“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” —Mark Twain

Torrid argument does not good policy make. Republicans are setting up an across-the-board 20 percent cut in non-security discretionary spending. There is management required to get government fit, but raw bullies have not the wit to do it.

A. Once upon a time, a Latin American political party promised to help motorists save money on gasoline. How? By building highways that ran only downhill.

B. Never mind the war on terror, the party’s main concern seems to be the war on arithmetic.

C. The only way to balance the budget by 2020 while simultaneously (a) making the Bush tax cuts permanent and (b) protecting all the programs Republicans say they won’t cut (c) is to completely abolish the rest of the federal government.

Tax cuts & Republican donations.
Bush tax cuts cost us $2.7 trillion in the first eight years.
The 25 top speculators average $1 billion each given tax rate of 17%.
People earning over $200,000 but paying no tax skyrocketed under Bush.
Twice before so much is held by so few—the late 1920s and the robber barons in the 1880s.

We a nation not ours.

White House view:

“On the economy, you said earlier this is going to take an ‘enormous amount of time.’ How long?”

“Well, I think it’s going to take several years from–I think getting through a recession as deep as the one that we were faced with, the sheer amount of job loss, the shock to the system, shock to our financial system, the change in our housing market. We’re dealing with, in many ways, if you look at what happened and what cascaded downward all at a certain period of time, you’re dealing with sort of the perfect storm.”

Three million protesters marched in France yesterday. [woot]

What a phenomena.

Timothy Noah writes at Slate. This 30-year trend “may represent the most significant change in American society in your lifetime,”  “and it’s not a change for the better.”

Part 1
Introducing the Great Divergence:
Trying to understand income inequality, the most profound change in American society in your lifetime.

Part 2
The Usual Suspects Are Innocent:
Neither race nor gender nor the breakdown of the American family created the Great Divergence.

Part 3
Did Immigration Create the Great Divergence?
Why we can’t blame income inequality on the post-1965 immigration surge.

Part 4
Did Computers Create Inequality?
No. The tech boom’s impact was no greater than that of previous technological upheavals during the 20^th century.

Part 5
Can We Blame Income Inequality on Republicans?
Yes, but for the very richest beneficiaries the trend has been bipartisan.

Part 6
The Great Divergence and the Death of Organized Labor:
How has the decline of the union contributed to income inequality?

Part 7
The Great Divergence and International Trade:
Trade didn’t create inequality, and then it did.

Part 8
The Stinking Rich and the Great Divergence:
Executive compensation took off in the 1980s and 1990s. Is it to blame?

Part 9
How the Decline in K-12 Education Enriches College Graduates:
When the workforce needed to be smarter, Americans got dumber.

Another type of regulatory capture? Being outright dumb.

Reporting from Sacramento — Scores of people convicted of crimes such as rape, elder abuse and assault with a deadly weapon are permitted to care for some of California’s most vulnerable residents as part of the government’s home health aide program.

It’s a gray area they say. No it’s not. It’s just sloppy and lazy. And dumb.

Two years have passed since the financial crises erupted and we have only started to realize how costly it is likely to be.

The Bank of England estimates losses in future output could reach 100% of world GDP.

!

c. len bullard:

The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

Rally to Restore Sanity

It’s set up as a joke, but there’s a serious point at the heart of it.

Dana Blankenhorn asserts, “It may be the most important political event of the year, putting the politics of our time on trial and calling for its rejection.

“He’s calling a new generation to renew the work before us, reasonably, honorably, purposefully, sanely, quietly, which is all the President is asking of us as well, and what our history demands of us.”

Ezra Klein reacts to the GOP’s Pledge to America:

Their policy agenda is detailed and specific — a decision they will almost certainly come to regret.

Because when you get past the adjectives and soaring language, the talk of inalienable rights and constitutional guarantees, you’re left with a set of hard promises that will increase the deficit by trillions of dollars, take health-care insurance away from tens of millions of people, create a level of policy uncertainty businesses have never previously known, and suck demand out of an economy that’s already got too little of it.

Economist Mark Thoma sums it up:

There don’t seem to be any new ideas here, just a promise to undo what’s been done since the Republicans lost power.

