politics

Long Division in American Politics – the money trail

January 26, 2012
Long Division in American Politics – the money trail

A recent John Stewart Daily Show that explored Mitt Romney’s recent release of income tax data got me to thinking about long division. Romney’s income of roughly $22 million per year is so large that it kind of disappears into the haze of too much information. But, get out your pencil and divide that by 365 days to discover that his income is $60,000 per day. That is slightly over $10,000 more than the median family income in the US. 2010 = $49,455. Then, I thought about corporate money in government. In 2011, $3.27 billion dollars was reported officially as expenditures on lobbying in Washington.  Again with the long division, that is $6.1 million per member of Congress. Remember this is lobbying dollars, not the super pac money or all of the campaign contributions Congress people spend most of their time soliciting. Or, to divide the $3.27 billion by the number of officially registered lobbyists in...

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Charts from Mother Jones Illustrate That the Rich Have Won the Class War

November 19, 2011
Charts from Mother Jones Illustrate That the Rich Have Won the Class War

I came on a set of graphics in Mother Jones, “It’s the Inequality, Stupid: Eleven charts that explain what’s wrong with America” that illustrate what you probably already know. But, a simple refresher course in some of the reasons why the rich are rich. The 99% already have this base covered. Here are some of the charts I liked. Read the whole article at the Mother Jones website. Income (constant dollars) Note that if median family income had simply kept up with inflation over this period it would have grown to $92,000 instead of $50,000.                         Are Corporations Over Taxed? Mother Jones does not make it clear that the Payroll Tax is also a tax on individuals. To add insult to injury the Payroll Tax is not levied beyond the first %106,800 of income.                    ...

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A Strange Sense of “Expertise” in the Cain Case in Milwaukee

November 17, 2011

This week’s installment of the Republican race for the honor of running for President bought us the eye-rolling scene of Herman Cain rolling his eyes trying to answer the question, “Do you approve of how Obama handled the Libyan matter?” The media leapt on this as an example of Cain’s lack of knowledge and expertise in foreign policy. What do they think is expertise? If one simply read the daily newspaper or watched the evening news with any regularity over the last year one could readily come up with a range of critiques of Obama’s policy in Libya, none of them expert, though many trenchant and much more interesting than Cain’s fumbling. This as not a lack of expertise in foreign policy. This is an example of a man who clearly is not even involved in the day to day news of world let alone a deep thinker. In...

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Economics Explained for 6th Graders

September 23, 2011

I ran across this somewhat longish article at NakedCapitalism.com. Even if you are not a 6th grader you will find this interesting. In part, Andrew Dittmer, who in fact has taught 6th graders, our author,  points out that modern economics is based on certain assumptions that render  much of the application of advanced mathematics in economics false, misleading, yet amazingly resistant to criticism by non-economists exactly because of the use of obscurantist fog of mathematics. One of these assumptions is that players in a market have “perfect information” – this is summed up in action by Wikipedia as “Perfect information would practically mean that all consumers know all things, about all products, at all times (including knowing the probabilistic outcome of all future events) , and therefore always make the best decision regarding purchases.”  There has been plenty of criticism of this concept even by economists, yet this concept is still embedded. Another assumption is that people will...

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FBI Training – another clever use of the Cartesian coordinate system

September 14, 2011
FBI Training – another clever use of the Cartesian coordinate system

I sometimes wonder why I poke at my Wired Magazine app almost every day…. Today brought a little reward, if one considers revelations of such nonsense as a reward. Here is a chart from this training manualon “mainstream” Muslims: How anyone with any level of day-to-day common sense, or rudimentary knowledge of history, any history, could believe that the followers of the Torah or Bible have been becoming less violent must be on some pretty serious drugs. I will leave it to those with a more serious understanding of the relative bellicosity of believers in the Koran to weigh in on the horizontal line…..

