company (basically, another form of bribery).

Again, only the people in charge of a corporation have anything to say about this, and that's certainly not the rank-and-file employees. Thus, the effect of a merger on rank-and-file employees is ignored (if it's not, as I noted, a positive benefit that many of them will lose their jobs).

But the reason why this is a scam is because none of this tends to benefit the shareholders - you know, the people who are actually supposed to own the company. In corporate America, there's a huge difference between ownership and control. It's the people who control the company who call the shots, and they may or may not own very much of it at all.

These days, with so many of us owning shares of mutual funds in our retirement plans, our "ownership" ends up filtered through multiple organizations. You probably don't even know what companies you, technically, "own" shares of, nor do you have any idea how your mutual fund is voting "your" shares.

It's bad enough for a small shareholder who owns stock directly, but it's even worse if you own stock mutual funds. You have zero control over what you, technically, "own." And the people who do control it tend to have very different interests. Their priority is to keep their own high-paying jobs - and to get as much out of them as possible.

Naturally, it's usually beneficial if the corporation's stock does well, too. But that's seldom the most important thing to the people running it. And even when it is, it's invariably the short-term results that matter. What happens in the long-term, as a result of your actions, makes no difference at all if your pay is based on short-term results (or if you won't be at the company long enough for the long-term results to matter).

Yeah, this is sort of like politicians not looking past the next election, huh? But I won't get into that right now.

This is the article Cenk Uygur is talking about:

Indeed, even when companies boast that they tie executive compensation to company performance, the country’s largest companies routinely game those systems to ensure they get their bonuses and payouts, such as setting targets so low as to be meaningless or fluffing up their reported profits. In one example, Walmart US CEO William Simon was only supposed to get a $1.5 million bonus last year if net sales grew by 2 percent, but he got it anyway when sales only grew by 1.8 percent because the company calculated “adjusted” sales at the necessary rate. Worse, out of the highest-paid CEOs over the past 20 years, nearly four in ten were fired, caught committing fraud, or oversaw a company bailout. Incompetence doesn’t stand in the way of a big payday.

There’s even evidence that paying chief executives lavishly can backfire. Shareholders at the companies that pay their CEOs the most get the worst results, with an average shareholder loss of $1.4 billion. That’s because exorbitant pay breeds overconfidence, leading to bad decisions about weak performance.

None of these findings have kept CEO pay in check. Median chief executive pay jumped above eight figures for the first time last year, hitting $10.5 million. The average pay package was $15.2 million, a 21.7 percent increase since 2010. Workers’ compensation, on the other hand, actually fell during that period, and the ratio of CEO pay to worker pay was 295.9-to-1 last year. Over the last 30 years, chief executive pay has risen 127 times faster than worker pay despite the fact that workers’ productivity has kept increasing.

Uygur was wrong about one thing, though. At the very end of this video, he talks about taxpayers "bailing out" the shareholders. Sorry, but that's a common misconception. Our government "bailed out" corporations, keeping them afloat so our overall economy wouldn't crash and burn, but the shareholders didn't benefit any more than the rest of us.

Again, this is the difference between control and ownership, although all - or almost all - of the employees of these companies benefited, because they kept their jobs. Other companies which did business with those corporations also benefited. And local governments certainly benefited by keeping those people employed and tax money coming in.

But the shareholders lost bigtime. Of course, they were going to lose in any case. If the company had dissolved into bankruptcy, their shares wouldn't have been worth anything then, either. But that "bail out" term is misleading - even to many shareholders.

I have a distant relative - a Republican, of course - who remains angry that his General Motors stock was worthless after the government "bail out." Um, no. Sorry. The executives of General Motors - most of them - got to keep their jobs, as did the other employees, and the company remains in operation. But you don't own the company anymore.

Frankly, if you don't understand that, you shouldn't be investing in stocks in the first place. In a bankruptcy - which was inevitable here - the owners of common stock almost always lose everything. (Creditors can't come after you for anything else, though, which is why the corporate structure is so attractive to investors.)

Bond holders lose, too, to a greater or lesser extent. Of course, in a bankruptcy, all this would be settled by the court,... eventually. But with our economy crashing down around us, we simply couldn't afford to let our banking industry and our automobile industry stop functioning entirely. You think the Great Depression was bad?

The so-called "bail out" kept these corporations running. It kept the employees from losing their jobs - even the executives, in most cases. So, yes, many of the people who caused the problem benefited from government action. That's a shame. But I've never been a big fan of cutting off my nose to spite my face.

Stock market investors in general benefited greatly, too. Shortly after Barack Obama took office (in early March, 2009, to be precise), Wall Street stopped panicking and stock prices turned around. We've been in a booming market ever since.