Why would we want to return to the policies that brought us
→ a stagnant middle class even in the best of times,
→ widening inequality,
→ out of control financial markets,
→ the biggest recession in recent memory,
→ declining rates of health care coverage,
→ threats to Social Security and to social insurance,
→ tax policies that reinforce inequality
→ big holes in the budget,
→ false claims that tax cuts more than pay for themselves, and
→ two wars that have brought Social Security and Medicare — programs vital to middle and low income households under increasing financial pressure?

Comment snippets:

• Didnt they have a ten point Contract With America when Gingrich took over? Let’s see… one was to run a balanced budget.

• The plan is to cut transfer payments that provide food and health care to children while cutting taxes, increasing defense spending, the deficit and expanding the size of government under the guise of protecting morals.

• Hey. Some of us get off on that kind of thing. Kall it Kinky Economics. Trickle down was just foreplay.

Republicans are now pledging to stop their spending spree? These Republicans that took a record $236 billion surplus into a record $1.3 trillion deficit? Sick.

The ship of State has a large hole in the bottom where the fuel tank used to be. The Reagan Solution is to chop more holes while invoking Reagan’s name.

“I’ve made clear over the last 20 months, when Republicans were in control of Congress we made our share of mistakes,” Boehner said.  Banana republic, here we come.

The mall.
They’re like little colonies of corpocracy beamed down from the capitalist mothership.

Let’s face it. Malls are soul-deadening, community-crushing, job-vaporizing, passion-flattening, purpose-destroying, innovation-sucking, future-munching vectors of the lethal disease known as consumer capitalism that’s eating America from the inside out.

Er, Walmart is a little different in China. [16 pics]

The bank. The reason banks blew up is that they aren’t really banks.

They are giant leveraged structured hedge funds where your deposits are casino chips in the hands of Gamblers Anonymous. So for Pete’s sake, will someone create a bank for the rest of us already?

The stock market. Gambling with our hard-earned cash sounds about as smart as eating a pound of plutonium.

It’s about time someone invented a stock market for actual investment; real, committed, long-haul, patient capital, not just myopic, narrow, by-the-nanosecond, rumor-mill driven speculation.

Get the idea?

If we could reimagine a better capitalism, what would we want — and where would we begin?

Because whether we like it or not, a Great Stagnation is choking us in the belching, noxious fumes of an industrial age, and it won’t go away just because we want it to. But it will when we cause it to.

Oil. Cash. Disruption.
Step #1: Eliminate whatever is stupid.

Brian Westerhaus’ blog:

Backed-up traffic costs $100 billion per year and wastes more than 2.5 billion gallons of fuel, not to mention the uncountable human hours —some of them yours.

What if traffic lights were smart?

Each set of lights is a sensor that feeds information about the traffic conditions, calculates the flow of vehicles, and works out how long the lights stay green in order to clear the road.  Each set of lights can estimate for itself how best to adapt to the conditions expected at the next moment.

Self-organizing traffic!

Self-controlled traffic lights detect the randomly occurring gaps in traffic.

The flow of traffic is managed as if it were a fluid. Travel time is significantly less, red lights are shorter and more naturally distributed. Does not fight natural fluctuations by trying to impose a rhythm.

David Degraw:

News reports are out saying that in 2009 the poverty rate “skyrocketed” to 43.6 million – up from 39.8 million in 2008, which is the largest year-to-year increase, and the highest number since statistics have been recorded – putting the poverty rate for 2009 at 14.3 percent.

This is obviously a tragedy and horrific news. However, this is blatant propaganda.

The Census Bureau uses a long outdated method to calculate the poverty rate. The Census is measuring poverty based on costs of living metrics established back in 1955 – 55 years ago!

These numbers are based on: $22,050 for a family of four. Let me repeat that: $22,050 for a family of four. That breaks down to $5513 per person, per year. I don’t know about you, but I can’t imagine living in the United States on $459 per month.

If you increase that measure by just a small increment, to $25,000 for a family of four, you are now looking at nearly 100 million Americans in poverty.

Let’s get real. Someday. Please.