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Parallels and Prescience – on the Tenth Anniversary of 9/11 and the “War on Terror”

September 12, 2011
Parallels and Prescience – on the Tenth Anniversary of 9/11 and the “War on Terror”

Having successfully avoided much of the national moment for our politicians to blather on about the true meaning of 9/11, I was struck this morning by parallel between our “War on Terror” and our longest war, the “War on Drugs” (I have written earlier about this here). Some may be offended initially by this comparison. The War on Drugs was invented for the most cynical of purposes by one of our more craven Presidents, President Nixon1. But, when one observes the gigantic interests in Federal, State, and local bureaucracies (think your local police) and corporate worlds that immediately lined up to feed at this trough of a war, a bit of cynicism can not help but creep into mind. Nixon’s invention spawned a plethora of Federal, State, and local bureaucracies consuming vast resources and spreading around the globe. Meanwhile, our social and criminal policies gauranteed high prices for the drug lords thus supporting a marketing...

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Idiocy in America

September 8, 2011

The recent scene of Jon Huntsman, Republican candidate for President, stating that he believed in evolution surrounding this with the parenthetical comment, “call me crazy”, sets out in stark relief how idiotic our politics and body politic are at this moment. Every other Republican running for President has disavowed evolution. Even the middling muddler from Massachusetts, Mitt Romney, could not bring himself to state a positive position on this bit of science. A 2009 Gallup poll showed that only 36% of Americans believed in Darwinism. Here we are more than 70 years after the Scopes trial and Americans continue to be enormously ignorant of the science and technology that underlies much of our day to day lives. They show no increased interest in the amazing findings of research in so many fields. This denial of fact-based thinking is tied up with the persistence of religions in their many guises....

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Job Creation – A Pliable (Fraudulent) Rhetoric in the Current Debate over Debt and Debt Ceilings

July 12, 2011

When it comes to job creation both Democrats and Republicans reflexively trot out small business as the engine of growth. These flights of breathy admiration for plucky small business owners are part of our national myth, right up there with cowboys. There probably is some truth in this myth as long as you accept the other side of the equation which includes the fact that jobs in small businesses are lower paying and less stable than those in the middle and big size companies. But to demonstrate the extent to which today’s political environment has lost any sense of consistency, we now have the Republicans saying that any tax increases on the wealthy and corporations are “job killers”. Since when have wealthy individuals created jobs? They don’t start new entrepreneurial ventures. They do buy extra vacation homes and fly to Vermont and Colorado and Switzerland more frequently in their...

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Where, Oh, Where Did Our National Debt Come From?

July 8, 2011
Where, Oh, Where Did Our National Debt Come From?

The political rhetoric of the current moment, chiefly flowing from Republicans, but barely challenged by the Democrats, describes tales of profligate over-spending by the Federal government matched with burdensome taxation. While it is true that Federal spending is higher proportionately than post-WWII norms, social programs are not the source of this over spending. One only has to look back to George Bush’s two terms to see the true sources of the debt.  War, Wars, More Wars First up are our profligate wars. A recent study at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies finds that since 2001 we have spent between $2.3 and $2.7 trillion on our adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan.All of these dollars are deficit dollars. George Bush did not ask for increased taxes to fund his wars. Barack Obama has not asked for increased taxes to fund his continuation of the Bush wars and now his new war in Libya....

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America’s Longest War – a socio-political-military disaster – indicted by Global Commission on Drug Policy

June 12, 2011
America’s Longest War – a socio-political-military disaster – indicted by Global Commission on Drug Policy

Report of the Global Commission on Drug Policy Last week this commission released its report,  ”War on Drugs“. This once again brings into focus our longest war, Nixon’s War on Drugs. Here are the first two paragraphs from the executive summary: The global war on drugs has failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world. Fifty years after the initiation of the UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, and 40 years after President Nixon launched the US government’s war on drugs, fundamental reforms in national and global drug control policies are urgently needed. Vast expenditures on criminalization and repressive measures directed at producers, traffickers and consumers of illegal drugs have clearly failed to effectively curtail supply or consumption. Apparent victories in eliminating one source or trafficking organization are negated almost instantly by the emergence of other sources and traffickers. Repressive efforts directed at consumers impede public health...

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