The people who owned shares of the "bailed out" corporations lost money, but that money was lost, anyway. And as long as they owned other stock, too, they benefited hugely by the rebound. Well, as long as they hadn't sold their shares in a panic (perhaps because they listened to wrong-headed right-wing pundits?).

The other thing to remember is that the people who owned shares of these banks when they were committing fraud on the America people are not necessarily those who owned shares during the crash.

Shares are bought and sold all the time, and if share prices collapse, you'll often see a big swing in ownership, as some people sell at a loss - worried about losing even more if they don't - while vulture investors, or other people making a bet that things will turn around, buy at what they think is a cheap price.

After all, for every buyer, there's a seller, and vice versa. Half of those people are going to be wrong. If we only knew which half, huh? :)

Fighting back

Loudmouth Rick Santelli, whose 2009 rant supposedly inspired the Tea Party, is finally taken to task for being completely wrong about... well, everything in recent years.

Rick Santelli, the CNBC personality who's been credited with giving rise to the tea party movement, was told on-air Monday that he's been wrong about pretty much everything.

The always-wired Santelli, reporting from his perch on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade, was fired up as usual, fulminating about how the Federal Reserve is behind the curve on inflation.

When Santelli asserted that he was right on the issue all along, he drew applause from some Chicago traders.

Enter fellow CNBC analyst Steve Liesman, who proceeded to list off Santelli's litany of errant forecasts.

It's impossible for you to have been more wrong, Rick. Your call for inflation, the destruction of the dollar, the failure of the US economy to rebound. Rick, it’s impossible for you to have been more wrong. Every single bit of advice you gave would have lost people money, Rick. Lost people money, Rick. Every single bit of advice. There is no piece of advice that you've given that's worked, Rick. There is no piece of advice that you've given that's worked, Rick. Not a single one. Not a single one, Rick. The higher interest rates never came, the inability of the U.S. to sell bonds never happened, the dollar never crashed, Rick. There isn’t a single one that’s worked for you.

All the while, Santelli continued to shout over Liesman.

This was two weeks ago, but I really wanted to blog about it, because I pay attention to such things.This was, and is, very important to me.

I retired early, so I live on my investments. At the end of the Bush administration, as right-wing Republicans proved to be wrong about everything they'd promised us, my net worth had dropped to half of what it had been.

As Barack Obama took office, Santelli and other right-wing pundits continued to give bad advice. I remember hearing that rant. I'd heard similar stuff from others who'd been wrong throughout the Bush years. Indeed, I've been hearing it since then, too - for five years now.

Well, I did the exact opposite of what Santelli's words advised. I figured that they couldn't have been more wrong in recent years - leading to the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression - so it wasn't at all likely they'd suddenly get it right this time. (I had, in fact, been taking money out of the market before the crash - though not nearly enough - because of how wrong they'd already been.)

I'm not kidding, that was the best investment move I've ever made in my life! Ignoring their warnings, I scraped together every bit of cash I could and bought stock investments. Sure enough, Santelli's rant marked the market bottom. (His remarks were broadcast in late February, while the market stopped crashing and starting turning up in early March.)

Ever since then, I've been hearing similar rants from right-wingers, and they've also been wrong. (They're consistent, you've got to give them that - consistently wrong.) The stock market - a leading economic indicator - has been booming, with the economy picking up as well, despite universal foot-dragging by Republican politicians.

Rick Santelli still has his soapbox, of course. Being wrong - consistently, demonstrably, astoundingly wrong about pretty much everything - seems to matter not at all to political pundits and television personalities.

Santelli still has his job, and he's still yelling. In fact, he continued to yell all the time that Steve Liesman was pointing out - accurately - how wrong he'd been. Well, no surprise there, huh?

But at least someone has said it - someone on his own network, in fact. I've got to give Liesman a lot of credit for that.

Yet,... note that the traders in the background applauded Santelli. Yes, he'd been wrong about everything. If they'd followed his advice, they'd have lost money - bigtime. But who cares about that, right? Having faith in your dogma is all that matters in the right-wing.

I do feel good, though, when at least someone recognizes how wrong these people have been. We need to keep pointing that out. If might never get through to the Santellis of this world, but maybe the American people will start paying attention, not just to the rants, but to the results.

Libertarian dogma in Kansas: the story of the next decade?

Will this be the story of the next decade? Maybe it should be.

After all, trickle-down economics was the American story of the first decade of this century, and it was a complete and utter failure. Everything the Bush administration promised us turned out to be a lie. We're still trying to dig ourselves out of the hole they dug for us.

But these people are faith-based, not evidence-based. They're not going to abandon their dogma just because it isn't true - especially not with billionaires spending millions to get them elected to office.