While the economic top half of one percent now fears a ‘double-dip’, the overwhelming majority of Americans are in the same downward spiral they’ve been on since Reagan.

A recent study done by Capgemini and Merrill Lynch Wealth Management found that a mere one percent of Americans are hoarding $13 TRILLION in ‘investible wealth’.

Yep, one percent of Americans are hoarding $13 TRILLION in ‘investible wealth’ and that doesn’t even factor in all the money they have hidden in offshore accounts.

Sita Sings the Blues:

A Free Culture Success Story.

Why I insisted on authentic songs, what is and is not property, how software is culture, the difference between Share Alike (copyleft) and other Creative Commons licenses, why I paid to legally license the old songs, how noncommercial copyright infringement is still illegal, legal costs, benefits of audience sharing & decentralized distribution, the Sita Sings the Blues Merchandise Empire (sitasingstheblues.com/store), open-licensed merch, audience goodwill, how fans support artists, rivalrous vs. non-rivalrous goods, the Creator Endorsed Mark, migrating Flash files to open formats, gift income, commerce without monopolies, why I encourage legal sharing, and more.

For those with longer attention spans, click here.
Or meet Nina Paley here.

very hip: rivalrous vs. non-rivalrous goods

Screen captured from Wall Street Journal.

ey wot?

In the last forty years, Americans have gone from citizens to consumers, from consumers to consumables. Thus no human being has any worth who is not a member of the wealth tribe. There is a treatment for this condition, which means that there is hope. For their own health and well-being we must take away as much of the ill-gotten gains of the rich as we can, leaving them only a fraction of their former stashes. $$$ is just as addicting a drug as crack but it affects a great many more people, not just those immediately surrounding the addict.

pic posted here 09/16

“When I hear Democrats griping and groaning and saying …

‘the health care plan didn’t have a public option’, and … ‘the financial reform — there was a provision here that I think we should have gotten better’, or, ‘you know what, yes, you ended the war in Iraq, the combat mission there, but you haven’t completely finished the Afghan war yet’, this or that or the other, I say ‘folks, wake up’.

“This is not some academic exercise, as Joe Biden put it, don’t compare us to the Almighty; compare us to the alternative.”

Have Americans gone mad?

Republicans need to make a net gain of 39 seats to retake the House of Representatives. The consensus is they will, and probably with something to spare; some analysts are even predicting a repeat of the 52-seat swing in 1994, when a pugnacious minority leader named Newt Gingrich led Republicans back to command of the House for the first time in 40 years.

You sense a flailing around for the vanished certainties once encapsulated in the notion of ‘the American Dream’, and a venomous search for scapegoats in the establishment that has failed them.

emphasis: venomous

Don’t they call this a hockey stick graph?

It is unquestionable that the last century has been marked by a warming trend having no equivalent over the last millennium. —The Geophysical Research Letters

“The rate of human-driven warming in the last century has exceeded the rate of the underlying natural trend by more than a factor of 10, possibly much more.”

Disruption this century is projected to cause a rate of warming that is another factor of 5 or more greater than that of the last century.

Were America not myopic.

The 717 emerging-cities market – cities with populations of more than 500,000 plus 371 cities that will reach this size in 25 years – is the largest commercial opportunity in the world. The report is titled Winning in Emerging-Market Cities: A Guide to the World’s Largest Growth Opportunity.

Emerging-market cities will need housing and infrastructure—most urgently, transportation, water, sanitation, and electricity. Meeting these needs will require an estimated $30 trillion to $40 trillion by 2030—the equivalent of 60% to 70% of the total global investment in infrastructure.

The strongest driver of infrastructure demand will be population growth.

Emerging markets will require an estimated $13.8 trillion in new housing investment from 2010 to 2030, with a huge portion of the demand coming from Brazil, China, India, and Mexico.

Emerging-market cities will reach 30% of all global private consumption by 2015.

h/t Next Big Future

Jobs. You want jobs? You can’t handle jobs.

One-third of the world’s population—2.6 billion people—live in emerging-market cities, and by 2030 that number will increase by 1.3 billion. In contrast, cities in developed markets will add only 100 million new residents in the next 20 years.