TPM covered this, too, along with other states where Republicans are "blowing up the laboratories of democracy':

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback is one of the most notable mad scientists. He’s rapidly taken Kansas to the extreme right, implementing the conservative wish list on abortion, voting rights, and public assistance. His biggest experiment in his laboratory has been a series of major tax bills that shift the impact of taxes down the income spectrum, cutting income taxes and corporate taxes and leaning more heavily on sales taxes.

The only problem? The fiscal disaster his changes created:

“Kansas is now hundreds of millions of dollars short in revenue collection, its job growth has lagged the rest of the nation, and Moody's has cut the state's bond rating. ‘Governor Brownback came in here with an agenda to reduce the size of government, reduce taxes, and create a great economic boom,’ says University of Kansas professor Burdett Loomis. ‘Now there's been a dramatic decline in revenues, no great increase in economic activity, and we've got red ink until the cows come home.’”

Brownback and his allies promised that the cost of the tax cuts would be more than made up for by new economic activity and new people moving to Kansas, but it turns out you can’t save the Economy Fairy just by clapping louder. The likely outcome is more cuts to schools and other state services — and maybe another lost job: Brownback’s own. Surprisingly for a strongly Republican state, Kansas is giving Brownback low approval ratings, and he’s polling dangerously close to his Democratic opponent.

Regardless of the facts, Brownback is happy with the results of the experiment: on yesterday’s edition of MSNBC’s “Daily Rundown,” Brownback insisted that his tax plan would bring economic growth eventually.

Yeah, you don't give up your faith just because it turns out you were wrong. You just say that Jesus will return someday. As long as you don't specify a date, you can keep on believing forever.

I'm particularly interested in this because it's Kansas, our neighbor here in Nebraska, and also because Brownback was once touted as a possible Republican presidential candidate. Of course, with the Koch brothers handing out the checks, there's no shortage of people who'll do whatever they want, regardless of its impact on the rest of us.

But TPM also talks about Louisiana, North Carolina, Texas, and Wisconsin, where rigid ideology trumps reality.

So let’s go back and look at what these laboratories have produced. A simple comparison of the results with the stated hypotheses shows that these experiments haven’t succeeded. As Thom Tillis seeks a seat in the U.S. Senate and Walker, Jindal and Perry all look with one eye towards the White House, we should be asking: have these guys earned the promotion that they’re angling for?

Of course, judging all of these policies against their promised impact — Sam Brownback’s state revenues, North Carolina’s unemployment picture, Scott Walker’s jobs record — is just begging the question. Don’t look at what their experiments are supposed to produce, because you’re bound to be disappointed.

The advocates of the right-wing ideological agenda use job growth and higher revenues as a selling point, but it’s not actually relevant to their goals. The goal is to have government do less stuff for people on the lower end of the economic spectrum, and stay out of the way of the people on the higher end. That’s what they want to build in the laboratories of democracy.

When you put people like Sam Brownback in charge of your laboratory, don’t be surprised when they create a monster.

Good point. Did the Republicans during the Bush years really believe that tax cuts for the rich would create a booming economy and actually raise tax revenue? Did they really believe that the Iraq War would "pay for itself"?

Keep in mind that these were the same people who wanted to "starve the beast," to "drown America in a bathtub." They wanted to bankrupt America, as a way of forcing a smaller government on everyone.

In Kansas, they got tax cuts for the wealthy, as they wanted, but also huge cuts to education, which they also wanted. So,... were they really this inept, or were they just lying about what they expected to happen in the first place?

Or both? I'm not a big fan of conspiracy theories, and I don't think that these people are all that bright, anyway. Plus, they're faith-based. They find it easy to believe whatever they want to believe.

And if the risk is that they have to slash education funding, well, that's not a problem, either, is it?

John Oliver explains the wealth gap

John Oliver does a great job, doesn't he?

This strikes home for me, because my 88-year-old mother worries about estate taxes. The fact that she doesn't have any money doesn't seem to matter. Well, she's a Republican, and she's been convinced that she has to worry about this.

(Face it. Even if she were wealthy, she wouldn't have to worry about it. Her heirs might, but not her. As it is, that's the last thing any of us are worried about!)

Also, I hate to break it to you, but you're not going to win the lottery. You might as well stop wasting your money by buying tickets. Certainly you need to stop wasting time wondering what you'll do with your winnings!

Lotteries are just a tax on dumb people. (OK, OK, people lacking in math skills. Is that better?) Rich people don't want to pay an extra dollar or two in taxes, so they take it from the gullible, instead. And then they promote gullibility on television, to promote the damned thing! Don't get me started.

If there's class warfare in America, you and I are losing. Worse than that, you're probably fighting on the wrong side. Somehow, the astoundingly wealthy have convinced ordinary people to support them, instead of themselves.

These days, children are less likely than their parents to graduate from high school. How's that for a sobering statistic? Kids lucky enough to make it to college come out of it with a staggering level of debt. But the wealthy are making out like bandits, thanks to tax cut after tax cut (and corporate welfare, too, to add insult to injury).

Ever since Ronald Reagan, Republicans have been brilliant in convincing poor and middle-class white people that black people and Hispanic immigrants are the problem. Remember those so-called "Reagan Democrats"? They were working-class white people who'd been manipulated into seeing economics in terms of race (thus supporting economic policies which were not in their own best interests).

Yeah, that was stupid, but it worked. Republicans may be piss-poor at governing, but they can sure take advantage of the worst of human nature, when they want votes. They're also great at taking a serious issue, dumbing it down into two words - "class warfare" - and then repeating it in unison.

It's maddening, but plenty of people are gullible enough to believe that sort of thing. And our news media help not at all. Thanks the gods for comedians, huh?

A rising tide lifts all boats

(Tim Eagan)

Actually, in economics, a rising tide does lift all boats. But you don't get that rising tide by giving more and more to the 1% until their cup runneth over.

If the 99% are doing well, the 1% will be doing even better. But the reverse isn't true. Of course, the 1% own the media and most politicians, and they've got plenty of money for propaganda, which is why there's even a debate about it.

Fantastic news about wealth inequality!

Isn't this wonderful? The 85 richest people in the world have as much money as the 3,500,000,000 poorest people - half the planet!

What an incentive, huh? Just think if you could become one of those 85 people! Let's see, with 7 billion people on the planet (rounded down), your odds would be worse than 1 in 82 million.

The odds are 240 times better that you'll die from exploding fireworks, a thousand times better that you'll be killed by lightning, a million times better than you'll die in an auto accident. I'm not going to guarantee those exact figures, but you get the point.

Of course, many of those 85 people were born rich. They probably didn't inherit all of their wealth, but they started off with advantages most people could only dream of.

And even people like Bill Gates or Warren Buffett didn't start out dirt poor. They didn't start out hungry, with terrible schools and zero prospects. They didn't start out in an America with wealth and income inequality as bad as it is today.

(The Atlantic)

And if you do make it, what about all those other 3,499,999,999 people? Do you care nothing about anyone else? I'd rather that everyone was doing reasonably well, instead of 85 people lording it over billions of peons - even if I were one of those 85 people.

Remember the America where our goal was a strong middle class, instead of a handful of aristocrats and a horde of serfs? Am I showing my age? Yeah, that almost seems quaint these days, doesn't it? Helping the rich become even richer seems to have become the default.

The loon in this video, incidentally, is Kevin O'Leary, and no, he's not on Fox. Oddly enough, he's in Canada. I guess they've got their crazy people there, too, huh?

No free lunch, Congressman?

Funny, isn't it? Or maybe it's just depressing, I don't know.

Note that the "free lunch" part of this video is only about five minutes long. Someone screwed up, because there's a blank screen for awhile, then a different video clip (about how many Americans self-identify as liberals, and what that means).

Rich vs poor - moral hazards and money immunity

The Daily Show
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The Daily Show
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,The Daily Show on Facebook

I know I've been posting a lot of these, but Jon Stewart has really been on a roll this week.

Can you believe that 99% of these moochers have a refrigerator? What's next, running water? Must be nice, huh?

And if you've got a refrigerator, where's the incentive to work? Of course, rich kids can handle their trust funds. That's different, right? I mean, if you inherit money, that doesn't sap your ambition at all.  They've got "money immunity," built up from a lifetime of having everything they want.

That's why we need to eliminate welfare, unemployment benefits, and health care for the poor, yet we also need to eliminate estate taxes. Because the rich can handle getting money for nothing. The poor can't. Right? Right?

These unemployment benefits were always supposed to be temporary, just like the Bush tax cuts for the rich. The difference is that these benefits are still going to be temporary. It's just that, with Republicans dragging their feet every step of the way, it's been slow climbing out of the economic collapse they gave us.

We bailed out the banks - we used tax money to rescue the rich from the results of their own folly - so the investment class is doing great. (Trust me. I'm not rich, but I do live on my investments. The investment class is doing great.) Yes, that was the right thing to do, but it was still rescuing the rich from the disasters they themselves created. But rescuing the poor? Oh, we wouldn't want to do that, would we?

Finally, as Stewart points out, welfare fraud means that we need to eliminate social safety nets for everyone, but bank fraud is just a few bad apples making honest bankers look bad. Double standard, anyone?

But I've got to say, as angry as I get at all of this stuff, what really burns my butt is to watch that smug asshole Stuart Varney talk about how people with little education don't deserve more money,... while right-wingers like him fight to make education as difficult, as ineffective, and as expensive as possible for the poor and even the middle class.

I'm glad that Stewart shows just brief clips from these people, because two seconds of them is about all I can stand!

A third of bank tellers get public assistance?

This is from The Washington Post business section. Hardly a commie-pinko publication, I'd think. But it blows me away:

Almost a third of the country’s half-million bank tellers rely on some form of public assistance to get by, according to a report due out Wednesday.

Researchers say taxpayers are doling out nearly $900 million a year to supplement the wages of bank tellers, which amounts to a public subsidy for multibillion-dollar banks. The workers collect $105 million in food stamps, $250 million through the earned income tax credit and $534 million by way of Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, according to the University of California at Berkeley’s Labor Center. ...

“This is the wealthiest and most powerful industry in the world, and it’s substantially subsidized by our tax dollars, money that we could be spending on child care or pre-K,” said Deborah Axt, co-executive director at Make the Road New York, one of four coalition members.

Profits at the nation’s banks topped $141.3 billion last year, with the median chief executive pay hovering around $552,000, according to SNL Financial. In contrast, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics pegs the median annual income of a bank teller at $24,100, or $11.59 an hour.

OK, sure, we know that lots of Walmart employees are on public assistance. Heck, stores are even holding food drives for them.

And employees of fast food restaurants, currently striking for higher pay, are always mentioned when talking about the working poor. Even our nation's soldiers often get public assistance. I know that.

But bank employees? That just blows my mind! Banks are where the money is, as witness the high salaries of their CEOs. (Their median pay is more than a half million dollars a year, and I'll bet the average is far higher than that.)

Nearly one-third of bank tellers make so little money they get public assistance! That's just nuts, isn't it? We seem to be getting to critical levels of income inequality in this country, especially considering that we're not even talking about the millions of unemployed Americans.

Elizabeth Warren on the Rachel Maddow Show

Two of my favorite people in the same video - how could it get any better than this? :) Seriously, this is why so many of us would like to see Elizabeth Warren in the White House.

After all, they're right. Social Security just needs a very simple fix to be perfectly solvent for the foreseeable future. And really, why should wealthy people - high earners - pay a lower percentage of payroll tax than you do?

That makes no sense at all. But we're so used to giving tax breaks to the wealthy - the very low rates on dividends and capital gains, for example - that we don't seem to think anything of it. Of course the middle class should pay more than the rich, right?

Where's the outrage over the 13% in taxes Mitt Romney paid (in that one year he paid enough that he was even willing to show his tax rate to the American people)? Where's the outrage over hedge fund managers taking advantage of a special loophole made just for them?

No, the outrage, in America, is about poor people - many of them working full time, some even as soldiers in our armed forces - getting food stamps! The outrage is that ordinary people in America, who've worked their entire life, actually expect to get the Social Security benefits they were promised when they paid into the plan.

Insane, isn't it? And you know, wealthy people tend to live longer, on average, than the rest of us, too. So they take advantage of Social Security and Medicare longer than middle class people, while paying a lower tax rate to support it. Why is there no outrage about this?

Most Democratic politicians are terrified to even mention such things. Well, they rely on the wealthy for campaign donations, too. But Elizabeth Warren is making sure these issues are heard. I like that!

Incidentally, this video is from just before Warren's appearance:

Dambisa Moyo - is China the new model?

Interesting, isn't it? Just look at what America is doing with our own democratic system. Half of us don't even want to make sure we have access to healthcare, let alone the rest of the world. Half of us don't even want to educate ourselves, let alone see others being educated.

Just recently, Republicans brought our country to the brink of default, because they couldn't accept that they'd lost an election. Even getting over that hurdle only gave us a three-month breathing space, with right-wingers threatening to go through with their threats next time.

This has happened twice already in recent years, and each time it does, it damages our economy. Now we're going to go through it every three months? No one is doing this to America. We Americans are doing it to ourselves - not all of us, admittedly, but still, what example does this show to the rest of the world?

Here's Thomas L. Friedman:

Having lived and worked abroad for many years, I’m sensitive to the changing ways that foreigners look at America. Over the years, I’ve seen an America that was respected, hated, feared and loved. But traveling around China and Singapore last week, I was confronted repeatedly with an attitude toward America that I’ve never heard before: “What’s up with you guys?” ...

“Few Americans are aware of how much America has lost in this recent episode of bringing the American economy to the edge of a cliff,” said Kishore Mahbubani, the dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy here, and the author of “The Great Convergence: Asia, the West, and the Logic of One World.” “People always looked up to America as the best-run country, the most reasonable, the most sensible. And now people are asking: ‘Can America manage itself and what are the implications for us’ ” — if it can’t? ...

Worse, whenever you’d visit China or Singapore, it was always the people there who used to be on the defensive when discussing democracy. Now, as an American, you’re the one who wants to steer away from that subject. After all, how much should we be bragging about a system where it takes $20 million to be elected to the Senate; or where a majority of our members of Congress choose their voters through gerrymandering rather than voters choosing them; or where voting rights laws are being weakened; or where lawmakers spend most of their free time raising money, not studying issues; or where our Congress has become a forum for legalized bribery; or where we just had a minority of a minority threaten to undermine America’s credit rating if we didn’t overturn an enacted law on health care; or where we can’t pass even the most common sense gun law banning assault weapons after the mass murder of schoolchildren?

I hear similar remarks from Europeans who are just astounded at the level of superstition in America. OK, call it religion if you like, but when such large numbers of the population don't accept evolution, global warming, or even the age of the Earth - 6,000 years old? really? - that's superstition, whether there are religious beliefs behind it or not.

Face it, most of these examples are issues and policies being pushed by the religious right. And yet, our only enemies in the world are also religious nuts. I've heard arguments similar to those in the video above, but with the idea that we should spread secularism worldwide before we even try to spread democracy. But as a nation, we're horribly faith-based ourselves.

What does that show rational observers in developing nations?

And do we really have 'private capitalism' in America? To some extent, sure. But in court cases like Citizens United, we've basically legalized corruption. How different is this from 'state capitalism,' if corporations run our government?

Yesterday, I posted Robert Reich's video about income inequality. Well, did you see that graph of income inequality in the video above? Did you see how income inequality is getting worse in America at the same time it's getting better in China? What does that tell the rest of the world?

Finally, how many people in America don't even bother to vote? How many don't vote regularly, in every election? We end up with a minimum of a minimum picking candidates in primary elections (this is why fanatics can control the Republican Party, even as a minority within the party), and with a minimum even bothering to pick between the two once you get to the general election.

Why should the rest of the world care about democracy when we obviously don't? Maybe China does have the better model government. For decades now, Americans have apparently been trying to demonstrate that we don't.

Republicans are winning

This has been going on for decades. With lots and lots of money - your money, some of it, if you own any stocks or mutual funds - and a relentless, uniform message, the right-wing has been shaping the conversation in America.

Remember the "you didn't build that" lie from the 2012 election? It was a lie, a baldfaced lie repeated shamelessly by people who knew that it was a lie. But the entire Republican Party joined the effort to repeat that lie over and over and over again until it became accepted fact. (Al Gore's claim to have invented the Internet - which also didn't happen - is the same thing.)

Can you imagine that happening in the Democratic Party? Sure, some Democrats will lie. Some will repeat lies. But not all. Heck, just getting all Democrats facing in the same direction is nearly impossible. And many Democrats value the truth (or don't value goosestepping to order, at least).

Polls show that the American public tends to be more liberal than even the Democratic Party, let alone the GOP. But right-wing Republicans shape the discussion, and timid or ineffectual Democratic politicians tend to follow along like sheep.

Even when the Republican Party loses elections - even when it has a 24% approval rating - it gets the media following its lead, and its opponents, too. As the Republican Party rushes to the right, the Democratic Party fills in the vacuum behind it - thus, also moving to the right.

Even when Republican politicians are completely batshit crazy, they'll fight like hell for what they want. Sure, they'll lie. They won't stop at anything, really. (Heck, they're still using that racist dog-whistle, so how naive can you be if you think they'll stop at anything else?)

Democrats,... well, sometimes it's hard to tell if Democrats believe in anything at all. Why is that? Is it just incompetence? Is it that lies are simple, while the truth is complicated? Or is it the simple fact that Democrats also need funding from the 1% in order to get elected?

Libertarians in America

(Mario Piperni)

There are some very interesting findings in this recent American Values Survey: In Search of Libertarians in America, from the Public Religion Research Institute. (H/T to Mario Piperni)

The survey identifies libertarians through their answers to a series of questions in regard to economic policy, personal liberty, and foreign affairs. Answers at one end of the scale are considered libertarian; answers at the other are considered communalist. In other words, 'communalists' are just people with the opposite beliefs to libertarians.

Note that 'communalism' isn't exactly a made-up word, but there seem to be many different definitions of it, most of which don't apply here. Here, it's just the opposite to libertarianism. After all, we don't really seem to have a word for that, do we? In an online search, the only antonym I could find is necessitarianism, which doesn't seem to apply at all.

Maybe that's why we hear so much about libertarians these days, when their exact opposite is at least as numerous in America:

(Public Religion Research Institute)

According to a newly developed Libertarian Orientation Scale, less than 1-in-10 (7%) Americans are consistent libertarians, and an additional 15% lean libertarian. At the other end of the spectrum, an equal number of Americans are consistent communalists (7%), and an additional 17% lean communalist. A majority (54%) of Americans have a mixed ideological profile, falling in between libertarian and communalist orientations.

I knew that libertarians were a small minority in America, and I expected that most of us would end up somewhere in the middle, but I guess I wouldn't have expected that consistent 'communalists' were equally as numerous as consistent libertarians, and that even more Americans lean communalist than lean libertarian.

That's surprising, isn't it? Think about the rhetoric in American politics these days. 'Socialist' is what you call your opponent just before you compare him to Hitler or accuse him of being the Anti-Christ. The debate has swung so far to the right that even 'liberal' has become a dirty word. (Admittedly, 'libertarian' isn't the same thing as 'conservative,' though it often seems so.)

Obviously, the exact numbers depend on where you divide the responses. What do you decide is the cutoff between "consistent" and "lean" libertarian? What do you decide is "lean," rather than "mixed"? None of that is very precise, nor can it be.

But the fact that there are at least as many people who have the exact opposite ideas to libertarianism as there are libertarians,... that's really significant, don't you think? But we don't seem to hear a peep out of those people. They don't seem to get noticed at all.

(For the record, I took this survey myself and ended up as "lean communalist." That seems about right. Certainly, I tend to reject libertarianism.)

The rest of the survey was interesting, too. Some things didn't surprise me at all:

Nearly all libertarians are non-Hispanic whites (94%), more than two-thirds (68%) are men, and more than 6-in-10 (62%) are under the age of 50.

Other things were interesting, but not too unexpected:

Libertarians make up a smaller proportion of the Republican Party than other key conservative groups.  Only 12% of self-identified Republicans are libertarians, compared to 20% of Republicans who identify with the Tea Party, 33% who identify with the religious right or conservative Christian movement, and 37% who identify as white evangelical Protestant.

Yeah, that's why Ron Paul could never make any headway in the GOP primaries. Libertarians are a very small proportion of Republicans - more than in the general population, true, but still pretty small. They're very loud, but they're a distinct minority.

But I was more surprised by other findings:

• Nearly 6-in-10 (57%) libertarians oppose making it more difficult for a woman to get an abortion, a proportion identical to the general population. ...
• Seven-in-ten (70%) libertarians favor allowing doctors to prescribe lethal drugs to help terminally ill patients end their lives. ...
• More than 7-in-10 (71%) libertarians favor legalizing marijuana. ...
• Unlike most other social issues, libertarians remain socially conservative on same-sex marriage. While a majority (59%) of libertarians oppose same-sex marriage, they are significantly less opposed than Republicans overall (67%) and than other conservative-leaning groups such as Tea Party members (73%) and white evangelical Protestants (80%).

With the first three issues, I was surprised that the numbers were so low. I mean, 96% of libertarians oppose 'Obamacare,' but only 71% favor legalizing marijuana? And when it comes to letting women control their own bodies, libertarians are no different from the general population. (Of course, remember that more than two-thirds of libertarians are men.)

But it's that last issue that just floors me. 59% of libertarians oppose same-sex marriage? How in the world does that make any sense?

Of course, these aren't self-described libertarians. These are people who actually hold libertarian views on a variety of issues. (In fact, the question about legalizing marijuana was one of the questions they used to identify libertarians in the first place. So it seems especially surprising to see that get only 71% support, doesn't it?)

Anyway, I thought the whole thing was very interesting. It really makes you think, wouldn't you agree?

Libertarians tend to be young, at least compared to other Republicans. And like other Republicans, they're almost entirely non-Hispanic white and more than two-thirds men. But even within the GOP, they're a small minority. And in America as a whole, there are at least as many - if not more - people who hold completely opposite views.

But libertarians are loud. They're organized, they're angry, and they have a lot of money behind them, while their opposites don't even have a name to call themselves. (I doubt if you could get a majority to agree with 'communalist,' don't you?)

Furthermore, there's this:

Libertarians are much more likely than Americans overall to pay attention to what is going on in government and politics. Fewer than 4-in-10 (38%) Americans report paying attention to politics and government most of the time or always. About 1-in-5 (19%) Americans say they pay attention about half of the time, roughly one-third (32%) say they pay attention some of the time and 10% say they do not pay any attention.

Among libertarians, a majority (56%) report that they pay attention to politics always or most of the time. Libertarians and members of the Tea Party are equally likely to report regular engagement with politics.

As the survey goes on to note, only 41% of Americans always vote in primary elections (a national disgrace!). More Republicans than Democrats vote in primaries (and more Republicans than Democrats are even registered to vote). But 53% of libertarians always vote in primaries (and 62% of Tea Party members). That gives them a real advantage in the GOP.

And there's this, too:

Nearly 9-in-10 (89%) libertarians have an unfavorable view of the Democratic Party, including nearly two-thirds (64%) who have a very unfavorable opinion of the party.

Maybe the opposite of "libertarian" is "Democrat"? :)

Reprieve ... but at what cost?

The hostage drama has ended, for now. Republicans in the House of Representatives have lowered their gun, agreeing not to pull the trigger for another three months, at least. We've got a reprieve on the government shutdown and on the threat of default,... for now.

But at what cost?

Containers of goods idling at ports. Reduced sales at sandwich shops in downtown Washington. Canceled vacations to national parks and to destinations abroad. Reduced corporate earnings forecasts. Higher interest payments on short-term debt.

Even with the shutdown of the United States government and the threat of a default coming to an end, the cost of Congress’s gridlock has already run well into the billions, economists estimate. And the total will continue to grow even after the shutdown ends, partly because of uncertainty about whether lawmakers might reach another deadlock early next year.

A complete accounting will take months once the government reopens and the Treasury resumes adding to the country’s debt. But economists said that the intransigence of House Republicans would take a bite out of fourth-quarter growth, which will affect employment, business earnings and borrowing costs. The ripple from Washington will be felt around the globe.

“We saw huge effects during the summer of 2011, with consumer confidence hitting a 31-year low in August and third-quarter G.D.P. growing just 1.4 percent,” said Beth Ann Bovino, chief United States economist at Standard & Poor’s, referring to earlier brinkmanship over the debt ceiling. “Given that this round of debt ceiling negotiations” took place during a shutdown, she said, “the impact on the economy could be even more severe.”

And we get to do this all over again in three months!

Our economy took a huge hit from this two years ago, the last time Republicans took us to the brink of default. It has taken another huge hit this time. (Yet you can bet those same Republicans will campaign on how anemic the economic recovery has been, the next time they're running for re-election.)

This is also the full faith and credit of the United States they're playing with. The American dollar is the world's reserve currency. It's as good as gold, worldwide - better, because it's far, far more stable than gold. Despite the hysteria from right-wingers about America's budget deficits, American government bonds are the choice of safety and stability not just for senior citizens here, but for cautious investors around the world.

But for how long? Will Republicans even have to force default in order to destroy the full faith and credit of the United States of America? Won't these repeated threats, these manufactured crises, these continuing demonstrations of politics over country have the same effect, eventually?

Here's Sen. Elizabeth Warren:

I'm glad that the government shutdown has ended, and I'm relieved that we didn't default on our debt.

But I want to be clear: I am NOT celebrating tonight.

Yes, we prevented an economic catastrophe that would have put a huge hole in our fragile economic recovery. But the reason we were in this mess in the first place is that a reckless faction in Congress took the government and the economy hostage for no good purpose and to no productive end.

According to the S&P index, the government shutdown had delivered a powerful blow to the U.S. economy. By their estimates, $24 billion has been flushed down the drain for a completely unnecessary political stunt.

$24 billion dollars. How many children could have been back in Head Start classes? How many seniors could have had a hot lunch through Meals on Wheels? How many scientists could have gotten their research funded? How many bridges could have been repaired and trains upgraded?

The Republicans keep saying, "Leave the sequester in place and cut all those budgets." They keep trying to cut funding for the things that would help us build a future. But they are ready to flush away $24 billion on a political stunt.

So I'm relieved, but I'm also pretty angry.

We have serious problems that need to be fixed, and we have hard choices to make about taxes and spending. I hope we never see our country flush money away like this again. Not ever.

It's time for the hostage taking to end. It's time for every one of us to say, "No more."

Amen. But will it end? 144 Republicans in the House of Representatives (and 18 in the Senate) still voted to default on our debts, at the end. That's almost two thirds of the Republicans in the House! It was a minority of Republicans who joined with the Democrats to end this debacle.

Note that Republicans control the House as a minority party. In the last election, Republican candidates received more than a million fewer votes than their Democratic opponents, overall. But they've gerrymandered election districts so badly that they were easily able to stay in power anyway.

Those people are unlikely to give up trying to force their wishes on the American people. And the rest of the Republican Party went along with them, right up until the very brink of default, until polls showed how disastrous that was going to be for their whole party.

But for individual Republicans, it's just the reverse, at least in the House. Because of those gerrymandered election districts, it's the sane Republicans who are under threat of losing their job, the sane Republicans who are threatened with a primary opponent from the Tea Party. (That's why Republican Senators - yes, those people who've been filibustering everything - were actually more reasonable than their colleagues in the House!)

Gerrymandering election districts didn't just guarantee the House for the Republicans, it gave the craziest Republicans a real advantage (well, that and the GOP's notorious 'Southern strategy' of deliberately wooing the crazies).

My point is, this has cost America bigtime,... and it's far from over. We've a three-month reprieve, yes, but that's all. Oh, it's much better than actually defaulting on our debts, but these repeated political games may well have the same effect, eventually. And it's already meant a huge cost to real Americans.

Elizabeth Warren on the debt ceiling

Again, another great speech by Elizabeth Warren! So, when is she going to run for president? She's got my vote.